Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  “Who are all of these people?” he asks.

  “Family and friends attending the funeral,” his daughter replies.

  “This is a funeral?”

  “Yes, Dad.”

  “Who died?”

  “Your wife.”

  He falls back asleep.

  Frenchie

  By the beginning of the 1970s Rochdale College was a tower of lost souls. Conceived as a free university during the previous decade, the 22-storey residence on Toronto’s Bloor West had quickly devolved into a crash-pad and HQ for the hippie homeless. If you were young and lost, it was where you went to get found.

  In the fall of 1970 I had returned to Canada after a couple of years walking the deserts and thorn forests of southern Mexico. Rochdale seemed the perfect place to regroup and recharge. I took what I thought was a simple job as a floor sweeper and toilet scrubber but within a few months I was co-managing the crew of some dozen or so misfits who mopped the elevator lobbies, vacuumed corridors, disinfected washrooms and shovelled garbage out the back door.

  The biggest expenditure in my budget was not for garbage bags or urinal pucks but for fire doors. On Saturday nights the drug squad would kick in the entrance to the sixth-floor east wing on a search and first thing many Mondays I’d order and install a new one. Sometimes we’d also have to clean up after a weekend jumper.

  Midweek we’d take City of Toronto health inspectors and their friends on an official tour of the communal washrooms. They came not so much to investigate infractions as to ogle the girls in the showers and observe men and women mingle in the same toilets. Other intruders from officialdom were much harder to please — the building department, the mortgage-holding CMHC and, as always, those bottom feeders of social order, the police. It all proved to be the most stressful job of my life. After doing my shift I’d often walk all the way home to Queen and Broadview just to unwind.

  The men of this so-called maintenance department included a Tennessee draft dodger, a Regina runaway, a New Brunswick petty thief, various middle-class dropouts and an agitated and intense floor swabber named David French.

  Most of the crew had mastered the dress code of the ’60s — long hair, low-rise bell-bottoms, tie dye and clogs — perfectly. Not Frenchie. He had a short mustache rather than a beard. His jeans were too high-waisted, wide, straight and short. He was older and thicker than the rest of us who were all Jagger-thin. And he wasn’t cool and relaxed.

  While most of us drank, swore, fornicated and smoked anything that would burn, David demurred. Weekly we had an extended lunch hour so that most of the crew could cross Bloor to the Medical Arts Building and get their doses doctored.

  David kept more to himself. He mopped his designated half-dozen floors of elevator lobbies, only occasionally joining the crew for morning coffee in Rochdale’s street level café. Like several members of the department he wanted to be a writer but as the building was full of hapless hopefuls I don’t think any of us took that too seriously. We were all in some smoky anteroom to the rest of our lives.

  My relationship to David came to be based on several things. Since the two of us were the only crew-members who regularly talked books and had actually been published, we began to collaborate on certain linguistic experiments. Hippie brother and sisterhood was largely based on a vocabulary and phraseology that was so limited and generic that it always seemed that all were in agreement not only in their opposition to parents, conventional careers and the cops but also about pretty much everything else. If some stoner rode his chopper through the front doors, into the elevator and disappeared into the upper floors the loafers in the lobby would nod sagely when someone declared the biker was “out of sight.” The crucial noun/verb/adjective/adverb in these pronouncements was always “fuck” as in “out of fucking sight.”

  In the Rochdale sub-dialect “fuck” was ubiquitous. Frenchie and I worked together to make it even more so. We would invent a new usage or insertion and then casually toss it out while swabbing the crowded ground floor lobby so that we could watch to see how long it would take to infect the patois of the entire building. “Far fucking out,” “too fucking much” and “out of fucking sight” were soon superseded by stealthy infixes such as “fanfuckingtastic.” Our linguistic innovations didn’t always catch on but many spread like a virus and we both had a good giggle when they took. We even worked for some days on an attempt to infix fuck into fuck as in “fuckucking.” But we never quite got one that worked.

  The other thing that distinguished Frenchie was his passion for one woman. While everyone else was vigorously “free-loving” it, Frenchie only had eyes for a reedy blonde girl with a most beautiful face. He was completely obsessed and smitten with L. She, in turn, seemed to find his intensity a bit terrifying. If she left the building and walked off toward Yonge on the north side of Bloor, Frenchie would scoot along a little behind her on the south side, dodging from mailbox to newspaper box half-wanting to be discovered, half-craving invisibility. He was just crazy about her. While such obsessiveness is scary — it’s like stalking — it can also be hard to resist. In the end he was successful and got the girl — for a while.

  After months of Rochdale craziness during the winter of 1970–71, it began to warm up and spring finally arrived. Frenchie announced that he was going to quit and head out to PEI for the summer to try to write. As I recall he disappeared sometime in May and I hired a replacement.

  Another member of the crew, RH, used to run a movie program on the second floor of Rochdale every Friday night. After one of his screenings RH, myself and Ralph Osborne, who’d moved on from maintenance to become general manager of the whole place, got to drinking and talking about the departed Frenchie. Around midnight it got decided that we should go visit him. Ralph phoned Wilf Pelletier of the Nishnawbi institute around the corner on Spadina and asked if we could borrow that aboriginal organization’s Travelall van. In the spirit of the times, Wilf gave us the keys at one in the morning and we were off. We drove through the summer night, taking turns, and by lunch time Saturday were on the ferry dock on the Northumberland Strait. We crossed and a couple of hours later located the little farmhouse David was renting to write. L. was there as was her best girlfriend, a beautiful young Black woman from L.’s hometown, Regina. Those two women together, L. willowy, pale, blonde and blue eyed and her best friend deeply dark, angel-faced and voluptuous, were an unforgettable sight.

  After we all went skinny-dipping on a north shore beach, RH, Ralphie and I were as obsessed with L.’s girlfriend as David was with L. We spent the night on the second floor of his rental house trying to seduce that Caribbean princess by whispering sweet nothings through the hot air heating ducts. Unlike Frenchie’s success with L., we failed.

  The following day we took off for the long drive back to Toronto and Bloor West. When David returned to the city some weeks down the road he failed to rejoin the crew. Instead we all joined him a few months later in the lobby of the Tarragon Theatre to see the first run of the play he’d written that summer in his little PEI farmhouse. Leaving Home was a hit. I had never seen Frenchie so happy.

  Almost four decades and numerous Mercer family dramas have passed since that night. During those decades I’d see him perhaps once or twice a year. Some of those meetings were simply encounters on Bloor Street. It seemed he never really got that far away from Rochdale, he just hung out down toward where Bloor met Bathurst instead of where it crossed Spadina. Those encounters were usually just quick catch-ups but a few were something more.

  One night in the early ’80s we found ourselves at the same dull party in a new loft conversion of a tall industrial building on King Street East. Frenchie and I were catching up in a corner when suddenly one of the guests — a transplanted Jewish New Yorker with a therapy practice in Toronto — started to howl. The party went dead silent while this guy gave us a play by play as he watched Jesus Christ himself float in through the fift
h floor window. I began to giggle but David stopped me. He was suddenly on high alert, concentrating on every detail of the moment, filing away the dialogue for future use. Becoming a photographer after leaving Rochdale had taught me how to see. That night Frenchie gave me an important lesson in how to listen.

  Some of the subsequent encounters had a kind of sweet justice to them. David and I raised a glass together when Ralph Osborne, the former Rochdale manager, had a book launch at the Red Room on Spadina. One of the legions of would-be writers in Rochdale, Ralph had finally put bum to chair and began to publish books. The Red Room launch was for his second and it was all about Rochdale. Not long after that I published a memoir. Predictably I ran into David at Bloor and Brunswick. “That book of yours,” said Frenchie, “is not bad. Actually it’s really fucking good.”

  My last encounter with Frenchie was just a few months later on his well-walked section of Bloor West. I congratulated him on the revival by the Soulpepper company of Leaving Home and his other Mercer family dramas. “Yes,” said Frenchie, grinning as he had on the opening night of Leaving Home so long ago, “my old plays are being performed again and this time they’re all over the world.” David died on December 4, 2010.

  EL

  “Hold my hand. I want to die right now.”

  I reach across the hospital bed and take hers. She begins to cough violently. For a few seconds I think that she might actually go but after several violent minutes she haltingly recovers.

  “I just want my mum to come and hold me — tell me that it will be alright.”

  At the moment this wouldn’t be easily arranged. She still hasn’t even told her 96-year-old mother that she, her daughter, has been terminally ill for over a year.

  EL was a tiny person with a big presence and an even larger life that almost beggars description. Physician, photographer, musician, restless searcher and, above all, traveller, she cut a jagged path through the lives of people in many parts of the planet. She did things that no other woman I’ve ever met would consider — travel the deserts of Mongolia a handful of times, most of them alone; hike by herself into the Atlas Mountains in winter to photograph rocks; sleep out in the great deserts of the American southwest; slurp soup in Kowloon; climb and shoot in the Himalayas and travel, travel, travel.

  Like many of us she had trouble peeking out beyond her immediate life to comprehend the big picture. She loved nature, the Canadian North, remote mountains and deserts and the very rocks that anchor the continents. She travelled to them all many times seemingly without a thought to the enormous and destructive footprint generated by all her restless air travel. She was a small person who left a long shadow.

  As I got to know her very well over the course of several decades I became intimate with her essential traumas — her childhood displacement from a room of her own when her brother was born and her subsequent night terrors sleeping alone by the courtyard woodpile in her family’s Hong Kong compound. Later on when her engineer father left for Canada to prepare a family base in the New World she felt abandoned again. Even when established at last, he sent for the family a handful of years later she could never forgive his absence. Not surprisingly this coloured all her subsequent relations with men and probably contributed to the erosion of two marriages and relationships with various boyfriends. Her simmering pot often boiled over.

  Numerous times after agreeing to meet her for lunch, the encounter, having begun affably enough, would degenerate into a shouting match as she began to broadcast, for all in the restaurant, my many crimes. I hadn’t told her about a party to which I’d been invited. I’d recently had everyone but her up to my little island. I’d ignored her at some event. She’d missed a dinner. And so on. It mattered little to her that she’d usually missed these occasions because she’d once again been on the road in a distant country. It was still exclusion and abandonment, the great wound at the centre of her being.

  These hurts became a loop that was always running and often made external dialogue difficult. You’d be attempting a short answer to her query when she’d suddenly interject, mid-sentence, with a remark that was totally off topic or inappropriate. She hadn’t heard a word you’d uttered. Her running abandonment loop had blocked it.

  I know that many friends wondered if she ever truly listened to her patients. Many complain that their doctors are poor listeners but with EL it must surely at times have been the case. When she withdrew from her working-class and immigrant practice in the outer reaches of the city she took on a downtown practice that was legendary for its difficulties. At its core were over a thousand lonely and angry, divorced Jewish women. They spent their time imagining pathologies, researching them on the internet and demanding their physician schedule endless tests for them. It was a plea for attention and caring but EL would have none of it. From her first month that practice began shrinking. Eventually hundreds of her patients stroked off for more sympathetic shores. Finally EL herself was encouraged to leave. She happily went back to the relative simplicities of suburban pregnancies and babies.

  Why chose to be friends with such a person? Well, in many ways she chose you and kept in contact to nurture the relationship. She worked at it and could be incredibly generous while maintaining it. Unlike many women on a “date,” she always insisted on paying her share if not footing the bill. If you could get her telling work tales she could be very funny about her practice and patients while always carefully protecting their anonymity. There was the huge and hairy trucker who liked rectal exams. Suspecting that a teen patient was pregnant she asked if she was sexually active. “Oh no! I just lie there.” Many of them drove her crazy but she loved all the babies despite maintaining that she wasn’t the mothering kind herself.

  Her photography practice was conceptually and formally quite simple. She chose a theme — for years it was rocks — placed the subject in the centre of the frame and pressed the button. These photographs often seemed blocked to me. They had no foreground activity and backgrounds that were merely an unfocused fringe around the central subject, frequently a huge stone. These objects, whether natural or anthropogenically altered, filled the middle ground of her photographs, standing almost like policemen halting traffic. They were barriers to entry into the larger world. It became difficult not to see them as expressions of an emotional state. The continent and literal content may have changed but in an essential way she was always taking the same photograph. She was trying to get through a door that remained closed to the end. She was stuck in her loop.

  It was only toward the end of her life that she began to include people in her pictures. In her African baobab photographs the figures beside those enormously inflated trees seemed to function as little more than measures of scale. In her late African pictures people posed rigidly in a short row, like the old slow-emulsion photographs in early geographic magazines. Real humanity only showed in the photographs of Mongolian nomads that she took late in her life. They were still centre-balanced and formally posed but they betrayed a certain reaching out and emotional identification with her subjects. They were nomads like her — always on the move.

  While I do have one of her Mongolian pictures on my photo wall a family photograph that she sent me some years ago still fills me with wonder. It records her extended family in Hong Kong. She and her brother are in the front row, tiny figures dressed in traditional clothing. The old ladies, including her great grandmother, have bound feet. When she told me about it she described how her great-grandfather’s concubine was allowed to join the family only after undergoing the public humiliation of approaching his house on her knees and asking permission of his wife. All these things gave EL a more intimate connection with an ancient past than many of us. We live in a land of forgetting.

  A couple of years ago a persistent summer cough took the doctor to a doctor. There were tumours in her lungs. She was told she had a month. Further investigations identified the tumor type — a congenital one largely confi
ned to Chinese women. The good news: there was a drug known to quickly shrink the tumors. You could even buy it at Shoppers Drug Mart. The bad news: it had never worked longer than 18 months. But she had bought time and hope. The drug did rapidly shrink the tumors and EL resumed her normal life. She began travelling again. She tried to practice medicine one day a week. She was going to beat it.

  The 18-month mark came and went. The tumors began once again to grow. This time the drug cupboard was bare. She began to plan her last trips. She asked me to go with her to the Serengeti. Was she really serious about dragging her oxygen tank through the heat and dust of an African plain? It was crazy. I declined. The plan she finally settled on was a cross-Canada odyssey by train. Her niece signed on and arrangements were made for fresh oxygen to be delivered at stations along the way. She had worked in many parts of the country as a young doc and stayed in touch with colleagues scattered along the route. They came out to see her as she passed through. It happened: she was happy.

  But when she returned the sky began to darken. Soon she was in Princess Margaret Hospital. She phoned me one day and ordered lunch. I took care to arrive at the Baldwin Street sushi joint she’d chosen well before noon to order her takeout. The callow staff there were not very organized and had trouble interpreting her order. By the time they got it together half an hour later people were starting to arrive for lunch. The officious young woman running the place exited the kitchen and gave me back the order form. Now that they were busy they would do no takeout. They had no time for dying people. I was shown the door.

  I finally got something close to what she wanted from a place nearby and made my way to her large hospital room that faced west over the city. The sun was pouring in and she had her main staples in her lap — white rice and noodles. She was happy. People began to come and visit.