Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 25-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
The Good Painter
Dad is leaning on the kitchen table. He is old. I am light and graceful. I should float away—up the mountainside. I’m wearing my favourite dress: dirty pink and murky green smudges on white. I call it my good painter dress. The dress is like a simple painting—a landscape—when everything is working. A connection has been made between the painter and the viewer. Yes, that’s what this dress feels like—appreciating the of value simplicity. The good painter knows when to stop and leave it alone. The good painter knows when it is exactly the right time to stop.
Mom is leaning, even older than Dad, on the counter by the kitchen sink. I look past her, out the window. I can smell pinesap in the dry July heat.
Dad asks, “Do you know anything about selling diamonds?”
“Not really,” I answer. “Why?”
“Eighteen years ago, your brother walked in here after visiting your grandmother at the hospital. I had … ”
“Pneumonia,” I say. “You had pneumonia.”
“A nurse from the hospital kept phoning me to say I’d better visit my mother before she died. I told her that I couldn’t, that I had pneumonia. And do you know what she said to me? She said, ‘We’ve all heard about your pneumonia.'”
“Wow,” I say. “It seems incredible that Granny Belle died 18 years ago.”
It was Christmas, and we were having pancakes when Granny Belle said she felt odd. Mom told her it was indigestion, but the pain didn’t stop. They began to talk about taking her to the hospital. But which hospital? Should they drive or call an ambulance? Mom was worrying about leaving the oven on and locking the back door. I told them to go, that I’d stay and make sure everything was turned off and locked up.
It wasn’t indigestion. It was a heart attack. When I visited Granny Belle in the hospital, she said, “It’s too bad you couldn’t come with us, but you wanted to finish your pancakes.” I wanted to say, “I don’t even like pancakes.” I didn’t say anything.
Dad starts the story again. “So your brother arrived here in a real mood after visiting your grandmother in the hospital. He put an envelope on the table and said it was for you. It was your grandmother’s diamond rings. I put it in my safety deposit box. It’s still there, with your name on it.”
“OK,” I say, wondering why they didn’t give me these diamond rings 18 years ago.
“When you find out how to sell diamonds, I’ll give them to you.”
“OK,” I say again.
Granny Belle’s diamond rings. One would be her engagement ring.
“Where did your father ever get the money for a diamond ring anyway?” I ask.
Dad says what he always says: “Mac was quite a character.”
“Tell me about him,” I say. “What was he like?”
Dad puts down his fork and leans back in his chair. “He had a lot of ideas for how to make money. At one point, as a teenager, it was my job to sort through barrels of used bottles at the dump. I was looking for a particular square bottle that Mac wanted for his perfume business. Belle-Mac perfume. He made it in the bathtub.”
Mom says, “Belle-Mac sounds more like axle-grease than perfume. They always had something going on in that bathtub.”
“We stuck labels on the bottles,” Dad says, making a rectangle with his crooked fingers. “And Mac sold them in bulk to loggers. $100 for I forget how many bottles, but that was big money. The loggers came out of the woods with their pay, and Mac talked them into buying the perfume to sell door-to-door. Then they came and pounded on our door, yelling that they couldn’t get rid of the stuff.”
“What did this stuff smell like?”
“It was pretty rough stuff. Acrid is maybe the best word for it,” says Dad.
“What did you do when the loggers came back with the bottles?”
“We hid. All three of us hid behind the furniture.”
“How did Granny Belle feel about all of Mac’s enterprises?” I ask.
“Enterprises,” Mom says. “That’s a nice way of putting it. More like an endless list of crazy schemes.”
Dad looks at Mom patiently and continues, “Mac got a lot of his ideas into production. Things were always just about to work out. The future was bright. Success was always right around the corner.”
“I said almost the same thing yesterday. Do you ever see Mac in me?”
“All the time.”
“How come you’ve never told me that?” I ask.
“Well, he had his problems,” Dad says.
“Problems like not being able to keep food on the table or pay the rent,” says Mom. “He was a man who never lived up to his potential.”
“Here’s a question for you Mom. When I was a teenager, did you think I’d just get married and not have to worry about earning a living?”
“I don’t know what we thought you’d do,” Mom says. “I’m still hoping you’ll live up to your potential.”
“After the Belle-Mac perfume disaster it was Sea-Foam wall cleaner,” Dad says. “Also made in the bathtub.”
“Did you ever get a chance to take a bath?” I ask, laughing.
“Not very often.”
“Did the loggers sell the Sea-Foam, too?”
“No, I sold the Sea-Foam,” he says.
“Door-to-door?”
“Yes. The idea was to get a foot in the door, get inside the house and rub it on the wall as fast as possible. Once a patch of the wall had been Sea-Foamed, the sale was in the bag. I think Mac used the extra perfume for the Sea-Foam, so it had an acrid chemically smell.”
Changing the subject to her own childhood, Mom says, “The vegetable man came to our house in a horse-drawn cart. During the Depression, men came with trays of hairpins to sell. I guess your father could have been one of them.”
I look at Dad, “You sold hairpins on a tray?”
“No, I didn’t sell hairpins, but I did have a cookie route.”
“How did that get started?” I ask, thinking I’d better get as much as I can out of him while he was willing to talk about these things.
“I heard about a bakery on Commercial Drive where, if you knocked on the back door, they’d sell overly brown cookies at a discount. So I got out my Sea-Foam tray and went across town to your mother’s neighbourhood to sell cookies door-to-door to rich people. I told my customers that I’d be coming back regularly, that I’d invented the cookie route. But I shouldn’t have told anyone the name of the bakery.”
“Why not?” I ask.
“When I went back to buy more cookies, they slammed the door in my face. I guess word had gotten back to them about my unofficial cookie route.”
“Did you come up with this idea or was it one of Mac’s schemes?” I ask.
“I came up with it,” Dad replies, proudly. Mom is wincing. I think all these stories were supposed to be kept quiet.
“Once, when I was a lot older, I was working straight through the night late on a freelance art job,” says Dad. “It must have been three in the morning when an ad came on the radio: ‘Come down to Crazy Mac’s. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s practically giving things away. You’d be crazy not to come down to see Crazy Mac.'”
“Wow. Crazy Mac’s. Where was his store?”
“It was on Hastings, one block west of Main. Basically it was a bunch of junk: knick-knacks and novelty items. What remained of his big ideas.”
“Did people call him Crazy Mac?” I ask. “And what happened to the store?”
“No one called him Crazy Mac and what happened was, he died. He’d gotten very, very tired. I drove past the store before the funeral. Guys were loading all his junk into a truck. He was in debt all over the place. I didn’t want to get involved, so I kept driving.”
Granny Belle’s diamonds are presumably still in the safety deposit box, in the envelope with my name on it. From time to time, I think about asking for them, saying that I now know how to sell diamonds, but another part of me doesn’t want to take them and sell them. Call it potential. And they’re not really mine— they’re part of digging around at the dump collecting bottles and the loggers banging on the door and all the other crazy schemes I may never hear about.
Her diamonds are fine where they are, then, one day, I’ll use them to pay for my crazy schemes.
