None of This Was Planned Read online

  I did badly in school. I had trouble reading, so they ignored me. I know others who had trouble hearing. They didn’t respond to teachers and so they were put in the back of the classroom. It happens.

  But, lucky me, I was in a classroom where the teacher’s only job was to keep us quiet while he read newspapers. He brought in the tabloids—the New York Daily News and the Mirror. They were both filled with crime and scandal.

  They were written at a sixth-grade level. Their stories were exciting and short. This I could read. And when I got hold of the newspapers, I did.

  Right there, right there in that classroom, I decided I wanted to be a reporter and meet the people in those stories. I didn’t care about the nobility of journalism. I didn’t want to be a writer. I just wanted to hang out with Two Finger Louis and Shotgun Sally and their friends who filled the pages of the tabloids between ads for “I’ll paint any car any colour for $24.99.”

  I was surprised, actually awed, when I found out that ads like that were placed there to help criminals. Of course honest people sometimes get their cars repainted; sometimes, not often, but occasionally. Mostly, though, painting quick and cheap was one way of covering up a stolen car. Right there in the newspaper was an education. It was more useable knowledge than geometry.

  None of us in that classroom graduated in June with the other kids. It was the following February that we were released.

  My mother met me later. She had a six-pack of beer and two ham sandwiches to celebrate.

  “What are you going to do now?” she asked.

  “I want to work for a newspaper.”

  “Well then, go to a newspaper.”

  Such a good idea. Why didn’t I think of it? She gave me a subway token.

  I got off the train at Times Square where the New York Times was and I went to the personnel office. This was not a tabloid but it was where the train stopped. They offered me a job as an outdoor messenger. It was cold in February.

  I walked across town and passed the Daily News. It was purely by accident. I didn’t know I was heading there. I saw a carving in stone over the front doors:

  “He made so many of them.”

  There were carvings of people below that. I knew it was from the Bible and, again, I was very religious. I went inside. They offered me a job as an indoor messenger working in the mailroom. I took it.

  I had no writing qualifications, but I found I liked being in the newsroom, the city room as it was called, so I started hanging out there while I was supposed to be working in the mailroom.

  I started changing typewriter ribbons, getting coffee and beer and inhaling the excitement of people on deadlines yelling, “How many dead?”

  After a while I asked to be transferred from the boring mailroom to the exciting, yelling city room. Maybe they could sense my desire or maybe they just needed someone else to sharpen pencils, but I got the job. The same pay as the taxi garage, one dollar an hour, with an extra fifty cents a day for working nights, and nights were what I worked.

  I was lucky, because if you want to be around crime and excitement as well as beer and deadlines and shouting, the night shift is where it’s at. Until I came to Canada I never worked days again.

  I stayed there eleven years and I went from bottom copy boy to top copy boy and then bottom reporter to, well, not so bad reporter. I was doing what I had dreamed of, mostly because of a subway token and a walk across town.

  There is a lesson in that. Do what your mother says and you will be all right.

  Pizza for the Pigs

  It is hard to write this because my good friends might be criminals, although they are not really. They have six guinea pigs. And if you counted more than six it is only because you could not count accurately. It is your fault. Guinea pigs can slip in and out of a counter’s field of vision very fast.

  “I didn’t count that one yet.”

  “Yes, you did. That one over there you counted twice.”

  “Did not. They are different ones.”

  “No, this is a different one. You already counted the one that just came out from under the sofa.”

  “Let’s start again.”

  And in the end they have six; not eight or ten or twelve or thirteen or fifteen as some people who have no idea how to count have wrongly stated.

  If they ever did have that many then they would be in violation of the guinea pig law, which says you can only have six guinea pigs no matter how much you love them—and the pig owners do love them. So they only have six.

  Now these six guinea pigs roam free in their house. Please don’t hold up your refined nose at that. When you love your pigs as much as they do, they say, the pigs should be free.

  Their names—that would be the names of the pigs’ owners not the pigs—are Ingrid and Bob. I will not tell you their last names because the guinea pig authorities could track them down, and it is possible that the authorities might make a mistake in their counting, but I will tell you that Ingrid is a famous editorial cartoonist and Bob is a well-known pianist.

  I’m not going to tell you the names of all the pigs, despite the fact that over the last twenty-five years Bob and Ingrid have kept a list of every pig they have ever owned, fed, nurtured and brought back to health with expensive vet bills.

  They have kept the names in a notebook from which some pages are falling out and some are held in by tape. They keep the names because they have never ever repeated a name. They have more than seventy names in the book.

  They didn’t always have more than one pig but one day, after their one pig died, they went to a nice pet shop and came home with one that they didn’t know was, well, you can guess the rest. She was pregnant, and then they had more than one guinea pig. Now they only have girls in fur coats.

  Anyway, a little while ago a problem came up in their world of pigs. One of the restaurants Bob played in on Davie Street ended its “music with dinner” program. That was unfortunate. The big problem for Bob was that he had been taking home the leftover pizza crusts for the pigs. They like pizza crusts. It doesn’t matter whether the pizza is anchovy or pepperoni, it’s the crusts they covet.

  Now the six pigs (that’s all, and please don’t ask again) had been without pizza for several weeks and, except for the fact that they are rather plump, they were starving, at least for pizza. You know the feeling.

  Bob and Ingrid decided to have a party at their home to make up for the lack of music with dinner on Davie Street. Bob invited all the singers and musicians who had had impromptu sessions with him. He invited anyone who could play an instrument, anyone who could sing or anyone who could listen to the first two categories.

  Just one request. Please bring pizza.

  Forty people came and they all brought pizza. Some brought two. There were pizzas in the oven and on a table in the kitchen and piled on dishes next to the sink. There were pizzas on top of pizzas with more pizzas on top of them.

  There were people who had never been there before and their first reaction was, “That’s a lot of pizzas.”

  Their second reaction was, “You still have your Christmas tree up!” This was the middle of January.

  There is no logical point in taking down a Christmas tree when the guinea pigs can frolic below it through the winter with needles falling on their heads. As I keep saying, these are well-loved guinea pigs.

  A friend gave Ingrid and Bob a fire extinguisher to stand next to the tree but they have delayed taking down their tree after many, many Christmases and many, many pigs have delightedly played with the needles.

  The third reaction, when they stepped into the kitchen, was, “What is that?”

  It is a three-storey condo for guinea pigs, a condo with an open door policy and a thick pile of hay to jump into when they go out.

  They are happy pigs.

  “Do they really run free?” the first-timers ask.


  To which Ingrid replies, “Would you lock them up?” What she means is, “If you would you can leave.”

  There was music with piano and drums and singing and pizza and wine and pigs squeaking and it was a fine night. That is when I sat in a cozy chair with guinea pigs sniffing my shoes.

  I tried counting them. Four, five, my eyes started closing, sleepy, too much pizza, but there, under that chair, six. Just like the rules say. Even with my eyes closed I can guarantee you I counted just six for absolute sure.

  ● ● ●

  Ingrid does a lot for her pigs. She has invented a guinea pig wheelchair for the older ones who sometimes lose the use of their rear legs. It consists of the soft sole of an old beach thong, some hook-and-loop straps and a couple of wheels. Attach it to the crippled pigs and they can run for pizza with the rest.

  And because some guinea pigs suffer with malocclusion, where the top and bottom teeth don’t meet as they should, Ingrid has made a sling for their tiny jaws and it solves the problem, although I can’t explain how.

  Mind you, the pigs don’t get all this free. They work for it. In the summer they get put out in a giant cage with no bottom and their job is to mow the grass, which they do while fertilizing the ground for more grass to grow.

  It was a perfect arrangement until Ingrid and Bob put the pigs outside their fenced-in yard to cut the city-owned grass. Someone who thought this was cruel called the spca.

  When the officials checked they found the six, yes just six (at that moment), six pigs as happy as pigs in grass and well protected by the cage. The officials gave them an official okay and Ingrid put a sign on her fence behind the cage saying that this is an spca-approved ecological pig party turning grass to food to fertilizer that becomes grass—so please don’t complain.

  They also have a cat but I don’t know how.

  The neat thing about knowing Ingrid and Bob is learning how to count to six.

  ● ● ●

  Some time later the story of the guinea pigs mowing the grass was on ctv. Cameraman Jazz Sanghera and I were approaching the house, which is in a secret location because we don’t want people who can’t count going there.

  “Can you count to six?” I asked.

  He said he had been to India once this year to visit relatives, and to Vancouver Island twice last month to visit his parents, and last week he played golf three times. “I think I can do it,” he said.

  Jazz is always upbeat, and having someone like that to work with is wonderful. Employers, take note. Find people who love their family, are active in some way not connected to their work, and can count.

  “Wow!” said Jazz when he went into Ingrid and Bob’s fenced-off private backyard. “That’s a lot of guinea pigs.”

  “No, just six,” I said. “Go ahead, count them.”

  “One, two.”

  “Wait a minute. You counted the first one twice.”

  Then two of the ground huggers went behind the organic chard, which is grown mainly for them.

  “One, two, three.”

  “Wait!” I said, again. “Number three was just slipping into a tunnel. That was a miscount.”

  Ingrid makes long pup-tent tunnels around her yard for her friends to hide in when the nasty birds that eat her friends are flying around, and obviously you can’t count them when they are inside—or was that one outside?

  “Six,” Jazz said. “You’re right.”

  Later that day he played golf. “The way I counted it I had six under par,” he told me.

  The Truck with the Wishing Well

  Most of the stories are funny. As I said a while ago, we travel in circles while looking for something that is straight ahead. That is either funny or stupid, but it works.

  “No one is out,” I said. It’s raining. There’s no one but dog walkers. I like dogs and I like dog walkers, but I do not like people walking dogs while I am looking for someone doing something that can go on television and time is passing and the weather is getting worse and I know the editor has given up and gone to lunch and all the world is falling apart.

  “What is that?”

  “What is what?”

  Doesn’t matter who says what, the cameraman or me. What’s important is it was said.

  “That!”

  Going the other way on Main Street is not an art car but an art truck. I have done stories on art cars, those idiotic creations of brilliant artists who use cars as canvases and weld stuff—dolls, hubcaps, pictures, any stuff—onto their cars.

  But this is an old postal truck: big, awkward, swaying, beautiful. And going the other way.

  “I’ll get it,” said the cameraman, Scott Connorton.

  A U-turn, an illegal U-turn on Main Street, and the chase is on.

  One block, two blocks, three.

  Please don’t be going to Burnaby or Coquitlam or Maple Ridge. Please.

  A light turns red. No, actually it is already red, but I jump out and run up, in the rain, with the traffic, to the passenger side of the truck. I don’t have time to go to the other side.

  And staring at me through the passenger window is . . . a witch. No, a mannequin. No, a hairy woman with her fingernails outstretched. Then the light turns green, the truck pulls away and I run back to Scott and his suv with cameras and gear in the back. It is basically an outlandish movable studio on the hunt for outlandishly strange oddities to photograph.

  “We’ll get him this time,” he says.

  Scott has a house full of children whom he’s trying to raise in a good, civic-minded, law-abiding way.

  Yellow light, almost red, gotta stop. Gotta.

  Zoom. Don’t tell his children.

  Red light. Stop!

  I run up to the driver’s side and, wonderful, it is a woman!

  I love women, professionally. They are so much better on television than men. They are alive and talkative and funny and touching and just plain neat.

  But there are so few of them out where you can find them. After doing this job for a long, long time, I have found most of the creatures on the street available for television’s instant fame are men. Darn! The women are home cooking or cleaning or raising and helping others grow, or they are at work before they go home to cook and do the other stuff. And that’s just the beginning of the things that they do. The men are out, not cooking or cleaning or raising and helping others grow. Even if you are one of the good guys who do help, 90 percent of the stories I’ve done have men as the main character because men are generally out and about and women aren’t.

  Despite all the advances in equality, men don’t do an equal amount of anything and women do more and women are home, or working and then home, and I get stuck with men.

  But now, there’s a woman behind the wheel.

  “Hello, we’re from ctv, we do stories, could you pull over?”

  I did not add the “please” that was screaming in my head. I didn’t have time for that.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Oh heavens. If I’ve been praying it has been answered.

  I get back in Scott’s truck and we follow her around the corner. Then I jump out. He looks for parking and I run. Yes, I am ancient but I run, just across the street but I still run. When a little kid sees a puddle and he wants to jump in it, he runs to it. That’s me. I run to her side door.

  She slides it open and says what most women say, “Can I first put on my makeup?”

  My God! First of all, thank you God for not making me a woman (because I can’t stand makeup), and second, thank you God for letting her say that.

  “Can we take a picture of you putting on your lipstick?”

  “Yes.”

  How lucky can you get? Most of the news of the world is pictures of explosions, fires, shootings and politicians making phony aggressive gestures with their fingers. We have lipstick
.

  Scott parks and comes up to the truck with his camera. She is turning her lips red. My gosh. A picture of a woman putting on lipstick. Unbelievably expensive commercials are made of this, but the commercials take days to film and Scott has it in ten seconds. Women will understand what a remarkable feat this is.

  I am so happy I could again jump, except we are on a street just off Main in the rain and traffic is squeezing by.

  “Is this truck yours? Did you do it?”

  Please say yes.

  “Yes.”

  “Could you show us around?”

  “Yes.”

  Give me a church with some candles to light.

  “I’ll hold my umbrella over your head,” I say, because I don’t want her to change her mind.

  Then I realize if I hold up an umbrella we can’t see her. So I fold up my umbrella and hold the dripping wet nylon in my dripping wet fingers while she gets out and I don’t hold the dripping wet thing over her head like I had just promised.

  Please don’t notice, I think.

  I finally introduce myself and Scott. That should have been first but everything is happening at once so this is still first. “Michelle,” she says, or over the noise of the traffic I think that is what she said.

  “This is my cup holder and this is the wishing well.”

  She shows us the cup holder on the outside of her truck, not the inside but the outside, which is a brilliant idea. You have to put your cup somewhere while you open the door, right?

  And then the wishing well. It is a . . . wishing well. How do you describe a wishing well? It’s a small wishing well on the side of her truck with a little fairy beside it.

  It is half-filled with coins and there is a sign next to it painted on the truck that says, “If you take anything out of the well it is bad karma, and you don’t want that.”

  So the well has coins in it.

  “I lived in this for three years while I drove across America and Canada singing and spreading joy.”

  “Will you sing now?”

  I know most people who say they do something, when I ask them to do that something, they say, “No! Can’t now. Not now. I won’t sound good. I need to warm up. Maybe later.”