First annual Ray Guy Day: 'Giggle the bastards to death'
The 1st
annual Ray Day, a celebration of the man and his work, was held Saturday (May 31at) at the
Republic bar in downtown St. John’s. The following was my contribution to the readings:
Ray Guy
wrote a column (A Poke in the Eye) once a month for The Independent newspaper, which ran from 2004 to 2008.
And he often made quote of the week.
Quote of the week three times in 2005:
(Mel) Gibson
belongs to a splinter Roman Catholic sect much given to wearing barbed-wire
jockey shorts because it feels so good when you take them off.
It is
the flesh and blood of exiled Newfoundland, the bodies and souls who must still
face the sad exodus, which must command the thoughts and efforts of any
Newfoundland administration. It’s the people, stupid. The Rock never cries.
I detested his
(Joey Smallwood’s) intestines when he lived and I’m still not sure he’s dead
right now due to the absence of a wooden stake and a burial at the crossroads.
Quote of the week three times in
2006:
On the week The
Independent closed (the first time) … “Over the years I’ve had, I don’t
know, 10 or a dozen horses shot out from under me and … I’d really like to
offer some cheer to people at The
Independent who figure all is lost and this is it. I know how they must
be felling. Who was it said: ‘I feel your pain.’
A recent
review … noted that while 50 per cent of columnists concentrated on how to fix
the world in three easy steps, the other half writes about nothing but the
pimples on their own arses.
Flash not around
thy fridge magnets and thy knickknacks. Keep the whoredoms, idolatries and fornications
down to a dull roar.
Quote of the week twice in 2007:
Didn’t I spend
enough time already kicking nine whole premiers in the goolies for good of themselves
and the commonwealth.
My safest bet for
housing, I sometimes think, would be a large cardboard box on the Health
Sciences parking lot.
Quote of the week once in 2008:
So rally on and be brave, my journalistic comrades! …
Pilferage of the public pot is bad enough but infinitely worse is the political
battlegab that goes unchallenged.
•••
The Northeast Avalon Times celebrated its 10th anniversary
in Mary 2010, and Guy raised his glass to the paper in a column headlined Gutsy
newspaper stands guard.
If huge tree killers like, say, The Globe and Mail concentrate on the dithering fools in Ottawa
and local chained puppies like The
Telegram go through yappy motions about the House of Assembly … then who
will watch the dozy dolittles on small local town councils.
In that same column Ray wrote about
how his “guts flop” over today’s news:
Not the nasty news, since it has always been the nature of
news to be nasty. No, it’s like being hit in the face with news pies, one after
another. Global warming we have always with us. We’re all going to die! Swine
flue. Half of us are going to die! Danny Williams, gone off someplace for some
time to have something done. Will he leave us to die?
•••
Kathryn Welbourn, editor/publisher of The Northeast Avalon Times, also edited the 2008 book of
Ray Guy columns, The Smallwood years, a collection of 167 of Guy’s
columns and articles from the old Evening Telegram between 1963 and ’70,
the latter years of Joey’s ridiculous reign.
The headlines for Ray’s old columns
were entertaining enough.
Here's a taste:
Cabot made a boo-boo;
Newfie, Nigger, Frog, or Wop;
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s the
saviour of his people;
Partridgeberries: A great new
industry;
Wise virgins. The Big Bang Theory;
and, one of my favourites, You
Rain Knee Yum.
Yet another memorable column is
headlined There’s Clark Kent and he really is Superman! about life in The
Tely newsroom, which he called the “boneyard of broken dreams.”
•••
Joan Sullivan wrote a May 26th,
2013 Globe and Mail feature about Ray.
On being funny, and how it’s a “terrible
thing”:
This satire business, that was one of the worst things that ever
happened to me. I was certified funny. From then on, I had to be funny – people
expected it. Twice the work for the same pay.
Needless to say, He raised some hackles.
“Got a dead cat in the mail once,” he told The
Herald.
“I still get a few dirty looks over the racks in the supermarket, but
nobody kicks me in the shins on Water Street. I’ve made sort of a point, apart
from being a social dud, not to fraternize with the people I write about. Sure
we’re all decent human beings and kind to dogs and children, but I think I’ve
kept some objectivity by not rubbing shoulders with these people. … It also
made it easier … if you’re going to try and cut somebody’s throat you don’t
want to know that their mother is dying of cancer or something. It kind of
cramps your style a little bit.”
Of his craft he said, Writing is like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer. It always
feels good when you finish.
Of appearing on TV, in skits on slows like All
Around the Circle:
I call it making faces. I look
it as therapy, better than making baskets or key tabs, to try and get over this
almost pathological bashfulness I’m cursed with.
•••
More quotes from Independent columns:
Of rolling out of bed at 4 a.m. to catch a
flight:
The last time I committed such an unspeakable outrage to my delicate
system was several years back. On that occasion, our old cat, Sleeveen, uttered
a filthy insult to our 100-pound dog, Mugsy, who jumped her right there on the
bed in the early hours.
Ray was up early to take an Air Canada flight to
Vancouver. Would he do it again?
Only if I can be medically stupefied and go through the Panama Canal.
Ray on Danny Willaims’ $1,000 baby bonus:
Concentrate, gestate, procreate … do the nine-month shuffle, and your
cheque for $1,000 is in the mail. “Up the government stump,” as the lower orders
may so crudely put it. Will we soon see the bassinets lined up at St. Clare’s —
little Dannys and Danielles, their hair parted in the middle, twitching their
right shoulders adorably? Fornication for the nation. If it’s good enough for
Quebec, it should be good enough for Newfoundland.
Then he got serious:
So far none of the great and colourful schemes to replace the dead
fishery have caught on. In Stephenville, the old stack and buildings of John C.
Doyle’s enterprise finally bit the dust. Some of those who’ve been in Fort Mac
a while are sending home tickets for Ma and Pa.
Newfoundland crawls in on itself, forsaking the Bays, conglomerating
on the Northeast Avalon. Clustering for comfort and hope when the only sign
pointed out as hopeful is the price of St. John’s real estate. Only a few more years say those who try to
keep the gloom away, five more years at most.
Then Hibernia! Folks will flock back from Fort Mac — or will they?
Surely they must because come the Hibernia boom the province will need 100,000
more inhabitants, easily. Or can you really come home again?
Placed beside the presumed boom in demographics, Danny’s breeding
bonus looks especially whispy. I doubt if $1,000 per bambino is going to lure
them here from Cape Breton, let alone the Punjab.
And if those Fort Mac Newfoundlanders have already got kids enrolled
in junior hockey, where do you think they’ll stay? No wonder D. Williams and
company are saying very little. What else is there left to say? Cowboys,
cucumbers, crude … been there, done that, bought the T-shirt.
•••
In July 2008, Independent writer Stephanie Porter
wrote a piece about what people were reading that summer (the No. 1 book was
Ray Guy: The Smallwood years). Stephanie asked Ray what he was reading:
My wife drags home sacksful of library books, trashy novels for the
ruination of a once fine mind. I prune out the chick-lit bodice rippers and
read a portion of the rest. Murder most foul, the lot of them. Why? I enjoy the
variations on a theme, no surprises about what but some suspense about how.
•••
Years ago Danny Williams used to go at it with
former St. John’s Mayor Andy Wells. At one point Danny said this of Andy: What
he needs is a good shit knocking.
Danny was premier at the time, but the House of
Assembly wasn’t sitting. So Ray tried to imagine what cabinet meetings must be
like:
HONOURABE THE MINISTER FOR SOAP SUDS: On one small point here I have
to disagree with the Honourable the Premier but …
HONOURABLE THE PREMIER: Do you want me to come over there and give you
a boot in the scrotum because you’re so full of shit you have to blink three
times before your cross the street?
HONOURABLE THE MINISTER FOR DINKIES: I don’t understand why …
HONOURABLE THE PREMIER: You carry on with that attitude, minister, and
you’ll be bringing home your teeth in a baggie.
HONOURABLE THE MINISTER FOR HOME AFFAIRS: Perhaps I could ask the
Honourable premier to put us all in the picture regarding …
HONOURABLE THE PREMIER: Put you in the picture? Jeeze, I’d put you in
straight through that window quick as I’d look at you. Yes, quicker. Because
compared to you … a pig is Albert
Einstein.
HONOURABLE THE MINISTER FOR DANNY’S COATTAILS: I think all of us here
today owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Honourable the Premier who by
his great wisdom, his wonderful fortitude and his outstanding foresight has
steered this ship of state into …
HONOURABLE THE PREMIER: Do you want the face bet off you or what? Do
you think I need a sheep-shagging Bay noddy to tell me who I am? You’re so full
of shit you blow khaki snots …
Ah gentle reader, I simply can’t keep up the pace. The teaching I
acquired at my sainted mother’s knee will not allow me to wade through the
municipal and provincial politics of today. Should some innocent child, blameless
spinster or toothless grandsire pick up this otherwise-excellent newspaper I
already fear what straightforward Danny-Andy reportage has done to them.
•••
Ray on writing:
Part of the reason I took up scribbling for a living is that I was
useless at sums at school. By the time we struck algebra and trigonometry I
felt like I had one leg caught up in the spokes and my head bouncing along a
gravel road. The alphabet seemed easy by comparison and so here we are …
… I always feel that IF we in the journalistic racket, starting way
back, had tried harder and done our sums, the public would have been BETTER
served
In my own poor case, I finished journalism school in Toronto, came
back and started with a St. John’s newspaper in 1963. I had learned all about
how to dig up records, background, facts and figures. It wasn’t that I was
ignorant of the way things should be done.
And yet I sometimes feel I was a cowardly failure. The first time
there was a news story calling for some official background information, I went
along to the basement of Confederation Building where the official files were
kept … stacks of filing shelves behind chain-link fencing.
I asked for what I wanted, paid my 50-cent fee and got a folder with
two or three sheets in it. Most of that had been blacked out. Useless, I threw down the folder
and marched out in a fit of (PEK) pique.
Idiots! Didn’t they know what was taught at J-school in Toronto?
Even if I had ever been good at sums, there was nothing in those
Smallwood files of use to any journalist. So I can’t really blame any newsperson for the fact that we were then
started on the trail that leads us to where we are today.
For my part — and not having the sums for it anyway — I decided to giggle
the bastards to death. IT worked, perhaps, but it took too long.
•••
I gave a statement in the House of Commons after
Ray died, and I mentioned how he once wrote that the rock never cries.
To quote myself: And
it doesn’t, but The Rock is drenched with the tears shed over the loss of such
greatness as Ray Guy.
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