Vaneisa: Our immortal BC

At the end of September, in Thank God It’s Friday, a column which has now been running for more than 35 years, BC Pires said: “Chances are Thin.”

Without a wallow or a moan, but replete with dread details of his beastly struggle with cancer of the oesophagus, he revealed that he had lost 20 lbs in 24 days and on the preceding Sunday had weighed just 105 lbs.

I burst into tears when I read it, overwhelmed by the sense that I had witnessed this many times, and that I knew how many grim aspects he had tossed aside in his typical way.

BC—Basil, as I always think of him—has written a lifetime of profound articles; penetrative and provocative, but so deftly and lightly presented that it is like being wafted along on some giddy breeze until you come to the end and realise it was a hurricane.

That column haunts me, coming at a time of such global bleakness that one feels that everything, everywhere is screeching to a dismal end.

What are we doing here? Why are we here at all? Existential questions rear their Hydra heads and challenge one’s philosophical beliefs.

I’d always felt that this was the heart of BC’s impact over the years. He could dance with any issue and even as he tickles, he tugs at our ideas of who we are.

When he first came to the Express in 1988, it was a scandal, one he recounted fully when he joined Newsday in 2017. BC Montana, Cuban artist, had brazenly presented himself to the local chichi, abetted by the late Anthony Milne and the late Allyson Hezekiah-Hennessy, and after a series of consequences, left the legal profession and joined the media as BC Pires.

I was a young reporter, there for probably two years, and the impact of his writing was significant. Christine Lee and BC would write features in a style that was conversational, engaging and full of chatter, observations larking about with reportage in a combination that I had not thought possible or permissible.

You can do that? I really and truly asked myself that question. What we were taught about newspaper writing was far more rigid.

The incomparable Keith Smith was there of course, but he wrote columns—daily ones!—rattling them off after lunch when there was a lull before the evening’s news reports started flooding in and he had to put on his editor’s apron.

Wayne Brown was doing these magnificent literary columns that transported you to a Trinidad you didn’t even know existed.

I wanted to write with the elegance of Wayne and the relaxed confidence of Keith. But I did not think I would be allowed to do that, especially as I was doing basic reporting. BC and Christine opened that window.

Anthony Milne and I had developed a curious friendship. Even in the oddball newspaper world, he was an oddity, and he was clearly an underdog in the newsroom—perpetually an outsider, brimming with esoteric knowledge that nobody wanted to hear.

We often had coffee together, and one day he gave me a small cardboard plaque, with an inscription on what looked like parchment:

“Beware of good Samaritans, walk to the right, Or hide thee by the roadside out of sight, Or greet them with the smile that villains wear.”

I later discovered it was written by RC Dunning, an American author, who died of tuberculosis and starvation in 1930. From all accounts he was very much like Anthony in disposition. More than 30 years later, I still have the plaque, faded now.

I don’t know why I feel compelled to relate all of this. All of them influenced me strongly and I think of them often.

I suppose I want to tell Basil what he has meant to my life, and I am sure, countless others. Over the years, he has written about everything under the sun: people, music, movies, books, life, politics; everything and then some. Fortunately, much of it is available online—on his website he has curated them for easy access.

Reading one of his pieces, a couple of his lines jumped out at me (you can always find a few in any piece):

“Today, as it was 27 years ago, when I first began tilting at Trini windmills, the Trinidadian avoids the fabric and minutely examines the hem of any and everything. … we dismiss the essential and dissect the irrelevant.”

Still sadly accurate.

He mentioned too how “lucky” he was “to have been able to come to this gig at all” as his parents wanted him to follow a more lucrative path.

“It took me near 30 years to come to the job of writing, the only one I ever really wanted.”

Despite his suffering, he said in that 29 September column that he could barely stay awake long enough to write it, so emaciated he had become. Yet he has written another and I hope he will write many more.

Writing has fed his soul over the years, and even if food has turned treacherous, he has sustenance.

So, BC, I want to tell you how I feel, how many others must feel, because I believe you ought to know. You have brought sustenance and joy and wisdom and insight to this clod of earth we call home. We have truly been blessed.

Editor’s Note: Veteran columnist BC Pires passed away on Saturday 21 October from oesophageal cancer.

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