by Tim Bowling
The old magic slowed for me. I clambered out of the orchestra pit of the self and into the illusion of art. No one kicked me back over the footlights. The projectionist barely stirred as I dropped my coins in the box and was offered a transfer by the little machine. And where exactly was I to transfer? Must we pay now even for our daydreams? It was like a ticket stub, so I accepted it fondly. I moved on and found myself become a child again, early at the matinee, with a whole theatre of seats from which to choose. Selecting one near the middle, I settled in comfortably and waited for the flow of images.
My hometown appeared, circa 1969. A slickness lay over the streets and lawns like the slickness on the scales of a just-caught salmon. I counted seventy-two masts sticking up from the harbour, four steeples sticking up from the tradition of belief and not a single tombstone sticking up from the moist earth. Imagine – a town so lightly built on water that there wasn’t enough depth of ground for a cemetery. We had death, of course, but we had no dead. The morning sun and the twilight moon changed their lights only for the traffic of the living. In the little theatre next to the dry cleaners next to the Daisy Dell grocery next to the shadow of the stray mutt sleeping at the bakery store curb, another projectionist readied the film, looping the tape into the reels.
The mist on the river flowed into my eyes, for I remembered the loss, the closure of the local movie house a few blocks from where I lived, the day the laughter stopped, to use Keaton’s phrase to describe the effect of the Arbuckle rape case on Hollywood. The theatre vanished within a month or two of my grandmother’s death, which was my first death and the only time in my childhood that I ever saw tears in my father’s blue eyes. His silence, for he was a silent man with a Keaton-esque mask, was different then; a deeper, more resonant chord sounded in the orchestra as we drove to the higher ground of Vancouver to lay my father’s mother under the cool shadows of the evergreens.
The theatre lurched to a stop. A brightly lipsticked woman in a pastel skirt, and a grubby, unshaven youth in a Charon hoodie cut across my vision of the screen. “Modern times,” to quote Chaplin. The day of the remaining days. I always tell my students, do you know, in the history of our species, there are far more dead than there are living? Do you realize that by the very act of sitting here, listening, breathing, yawning, just exactly how rare you are? Nine billion, and rare. They blink; they stare into their digitized hands; they google to see who this lunatic is and whether there’s another section of the course they can take. Maybe a half dozen look up with fresh attention; I give them my transfer for the incubus and insert some change for the succubus. What else can I do? They’re on their way to the places I’ve already been, the places that have worn me down at last. My father’s dead without a grave; who will give me back my hours of fiercest watching?
It was too late. The mist evaporated, the bus filled with workers and I stood in the downtown core of North America, cattled among the chains and franchises, the terrified flesh of power on one side, the terrified flesh of money on the other. Cattle chute and spawning stream – so much life on the way to death, forced and natural, panicked and driven to fulfillment. I sighed and walked a few blocks west on Jasper Avenue to the corner of 102nd Street.
Here, almost exactly a century ago, on May 12, 1913, the vaudeville business mogul beautifully named Pericles Pantages (though he went by Alexander, for Alexander the Great) opened what was billed as “the most northerly high class playhouse in North America.” In partnership with an Edmonton businessman, the not-so-beautifully named George Brown (he went by George, for George), Alexander the Great recognized that Edmonton was large and thriving enough to join his chain of western North American theatres. And so the Pantages Theatre was born – and what a palace it was. Built from classical inspiration with Italian Renaissance touches, Pantages was a $250,000 explosion of culture in Hicksville, all bevelled glass and Grecian marble panels with an interior boasting a proscenium arch, Corinthian columns, delicately moulded carvings, a vaulted ceiling with a domed light, and ivy, gold and rose auditorium walls. The auditorium walls were finished with panelled red damask silk, imported from Peking, and the boxes, balconies and draperies featured deep gold fabric trimmed with handwoven embroideries. It was like walking inside a whale that had just swallowed centuries of European high culture. And the effect it must have had!
According to the Edmonton Bulletin, a crowd of sixteen hundred gathered outside for the grand opening, many without tickets, as crews inside worked feverishly to put on the finishing touches. The opening was delayed fifteen minutes, then a half hour, then forty-five minutes. The crowd swelled. All darkly clothed with charcoal silent-film eyes full of romantic longing and immigrant hunger, the crowd stood on the titanic deck and sang to themselves the song of the coming god of entertainment, “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Escape! An hour late, the doors finally opened. Rush into the whale’s mouth! Pushing, jabbering, sweating, the rich and the poor together, first class and steerage, on the hunt for magic. Who’s got a ticket? Where’s your ticket? Oh never mind, let it go, it’s the wave of the future and we’re all on the crest, no icebergs anywhere.
One hundred years later, I stood at the corner of Jasper and 102nd Street and tried to count to one thousand six hundred. It didn’t take long; the big commute was emerging from darkness into dusk, the human flow was accelerating like the river at the end of Our Hospitality. I ballparked sixteen hundred people and put them in a mob and milled them outside the Pantages Theatre on opening night. It almost worked; I could almost pull the present that far into the past. But the present, as it must, resisted. I yanked the history rope. The present yanked back. I yanked again, my eyes closed against the clamouring day. Just when I thought I might not win, I remembered my own history in this place, I saw my ancestors in their youth and the rope turned to taffy in the delighted pulling of a child.
They had come west by train, with their bees. I’m not sure even Buster Keaton would have dreamed up quite so unusual a gag. He always maintained that an effective comic feature film could not be ridiculous, that it had to be constructed on a platform of believability in order to hold together. In the early days (not long after Edmonton’s Pantages opened, in fact) when he worked with Roscoe Arbuckle, Keaton had only one disagreement with the rotund, ill-fated funnyman that he loved so well, and that disagreement involved this question of artistic integrity. Arbuckle claimed that movie audiences had the intelligence of twelve-year-olds, so why not mug for the camera, why worry about structure and believability? Keaton saw no sense in this argument at all. But then, he was an artist who had just discovered his medium. The movie camera fascinated him. Unlike any of the other great comedians of the silent era, unlike almost any actor in the film industry from its beginnings until now, Keaton had an intense technical interest in the camera. Immediately upon leaving the stage to work for Arbuckle in the movies in 1917, he asked if he could take a camera apart and study how it worked. Buster Keaton had never spent more than a day in school, but he had a curious, searching intelligence; some might even argue that he had that intelligence because he’d avoided school. Whatever the case, one point was clear enough: there is no beekeeping in any of Buster Keaton’s films.
But there are plenty of trains, of course. The elderly Keaton in the fall of 1964 crossed Canada by handcar in the same direction and on the same tracks as my ancestors had done in 1905, heading west from Ontario with the family’s precious bees in their luggage. Well, they thought they might need them in their new life. And as it turned out, they did. My great-great-grandfather, an expert carpenter, had built a special case designed to bear the bees in secrecy. As Great-Aunt Gladys pointed out in a privately printed little family memoir, “Imagine what would have happened if the porter had discovered that we had bees in our luggage!” At this point, Keaton, the real or the dream version, would have glided in with all of his comic imagination on fire, suggesting this gag, that stunt, directing the swarm of bees to chase him across the tops of the moving boxcars. Or p
erhaps he would have directed the porter to toss him out of the moving train as it passed the town of . . . oh, let’s say, Rivers, Manitoba, if there was a Rivers, Manitoba, in 1905. Here, in the west, which isn’t really the west if you’re from it, towns come and towns go. Keaton’s own birthplace of Piqua, Kansas, for example, was blown off the map by a cyclone shortly after his arrival and almost-immediate departure to the next vaudeville stop. And the Hollywood of the silent film era, that glittery, romantic town where the money men sometimes gave geniuses absolute creative control, vanished too.
I wavered on the sidewalk outside the twenty-storey, phallic Enbridge Place skyscraper and peered through the black-tinted glass. A security guard sat up high behind a massive desk. A sign on the glass read, “All visitors to this building must report to security.” I wanted to put some bees in my pockets and stride in with Keatonian insouciance, just as my grandfather and his four siblings had strode into the grand lobby of the Pantages Theatre on May 12, 1913, without tickets, as eager as the rest of the crowd to see the inside of a theatre that had cost a quarter of a million dollars to build. I wavered. Even now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, I would have to teach fifty sections of introductory grammar and rhetoric in order to make $250,000. Years of work, over a decade’s worth. It was a lot of money, and a king’s ransom in 1913 – my grandfather and his siblings must have goggled at it. Alexander Pantages, however, was a business king by 1913. He’d eventually build an empire that, at its peak, included thirty vaudeville houses scattered across the northwest, including Vancouver and Winnipeg. Sixteen years earlier, he’d been a penniless Greek immigrant toiling as a waiter in the goldfields of Skagway, Alaska, dreaming of ways to make it big without having to sweat and labour like a prospector. What better way to separate the miner from his poke than to set up shows and watch the gold nuggets and dust pour in?
Eventually, he hooked up with Klondike Kate, the legendary dance-hall girl, and together they established the Orpheum Theatre in Dawson. Kate became Pantages’s mistress, and then he left her, virtually at the altar. There was a breach of promise suit with a delicate violinist as the other woman. The strings played. It was all in black and white but very colourful. Over a century later I stood in the chill winds of time and death and ruin and fumbled in my pockets for admission. My grandfather, who, perhaps not incidentally, was born the same year as Keaton, had no ticket. Neither did I. But I had a fierce love of the past and a memory soaked in nitrate and honey. Here’s a handful of dust, Mr. Pantages. Or perhaps a handful of pollen. Open the doors and let me in.
It’s a Sherlock Jr. moment. I’m in a fan-shaped auditorium blinking up at a great asbestos curtain of deep gold. The walls to my sides are panelled with real damask Chinese silk. Giant Corinthian columns. Panels and cartouches. I look around. I look back, my eyes full of a great plaster relief of crossed swords supporting a torch. Lion heads, dolphins, garlands, scrolls. Lion heads! Suddenly I’m teetering over a great hole in the earth, and a wrecking ball swings straight at me. It’s 1979 and the Pantages is being razed.
I jump, and land in a plush theatre seat. The mayor of Edmonton is giving a speech from the stage to honour the grand opening. I lean forward to watch the evening’s entertainment, which begins, in a disturbing act of foreshadowing, with a moving picture. Then, according to historian John Orrell, comes a “trio of equilibrists, a singer of ragtime songs, a one-act skit called ‘The Police Inspector,’ a comic duo known as Coogan and Cox, and a group of dancers known as the Alisky Royal Hawaiians.” Three months later I’m still sitting there as the Marx Brothers parade around in their anarchic fashion, and three years after that I’m still there when The Three Keatons take the stage. Open-mouthed, I watch the young Buster work hard to cover up the timing inadequacies of his increasingly drunken father as his almost-always-written-to-the-wings mother tootles on a saxophone. Within a year, Buster and Myra will walk out on old Joe and end the act, and Buster will hook up with destiny (in the roly-poly form of Fatty Arbuckle) and begin co-starring in the Comique Film Corporation’s short films in New York.
I stand and approach the stage. It changes to a speeding train on which I glimpse a family of beekeepers heading towards my own modest production in 1964. Then the image blurs completely, and I’m standing on the corner of Jasper Avenue and 102nd Street on September 4, 2012, the day’s commute in full swing, my nerves jangling, my stomach a swarm and not even my immediate destiny known.
HEEDING THE order “Go west, middle-aged man,” I walked along the avenue, thinking that I ought to pick up something to go for my lunch. As I strolled, I continued to muse on the rapid pace of North American progress.
Vancouver – that sexy metropolis of reckless real estate speculation – demolished the oldest Pantages vaudeville theatre in North America in 2011. And when the wrecking ball crashed into the side of the grand old playhouse, what sound came out? The long, mournful cry of the railroad whistle of the trains that carried the vaudevillians around on the circuit, Winnipeg to Calgary to Edmonton to Vancouver – all those bridge games in the club car, all that cigarette smoke, all that scenery! And the granite railroad hotels, those glamorous tombs of opulence. The very British stationery, the promotional postcards sent from Jasper and Banff, the royal family’s royal visits, I say, jolly good what! But, so much more than all that, the very real, very moving link between so many vanished lives and their vanished aspirations.
One example: my mother, born and raised in poverty in Toronto, left in October 1945, at the age of eighteen to start her married life on the west coast. How did she travel? By train. She was the youngest of my grandparents’ eighteen children, only six of whom survived birth and infancy. Obviously, she and my stout Irish grandmother were very close. I believe my mother’s shabby luggage was drenched with peat-black Irish tears, I believe my mother’s cedar hope chest was lined with tear-sodden Irish lace. Well, the story ended a few weeks later. My grandmother, sixty-five, died of a stroke, and my mother couldn’t afford to travel across the country again. She lay, a new bride, in a little, rainy fishing town full of strangers, and listened to the trains cry across the salt flats. It was the sound of her mother calling to her. It was the sound of her childhood, which was gone forever. It was the sound of human history, and what else is a country if it isn’t just that?
Money? I beg your pardon. For a moment I forgot where I was and who I was, out in the relevant urban jungle, child of the cold Scottish till, walking west along Jasper Avenue on the morning of my first day of classes. As it happens, my great-grandfather might have done the same in 1905, though his labour was different from mine. He worked for the railroads. But then, who didn’t work for the railroads in Canada a hundred years ago? It was unifying, in its way. Why else should a British-born filmmaker named Gerald Potterton make a railroad promotional film in 1964? Why else would he go to the inspired trouble of travelling to noisy New York to persuade a faded screen legend that riding a motorized handcart across a massive land mass in autumn would be just the ticket? It was unifying, the railroad, and the reach of its tracks was long, long enough to touch the imagination of Buster Keaton. The romance convinced one of the world’s greatest artists to come here near the end of his life – why would he bother to come?
Of course, it always boils down to work and money. Keaton came for romance, perhaps, but mostly he wanted the opportunity to work. He made no distinction, in fact, between life and work. His attitude was very much akin to that of the Spanish poet, Juan Ramón Jiménez, who believed that the greatest joy in living was to work – but that’s only if your work calls to the deepest parts of yourself. Another poet, the stereotypically miserable Englishman, Philip Larkin, famously asks, “Why should I let the toad work / Squat on my life?”
I looked into the faces of the men and women walking past me on their way to work, whatever kind of work it was. I tried to guess who would be passing the security guard in the Enbridge Tower and who would be putting on latex gloves to make sandwiches
at Tim Hortons. Perhaps that rather handsome and intense middle-aged Asian woman served on the board of directors of the Edmonton Opera Association, or perhaps she was a dentist or a cashier at Shoppers Drug Mart. I smiled a limp smile, which she did not return. Was that a toad squatting on her life?
And what about my life? I had a toad worthy of a Macbeth witch on my shoulder, a toad the pale green colour of American money. It was a wonder that all of Edmonton didn’t turn at the sound of the terrible croaking. I walked faster, longing for the whistle of the train to drown out the toad’s monotonous harangue. I thought of an interview Keaton gave near the end of his life, in which he explained that he would have been a millionaire if he’d cared about money and business the way Chaplin and Harold Lloyd did. Chaplin, who loved to play at being a communist, was a consummate capitalist, just as Mick Jagger, who loved to play at being a rebel, was a proud graduate of the London School of Economics. So the world goes, full of illusion, like the movies.
Life isn’t the movies, especially if you have an uncertain income, no benefits or security, and few prospects for anything better. I thought of the thirty teenagers now rising from their more optimistic sleep and getting ready to commute to my class. It might be the first class of their first day at university. My God, they deserved better than me, they deserved a teacher who didn’t stagger in with a twitch in his left eye and an amphibious right shoulder. “Canada, land of the train,” I cried, “don’t fail me now!”
It didn’t. But it saved me, or at least offered salvation, in the only way that it could, with an almost vaudevillian turn, as moving and sad as Keaton’s few minutes on screen in Chaplin’s 1952 film, Limelight. When I crossed 109th Street, the dark had almost lifted, but I still dragged the heavy chains of Labour Day behind me; the cold, grasping, Jacob Marley rattle of money. Between the squatting toad and the rattling chains, I made a sorry sight, which was probably why the sun made no hurry to climb over the horizon and rest its yellow peepers on me. It was over four hours until I was due to take roll call, and that fact turned me south, toward the North Saskatchewan River, over which a magnificent iron railroad bridge, constructed a century before, soared. Water and trains.