Above: BC Pires, April 2019. Photograph by Mark Lyndersay.

BitDepth#1430 for October 30, 2023

What would Basil Carlos Pires have made of everything that followed his passing on October 21?

I think he would have blushed a bit in that Sally-Field-at-the-Oscars way he had, flustered by the outpouring of love and appreciation that followed the news of his death.

I also think he would have also been a bit cynical and perhaps a bit rude, asking after the initial rush, “Wait, where was all this firetrucking love when I was around to read it?”

Then I think he would have probably settled into a couch to wonder, “How the eff am I going to top this?”

We’d known each other for years, but it wasn’t until 2002, when BC came to the Guardian, that we really met.

Of course, there was an argument. I was running The Wire (a youth-focused daily published by GML for two years) and he wrote something that annoyed me. So I wrote something. Then, he wrote something. Then he walked over to The Wire office and we spoke.

It was impossible to be upset with him in person. He was a bundle of energy with a quick smile and a keen twinkle in his eyes that made it hard to sustain annoyance.

So I invited him over to my home a few weeks later, along with graphic artists Sean Simon and Keifel Agostini who worked at The Wire, to break the seal on a DVD of Jimi Hendrix’s Isle of Wight concert. I offered beers left over from my wedding.

That’s when I discovered that you can’t leave beer in a fridge for two years and expect it to be palatable. There was laughter. I pleaded non-tippler ignorance.
That, I suppose, is where it all really began.

Sifting through emails going back to 2003, most were pleas for help with one computer problem or another, some pleasant comments about a column I’d written or a picture taken. He wrote them as if we went back for years before, which we kind of had, albeit in parallel.

By the time he sent a line of appreciation for Cable Guys, a column about cable TV that Agostini and I wrote for a few months at The Wire, he’d already extended his column into reviewing.

He did The Arts Forum (meant to be read as The Arts, for Rum), travel pieces under Bed & Breakfast, BCTV and the extensions of his signature Thank God It’s Friday column (TGIF); Hell of a Weekend, Oh God, It’s Monday and more.

In 2005, he commissioned me to write restaurant reviews for Cré Olé, the annual restaurant magazine survey published by his wife Carla, which he edited.
His guidance?

“I’d want you to make the piece itself, the writing, work before all else, even if it means we end up with BitDepth Food Version.”

He began TGIF in 1988 at the Trinidad Express, writing it without significant pause for the next 35 years. That turned out to be more than half his life and he would have turned in around 1,750 columns.

To do that successfully, at a pace that does more than spin the same top in the same mud while continuously working to engage readers, requires a nimbleness of mind and an adventurous imagination.

To get there, you have to be willing to continuously redefine the boundaries of the perceptual box that contains the writing and to engage in a dialogue with reader expectations.

The columnist lives with the reality that each week, some readers will thoroughly enjoy what you’ve written and some will be bored or appalled. Some will hope next week’s will be better. If you can keep those (sometimes competing) interests on a merry-go-round, it’s possible to keep going while enjoying the process.

The best columns are enriched by the author’s personality. A sense that the writer is having an intriguing chat with you and at the very least, you find yourself inclined to listen politely while they continue.

TGIF exploded with BC’s personality. If you read ten in a row, nothing would surprise you about him.
Part of that enthusiasm was deeply personal.

When he found a band or a musician he appreciated, he used his newspaper space to spread the word, vigorously and often. Ask David Rudder, Ataklan or Gary Hector.

When he descended on Freetown Collective backstage at Naparima Bowl to interview them for Trini to the Bone (T2DB), they seemed startled by his unabashed, fanboy enthusiasm for their work.

BC brought Trini to the Bone to TTNewsday in 2019. A few instalments had appeared in the TTGuardian between 2015 and 2016. An earlier version called Bajan like Flying Fish was published in a Barbados paper.

We did 156 subjects together for Trini to the Bone over the last four years, two of those years navigated during covid restrictions, yet it’s surprising how little we actually spoke.

On his trips to Trinidad, he’d run out of time for a visit and our project discussions were a blizzard of WhatsApp messages and voice notes.

But I knew where he’d been in that last year. Many 2022-2023 T2DB subjects were people he met on his treatment journey, and I’d trail along behind him, photographing the caregivers who had impressed him.

I saw him just twice that final year. On a mercy run to the St James Oncology Centre to bring saltprunes, water and biscuits and for one successful in-person visit he squeezed into his schedule during the brief three months he lived with a cancer-free diagnosis.

We spoke then as we always did, as men, frankly and to the point. The man was sick, often terribly, violently ill, and I preferred to help by making sure the column was visually supported, rather than intrude unnecessarily.

“The dollars are flowing out,” he told me of his treatment regimen, “I need to keep the pennies coming in.”

There were just three video calls, and one phone call in our last year of collaboration. He insisted on telling me, face to face, first that he’d been diagnosed with cancer, then that he’d received a cancer-free diagnosis and finally, that the cancer had returned.

As his messages dimmed to phrases in the last few weeks, then single words, it became clear that things were becoming cripplingly difficult for him.

I’d suggested at the start of October that if the final two T2DB columns were still going to be our interviews, that we put them down if things became, as I put it, “untenable.”

He sent the questions to me on October 16. I asked who he had planned for October 23. The single word response was, “You.”

Discussing the images on October 17 for his final T2DB – which he could not complete – he wrote, “I’m a longggg way from looking good. I weigh 98lbs.”
At 98lbs, his body was consuming itself faster than he could feed it.

When he couldn’t accept a request for a voice call from me for 26 hours; I knew things were mortal. I know that he struggled to take that call at 4 pm on October 19. I spoke at him for just three minutes, shushing his raspy croak and promising that we would follow up on WhatsApp.

The texts never appeared.
That final call from me was one of two things I’d hoped to do for him before the end.

BC was a fan of my obituaries. Once he joked that, “The advantage of me going before you is that you get to write my obit.”
Facing that reality, I wanted to send him a first draft and woke up on Sunday morning ready to get that first rush of thoughts down. On WhatsApp were a wall of messages, the earliest from Carla just after midnight, telling me that he had passed.

I have no doubt that BC fought fiercely during that last week, just as I am certain that he chose to spend his final hours with his family.

He’d written his life. It was time to cut to fit the space available.
Journalism was his famalee, but Carla, Rosie and Ben were the family who owned his heart to the end.

BC Pires met his final deadline. He wasn’t done, but he’s finished.