Bye Fur Now, TK

[Univaded_Fox]

On February 25, 2010, I had my first encounter with the local Furry Community.  It came on Robson Street, in the middle of downtown Vancouver, during the 2010 Olympic Winter Games.  I had been soaking up the atmosphere when I stumbled upon a group of eight fursuiters roaming about the street, completely at the crowd's attention.  Until that time, I had never even hugged a fursuiter.  In short order, I sought out my first hug from Lace/Roan.

Immediately after receiving that hug, I turned a little to my right and found myself staring into the big green cartoony eyes of a Fox.  A Fox; my own species!  "FURRIES!" I shouted and embraced the Fox.  The Fox starting jumping as we hugged and I dissolved into laughter.

That is how I met Rennie Fox.

About a month later, I met that Fox again when he went ice skating in Robson Square during the Paralympics.  I was not to meet the man inside the Fox until April.  When we met face-to-face, I was somewhat surprised to discover that he was not Caucasian (as had been the case with all of the Furries whom I had encountered up till that point).  He was from Bangkok, Thailand.  Despite having learned English from childhood and spending a decade in Canada, he still spoke with enough of an accent that sometimes I was not quite sure what he had just said. His real name was terribly hard to pronounce, but the shorthand was TK.  I will always think of him as Rennie Fox. 

The timing of our introduction to each other could not have been more appropriate.  After living for several years on Vancouver Island while attending the University of Victoria, TK was moving to the Lower Mainland.  He was also about to begin his foray into the world of professional mascotting.

TK wanted more.  He had his own Fursuit; had been to a number of conventions; had a role in a group of local volunteer mascots, Helping Pawz.  But TK desired opportunities to costume beyond what he had become used to doing for years.  He wanted to go professional.  He had long studied the methods of mascots: Their movements; their routines; their approaches to interaction; their abilities to use the costume, other persons and any nearby props to produce magic.  He knew what could be done to produce the best results in any audience: Smiles. 

He also knew what to avoid.  A lot of people in costume acted like people thrown into costume against their will.  They were not entertainers, or clowns, or anyone associated with costuming; they had been drafted and shoehorned into a role which they regarded as being undignified.  You could recognize them with no trouble whatsoever: The mascots who stood strait up like a totem pole; shoulders drooping at the sides; dolling out the same apathetic hugs; hitting the same unspectacular poses; embarrassed to be seen; inarticulate; unmoving; utterly uncomfortable with being anything other than human. 

For TK, it was an honor to be in costume.  He never looked more at ease than when he was dressed up as a mascot, no matter the species or shape of the costume he was wearing.  He was a brilliant improviser.  His energy was seemingly boundless.  Even on his "off" days he appeared to be giving his all.  He never broke character and he never stopped moving, even when nobody else was looking.  For each character, he employed subtle differences to his routines and mannerisms.  The one that I saw most consistently was Rennie Fox.  Rennie was like a child mixed with Gurgi, a character from a half-forgotten Disney film, The Black Cauldron: energetic, mischievous, curious, compassionate; the comedic sidekick that you would always love to have around.

Over the next two years, TK wore a parade of costumes for a variety of employers, and, after retiring Rennie Fox from Furry gatherings, he also free-lanced the character at various non-profit charity events.  The numbers speak to his ability to stand out.  In 2009, he made five appearances in costume.  In 2010, sixty-two.  At the start of 2011, he made a New Year's resolution to do more than one-hundred gigs.  He finished the year with 189.

In September 2010, TK began his single longest mascot tenure as Winger for the British Columbia Hockey League's Surrey Eagles.  Not content to simply fill out the aging Eagle costume, TK set out to provide the team with a "full package service": Giving 110% at every appearance; overseeing the costume's maintenance; and enhancing the character's community relations.  Winger soon had his own Facebook and Twitter accounts.  His number of community appearances increased substantially.  With his input, Winger received a costume upgrade for the first time in 13 years.  TK even took the time to learn how to ice skate forwards and backwards so that Winger would look natural and at ease gliding across the ice.

Where TK went I often followed.  Prior to 2010, I had no experience as a mascot handler.  Beginning with that year's North Shore Canada Day Parade, I spotted for TK at dozens of events: Hockey games, fundraising walks; mascot derbies; even onto Empire Field during halftime at a BC Lions football game, where Rennie and a dozen other local mascots played soccer.  I took thousands of photographs and hours of video to document these appearances.  I even cast Rennie in a couple of my Art Institute short films. 

TK offered his experiences to other performers as a mascot trainer, but I received plenty of free training just by studying his routines.  He became my mentor. When I finally got a chance to wear a Fursuit for the very first time, I unashamedly copied his techniques: Keep your shoulders up; move like there is music even when there is none; always leave someone feeling better than before they first met you; never stand still; take pride in what you are.  Through a roundabout way, his job as Peter Puck for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation would lead to my assuming the role one year later. And in September 2011, we even got to mascot simultaneously at the Eagles' season home opener, when I stepped into an ungainly A&W Bear costume that had been dropped off without a performer.  I ended up blind on the ice with a Zamboni barrelling at me; but I was glad that we had finally done a gig together.

Somewhere along the way we became more than just friends.  We became brothers.  We did things outside of mascotting.  We went to movies.  He came to my house for Christmas, Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve with my family.  We made a tradition of spending Canada Day together and stalking mascots at the festivities downtown.  I got the impression that despite giving his heart and soul to the world, he could oft-times be a very lonely Fox.  His family lived half a world away.  His gigs conflicted with Furry events and so he could not participate in the community.  Sometimes I seemed to be the only person that he could count on for regular company.

Only two times was I really afraid for his life while he was in costume.  On December 29, 2010, the Surrey Eagles were playing a special home-away game at Richmond's Minoru Arena in front of a crowd of minor league hockey teams.  As typical of every Eagles home game, the second intermission was devoted to the Frisbee Toss.  Winger would skate onto the ice and drop a target at center rink, which the crowd would then try to hit by tossing Frisbees from the stands.  The Frisbee that landed closest to the target would receive a prize.  It was customary for Winger to skate around and help collect the Frisbees afterwards.  On this night, Winger, his hands full of Frisbees, was skating towards a large plastic trash bin used to collect the discs.  As he began to stop, his skate caught a rut in the ice, throwing him chest-first into the bin.  Afterwards, I found Winger in a hallway under the stands, struggling to breathe.  Not about to let his injury detour him, he finished the last period of the game.  Then I rushed TK to the nearest hospital (coincidentally where one of the injured Eagles players was also being rushed).  TK had bruised two ribs and wore a cast for the next few weeks.  But Winger kept doing his home games.  The very next night, I photographed him stomping on the cursed bin.

Six months later, TK had become Peter Puck, mascot for CBC's Hockey Night in Canada.  With our local NHL hockey team—the Vancouver Canucks—on one of their rare playoff runs, TK got a chance to milk the role for all that it was worth.  Series after series, the Canucks advanced through the playoffs, and, in front of every game shown to the enlarging crowds outside of CBC's broadcasting center downtown, Peter was there.  That included Game 7: the final game in the final round of the 2011 Stanley Cup Playoffs on June 15, 2011.  Peter was out front of the CBC as 100,000 people filled nearby Georgia Street.  Once the game got underway, Peter was withdrawn from the street.  A few hours later, all hell broke loose.  As images of burning cars and tear gassed rioters flickered on my television, I tried to reach my friend via his phone.  He was OK.  He had been barricaded inside the CBC while the world outside had lost its sanity.

In December 2011, I received an urgent email from TK saying that his world was coming to an end.  Although he had been living in Canada since 1999, had graduated from a Canadian high school and a Canadian university, and had taken all of his mascot jobs for Canadian employers, TK's work visa would expire in the new year, and he had been told that he would have to leave the country.  He had never sought permanent residence status, and his job with its rotating litany of employers did not meet the requirements for him to submit an application.  In May 2012, TK had to stop taking paid mascot jobs, but he received a six-month tourist visa, which would expire on November 30, 2012. 

As our months wound down together, I took every opportunity to see the TK Farewell Tour in action.  Despite the cloud of doom hanging over his head, he kept doing gigs and his performance never faltered.  He handed Winger over to a new performer, but kept doing volunteer gigs as Rennie Fox.  He got back into making appearances at Furry events like our monthly bowling meets.  On Canada Day 2012, Rennie Fox crashed the celebrations at Canada Place unannounced, drawing a rapturous crowd.  After missing out on being part of the shoot for Warehouse Furteen due to illness, Rennie Fox got to run around Burnaby Village Museum as part of the VancouFur 2013 Promotional Video.  In August, I brought TK back to Victoria to assist with a photo-shoot for Baby Cheetah, and while there he took us to one of his favorite haunts, The Blue Fox Café.  In September, both Rennie and Winger appeared simultaneously at an Eagles hockey game, inspiring the events organizer to invite Rennie to appear at a series of Simon Fraser University hockey games throughout October.  On a rainy Halloween, Rennie joined six other fursuiters for a romp through the damps streets of downtown Vancouver.

By now we had entered the unwelcomed final act of this story.  It was impossible for TK to relocate all of the accumulated possessions from his life in Canada back to Thailand.  That meant sorting through everything he owned and deciding what fell into five categories: What to keep, what to sell, what to donate, what to give away, and what to throw out.  Some days we averaged four bags of trash for every bag of donations.  Over the course of four weeks, TK's life passed before my eyes and I learned quite a few heretofore unknown details about my friend.  He had been a very good high school student, earning better than a 4.0 GPA.  He had studied art for a number of years, practicing both sketching and photography.  He had been to San Francisco, Washington D.C., and New York City.  He had photographed The Spirit of St. Louis, and been to the top of the World Trade Center.  He had attended several Anthrocons, Further Confusions and Rainfurrests between 2006 and 2010; stowing his conbooks, badges and DVDs at the bottom of a "time capsule" topped with Vancouver 2010 merchandise.  He had a collection of dozens of Disney DVDs.  He had been to Disney's theme parks several times, posing with numerous characters and procuring their autographs; including one from my favorite character, Robin Hood.  He had a surprising number of items related to Brother Bear; even more surprising was that he gave them to me.  And then he dug deep into his closet and pulled out a green bin full of plushies with a Koda Bear sitting on top.  "How much?" I asked him.  "He's yours."  I must have kissed him a dozen times.

From November 10-11, 2012, one week before he was scheduled to leave the country, TK attended Howloween 2012; his first appearance at our local mini-convention in six years.  Rennie Fox came out of his den twice that weekend: first to be part of a very ruckus Fursuit games, and secondly the succeeding day at Fursuit bowling.  By coincidence, the latter event was held a dozen lanes over from a child's birthday party.  Rennie became one of a handful of suiters at the kids' utter fascination.  Too shy to approach upfront, they were never shy about grabbing his attention, and he merrily indulged their fascination by chasing those kids around the alley.  On Thursday, November 15, TK attended RainRat's weekly Game Night.  It was his last Furry event in Canada.

TK spent his final 24 hours in Canada at my house.  My family took him to The Keg for his last dinner. We watched Robin Hood together.  He got to speak to my mate by phone for the first time.  The next morning I took him to the airport.  As fate would have it, we said our final goodbyes next to a small parked vehicle with Vancouver 2010 branding.  The moment my hand slipped out of his, I started to cry.

Half of me wants to believe that we will see each other again; that he will someday find a path to move back to the Lower Mainland and we will have more adventures together.  The other half wants me to accept that there is a very real possibility that we will never see each other again.  But I want him to come back and I hope that he does.  I hope that this is just Bye Fur Now and not Furever.  I hope that he will be happy in Thailand, that he will find others there who share his interests so he won't be alone, and that he will land a job where his English skills enable him with an opportunity to go abroad.  And I really, really hope that he is able to costume again, because I hate to see him cut out of his prime.  This is not just my loss.  This province lost a great mascot performer; definitely one of the top five.  If they ever tell my story let them say that I walked with a giant.  Men rise and fall like the winter wheat, but his name will never die. Let them say I lived in the time of TK, the mascot for all seasons, and my dear friend.

To coda this article, I should answer a question that some of you are probably waiting to have answered: What happened to Rennie Fox?  TK decided not to take Rennie back to Thailand.  He said that Rennie belonged here.  For more than a year he weighed various decisions about what to do with the aging Fursuit.  Poor Rennie has seen his years and needs a lot of TLC.  He considered selling it to a sports team so that Rennie could live out his years professionally.  He thought about donating it to a charity organization.  In the end he decided that he was not comfortable with giving it to just anyone to wear without the heart and soul of the Fox; someone who might not care what would happen to the costume.   He decided to give it to another Furry and to let him decide what to do from there.  And so Rennie Fox is now with me.  I hope that I can somehow keep him alive. 

[Red]

An amazing story, thank you for sharing

[Tef]

I have to agree, this was very well written. I do know that my comments do not do your post much justice, but I do understand the part about brotherly friends quite well. Thank you for writing this, Univaded. Your words have led me to think just how important it is to keep the dear friends of mine close, because the future in terms of relationships are unforgivingly treacherous.

:hug:

[Sevrin]

I do not have the energy right now to read all that, can someone give me the tl;dr?

[Red]

I do not have the energy right now to read all that, can someone give me the tl;dr?

Uninvaded meets a guy from Bangkok, Thailand. They grow a very strong friendship, however later TK's work visa expires, and he has to move back.  :'(

[Sevrin]

Oh no! that's sad D:

[Rant]

It's more sad when you actually read it and feel the emotion behind the words. I hope you get to see your friend again some day Univaded. It's hard when people have to leave and be so very far away.
Surely you're still in contact?

thank you for sharing!

[Nibi]

This was so sad. :< I've had many friends move away over the years, but none of my really close ones, but, that'll be happening next year for me. It's never easy to say goodbye. <3

[ravewoif]

Reading this I cannot feel much pity as I can jealousy that you have a friendship like that. While life is a cruel place it is still kind. Your friendship will definitely not stop there. Your bond is too strong to be broken by separation and unless one of you tries to give up I'm almost certain that you shall meet again. This is by far not the end. Don't let the thought of moments that won't happen weigh you down, but rejoice in memory of the sweet and great moments you shared.

[Univaded_Fox]

Thank you very much everyone for all of your kind words.  I am still in touch in TK.  He is back safely in Bangkok, where in winter the temperature never drops below twenty Celsius and it is their dry season!  He says mascots are everywhere; not in person, but in all their advertisements. 

[Dervacor]

Very sad tale.  :<

I know it's super hard to say goodbye to friends.  Especially for bullshit immigration reasons.  I hope things go well for both of you.