Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  Dragon tries but negotiations are clearly not going well. This summit seems to be deteriorating into aggressive giggles on the part of the women and increasing discomfort for Dragon. Being a guy from the West I assume that money is the issue. I offer more. Dragon says no, that’s not the issue. For many long minutes I try to tease the answer out of him but he won’t say. He just looks embarrassed. Finally, just as I decide to drop the whole project Dragon takes Paul and me aside. They don’t want money. Instead they want to see what white guys look like naked.

  Paul turns to me and says, “Well, I’ll never see these women again and besides I’m gay. So what do I care?” So he and this giggling passel of women troop off along the Great Wall of China to the nearest guardhouse. They disappear through its door. Now even though I’m travelling with a gay guy I’m definitely a conventional hetero. Paul has just taken our friendship to a whole new level.

  Ten minutes later the gang returns. The women sign the releases and I make the photographs. Later Dragon explains that the women had heard that Asian guys had smaller penises than white or Black guys. They were truth seekers. Paul claimed that by exposing himself he had more than proven the affirmative. He claimed they were impressed.

  This was not the end of the incident. Months later I got a call from the legal department of the big stock photo agency in New York. My rep was very pleased with the images but there’s a problem with the releases. I’d left the line listing payment amount blank. Would I please explain the omission.

  ***

  On a cool and damp early September day I run down the river with DH, a fellow photographer. We race to beat a rainsquall and reach the island with a few minutes grace. We run for the cabin — I build a fire as rain begins to tap the roof. As my guest begins to sort out his things I discover he has a secret life. He has packed as a mycologist — dissection equipment, collection bags and a stack of field guides. As soon as the rain stops I will take him to the big back island where I’ve occasionally seen fungi fruiting under the pines.

  When the sun finally staggers out we wade across the narrow channel between islands, pick our way along the shore and enter the woods. It’s a revelation. The vast, secret underground network of buried fungal filaments has been exposed by perfect conditions. Mushrooms of every shape and colour erupt through the bed of brown needles and leaves. DH sets to work collecting. He is later able to identify fewer than a third of the dampness’s cool bounty. The forest keeps her mysteries.

  They arrive every evening just before dusk, these old men pulling small carts from all corners into the vastness of Tiananmen Square. As the day declines into dusk they unpack and lay out their kites in anticipation of the day’s end wind from the wastes of Mongolia. When the first breath of the steppes sweeps over the Forbidden City and into the great square the vanguard kites float upwards into a cloudless sky. At every day’s dusk I bicycle here to watch the sky fill with paper bats and tissue birds. Next come fish and sea monster kites that swim into the blue so that the sky becomes a sea. Finally the huge dragon kites ascend and the vast sea/sky above the great square becomes the realm of myth and legend until the light falls and the wind fails and the square becomes as bleak as a parking lot.

  1979

  Magazine editor Charles Oberdorf and I are ambling up Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. We have just spent the morning with the Miami Tourism Department’s official photographer. It’s his job to photograph the bikini-clad girls who used to wave at you from the southern surf in your local newspaper every winter morning. The cut line under their pictures would tell you the air and water temperature at the beach. The theory behind this was that when you opened your paper in Milwaukee or Des Moines during February and saw the Florida weather you’d impulsively jump on a plane.

  The guy who daily did these photographs of nearly naked women looked like a small town accountant. Because he had a phobia about his own legs he had a tailor in Miami make his trousers out of special non-staining, non-wrinkling quick-dry material so that he could wade into the surf with his subjects and not have to roll up his pants. By the time he’s gotten back to his car after a session he’d look ready to do your tax return.

  He took his job seriously, so seriously in fact that he’d written a whole book about how to take bikini pictures in the ocean. Every photo illustration in it had numerous arrows, diagrams and footnotes explaining the secrets of what he called boob and bum photography. He gave me a copy. He was serious. The book is unintentionally very funny.

  As Charles and I slowly walk north along hotel row my jeans and cameras begin to dry out after my shoot of the shooter. Somewhere north of the Fontainebleau we approach a hotel entrance jammed with stretch limos and cabs. Dozens of people wait on the front steps. As we pass the entrance someone shouts, “At last he’s here!! The photographer has arrived!” A dozen people rush over and sweep us into the hotel. The photographer: the photographer! Charles looks as puzzled as I am.

  After we are escorted into the auditorium atrium off the lobby we discover we have just become the sole media presence at the Miss Teen America pageant. Heavily made-up middle-aged women begin aggressively thrusting their daughters before my cameras. These 15-year-old girls are like little porcelain dolls — absolutely flawless skin, silky hair, molten eyes. Their ambitious stage mothers have shoehorned them into incredibly provocative costumes trimmed with lace, feathers and fur. The little girls vamp like centerfolds for my cameras.

  After 40 minutes of frantic photography a master of ceremonies announces the beginning of the competition. The mothers and daughters immediately vanish. We’re suddenly alone. Charles looks at me and shrugs. “Let’s go for a beer.”

  Somewhere in my basement are rolls and rolls of little Lolitas and Alices.

  1992–93

  “Dad, when you go to Kiev please bring back a bottle of the very best Russian vodka.”

  My assignment involved visiting various Kiev museums and monasteries to photograph Ukrainian treasures — mammoth-tusk dwellings, ecclesiastical jewels and Scythian gold in preparation for an exhibition proposed jointly for the Royal Ontario Museum and the Smithsonian in Washington. It would require a lot of lighting gear. Since the prehistoric tusk dwellings were in a cluttered and rundown museum setting I would be obliged to somehow disguise the backgrounds while working onsite — these were the last analogue days before Photoshop. I bought several large bolts of black cotton to hang in the rooms and wrap the very ugly columns surrounding the installations. A big box of Canadian hockey-stick tape was purchased to secure the fabric. I boarded a plane for Frankfurt accompanied by a stack of aluminum equipment cases.

  Journalist friends had warned me that expensive cameras disappeared during customs inspections at the Kiev airport so I requested local government assurances that my equipment would have safe passage. No cameras, no pictures, no exhibition. The Russians had only recently departed and the new regime in Ukraine was anxious to reach out to the West. I was assured that my gear and I would have secure passage.

  The Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt was uneventful until the landing at Kiev. As the jet taxied its passage was suddenly obstructed a half mile out from the derelict terminal by a small convoy of military vehicles. Several trucks closed off the runway and surrounded the aircraft. When the 737 stuttered to a stop a handful of soldiers pounded on the door and a pair of grim-looking officers boarded and began to read from an official document. “We are looking for Michael Mitchell.” All eyes in the plane were on me when I responded. Escorted off the plane I was taken to the hold where all the baggage hatches had been opened by the military. While the irritated German flight crew stood by, soldiers clambered through the cargo hold in search of my equipment cases. When my extensive luggage was safely aboard an army truck our little convoy headed for the terminal leaving the crew fuming on the tarmac. This was going to be an interesting trip.

  The military’s tactic for dealing with customs was simple: they drove r
ight by the terminal and onto the highway to Kiev. While this strategy effectively dealt with the logistics of entry it caused me no end of problems when I left Ukraine some weeks later. There was no import record of my gear and no entry stamp in my passport. I had a very complicated departure.

  Kiev has a stunning setting high on a plateau above the Dnieper River. We crossed the river and drove up an escarpment into one of the strangest landscapes I have ever seen. The old city was entirely surrounded by dozens of unfinished skeletal high-rises that had been abandoned by the Soviets. The winds of the steppes howled through the open floors and slowly rotated the rusting construction cranes swinging from the tops of each building. This devastation stretched for miles.

  After dumping baggage in the small apartment I’d been assigned as my home and headquarters we went downtown to eat. We parked and cut through a huge butcher shop where dozens of cold cases were guarded by large ladies in white. A lineup of monochrome, exhausted customers gripping plastic bags shuffled across the tiled floor and out into the street. At the head of the line an old couple watched as a single slice was cut from a cylinder of gray meat the size of a drainpipe. This dead thing was the only stock in the entire place. All the other cold cases were empty.

  These were difficult times in Ukraine. When colonial powers withdraw they invariably take all portable valuables with them. The newly reborn country was still trying to figure out how to govern itself, accommodate so many different factions and keep everything rolling along without money. A new paper currency had been designed and printed by nice people in Canada who had refused to release the bills until somebody paid for them. Consequently much of the county’s daily business was being conducted using little paper tickets like those you’d get at a bingo hall. While, on the one hand, there wasn’t much to buy and luxury goods were extravagantly expensive, on the other you could bus all over town on a half ticket that was worth about half a cent. There was a town outside Kiev that had made car tires. In the absence of a circulating currency the local women and children would squat by the roadside with piles of these tires arranged in pyramids like apples and oranges in the hopes of exchanging them for food. They were of execrable quality, crumbling under the touch and blackening the hand. Nobody wanted them.

  I began working the next day at the Lavra, a fairytale monastic complex of shimmering white buildings and gold domes high above the river. A network of caves beneath it housed the desiccated ecclesiastical dead of centuries. The many display cases in the Lavra museum protected an amazing inventory of Scythian artifacts hammered out from sheets of soft gold. But the keepers of this treasure seemed astonishingly casual about it all. They’d unlock the cases and then disappear leaving me to choose my 2,500-year-old subjects and arrange them as I pleased. Photographing metal objects can be quite tricky — I recall sweating over the Stanley Cup at the old Hockey Hall of Fame for many hours to get a transparency that didn’t reveal too much of the contrivance required to control all merciless reflections in so many curved and polished surfaces. Gold is more gracious — it just sits there and glows.

  Every day as I arrived at the Lavra I’d notice a long 18th century building across the street. It looked like another monastic building but wasn’t as well maintained. Considerable quantities of smoke and steam issued from stacks in its roofs. Whenever I inquired about its purpose I was told sotto voce that it was part of “the military-industrial complex.” End of conversation. Finally, toward the end of my stay I found someone who could get me in. It proved to be the home of the industry that made the fake Hasselblad known as the Kiev. Rows of gnomes sat at worn wooden benches fitting tiny screws into tiny holes. It was astonishingly archaic.

  I reserved the tusk dwelling for the end of the trip. I wrapped much of the small museum rotunda in black cloth before installing strobes inside the dwelling to give it some drama — it was basically an igloo-shaped pile of bones. With assistants I wrapped the bastard Ionic columns surrounding the installation and was finally ready to begin photography. It was a very long hard day. When I returned the next morning to pack my lighting gear and remove the black wrap from the building I was greeted by a crowd. Word had gotten out that I was finished and perhaps a dozen young women in heels, tight sweaters and very short miniskirts had shown up to charm me out of the bolts of cloth and the unused rolls of hockey tape. Things were that bad. They got what they wanted.

  And I only wanted one thing more — vodka for my son Jake. As the job was winding down my hosts offered to take me out to dinner. Until that point I had been making simple suppers at home from whatever I was able to buy from one of the foreign exchange stores. Not far from the downtown empty butcher shop was a large complex designed with exotic Moorish detailing by a French architect in the late 19th century. Its various wings connected with arched passageways. We went down one of them and slipped through a small door into another world.

  Outside all was cold, gray and destitute. Within, an elaborate crimson and gold dining room glowed under crystal chandeliers. Beautiful gowned women moved between the tables serving drinks and foods I hadn’t imagined were available in Ukraine. At supper I was promised that I’d soon be taken to a place where I could buy the country’s very best vodka.

  We went down one more arched passageway and slipped through another modest and unmarked door where one was greeted by a floor-to-ceiling mosaic of TV monitors showing lifestyle clips and sports highlights. A long gallery to each side was staffed by men and women in evening dress standing behind counters under beveled glass. French wines and single malts slept on satin cushions within the cases. I was the only customer.

  My request was translated and an unctuous young man in a tux slipped into a back room. I would be brought something too precious to be on public display. Several minutes later he returned with an elegant embossed box which he ceremoniously opened and withdrew the vodka bottle — Seagram’s.

  Back in Toronto a few days later I found myself in the premises of a rare book dealer setting up a session with a couple of graphic designer friends. We’d selected a wall of shelving and were carefully rearranging rows of beautiful leather-bound books so as to create a void on the shelving with a familiar shape. The void was echoed by the stack of removed books in the foreground. I carefully spot-lit the whole arrangement and photographed it with a view camera leaving enough space at the bottom of the image for the cut line that would be superimposed later — “Absolut Knowledge.”

  A friend subsequently told me that he’d found a site on the internet that sold original magazine tear sheets of all the Absolut Vodka ads ever run around the world. The rarest and most expensive one? Ours. It ran only once in Saturday Night magazine.

  2012

  I’ve caught it again — boat fever. Every six months or so I fall in love with a vessel that’s just a little larger, or faster, or handsomer than mine. I convince myself that if I acquired this latest love, a 16,000-pound motor-sailor, then my life would be transformed and elevated to another plane. I would no longer have tooth decay, flat feet or thinning hair. So I drove to Buffalo, caught a plane to Minneapolis and hitched a ride with a yacht broker to the banks of the St. Croix River where I was going to rescue this sweet virgin called the Yankee Lady. Of course when I got there and met the boat she was a smelly old whore badly in need of rehab.

  Her owner was more than a dozen years my junior but he was an American shipwreck. He could barely stand because he’d once fallen down a 70-foot mast and altered his spine; he could barely walk as he’d destroyed both knees in a motocross accident. He’d celebrated his mid-20s by having a couple of heart attacks and now he was overweight with hypertension and eczema. After we’d viewed this expiring vessel we drove to my overnight accommodations, the Thunderbird Motel, on the outer parking fringes of the Mall of America, the world’s largest shopping centre. I crashed out at eight.

  At four a.m. I was out the door to catch an airport shuttle bus. My plane circled Washington’s Ronald Rea
gan Airport for 90 minutes before landing in the rain. My flight to Buffalo was rescheduled four times so I wandered through the food courts and airport shops. Finally I was on my way again and landed in Buffalo in under an hour. I eventually found my car buried in P8 of long-term parking and drove to the Peace Bridge.

  At the border Canada Customs asked me what I have to declare.

  “I have three Mitt Romney action figures at $6.99 each — U.S.”

  “And what action does Mitt Romney do?” the officer asked.

  “You wind him up and he waddles across the floor shitting red, white and blue candies.”

  “Really? Out of his asshole?

  “Yes, officer.”

  “Sir, I’m going to have to pull you over and inspect your imports. I gotta see this.”

  1990

  This year on my annual grind across Canada I’ve made it as far as Prince Albert, a small raw city of prisons and a pulp mill that always feels like the beginning of the north. The huge, viscous North Saskatchewan River slithers through it in a gorge that separates two worlds, aspen parkland on the south bank and the boreal forest of jack pines on the north. After a long morning trudging through my shot list I cut through the city’s very utilitarian shopping mall on my way to lunch. When I reach the appliance department of Eaton’s a crowd stops me dead. Dozens of people stand mutely with their plastic shopping bags in front of a display wall of televisions. They are watching Clyde Wells speak in the Newfoundland legislature. Will the centre of this country hold? Will Meech Lake dismantle Canada? This crowd of ordinary Canadians is absolutely still and utterly silent.