Five things you’ll learn about Charlie Demers if you read his new book

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Local writer and stand-up comic Charlie Demers is out with “The Horrors: An A to Z of Funny Thoughts on Awful Things,” a new book of autobiographical essays. As the title suggests, the pieces are arranged in alphabetical order based on subject matter, everything from A for Adolescence to Z for Zzzz to describe the state of contemporary social discourse.

In between, talks about his struggles with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and depression. Demers explains the motivation to use the alphabet to order his thoughts. “It’s a random order…that everybody knows,” he says paraphrasing his friend and mentor George Bowering or the French literary theorist Roland Barthes, he’s not sure which. “There’s no reason the letters are in the order that they are, but it’s one of the first things that we learn as children.”

And if you didn’t know them already, here are five things you’ll learn about Demers if you read the book.

1. He was a teenage Trotskyite

Demers points out this is one of the least best-kept secrets about him and even admits to being criticized for going to this story well once or twice too often. However, as the story goes, 15-year-old Charlie was recruited to what he calls a youth auxiliary of the local branch of a Trotskyist sect after being spotted reading a copy of the Communist Manifesto.

“In terms of ways to spend your teenage years, I think there are probably better ways to spend them and I think there are worse ways,” he admits. “But I did learn a lot about history, I learned a lot about politics, and, as I say in the book, during your teenage years you’re kind of trying out a more extreme and maybe zanier version of the grown-up that you become.”

“My dad was always fairly cool with it. There were other family members who were worried,” he recalls. “They were like, ‘Is he going underground? Is he going to pop in Latin America somewhere as part of some hostage exchange or something like that?'”

2. He lost his mother at a young age

Charlie’s mother was diagnosed with leukemia when he was five and would be in and out of hospital for weeks at a time before passing away by the time he was 11. Demers says writing the essay about his mom would decide the fate of the entire book.

“If it’s not the heart of the book, it’s the essay that I knew going in, if I couldn’t get it right, then the project probably wasn’t worth doing,” he explains.

It also made him question his instincts as a comedian and a writer. “Do I only use humour as a way of not facing up to the things that scare me and facing up to these sorts of demons? Could I write an honest piece about losing my mom that was also funny in parts,” he wondered.

“Could the book actually be an honest engagement with these nightmares or would it just be sort of schtick-y and glossy? And could I be respectful of my worst memories and my deepest hurts?” It’s clear the death of his mother was the moment that defined his adolescence and the life-shaping event that also informs much of his comedy as well.

“That kind of dichotomy between pain and laughter is a real kind of defining feature of my memories of her, it’s a defining feature of my understanding of my whole maternal family, and, in some ways, I view this book as an extension of that contradiction.”

3. He organized a union drive at a local arcade

After Demers left his Trotskyist sect, he decided to pursue his university studies at SFU, but needed a job to help pay for his tuition. Enter his time at Playdium, a warehouse-sized video game arcade once located inside the Metropolis wing of Burnaby’s Metrotown shopping centre.

Citing poor and exploitative working conditions, he and some co-workers tried to certify a union, hiding membership cards in their black socks. They weren’t successful. “It was this kind of early lesson in reality as a crushing exercise in futility,” he remembers.

4. He used to park cars for a living

Demers then went from the arcade to the parkade, working as a valet, where he saw the stark contrast between the very rich and the very poor firsthand. He remembers the dot-com boom as an ugly time in Vancouver’s history.

“I was valet parking in Yaletown right after Yaletown had become Yaletown,” he explains.”That was at a time when, in that neighbourhood, there would be a brand new yuppie restaurant and there would be guys fishing cans out of the dumpster 10 feet away from the patio. The two worlds were really right up in each other’s faces.”

He does have some fond memories of the job, especially of his boss, whom he describes as a real inimitable East Van character. “This is a guy, who, when I crashed a Mercedes, was absolutely like, ‘Oh, you know, Charles. That’s okay. Things happen. That’s why everybody’s got insurance.'”

But Demers raised his ire one fireworks night when he left a parking space before his boss had a chance to pull in with his car. “So, over parallel parking that he almost missed he was livid with me, [but] crashing a Mercedes into a concrete pillar was just like an Act of God.”

5. He secretly wrote jokes for then-NDP leader Adrian Dix

In the book, Demers reveals for the first time how he was secretly drafted to write material for the then leader of the Opposition. Launching into an impression, Demers (as Dix) says, “You know, I’ve been making all these speeches and they’re not very funny!”

So Demers was brought on board, but under one condition. “[Dix] had to be the butt of all the jokes. No jokes at Christy Clark’s expense… nothing was supposed to go after anybody but Adrian.”

One joke that still tickles Demers even made it into BC’s paper of record, the Vancouver Sun. “Christy Clark had just announced the BC Liberals are doing something called ‘Free Enterprise Fridays’ and so we had Adrian say he was going to pre-empt her by doing ‘Theoretical Marxism Thursdays,” he recalls with a chuckle. “And I was just so proud to have Adrian Dix talking about Theoretical Marxism at the Vancouver Board of Trade and leaking that into a Vaughn Palmer column!”

Demers talks about how he got Dix to give his blessing tell the story. “I called Adrian up and I was like, ‘Hey listen, I know this was supposed to be a secret.’ And he said something like, ‘Oh, hey, yeah, no. I just leave it to you whether you want people to know that you were writing for me!'”

The NDP’s defeat in the 2013 BC election is still something of a sore point for Demers, who considers Dix the best premier the province never had. “He’s just one of the smartest people you’ll ever meet, in a lifetime of knowing smart people,” he insists. “I keep waiting for that feeling of frustration to subside. It never does.”

“The Horrors: An A to Z of Funny Thoughts on Awful Things” is in stores now.