How Did I Get Here?

by Bruce McCall

  All well and good for most people. But as might be expected of me when faced with positivism and opportunity, I was pissed off. This Toronto felt oddly alien at first, as if some swankier, more streamlined city had swiped the name. Once again, I’d have to start from scratch in a strange new environment.

  To my surprise—no, astonishment—I barely had to pound the pavement before a leading commercial art studio took me in, and at a decent salary. The “studio” (the name escapes me, as do so many places you can’t wait to forget) was one vast, low-ceilinged room, more amphitheater than atelier. I sat at a workstation among orderly rows of identical spaces. There must have been thirty artists, and, in commercial art custom, every one of them was male. Squint and the studio could have been a frat house with very lax rules: continuous horseplay, lobbing of missiles, much bawdy howling back and forth.

  Despite my outsider status and a temperament at odds with those of my boisterous workmates, I willed myself into the pretense of feeling at home. New start! New city! New horizons! Then I was handed my first assignment. Blam! That ugly old sense of inadequacy knocked down my flimsy resolution, flooding back and drowning hopes that the six-year curse in Windsor had magically lifted.

  That first assignment was also my last assignment. Two weeks and two dozen runny, blurry, hopelessly inept tries at airbrushing a can of motor oil into a Container of the Gods later, a flaw in my work was exposed to the world. I lacked the skills of even a mediocre commercial artist. To his genuine sorrow and my even more genuine relief, the kindly studio manager, using that softly self-serving euphemism for being fired, let me go. Oddly untroubled, I went.

  The next day, a sunny summer Saturday, I was giving my friend’s then-girlfriend, Susie, a ride home when my tiny motorized tin can (an Austin-Healey Sprite) met with a taxi in a head-on collision. I cut a gash in my forehead. My right knee banged into the dash; I limped for months. Susie was less fortunate: she went face-first into the windshield. While her injuries weren’t as severe as they could have been (mostly cuts and scrapes), it took her the better part of a year to fully recover. The Sprite was totaled. Had I paused and taken it as an omen, I might have been spooked.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Well, I had always liked to write, and I wrote smoothly, a unique gift found in few kids (and adults, but that would need a paragraph . . . maybe later). I was a sure-fingered touch-typist. I could spell like a literate grown-up, almost perfectly. I wrote fast. I read newspapers and magazines avidly. I loved books, was young and untutored enough to indiscriminately lap them up, learning while thinking it was fun—the good and the bad. I read the new novel reviewers called “a work of genius.” The obscure biography of a forgotten hero. Travel books, with maps. Books of nineteenth-century European history. Autobiographies of the latest heroes. Books about exploration. Science books. Sports books. Books about war.

  I had inhaled prose through osmosis. Learning to write by learning to read obviated the task of learning grammar. If I could write a single page as clear, rich, and honest as A. J. Liebling’s prose, I’d have made the grade. Was there any such thing as a dull person who wrote like Liebling?

  My strategy for getting hired as a writer was as follows: Compose an intelligent letter, restraining the temptation to shoot my cuffs but dropping in some wit. Write a memorable letter, differentiating me from the overearnest applicant with magnificent qualifications but no perceptible personality. Make it a single page. Write on paper that crackles when folded. Send versions to the editor of every Canadian magazine with a mailing address, proposing my candidacy for whatever position was or might be open, at whatever pittance he felt like paying. I must have written and sent a hundred such beseechments. The cost in postage about exhausted my funds. I sat back to await my fate.

  Where I sat was on a couch in a crummy small room in a second-floor apartment that if it was fixed up would qualify as dreary, a sublet on a humdrum street. I stared at my typewriter.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  I’d never had any money and never expected to. My meager earnings couldn’t hang around luxuriating in a savings account. Whatever I earned in any typical week was spent by Friday. Dad must have instinctively foreseen my financial future; years earlier, he’d bullied me into an insurance policy with a cash payout of a fraction of its worth in a crisis. I declared a crisis, cashed out, and now sat atop the world’s tiniest nest egg. With such solid backup I could coast along indefinitely, indefinitude being close to a fuzzy-minded twenty-five-year-old’s concept of time’s forward march.

  Waiting for bites from my postal broadside, like the hapless Robert Falcon Scott waiting in his Antarctic pup tent for a miracle, led to days of mingled tension and ennui. They’d have been dead days but for my similar trials invented ten years before, in the cauldron of 2377 Danforth. I hurled myself back into a frenzy of creative onanism, and kept on bashing the keys until something, I hoped, took me out of my head. A rented Royal portable and a ream of copy paper and off I went, stumbling back down into the subterranean wonderland of my subconscious.

  This header into an insane cosmos, sculpted out of fear and anxiety, explored caves and crevasses where no healthy mind had gone before. I wasn’t composing pulp fiction. These were fantasies, yanked from steamy far corners of my imagination where I’d hidden them away, an attic stuffed with mental chaff, signifying nothing meaningful to anyone but me.

  What it meant came from the frustrated rage, growing like a tumor, felt in my gut ever since I first detected the rickety hypocrisy that pretended to, but couldn’t, support our family life. Parents who hadn’t wanted six kids but ignored birth control. Who played the roles of Dad and Mom while killing any possibility of a decent family life. Who abused their twin sons for the crime of existing. A father who did nothing to help his sad, lonely wife as she sank into terminal alcoholism. Parents who boycotted doctors and paid for their neglect by dying before the age of fifty.

  This Grand Guignol of lovelessness and casual cruelty had stunted my life. I became skeptical, then cynical, too early. Yet when I hunched over the keyboard, free to rant and vent and cry out for understanding, I did no such thing. In retrospect, I believe this was the funniest stuff I’d ever written. From breakfast until dark, pausing only to refill the cigarettes and Pepsi stocks, I slammed out page after page as if there were a gun at my head.

  The claim of priceless hilarity can be proven or disproven only by reading that work. Alas, no chance. It disappeared shortly after I finished it and sent it off to Hugh, the family archivist in Windsor, for safekeeping.

  It was a dense phantasmagoria, its meager plot following a troupe of my usual characters. My first stories were of bums, psychopaths, certified idiots, and indescribables—moving purposelessly through a landscape that, though rural and vast, hadn’t brightened since the swampy grotesqueries of Grubber’s world. I created a fresh collection of lost souls: Blimpet, a star-crossed tramp, selling phony patents door-to-door, even though there were no doors in this empty region; Cheese, the stupidest mystic the world had ever seen, worshipped by some; a fat young orphan, Doby Frout (“I got one tooth left, and even that one’s hurtin’”), forced to live in the swampside shack of an aunt, who continuously cooked meals of carp and demanded that Doby eat, whereupon the obese sad sack bolted and hid out in the swamp until caught.

  I titled the pile of narratives Caught in the Cracks. I knew it wasn’t a commercial product and feared exposure as a purveyor of idiocies who made Lewis Carroll look mundane by comparison.

  Previous forays into nutland had been all tableaux. This latest effort moved its characters and locations, setting forth the rudiments of a narrative, a story. I seldom laughed; as I wrote I was dead serious—not about being funny, but about the craft of it. I invested weeks and months in these creative binges. I considered what I was doing to be practice. I was also teaching myself to write. For what, I hadn’t a clue.

 
; Alas, Caught in the Cracks was evidently caught in the cracks. Hugh never lost things, but my masterpiece disappeared. It was never found. My contention that it was the funniest work I ever wrote may be nostalgic bullshit. But when the perfect adjective flies out of nowhere and perfectly fits, when your story seems to tell itself to you as you write and you feel you’re simply transcribing it, when some seventh sense leads you to a finish with a satisfying final phrase, you’ve hit the sweet spot. And you know it.

  This is the moment when I must confess: I didn’t write that masterwork alone. The artist craves the presence of life as he works, to warm and soften the lonely hours. A famished mouse was my boon companion. He let me keep working, never interfered, stayed as quiet as a small, tame rodent. We shared a package of decaying hot dogs day after day. One night, hearing no familiarly faint scratching sounds from the kitchen, I tiptoed in to investigate. The hot dogs sat there, mouse-free. Curiosity led me to pick up a nearby cardboard box of molasses, left by a previous tenant. The top had been nibbled or gnawed open. I pulled it all the way open. There was the mouse, drowned facedown in the sticky brown goo.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  This fit of creative excess finally burned out in mid-October. It was now November and my third month of involuntary freedom. I couldn’t wait any longer for my letter-bombardment of Canada’s print media to respond. A couple of months ought to be time enough for an editor to gamble on an interview. None did. One, a South African named Royd Beamish, who was editing a Maclean-Hunter service station trade journal, did reply. No openings, but if I was a son of his friend, the late Tom McCall, he’d try to help when he could. Well, best wishes and good luck.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Cars had gripped my imagination almost since I had one. First, in the immediate postwar era, foggy reprints from British racing journals of prewar Grand Prix. A golden age of mighty giants and fierce competition: Auto Union, Mercedes-Benz, Alfa Romeo, and Delahaye. Immortal drivers: Nuvolari, Caracciola, Seaman. Spectacular events in spectacular venues.

  America had the Indianapolis 500, dirt-track racing, world-speed attempts on the Utah Salt Flats. The so-called sports car revolution, sparked by U.S. servicemen bringing home spindly little MG TCs, mushrooming into a whole car culture that ignored Detroit. By the time I could legally drive, cars occupied my mind and much of my life. A Ford Anglia, a Morgan Plus Four, two Triumph TR3s, a Porsche 365 coupe. The upward climb that often ended only in bankruptcy or death.

  By the time I repatriated to Toronto, a Volvo 444 was my car. It looked like a humpbacked prewar Ford; it was fast, unbreakable, and utterly ugly to most prospects, leaving Volvo to highway hotspurs and club racing drivers. My best friend at the time was Eric, a cyclist I met while hanging out with Hugh and Mike, who’d met him somewhere or other. He was smart, articulate, funny, and a fast, safe driver in his newer Volvo 544. Eric worked downtown for a trust company and lived twenty miles away in Mississauga. The two of us screeched around cloverleafs and blasted into town on the Queen Elizabeth highway. Eric had quick reflexes, a sense of balance, and willpower. I never beat him on our cloverleaf epics.

  He and I were both intelligent, hardworking fellows: both readers, both politically aware, both liberals. We were curious about the wider world, capable of serious conversation on subjects arcane and obscure. It puzzles me, embarrasses me, and in some sense annoys me that whenever Eric and I talked—at lunch, dinner, while driving, hanging around his house and my apartment, on the telephone—it was exclusively, spiritually, excitedly, nostalgically, and amicably about cars.

  We drove together in the Canadian Winter Rally, a thousand grueling miles of slogging through deep winter snow and ice over one weekend. On Saturday night, near the halfway point in North Bay, both of us groggy from sleeplessness, the car slewed off the road, bulldozed through a snowbank and, crunch!, slammed into a buried fence post. We escaped with only cosmetic damages. Powered by the adrenaline of a near miss, Eric and I kept jawing about cars on the way to the overnight stop in North Bay and through dinner.

  My Volvo needed an oil change. Money was running low. My job hunt accelerated, dropping standards by a few degrees and fetching me up at the A.V. Roe company building near suburban Malton. The firm had recently developed Canada’s first supersonic jet fighter, the Arrow; praised as it was by the aviation world, the plane and its program had been canceled by the Canadian government. A.V. Roe was devastated. To attempt survival, its mighty presses were converted to bang out metal canoes, vending machines, and other civilian goods. My humble task was to retouch black-and-white photos of these products for sales brochures.

  I got a taste of what working life was like for millions of people: tedious, impersonal, empty. I sat along with scores of fellow drudges in a hall that must have once seen aircraft assembly. This was my first job in a union brotherhood, and my last. The work was loosey-goosey doable: it was the shop rules I found stifling. Lunch hour began the instant a bell rang. Bad form not to instantly stop work. Bad form, too, to restart working one minute before lunch hour officially ended. At five o’clock on the dot, it was tools down and rush to the exit. I was informed that I must pay union dues. And I had to cough up five bucks every Monday for the weekly office lottery, the one event that stirred any enthusiasm.

  Wednesday night, the phone in my apartment rang. It was Royd Beamish. I had a job, starting next Monday. On Thursday morning I quit A.V. Roe’s blacking factory. Friday would be my last day. Not only would I be out of that soul dump, but I found I had won the week’s office lottery. I had been there just short of forty hours. I’m certain that I left as the most hated employee in the annals of A.V. Roe.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  The next job started first thing Monday morning. The Maclean-Hunter copy cub department consisted of a few desks in an unused space on the top floor of the firm’s headquarters building on University Avenue. Being noiselessly whisked up to the top floor by an elevator heightened my self-esteem. “Writer” was now my actual, official identity. It hardly mattered what I wrote. Being paid to crank a blank sheet of paper into a typewriter and run a string of words across it felt, from the first crank, like what I’d been born to do.

  Down to work. Cutting a two-page press release on the latest sensational advance in slurry control to 150 meaty words, to be featured in the New Products section of Canadian Paint & Varnish, sent infinitely more pleasure signals to my brain than all the spot illustrations I’d ever done for the Dodge Royal Lancer brochure. This drab, isolated little cell was the place for me. These were my people, my new colleagues: Terry and Clyde and Madeleine (no relation to the previous Terry and Madeleine). And they actually read books. It didn’t exactly hurt, either, that I typed faster and generated more copy tonnage per hour than any of them.

  My artistic proclivities were on indefinite hiatus. The new thrill of editorial work and attendant mental stimulation eclipsed the lifelong pastime, or pathological urge, of scrunching down in a metaphorical foxhole and creating images meaningless for a connoisseur, or even a normal individual. But crude, smudgy, indecipherable images to banish my demons. For the first time in a decade and a half, the trap door behind which mocking satire had hidden could be bolted shut. If it threatens no more, why run away from reality? The energy thus saved, and utilized in positive ways, could turn my life away from a cave of darkness and toward the sun.

  * * *

  ■ ■ ■

  Grinding out fare for the back pages of trade journals thrilled me for a few months. Then the sense of standing still, of a flattened learning curve, led to the stirrings of an appetite for bigger things. Almost any kind of writing qualified as a better thing.

  I had lucked into the romance of driving at its fervent peak. Driving under the proper conditions—the right kind of car, small, light, and responsive to the slightest touch of the steering wheel, the gearshift, and the brake pedal—made dr
iving a sport and a pleasure, with a frisson of underlying danger to penalize a lack of skill. Automotive literature goosed enthusiasm by serving up racing, new-car road tests, and similar information. Driving tours around Europe and America added color and fresh air. Technical articles and diagrams enlightened spare-time mechanics. (Karl Ludvigsen, an American writer, former editor of Car and Driver, and arguably the foremost automobile intellectual of the day, doped out the arcane Mercedes-Benz desmodromic valve system used on their racing cars. He was feted in Bad Cannstatt for writing an article about it. It was supposed to be secret.)

  Mine was close to the last generation of car nuts. Cars have morphed into emotionally neutered large appliances, competing more on entertainment than performance, dulling risk with technological interventions that replace the need for judgment. Good for safety, inarguably progressive—but heading into a tomorrow where we’ll all be guests in our automated, self-driving blobs. The automobile is becoming too sobersided, too good a planet citizen, to spoil the mission with fun.

  This is now, that was then. Back in the hot-blooded heyday of driving as a hobby, Canada supported, marginally, a single magazine: Canada Track & Traffic. No such census existed, but an educated guess put the likely national readership of car freaks at maybe three thousand. The goal of Track & Traffic was to augment respected American enthusiast publications, such as Road & Track and Car and Driver, by covering the Canadian sport and industry.

  The objective critic might ask, “What Canadian sport and industry?” Touché. Canadian sports car racing amounted to a few amateur regional races on dreary abandoned airfield circuits in Ontario, Quebec, and British Columbia. The Canadian automotive industry was a bunch of factories in Windsor and Toronto bolting Detroit cars together, to embellish Motown’s bottom line with sales proportionate to Canada’s ninety percent smaller population.