None of This Was Planned Read online

  None of This Was Planned

  Also by Mike McCardell

  Chasing the Story God

  Back Alley Reporter

  The Blue Flames that Keep Us Warm

  Getting to the Bubble

  The Expanded Reilly Method

  Everything Works

  Here’s Mike

  Unlikely Love Stories

  Haunting Vancouver

  Cardboard Ocean

  None of This Was Planned

  THE STORIES BEHIND THE STORIES

  Mike McCardell

  Copyright © 2016 Mike McCardell

  1 2 3 4 5 — 20 19 18 17 16

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [email protected].

  Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.

  P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0

  www.harbourpublishing.com

  Cover photograph by Nick Didlick

  Edited by Ian Whitelaw

  Copyedited by Nicola Goshulak

  Dust jacket design by Anna Comfort O’Keeffe

  Text design by Mary White

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Harbour Publishing acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  McCardell, Mike, 1944–, author

  None of this was planned : the stories behind the stories / Mike McCardell.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-55017-778-7 (hardback).—ISBN 978-1-55017-779-4 (html)

  1. McCardell, Mike, 1944–. I. Title.

  PN4913.M36A3 2016 C818'.602 C2016-905336-9 C2016-905337-7

  I’d like to dedicate this book to Les Staff, the news director for ctv News Vancouver. Three years ago he saw my age and experience as a plus, not a negative, and hired me. It’s good being a part of a happy, upbeat organization and watching the ratings soar, and it’s great to be wanted. Thanks, Les.

  Foreword

  I can’t. No way. Impossible. There is no way I can write another book.

  I said that when someone said I should write another book. “No!” That’s what I said.

  Look at the facts: I am old. I am three score and ten and two. That’s an old-fashioned way of counting and, when you look at it that way, that is old—at least to me.

  Most importantly, I don’t have any more stories to tell. I have run out of stories. There is nothing left.

  I am a kid from a less desirable area of New York. Nothing was expected of me. And now I have written ten books, not counting the one with stick figures that I gave away free last year. (By the way, you can still get it.)

  But I have no more stories. And look at my age! I should be sitting quietly drinking tea—only tea makes me go to the bathroom. That is a problem when you get old—okay, older.

  I remember seeing a poster on a wall in a bar in New York when I sneaked in with my friends when we were sixteen. We were not supposed to be in there before we were eighteen but the bartender said, Okay, sit in the back in the shadows and if anyone comes in with a uniform go to the bathroom and stay there.

  The poster said, “I’m a member of the beer and pistol club. Drink all night and piss ’til dawn.”

  That was funny, I thought, even though I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know beer made you go to the bathroom, but it was funny because it said something we did not learn in school. Boring things were in school. I don’t remember them. Exciting stuff was in the bar. An ice age later I still remember that poster.

  What I also did not understand from the poster was how anyone could drink all night. I thought it was crazy. Wouldn’t they get in trouble when they went home late?

  Now if I drink tea after dinner I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. So I don’t. And I am too old and wise to drink beer all night, or even all afternoon. Or even more than one, ever. What a state to be in.

  On the other hand, I don’t feel old. In fact I feel the same as when I was sixteen, except I have a lot more sense.

  At sixteen I was an idiot. I dreamed of sex. I dreamed of being a hero. I didn’t have sex, and nor was I a hero. Ever. I dreamed of getting through the day without screwing up in front of a girl or any friends. Those were the highest goals.

  Actually, at sixteen I was deeply religious. I thought I was going to be a priest or a minister—not that I went to any church. I could have been a rabbi. It didn’t matter. Sneaking into a bar was not against the rules of my religion.

  I prayed a great deal. God to me then was the big figure on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, of which I had seen a picture. He had a giant white beard and looked ticked off.

  I had just returned from Germany, where I was alone much of the time. I went there when I was fourteen and came back when I was sixteen, and maybe because I was alone I found God. He was friendly.

  Fourteen, fifteen and sixteen are hard years, especially when you are in a place where at first you don’t understand what anyone is saying, you have no friends and there are no kids living nearby.

  Our apartment building had bullet holes in the front. Germany was still digging out from years of bombing and defeat. It was a bad time.

  If you’ve read the earlier books you’ll know that I went to Germany with my mother, who worked for Radio Free Europe as a teletype operator. I know many of you have no idea what this is. Remember the sounds of clicking behind the news programs of the 1970s and the tv shows about news? Those were teletype machines. They were everywhere. They were the early version of Twitter but they made a beautiful clicking sound. My mother was a fast clicker.

  Actually, almost sixty years later, I think she really went there for love. Most of us do most things because of that.

  Two weeks after we arrived there a taxi pulled up in front of our apartment building and a sort of fat guy in a black suit knocked at our apartment door and my mother looked very happy.

  “Go pay the driver and tell him to wait,” said the fat guy to me.

  He was a doctor. I knew this because my mother had told me he would visit.

  I paid the driver. I knew four words in German. “Here, don’t go. Thanks.”

  I went back into our apartment and my mother told me she was going away to Vienna for a few days with the doctor.

  See? It was all for love.

  After she was gone I took a long walk through the neighbourhood. The buildings still standing were mostly shells. I looked up through the bottom windows and saw the sky, six storeys up. Building after building after building.

  Someone came out of the next building I passed. He ran to me, shouting, and he grabbed me and was pulling me back with him.

  I said I did not understand German. He looked at me like this was impossible. Actually, I can’t describe his look, but it was deep. Then he shook his head and kept pulling me.

  We went through the doorway of the building he had come out of. There was no door. He led me up a broken stairway. I thought it was going to fall. I thought I was going to fall.

  Two flights up, with not
hing but empty space in the middle of the building and the sky still above, he went through a blown-out doorway into a room. I did not know how it did not fall.

  He said many things to me. I understood nothing. Then in the dark he pointed to a man lying on a broken bed.

  He said more things to me and then he put one of his arms under the man’s arm and pointed at me to do the same.

  I got on the other side and put my arm around the man. He looked at me like I was a monster. He had nothing but fear in his face.

  We picked him up and I put my other arm under his legs. The man who had called me did the same and our hands grabbed each other and we lifted him and started moving toward the hole that had been a door.

  The floor made a terrible groaning sound and I thought we would die. Actually, I did not consciously think that, but when I think back now I know that’s the best way to explain how I felt. What was actually going through my head then was bad words, especially one, in English.

  We carried him down the stairs and out the front door and put him down on the sidewalk. The man who had grabbed me thanked me.

  I know what he was thinking. He knew I was American. He knew it was American bombers that had blown apart these buildings and his life. He knew that I was helping him.

  I have no idea if they had lived in there since the bombing stopped or if they had moved in the night before and just decided it was not a good thing. I had no idea of anything that night and I still have no idea how it happened.

  The man who stopped me thanked me again and it was clear he would be all right and I left. I walked for another hour before going back to our apartment, which was the only building on our street that was still standing.

  That was my first memory of Germany. Six months later I wandered alone into Dachau. The gate was broken and open. It was the way it had been abandoned. I looked inside one of the ovens. There were rows of them. I leaned too far forward and fell, my arms went deep into ashes and bones. I said I was alone. I was not. When I walked back out past the gate I was different, I don’t know how, but I do know why.

  Two years later my mother came home from work and said, “We are going back to New York.”

  “When?”

  “Next week.”

  This was the middle of a school year, but she looked mighty ticked off, like God in the Sistine Chapel.

  Again I suspected love. Or the end of it. Still do. Don’t know, of course. Will never know.

  Back in New York, during the gritty times, I became Missionary Mike. As I said, I was deeply religious. I could stop fights. I could listen to kids who wanted to do really bad things to their friends and tell them not to do them—and usually they didn’t. That was an amazing thing to experience. Tell someone to do something, tell them with authority, and they usually did what you said.

  I listened to girls who had just been dumped by their boyfriends. I told them things would be better. And usually they were. But of course. They always are. And during it all I was still afraid of girls.

  I was sixteen. Sixteen is a crazy age.

  More about religion later, but now I have a new job with ctv. It was very good of them to hire me after the newly imported managers at that other place in Burnaby dumped me.

  They were going in a new direction, they said. What they meant was they wanted a youthful look. I am not youthful. I was out, totally out, after thirty-seven years, standing in the parking lot of that place in Burnaby feeling lost. Things like this happen in life. That is what gives it so much pain. I had spent more than half my life there.

  A week later I was talking to the news director at ctv who asked me to come to them. He is Les Staff. He met me at a coffee shop in Lougheed mall. After we talked he asked some people sitting there if they would switch to ctv if I was on it.

  I was lucky. The people he asked were wearing worn-out jackets and loose-fitting shirts. They looked like they did not go to the gym.

  They said yes, of course they would switch.

  If they had been in tight suits with close haircuts and perfumed faces I think they would have said, “Who?”

  I got lucky. The people I like and who I do stories about wear last year’s jackets.

  He hired me. That is how things happen in life. First you lose by a nose, then you win by a mile. Follow that philosophy at the track and you’ll die broke. Believe in it in your life and you’ll live happy.

  Les also told me later that he had checked the ratings and most people who start watching the news stay around to see my stories at the end.

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  “They want to see something happy,” he said.

  Well, gee! I know that. That’s everything I believe.

  He said come join us. I went, and it’s been heaven. They are so nice there. I still do what I have done for so long. I still go out with no plan, no direction, nothing, and we look for something. We don’t know what, but when we see it, presto! Pictures, interview, editing, writing and bingo, a smile on television.

  But now I do it for someone who wants me, which is a really good feeling. If you tell someone in your family you want them, that you are happy to have them, you give them the same feeling. So what are you waiting for?

  And now that I think about it, writing a new book is what I should do. Of course it is! The stories make me feel good. It’s what I want to do. In fact, it’s what I will do. So you are stuck with me for one more.

  What I tell everyone, in the talks I give, in books and on television, is that the stories you gather are precious and exciting. Some are dramatic, some are less so. They can be funny or sweet or terrible. It doesn’t matter. Whatever they are, they are wonderful. We all have them, we can share them and they are free. You have them for as long as you have your mind, and at some time later in your life they will be the most precious things you have.

  To keep your mind, I think, is luck. To put things in it that you treasure is simple. You just go out and search for them.

  You can tell the stories, remember them, smile at them, and when you go somewhere that you haven’t been for a while you can suddenly say to yourself or someone else, “You know what happened here?” And then you tell it. “I met someone who . . .” The place and the memory come alive.

  It’s better than collecting bottle caps or stamps or stocks (which can leave you feeling so, so ill). Stories are better than money, better than whiskey or wine (and eventually you should be too wise for those). They are almost as good as new love, which leads to new memories no matter how old you are.

  That’s it. In here are more of my treasures, the stories that I have accidentally stumbled upon. This is the fun part of collecting: sharing the collection. I’ll give you mine first. You write back and give me yours.

  So I will now close my eyes and see what I remember. One new book coming up!

  ps: If you would like to read last year’s free, yes free, book, go to [email protected] and I’ll send you a copy. It doesn’t have covers like this book, and you can’t hold it, but heck it’s free and it may make you want to buy more of these real books, even the ones I wrote before this, and that would make me and Harbour Publishing very happy. And by the way, Harbour is made up of very nice people who are giving writers on the West Coast a chance to be published. It’s a chance they wouldn’t have anywhere else.

  Back in Time and Space: The Taxi Garage

  Everyone back then went to work at sixteen and gave half their paycheque to their mothers. And I mean everyone. Try that now. I got a job in a taxicab garage.

  “You start tomorrow, kid, and be on time.” That was the boss with a cigar and a fat belly. He did not look like the teachers in school.

  I worked every day three p.m. to seven p.m., all day Saturday and half a day on Sunday. I had every other Sunday off. The fact that school ended at three and I started at three was a problem. I ran very fast.


  “You’re ten minutes late,” said the boss. “You get docked a half-hour.”

  That meant that for working fifty minutes I would make fifty cents.

  What I did was pump gas into a fleet of cabs that ended their day shift at three. I pumped the gas, opened the hood, checked the oil, opened the caps on the batteries (yes, batteries had caps that unscrewed and inside was water that had to be refilled), and then the worst part: the radiator. On a hot day, after ten or twelve hours of stop and go driving, the radiator was like a kettle that was hissing on a stove, and the water inside had to be checked.

  A big rag went on top of the cap and with all my weight I pushed down and turned it so slowly it barely moved but enough to let out the steam.

  “Please don’t blow, please.”

  Open it too much and it would. Scalding hot water would shoot up into the rag and onto me.

  “Please don’t.”

  “Hey, kid, hurry up with that radiator. I gotta go.”

  That from the driver still smoking a cigar, with the gasoline pump an arm’s stretch away. But almost every driver had something to say—weird, strange, scary, erotic—about someone who had been in the back seat.

  “He was gonna blow up the world. He said that.”

  “He brought his poodle. A guy had a poodle. Can you imagine that?”

  “This lady was changing her clothes. I tried not to look. But she was. So I looked.”

  And after the last cab came in I swept the vast garage floor. Then I went home stinking of gas and oil and did my homework—or not.

  “You should wash,” said my mother.

  But I was too tired. I went to bed and thought about the things the cabbies had said.

  How I Got to Do What I Am Doing

  I know I have told you some of this before, but that was long ago.