Author Andrew Pyper was a ‘universal donor’ | Canada Voices

Craig Davidson is an author based in Toronto.

Here’s a truth I hold to be self-evident: The older one gets, the harder it is to make friends.

Acquaintances, sure. Colleagues, fine. But that intimate alchemy that results in a lasting bond? That’s rare at any stage in life, but as we age the circumstances leading to close friendships – once kindled by the shared duress of school or summer jobs or simply the flexible affections of youth – tend to erode. As you get older (and I suspect this applies more to men), the feeling dawns that maybe you have enough friends already. The impulse becomes to nourish those existing friendships, lest they wither.

To me, there must be that galvanizing spark. Something deeply alike, primal, perhaps even cellular that makes one soul reach out in kinship towards another.

I’d known of Andrew Pyper for years before we spent any meaningful time together. He was the princeling of the Canadian literary world. I’d read and admired his work. I’d see him at events where he was ever-dapper, ever-garrulous, never so showy as to be holding court but exerting a specific gravity that tugged others into his orbit. For whatever reason, I never succumbed to that tug. Why?

I suppose there was some degree of uncertainty. Perhaps jealousy? I was a younger writer clinging by the tips of my fingernails to a career. I never imagined Andrew to have such worries. Or was it a matter of aesthetics? Andrew wrote thoughtful, mature, wise, but dark novels. I wrote brutish, feral, repellent and yeah, dark novels.

We travelled the same path in different guises. He, the dapper silver fox. I, the unshaven but genial lout.

In 2014, we both had novels out with the same publisher, who decided to make a splashy push on its horror division. Andrew and I were sent on a two-week junket where we zipped back and forth across Canada peddling our wares.

“This could be a miserable experience,” I’d said to my wife before the car picked me up to the airport. “That’s, like, a lot of time together. What if we hate each other?”

“Or maybe you’ll make a friend,” my wife reasoned.

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By the time the flight took off to Calgary with Andrew and I seated next to one another, I knew I liked him. He was easy to talk to, charming, sincere, wore his own insecurities quite lightly on his sleeve, and was funny as hell. I exhaled inwardly. We could exist together as fellow professionals at least.

We landed. Went to our hotel. Agreed to meet for a drink before that evening’s event. Laughed a lot over said drink. Went to the event. Andrew dazzled, I coattail-rode.

Afterwards, in the signing line, we were approached by a gentleman. Let’s call him, um, Nathan. Nathan didn’t want to buy a book. But he bore a sheaf of crumpled papers. He shoved it at Andrew and I under the belief we were the industry’s key-masters and could get it published for him.

Graciously, Andrew accepted Nathan’s story. The next day on the flight to Vancouver, the two of us again sitting side by side (with our lovely publicist Amy), Andrew read it. When he was done, he said, “Eeesh,” and handed it to me.

Nathan’s story involved a narrator who murdered his ex-wife and cooked her up in a pot of spaghetti. One got the sense that the writer had come off a rather bad relationship.

That night, after our event, after dinner, after drinks and deep belly laughs with Andrew and Amy, he and I took the elevator up to our hotel rooms. Andrew’s room was before mine, so we said goodnight and I toddled on down the hall.

Behind me, Andrew eased the door to his room open. I caught his sharp intake of breath and turned to see him squinting into his darkened room. His mouth fell open.

“Nathan?”

And there it was, y’know? That spark.

I laughed as hard as I can recall at the notion of spaghetti-pot Nathan stalking Andrew to the next stop on the tour. Such was the magical truth about Andrew. You’d think in looking at him – the handsomeness, the elan, that grand silver coif – that he’d be … uptight. Fussy. But it was the greatest trick the devil ever pulled, because he was the funniest, the wryest, the honest-to-god goofiest person you’d ever have the great good fortune of meeting.

The tour ended weeks later. My wife met us at the airport. We drove Andrew home. The two of us already had plans to meet the next week.

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For the next ten years, Andrew and I found professional reasons to hang out with one another. I think we needed the excuse that we were “working on stuff,” and assiduously, we did so.

I went through my old emails to confirm these facts. Over the past decade Andrew and I have co-written no less than four TV pitches (their names, from the first in 2015 to the last in 2023: Crypto, The Mansfield Investigation, Neuro, Creation). We wrote a young adult novel together: The Monsterhood. We wrote a short story that we posted on Reddit. When nobody seemed induced to pay us a whole whack of money for it, we wrote a film pitch of that story. When nobody gave a fig about that, either, we wrote the full script.

Reader, I give it to you plainly: all of these endeavours met with rank failure. No, wait: one of the pitches was optioned by a producer for $4,000. That option was not renewed.

The total earnings of our decade-long collaboration was $2,000 each, minus agency fees.

I cannot impress upon you how dismal that is for two writers who made our livings by our pens. A working writer is a shark: if that shark is not eating, that shark is starving. Time after time, swimming together, Andrew and I went hungry.

But you know what? Simply and elementally, we did it as an excuse to spend time with one another.

Our collaborative days would start early, 9 a.m., at a coffee shop. The project would be discussed, notes taken, but our conversations would range off to cover all sorts of terrain. At some point noon would arrive and we’d head to a lunch spot. More conversation, some notes.

Then, well … was two o’clock too early for a beer? We’d both decide no, it was perfectly adequate hour. A few beers, the notes getting wilder and more unfocused, night painted to the bar windows and it’s nine pm, it’s ten, our wives are sending weary texts as to our whereabouts …

This was not a weekly or monthly or even bimonthly thing. I don’t want to give that impression. It was a rarer event, and the next morning we’d awake soggy-headed and go over our notes and punch up a TV pitch, passing it back and forth until we were pleased … and then it would get flown up the flagpole, roundly rejected, and we’d start again.

The dream, such as it was, was to get one of these things made and hightail it away from Hollywood with a tidy bindle of cash, back to Canada to live out our days. I wouldn’t have wanted to face the predations of that world without Andrew by my side.

After each tragic meeting with a producer or director or the odd tire-kicking actor, Andrew would call me for a debrief. “How do we think that went?”

Over time my cynicism increased. We fell into roles. I was the cranky miserabilist who hated these Hollywood phoneys, these smooth-talking flim-flammers who I wished would dry up and blow away.

“Yeah, I get all that, Craig,” Andrew would say, “but I got a good feeling about this one!”

Which was his role. Less an antidote to my cynicism than his own baseline demeanour of a hopeful, far-thinking, and luminous human being who really and honestly saw a silver lining at the edge of every dark cloud.

It was during one of these collaborative meetings that Andrew mentioned a pain in his leg. He’d gone to see a chiropractor with no success. He didn’t think it was anything much of a big deal. But he did have a biopsy scheduled.

A few weeks later he’d gone to Italy with his family. I’d sent him an e-mail asking if he’d be willing to MC an event for me and my friend and co-writer Andrew F. Sullivan. He wrote back to say he’d have happily done so except for the fact that when he returned from Italy – a trip he’d ultimately had to cut short – he’d be beginning his “cancer journey.”

We spoke on the phone for an hour once he’d gotten home. He was scared. I understood how serious this was, but I’d known people who’d survived cancer. This was detected early, yes? A mild pain in his leg. Modern medicine could work wonders. He was only 54, 55. Jesus, he was so young. He had teenaged kids. There were hopeful outcomes. I said I’d be there for anything he’d ever need of me. I felt helpless.

We met the next week. I hadn’t seen him in a month. He’d started treatment. He looked like a man who’d started cancer treatment. He had this pre-existing book contract that he’d told his agent (also my own agent) he didn’t have the energy for. He told me the amount of that contract. It was a healthy amount.

That was my first true sense that there may be no good ending to this. As I said, we’re sharks, yes? For any shark to turn down such a big meal spoke to something deeply the matter.

On my walk home I called our mutual agent and told him I’d ghostwrite that book for Andrew. I’d come away from that lunch in the dire headspace that Andrew had only weeks to live.

Mercifully, Andrew lived much longer. And we did co-write that book. But Andrew did most of the heavy lifting in the way of a detailed outline. It was paint by numbers for me. And he insisted we split the money, though that was never my will. He was emphatic.

Again, it gave us an excuse to meet up. More lunches, more talks. Over time he grew thinner. He ate less. At our last dinner, he was tired but he talked about the things that kept him going. Getting to watch his son’s hockey games. Dinners with his wife, Heidi. Seeing his daughter away to university.

“You look good,” I told him, and I’d meant it within the bounds of reality. He looked good for a man who was not going to survive this terrible thing that had found him.

Andrew mimed a meeting with his oncologist. He mimicked her looking at his chart, wincing, then shrugging and smiling at him. “But you look great.”

In the final weeks leading to Christmas, I didn’t see him. My childhood friend Neil did, as their sons played hockey on the same team. Neil had only gotten to know Andrew over the past few years, but his fondness for him was vast. Neil called Andrew a “universal donor,” by which he meant that he was the sort of person who everyone took to. The sort of person you could strap a parachute on a shove out of a plane and when you found him on terra firma a few hours later he’d have made friends with whoever he’d happened to land amidst. He may not even be overly upset that you’d pushed him out of the plane.

My last communications with Andrew were emails and texts. His responses were brief, bearing traces of exhaustion and heavy medication. When I suggested he watch the films of Hayao Miyazaki – which seemed the sort of films I’d watch at that point – he wrote: I love Miyazaki. A breath of meadow and cold white wine comes to mind.

What would you give for another afternoon with someone you care for, and in what way would you wish it to transpire? I’ve thought of this often. For me, with Andrew, it would be when he got on one of his creative rolls. His fingers daggering through that silver mane of his, ideas popping alight in the ether above his head, characters and plot lines and emotions all clashing as he strained to put some order in the mad creative riot going on inside his mind.

“You can see that, though, right Craig? You see how that could all work?”

Yes, Andrew. I can see.

For me, that would be it. For Heidi or Andrew’s children, his childhood friends or our poker circle or his siblings it would be different. Andrew was many things to many people, all of them fine and good.

When Andrew called me after returning from Italy knowing he had cancer, before he hung up he said: “I love you.”

It took me a beat to reply in kind. Not because I didn’t love him, but because it was not part of our regular signing off. Andrew using it meant we’d stepped into some new and quite terrifying place where we spoke the silent things aloud. There wasn’t enough time left not to.

It became Andrew and I’s regular goodbye from that point on. I love you. The last time I saw him, at an event ostensibly for his book William but more honestly for his friends to say farewell to him personally, those were the last words we spoke in parting. I love you.

Why do male friends so rarely say it? I don’t know. It’s heartbreaking, really. To hold that inside, walled off. But I think if the genuine feeling wasn’t there, it would never come to us to speak those words at all.

Well.

I love you, Andrew.

So many of us did.

I love you dearly and I’ll miss you.