MR DOG FACE

The night I met Ciaran I couldn't see his face.

It’s late on a Thursday in the back of a movie theatre in East London. A crowd is beginning to gather, not to see a movie, but a show. In between the bar and cinema room number 3, sits a stage, a microphone and a dog.

Mr. Dog Face, he declares himself into the microphone. A half man, half dog. Or rather a man dressed in all black, with a plastic dog mask covering his face. We sit transfixed as he begins to perform poetry; words escaping only through a small circular mouth hole. The audience is completely silent until his last rhyme is squeezed out of motionless lips. The dog takes a bow. 

I watch the crowd in front of me slowly turn their heads towards their friends. Without anything said aloud, I could hear what they were thinking:

 “What the fuck?!’’

A few weeks later I found myself drawn back to the same small room - this time to meet the man behind the mask and to ask him the one question I couldn’t get off my mind:

 Why?

 Before sitting down, he prepares himself a drink. A mixture of Cointreau and other miscellaneous liquids one could only find behind a well stocked commercial bar.  ‘A Cowboys Cocktail’ he calls it. 

 I watch as he fiddles with the cup, moving it slowly from hand to hand. The liquid starts to swirl into a small cointreau flavoured whirlpool. ‘I never knew normal,’ he begins. He was five when death first came knocking at his door. His brother got sick. He remembers seeing his mother’s pain. He remembers the awe of watching raindrops chase each other to the bottom of the windowpane. When you’re young, the world is so big, everything is new and exciting, he tells me. His world became a weird mixture of wonder and sorrow. 

 Death came once more to his living room. On his eleventh birthday, his dad had a heart attack and died in his arms. The contours of his life darkened again. Grief seemed to hide around every corner. Soon after, his mother joined a cult and left her family behind. “Jesus sized scars” he tells me, with a strained chuckle. 

 Cults, death and addiction “I was having these crazy experiences, but at the same time I was watching beautiful films, listening to great music and reading philosophy that I found really inspiring. I could go and watch Paris, Texas and see a sense of humanity that just doesn't exist in my intimate familial life.” So, he disappeared into the cinema to find a better reality.

 Still the films eventually had to come to an end. Reality remained. Youth spent in a no-hope town, with a broken family. A bitter pill, sweetened only by the naivety of adolescence and the desire to rebel against how much the world told him he was allowed to have. 

 “I didn't go to a really nice school. I didn't read the classics when I was younger. But every person is entitled to fine words in their mouths and fine thoughts in their head. I can be a poet, and I can still be Cockney.”

 There is solace in a mask - in breaking the feedback loop of how the audience expects him to look and act. ‘A fun curveball in a world of tepid order,’ he explains. If there’s one thing he wants no part in, it’s the cleanly, boringly constructed nature of normality.

 “The stronger, more seemingly fixed the sense of order, the harder it is to truly express oneself, to let feelings and thoughts surge, and see where they might go. If we’re too self-conscious, restrained, predictable and programmatic I don’t think we really get the chance to know and experience ourselves.” Performing poetry in a plastic dog mask is a strong tonic to that. 

 He takes a small sip from his nearly empty cup and continues. 

 We must believe that anything that art can arouse in its audience, is innately a good thing. Art can evoke things in us that the rigid world cannot and it’s only by bringing these internal undercurrents to the surface, that we can begin to explore them and process them. If we constantly run from the thoughts and feelings we keep deep inside, the bigger, wilder and more frightening they become. ‘If art makes you feel as though the air is getting knocked out of you, you’re on the right track,’ he tells me with a grin. 

@_TAKEASEAT__