I knew a psychopath, his name was Barry. If he wasn’t a psychopath (I don’t really know) then Barry was a skilled confidence man. He was great company but Barry would lie and lie.

Barry was the office manager at a small print shop, situated above a warehouse I ran as shipper-receiver in the mid-to-late ‘90s. Barry was a small, gay, red-haired man in his 50s with an Irish face and a busy party life. A bunch of us would hang after work at the ANZA Club on 8th and Ontario.

We would drink. Long nights would proceed into shitfaced arguments and inebriated comedy but not before Barry’s usual appetizer of fabrications and pointless fibs. We absolutely enjoyed and encouraged this bullshit, but.

Did he really have HIV? Was he honestly the vice CEO of Colgate Palmolive in the 60s, based in Brazil, and the survivor of a DC-10 that ditched in the Atlantic Ocean?

Moreover, was it true that Barry spent his youth in the London suburb of Pinner, growing up next door to Elton John, or as he referred to him: “Reggie”? Did Barry have an accent even? No.

But here was the thing. No matter how outlandish and implausible the story, Barry’s gift was an ability to plant some tiny little detail inside his manure that you couldn’t… quite… dismiss. Sometimes, often, it was esoteric enough to beggar statistical probability or coincidence.

In other words, Barry was either a genius mindfucker and maybe psychic, or it was all true.

For example, I mentioned one evening that I’d found a program from Elton John’s 1975 world tour in a nearby thrift store (the Captain’s on Kingsway, for those old enough to remember.) In an instant, Barry was nodding sagely, wearily even, and telling us that he was a guest on that tour. Because he was old friends with Reggie. Because they grew up as neighbours.

“Sure,” I said.

“You can see me,” Barry continued, “in that photograph of the crew, on the tarmac, next to Reggie’s private jet.”

“Sure,” I said again, immediately resolving to take another look at the tour program, which I did, in the next couple days, whereupon I opened it to a gatefold image of Reggie’s private jet with a sizeable number of people posing beneath its wing, waving at the camera, taunting me.

But it was impossible to make out a single face. See what I mean? How did he know?

A couple months later I put one of Barry’s claims to the test, and watched as this bullshitting little fruit turned his entire apartment upside down, searching vainly for any of the Christmas cards he insisted were sent every year to him by his old friend Reggie.

This charade went on for hours. I was there with Dave, who shared my fascination for this nonsense, and Barry’s colleague and “roommate” Cory, an aspiring actor who, in the spirit of these things, would turn physically threatening if you suggested or even joked that he was gay.

It was around midnight or so when Barry finally admitted defeat, all dishevelled and sweaty and surrounded by emptied boxes and hastily flung clothes and upturned drawers in his little one-bedroom West End flat. Not that he recanted anything. He must have thrown the cards away. Wait till Christmas.

It was only a short time later that we learned about Barry’s other neighbour, Gordon Lightfoot.

Turned out his family rented or owned a lakeside cottage in Ontario next to the Lightfoot property, situated at some significant distance from Pinner in the UK, but fine, my fault, I made the mistake of telling everyone, sitting again in the ANZA, one or two pitchers in, that I had tickets to see Gordon Lightfoot at the Orpheum.

“Oh Gordie,” is how it began, Barry now appearing wistful as he leaned back in his chair. “I often think about their beautiful old boathouse,” he said.

“Uh huh,” I said.

“That’s right,” Barry said.

“You lived next door to Gordon Lightfoot?”

“I did”

“And he had a boathouse?”

“A beautiful old boathouse,” Barry sighed, fixing me with his confident stare.

“We’ll see,” I growled.

Anyway, the show was great and at some point, not sure when, this was a long time ago, Gordon Lightfoot introduced a number that he didn’t play very often. An old number, he said. A song from very long ago and I hope you all like it, he said. A song called “Boathouse”.

As it happens, the song “Boathouse” appears on Gordon Lightfoot’s third to last album, A Painter Passing Through, released in 1998. It’s possible that my memory is faulty. I recall that he said it was an “early” effort, and sure, there’s no reason it wouldn’t be revived decades later.

But that’s not the point. Barry had done it again. Nobody, least of all Barry, owned, listened to, knew about, or even picked up and browsed a copy of Gordon Lightfoot’s A Painter Passing Through. Not between its release and Barry’s crowning gust of improvised fabulation a few months later. How did he know?

This all happened as my time with Barry was drawing to a close. He finally went off the rails and embezzled something like a quarter million dollars from his employer (and friend), disappearing in a rented car (paid for by his boss) that was eventually found abandoned somewhere in Vancouver.

Last thing I ever heard was that Barry died from complications brought on by AIDS, so I guess it wasn’t all lies.