Interviewed by Reese Sawyer
T Paulo Urcanse was interviewed by the Editors of High Horse on assignment for The Paris Review sometime in early 2023, prior to the horrifically painful and fatal heart attack that stole the great author from his beloved audience and the world.
The text below contains a befuddling and unnecessary description of the lead up to the interview, followed by a transcript of the actual interview. High Horse is both honored and thrilled to share this with our audience. (All apologies to Emily Stokes, who understandably refused to publish this piece in The Paris Review after having received a draft of it written down on a stained Denny’s napkin several weeks past deadline, and without ever having addressed the massive amount of money spent on a Paris Review credit account during the research phase for overstocked Korean knockoff Yeezy Foam Runners).
I got an email from Emily the day after New Year’s that we had the go ahead from the Board of Directors. Her email was crude. Lots of f-yous and don’t you f-ing this or that. Keep it between the mayonnaise and mustard, when you’re talking to this freak. There’s a reason we’ve ignored him, until now.
Doggone it, Emily, I said, in my email back to her. Are you sober? Her reply was a photograph of her miniature schnauzer wrapped in tin foil with a Christmas bow stuck to the top of its head. What the fuck do you think? she said.
Me and Hank could pull it off, but we’ll need a credit line, and 24 hours of uninterrupted access with T Paulo, I said.
She emailed me the details for a credit card she said she’d have one of her assistants ship to my duplex overnight. Emily is always getting other people to take care of things she doesn’t have time for. The Paris Review is a massive publication, with lots of new and interesting writers they’ve got to cultivate and manage. No wonder she’s busy. If you haven’t read their magazine, you should swing by your local gas stop or bodega and pick up a copy. I always catch a few TxDot workers and roughnecks and sometimes single mothers flipping through the pages of a new issue when I’m stopping in for a package of peach rings or a can of baked beans.
The credit card came in the mail the next day, just as Emily promised. It had a metallic peacock on it that flashed all kinds of greenish and bluish colors when I held it to light. It looked weighty and officious slid into the folds of my duct tape wallet.
I put on my field uniform of cargo britches and an unbuttoned tan work shirt over an ironic band t-shirt and called up Hank. Hank is between residences now, living someplace in the West always, but never anywhere findable on Google Maps.
“Hank?” I said. Someone had answered but all I could hear was their breathing. “Are you okay?”
More breathing. Some grunting.
“Hank? We got the go ahead. I got a credit card and everything. Listen, it’s not an easy assignment, but it could be big for us if we pull this off. Did you know no one has confirmed seeing T Paulo Urcanse since 9-11? That’s over 20 years. 20!” I said.
“You just want me to go so you can make me buy the Jimmy John’s again,” said Hank. He was drunk, slurring. He fell into blue moods like this sometimes, rendering me his enemy.
“This trip, we don’t have to worry about who pays for the cheeseburgers and sandwiches. Emily’s off the wagon! It must be really bad. Did you not hear me say she sent me a credit card? We can spend however much money we’d like!”
“Did she ask about me?” said Hank.
Hank and Emily Stokes had looked at each other in the foiler of a convention center during a writing conference in Portland one time, and ever since Hank worried that Emily would fall desperately in love with him and they would run off someplace where they didn’t know the language and waste away reading bad collections of poetry at cafes across the street from famous art museums.
“Not once,” I said.
The line went silent. Hank had hung up on me.
I texted him the details for the assignment anyway. If given the opportunity, I knew Hank couldn’t miss out on sitting in the presence of T Paulo. He had been the person, after all, who introduced me to T Paulo’s horror sonnets in graduate school. Our other classmates scoffed at the sonnets, considering them juvenilia written by a Portuguese provincial, no more attuned to the rhythm of great literature than a tortoise to the canopy of a tall majestic tree. Me and Hank knew better, though. Me and Hank knew T Paulo had it. It is the thing that top of the wrung athletes are described as having. I would contend janitors at elementary schools are tapped into it too, but that’s a subject for a different time.
I flew out of the backwater of a town I call home, had a brief layover in Dallas, and set off for Lisbon in the afternoon. I flew first class, of course. I had purchased Hank a ticket, also, from Albuquerque, which was the closest town to him with an airport. I hadn’t heard back from him since our phone call, but I knew he would be there when I stepped off the plane, eating a cheeseburger or raiding the snack machines, clenching his jaw from the nicotine withdrawals. I fell asleep imagining this, and when I woke up, it was still afternoon, although on a different continent, and the Iberian light full and glowing in a way I’d picked up from what little poetry I’d read and could understand.
I got off the plane and went to the baggage claim. I said “Gracias,” and “Lo siento,” a whole bunch, to let the natives know I was a kind soul. I didn’t know much of the Portuguese, but I adored enchiladas. I would figure my way around.
At the baggage conveyor, I ran into Hank, who was holding a cardboard sign that said, “It’s me. Jesus. Can we talk?”
I socked him in the arm, saying, “If it isn’t ole Atilla the Hun.”
He socked me back, saying, “Hello, Mr. Rodgers. Let me out the closet.”
We went back and forth, socking each other in the arms, a crowd of well dressed Europeans stopping to stare at us. It had been too long, but we had finally reunited. The times we would have, exploring a foreign land. The memories we would create. The lessons we’d learn…
My phone rang. It was Emily.
“We’ve made it, Emily,” I said.
“What in the name of Samhain are you doing in Lisbon, Portugal, running up your credit card?” said Emily.
“T Paulo. The Pucker Fish. Lisbon,” I said. I found it difficult, advocating for myself. Emily had a strong phallic voice that sounded like it was meant to knock over constructions of toddler’s blocks. When she was angry, and turned it around on you, you could feel practically Lilliputian.
“T Paulo hasn’t lived in Lisbon in years,” said Emily. “He lives in Lubbock, Texas. Why’d you think I allowed you this assignment? Globalization, rising costs. Before long, we’ll replace you and the work you do with a Fisher-Price synthesizer.”
“Got it,” I said.
“Now get your dumbass back on a plane and make it commercial this time. You aren’t Gay fucking Talese.”
“Did she ask about me?” said Hank.
“No,” I said. “She’s forgotten about you.”
“I think about her every day,” said Hank.
“I know you do, buddy,” I said, and Hank started to sob. I brought him close to me and held him while he cried. I didn’t know how to tell him we were going home before we even started.
We flew back to Lubbock, Texas, and rested at my duplex for several days, eating pizza and watching Nick Cage movies. We were both depressed and disaffected, Hank about his unrealized love for Emily Stokes, and me for the fact that my hero, the man I had described once as my literary animus, was not existing in extravagant European locales, but at an address someplace on the east side of Lubbock, across the street from a dog food distribution center.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said to Emily on the phone, after the upteenth ass chewing I’d received for flying to Lisbon without receiving clearance. Hank was passed out, which was the only reason I could talk to her inside. Otherwise he’d be clamoring beside me, like a dog for a treat.
“You don’t think Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman, do you?” said Emily.
“Are we sure he’s really Portuguese? Is this some kind of scandal?” I said.
“I fucking knew it. You accept the narrative propagated by the regime,” said Emily.
I had begun to doubt the value of this entire enterprise. Emily was an alcoholic. Hank was depressed. I was running low on faith. And T Paulo was just down the road, probably eating tacos at the Pollo Rico. I flipped through the well worn pages of my graduate school copy of The Pucker Fish. During the scene in which T Paulo’s narrator falls off a bicycle in a metaphorical dream narrated by a capybara, I nearly had a realization, but the manifestation of said realization was interrupted by a phone call from an unknown number.
“When are you coming?” said a woman’s voice.
“Who is this?” I said.
“He awaits.”
“We’re busy,” I said, looking down at the coffee table, covered in empty crummy pizza boxes and crushed up paper bags once filled with cheeseburgers.
“Have you not received the address from Ms. Emily?” said the voice. It sounded like an old woman, maybe Hispanic, definitely a native speaker of a Romance language.
“Emily’s chasing the bottom of the bottle right now. She passed along an address, but I don’t know if I can trust it. I don’t know if I can trust any of this.”
“Trust. Believe,” said the woman. “T Paulo awaits your arrival with a loving patience.”
A loving patience. The man who wrote the books I loved so dearly would never await anyone with loving patience. I put down my phone and poked at Hank, who had come alive, and was reading a book of spells or something by one Alastair Crowley.
“I can manifest things,” said Hank.
“We’ve got to go to this address and at least see,” I said.
“See what?” said Hank.
“See if T Paulo’s really living there,” I said.
“I don’t care about T Paulo,” said Hank. “I won’t rest until the Editor of The Paris Review is desperately in love with me.”
“Look at this. Look at us,” I said, gesturing at the duplex. It looked like a droning Velvet Underground song made real. We were both covered in acne and bedsores. We needed to shave. Or at least I needed to shave. Hank grew a beard that reminded one of the term ‘beaver trapping.’ “Emily is never going to love you if we don’t get out of here and do something to make her see us.”
“Alastair says I can have Emily if I get down with his magic,” said Hank.
“Let’s start by following through with this T Paulo interview,” I said.
“Have you ever read The Pucker Fish backwards?” said Hank.
“No,” I said.
“I bet something cool would happen if you did.”
We drove to the dog food distribution center and parked where the employees did, then walked west across Avenue Q and into the rundown neighborhood where T Paulo lived. I was wearing my interviewer suit, which was also my funeral suit. Hank was dressed like always, in a Canadian tuxedo that smelled like the inside of a reggae band’s touring van.
By the time we’d stepped onto the creaking porch and opened the screen door, knocking on the regular one, my no no region was dense with sweat, and the wind had blown my hair out of order, so that I was pressing it against my head, my other arm occupied by the tape recorder. A woman opened the door, greeting us and welcoming us inside.
“T Paulo is excited to share his methods with the literary world,” said the woman. Her name was Ornita Roche. She claimed to be T Paulo’s publicist. She was probably a hair under five feet tall, and didn’t look Iberian. She spoke English with a Hill Country drawl much different from the voice of the person I’d spoken to over the phone.
“It must be different, living here,” I said. Ornita had sat us down in the living room, and served us a glass of Port that she claimed to be rich and old. It tasted like Boone’s Farm, but I didn’t complain. Hank swished it around in his mouth and humphed a lot, approving.
“Oh yes, we sure do miss Lisbon,” said Ornita. “But that humid sea air just warn’t no good for T Paulo’s lungs. So here we are.”
Hank burped.
“Why is he here?” said Ornita.
“Hank?” I said.
Ornita nodded her head.
“He holds the tape recorder, mainly. Sometimes, however, if I don’t know what to say or I’m not feeling well, he’ll take over the interview,” I said.
“So you two have what you might call a partnership,” said Ornita.
“A lot like you and T Paulo, I guess.”
“What me and T Paulo share,” said Ornita, leaning over the coffee table. “Isn’t a partnership. It’s lust. Pure-dee-lust, like the Good Lord would never approve.”
“I’ll have another of your oldest, finest Port,” said Hank.
“I like him,” said Ornita, showing teeth.
We ended up sitting there far longer than what I’d planned, drinking Port (allegedly), and listening to Ornita tell stories of old colleagues at the publishing houses in Porto where she’d started. Sometimes the details of Porto would mix with descriptions of places I’d read about in Steinbeck or Faulkner. I drank more Port and tried not to question it. Before long, I was pushed to the periphery of the couch, Ornita having joined us, growling at Hank, who was chuckling and coughing and drinking, and then Ornita began teaching Hank a love song in Portuguese that mentioned a famous Medieval battle against the Spanish, and when she did this she sounded like the voice on the phone, the voice of my mother, the voice of Emily Stokes.
I heard something rasping in the back of the house.
I picked up my tape recorder, and started for the sound. The house was ornamented in Catholic figurines and smelled of incense. The paintings were all scenes from the Gospel. I entered into a small hallway and heard the coughing again. My heart fluttered, as I twisted the doorknob, and there, unmistakably, his face a drawn version of the one I’d seen on book jackets, T Paulo Urcanse.
He was trimming his fingernails with a Bowie knife, and smoking a cheap cigar.
“Hello,” I said, and I pressed record on my tape recorder, and sat down in a chair across the room from T Paulo’s mattress.
Note: The following interview is the property of The Paris Review. Certain portions of said interview have been released for public consumption with the consent of the editorial staff at The Paris Review. T Paulo’s responses, however, were redacted, per the wishes of his estate, and Emily Stokes. Questions about the nature of the responses given by T Paulo may be addressed via email to rights@theparisreview.org. We thank you for reading The Paris Review.
The Paris Review–The Official Literary Magazine of Jack Links Beef Jerky. Jack Links Beef Jerky–Feed Your Wild Side.
INTERVIEWER
I’ve been waiting my whole life for this moment.
T PAULO
REDACTED
INTERVIEWER
It is kind of you to say. I didn’t expect to find you here. Are you well?
T PAULO
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INTERVIEWER
I suppose there is a great deal of truth to that. It reminds me of a meditation made on the 66th page by one of your famous antagonists–Bo Hemoth. In The Pucker Fish. When he’s about to shatter the metaphor of civility through elevated recreation by crushing the golden fiddle.
T PAULO
REDACTED
INTERVIEWER
So you see Bo Hemoth as being the protagonist, if I’m understanding?
T PAULO
Interrupted by an animalistic grunting and squalling coming from another room…
INTERVIEWER
I’ll shut the door. They’re very loud out there. But with the door closed, see, you can barely hear them.
T PAULO
REDACTED
INTERVIEWER
May I ask you about your writing process?
T PAULO
REDACTED
INTERVIEWER
Something bred of faith and not habit.
T PAULO
REDACTED
INTERVIEWER
I get the sense, however, that The Pucker Fish was written in a short burst.
T PAULO
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INTERVIEWER
I’ve never heard it described more beautifully.
T PAULO
REDACTED
INTERVIEWER
Do you have writing blocks?
T PAULO
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INTERVIEWER
And this, you say, forever eliminates the possibility?
T PAULO
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INTERVIEWER
What was the inspiration for writing The Pucker Fish?
T PAULO
REDACTED
INTERVIEWER
Not a lot of people know this about you.
T PAULO
REDACTED
INTERVIEWER
Yes. I suppose so. The links between Dick Cheney and Dick Nixon.
T PAULO
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INTERVIEWER
That’s a wonderful image of you and Pynchon. Can we print a copy with the interview?
T PAULO
REDACTED
INTERVIEWER
Memory is an important theme in your creative work. If you could have your druthers, how would you choose to be remembered?
T PAULO
REDACTED
INTERVIEWER
Your saying so helps me finally understand what Flannery meant by, “Moment of Grace.”
High Horse 
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