Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  Initially fate smiled on this voyage. I owned all the gear necessary to record and film her journey and Sheila had a sophisticated editing suite. Best of all, it turned out that we lived only two blocks apart in downtown Toronto. This was the most important element because it meant that whenever Mary had energy and felt like talking, she could phone me and I grab my camera bag and walk over. I could be there in under five minutes, crucial timing when her energy was at a premium and fugitive. I’d roll tape and she’d speak her mind and describe her journey.

  At the time I had other friends — longtime ones — who were also dying. They were angry, irritable, hostile, confused and fearful. They had shitty lives in their last months. Their lack of a good life ending made me sad. But Mary didn’t. She worked hard at life, embracing whatever light and pleasure she could get from each moment and her friendships, even while her body was abandoning her. She was amazing.

  Documentary films can cost serious money to make — hundreds of thousands. How were we going to finance this one? I’d long ago come to accept that my personal art-making time, my energy, my ideas and my skills were worth diddly-squat. I’d founded organizations, sat on arts boards and written books for free for years. And Sheila and I would work gratis on this one but materials had to be purchased and labs had to be paid. We began to approach various funding agencies.

  In film this is a brutal process. The very important, wise and all-knowing, extremely powerful and impressive people in Ottawa want binders full of forms, plans, schedules, budgets and rationales. You even have to do their photocopying for them. Then they make their very predictable decisions and further the ordinary.

  We decided to focus on TVO and the Ontario Film Development Corporation. Both have significant offices. At the time we applied to fund Mary about 60 other filmmakers also did. There was really only a slot for one. We made a short teaser, filled out pounds of paperwork and sent it in. Mary, Mary, My Last Act of Love in the World made it into the final three. We went into an impressive boardroom for an interview. A half-dozen organization people sat around a boardroom table asking questions. Finally one of them, a woman, asked where Mary’s husband was in all of this. Our treatment and sample footage had focused almost entirely on Mary. Sheila and I explained that her personal journey was the story and we’d decided not to focus too much on Marcus because their struggle to get through all this — it had been the focus and challenge to their relationship for about a decade — was their private matter. Mary was our main story: she was the one who invited us into her life. Marcus was willing to go along with us and try to make the best of it. The commissioning producer at TVO finally said that if we’d build the film around the drama of their struggle as a couple facing death then they would give us the money. This, he said, would make better TV.

  When I looked at Sheila I could tell by her eyes that she felt the same way I did. This man’s idea was invasive, insensitive, even cruel. Their struggles after years of dealing with Mary’s slow decline were theirs, not Sheila’s and mine and certainly not the viewing public’s. Mary’s triumphant coping, her gathering wisdom and willingness to share what she was learning were what mattered. Her journey would help others. While Marcus certainly was there and important, it was Mary’s thoughts and emotions that would be the primary message of the doc.

  If that was our position, then our interrogators said they would give the money to somebody else. And they did so. We left with nothing in hand. Some months later I ran into that producer at a photography event and he began asking about Mary. He remembered every detail of our submission and recalled our footage vividly. Finally I inquired as to who had won the competition for funds and what their film was about. He stumbled. He couldn’t remember either. That was a depressing moment.

  Nevertheless we continued to make the film. When we got desperate a couple of times an old friend of mine, Michael S., stepped in and wrote the cheques that got us to the next step. Other friends in film donated time and their services. The project inched forward as Mary inched downwards. At times it got very intense as the end got closer and closer.

  And there was subterfuge. Several times I had to sneak my large shoulder-mounted video camera into her room in palliative care when it was against rules. When the final summer came around Mary and I increasingly had sessions where we didn’t film, we just talked and I kept her company. It was all she could deal with. Me too.

  In mid-summer I filmed a birthday party in Trinity Bellwoods Park that the entire Pocock family held for both Mary and her sister Kate. Mary’s many sisters and brother flew in from Europe, the U.S. and Ottawa. Despite Mary’s dim prognosis the event was joyous. It was a very beautiful day despite omens. That party is part of the film.

  Not many days later my younger son, Ben, called and asked if Sheila and I could drive my van to Montreal where he was living and help him move. As distance had kept us apart for some years I readily agreed. We drove down and began hauling his stuff from storage in the north end of the city. It was pretty hard work.

  After a day or so I began feeling an unease. I think that Sheila and I both did. I talked to Marcus by phone. The situation was getting critical. We quickly wound up the move and set off on the long Toronto drive. We got in very late.

  Early the next morning the phone rang. It was Marcus. Mary was in critical care. Her lungs were filled with tumours. She was struggling to breathe. If we wanted to say goodbye we’d better get over there. We dressed, made coffee and set out. We were too late.

  Now this was all wrong. Mary and I had still more plans for the film. Its arc was not finished. I didn’t know what to do. Our intimate filming sessions were over. Forever.

  This was where Sheila really stepped in. She went down into our basement editing suite and sat there alone for days, weeks and months, cutting all the footage I’d shot. Several times she needed to start all over again. She did. And the film I’d been unable to finish began to take shape. She saw it through to the end when I no longer could. She did a wonderful job. The movie is now out there and it moves people but it’s been a very hard sell. Nobody likes to witness death unless it’s in Hollywood.

  A couple of years ago Sheila and I went to a lecture at the City of Toronto Archives during Black History Month. When one of the speakers related the story of Toronto’s first Black postman I remembered that somewhere in my vast basement studio archive was a beautiful little crimson box of Kodak Canada Royal Dry plates. They were century-old glass negatives of that Black postman’s funeral. He lay in state in an open coffin surrounded by large floral offerings from various organizations. I told the archivist and asked if the city would be interested in a donation.

  It is not easy to give something away to most institutions. I’d once offered Ryerson’s film and photography department a dozen or so signed vintage Karsh portraits that a colleague had salvaged when Saturday Night magazine trashed its archives. They were fascinating because they held all the crop-marks and stamps from all their appearances in print. Ryerson’s curator said they weren’t in their mandate. They only collected (American) masterpieces. I’d once offered the Art Gallery of Ontario a 45-print set of elaborate little 17-colour silkscreens by the Group of Seven. They were all mounted in mats that had been handmade by A.J. Casson for my grandfather. He’d known all the Group members and had at one point employed Casson. The prints were a make-work project printed by Sampson Mathews to help artists survive the Depression. The AGO’s curator of prints and drawings rejected them because the Group had silkscreened their signatures onto the pieces. Therefore they weren’t art. In both cases the pictures got sold to private collectors. Stupid.

  It took the city months to come around and have a look at the glass negatives. They took them away and some months later announced that they weren’t records of what I said they were. Before I got around to taking them back they informed me that they’d like to have them anyway. I suggested that if someone made enlargements from the plates
or examined them with a magnifier, the type on the ribbons securing all the funeral wreaths would identify both the date and the dead. Months later the archives got back to me. I guess that someone had finally done just that. The plates in the box were indeed what I had said they were.

  All this is to remind us that photography was once a mortuary art.

  2017

  Reeves

  John Reeves, portrait photographer, drinker and, above all, marathon talker is gone. When his favourite watering hole, the Waterfront Tennis Club, was closed down by the city’s development ambitions, John moved his monologue down to the Keating Pub where the Don River awkwardly elbows into Toronto Harbour at Cherry Street. It was the perfect site for his memorial service.

  I drove in late that day from Hamilton, found the last parking spot and entered the bar. The moment I slipped into the hushed room I realized that I was in the wrong place or had missed the right day: the place was full of gray, balding men and faded flowers. However, within a few seconds I began to recognize faces. Once again I had forgotten that I too was old. His people were my peers. John was dead as were many of his sitters like Leonard Cohen. We survivors were at yet another rehearsal for our own exits.

  2011

  Overcoat

  He sits at his command post in the kitchen with his oxygen tank beside him on the floor. From this high extension of the kitchen counter Charles Oberdorf can see down the hall to the front door. To his right he can supervise his dining room while behind him glass doors give on to a small deck before his beloved garden that ends in a deep cut hiding the Yonge Street subway. Once a globe-circling travel writer, his whole world has shrunk to this little outpost in a corner of his North Toronto house. He has emphysema. It will kill him.

  We used to share a studio and smoked together. He was a pack-a-paragraph writer and I was a pack-a-picture photographer. I managed to quit. He didn’t until the damage was already evident. As he’d started much earlier than me and was also older, his tobacco career was considerably longer than mine. Also, he really knew how to inhale — deeply. I was an amateur.

  Although we largely worked independently, we did collaborate a handful of times to create magazine stories. He was already a well-known journalist and editor when he sublet a writing room in my studio on Downtown Toronto’s Queen Street East. As I was just beginning to establish myself as a freelance photographer, I was barely earning a living and spending much of what I made on equipment. In those days you needed cameras in various formats and various prime lenses for each of them as contemporaneous zoom lenses were still drawn out on paper and weren’t very good. Since the cameras were mechanical and prone to break down, one had to have at least a second body in each format for backup. Film stocks were slow so you needed lighting gear, both hot lights and strobes, as well as a darkroom to process film and make prints for publication. All this was a big investment. The few hundred thousand I spent in those first years gave me tools that last year fetched less than $10,000 at auction. It’s all now obsolete. Today’s freelancer can get going with a single camera body, a couple of zooms and a laptop.

  Hence I was quite willing to pose as the hot woman across the table when Oberdorf did restaurant reviews for newspapers and Toronto Life. He was still single in those days and I was hungry. My only obligation was to order a different dish than he did and pay close attention to what I ate and give a critique. I remember on our first “date” I had to ask what crudités were. After a couple of years of this cross-eating I got quite sophisticated about classic dishes. We had some laughs and a few disasters.

  Sometimes a review produced a regrettable outcome. By accident I’d found a pizza joint way out on the Danforth that made amazing pizzas. The immigrant guy who opened it was fanatical about quality. Prior to opening his dream restaurant he’d spent an entire year driving all over North America eating pizzas and talking to their makers. He had thrown everything he’d learned into his creations and every cent he had into buying the best ovens.

  This had left him with no capital to renovate his leased storefront. So he’d opened his pizza palace with the previous tenant’s lurid erotic murals still on the walls. It looked like a whorehouse. Our review celebrated not only the food but also the Freudian excesses cavorting on the walls. The publisher loved it and so did the readers. A couple of days after publication the pizza guy phoned us in a panic. His phone was ringing constantly. People wanted to make reservations. He couldn’t cope.

  His new customers from Playter Estates and Rosedale would order their pizzas and snigger at the artwork while they waited. He felt ashamed so after 10 days of exhausting work he decided he had to renovate. He borrowed money and put a sign in the window. The renovation took weeks. When he reopened, ready at last for his new clientele, they’d moved on to the next review and several after that. Toronto’s still the same. He went bust.

  We also did some travel pieces. When we did a piece on Mardi Gras the U.S. Travel Service put us up in a grand hotel in the Vieux Carré. We arrived tired and hungry. After leaving our bags with the porter we headed for the dining room. No jackets, no ties — they wouldn’t let us in. Defeated we took the elevator up to our room. A well-dressed guy in a pinstriped three-piece rode up with us. Still thinking about my stomach I asked him if I could borrow his suit and tie so I could eat. He stiffly refused my feeble joke then exited on our floor and vanished down the hall.

  When we got into our room the phone rang. Three-piece pinstripe was on the phone. “I won’t lend you my clothes but I will take you guys out on the town for dinner.” After we accepted we discovered that he was a corporate lawyer for a huge aluminum corporation. As we walked together to his restaurant we found out more about him. Although he lived in the Southwest he’d grown up in New Orleans and knew his way around. When he found out why we were visiting from our northern icebox he stopped in the middle of the street and said, “What you guys gotta understand about New Orleans is that she’s a grand old lady with really dirty underwear.”

  At his great Cajun seafood restaurant I asked him about his job. There was an enormous pile of aluminum ingots sitting in a parking lot out in the desert. This valuable heap was the subject of an ownership dispute. Our new friend’s entire decades-long career had been focused on this one case. As a matter of fact his was the third generation of lawyers fighting to recover this treasure.

  “What do you call that kind of work?” I asked.

  “Rolling the turd.”

  Returning much later to our hotel we stepped out of the elevator to a hallway full of screaming girls. Fonzie, a sitcom actor named Henry Winkler, was in the room next to ours.

  One day Charles called me to say he’d been asked to do a travel story on Mexico. Since I’d lived and worked there he wanted me to partner on the piece. A self-described piazza man, he had an aversion to any developing-world location. He’d once flown to Africa for a travel piece. When he stepped out of his plane into a hot weird world of Black people and funny trees he immediately turned around and flew back to Toronto. Although he’d lived in Toronto for years he remained, fundamentally, an American. He never did take out citizenship and every time he returned from some exotic locale he’d rush off to the McDonald’s at Yonge and Dundas to eat a hamburger and get grounded.

  So naturally I suggested that we do a piece on my old hometown of Oaxaca in southwestern Mexico. I knew it well and could tour guide and provide local dirt. On this trip I made some myself. On Oaxaca’s main square I ran into a stripper from Shanghai on holiday. Lily was clomping around this little conservative Catholic city in her stage outfits. Since she was having trouble connecting with locals she asked if she could join us on our tour. Before Charles could open his mouth, which was already open, I said yes.

  She proved to be a lot of fun. Totally innocent of any education but that of life, she was full of curiosity and absorbed every boring archeological lecture I gave Charles and asked challenging questions. She travelled
with us all the way to the Pacific coast, at that time a 10-hour switchback odyssey over the coastal sierra. Inevitably we ended up bonking on a remote beach near Puerto Escondido. We later discovered we’d had a supportive audience of a half-dozen campesinos on horseback.

  Our Mexican travel story was published in an august Canadian magazine during the late ’70s. Once it was on the stands we got a note from the Mexican consulate. It pointed out that Mexico’s Ministry of Tourism sponsored a prize every year for the best piece of international journalism about Mexico. It was a huge competition. They thought we should submit our piece. We ignored it. A few weeks later a second letter arrived. Same thing.

  One day when my wife, Annick, was visiting the studio she discovered the second letter on Charles’s desk.

  “Have you acted on this?

  “Nope.”

  “Stupid!”

  She tore out the article, filed out the form and mailed it.

  A few weeks later we got a registered letter. An international jury of eminent journalism professors has chosen our piece as one of the three best in a field of 450 entries from all over the U.S., Europe, the Far East and Australia. Our presence was requested at a dinner in Acapulco a month hence.

  We ignored it. We had no money that spring and no way to get there.

  The Mexican consulate called and told us to show up at Pearson on a certain day. I’d looked up Aero Mexico flight schedules for that day. There weren’t any. As I was overly familiar with the fragility of Mexican arrangements I expressed my concerns to Charles when we were in the airport cab. Did he have any money? I had only $25 Canadian cash. It turned out he was almost twice as rich as me. He had $48. Neither of us had a credit card. We were fucked.