1980
It’s midweek in late November. The month has been true to itself — gray, cold and damp. Rain was falling when I made coffee in the dark at seven this morning and now that evening rush hour has arrived it still falls. Outside my studio door on Queen Street East is a streetcar stop. It is always busy, being the point at which people riding east on King from downtown on King disembark to wait for the Queen car which will carry them to their homes in the Beaches and beyond. From here the King car swings north to rumble up Broadview all the way to Danforth and the subway.
I’m in my third floor darkroom printing an assignment when the doorbell rings a few minutes before five. I shut down the wash water and descend to street level where I open the door to a rush hour crowd hunkered resignedly in the rain. A small gray man in a trench coat stands by my door. Am I Mr. M. Mitchell? “Yes,” I reply. He reaches under his coat and withdraws a long tractor feed printout that he allows to unfold until it reaches the sidewalk. The paper rapidly darkens in the downpour. “This,” he says, tapping the soggy paper, “is your life.”
The TTC waiting crowd begins to take an interest. Dripping-Trench-Coat points to the top sheet. “January 1976: late! February 1976: late! March 1976: late again!!” And so on all the way down the soggy printout until we reach the present lying in a puddle on the sidewalk.
“This is your record!” he shouts in the rain. Again he reaches under his coat and hands me his business card from the provincial retail tax department. I do not hang my head in shame.
Those were my days as Sisyphus. I was working 60, 70 hours a week, doing labour-intensive assignments, spending most of my meager returns on new equipment to better execute my jobs as well as realize my own projects. I bought my first Nikons and Hasselblads in those years, my first large format Linhofs and enlargers as well as aluminum travel cases. Optimistically I had incorporated, a legal move that added yet another layer of calendrical tax obligation to my life. At one point I stopped to count the number of tax filings I was obligated to produce each year. There were monthly provincial and federal sales tax returns. A palimpsest of quarterly returns lay over both those as well as quarterly income tax filings and the dark tower of the annual one. Somehow, as addendum to my 70-hour weeks, I was to file taxes a total of 32 times a year. I was a one-man operation, I had a small child at home, I was exhausted, I couldn’t keep up. As it often took several months to get paid for jobs I repeatedly applied to have the filing periods reduced to quarterly or less. However, as soon as I had a good run of getting paid promptly or extra business, the computer systems would automatically return me to monthly filing and the 32 returns. I was endlessly rolling the return rock up the tax mountain that would then roll down over me. Then I’d spring up like Road Runner, my third dimension restored, and put my shoulder to the rolling return and begin the uphill push once again. I felt like the victim of a protection racket.
Yet another corporate assignment. This young company has somewhat unexpected roots. Founded by the son of a Scarborough heavy equipment mechanic, it grew out of the operations of a large Canadian life insurer that has since gone bankrupt through risk-taking management. This division was hived off in time to survive. Its business was simple — finance the acquisition of tangible hard assets in low risk enterprises.
It began with dentists. At the time it cost about $100,000 a chair for a graduate dentist to get set up. One knew that the personalities attracted to dentistry were going to be basically stable and conservative ones — all those small town WASPs and ambitious Hong Kong immigrants and Jews just wanted a secure place in the middle class. And you also knew that people’s teeth were going to rot. If you bought a newly graduated dentist his gear and set him up, chances were pretty good you’d get your money back plus your fees and interest for doing so. If the odd one proved to be a nut-bar then you only had to repossess the chair and drills and X-ray gear and peddle it to the next grad. It worked like a dream.
To expand beyond this model you had to cultivate political and corporate connections. By the time I started working on their annual report, Newcourt Financial was buying whole trains, fleets of buses and flocks of huge aircraft for different enterprises. I’ve never had an interest in being one of those aggressive guys who set up businesses like these and makes them prosper long enough to cash in and cash out. But it was always intensely interesting to be a fly on the wall watching their moves and figuring out how it all worked.
I have to say I thought some deals seemed to lack client utility. At one point I was sent out to a wintry field an hour east of Toronto to photograph its contents. When I got there I discovered rows and rows of Grumman step vans lined up in the snow. All were painted up in Canada Post colours and ready to go. Now I had done considerable work for Canada Post — shooting pictures for stamps, writing and researching various commemorative booklets and I knew some of the people in Ottawa. Thanks to email Canada Post is now a shadow of its former self. But in those days it was wallowing in cash and André Ouellette, its boss, had built a specially furnished and ventilated cigar smoking room at headquarters for himself and his political buddies. One can only guess why they chose such an expensive way to acquire delivery trucks.
Today we’re going off to inspect Newcourt’s latest acquisition, Xerox Capital. We are four: Newcourt’s founder Steve, his leggy secretary, his chubby chairman and this photographer. We boarded a small plane at Pearson and lifted off for Indianapolis where a limo glided us to headquarters. Once there the Newcourt trio sweep through the offices like a juggernaut, wheeling around corners in the corridors to take yet another division. At one point I linger behind to make some photographs — it’s not easy finding visual correlatives for what is basically a bunch of numbers on spreadsheets and deals made on the phone. A couple of Xerox Capital’s senior execs catch up with me. They look pale and shaken. “How do we deal with you Canadians?” they whinge. “You’re all so ruthless and aggressive.” As Steve Hudson, the Newcourt founder, loved to say, “You eat what you kill.”
***
The wind has shifted to the east exposing a reef to the sun. Two gulls and a crow have landed on the brand-new little island and squabble over a dead fish. All three are big talkers.
1978
Sometimes I thought that magazine editors would assign me to a story as a setup. They were amusing themselves and checking to see if I had the right stuff — like the time I was banished to Moose Jaw to fly with the Canadian aerial acrobatic team, the Snowbirds. A Vancouver magazine writer, Sean Rossiter, was to do the text and I was to provide the pictures. He flew east, I flew west and Moose Jaw was the monkey in the middle.
When we arrived in a prairie heatwave the mood of the flight team was sombre. They’d been rehearsing for an air show only a few days before when one of their crack flyers came barrel-rolling out of a dive as the small aluminum casting that held the rear stabilizer wing to the top of the tailfin disintegrated and the pilot had to eject from his little Tudor jet. As the plane was rolling out of control he’d unluckily hit EJECT when upside down. He was less than 100 feet above the prairie when the charge went off. The hole he made on impact was still fresh as was the memory of his death for his teammates. I found it hard not to stare at it. Years later I watched the CNE air show with my two young sons from the third-floor deck of my downtown Toronto house. As the Snowbirds team climbed out of one of their standard show maneuvers I realized it was fucked. I did have a little insider knowledge having been inside it once myself. I tried to quickly turn my sons around but I wasn’t fast enough. They saw another team member die.
Rossiter and I were given a brief course of instruction before suiting up for the rehearsal flight. You wouldn’t run a marathon in one of those flight suits. In fact you’d be lucky to stagger to the plane. The outfit included two parachutes, a tent, a PFD, a rubber raft, an axe, utensils and enough food for a week in the bush. All this was attached to your backside. Before waddling out to the planes we each sign
ed a waiver promising not to go after the Queen if we got killed.
We did this in the base canteen where Rossiter declared he needed hydrating before going up. While he sucked down a chocolate milkshake I asked the flight captain if I could have a couple of barf bags. Sean laughed at me so hard that he sprayed a couple of us with his shake. Nevertheless, I stood my ground and slipped the bags onto the clipboard built into the thigh of my suit. We then monster-walked out to the runway.
The little Canadair Tudors are training jets configured so that student and instructor sit side by side in the cockpit. It’s very cozy. Rossiter was lucky — he got to be in the middle of the formation — but I had to fly at its very edge so that I could take a photograph of the entire formation framed by the pilot beside me as we banked into a turn. When we got airborne it proved to be a very rough ride. We rattled through the columns of air rising in the prairie heat like a springless, steel-wheeled Mennonite wagon on a rutted road. It was truly a boneshaker. Not only that but those guys fly so tight that their wings overlap. The pilot had to work the stick like a game controller. Every movement by the lead aircraft had to be exaggerated by the adjacent planes and then magnified again by the plane on the outer tip where I was. As if this wasn’t dizzying enough I quickly discovered that I couldn’t see through my viewfinders because the oxygen hose got in the way. I tore off my facemask only to discover that I was breathing a nauseating admixture of kerosene fumes and jet exhaust generated by the plane only a few feet in front of us.
We pulled so many Gs on the turns and dive recoveries that my Nikons and arms seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. On some maneuvers I couldn’t even lift them. As I knew I wasn’t going to last long I quickly raced through my shot list and a couple of rolls of film. After 20 minutes I reached for both barf bags and asked the pilot to take me back to base. When I’d finished puking I began to prepare myself to face Rossiter. As we approached the runway I looked back and was surprised to see that the whole formation was coming in behind us. I’d thought I was the lone wimp.
After the team had lined up their planes in a neat row I climbed out and steeled myself to face Sean. When I asked the ground crew which plane he was in they told me to approach the one with the opaque canopy. When it opened the smell of puke was overwhelming. Both Rossiter and the pilot were covered in it as were the seats and the instrument panel: I daintily dangled my neatly closed airsickness bags. Fifteen minutes later I was leaning against a hanger with the Snowbirds and the American Golden Hawks, a cold beer in my hand. Meanwhile Rossiter was lugging pails of soapy water out to his plane where he was removing barf from the instruments with a toothbrush.
I was in my mid 30s when I did this and was already old compared with the team members who were all in their early or mid 20s. Last year when I was in my early 70s I dropped into the aircraft museum at the Hamilton airport. In among all the nifty fighters, bombers and bush planes squatted a dinky Tudor. When I mounted a stepladder to have a peek inside I was horrified. It was so small, so fragile and so primitive. I’m amazed I ever got in the damn thing to race off at 450 miles an hour.
“Beloved Vancouver writer Sean Rossiter dies at 68,” Georgia Strait, January 8, 2015. Sean Rossiter died on Monday, January 5, at age 68 after a decade-long battle with Parkinson’s disease. Tears were shed.
Canadian Pacific owned the Calgary Tower. In the 1980s, before the corporation was dismantled, it seemed that CP owned everything. They had the railway, of course, but they also had an airline, ships, trucks, office buildings, industrial parks, shopping malls, hotels, coal mines, an oil company, and at times, it seemed, various governments. It was a powerhouse.
Today I’m just trying to get a little power. One of the public relations managers wants to promote the Calgary Tower restaurant in a corporate publication. As I’m in town to glamorize various real estate holdings, the tower gets added to my list. A young couple will enjoy a romantic dinner at the top of the tower with “scenic” Calgary spread out below and beyond the restaurant window. Dinner is to be at dusk when the still visible scenery will be decorated with twinkling big city lights like Christmas. This means that I will have to light the couple and their table.
An assistant and I haul cases of studio strobe lighting up the tower and set them up as the service staff sets the table with dishes, candles and flowers. We tape down the power cords that snake down the aisle to duplex outlets in the core of the restaurant. Then the models arrive along with the evening’s first dinners. Everyone takes their position and the beautifully plated meals arrive. When I’m ready to shoot the restaurant begins to rotate. My couple lift their glasses in a toast. They look longingly into each other’s eyes and the lights go out.
The tower is an axle holding all the services while the restaurant is like a wheel that rotates around it. As the restaurant turns my extension cords get tighter and tighter until the turning torques my plugs from their outlets. The headwaiter shuts down the electric drive and we add several hundred feet of additional extension cords. The world begins to spin again and people lift their forks. I get in a few exposures but each one is flawed. Sauce dribbles down my guy’s chin and then his date drops her knife. We make adjustments and go at it again. Just as the distant Rockies rotate into view my lights again go out. The manager stops the rotation motor and fetches additional power cords from a closet. I add the last pair I have and we wind them a couple of times around the tower, plug them in and start again. By now the restaurant has rotated past the Rockies so we’ll have to do another full 360 to get back to the ideal background. We almost make it when we run out of extension cord and are once again plunged into darkness. The headwaiter turns off the rotation motor.
At this point I encounter western alienation. When I crouch down to re-power my lights a trio of late middle-aged farmers in tractor hats loom over me. They’ve driven hundreds of miles south to Calgary with their wives for this night of a lifetime and they’ll be goddamned if some pansy photographer from Toronto is going to ruin their romantic evening spin. They bully the headwaiter and manager who rush off to turn on the motor switch. To hell with Toronto, corporate headquarters in Montreal and every bastard in the east. The farmers will dine, the world will turn and I’ll hire a photo retoucher to fix the chin dribbles and gravy on the tablecloth.
I should have known better. I once had lunch with the Italian classical guitarist Oscar Ghiglia in Niagara Falls’ Skylon Tower dining room. He took one sip of the soup, gagged and wrote “Don’t eat the soup!” with his finger in the condensation on the window pane. All through lunch his message repeatedly circled the restaurant. We were having coffee when the waitstaff finally figured out why no one was ordering soup. And during my brief career as the glamorous woman across the table during editor Charles Oberdorf’s stint as a restaurant reviewer — we shared a studio for years — I once asked him what he’d learned after eating so many restaurant meals. He adjusted his glasses, leaned toward me, cleared his throat and whispered, “Never eat at the top of anything.”
2002
And never eat everything. For me it’s never eat animals or birds although I do make a guilty allowance for the occasional fish. So my worst meals were camped on the tundra on the Boothia Peninsula, northwest of Hudson Bay. The Bannock bread was fried in lard, huge chunks of caribou body parts were forever roiling around in a tub of boiling water and the nearest vegetable was 1,000 kilometres away. While I understood why people hunted — buying processed food in the co-op store was like shopping at Tiffany — the incessant killing really bothered me. The young boys were taught that if it moved, kill it. Every gull that landed, every siksik that ran through the camp, every narwhal that entered the harbour had to die. For the elders that was how the young would learn to be good providers. And don’t believe that stuff about Inuit using every piece of the kill. There was always tons of waste. Rotting body parts lay all over Kugaaruk, the nearest hamlet. You could never forget mortality.
Some of my Canada Po
st assignments were a pleasure to execute. In 1980 I researched and wrote a booklet to accompany a series of stamps based on Inuit prints. Singing Songs to the Spirit was a beautiful little book, the first, I was told, that actually made some money for the post office. It had lots of space for me to be an anthropologist and do some justice to a complex history. I was able to background the pages that presented the actual stamps with historical photographs recording the scenes and activities that were stylized in the prints on which the stamps were based. And I managed to spread the wealth around by buying rights to Arctic photographs done by various photographic colleagues. I still like that book. I later worked on stamps and booklets about forts, historic Canadian textiles, golf and the Olympics.
Other projects were near nightmares. Try writing a history of Canadian higher education that included the story of the development of Queen’s University in a tidy 350 words. Try making it more readable than a telegram or a tweet. Every the and a was a word count crisis. With no room for colourful modifiers all one could do to keep the reader awake was to maintain a prose rhythm that could propel the story forward. It was hard work.
Nevertheless, the little commissioning gang of four at Canada Post in Ottawa were an intelligent and interesting group to work with despite the very modest fees they were able to pay designers, artists and writers. Sometimes quite improbable things happened while their projects were being executed.
For several years my local letter carrier in the west end was a smart and quite sweet little guy. We’ll call him Gordy. He soon noticed all the mail I was getting from his corporate headquarters and was curious about what was going on. I explained that I periodically worked on stamp designs and commemorative booklets. We began having frequent dialogues about the Corp. One day while I was walking up my street with a client we ran into Gordy doing his rounds. He loved to gossip about his bosses and on this day he was relishing the fact that he’s just heard that the postal Corp. had printed an enormous run of Christmas stamps with the umlaut over the wrong vowel in Noël. Gazillions of stamps had to be destroyed and reprinted. Gordy took delight in declaring the big boys in Ottawa a bunch of assholes and I took wicked delight in introducing Gordy to my companion Georges, the “asshole” from Ottawa who’d made that mistake.
Final Fire Page 10
