by Bruce McCall
Culture shock socked the innocent McCall kids in their solar plexuses: we had just vacated a drafty, roomy old barn of a house on a quarter-acre corner lot in a leafy neighborhood in a small town. What we now had to call home was a third-floor walk-up in which eight humans were crammed into three cell-like bedrooms. The “Court” in Danforth Court was a stingy rectangle of grass surrounded by three-story buildings and was soon beaten down to mud. Even greenery was rationed: Albert Speer probably saw more foliage from his cell window at Spandau.
The sickly-sweet odor of fresh paint permeated our apartment and mixed with the perplexity and mild terror I felt in those first, woozy hours. That olfactory insult replayed itself for years. Another pungent aroma—of fresh horseshit—wafted on hot summer nights from the Acme Farmers Dairy stables next door. The dairy still used horse-drawn wagons, a somewhat uncommon holdout.
Escaping the toxicity of Danforth Court for school wasn’t a relief so much as a variation on the theme of ugly surprises. Gledhill Public School was an ugly revelation in itself: a brownish-black stone fortress in that unlovely Victorian Gothic architectural style favored for every British prison, asylum, orphanage, and workhouse, faithfully copied for Canadian schools in order to terrify students before they even passed through the doors.
I made no friends right away, founding a tradition of social self-isolation that would persist for years. I did, however, attract an enemy in my first week at Gledhill. The school playground was larger than certain Polynesian islands, a vast open space modeled on the Alcatraz exercise yard. Making enemies at Gledhill was easier, I realized, than making friends. What provoked the enmity I never knew, but when I sidled out to the yard at recess, scanning the milling throngs in search of a friendly face, an eggplant-shaped thug waddled up to welcome me with a hearty smash on the shoulder. “Fuckin’ little sissy,” he explained.
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I had been drawing, like every other young kid near a paper supply, almost from the day I realized that the little pink rubber thingamajig at the top end of a pencil wasn’t nearly as good as the pointed graphite tip at the other end for making marks on paper. Nobody in the family, the school, or Simcoe had yet detected an embryonic Michelangelo (the artistic talent scouts hadn’t reached Norfolk County). Reducing the circle to my family, I was a prodigy. Too bad if artistic merit in my neck of the woods conferred prestige only to those whose talents lay somewhere between carving a good jack-o’-lantern and accurately spelling the name of Prime Minister Mackenzie King.
I never flattered myself that my drawing and writing amounted to anything but a hobby, private and pleasurable. I could use this creative energy as a bathysphere to explore the deep mysteries of my life hidden below the surface. My vessel bore no relationship to the Good Ship Lollipop. The route to understanding my world, and my place in it, was oblique. I crept up on truths, spun my wheels, invented detours that led to more detours. I spent more time in the psychic muck than in sunlit uplands. My subject matter differed from those of the standard exercises: I went slumming. My fledgling artwork limned no pastoral vistas or still lifes of fruits and flowers. My instincts led me to a dark, humid, nasty subterranean world.
I had never seen a Hogarth or Cruikshank engraving, yet one of my earliest renderings was uncannily similar: I drew a dank stone cellar. A scrum of lowlifes were brawling to grab chunks of garbage tumbling down a chute. What in hell was my point? I didn’t know or care. Maybe it was fascination with the underclass. Maybe panoramas of human desperation raised the creative stakes: it’s harder to show misery than happiness. My ideal was perfected through practice in lovingly rendering armies of cretinous bums in mildewed rags. The most Neanderthal one stands in a mud puddle, waiting for a lightning strike.
No such scenes of misery could be found near Danforth Court or anywhere else, even in the slums. My life had never intersected with society’s dregs. Our family was never Norman Rockwell–content with life or with one another, yet despite all the tears and tantrums, we never came close to the brink of patri-, matri-, or infanticide. And even with six kids to feed and succor, our parents managed to squeak by financially. So then why on God’s green earth had I plunged my gifts into despair, sought out scenes of abject poverty, and then populated my entire netherworld with human flotsam comfortable in their rotting domain?
It seems that I wasn’t entirely happy with the circumstances of my life and expressed my disaffection by declaring war on what I perceived to be the enemy. Drawing and writing were my weapons. The tragic truth was that my weapons couldn’t change anything. Couldn’t win this war within the family, nor out in the real world. But the purpose was in fact internal. I drew and wrote to vent my feelings, to explain to myself what was going on. The psychology of it is revealing: I was afraid to openly criticize Dad and Mother, from whom I believed all the unfairness, frustration, and evil flowed. So I disguised them, and my most urgent beefs, in a world so weirdly strange that neither they nor anybody else could detect my purpose. I felt at the time so unworthy, so powerless, and so low on life’s totem pole that the slums and hopelessness, the failed lives I created, radiated from one source: me.
When I began my descent into defeat and depression in my early teens, I felt that we were six siblings without parents—even though our parents actually lived in the same apartment. Mother, upon whom all McCall siblings depended for food and a soft refuge, had begun drinking during her lonely nights in Simcoe; in Toronto she slipped from tipsy to slightly drunk to a state near stupefaction. The creepy sense of our mother living with us while we had no mother agonized us all. Dad ignored—or pretended to ignore—Mother’s alcoholism. He never intervened. His weekends in Simcoe had been devoted to his selfish hobby, golf. He had all but rejected his paternal role long before the war, which supplied a plausible alibi to continue leaving Mother alone with their brood. She was a ghost. From ages three to eleven, when I felt I needed them most, I lacked the benefits of a mother and a father. This was a gap that was never closed.
Dad was too busy and too tired, when he was finally pinned down and cohabited with his offspring, to make quality time for his kids. Now and then after dinner we’d play catch in the alleyway beside our apartment block. And he often took two or three volunteers on Saturday-morning drives to the Liquor Control Board to pick up Molson’s and Labatt’s. Otherwise he was unavailable. Stingy as he was with his attentions to me, Dad seemed to actively dislike the twins, Tom and Walt, from the minute they were born. He was no baby kisser. Kids made him nervous. His—and Mother’s—cold rejection of these two sweet-natured young boys was lifelong. Apparently the twins were being punished for existing, and this neglect amounted to child abuse.
The parental vacuum created a noxious side effect. Kids need attention, love, and a decent home—normality. We siblings never got these things. But every day in a desperate kid’s life starts out hopefully. Every school day was another exercise in willed optimism. At the three o’clock dismissal I started for home, lifted by self-generated images of a fresh start. These foolish fantasies were exposed the instant I closed the door behind me. The bedroom door was shut. Mother was in bed, privately trying to will her hangover away. The apartment was as I had left it early that morning: dirty dishes in the sink, a peanut butter jar, an empty cardboard orange juice container, and other breakfast leftovers littered the kitchen table. The place was permeated by the stale funk of cigarette smoke from the night before. Moments of warmth, brief breaks in the clouds, now and then relieved the tension. But frustration, estrangement, and that chilling absence of affection made daily life miserable for most of us kids, most of the time. Neither Tom nor Walt ever spent a day alone with their father. Walt’s 1950 Christmas gift to his mother was signed Your Friend, Walter. Tom wet the bed and stuttered. “He just wants attention,” Dad sneered.
High school provided no relief. None of us succeeded in shucking off the gloom of life in that apartment enough to gain t
raction. All of us struggled with learning; studying demanded concentration, which we could muster only erratically. Outside of school, we all dwelled in perfect social emptiness. Hugh, Tom, Walt, and I had two or three friends apiece. (Mike was in the navy at this point; I steered clear of Chris’s nascent romantic affairs.) None were girls. The idea of any of us ever dating a female person was a bizarre notion: none of us had the poise, the clothes, the confidence, the social skills. None of us could dance.
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Dinnertime. All eight McCalls are crammed around the kitchen table. The dull clack of working mandibles only emphasizes the tense silence. Dad reigns, too preoccupied with some grievance too private, too important, to share with strangers, i.e., his kids. And anyhow, the unwritten code forbids anyone asking what’s ailing him. Dinner drags on and finally ends. A gust of relief emanates from the kitchen.
It was during this period, before high school, I started becoming an artist. I’d hurry from the dinner table to the bedroom desk to once again squeeze through the cracks in reality and try to fathom the confusion I felt. Drawing and writing were a kind of lens through which I could narrow my focus. What I was doing with pen and ink and paper had nothing to do with art. My creativity was too intimate to share. And nobody would understand what this continuous flow of seeming nonsense meant. I had adapted creativity as a survival therapy, not a calling. Nobody except an absolute narcissist could keep examining his own belly button and feel satisfied with the result. The early sprinklings of humor in my creative efforts did not represent aspirations to entertain a mob. They started out as an intensely private communion with myself, for mental comfort and to lessen the chronic fantods. The technique was not to use “humor” in a broad sense, like a network radio comedian, but to shave an idea down to a sharp point and stick it into my tormentor. Satire demonstrated an intellectual jujitsu, a way of bringing villains down with ridicule. And even if it couldn’t topple the antagonist, the revenge felt deeply satisfying.
Lacking identifiable examples to emulate, my initial version of satire was crude, but that cast of mind affected almost everything I produced. It was a weapon the powerless could use to ridicule the overstuffed, the phony, the bully, the pretentious everybody and everything. Nothing was so invulnerable that it couldn’t be mocked. Satire so suited my temperament and my emotional needs that it became a habit of mind—so much so that I began seeing my life and world through a satirical lens. My perspective skewed off to the side, oblique, slightly skeptical, somewhat jaundiced. Or maybe that trait had been in me always, and satire simply drew it out.
What can an unsophisticated thirteen-year-old know of the world? He works his way inside his targets like a termite, and once he’s there, his close observation, guided by a mischievous intent, mocks what nobody noticed before. Close observation, indeed. The latent satirist sharpens his wits out of self-protection. He feels he’s on a precarious perch. To him, survival depends on reading the tiniest clues to escape being ambushed.
Now, looting the archive, tracing ancient fragments of work from the era just before puberty, I’ve uncovered my first attempts to make satire not simply a flavor but the formal purpose of a piece. Wild exaggeration, excusable in a kid whose world is already arguably half made of stupendous lies, runs through this early work like a locomotive through a straw hut. It would take time to acquire the restraint and maturity to give up pounding points home with a rhetorical mallet, making triply sure that the joke wouldn’t be missed.
Toronto only stubbornly released its charms. I sensed that there must be some differences between a town of six thousand and this mighty metropolis, but I was cautiously slow to experience them. Walking tours made sense: Toronto held the distinction of being Canada’s largest city, and that surely guaranteed something. And on a gray Sunday morning in January, I wasn’t drowning in things to do. Movies, plays, imbibing spirits in a public space, sports of most kinds—all were proscribed on Sundays by way of the Lord’s Day Alliance, Toronto’s self-appointed God cops, Protestant protectors of civic virtue.
Touring neighborhoods revealed only streets and houses, so Mike, Hugh, and I headed downtown. That’s Maple Leaf Gardens; now we’re in Queen’s Park, home of the Ontario government; a few blocks north lay the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto. The city’s main stem, Yonge Street, looked deserted, as if there’d just been a bomb threat; the Lord’s Day zealots had made certain that Yonge Street’s almost wholesome vulgarity was suspended every Sunday. Even in the commercial heart of the city, the paucity of fellow pedestrians suggested that all Torontonians were still in church, had been kidnapped by Roman Catholics, or had expired from boredom. Sunshine was illegal on Sundays.
It’s not incidental to this story to note that although the McCall household was starved for parental love, the act of reading thrived, independent of our day-to-day relations. By age nine I was spewing words and sentences, symbolically twinning my two creative pursuits by drawing on the reverse side of a failed prose masterpiece, or writing on the reverse side of a drawing gone stale. All my meaningful reading occurred outside the classroom. Reading was the key, the one reliable means of understanding the world. And at this juncture it was a pleasure without consequences. I read not in order to get smarter than everybody else or to bone up on exotica. Living in that troubled home made reading ideal: it cost nothing, and it was selfish, shared with nobody. Whatever information or pleasure, whatever exciting boost it gave, was a gift to a solitary person: me. And amid the squabbling mob that six siblings could become simply by being in the same room at the same time, solitude was an escape.
Canadian culture mixes aspects of a British sensibility with the dominant presence of the United States. It’s a form of hybridism that can affect reading, writing, and values—in my case, just enough to amuse the Americans and occasionally piss off the Brits. The British version of the English language permeated those years when, as with music closely heard, subtle differences alter the pace and rhythm. I’d love to go about drawling in that inimitable Mayfair accent, dripping with class. It’s all bullshit, this use of accent and speed of delivery, but I don’t care. It sounds the way every English English-speaker should speak.
It’s a secret craving of mine. I owe it to the cache of British boys’ weekly magazines stashed years ago at the back of a closet by Dad, bound into a volume as thick as a brick. An embossed cover depicted a bronco about to buck the cowpoke on its back into the next dimension. The magazine was Chums. The Chums I had excavated were dated 1922 and were natural fare for a thirteen-year-old kid. But why did Dad drag this oddity along when he and Mother changed homes many times before he laid it in that closet? It’s another regret that I never got the chance to hear the Chums story. Perhaps it was his Rosebud. No other mementos or souvenirs from Dad’s adolescence survive.
Devouring hundreds of Chums stories, which were devoid of the female gender, that year may have further postponed my sluggish sexual awakening. Maybe. But the weird genius of Chums was to so lather up the preadolescent in the noble pursuit of enemies and protection of the British Empire that girls and sex were irrelevant. Nary a slinky Oriental spy, nor a temptress from the Argentine, nor even a peaches-and-cream English Mata Hari could get into Chums with a Luger in each hand and Mills bombs in her trench-coat pockets. These lads had a more urgent mission: save Britannia. The Imperial High Noon was clouding up. The Great War just ended had killed seven hundred thousand Tommies. The exchequer was drained dry by the cost. A worldwide depression stalked the land.
Wherever the Union Jack was imperiled, whether in 1678 on the Spanish Main, or 1857 at Sevastopol, or 1916 on the Western Front, penny-a-page hacks devised tales of derring-do to fit any war by these volunteer upright young public school military geniuses: Reggie. Algernon. Roger. Plus, trailing behind, fat and permanently famished Tubby, the reliable dunce, good for a chuckle, while Napoleon’s cannons lob fire and steel over their heads. These
brave boys sallied forth to foil Evil, always in unstinting loyalty to King and Country. And, of course, playing the game the British Way.
The exploits of these precocious juniors ran a distant second to the real attraction: a prose style baked in Victorian formality, burnished with Kipling-quality touches—“That worthy, for his part” . . . “Twixt Law and Outlaw”—written for a reading experience chewier and more nourishing than the monosyllabic grunts that served as the dialogue in American comic books. Mimicry was a reflexive act in my youth, so it’s hardly surprising that a preference for the literary high road seeped into my writing style, veering into fancy-pants verbiage that added nothing but length. Just before some more literate friend suggested that I knock it off, I knocked it off.
My art career developed slowly. (I should put it that my art career “cautiously advanced.”) School offered tiny bites—a weekly class in the ninth grade, and later, a weekly fifty-five-minute spare period in an empty classroom, drawing anything I fancied, sans teacher. One teacher, Mr. McKenzie, had an imagination. For one project he challenged us to design a swatch of wallpaper for a modern living area. I dived in. The next class required a sample of the design and a brief sell. I stepped to the front of the room and faced the class.
“These are dangerous times,” I mumbled, facing the floor. “Soviet Russia is threatening atomic war. I thought the wallpaper in a Russian home would look something like . . . this!” I hoisted my sample to show the class: raining down in a diagonal pattern against a flat, butter-yellow background were fat little red bombs bearing the Communist Party hammer-and-sickle insignia. Mister and Missus Red Russia, I surmised, supported the Kremlin’s threat to annihilate the capitalist warmongers and honored it on their living room walls.
My exposition elicited silence, then some polite coughing interrupted by the bell signaling the end of the period. I figured it out on the walk home: these kids, my classmates, clearly didn’t read the papers or listen to Edward R. Murrow’s nightly radio newscast. Once more the world was out of step with me.
