2016
On this bright Sunday morning I’m driving through the mountains of St. Ann, ricocheting from cliff to chasm on tiny ill-paved roads in a hummocky landscape dashed with dazzling greens. Every handful of miles a hamlet emerges with its ladies making their way to church wearing bright spangled dresses and extravagant hats — wide brims, ribbons and sequins, satin and bows. Still this rural world’s biggest buildings, these holy houses gush music and song — tambourines and drums, pianos and small organs — flowing from a reassuring faith that moves lives forward day by day despite sickness, poverty and disappointment.
2016
After weeks alone at the Brown’s Town house I get a call from a friend asking if I’m free for Christmas dinner. I affirm that I am. Where’s the dinner? It turns out it’s at rocker Keith Richard’s house overlooking Ocho Rios. I offer to pick up my friend on Christmas morning and drive us both to the house.
Richards has figured out how to maintain his privacy. As I turn up the road inland from Ochi’s cruise ship terminal I find myself on a series of branching dirt tracks climbing up into the bush. With each unassuming turnoff the road gets worse. Several times my vintage Corolla gets hung up in washouts. The wheels spin as the little car pivots like a compass needle on humps on the roadbed. The track gets steeper and rougher as we crawl into the hills. Finally, just as the track begins to give in helplessly to the bush we encounter a pair of enormous steel gates flanked by razor wire. They majestically swing open by remote control and I scoot through only to get hung up on another hump in a very steep washed-out drive. There is still no sign of a house, just jungle.
We grind slowly uphill, the body pan, transmission and muffler yowling every foot of the way. Finally a bright blue wall appears around a corner and my little-car-that-could finds a resting place next to Keith’s big 4x4.
While the wrinkled rocker isn’t home his old buddy S. is. He’s been in the kitchen all morning but there’s still time for a drink on the long balcony cantilevered over the swimming pool and all of Ocho Rios a thousand feet below. Then it’s dinner for three with the best view in the world. Why would one ever wish to leave Jamaica?
Fourteen
Bad Daddy
“Life is bullshit and it’s your fault!”
Ben Mitchell
“Only a thin line divides the articulate man of wisdom from the windbag.”
John Kenneth Galbraith
1977
An unexpected pregnancy, at least for me; a horrendous high forceps delivery after a 36-hour labour and I’m suddenly a married father. It’s very intense. Despite sleepless nights and exhausting days, the first few years of parenthood go quickly. In no time at all I have a four-year-old son in daycare. But this is the late 20th century so it’s called an early childhood learning centre and it’s part of a community college in a northern part of the city near his mother’s work. She takes Jake in. I pick him up. The young women who run it are intelligent, committed and sweet. My son is happy.
Then one afternoon I arrive to retrieve him and walk into a freezer. Jake seems normal enough but the women avoid eye contact and are brusque. This continues for several days. By the end of the week I’ve graduated to a few glaring glances. The following week his mother discovers why.
There’d been a kind of show and tell. “And what does your mum do?” Jake had given a somewhat credible account of his mother’s work as a designer. “And your daddy — what does he do, Jakey?”
“He goes away.”
“But he must come home sometimes. What does he do then?”
Long pause . . . “He drinks a beer.”
“But after that what does he do?”
“He drinks another one.”
“Then what?”
“He gets sick.”
This told them the whole shabby secret — an absent alcoholic father who’d occasionally stagger home to hurl abuse and barf on the broadloom. They’d been warned about these fathers. They could imagine the whole thing — the unpaid bills, the smashed brown station wagon and the table dancers. Poor little Jakey. A storyteller like his father.
1994
The premier’s limo is idling in my driveway. The economy has tanked and Bob Rae is daily beaten up by the press. I’ve been doing his official photography for a while now, watching him look older and heavier week by week. I would never, ever want his job.
A few times on his way home in the west end he stops by my studio to do a photo session and have a beer. He’s an odd mix of smarts and naivety. Jacques Parizeau has recently visited Toronto and upon returning to Quebec complained loudly and publicly about his treatment by Ontarians. He saw himself as a foreign head of state: Ontario treated him like just another visiting fireman. He’s deeply offended and particularly annoyed with the Ontario Provincial Police. Bob gets busy on my studio phone discussing security arrangements with the head of the OPP and a member of his cabinet. I finally manage to catch him between calls and point out that every layabout in my neighbourhood can listen in to my cordless phone. It’s not remotely secure.
Finally his business is finished and the beer has started to erase the day. We get to work. We’re in the middle of a portrait session when my younger son, Ben, sashays into the building, cuts right across the seamless setup and demands his allowance. I fish for some change and he turns around and spots Bob. “What are you doing here?” he says. “Why aren’t you on TV?”
1982
My friend Charles and I slip down to the Toronto’s lakefront railway yards at dawn on a chilly Sunday morning. We are met at a back gate by a co-conspirator, a CN locomotive electrician. With my young son Jake in tow we sneak quietly into the yard. Soon our little gang of four is hustling between the long lines of boxcars in a silent freight yard. The famous but troubled high-speed train, the Via Turbo, is to be quietly scrapped the following week. Built at the Montreal Locomotive Works, this sleek, gas-turbine-powered aluminum passenger train had set a Canadian rail speed record by racing toward Gananoque at 140 kilometres an hour. That record still stands.
We dodge under a coupler between some old wooden boxcars and there it is — a crimson-nosed dolphin with a long pale and pearly tail shimmering under the early morning overcast. Our inside man pulls a ring of keys from his jacket and unlocks the last car. We slip down through the cars, single file, two seats on the left, two on the right until we reach the engine fronting the train. In a few minutes the Pratt and Whitney Canada ST6 gas turbines are winding up. We all crowd into the control cab and Canada’s fastest train ever slinks forward on its last run — some 200 feet — driven by a six-year-old.
2001
I think I remember how I met the pair of Italian Canadian guys in the shoe business. It was when my older son Jake called and persuaded me to drive him to a peeler bar out on the Queensway for the Miss Exotic World Universe competition. Jake has always had a refined sense of the ridiculous and I suspected that this event qualified. In spite of knowing deep down that this would be another of my “Bad Daddy” moments I agreed. We got in my minivan.
The room was packed but Jake found us a table right at the end of the long runway projecting out from the stage and the announcer’s booth. The competition began.
The first dancer came out with a handful of radio-control remotes and distributed them to members of the audience. When her music began she started to remove her clothes while grinding around suggestively on the runway. Once she was down to a G string and heels she introduced a new element — a motorized dildo on four wheels. The idea was that while she languished on the stage guys in the audience would use the radio controls to pilot the rubber erection to the appropriate destination. She was always faster than the rolling radio-controlled stiffy. It was hard not to laugh.
The next act had a Mayan theme. Two life-sized pre-Columbian sculptures were wheeled out on dollies and set on each side of the runway. One never knows when one’s background as a Mesoame
rican archaeologist is going to come in handy. This was one of them, as I immediately recognized these figures as chacmools, the recumbent figures that are feature of the late classic Maya site Chichen Itza in the Yucatán. The original chacmools were carved in stone. They are male figures lying on their backs, knees drawn up with the upper torso supported on their elbows. The idol’s heads are always turned at right angles to the body. They usually support a sacrificial bowl on their stomachs.
The chacmools at this event were cast in ice and cradled enormous erections instead of ceremonial bowls. As soon as the dancer emerged in her feathers and jade it was clear there were problems. The runway’s hot lights made the erections drip and then droop. In a couple of minutes both hard-ons had crashed to the boards. The music stopped, the dance ceased and four burly guys came from backstage and reinstalled the boners. The dance and music resumed. As soon as the dancer shed her upper feathers the stiffys sagged and fell once again. The music stopped, the four guys reemerged, did the bodywork and vanished. When one of the erections finally rolled off the stage and disappeared into the crowd the dancer was disqualified.
Following this foolishness I left Jake and went to the men’s room. At the end of the corridor I encountered a shoe display. It was amazing. Several dancers were picking through the racks of spike-heeled sandals, pumps and thigh-high lace-ups. The girls told me that a salesman came every month with samples of the latest exotic dancer styles. The shoes were lurid but very well made — beautiful leathers, double stitching with studs, chains and heels of solid brass. They were built to be comfortable for an eight-hour shift. And they were designed and crafted right here in Toronto.
I phoned the shoe company owners the next morning, explaining that I was a writer/photographer interested in doing a story about their business. They agreed.
A few days later I parked outside an industrial unit in the north end of the city. Inside I met Marino. He and his partner were each born in the Marche region on the Italian Adriatic coast. However they didn’t meet until both attended a wedding in Wood-a-bridge-a just north of Toronto. Many towns and villages in the Marche are focused on shoemaking. Both partners had apprenticed there, one as a shoe production mechanic, the other as a designer. When business got slow there they had immigrated to Canada and found jobs with different local shoe companies. But when the recession hit at the end of the ’80s both men lost their Toronto jobs.
They got talking at the wedding and agreed to explore a partnership. The economy was still weak so they had to find an unexploited niche. They eventually settled on the stripper and hooker sex worker market, leased a factory, bought equipment and hired staff. They soon found the market was bigger than they thought. Orders began to come in from New York for many of their styles but in men’s sizes up to 14. Manhattan apparently had a lot of cross-dressers and queens. While in the plant I watched rows of old Italian ladies in black busily sewing chains onto enormous slutty shoes.
Marino invited me to join him for a few late nights at the plant. Once the ladies in black went home he would sit alone at a drafting board under florescent strip lights in the bleak front office and design whips and chains shoes while Verdi operas blasted out of the office stereo. It had proved to be a high stress, very competitive business. As soon as he released a new design to the local peeler bar circuit, spies from China would sweep up pairs and courier them overnight across the Pacific. Within 10 days precise copies would be back on the North American market. However they would be vinyl instead of leather, have breakable plastic heels and hurt your feet. But they were cheap so they sold. Thus Marino was under constant pressure to innovate.
Eventually they gave me a dozen sample pairs for the photo essay. While I had fun pairing the shoes with sliced fruit and certain vegetables in tabletop setups, I also wanted to make some photographs with live models. This proved to be a problem since most women don’t like to admit they have big feet. Shoemakers cater to this by making all samples in size six. Buyers think they look better. I began furtively glancing at the feet of women friends and colleagues in the hope of finding someone with small feet. I was beginning to get a reputation as a foot fetishist. Eventually I got a well-known literary publisher and poet as well as a doctor friend to model. While they clearly had fun staggering around in the tarty crotch-high crimson-and-black numbers both swore me to secrecy. I mustn’t show their faces.
Sworn to Secrecy
I started shopping the story and photographs around to magazine editors that I knew. It sold immediately. A few months later I sold it again. And then again. And again. Each time the publisher, fearing a feminist backlash, would get cold feet. To date I have been paid four times for that story and it still hasn’t met a printing press. Its soles have yet to bump and grind across a page.
***
Morning coffee on the cabin stoop. A swirling in the pollen-streaked waters of my harbour lures me down to the shore to investigate short streams of large bubbles that erupt randomly around the bounded waters. Looking down I spot sex and a quarrel. Three male longnose gars are roiling with an enormous female as she scatters her eggs. This very public sex has riled a largemouth bass that is attempting to protect its nest and eggs in the shallows by the shore. The bass repeatedly attacks the tailfins of the gars who are too busy bonking to notice.
2015
Months later I step from my cabin into the incomprehensibly black October night. The brisk wind is warm, the sky shot through with a spray of white-hot stars. My younger son, Ben, has recently phoned and asked if I would go halves with him on a 10-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. “We’ll keep it at the island, Dad. Everyone thinks it’s nerdy but I think it’s cool.”
I have no memory of seriously discussing astronomy with him, of telling him about my long winter nights as a teenager walking a tight circle around a stool with a big glass disk glued to it, slowly over many months making my way through graded pots of jeweler’s rouge as I ground it into a parabola to be silvered and mounted into a tube. I had built several astronomical telescopes with a friend. Now, through some sleight of genetics, Ben also wants to be awed by dark immensities.
1994
Ben has been bugging me for weeks to take him to an astronomy lecture at U of T’s Hart House Theatre. One of those popular village explainers of science will be onstage revealing the dark infinite secrets of the universe. Ben really, really wants to go. In my needy quest for parenting points I finally buy the tickets by phone and we’re all set.
Now Ben is a guy who worries about things. There was a period when he’d spent hours each day watching the Weather Channel so that he’d be the first to know if there was going to be an earthquake. Back when I was doing graduate work in anthropology, against the counsel of my advisors I insisted on taking a graduate course in geology. However, despite the fact that I had none of the science prerequisites and schedule conflicts prevented me from taking half the classes or any of the labs, I’d managed to squeak through a pass. This made me an expert. I repeatedly tried to reassure my son that southern Ontario was geologically quite stable — there was little danger of a Lake Ontario tsunami sweeping over Toronto Island to topple La Tour CN Tower. And any attempts by me to suggest that since seismic events traditionally were not part of weather systems, he might better get advance quake warnings from another source didn’t make any difference: the Weather Channel was always on with Ben hunched anxiously before the flickering screen.
On lecture day Ben was dressed and ready to go hours ahead. I was too old, adult and dim to understand the urgency of getting to U of T several hours in advance. When I finally capitulated we arrived sufficiently early that a janitor had to admit us. The holy grail was a seat in the front row. We had no competition. The room was dark. As it gradually filled Ben repeatedly squirmed around in his seat to watch. When the auditorium reached capacity and Ben turned to me and announced in a gale-force stage-whisper,
“Dad! They’ve all got pocket protect
ors! Why didn’t you warn me? The place is full of nerds!”
***
Rain has fallen now for three days. The new roof on my cabin has surrendered. Gray skies and the east wind have won, allowing a million tiny drops to make their way through the cedar shakes, the asphalt singles, the weather membrane and the pine cladding to drip on the counters, the big oak table and varnished floor. In some places the water is spackled into bright droplets, in others it forms glycerin tongues teasing across the tabletop. I have learned a life lesson: never build cupolas, they always leak, every single one in all of history has leaked. Keep it simple.
2017
My architect son Ben has recently called me a couple of times. He knows I’ll soon be moving out of Toronto and he’d like to go through the stock of my photographic prints in the basement. This is a strategic advantage-taking of my need to downsize for life in a condominium after the big house. He gives me his criteria — no unmatted or unframed items, all pieces of my art must be hang-ready. And while he’s willing to bang nails into the walls of his new condo himself, I’m also expected to provide delivery. This is a requisite part of parenting. I accept his terms.
Ben arrives for his shopping trip accompanied by his partner, Sharon. They let me know how busy they are and quickly descend to the basement storage. They’re gone for a couple of hours. When they finally emerge I ask them how it went. As Ben puts on his coat he replies, “I’m sorry, Dad, we’ve decided to go with another artist.”
Final Fire Page 31
