by Bruce McCall
The focus of my ardor was the Sumach Browns—same uniforms as their St. Louis namesake. (“Sumach” was a place-name invented to set my fantasies in some identifiable location.) For reasons I can’t quite fathom even now, a slummy Toronto neighborhood popularly known as Cabbagetown was transformed, in my version, into a permanently depressed and impoverished dump. My fond depiction had the advantage, for a fictional fantasy, of my having never set foot in Cabbagetown, thus freeing me to explore extremes of misery way beyond earthbound reality. Sumach Street—an actual thoroughfare—was chosen to be the epicenter, the real Sumach shoved down into a medieval-level hell. Sackville Street got a similar loving drubbing; their team, the Sackville Romans, I created specifically to let me use a familiar Roman fretwork pattern on their uniform sleeve trim.
I didn’t bother inventing an equivalent to the American League for the Sumach Bowns to play in. My satirical zeal was satisfied by the Cabbagetown model. Silly names were too good a satirical subject to avoid. I did invent a few competing teams: the Chain City Gluemen, the New Huskard Barometerisers. I was flailing about and hoping to catch, and ridicule, actual organized-baseball team-naming styles.
The baseball part was enlivened (or burdened) by my awareness of postwar geopolitics. The Sumach Browns pioneered the signing of foreign players. Sensitive to these factors, I created Klein Nachburger, “the Hamburg Wheelhorse,” the first German—and the first ex-Nazi—to pitch in a postwar North American game. I deposited Tang Onamuro, the first Japanese import, at shortstop. First base was occupied by Bruce McSunnyworth, a fictional version of myself and, naturally, a yappy incompetent.
A perennial Browns favorite was the ambidextrous pitcher Jasmun Chickerby, who lost thirty games throwing lefty and thirty games as a righty. He had last won a game in 1937, when the opposing team was disqualified for robbing the box office and the score was reversed. One must bear in mind that Jasmun was seventy-six years old in 1952 and had been the Browns’ rubber-armed moundsman for forty-three years.
My movie and baseball activities were intensely personal and private. Maybe they were subliminal masturbatory fantasies or further examples of a thoroughly warped mind. In any case, it was vital to keep them secret. Not that anyone—not even the generally supportive Mike and Hugh—attempted to crash into my files, searching for movie and sports idiocies.
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Scattershot inspiration began to feel insufficient after a thousand renderings of isolated events. My seedy tableaux, grotesque characters, and their unbroken record of failure after failure had about exhausted the genre. I tried enlarging the scope—e.g., the Snider Lily, a rusted hulk of a passenger vessel too broken-down ever to leave its berth. Not enough. Some overview was missing, some way of tying hundreds of disparate fragments together.
Now everything coalesced. I had been blundering in circles. I had been stringing together a narrative, but that narrative needed a setting and a protagonist. Thus was born the legend of Li’l Grubber. The name fits, with admirable aptness and clarity. Li’l Grubber was a little guy, and his life was grubbing—for food, for shelter, for survival. His backstory is blank; he simply appears in the Sumach setting one day and becomes a Robin Hood, leading a small band, the Tumblin’ Rovers, on missions aimed at sticking it to the powers that be. Grubber is seen in his raw, early form, and he’s shown as he’s elevated to prosperity in the legitimate world. The inspiration for this mischievous, lovable hero was, of course, me. I created him as a surrogate for myself. My real self. Through his exploits, his pluck and bravery and unquenchable cheer, I gave myself the security, the pleasures, and the eminence I so ached for in real life and feared would remain forever beyond my reach.
I lavished my hours and days on chronicling Grubber’s rise. His heartwarming apotheosis came not magically, overnight, but incrementally—a touch of realism. His circuitous route through Cabbagetown to the executive suite, from ballsy desperado to upper-middle-class dandy, was illustrated in a hundred drawings. Moving from gray pencil renderings of garbage-dump ambience to four-color magazine spreads erased sad times for both of us. I fitted out my diminutive alter ego in smart suits, posed him in front of his Tudor mansion, beside cars marking his ascent from a rusty 1940 Dodge to a gleaming new 1949 Nash Airflyte in his (well, actually, my) favorite two-tone brown-and-white paint scheme. Grubber’s body and head matched his persona perfectly. The head and face were fixed with my first attempt and never needed to be changed. I didn’t flatter myself that I had a gift for cartooning, but that simple physiognomy is still, in my opinion, one of the most successful drawings I’ve ever done.
Grubber and his life obsessed me for two years. So immersed had I become in wish fulfillment that writing and drawing weren’t enough to contain my enthusiasm: I worked up a low, croaking voice for him and ventriloquized stream-of-consciousness monologues from my bunk after lights-out to a captive, laughing audience of Mike and Hugh. Grubber was literally living in my head, somewhere between my brain, my eyes, and my vocal cords.
But after those intense two years, as I approached seventeen, I had to admit that the bromance with my sawed-off friend was about played out. I had brought Grubber from the slums to affluence and contentment; there was now no place to go. He had made it. As his real-life proxy, I felt as if I had, too.
Simultaneously living Grubber’s life, tracing his upward climb from the depths to the heights, sweetened my existence in the sour real world. I had used his happy saga to buffer ugly reality. His presence—even if only in my head—gave me an optimism I doubt I could otherwise have sustained. He was, in no altogether imaginative way, a loyal friend. Li’l Grubber was so deeply, idiosyncratically, intimately bound up with my emotional life in that miserable period that I shirked from revealing his role. It seemed too embarrassing, too childlike, to share with the outside world. But I came to believe that withholding this episode and its positive effects on my creative life—on my life—would be so incomplete as to distort it.
And then came Punerania, a place that expanded my oeuvre to encompass not merely a crummy urban neighborhood but a whole nation. Once again the object of interest was a place no sane person would visit, much less reside in. I broke away from Cabbagetown and fashioned a fairy tale of despair. Punerania was depicted as a flat, wet nowhere, as stagnant and featureless as the East End of Toronto that inspired it. I relished this paradise of sloth. The Puneranians were a race of dumb, bulb-nosed runts wearing identical knitted toques, as passive as grass and unemployed to the last man.
Punerania was a hotbed of ennui. The populace stood around Bomsak, the muddy clearing called the capital, energized daily for a few minutes by alarms from the border: the dreaded Billywoshians were coming! Puneranians saw a vandal horde in what were actually hundreds of fuzzy powder-blue earmuffs spilled from a truck and windblown across the border toward Bomsak. The earmuffs/Billywoshians blew back and forth but never into Puneranian territory. Still the Puneranian army fled, escaping what they believed to be vandals bent on conquering their inert domain.
The Puneranian skies were either raining, just about to rain, or had just stopped raining. I worked to capture a late spring afternoon in Toronto: a faint violet, tinged with pale yellow. The puddled mudflats surrounding Bomsak stretched to the horizon at all points of the compass, littered with abandoned wrecks and crashed airplanes. Presiding over this do-nothing nation was do-nothing King Gus: torpid, meek, a dithering, indecisive cipher with nothing to do. His palace was a battered old house trailer, a busted wicker chair his throne.
Punerania was, of course, another romp in sublimated wishing. Barren and waterlogged, it stood for my experience of Toronto. Nothing happening transferred the tedium of Danforth Court to a neutral, in fact nonexistent, site. The Puneranians were stunted gnomes, unlike the thugs in school who bullied me. King Gus—you guessed it!—was Dad, redesigned to be harmless.
Punerania was short of females. All my work was. W
omen remained absent from my prepubescence, adolescence, juvenilia, and beyond. I wasn’t a slow starter with the opposite sex, I was a nonstarter. The absolute lack of contact with females, plus an undersocialized home life and the conviction that my appeal was a laughable bad joke, kept me in trembling ignorance well past the normal evolution into maturity. I was a gutless sap, making do with hapless crushes on girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day.
Spring of 1953 found a rejuvenated Bruce McCall. Maybe I’d found my stride. Maybe it was an aftershock from the Little Bang. Maybe the years of domestic wretchedness and the clammy taste of isolation would someday—sooner rather than later—do a U-turn and at least show me the first steps on the path to well-being. Maybe. Yet to feel so suddenly lifted out of the shadows and into the light—to sense everything shifting as easily as turning a page (wait a minute, cool down)—this couldn’t be my life. And it couldn’t be me, living it.
I had transferred to Danforth Tech (a slippery word for vocational school; it sounded less déclassé) in the fall of ’52. My former school, Malvern Collegiate, with its excellent reputation and such alumni as Glenn Gould, Norman Jewison, and, later, Kiefer Sutherland, fit me like an iron maiden. I flopped scholastically, continued to go nowhere socially, and despised many of my classmates. Malvern’s student body was full of kids from the affluent Balmy Beach neighborhood.
My fast-developing socialist sympathies were abraded by the crude snobbishness of certain female Balmy Beach classmates. One example still flits in memory like a bat. A girl from the wrong side of the tracks—I’ll call her Dolly—wore cheap and ragged clothes. Lank hair hung off her head. She wasn’t very nice. Before class one morning, noticing Dolly’s unfashionable dress, the other girls lit into the poor thing. Teasing her, mocking her, mouthing nasty comments about every flaw they could find or invent, her tormentors kept up their barrage. Dolly fought back, forcing a smile, acting unbothered, until one insult too many broke her spirit and she collapsed in tears at her desk. Malvern supplied too many memories as painful as that.
As both an artist manqué and an aspiring writer, I had given up art at Malvern for a conventional academic education. A vocational school, Danforth Tech taught art classes, but its resources for an academic curriculum were slight. Wherever I went for my schooling, my education in art and my education in more intellectual pursuits couldn’t both be served. When I began high school at age twelve, art beguiled me. But I failed ninth grade at Danforth Tech, and my art enthusiasm took a dive, so I transferred to Malvern to pursue the life of the mind. Three years of declining marks, the intellectual stimulation of a train schedule, and the resurfacing of my artistic interest reversed my course. Back to Danforth Tech.
Third time lucky. My art class at Danforth Tech irradiated my soul with the first firm sense of security since I’d left cozy Simcoe. I rushed to school every morning and lingered every afternoon. Life at last smiled. It wasn’t even particularly annoying that half the curriculum of the art class was hilariously irrelevant to its ostensible goal of preparing students for commercial art careers. Heraldry. Stained glass. Leatherwork. Bas-relief sculpture. Commercial art must have been a very different trade back in the Victorian age, when Lewis Carroll or some other mystic designed that lunatic’s holiday of a curriculum.
Within my first week in art class I’d made five or six friends, one of whom was a girl. Could my long and lonely period of friendlessness have been a simple matter of looking in the wrong places? Did this bounty mean that I’d been selling myself short, that I had never been the hangdog loser, devoid of personality and charm, who trailed through his life, unaware of a fulfilling destiny patiently waiting for him to finally discover it?
I was too engaged with my exciting new life to brood about what it meant. Admittedly, competition for artistic merit here fell short of beaux arts caliber. Perhaps half a dozen students had serious ambition; most of the rest showed no visible talent or interest. Pleasant and chummy as my classmates were, few had a sense of a calling. They’d enrolled in the art class only because it seemed an easy route through high school and was a way to kill time until the Voice in the Sky told them what they really ought to do with their lives. I’d call these skimmers of art dilettantes, but that describes someone light in the brainbox and easily distracted by novelty. My classmates took their assignments seriously. They toiled conscientiously. It didn’t seem to rankle them that they weren’t any good.
April wasn’t girlfriend material, her life ruled by one of those off-brand religions that bans fun and wouldn’t know joy if it drove up in a Cadillac and dropped a bag of money on the porch. But April offered something I needed more than God: a warm, sympathetic, mature female presence. A motherly figure, in brief. Maurice was my one serious rival for top dog, not only in his skill but in a passion for art that was unique in a high school student. It should be no surprise that Maurice would become a master of Canadian nature painting, much of it devoted to Arctic scenes.
It became clear by Christmas that Maurice and I were the two class members with fire in our bellies. My hundreds of hours spent drawing had given my hand a sensitivity that derives from constant practice.
I realized that my strange upbringing and the training gained from it put me far ahead of the class in sheer drawing skill. This had been my first opportunity to gauge my talent against the world—albeit a comically unthreatening world. I knew I’d be tested eventually by serious contenders, and that was no discouragement. Confirmation that I was actually above average at something that really mattered to me sparked a tingling sensation. Confidence, after eighteen years without it, can work wonders.
The end of my renaissance came swiftly and without warning. The evening of March 23, 1953, began promisingly. I had arranged the first date of my life. The female, a redheaded classmate named Betty, was neither pretty nor fun to talk to. I hadn’t stirred her, either. A romance could break out, but Betty was as lukewarm as I was. Neither of us would admit it, but our date was practice, a dry run. Still, it seemed a useful experience.
Dressed in the nearest thing to a not-entirely-clownish outfit I could scrounge from the bedroom closet, I garbed myself in a red corduroy smoking jacket discarded by Mike. My powder-blue gabardine trousers had hung so long on the hanger that a vivid horizontal crease and the standard vertical creases fought for supremacy. The horizontal crease won. My oxblood loafers were my favorite—and only—pair of shoes.
Betty lived in a small house on a pleasant little street with her mom, a freelance illustrator. We met up about halfway between her house and Danforth Court, a distance of perhaps a mile. Woodbine Avenue was our chosen route; a hill led us down half a mile or so until we’d hit the bright lights of Kingston Road. I mumbled something about our maybe getting a coffee (though I’d never sipped a cup of it, and wouldn’t for eight more years). Betty was agreeable, but Kingston Road had closed for the night. Staring into shop windows, marveling at displays of plumbing supplies and kiddie clothes and a barber pole perpetually twirling, fascinated me, while Betty waited on the sidewalk. I had no ideas, so I suggested heading back up Woodbine, where Betty could turn off to walk the couple of blocks home. She hastily agreed. Had I valued her company more and foreseen a romance, I might have been offended, but we shook hands and went our separate ways. Relief flooded my heart. It had been a nothing outing, sure, but it wasn’t the disaster it could have been.
I got home by nine. Mother wasn’t tipsy. She was ironing clothes in the kitchen while Foster Hewitt on the radio called the playoff game between the Leafs and Bruins. The phone rang. Mother picked up; it was Dad. He was on a business trip and probably checking in for the night. I wandered into the living room. Then, hearing Mother put down the receiver, I sauntered back to the kitchen.
“What’s new with Dad?” I asked, feigning interest.
Mother had already turned back to her ironing. She paused a moment. “Dad’s taken a job at Chrysler,” she said. “We’re mov
ing to Windsor in June.”
Driving the Amphicar: It handled like a car in the water and a boat on the road.
Chapter 3
Chronicles of Wasted Time
The British man of letters Malcolm Muggeridge titled his autobiography Chronicles of Wasted Time. I succumbed to the temptation to swipe it for this chapter title.
I arrived in the industrial Ontario city of Windsor as an adolescent and left as an adult. Of the roughly 2,500 days I spent there, a couple of hundred felt good. I’d resisted moving to Windsor, where I proceeded to drop out of high school and squandered the next six and a half years in a futile attempt to achieve competence as a commercial artist. Within a span of fewer than two years of each other, both of my parents died. Nothing positive ever came from living in Windsor. I had to leave and start my life over again from scratch.
Moving to Windsor was never a choice. I was forced to accompany my family when we moved there from Toronto in June 1953. My dad had taken a new job, as Chrysler of Canada’s director of public relations. I’d desperately wanted to remain in Toronto and continue in high school, then go on to an art career. No dice, Dad ruled. Like it or not, Windsor was now home.
Boy, did I not like it. I saw no upside to moving from big-city Toronto to a factory town where the only art we knew was the mayor, Art Reaume. I’d excelled in my high school art class; as I interpreted it, leaving Toronto for Windsor was akin to being demoted from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Class-A High Point–Thomasville HiToms. My idea of boarding somewhere and staying in Toronto never had a chance. Dad was no loosey-goosey liberal. What I proposed was unconventional. In his musty book, “unconventional” meant communism, free love, and drunk driving.
