Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  This morning when I boot up my laptop and check email I realize that Ben has sent a message the night before. Understanding that I’m on duty for my two sons on a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week shift — they’re only 35 and 40 — I immediately write Ben back. His reply takes a mere minute to reach me. “Too late. Unreliable parenting.”

  Fifteen

  The Dead and the Not Yet

  “Don’t get old. There’s no future in it.”

  Jerry Evoy

  “Life’s a tough proposition, and the first hundred years are the hardest.”

  Wilson Mizner

  “I have tried existing, and I do not like it.”

  Agnes Martin

  New Year’s, 2015

  “Don’t die on me, Dad.” My elder son Jake is at the door, departing for Pearson and Louisiana where he has been living and teaching for the past year. We’ve spent the week together, his first visit since he left for the States. Our shared times have been the brief pauses between his visits to old friends, mostly ones prefixed with “girl-.” On his first morning here he’d descended, tousle-haired and deeply dark around the eyes, inquiring as to whether he had “missed the continental breakfast?” And at what time would his laundry be picked up? Once each day we wedged in time to have a drink together. He’d always been an enthusiastic sampler of exotics from various microbreweries. A year on the Gulf Coast has made him a drinker of Bud Light. The crime and decline of continentalizing has set in. However he does leave me with a half-pound of Slap Ya Mama Cajun seasoning from Ville Platte, Louisiana, as an opinion reviser. Then he’s off for his plane. Despite my aversion to crossing the U.S. border I promise a spring visit. He’s gone.

  This airport is under construction — there are temporary walls, barriers and closed corridors. I search for the Toronto check-in, very tired, as I’ve been trudging for several hours — going up and down curved ramps, taking stairs, escalators, elevators, running into dead-ends or doors too small to enter. People, intent, busy, rush by toward the end of their lives.

  I remain lost. There are no arrows, no signs. I’ve long ago stopped lugging my bags having abandoned them on a ramp up to the roof. Even travelling light I still move in circles, occasionally passing a place I may recognize but I’m not always sure. So I continue to move with the current, letting the river of people carry me to where the planes will never arrive and never depart. This dream is a nightmare.

  ***

  I’m drawn out of the cabin by a glass-rattling thunder. An enormous Hercules aircraft stampedes toward me a couple of hundred feet over the pines across the inlet. It lumbers ox-like out of the noon sun, advanced by a cruciform shadow that plows the waters before it. The sun is briefly eclipsed, my pines toss, then the huge aircraft vanishes into the northern woods trailing a long tail of black smoke. It is searching for a capsized vessel that is never found.

  2014

  Pat the Beggar

  “Hello Michael, it’s Pat the Beggar. How are your cats, Ziggy and Billy?” Patricia, the caller, is a big bag-and-cat lady that Sheila and I have known for more than a decade. Superficially she’s what you’d expect — she wears several hats at once, various layered coats, sweaters and shirts and lugs an assortment of plastic bags containing, as far as I can tell, more plastic bags. She’s a sight but one that’s all too often invisible in a big city downtown. And she doesn’t smell like a flower arrangement.

  We give her money when she’s desperate, I drive her and her stuff from one transient hotel to another when she’s forced to yet again move and we chat with her on the phone when she’s lonely or in crisis. Most years we take her out for lunch on her birthday. This can get tricky as numerous restaurants along Queen West where she begs and we live won’t seat her. The hipster places are the least tolerant, donut shops the most. The best birthday lunches have been at the Free Times Café up on College where the staff always treat her with dignity and voluntarily produce a birthday cupcake with icing and a candle. She’s big and can really pack food away. In recent years she’s developed a taste for sushi.

  Who is Patricia? She gives highly articulate accounts of her past. She’s entertained royalty, has had lovers like Raymond Massey and John Lennon. There have been husbands. She knew Einstein and Freud. As a result of a past career as a painter she has pieces in the Louvre. When she had to initiate a lawsuit against her wrongdoers she was represented by her old pal Paul McCartney who was a lawyer before becoming a Beatle. When she was finally moved into a home following an extended hospital convalescence the matron of her floor told me that Pat was their very first resident theoretical physicist. This all sounds like a rich interior fantasy life but when you question her about her travels she’s able to give very vivid and accurate descriptions. The small details couldn’t come from movies or books. There would seem to be some real travel experience behind them.

  Pat’s dream has always been to move out of the home, get away from the shouting crazies, the disabled, the sad and lonely lives. She would announce that her inheritance had finally come through and she was moving into an apartment of her own. Each move would go pear-shaped. There was no wheelchair access, her keys hadn’t arrived, the public trustee wouldn’t release her money. Pat was marooned again with a ranting roommate.

  This past summer when Sheila called Pat’s refuge to say she would drop in for a visit in a few hours the receptionist announced that Pat was dead. An online search revealed a three-sentence confirmation. Pat was gone.

  Who was she?

  One of the most consistent elements in her tale-telling was that she came from the Bear Island Reserve in Temagami. So far our enquiries, including one to a JP from the reserve, have revealed no friends and no family. It’s as if she’s never existed. But she did and for nearly 70 years. Three tall garment boxes from movers Tippet-Richardson still stand in our basement as testament. They contain all her worldly possessions. We’ve only peeked in one. It’s stuffed with teddy bears.

  2002

  Joking Joe

  I’m back at my table in the cabin picking away at what will become my memoir The Molly Fire. Both my parents have died within a few months of each other and I can’t believe that they’re gone. Every word I write is a stepping stone to my own understanding and acceptance. Little do I know that in a few short months my own heart will stop for 81 minutes while my chest is sawn open and new plumbing installed. I have four bypasses that are said to be good for 20 years. That warranty lapses five and half years later and in I go again. Ten days after that I’m back again in the cath labs at Toronto General for stents in my stents in my bypasses. As my gurney squeaks back into the operating theatre several nurses wave cheerily. “Nice to see you again. Have a nice day.”

  Now 10 years have passed since those 81 minutes. I hike and kayak but always listen when my body tells me to forget it and take a nap. Life is pretty good but the ever more frequent exits of old friends and colleagues are numbing. Many have left so fast there were no goodbyes. Today’s breakfast news brightener is that an old work colleague, Joe Bodolai, has killed himself in L.A. He was 63. Last time I saw him he was still working in a Toronto art gallery but writing his first “funny,” a country-and-western song “dedicated to all the good folks in Montevideo, Uruguay.” He called the song “TV Mountain.”

  After some successes in Canada, Joe tried to advance his career by attempting to scale the television comedy heights of California. It hadn’t worked out so he’d taken comfort in the bottle and then finally death. Long after I’d lost touch with him I remember driving to Montreal listening to him on the radio describe how to fit legs to a coffee table book so that it would support your cup and saucer. It was stupid but it made me giggle in the car. When I hear that Joe had two sons, as do I, his death suddenly rears up in dark relief.

  A Pair of Laurences

  Margaret Laurence and I are jammed into a very tiny room down by the lake. She’s smoking. I’m trying to do her portrait. She won’t be ph
otographed with a cigarette.

  Each time I pick up the camera she lights up and asks me not to shoot. I wait until she finishes then reach for my camera. She reaches for her lighter. I’m totally frustrated.

  Almost two decades later while working on a project for the Perimeter Institute with her daughter, Jocelyn, I describe my attempts to make a portrait of her mother. Jocelyn sighs and lights a Gauloise. I tell her how much I’d admired The Stone Angel when I first read it and how stunned I’d been some years later when, in response to a request from a well-known American writer friend curious about CanLit, I’d sent him a package of a half-dozen favourite Canadian novels. He’d loved Findlay’s The Wars but found Laurence old fashioned and unreadable. Jocelyn lit another cigarette and told me that she and her brother used to anticipate Margaret’s posthumous royalty cheques every year. However recently they’d gotten smaller and smaller and finally trickled to zero. Nobody bought her books anymore. She’d even fallen off university courses into the abyss of the forgotten that follows death. And now sadly, halfway through the 21st century’s second decade, Jocelyn has followed her.

  ***

  After a dusk arrival at the island I unpack, fill the fridge and drag my duffle into a bedroom. Those rituals complete, I pour a drink and open the door to the big screen porch by the water. It’s become dark and cold.

  Far across the inlet a single light flickers from the low fringe of bent pines separating invisible waters from the faint luminance of the sky. Beyond that I’m alone with the unseen sound of unquiet waters. It’s fall — mid-October — so the world is unstable, unreliable, not to be trusted. It’s transitioning from benign heat and sunshine to turbulence and the gray gods of winter. This small place on the great curve of the planet has only two witnesses — me and a single small light far across the inlet.

  Macbeth

  My old friend Macbeth has come down with me this time to Jamaica. It’s his first time on the island even though we’ve known each other for over 40 years. We don’t talk much now that we’re old men whose friends are dead. On this trip I’ve twice thought he was too when I caught him on his back during the day, body stiff, mouth open, pale, scrawny and very still. But he wasn’t. We pass in the hallway with few words and go off into separate corners to read. At midnight his room light is on, as is mine, while the rest of the house is dark. The night creatures shout outside the windows and something big huffs and roars; I’ll never know what it is.

  He’s become an all-inclusive resort guy rather than the adventurer of his youth. He likes everything to be taken care of so he can concentrate on his creature comforts — booze, tobacco and lunch. Like a dog, he needs to be fed regularly and like a dog he’ll hang around the periphery of the kitchen totally focused on the preparation of his next meal. Sometimes I expect him to dart into the room to wolf down dropped scraps. It seems to me that his world has become very small.

  Jamaica and Brown’s Town can be very intense. The market in the centre of town is like an ant colony until you engage a higgler and an individual quickly emerges. I don’t think that Macbeth has seen that yet. He seems defensively withdrawn, almost stunned by this mountain town’s frantic, African alien-ness. I can’t seem to get him interested in the small local sights — the produce higglers’ homemade carts with their wooden drag brakes and rebar steering wheels, the Westwood High School girls in their crisp jumpers and jaunty little straw hats or the wizened old Black ladies in huge hats and cat’s-eye glasses. He just seems disengaged and stunned. When I take him out in my ancient right-hand-drive Toyota, rally-driving down the narrow, potholed mountain roads he says nothing until I pause and he declares that he’d like to go home. He needs a quiet drink, either coffee or neat gin on ice.

  It’s 7:30 in the morning and we’re both sitting in the cage, the barred-off, roofed and tile-floored deck over the cistern at the back of the house. The new-day sun is dramatically spotlighting the dense plantings in the garden. A golden yellow croton suddenly glows in a beam of light against the dark greens behind. The magenta blossoms covering the tall bauhinia tree shine like Christmas lights and the poinsettias are intensifying as the milky dew burns off. The background of all of this is an 80-foot-tall guango tree. The still rising sun paints a shifting theatrical light rapidly across its many spreading limbs, making the big tree seem to advance and retreat with every passing minute. While all this showy chiaroscuro is unfolding hundreds of bright birds — streamertail hummers, todies, bananaquits, orioles, warblers, parrots, parulas and parakeets — flit, soar and flutter through the glossy trees and bushes. But Macbeth remains hunched in his plastic chair, head down in a magazine, coffee at his fingertips and a roll-your-own in his mouth. Everything beyond the bars is just background noise.

  More than a quarter century ago Macbeth talked me into quitting tobacco. We were on the phone — he was out on his toy farm an hour north of the city and I in downtown Toronto. “Yup, that’s over,” he said. “Finished.” This was a few days after another friend, sitting cross-legged in the middle of his sitting room carpet while grinding coffee by hand, looked up at me critically and said, “You still sucking on those things?” So I decided it was time to quit.

  This wasn’t so easy. I had been a small child in my grandparents’ country house, a big Maxfield Parrish kind of place with fan windows, elaborate gardens and a handful of staff to keep it all going. Where did my grandfather get the money to run that huge place as well as a big Victorian just off the Avenue Road hill in downtown Toronto? Tobacco. He was president of a major Canadian cigarette company. He’d built the big country house in 1928 when everyone was smoking their way through the Depression. He did well. And I grew up in a cloud of smoke.

  I was probably addicted to tobacco by the time I was five; however I managed to get on for years by occasionally bumming smokes, until I was 27 when I went to a store and finally bought my own pack. A loud voice in my head said, “Bad idea, jerk!” But I did it anyway and smoked for the next decade and a half until my buddies shamed me out of it.

  I did it cold turkey and was miserably sick — dizziness, hot flashes, headaches and the runs — for almost a year. I was always desperate for a smoke and relief but simultaneously so horrified to witness how smoking had altered my body chemistry that there was no way I was going back. I eventually safely made it out. It was like reaching land after a long desperate swim.

  A year after I quit Macbeth was back on the weed and has been ever since. He smokes his own rollies made with French papers and cheap pipe tobacco from a reserve. He uses the cap from a ballpoint stick pen as a cigarette holder. He and his wife have money so that’s really just an affectation. The whole operation takes up tons of time and makes him stink. Someday soon it’s going to kill him.

  Puffing Peter

  Three artists are crammed into a little basement studio in the old CBC building on Jarvis Street. We are trying to explain the seductiveness of photography to Peter Gzowski on his Morningside show. I had agreed to join the others because when he was really cooking the listener had the sense that for a couple of magical hours our enormous, empty country was held together by a shared curiosity, generosity and common goals. Canada was an endearing and worthy experiment. Through Peter we could all talk to each other across thousands of miles of bush, prairie and stone.

  But today I’m having a hard time. My fellow photographers are being relentlessly conceptual and academic while I’m trying to hold ground zero as a classic documentarian and purist. The table we sit around supports the largest and ugliest ashtray I’ve ever seen. And it’s full. In case it’s not quite at full capacity Gzowski has a couple more smokes on the go and a little stack of fresh packs at the ready. The air in this studio is so blue that my throat burns, my head pounds and I’m beginning to get chest pains. I desperately want to be out on Jarvis Street breathing fresh auto exhaust. As we stumble along I can see the producers sweating behind glass. None of us are on the same page and none listen. Gzo
wski finally allows that he’s amazed that there are people who think so hard about photography. It’s clear that he has not. It’s like puzzling about blue sky.

  ***

  It is now well past mid-August: I’ve never been alone on the island for so long. I sleep not in the cabin but in my favorite room — the big screened porch fronting the Bay. Waves break barely 10 feet away, air whispers through tall screens that admit all the songs and smells of the northern woods.

  I dream vivid, visual, dreams peopled by all those who have floated my life — friends, colleagues, lovers, family. These dreams are so detailed and intense that they pull me back to consciousness, leaving me wide awake and watching a waxing moon throw confetti on the waters. Another two nights and it will be full and fabulous. So many people from my life have filled these dazzling nights of dreams that it’s all beginning to feel like a long goodbye. Then the dream pops like a bubble and I’m suddenly back in the world, awake.

  Eli

  I’ve been to this Mount Pleasant Cemetery chapel too often in recent years. Today’s funeral is for my ex-father-in-law’s second wife. She has died just a year older than me. Her husband, a well-known professor of classical guitar, has been wheeled out of Baycrest, the big Jewish home for the aged, to attend this ceremony. He’s in his 90s. He sleeps in his wheelchair.

  The chapel event is run by a funeral host. Essentially an MC, it feels as if she graduated with a C from theatre school so she went into funerals. Her execution is trite and glib but professional. Once the chapel part of the event has concluded the family trudges across the street to surround a deep hole. Its depth is designed to accommodate her husband above her when his time comes. His younger daughter trundles him to the edge of the pit. He wakes up.