He was an habitué of the Café S'il Vous Plait, one of Vancouver's legendary warmed over hot spots. It began as a woefully precious café squatting on the premises of a former greasy-spoon previously known as Teddy's Café in a semi-detached heritage commercial space on the corner of Robson and Richards. The building face was adorned with vintage tile: black polished ceramic squares with small green tiles running a horizontal row near the top. S'il Vous Plait died a few years ago. It is now a sushi joint, the interior is soulless and the vintage exterior tile has been removed. I never go in and I don't like sushi anyway.
When I became a near daily presence in S'il Vous Plait it was already owned by a Korean couple who promised the staff and regulars to do nothing to change it. Aside from filling the space with lush tropical plants.
Thang almost lived there, along with some of his friends. They were all rather burnt-out warmed over punks, or should I say art punks, or painfully creative souls with brilliant minds, adult survivors of the gifted child syndrome who simply cannot do anything practical or useful and are by default doomed to lives of poverty and underachievement. (I resemble that remark)
I quite didn't like him at first and felt very suspicious of him. We never spoke to each other but I was often eavesdropping as he sat at one of the swivel stools at the counter chatting up the staff about his latest sparks of creative genius. Not really a loud talker, but relentlessly chatty and chronically entertaining, like dancing shoes that never stopped. He was also an illustrator and writer of graphic novels and I found his vampiric illustrations off-putting to say the least as well as his aesthetic necrophilia (he was fascinated by bones and skulls, animal and human). I suspected him to be a Satanist, which was actually a projection of my own dark side. I had by then become so suspicious during this brutal period of extreme spiritual warfare during the eighties and nineties that I often erred on the side of paranoia.
Thang and I, and some of his following, eventually became friends. He couldn't stop talking to me and was amazed and nonplussed that a devout Christian such as myself could also be intelligent, creatively and verbally gifted and open-minded. And an artist of quality. We soon became a kind of default community. We were often visiting each other's homes, going for coffee, walks, but not really attending events given that we are all desperately poor.
Really there are quite a few remarkable people who were enmeshed here but I have chosen Thang as one to focus on in order to simplify things a bit. He did at times really wear on my nerves with his nonstop neurotic jabbering and when I brought it to his attention one day he became so upset that he walked out of the café.
Eventually he harboured me during my final three months of being homeless. Part time I stayed in his communal house full of burnt out and dysfunctional punks. It was a difficult and tense situation and might I add a bit challenging in some ways with the smoking, the drugs, the alcohol, the noise, the household soap operas and some of the sexual tensions (one of the young men staying there had a thing for me and I was not about to rise to the occasion). Following a confrontation I was asked to leave, which I did, only to founder on the threshold of another friend waiting in the wings.
Our friendship never returned to what it was. Thang made a few missteps and himself ended up homeless. I felt too sorry for him to enjoy any schadenfreud. He has since been diagnosed with a mental health condition, is on calming medications, and receives a disability pension. He is in his fifties now. We still never see each other.
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