1975
I’m sitting on a Queen streetcar next to an east end punk. He’s sizing me up, looking at the bulge in my jean jacket breast pocket that betrays my wallet. He’s also looking at my watch. You know that at whatever stop you get off it’s going to be his stop too. My problem is not my wallet or watch but the $700,000 worth of diamonds and gold in the pockets of my Levi’s.
I’ve been doing this monthly for a year now, riding the streetcar to a hotel downtown, picking up the latest jewelry designs from a shop in the lower level arcade of a hotel, stuffing it into my pants and then taking transit back to my studio where I make the photographs. Each month the shipments get more valuable. Sometime, somewhere, this has got to go bad.
***
I arrive at the island to discover another round of asset stripping. My ex has visited the one thing we still co-own and she’s been shoplifting. The heavy German chef’s knife is gone as is the big Israeli manual juicer. She did buy those but not many of the others. A Chamula house cross, a memory from my work in Mexico a half century ago, has vanished and my little Japanese teapot is gone. For her it’s just a pretty little blue and white teapot with deep red ring around the lid and ochre dots orbiting it like little moons. For me it’s much more. When it’s in my hand I remember my long, lone walk through the rainy back streets of Kyoto in the days when I would go with some regularity to Japan. I was wet and dog-tired the day that teapot called me to the window of a neighbourhood shop. It was not antique and just a few steps above the stuff in a hundred-yen shop, but it had a welcoming friendliness worth much more than the few dollars it cost. It was made for daily use. I bought it. It’s true I’m not a big tea drinker but I miss it.
1972
I’ve been moving around Ontario for weeks now, filming and photographing in the province’s prisons. There’s considerable variability in the institutions, both in physical plant and philosophy. Old near-dungeons like Guelph coexist with modern institutions in Brampton that seemed based on a notion of class upgrading. If we could just instill middle-class values in all these grotty working-class criminals then everyone will be nice, life will be nice, the world will be nice. The new cells have designer fabrics and furniture. There’s classical music. Inmates learn the language of sensitivity training and therapy. It’s class war. It’s creepy.
I’m allowed to read inmate’s files. With the exception of a handful of middle-class boys who got caught dealing dope, the files are all the same — neglect, no education, family violence, alcohol, no money. No wonder.
Nevertheless it’s painful to watch the process. After many days filming group therapy sessions in a women’s prison I’m allowed to record visitors’ day. The tough guys from outside come in to see their wives and girlfriends. The women all have the new vocabulary of therapy. Their guys don’t know what they’re talking about. They can’t talk to each other. They’re being split apart. It’s a strategy; it’s sad.
Those were the days before the cells became full of Black faces and a different kind of cultural war began.
I spend a lot of time in Guelph and eventually acquire a couple of inmate assistants. I get to know them well and start to appreciate the strange disfunctions they live with. The inmate I get closest to is in for robbing a country general store in southwestern Ontario. He did it in November. He spent weeks parking a concession road away, hiking through the cold wet fields to a ditch across the road from his target. He’d lie in the damp ditch for hours memorizing the farmers’ movements — when people came for their mail and supplies — until he knew the few minutes when the proprietors, an old couple, would be alone. He struck after a month of research and scooped up $85 — so much careful planning to earn a fraction of minimum wage at the cost of great discomfort. Stupid.
Yet he wasn’t.
When I am about to leave Guelph after several weeks of work several inmates come to say goodbye. They tell me that they figured I was a good guy and so when they get out they want to do something for me. They usually charge $1,500 to take somebody out but for me the first death would be free.
***
My old friend Billy stands on the high bluff edge talking to me over his shoulder. He begins to descend the battered soft face of the precipice, waving his arms as he talks, not focused on where he is. I want to warn him but I’m too late. He stumbles and falls. I can clearly hear his body thumping on the clay face as he cartwheels toward the rocks below. The final lakeside impact sounds like a softball into a mitt. When I start up in my cabin bed I remember that my dream is also too late — he is already dead, the victim of a midnight car crash on a Tennessee exit ramp two years earlier. Why has my brain changed the script?
1988
Their colour goes, then weight and finally the sores appear and you know that another friend has succumbed. This mystery illness is shadowing the land like a dark nimbus driven by a hard wind. People in the way are falling like old trees.
The Ontario Ministry of Health has concluded that a major public awareness campaign is mandated. The population needs to understand how AIDS is spread and how it’s not. They need to know more in order to protect themselves and slow the wildfires. There will be thousands of posters for public buildings. Illustrated brochures are to go to every home in the province. The Ministry will provide the words. I’m to make the photographs.
The shot list proves to be very long. I’ll need dozens of models and numerous locations. By the time all the models are assembled, Ministry and agency reps, assistants, makeup, wardrobe and handlers we are in excess of 60 people. I hire people to load cameras, hold reflectors, corral the models and keep track of their hours. Some of the crew that I hire are fellow former students from my film school. A small fleet of vans is rented to move this little army from location to location. It’s all to be done over an extended weekend of very long days.
Less than a week before the session there remain a couple of setups that still are not cast. And we are weak on diversity. One morning I’m in the agency office at reception talking to the main art director and designer when a young guy enters with a courier package. The director and I look at each other and simultaneously say, “You can’t get AIDS from a drinking fountain.” This handsome Black kid would be perfect for that poster. We explain the project to him. When we tell him how much he’ll be paid for drinking from a public water fountain his eyes light up. Suddenly a courier’s hourly rate looks stupid. As he’s still in his teens he needs to run the offer past his mum. He’ll get back to us.
His mother turns out to be a well-known Canadian artist who often works with photographs. His father is a well-known figure in municipal circles. The kid goes to his mum. She says no. He pleads: it will be an adventure, he could really use the money. This kitchen argument won’t go away. Finally mother enquires about the photographer making all these pictures including some of her son? When he tells her she suddenly relents. “Okay, if it’s Mitchell, then it will be okay.” She knows of me.
We begin this intense weekend shoot at Queen’s Park. Not at the legislature but in the actual park with its wonderful trees and numerous interesting nearby buildings. It’s hard work but we’re well organized and move through the long shot list like a guerilla force. Every few hours a catering truck arrives and refuels our little army. I finally get to the drinking fountain session. Our young courier seems to know exactly what to do. It goes well. His hours are recorded; he signs a release; the cheque will be mailed. The convoy moves on to a new location down by Cherry Beach.
During the following week the many rolls of film are processed, proofed and printed. There are no mishaps. The brochures and posters are mocked up and presented to the Ministry. Despite the scale and urgency we have pulled the whole thing off. We’re pros.
Then an ominous call came from the minister’s office. I was to show up immediately for a meeting. I was puzzled. All initial responses to the pictures had been enthusiastic. Government representatives had been on s
ite to suggest any changes and approve final Polaroids. What was this all about?
I had some anxieties as the last time I’d done a big project for a provincial ministry — Corrections — there’d been a big post-project stink because after delivery and payment for the films I’d written and published an article in which I expressed my concerns about the new direction the Ministry was setting for the prison system. The minister, the former hockey player Sly Apps, had taken to phoning my wife at home demanding to know “where I was hiding out.” She didn’t know precisely. I was doing visuals for a museum project in Stratford at the time.
When I arrived at Queen’s Park the minister was in her office surrounded by a cluster of grim staffers. Ontario has had a string of large women in various portfolios. This minister was even larger than all of them and a chain-smoker to boot. She scowled at me. How did I explain what had happened to one of my models at the hands of an assistant of mine? What was I going to do about it? I had no idea what she was talking about.
As this very awkward meeting progressed it became apparent that the woman I’d known at film school whom I’d hired to track the models’ hours had seduced the boy at the drinking fountain. He’d gone home after losing his virginity and told Mummy. How could she have done this to me? And on an AIDS shoot for Christ’s sake?
As we talked this thing through I discovered that the seduction had taken place some days after the shoot. My assistant had run into our handsome courier boy on the street and had invited him back to her place. He’d gone. It happened. How could I be held responsible for this post-factum event? I agreed that it was extremely unfortunate and I understood why his mum had felt betrayed by me and complained to the minister. But I wasn’t an afterhours baby sitter. I didn’t accept responsibility. In the end they agreed. Apologies were sent to the family and the matter dropped.
But not by me. When I later confronted my assistant she confessed and expressed regrets. She would make it up to me. Why didn’t I come and stay for the night?
***
With the last days of spring the river has begun to drop and the water clear. Now that sunlight penetrates to the bottom the creepy, waving marine grasses have begun their summer growth. In a few weeks they’ll be grabbing our ankles and drawing us under. A thin line of mud has appeared to mark the waterline along the banks. The season of rutting and reproduction screams its arrival all night.
It’s a misty late August early morning just outside of London, Ontario. We’re racing down a lake in a 14-foot aluminum skiff with a 15-horse outboard. The driver is the national rowing team’s coach. He keeps the boat tucked into the narrow slot between where the cox sits in the shell and last sweep of the women’s eight. These women are so strong and so fast that the coach must run the Evinrude flat-out in order to maintain position so that I can photograph. I stand astride the gunwales, just aft of the bow thwart. It’s a fine balance that I can only maintain if the coach has an absolutely steady hand on the tiller and we cross no waves.
I gingerly step down to the bilge just as Silken Laumann slips magisterially out of the fog in her single shell. She was never the most beautiful woman on the team, Kathleen Heddle was, and she may not have been the strongest, I suspect that crown went to Marnie McBean, but she was definitely the presence. Not because of her achievements, I knew little of them at the time and certainly didn’t understand her triumph over abuse. That story surfaced almost two decades later. But to see her on the water was to witness a focus and purpose that produced a union of boat, sweep, water and sculler in a fluidity of movement that was silent, self-contained and powerfully hypnotic. It drew the press to her with a force that was resented by some other women on the team who’d grumble about “that Silken shit.”
She was clearly isolated so I was more than pleased when at a subsequent World Cup event in Finland she suggested a couple of times that we go for a beer. She was a compelling presence because she was a triumphal survivor — over a tough childhood, flirtations with suicide and a competition leg injury that would have ended most careers. That was the power that made her so beautiful to watch on the water. The “shit” was elsewhere. Sadly the many beautiful photographs of her and the team we made were later lost when the sponsor forgot all the slide trays of our hard-won originals in a B.C. meeting room.
My pal Dougie won’t shut up. I’ve brought him with me to Switzerland and France to assist with an intense weeklong shoot with the Canadian freestyle ski team. There are numerous events to cover, multiple cameras to load, many rolls of film to label and keep track of as well as the sheer grunt work of lugging cases of gear up and down mountains in the snow.
And there was a great deal of snow on the mountaintops at Val d’Isère and Tigné. First day out we traverse a high ridge on foot pulling a handful of aluminum equipment cases behind us. The snow we struggle through is chest deep and the wind howls over the ridge. Our beards are frosted with ice; our faces burn in the cold.
We slide and stumble down slope to where a special mogul course has been built so the team can practise and I can photograph. After watching several women on the team ski the bumps I select a point in the course from which to shoot. We dig a pit in the snow for me to lie in with my cameras. The idea is that team members will descend the mountain, hit the mogul just above me and make a hard left turn dramatically spraying snow as they avoid me. Dougie will let the skiers know where I am from the margin of the run. He will pass me freshly loaded camera bodies as I hit the roll ends.
The first couple of runs go well; we are a team. But Dougie is relentlessly social and one of the world’s great talkers. He soon gets distracted and begins to talk up the young women on the slope beside him. He forgets to indicate where I am to one of the descending skiers. She rockets off the mogul just above my spot and lands squarely on me before vanishing down-slope to the end of the run. I’m wearing so much clothing that I’m not really hurt but her ski edges have sliced through both shoulders of my snowsuit. I scream a couple of obscenities at Dougie and then feel better. We finish the rest of the day without incident.
Being in amateur sport is like being in the arts. Visual artists and most writers are expected to produce for free or pocket change. In my experience the only people in the arts who get paid for what they do are musicians, especially classical ones. They have a union. So I’m always somewhat embarrassed by the realities of the many photography sessions I have done with our Olympic and World Cup skiers and the rowers. When travelling to these events, whether in the Pacific Northwest, Ontario, Quebec or Europe, I get a nice hotel room, restaurant meals and a car or van, plus an assistant.
The athletes, however, must work at menial jobs to pay for training or transport to cup events. With each competition some of them don’t attend because they just don’t have the money. When they do they usually bunk up four, six or eight to a room. They eat takeout and fast food. It’s all they can afford. It’s shabby.
This first evening the sponsor is treating the entire team and crew to dinner at an inn. The athletes are in high spirits and ravenous. One of the male team members, a contractor in B.C. by day, does his famous “ball walk” after dinner. This involves climbing up into the beams and rafters of the dining room and stalking along them like a cat with his testicles dangling from his fly. It always gets everyone’s attention. We all drink — a lot.
It’s well after midnight when the party breaks up and I return to my hotel. As I drift off to sleep there’s a gentle tapping at my door. I stagger over in my gotchies and open up. It’s the mogul girl. She’s come to make up for the disaster on the slope.
Now I’d seen her on the weight machines doing a workout earlier in the day. I’d photographed her massively muscular thighs. I was terrified. We have a little talk instead and then I offer to drive her home. We sneak out of my room and down to the lobby. Every door is locked for the night. The reception desk and office are empty. We retreat to my room.
As I’m on
ly on the fourth floor we decide to climb out my window, sneak downwards from balcony to balcony until we can jump into the big snowdrifts piled on either side of the adjacent road. It’s slippery as it’s still snowing but we make it and cross the street to my rental van.
I get it started but we’re stuck in the new snowfall so I begin to rock the van back on forth to get out. The wheels spin and scream in the night. Lights start to come on in the hotel. Dougie looks out from his room and sees someone trying to steal our van. He calls security and the police. Ms. Mogul and I blink in the beams of a half-dozen flashlights.
2000
My old friend and photo partner K.S. is in town from Tokyo. I’m up at the island when he calls to arrange a visit. A Japanese girl, Mizuho, whom he’d met in Kyoto is with him. She’s tiny and beautiful; he’s well over six foot and enormous. In Tokyo some call him Mr. Belly. He loves food and drink as well as women.
They drive north and I do a river run to meet them. Mizuho looks stunning: K. looks huge. As usual he’s brought great food and excellent wine. He wants me to take them out to the coast where the smooth rocks undulate in and out of the bright water for many thousands of feet. He’s in mind of a picnic. I’m in mind of staying where we are or seeking a sheltered back bay as the west wind has blown hard for three days. There’ll be a lot of leaping horses on the reefs and shoals. But I can’t dissuade him.
Final Fire Page 11
