Unheard Of!


I rose at four in the morning skipping breakfast and drove the ninety-six miles to Rapid City to catch a twin prop to Denver where I skipped lunch and caught another twin prop to Toronto. They don’t like jets much in Toronto, the signs are everywhere. After running a formidable maze of airport security and showing my passport nineteen times (but not having a cattle prod rammed up my ass as they love to do to you in the States), I missed the hired driver holding up a sign with my name on it. At long last, after finding the guy holding up the sign with my name on it, I made amends and he cheerfully drove me down into the heaving and prosperous metropolis, the largest city in Canada, to a rented three-bedroom suite (cheaper than a hotel for the seven people staying there) on Bathurst, where I met my good pal and collaborator Dave Jannetta, whose documentary based upon my memoir Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere had been accepted at the Hot Docs International Film Festival. We did the crab handshake (pinkie fingers interlocked, elbows pointed at the sky), embraced, voiced many exuberant Italian-sounding greetings (Cazzo! Sotto Voce!) and immediately descended into a whirlwind of taxis, tankards and goblets of alcohol, hobnobbing with the cognoscente, and, of course, documentaries: Swedish, Danish, Romanian, Canadian, American, Ukrainian, and Belgian (dark as their chocolate), one of which, Ne Me Quitte Pas, won the filmmakers’ choice.
Perhaps because I was skipping meals (starvation, the great aperitif) or because I would not normally be able to enjoy fancy food without someone else paying for it, every street in Toronto looked like a page torn out of Larousse Gastronomique. C’est Magnifique! I did not have a bad nibble in my four days in “Queen City,” but three restaurants stood out, Aunties and Uncles, a beatnik diner where every item on the menu comes recommended (I had the Croque Monsieur) but you have to wait since the seating is minimal, the Momofoku Noodle Bar (can three words fit together more delectably?), a pinnacle of Japanese fusion, and Parts and Labour, “the philosophy of Paris,” where we dove into pile after pile of toothsome morsels, mussels, mushrooms, pasta, salmon, steak, whole-fried cauliflower and on and on all washed down with fine wine and followed by shots of Canadian rye and coffee.
Dave had already screened his world premiere twice before I got there, and he’d met with teams of distributors, agents, TV moguls, and other visual media prospectors. I arrived for the third screening, Friday night, as Ed Sullivan might’ve called it: The Really Big Shew. The house was packed and the theater was hot, just as its festival advertised. Dave, as he had for his second screening, fled the theater within ten minutes, too nervous to watch. I’d seen a number of rough cuts of Love and Terror but this was my first big screen exposure. The movie was gorgeous. My eyes grew damp from pride. At the Q&A after the showing there were more questions than Dave and I had time to answer and we were pursued by interrogators up the exit aisle and out into the lobby, Dave deftly fending off admirers, me briefly engaged (though we decided not to marry) with a philosophy professor from the University of Toronto.
All week, pre- and post-screening, the reviews were enthusiastic. Kurt Halfyard from twitch.com was so taken with the film that he invited us for an interview at Friar and Firkin, a pub on St. John street, where we downed three pints each and talked like apes on Dexedrine for two hours straight. Several times we were recognized on the street. One fellow came up to us and declared: “I couldn’t get your movie out of my head.” Another fellow shouted from ten feet away that seeing the movie had provoked him to buy my book, which was a tremendous achievement in my view since I was generally regarded in Toronto (and everywhere I go) as “unheard of.” My unheard of status and the delight with which so many reviewers seem to take in proclaiming that they’ve never heard of me (while I’ve been invited to speak at dozens of universities including Stanford and Iowa, published five books, submitted to fifteen interviews in the last six months, won several awards, and consistently hit best-of lists) is puzzling. As an experiment, Dave asked his first audience of two hundred how many people had heard of Poe Ballantine. Not a hand went up. At his second showing with a larger turnout he asked the same question and one gentlemen admitted he thought he had heard of me. At the last screening, two people among nearly four hundred raised hands. Exponential progress!
A few traveloguoids (as I have just coined the term): I never saw the legendary Torontosaurus Rex; Canadians are better behaved than Americans and were therefore patient when I pointed out that their hockey team, the Toronto Leafs, should be called the Toronto Leaves (though in fairness, one member of that hockey team can easily be called a Leaf, whereas it’s awkward to call a single player from the Red Sox either a Sox or a Sock); and I almost dodged my strange-beer-wine anaphylaxis until I got a two a.m. pint pulled from a draft handle with a baby’s head on it at a dandy dive bar in Kensington called Ronnie’s Local 069—should have known better!

Besides Love and Terror, my favorite documentary among the ten or eleven I managed to see was The Nose: Searching for Blamage, a Dutch film about Alessandro Gualtieri, a hilarious rogue perfumist who thoroughly inhabits and speaks eloquently about the lonely world of art. In one scene at a perfume convention he approaches a woman representing the most expensive perfume in the world at a hundred and fifteen thousand pounds a bottle. “ Can I smell it?” Alessandro wants to know. “It’s not too expensive to smell?” “Of course,” says the rep, dabbing a splash on his wrist. He sniffs. “It’s a no good,” he says. “Smells like a cat poop.” The Nose didn’t win anything, and neither did we, but what should anyone expect at their first premium film festival stacked against 197 of the best documentaries in the world? This was only the beginning. We were thrilled and honored to be included, feted, pampered, flocked after, and discussed, and I’m tickled that at least eight hundred people in Toronto now, if only faintly, know who I am.