How Did I Get Here? Read online

  No other kid I knew, or knew on sight, had the drawing or writing bug in their system. They were consumers, and I produced. Art wasn’t taught or talked about in public school. Once a month or so, Mrs. Coombs broke out sheets of poster stock, placed a dozen jars of poster paint on the table at the back of the room, and watched an Oklahoma land rush of kids racing to grab a jar of paint and start slathering. My fame as an artist was mild, but enough to attract attention. I’d drawn my usual Spitfires and piles of dead Nazis, but that wasn’t what my clique wanted. “Draw Mickey Mouse!” “Naw, do Donald Duck!” “Or Donald Duck and Huey, Louie, and Dewey!”

  When some crossed parental wires brought a well-meaning but totally wrong gift to me under the tree on Christmas 1950, I curbed the instinct to vent and pretended surprised gratitude. “You must have been reading my mind!” I lied. My gift was an oil-painting starter kit. To date I had painted exclusively in watercolors: simpler, cheaper, faster-drying than oils. But I refrained from bitching. I’d try the medium of Rembrandt.

  My first—and last—venture into this new medium would be a cinch in any contest for World’s Worst Oil Painting. A thick smearing of linseed oil all but obliterated the paint. I ignored the instruction book, which was clearly insulting to a master craftsman such as me. Compounding the missteps in the wrong order, I attempted a battle scene in the War of 1812; you could tell this by the red coats of the British army. I set the scene in a barnyard. The skirmish appeared to have been fought during a partial eclipse. Human figures of various height stand around, helpless victims of my troubles with perspective. Many more are sleeping or dead. So grudgingly is the oil paint applied that more canvas than paint is visible. I never did take to oils.

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  Rainy Saturday afternoons sent me by streetcar on a straight line to the Royal Ontario Museum. I’d pull a wad of blank paper, a few HB pencils, and a gum eraser from various pockets and sit down to draw—mostly beasts from Africa, fantastically lifelike, posed in dioramas. (I admired those ingenious fakes that somehow defied reality by turning a cave-shaped space into a view of the Serengeti Plain receding to a horizon miles away.) The point of these drawings was the accuracy of line that drawing from life can instill. What I learned tended to go from my brain to my synapses to my fingertips. By the time I got home in the late afternoon, the three or four finished drawings were wrinkled and smudged and unceremoniously chucked. They had served their purpose.

  In the spring of 1952, Hugh was stricken with appendicitis, rushed to the hospital, and consigned to bed to recover. McCalls weren’t the flowers-and-candy type. My hand-delivered get-well card flirted with no cutesy sentimental mush. In fact, it had nothing remotely to do with Hugh’s condition or his medical ordeal. Aviation—airplanes, and especially military airplanes—were mutual enthusiasms. My gift to Hugh was a small stack of bubblegum cards, sans the gum. I drew satirical flying idiocies—the Avro Churchmouse trainer, the hideous Blowmouth Gumby bomber powered by twin orange juice–cooled engines. (Looking back now, I realize that the planes constituted my first foray into the form that could be the shorthand for my “style.”) On the card’s reverse side I added a text description. I found that even a dry couple of paragraphs could be satirized. Hugh almost laughed his stitches out. Jeez, I wanted to entertain him, not kill him.

  Our sister, Chris, age eight, spent a couple of weeks in the Sick Children’s Hospital at about the same time. Her case was rheumatic fever, a childhood disease that came on quietly, then became alarming. Chris gamely tried to lift a spoon at the dinner table; she fumbled with it, and it clanked to the floor while the rest of us sat, fighting back tears. While she was in the hospital I made an effort to amuse her, avoiding dolls and other sickroom clichés. I drew and wrote a series of comic strips featuring a squat masked hero in a wrinkled crimson costume. He was Captain Puff. Explosions, fires, and train wrecks surrounded him. Captain Puff coughed into his hankie, muttered, “Hem-hem,” and did nothing. Chris lapped it up.

  Most of my creative effort in the middle Toronto years involved such jokes or satirical caricatures for a small group of friends. The research was my imagination. Every pencil drawing was crammed with idiotic detail, then inscribed on a sheet of typing paper with a fine-point crow quill pen. A light watercolor wash tinted the scene. An innovation I prized (because it was mine) was to place the drawing on a flat surface and run over it with a steam iron, locking in the colors, protecting the masterpiece from peanut butter and strawberry jam smears, and turning a sheet of cheap typing paper into a stiff parchment heirloom suitable for framing. This innovation, as with so many others, successful or not, arose from the continuous bedroom experiments conducted by Hugh and me.

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  My prolific production of art slowed to a crawl—not because I’d lost interest, but because I had segued into an intense new phase. Drawing and painting took longer: I had fallen madly in love with detail. Detail for its own sake. The challenge of injecting everything visible into everything shown in an illustration became primary. I wasn’t furnishing information so the picture would be crammed with detail that told the story. Rather, I’d sold myself the alibi that this obsession was propelled by the artist’s solemn sense of duty. I thought it was the job of the artist to fill in all the details. Give the viewer not a mere suggestion, but a scene so complete that no interpretation was possible other than the one so painstakingly, exhaustively provided. There lurked a second consideration: there could be, should be, sufficient detail to allay a viewer’s suspicion that this house, that airplane, and the car purporting to be a 1946 New York taxicab, weren’t real. One careless mistake could smash the viewer’s confidence. Therefore, the artist—at least, this artist—was honor-bound to capture absolute realism.

  Pulling back from my intense concentration on getting every detail correct was a necessity. The need for an overview, a step back, to read the composition of the picture, to see how the individual elements worked together and balanced, was urgent. Alas for my obsession with photographic realism, that way lay madness. As a telephoto photograph flattens depth and perspective, my approach was to render the background as precisely as the foreground. But fine focus needed a break: a background was a background for a reason. It wasn’t really necessary, for instance, to painstakingly trace individual treads on the tires of a car that was supposed to be a thousand feet away. I forgot the workings of the human eye. Learning to convey depth as seen by the eye—to separate foreground from deep background, overcoming my detail mania and letting my pictures breathe—was a process that would take years.

  When the gum-eraser crumbs had been swept aside and the picture unpinned and lifted off the drawing board, a piece of art filled me with pleasure. Making art was not often a mellow experience. Rage at my right hand and its five fingers’ mulish refusal to guide the outline in my brain onto paper could probably be heard a block away, climaxing in hot tears and a howling vow to swear off art forever.

  Forever recycling in my YouTube of memory is the anguish of trying, failing, trying and failing again, to capture the exact curves of the nose of the Douglas DC-3. Though I’d memorized it with blueprint exactitude in my mind’s eye, my intent was then sloppily betrayed with shapes too curved, not curvy enough, too clumsily inept to accurately portray it.

  Exposure to objective teaching might have telescoped my agonies into a few days instead of squandered weeks of DIY fumbling. I was educationally shortchanged. Perhaps a proper art education would have inspired worthier ambitions and produced a conventional artist who obeyed conventional rules. Perhaps. But what I achieved by teaching myself, ignoring the rules, working around the gaps, was a style. Eccentric, to be sure, but whatever my style could be called, it was unique. Entirely my own.

  The autumn of 1948 brought a large envelope with a Simcoe postmark addressed to me. I had swept the Norfolk County agricultural fair’s art show. Three large prize tickets wer
e proof. Mostly I felt embarrassed. My prizewinners were a trio of weak umber watercolor tints over a lake in a dark forest. They went for the cheap trick of a canoe reflected in the water. The honor of winning wasn’t diminished by the fact that the ag fair art contest was no revival of the 1913 New York Armory Show but mostly a titanic struggle to decide the finest swine in Norfolk County.

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  The family dynamic took a torpedo amidships in the summer of 1952. Big brother Mike was twenty-one and restless. He was studying to be a chef at Ryerson Institute of Technology in Toronto. The future failed to excite him. One afternoon he heard a navy recruitment radio commercial in the tiny bedroom he shared with Hugh and me. Within two weeks he was gone, now a midshipman. Mike would eventually become a pilot, landing on aircraft carriers and, in classic naval fashion, seeing the world.

  His departure was less good for the siblings he left behind, knocking out the props that shored up our rickety relationships with Mother and Dad. As the eldest, closest to both parents because he was the firstborn and that novelty never faded, Mike had been our ambassador and advocate for the defense of us younger siblings. He had lubricated the hinge of the door between Them and Us. That task fell to Hugh and me, now seniormost among the young McCalls. We adjusted and did well enough, but things would never be the same.

  Mike’s absence left a hole in my way of life. I’d depended on him for a strong defense against Dad’s occasional explosions generated by some idiotic and/or wrongheaded charge. Mike, being four years my senior, could be a sympathetic audience for grievances; an encyclopedia for answering questions and giving advice; a neutral arbiter of internecine disputes involving money and Monopoly. All sibling issues temporarily benched, Mike came closest to normality than anybody in the family. He was cheerful and witty. He must surely have sometimes chafed at his role as Big Brother, but Michael Scott Cameron was the one McCall everybody liked. I also admired him, and still do.

  I had no candidate for a replacement Mike. Then, in my final high school year, I fell into the original Gang of Four within the school: me, Dave, Maurice, and Tony. We formed a loose group based on no mischievous pranks and no aggression. Dave smoked, he laughed at my humor, and he lived in a drab household. Dave was in an art class under false pretexts; he was almost spectacularly ungifted. But that didn’t matter to me. He lived in a world more interesting than mine, and he knew his way around. I envied his cool gravitas; he seemed the kind who’s seen it all, who’s never surprised, maybe because he’s learned to expect the worst. He kept to himself, a taciturn type who used words sparingly. Dave and I hung out on Danforth Avenue. We’d lock ourselves in conversation in the Gainsworth, a huge eat-o-drome where I wolfed down strawberry shortcake, or in a struggling little Greek greasy spoon. Spring came; growing restless, we got to Avenue Road, took the elevator of the Park Plaza Hotel to the top floor and the outdoor roof garden. This was, we’d heard somewhere, a favorite spot for young people to hang out and hook up. Maybe so, but as two high schoolers with nothing to say and too timid to initiate a conversation, we were in over our heads. We fell back on our specialty, sneering at these pretentious jerks, pretending to be enraptured by the view, and soon shuffling off.

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  Making some money and escaping the alternating drudgery and terror of life in our apartment furnished two powerful incentives to find summer employment. Pressure from Dad added urgency; he expected us to live like other teenagers, a view that was closer to an Archie comic book than to reality. I quickly realized that I wasn’t cut out to be an adult: anxieties I’d been grooming since I first learned to worry rattled me. My lack of self-esteem turned the prospect of meeting strangers and bargaining for employment into a moment in the Spanish Inquisition; the would-be employer would know in an instant that I was a screwball loser.

  Luckily, no opportunity to shame myself popped up. But Hugh and I did find lucrative summer employment after all. We applied for and were accepted into the Royal Canadian Air Force Reserve program for high school boys, a summerlong program. When we arrived, way past bedtime, at the Trenton air base, we were still vibrating from the bus ride with the small mob of fellow Reserve recruits. We’d been isolated from our age group when we arrived in Toronto. Now, in one fell swoop, we were plunged into a mayhem of barbarian tumult. These were our peers? Hugh and I cowered in our seats amid the noisy anarchy. I never mastered the language in which every verb was a sexual thrust, every noun a private female part. That five-hour bus ride was a sudden, merciless dunk in a living cross section of male Toronto teenagers. Witless, ill-equipped to interact with our fellow summer airmen, Hugh and I had no contributions to make to the evening’s entertainment: filthy jokes racketed around, as did beloved old songs with obscene new lyrics. Swear words machine-gunned through the assembled. An unseen performer recited a poem of sex and misogyny and bestiality, while verbal cross fire from some other corner sang of killing Jews, lynching Negroes, and raping nuns. The hilarity depressed both of us. Homesickness tripped up both Hugh and me. We couldn’t fathom why, but that sickly form of misery hung around for the first several days, until the clouds finally lifted.

  The familiarization program, held at the Trenton air base, combined deep boredom (World War II–era films warning new inductees about social diseases and how penicillin could save your life) with genuine excitement (as in my first airplane flight: eight minutes circling the Trenton base at a low altitude in a battered old DC-3). In the end, Trenton gave me more than training. It was there that I met a couple of brothers who appeared to be as bemused as Hugh and me by the swamp level of civilization around us. Frank Levay and his brother, John, while not officially part of the Gang of Four, were a godsend: funny, fearless, the brainiest guys I’d ever met—and baseball fans more rabid even than I was starting to be. The pair lent much-needed polish to the Trenton experience, and we kept up a friendship for years afterward. Frank knew literature, had a skeptical view of modern life, and was a devout Roman Catholic whose religious dedication eventually gave him a career. I now realize that if not for Frank Levay, I could all too easily have slid down into the mire with the Snopeses of the RCAF Reserve.

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  After two years in Toronto, I found that nothing in my life was better than it had been in Simcoe. Small wonder: Simcoe had expected nothing of me. No challenges, no unfamiliar feelings. Toronto threw everything at me, and my resources were shallow. I tried to thwart or duck most challenges, until I realized that I had been trying to live a Simcoe life in big, strange, uncomfortable Toronto. The minute I admitted this, I started to live where I actually lived.

  Call it the Little Bang: since the day I discovered that my right hand could do more than scratch my ass and began drawing, my cozy little world suddenly became a universe. It started at five or six with crude airplanes and continued through adolescence. (So it’s more a reverberation than a bang.) Drawing felt right. I drew and drew. Drawing expressed more than, say, farm animals.

  Simcoe had as much to offer the young artist as it had flamenco dancers. What triggered my Little Bang can’t be explained by genetics, environment, or neuroscience. Nothing in my childhood suggested a latent creative spark. Two siblings also drew, but without talent. Simcoe had as much to offer the young artist as it had to aspiring poets. Our parents, like all other Simconians, could be described as philistines. They neither handed down a love of art to their kids nor looked for signs of blazing talent. They wouldn’t have much prized it if they’d found it.

  So softly did this Little Bang go bang! that nobody heard it but me. It helped smother any vain ideas. McCall family doctrine, at least for us kids, dictated that you keep your mouth shut in triumph and suffer defeats in private.

  The only humans I drew from the beginning were sad sacks, shysters, simpletons, bums, and unlovable orphaned boys. They lacked spirit; stuck in a stygian slum, hanging around tumbled
own horsemeat shops, Greed’s disgustingly dingy pool hall, Sid’s Church (entry five cents), Floyd and Lannie’s ptomaine-heavy bake shop, and Tunoblur Studios, home of films such as Oh, That Mustard Gas! and Arnold in Madrid.

  I dreamed up these films, then invented a dyspeptic critic named Leeman Bonky to review them. His/my column, “See What I Mean?,” mercilessly attacked Tunoblur’s cheapskate rip-off style. He was more world-weary than angered by these stupid follies, yet kind to the morons and layabouts dragooned into “acting” in them for no money. These included Ancient Sid Malone, a sweet-natured rummy, and Rio Rita Jackson, the three-hundred-pound femme fatale. They and other cast members were drawn from the dregs of my imaginary slum city. I poured serious energy into Leeman Bonky’s reviews. The screenplays made no sense. He loved wading through Bedlam-quality trash and confessed that he had abandoned any attempt to follow story lines. The impetus behind this weird little creative detour was my passion for B- and C-level Republic and Monogram pictures—usually westerns—that intrigued me because they were so awful compared with the output of the major studios. A stupid inspiration, admittedly. I invented Tunoblur, its movies and casts, then reviewed them so I could create posters and write hyperbolic self-praise for the shabby results, satirizing Hollywood’s styles of the time.

  The movies made a highly visible target. A similar satirical enthusiasm, running parallel to the movies, was baseball. I created teams and lineups, feeding in my rabid fandom for actual stumblebum big-league teams, focusing on the hapless St. Louis Browns and almost-as-hapless Washington Senators. I wrote game reports, profiled players, and illustrated them with drawings that imitated the crappy team photos of the times.