Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  After much bluffing and temporizing at the Mexican check-in desk we were led down a back corridor and onto the tarmac. Mexico had sent a DC8 to Toronto to pick us up. We were the only passengers in a 200-seat aircraft. I sat in the cockpit playing cards with the pilots the whole way down. We burned $3,600 worth of fuel — American.

  Mexico. Nobody met us at the airport to tell us where to go. After many phone calls we reached someone who told us to take a cab to a beach hotel south of Acapulco. The Princess proved to be a gigantic concrete “Aztec” pyramid that towered over an otherwise undeveloped beach. Nobody expected us at check-in. More phone calls. Finally we were ushered into a vast penthouse suite.

  Now I was really getting nervous. We started to charge stuff to the room — meals, sunscreen, a bathing suit each, booze and cigarettes. How were we going to pay for all of this if we remained persons unknown? I knew something about Mexican jails. On our third day we got a message from the Ministry of Tourism. Be sure to show up in a week’s time at the Acapulco convention centre for dinner. In the meantime just charge whatever we wanted to the room. Go crazy. We did.

  I chartered a boat and went way offshore to scuba dive in a reef. I’d lots of experience snorkelling in Mexico but no diving instruction or certification. My boat guys used the air tank nozzles to open our beers. When you suited up to dive the tanks and regulators leaked like soda fountains. When I got down 50 feet I suddenly ran out of air so I decided to go parachuting instead. I went up in a light plane, struggled into a parachute harness and jumped out. It actually opened but the groin straps nearly severed my thighs. The next day we rented a car and drove inland to Taxco, the silver city way up in the mountains. Driving back in the dark via a lonely mountain road we hit a bonfire roadblock. As soon as I stopped some guys appeared out of the gloom and stuck pistols to our heads.

  I babbled away in my back-country Spanish telling them we were special guests of Miquel A., the Minister of Tourism, and if they didn’t let us go with our silver and sombreros the entire Mexican army, backed by the Princess Patricia light infantry, would suddenly materialize and kick the shit out of them. After a conference in the ditch they put out the fire and waved us on.

  Charles was beginning to regret having teamed up with me. I got grounded. He insisted that from then on he would be in charge of our activities. They proved to be a Mexicanized version of his famous piazza man routine. We sat all day on underwater stools at a swim-to bar trying not to swallow the paper parasols floating in our pink drinks. I wore out the bums of two bathing suits by sliding repeatedly down concrete water slides to reach other bars. I started to put on weight.

  Charles Oberdorf

  When the big day came we cabbed to the convention centre and waddled in. Dinner was set for 3,500 guests — tourism people from all over the globe. For the very first time we were actually expected, welcomed and led to one of three tables by the lip of the big stage. One had a flag that said National Geographic. Another one said Sports Illustrated. Both big round tables were ringed with publishers, editors, circulation managers, publicists. Even the legendary Grosvenors were there.

  Then there was the third enormous circular table. It had a hand-lettered sign naming our magazine and a score of seats for Charles and me to sit on. We looked so pathetic at our lonely table that the Grosvenors invited us over to theirs. We brought our own chairs.

  Dessert after dinner was the announcement of the winners. Third place: National Geographic. There was some irritated shifting at our table. Second place: Sports Illustrated — more awkward shifting. Grand prize winner: Charles went up to represent both of us. So we left Mexico having had a deluxe 10-day holiday with a thousand bucks (U.S.) each in our pockets and an incredibly ugly two-foot-high silver trophy.

  Halfway back to Toronto Charles turned to me and said, “You know, Mitch, since the story was your idea and you did all the driving and provided all the information I think that the trophy properly belongs to you.” He then took the monstrosity which had been restricting his legroom and made it affect mine. However, when the approach to Pearson was finally announced he turned to me with irritation and announced that since he was the real professional travel writer and I was just a photographer, the trophy was really his. He leaned over and extracted the prize from my crotch.

  In the immigration and customs lineup an officer spotted the big trophy, examined it and announced that since it was 99.9% pure silver Charles owed a whack of duty. Charles immediately dumped the monster in my lap and declared me to be the true owner — he’d just been helping me out with luggage. His name was on it so I declined ownership and to this very day it sits, heavily oxidized, in his old office. It is accompanied by a second iteration of the same prize, as we won it again a few years later for a piece I dictated on the Maya in the Yucatán. Now you know that there’s big money in archaeology.

  In 2013 I returned to Oaxaca after an absence of 36 years. While photographing students during preparations for Day of the Dead celebrations I suddenly realized that I was recording the children of couples I had watched courting every evening in Oaxaca’s main square during the late 1960s.

  Now I don’t want to leave you with the notion that Charles was a piker. He was usually very generous and taught me much. Listening to him do his assignments I learned how to work the phones, how to find people and how to find out about . . . He was a real pro.

  After stints editing various magazines Charles retreated to the Valhalla of exhausted freelancers — college teaching. He was very good at it and persisted even after emphysema stuck its ugly head out the closet. He’d wheel his oxygen tank into classrooms and deliver his lecture between gasps for air. It was heroic and taught one the true value of the ordinary, small things in daily life.

  Bill & Billy

  My cat Billy has a secret. Actually he has a number of secrets. He’s never told me where he came from or how he came to live with my friend Bill the Human. And I don’t know exactly when feline Bill joined forces with Bill the Human. Moreover I have no clue if Bill the Human named him after himself or if Bill came into Bill’s world as Bill fully formed. The feline Billy may have been an avatar and may now be a duppy, a manifestation of Bill the Human’s spirit because the bigger of the two Bills is now dead.

  They looked alike: both were stocky, thick limbed and friendly faced. Both liked girls and eating. Neither asked too much of the world: they accepted their small part in it and its many disappointments without complaint. The main area in which they diverged was sartorial. Bill the Human was one of those guys who was always rumpled and disheveled — his fashion sense was indeterminate. But Bill the Cat always wore a tux — by day, by night, even on weekends and holidays. Feline Bill was a sharp dresser although I did take exception to his insistence on white socks with formal wear.

  They also diverged somewhat on the subject of possessions. Stuff stuck to human Bill. He had many expensive tools — the full set of Snap-On wrenches and drivers, for example. He had dubious taste in music but loved good sound so he owned racks of exotic McIntosh preamps, amplifiers and receivers. He loved vacuum tubes and reel-to-reel tape decks. He had once loved Ducati motorcycles to the point where he bought a dealership so that he could possess many of them. He quickly bankrupted it and lost his house along with his steady girl. These were things that just happened along life’s trail. He didn’t dwell on them or complain. They just happened.

  On the other hand Bill the Cat merely owns a cardboard scratch box that he has converted into a bed. He also owns a stuffed white Ikea rat and has recently acquired a stuffed panda named Lin Lin from the Toronto Zoo. He tosses both rat and panda into the air and likes to bat the rat across our tasteful designer-gray hardwood floors. The rat skids from living room to dining room and down the hall with Bill in hot pursuit. He calls bouts of this activity “the rat race” and has to sleep afterward. Most importantly, Bill owns a bowl that says “CAT” in caps. It’s decorat
ed with multi-coloured fish skeletons. Bill loves it, especially when it’s full. Like Bill the Human, he used to have a girlfriend, a big soft angora sweater that he liked to bonk. But he lost her when we moved. I can take credit for all these things because I bought all of them for him. He’s very happy with his few possessions but would like me to buy him another soft sweater. Despite this one deficiency he’s basically a happy cat.

  However, Bill the Human was a bit of a sad case. He came from a family that grew rich in the 19th century logging and lumber business. They had a huge multi-storey head office building with their name carved in stone right on Yonge Street downtown. But the family got tired. Human Bill kind of drifted from job to job and place to place never quite finding himself although I don’t think he ever looked very hard.

  When I first met him over a quarter century ago he was working as a yacht broker. In fact he was the only yacht broker in southern Ontario who would talk to me. I was in the fortunate position of walking around with a bunch of cash I wanted to spend on a boat at a time when there’d been a big recession and the Great Lakes were lined with large locked yards full of repossessed yachts. You could buy anything for 25 cents on the dollar. Since I didn’t wear a captain’s hat or blue blazer, didn’t look like a commodore or drive a Mercedes, the majority of yacht salesmen pegged me as a keel kicker — a dreamer, another loser. So I bought my yacht from Bill. We became friends.

  Bill and I would get together for lunch several times a year and shoot the shit. Bill always ate huge hamburgers with greasy chips and drank several pints of Guinness. When the yacht broking business got very slow he became a boat service guy — work that was seasonal and marginal. He ended up living in a basement out in the Beaches. His little apartment was chaotic. There were tools and toys everywhere along with Carrara marble statuary that his family had bought in Europe for the family mansion during the Gilded Age. Now those white fauns and fops lived with Bill in a basement in the Beaches.

  One day Bill woke up in his subterranean lair and discovered that he couldn’t move. He’d had a stroke. He managed to call an upstairs neighbour who got him to a hospital where he partially recovered. Not long after this Bill had a stroke of luck — sort of. His mother died in Calgary and left her sons and daughter a bunch of money.

  Donny the architect, another friend of Bill’s, knowing that Bill was no banker, insisted that he spend some of his inheritance on a condo so he’d always be housed. He helped Bill find a nice top floor unit in a nice building on a nice part of Queen Street in the nice Beaches. Bill moved in with all his stuff and then complicated things by getting a cat. She was some sort of expensive exotic from Southeast Asia — lively, smart and very loud. This tiny cat got into all sorts of trouble. She opened boxes, jars and cupboards, adding her chaos to Bill’s. Bill claimed that she even opened the condo fire doors.

  Whenever I went to visit Bill I’d buzz him from the ground floor entrance and he’d shuffle down to let me in. We’d take the elevator to the top floor and each time we stepped out the cat would be waiting for us in the elevator lobby. And each time Bill would swear that he’d locked her in his unit. As he was not quite running on all cylinders since his stroke, I always assumed that Bill had been forgetful. That is until one day we ran a test. When the cat was sleeping in the front bedroom Bill and I announced that we were leaving. Bill left the unit but I didn’t and concealed myself in the little condo kitchen that was right beside the entrance door. After that door closed behind Bill that little cat came streaking down the hall, scrambled up a tall bookcase and leaped off it catching the lever handle of the fire exit door. Despite her featherweight she had enough momentum to release the lock. She then darted into the hall. Despite being only a V7, Bill was right.

  This condo period was a scary time for Donny and me. We seemed to be his only friends so he called us whenever he needed things done or documents signed. We were both uneasy when Bill needed our support to get his driver’s licence back. In the end his doctor signed for him and he began to drive his big van again. He regularly sideswiped power poles and columns in his underground garage.

  Donny and I got really nervous when Bill became fascinated with guns. He started ordering fancy long rifles, the kind with lots of engraving and exotic wood stocks. He asked both of us to sign as witnesses when he applied for a gun license. This was very uncomfortable for both Donny and me. We didn’t trust Bill with a gun; he was forgetful and at times confused. However, his passion was, on some levels, clearly good for him. His obsessive research on guns helped him recover his reading skills. And taking apart and reassembling all those complicated mechanisms was helping his brain recover and tuning his small motor skills. Besides we couldn’t get him interested in anything else except his raucous little cat. So we both signed but with a caveat. He had to join a gun club, get proper training and only shoot on their ranges and under supervision. He kept his word.

  Then one winter Bill decided he was interested in yachts again and was going to drive from Toronto to Florida for the annual Miami Boat Show. He didn’t tell anyone of this plan. He just hobbled into his van, scraped his way out of the underground garage and took off — alone. Before leaving he’d calculated how far he’d get the first day and pre-booked a hotel room just off the interstate in northern Tennessee. He managed to talk his way across the border and arrived in Tennessee late that first night. When he spotted his hotel glowing on a hilltop west of the highway he took an exit ramp up the hill. As he got to the top he realized that the exit he’d taken didn’t actually lead to his hotel so he pulled over to call the desk for directions. The cell reception wasn’t very good so he opened the car door and got out. He had to lean on the door because his left leg had still not recovered from the stroke and was gimpy. He got through to the desk but as he was talking the van began to roll back down the hill. He’d forgotten to set the brake and put the van into park. As the van picked up speed Bill struggled to get back inside but his gimpy leg wouldn’t let him. He got slowly crushed between his car door and a lamppost while gasping to the desk clerk. Bill died.

  I hated Bill’s funeral back in Toronto. His siblings came out from Calgary and each used their 15 minutes to tell stories about what an idiot Bill had been — the yacht he’d lost, the failed Ducati dealership and relationships, as well as his inept financials. By this time he’d lost his condo and car and was living in a low-rent tower on the Danforth, one where new immigrants went to begin their new lives. Depressing.

  A few days after the funeral his brothers showed up at our place with two cat boxes. Two?! Before returning to Calgary they were going to put me in charge of Bill’s cats. Cats?!? This was the first time I met Billy. Where the hell had he come from?

  As I already had my cat Ziggy, having a second and a third cat proved overwhelming. That little girl began to raise hell at Sheila’s and my place just as she had at Bill the Human’s. Meanwhile the other Bill hid for six weeks under the claw-foot bathtub on our second floor. I suspect that little smarty-pants cat knew she was driving us crazy because when friends from the country dropped by she snuggled with each one of them and then curled up in a cat carrier and waited to be transported to their farm. That little squawker never even said goodbye.

  Up at the farm she bolted out the front door and got eaten by a coyote. So she’s gone, Bill the Human is gone, but Tuxedo Bill sits beside me as I write this story. He’s proved to be a wonderful cat. He pays close attention to both of us, tries very hard to be good and to make us laugh. He does roll-overs and somersaults upon request. And he reminds me of the other Bill every single day.

  Dougie

  Photographers tend to be collectors. Most people travel through life experiencing the world in successive moments — moving on to the next and the next — remembering some, barely noticing others, acting, intending, moving on. Photographers, however, stop to concentrate, preserve and collect certain of those moments. This is how they connect to the planet, its inhabitant
s and the stream of time.

  After a working life of image-making, some photographers finally put down their cameras and just are in the world. Some forsake images for objects. The great American photographer of Depression-era America, Walker Evans, after years of documenting commercial signs plastered on the barns and fences of the rural South, devoted his last years to prying real signs off walls and spiriting them home for his own private enjoyment. Why have a mere picture when one could have the real thing?

  Doug Clark was the quintessential collecting photographer. His successive studios were treasure troves of signage, machine parts, molds, toys, goofy objects and 19th century photographs. He loved all that stuff. His things taught him how to see and, in the last decade or so of his life, much of it became the stuff of his own photographs. The constructed photographs of his Gio and Articles of Faith series are full of those objects. They are there not to be just what they are but also to become part of a larger private message, a projection of what it was like to be Doug, made available to the larger world.

  Clark’s career was launched by his studies at Ryerson in Toronto. When he was a student there in the film and photography department during the early 1970s, only a couple of approved modes of serious photography were considered. The main one was a kind of arty photojournalism derived from the early 20th century work of European Leica photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson. Its North American heroes were the rebel Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank and the Life photo-essayist Eugene Smith.

  The other dominant mode favoured the much larger view cameras, which produced at least a 4x5 inch negative, if not one that was 8x10. These big camera photographers were craft-obsessives who argued for hours about developer formulas, exposure systems and elaborate printing techniques. Every print they made was overflowing with high art ambitions and had significance that transcended the literal content of the image. Edward Weston converted vegetables into existential presences and the California coast into eternity. Ansel Adams deified mountains and the American West while Minor White deified just about everything.