T. Paul was the second or third impossible person we met in Vancouver. It depends on whether you count Rowan or not. Upon reaching Vancouver, BC, Bret and I went first to Lush and bought very fancy and expensive soaps and things. Bret spent over $100 on fancy soap. Hehehehe. I bought a couple of these things called Bath Melts which make bubble bath and are shaped like little cakes. I found them much less intimidating than those bicarbonate "bath bombs" that sound like they're for getting rid of ticks and fleas.
We wandered up to The Butchershop where the reading was supposed to be and waited around for a bit. There was a gallery showing called Brown, and the theme was... Brown. There was one whole wall taken up with brown owls. My favorite thing was a painting of a little girl with a kitten in her panties. She was pulling the red panties open at the front and looking down at the kitten. The title of the painting was "Brown Pussy".
Rowan was our contact or "agent" as they kept calling him in emails. I had imagined a small thin-nosed, red-haired hippie chick. HA! Rowan is a six foot something dude with a bushy black ponytail and a bushy black beard and a big face. Rowan as an agent of anything should be fired. He didn't know if the featured reader was going to show up. He was supposed to find us a place to stay and he opened his hands toward the concrete floor of the gallery and said, "My roommates are not as into hosting folks as I am. I can offer you this building." We asked him if he knew who was coming. He said he didn't know, maybe nobody. Enter Magaret the french lady.
Magaret was a dancer who recited poems in French and dances at the same time. It was very sweet. Not good, but very sweet and charming. She had this impossible accent. An accent that does not exist in reality. An accent that only comes of being harrangued for months by a professional dialogue coach to get that perfect sexy, sweet French accent so she can play the darling little French waitress in a movie based on some Hemingway novel. The fact is, it was her real accent. It just turns out she lives in a world where people talk like that for real. And you and I, well we just don't.
After waiting around for a while and being informed by Rowan that people sometimes don't show up to these things until around 9 (a full hour after we were to start). I was so tired, that concrete floor started to look like a reasonable place to sleep for a seven months pregnant me. The featured reader, Brandon, did show up and informed us that there was an open-mike at a place up the street and did not have a featured reader that evening. He couldn't do it, because he'd just done it the week before. Rowan walked up there and talked to the currator and came back and told us we should go up there, though the audience was mostly people who'd signed up to perform, there would at least be people there to listen.
There at the Monmartre, the name of the place with the people in it, we met T. Paul. T. Paul the curator of this particular open mike. T. Paul. T. Paul was wearing an immaculate pressed red and blue plaid flannel shirt, an immaculate pressed white t-shirt underneath, a pair of immaculate pressed Levi's rolled up twice at the bottom about a palms width and pressed into place.. He wore a red dyed rabbit's foot on a chain clipped to a belt loop and a black leather belt with an enormous immaculate shiny belt buckle. T. Paul's hair was an absolutely prefect facsimile of Mickey Rourke's in Sin City. Black and slick. Too high and far back to be called a pompadour. Two perfect immaculate rolls of hair at the crown leading to a perfect duck tail. Sideburns long and thin following his jawline for so long they almost meet at his chin. T. Paul is a man who does not exist. T. Paul inhabits a reality that you and I simply do not. We just do not.
Posted by jlp716 at December 12, 2005 08:30 PM