How Did I Get Here?

by Bruce McCall

  When I was home I didn’t dare look across the street at Diane’s house. Inside ours, it was clear that Dad had abandoned every interest he’d had. His beloved stamp album sat on the coffee table unopened. Unwashed dishes clogged the sink. Golf at the Beach Grove Country Club no longer filled his weekends. It was as if his electricity had been cut off.

  Hugh and I had had no practice at reaching out to lend support and comfort and companionship. The shoe was now on the other foot. Our bitterness dribbled out: Dad had never made the effort to know us. He was content that his superficial understanding—of Hugh, Tom, Walter, and me—sufficed. I experienced more than a frisson of near pleasure now that relations were reversed. His regime had backfired and lay in pieces. (Including myself as a piece.)

  A few years earlier Dad had hired Don Tucker, a friend from his RCAF days, as his PR second-in-command. Don, his English wife, Madeleine, and Tom and Peg McCall had become an inseparable social foursome. I was fascinated by Don’s wartime career as an RCAF navigator over Europe. Madeleine was a cheerful, maternal soul. The Tuckers became pseudo parents to Hugh and me. We spent dozens of evenings dining and shooting the shit with them at their suburban home. After-dinner conversations soon swelled into harangues by Hugh and me. Dad was so damned unpredictable. A bully. A tyrant who made our lives intolerable. I blabbed myself hoarse, but nothing was achieved. Why Don and Madeleine put up with two overheated knuckleheads, I never understood. They never got sucked into bad-mouthing the villain, but that was okay. We didn’t need an ally. Just someone to listen.

  Then, not long after Mother’s death, the Tuckers were no longer mentioned in our house. A short time later Don quit Chrysler, moved from Windsor back to Toronto, and joined the Ford PR department. Perhaps Dad’s brooding following Mother’s demise made working with him too demanding. I never found out what ruined that friendship. I never asked.

  Dad’s grief was total. Alas, he hadn’t the foggiest idea of how to connect with the only people who might have helped him cope. Hugh and I felt bad but not guilty. In the natural way of fledglings leaving the nest, we judged it was time to remove ourselves from 1793 Byng Road and the man who had left us out of his life. Let him suffer what we’d suffered. We moved into a crummy apartment on the upper floor of a house a mile away on Chilver Road. Dad affected resignation, but he was heartbroken. We left him alone and overpowered by pain, in the lowest moment of his life. What amazes me in retrospect is how little guilt I harbored. It was not my finest hour.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Catalog season came around again in June. The changes that had been brewing for years walloped Windsor Advertising Artists in a single blow: no painted illustrations would be used in the 1960 catalogs. Instead, we got a batch of dye transfers—chemically treated studio photographs of the new models—to be lightly retouched. The tasks were so simple that Rudy gave me a good share of the work. Retouching involves no complex processes; the entire studio workload left my evenings and weekends free. By the beginning of August, catalog season was over.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Dad drove to Toronto in August with Chris en route to a two-week vacation at Mont-Tremblant, a deluxe resort north of Montreal. They dined with Dad’s good friend Wendell and his wife on Saturday evening, then checked into the Benvenuto hotel. After assuring Chris that he would sleep on his side so his snoring wouldn’t keep her awake, he instantly fell into a deep sleep, as was his habit. Shortly thereafter Chris heard a change in his breathing and saw him jerk into a sitting position and then fall back, his breathing ragged. Chris shook his shoulder, half-afraid of his ire if she were to wake him needlessly, but there was no response. She paced the room, tried to rouse him again, and then called the front desk for help. A night clerk arrived and told her to dress and pack, then took her to the lobby while they awaited the arrival of a doctor. The verdict was death by a massive heart attack. The clerk called Wendell, who took on the melancholy task of making the immediate arrangements. He drove Chris to his home and the next morning put her on a plane back to Windsor.

  Back on Chilver Road, the ringing phone next to my bed woke me. It was three thirty a.m. In the instant before I picked up the receiver, I sensed that someone must have died; no other reason justified a call at that hour. I braced myself, mentally vetting candidates. Wendell’s news blindsided me. How could a figure so dominant be taken away in an instant? Shock waves continued to rock me for days afterward. Dad’s passing reverberated through everything. It changed everything. For Chris, for Hugh, for me. For the six of us.

  Again, the funeral was in Simcoe. Dad was interred next to Mother on a hot, sunny August afternoon. The grief that cascaded down on me and my siblings was intertwined with guilt. Mingled with those black feelings was an undeniable sense of relief. The overwhelming force of Dad’s presence had pinned us down. Now restraint after restraint snapped open. Charged for so long by Dad’s aura, the Byng Road household tensions vanished. The place was neutralized. Now it was just a set of rooms. Life itself suddenly felt freer.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  It all made me think of my father’s own father, Walter Sydney McCall, who was something of a rogue in his younger days, when he had often strayed far from home in pursuit of betting of various kinds, including the Texas cockfighting circuit. Grandfather Walt, born in 1887, entertained no dreams of worldly success. His total lack of ambition and his chronic irresponsibility caused hardships for his wife, his daughter, and his son. Dad felt sympathy for his mother, for many of the same reasons in the next generation I felt it for mine. A gregarious storyteller brimming with anecdotes, Walt spun fascinating tales that enraptured Hugh and me.

  They failed to enrapture Dad. His cool reaction to our excited reports on Grandfather Walt’s autobiographical snippets was puzzling, until I’d matured enough to dope it out: Dad found these adventures infuriating. While Walt was larking about, his wife, stuck at home, paid the price for his childish shenanigans. His absence sabotaged family life. Nothing could be certain. Walt left his wife and kids to go off adventuring. Dad seemed to me to be curiously aloof from his father in their later years. This biographical story shared a truth so sad, so simple, so familiar, it belongs in the realm of cliché: like father, like son.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Dad’s sister, Margaret, was an energetic socialist early in her life. She would eventually become secretary of the provincial Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the CCF, a left-wing political party (known by nonmembers as the Convention of Crazy Farmers). On her rare visits to our home, a nervous restraint prevailed. By ten p.m., the way my bedroom floor reverberated told me that all restraint was off: brother and sister—as was inevitable—had got into politics. Aunt Margaret savaged the very foundation of Dad’s beliefs. Dad saw communism in her fuzzy-minded liberal crap. His ideological anger could have powered Howard Hughes’s monster “Spruce Goose” flying boat around the world sixteen times. Without stopping.

  Any effort to classify Tom C. McCall involves questions, mysteries, and deep frustration. He keeps hopping in and out of categories. His honesty, his appetite for hard work, and a well-furnished mind made him a valued executive. He dropped out of high school at age eighteen, worked his way through newspaper reporting, and went to Queen’s Park, the seat of Ontario’s provincial government, ending up as a senior functionary, Deputy Minister of Travel and Publicity. He won photography prizes, was a catcher in semipro baseball and a badminton tournament winner.

  This same man was an emotional isolationist. He hated Germans and despised Frenchmen, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Spaniards, Arabs—all foreigners, in fact, except Jews. He was sour on the British, a legacy of his wartime stint in England. He saw a Colonel Blimp in every Brit officer, dismissing the lot as a bunch of condescending snobs. He wasn’t exactly crazy about Americans, either. This otherwise broad-minded sophisticate held a stubborn contempt for virtu
ally everything European, an attitude unsullied by knowledge. Example: I once came close to disinheritance for the crime of excessive enthusiasm for a twenties-style French telephone.

  There was a strange blind spot in Dad’s essentially moral nature. This same man abused his twin sons by ignoring them from the moment of their birth. He never struck Tom or Walt; his brutal indifference, his distrust, a contempt he couldn’t disguise, were enough torture. By ignoring his wife’s long slide into alcoholism, he sanctioned it. He never invited his kids to share his hobbies: photography, woodworking, golf, stamp collecting. He fenced us off. A childish dread of dentists consigned him to a mouthful of rotted teeth. His kids obediently followed suit. His paranoia about medicine became a McCall family trait and no small factor in his physical condition.

  But then, without forewarning, this serious fellow would suddenly lapse into an impersonation of a drunkenly belligerent Great War vet, bawling, “Where was you at Vimy!” In the same satirical frame of mind he threw the dignity of every family member into the trash can with an annual calendar illustrated with detailed photos of a beaten-down, cretinous family of the lowest class in comical Kallikak poses. All of us volunteered. It was a hilarious project. Dad lavished care on his photographs. He must have had second thoughts, though. Satire wasn’t in demand in Windsor, and I don’t think this masterpiece of misery ever left our apartment.

  Nobody could determine whether Dad was an angel or Satan. The ultimate consensus was that he alternated between them. I crashed a brand-new sports car on a snow-slick road en route to Toronto and a New Year’s celebration. The car was a total wreck, but somehow I escaped unscathed. I phoned home to report my latest disaster. Dad, who regularly blew a fuse if somebody made off with the sports section of the daily paper, was neither upset nor angry, only concerned that I was physically intact. An angelic act.

  On the other hand, Satan in the corporeal form of Dad tore away from a card game in somebody’s Danforth Court apartment one night and rushed home, crashed into Walt’s bedroom, and dragged him, half-awake, into the living room. One of the card players had accused Walt of beating up his six-year-old daughter for the fun of it. Dad ranted and raved at his evil brat of an eleven-year-old son. Walt protested, but it was futile. He was convicted on the spot by his own father, on the say-so of a six-year-old.

  He, like Mother, died at the bizarre age of forty-nine. What a waste!

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  The year spun on until the end of December and the beginning of a new decade, the sixties. Rudy foresaw that the WAA goose was cooked. In fact it was blowtorched. Talks had begun in October: Maybe we’d merge with another studio. Maybe some big Toronto outfit would buy the business—i.e., Rudy and Bill Windsor and me—and relocate us to Toronto. Two or three reps from Toronto studios visited our humble quarters. Their mission was to do, in that awkwardly meaningless phrase, “due diligence,” attempting to winkle out any vital secrets, look over the books, get a feel for the quality of the studio’s artwork in magazine, newspaper, and catalog form. Also to meet the artists, to decide how many they could use and how much they’d cost.

  The final inspection came in mid-December. Rudy being Rudy, any information stayed in his pocket and/or his head. The portfolio of my favorite renderings was slim. Also thin, and also unimpressive, even—or especially—to me. Here it comes, I thought, when Rudy called the meeting that would reveal my fate. Rudy was the prize and Toronto-bound. Bill Windsor was a fine automobile artist, but two was more than they needed. I wasn’t awarded a job. I wasn’t even discussed. The next morning, Rudy came to my cubicle bearing a check for one month’s pay. He had no ideas or suggestions about another job. It wasn’t a sad moment for Rudy or for me. He didn’t wish me luck because Rudy didn’t believe in luck. After he left my cubicle I never saw him again.

  An hour or so later, having left Windsor Advertising Artists for a final time, I sat down on the living room chesterfield to ponder my situation. The hellish fate that Dad had warned me would be the worst worst-case scenario had occurred. I was unemployed. I didn’t feel scared or guilt-ridden or even very worried, although the end of the world was nigh.

  Or was it?

  With no experience and less money, a friend and I dreamed up our own Canadian car magazine.

  Chapter 4

  Canada Trash & Tragic

  I was now twenty-four, freshly sprung from six years of learning how to suffocate my instincts, thereby making myself into the worst commercial artist and least evolved person in Canada, if not the world. Windsor Advertising Artists no longer existed. Hugh and I had moved back to 1793 Byng Road and lived rent-free; the mortgage was paid by my parents’ estate. Chris was back home from Toronto after a year at Bishop Strachan, a joyless prison of a school for rich kids, where Dad had placed her after Mother’s death. For her own good, he’d thought. He’d thought wrong.

  A small, frightened black female dog was sitting at the curb one October morning when I went out to grab the newspaper. She seemed to want something. Probably wants food, Chris said, walking the fifteen feet between the house and the dog. Which, terrified by the near proximity of a human, backed away and slouched down, as if expecting a beating. Two cautious steps forward, one step back, the dog could be lured up to the front porch only haltingly. Chris and Hugh and I competed to pat, baby-talk, and reassure this poor mistreated creature until she calmed down and ceased trembling. She was sweet and friendly. She wouldn’t or couldn’t bark. Dad had hated pets; this dog was our revenge. We named her Sapphire, probably from the Amos ’n’ Andy character. She stayed with us, the one family member everybody could—and did—unreservedly love.

  Three months after the studio was shuttered, I was unemployed, flat broke, and happier than I’d been in years. The world not only failed to end when I went jobless: the relief from that pointless life liberated me from a paralysis that kept me frozen in place for almost the entire duration of the Eisenhower era.

  Dad had been wrong—as wrong as Red Hill Jr., daredevil son of a daredevil son of a daredevil father. Junior rode a barrel-shaped roll of inner tubes over Niagara Falls in 1951 and didn’t live to tell about it. A paycheck had brought me freedom from something worse than the breadline: fear. Now the bogeyman who had been muttering in my ear for years was exposed as a phantom and swiftly dispatched. I had twenty—count ’em, twenty—bucks in the bank. Wooo! Disaster! Not exactly. Unemployment insurance coughed up just enough cash every week to keep me in Rothmans cigarettes and Pepsis and a full tank of gas for the car.

  I took off the first six months of 1960, a month for every year at the studio. I knew I’d eventually have to go in search of work, so halfheartedly plugged away at a freshened portfolio—illustrations of office furniture and other nonautomotive subjects. In my spare time (and my whole life was nothing but) I borrowed Alex’s Triumph TR3 and blasted over the empty back roads of springtime Essex County, pretending the TR3 was a Ferrari Testarossa. Concurrently, Diane and I had a rapprochement. My anxiety about an uncertain future transformed itself into sexual energy. I bedded Diane as often as possible, which was often indeed.

  My values were shifting every week. So was my motivation. The new perspective persuaded me that I could have contentedly remained on life’s periphery and never rejoined the workaday world. What was the downside? I hadn’t dared to allow myself the luxury of wanting a career. Losers like me didn’t aim for careers. Commercial art had beaten out of me the schoolboy delusion of riding my great gifts to fame and fortune. I was a mediocre nobody. Why not relax and live like it? Constant failure to cope had deflated my dreams to a midget scale. If I were ever lucky enough to pull down a hundred and twenty bucks a week, I could rent a tract house and buy a car. If my wife worked, we could have color TV and other luxuries.

  Alex was the only person I knew in Windsor who had ambition, and it wasn’t exactly a raging one. He’d have been validated, his dreams fulfilled, if he wer
e transferred to Toronto and landed a job with the CBC.

  I remember idle afternoons staring out the living room window at Walker Road, the street a couple of blocks away that led to the new Highway 401 heading east. I fantasized images of one day coming back on Walker Road the other way, basking in worldly success. But, whenever forced back to the real plane of existence and the dreary truths of my life, I knew I had no option other than to perform a self-lobotomy, take a few deep breaths, and offer myself one more time to my wicked stepfather, commercial art.

  Windsor, thank God, was not even a possibility. Sign-painting was left as the only commercial art business in town, and contrary to recent evidence, I still had standards. I had never ceased aching to be back in Toronto. Now I more or less had to go there and try peddling my wares to one or the other big studios, churning out artwork for major agencies and their weighty client rosters. With my portfolio assembled, I turned my back on Windsor for good.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  The return to Toronto was anticlimactic. Most of my school friends were embarked on careers, few of them connected to art. The city had changed since my enforced departure, and cosmopolitanism was no longer suspect. The cultural constipation of decades, challenged by the postwar infusion of European and Asian immigrants, had ended. A gleaming new subway—a civic innovation that lifted Toronto to status as a player among North America’s big-league cities—symbolized progress. The new city hall, a Scandinavian confection that barely looked like a building, symbolized the fact that Toronto had cut its ties with musty yesteryear.