WILL A QUEER BE CANADA’S WORST HANDYMAN?

“I have Venetian blinds in my apartment and I’ve never lowered or raised them because I actually don’t know how.” This surreal admission could only come from a sitcom character, or from someone like Keith Cole. What does he do at times like these? “I phone David Hawe.” But it’s frustrating for Cole’s friend Hawe to watch him screw up simple tasks and drop tools as if they were hot. So Hawe found it impossible not to nominate Cole as a contestant for Canada’s Worst Handyman, a series currently running on the Discovery Channel (Mondays at 10pm), in which five couples from across Canada compete against themselves to be the worst. Or is it not to be the worst?

“You’re competing against yourself,” Cole explained over a lovely dinner at Hair of the Dog.

“You’re competing to be the best of the worst,” clarified Hawe. Best, worst, who gives a fuck? What I want to know is what are Keith Cole’s chances of winning this thing?

“You know how they say gay people have the fashion gene, or the design gene, or the hair gene? Well, I didn’t get any of those,” admitted Cole, which is why he qualified for the show. Cole keeps it real. “I like to dance. I like to use the phone,” is how he sums it up. But when it comes to using a hammer or screwdriver or anything like that, he sucks.

Every morning, they’d be driven to the “set,” good old slatedto- be-demolished Regent Park. Each team was given a vacant apartment to ruin/renovate. The shoots lasted up to 14 hours a day. “It was really hot and they had just sprayed for roaches,” remembered Cole. “There were fridges full of food from eight months ago. Still, we were on our way to making it nice.”

Part of “making it nice” included laying carpet, installing ceiling fans and panelling, building a fire pit, designing pathways, roofing, toilet installation, even painting a mural – about 25 different tasks in all, not one of which was performed properly. Watching the show reminded me of the first time I saw Plan 9 From Outer Space – you’re basically laughing at ineptitude, and many of the scenes, in which things fall and smash or are jammed in because they weren’t cut properly, play like silent film gags. The whole time, cameras are hovering, capturing every embarrassing moment.

“We forgot we were wired for sound,” said Cole, “and one day we were making fun of the designer chick who we hated and we were going on and on about her hair and they were listening in the control room.”

“When they told us that they had heard everything, I got so mad I walked off the set,” said Hawe, now media-savvy after appearing in this, his first TV show. Nevertheless, there was a lot of camaraderie, and both Hawe and Cole bonded with their cast mates. They flirted with the hot straight guys, mocked the guy with the harridan wife (“We started to refer to them as Paul and Karla,” said Cole) and bonded with the aboriginal couple.

“We were the only gays the Eskimos ever met,” said Hawe of Merle, a 34-year-old trucker from Sucker Creek, Alberta whose wife nominated him because she is tired of him fixing everything with duct tape. Cole took an instant liking to Merle, who reminded him of his father. “He was such an easygoing, wonderful guy, just like my dad. I was adopted and my father is Indian. We just say ‘Indian’ in my family, not First Nations or any of that stuff,” said Cole, who not long ago caused a stir by performing an Indian rain dance at a fundraiser.

Cole grew up “gay in Thunder Bay,” but left at 18 to come to Toronto. His first night here, he was shaking his booty at a Tina Turner concert. He went to York University to study dance and film and has been dancing and filming ever since. He has also staked out quite a reputation as a performer. He played Polkaroo once, he’s been in an Alanis Morissette video, he played a penguin in Billy Madison and did sketch comedy bits on PrideVision’s Locker Room, in which he shone as one of the World’s Strongest Effeminate Man contestants. He is an accomplished experimental short filmmaker whose work has been shown at the Pleasure Dome, and he’s tap danced his way through well over 150 hosting gigs in the past two years. When I asked him to sum up his diverse career, he said diplomatically that it is “not as good as Fiona Reid’s or Sheila McCarthy’s.”

As for delightful David Hawe, he has been a professional photographer for more than 15 years. We first met when he was hired to take photographs of comedian Scott Thompson for the cover of The Advocate, back in 1989. Since then, his client list has expanded to include Winners, Harry Rosen, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Xtra, Playboy, and the Brass Rail, where he took portraits of all the strippers. “I love strippers. They’re so real. They were all lesbians.” One of Hawe’s shining moments was when a Globe and Mail columnist called him a “professional homosexual” in print. It must come from his irrepressible candour. “I never liked Keith when I first met him,” Hawe admitted bluntly. “I thought he was annoying and loud. Now we’re really close, best friends.” As such, they have great on-screen chemistry, but are they the next Lucy and Ricky? “More like Shields and Yarnell,” said Hawe.

As a condition of appearing on the show, the contestants had to stay together, sequestered for the entire two-week shoot. “We stayed at the Grand [Hotel] on Jarvis,” said Hawe, “in an $800 suite with separate bedrooms and maid service and everything. We had all the parties in our room.”

Of course they did. Partying is a skill at which Cole and Hawe excel. The first time I met Cole, he was dancing on a coffee table and singing the theme from Maude at the top of his lungs. It was in a rambling, dumpy apartment he shared with about a hundred people at Queen and Parliament, and in the early ’90s they threw the best parties around. Cole would do things like encourage everyone to wear record album covers on their heads. “One night we were all dancing to ‘Love Shack,’ and there were so many people bouncing up and down that the floor dropped two feet,” Cole reminded me. And still the party continued.

Much like Pee Wee, George Michael and Hugh Grant, Cole has a legacy of scandal that will win him new admirers for years to come. At the Sushi benefit for Fife House in December 2004, his hosting duties took a turn. “Yes, I was very drunk and bored out of my mind and I remember walking to stage right and I peed, just let it go.” The audience, made up largely of social workers and the people who donate money to them, fled. Thank God it was the end of a very long evening.

Cole didn’t realize what a big deal it was until the next day, when there were dozens of messages on his answering machine. There were threats of a lawsuit, and he was finally asked to issue an apology to the community. “Well, my community is the world, so I put my apology on Reuters. My friend Wayne in Perth read about it.” The incident placed him in the grand tradition of rock stars who puke or take dumps onstage, a lineage that runs from the surrealists to punk rock and avant-garde performance art. Never has a tinkle left such a ripple in this town.

And of course, the controversy was revived in January, when Cole put in a token appearance at the Sashimi benefit at Buddies. This time, Cole appeared as his character Pepper Highway, doing a little tap dance to Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” while holding two feathers and wearing a handmade T-shirt reading “Drinking Ain’t Native.” “It’s like saying not all black men carry guns, or not all gay men have AIDS,” he explained. Though hardly shocking, the performance didn’t stop someone from demanding an apology, although this time he was prepared to dismiss it as crabby cuntiness. He doesn’t seem to realize that being controversial is its own reward. “And yet I’m normal,” Cole professed while daintily dipping a chicken finger into some plum sauce.

But back to the point of it all: just how bad a handyman is Keith Cole? Is he the best of the worst, or the worst of the worst? Is he still fixing holes in the walls by filling them with toothpaste? Will his next scandal involve home renovations? And the next time he needs help, will he phone David Hawe, or has he finally learned how to do things by himself? You’ll just have to tune into Canada’s Worst Handyman to find out.

Paul Bellini is fab’s Troll columnist.