The Figure in the Frame: ch. 4 mississauga

 

4. mississauga

Something strange happened to me today.

It happened when I was walking home from work. I say "work" but what I really mean is one of my side-gigs, a contract job sketching little girls at a birthday party. Her name was Hilary—or was it, Haley? Doesn't matter. What matters is I was in a foul mood. A culmination of weeks, no, months, feeling unfulfilled. I had been supplementing work for nearly sixteen months now that my contract at The Tribune was terminated. I was their resident cartoonist (a word I've come to hate these past few years), pumping out silly five-strip comics for what remained of the paper's readership. Like the major outlets, the Mississauga Tribune migrated to an online platform that utilized all the latest social media outlets. Work came and went depending on the amount of clicks they garnered in a year. I was lucky to nab my position after graduating from the animation program at Sheridan College, with a solid portfolio that "promised talent and efficiency." Whatever that means. For me, the job at The Tribune was a way to keep building my portfolio while I found a way into the animation industry. Then, after building a resume animating other people's ideas, I'd eventually open my own animation studio, specializing in 2D and stop motion, in particular. That was the dream, anyway.

Being near Toronto helped. When I was terminated from the Times for a rough fourth quarter (surprise surprise), I found work freelancing. This mainly consisted of sketch work for clients who wanted to commemorate an anniversary or birthday—every so often I'd nab a high profile client who would want a portrait done, colour and all. I made enough to get by. And when I couldn't make my rent, I went on E.I. to supplement the difference.

But you know this story already. It's the same sad tale every artist tells before making it big. Except I wasn't making it big. In fact, I was the furthest thing from "big" I could imagine. I was jobless, and Heather's (or was it Holly?) birthday put me in an even more sour mood.

"Mommy, why is my head so big?" Maybe-Hannah said. Her mother turned to me. "Why is my daughter's head so big?"

"It's kinda my style."

"Oh." A pause. "Well, you know…I kinda figured when we hired you you'd kinda, like, draw normally."

Normally. It took everything in me not to scoff. The word was a plague on every artist's existence. Normal. Straightforward. Commercial. Same shit, different pronunciation. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not your typical snotty artiste (but of course every artist would say that, right?); I do, however, like to think I have some backbone in regard to my work. Maintaining originality is one way of doing that. Protecting my style would be another. The first time I picked up a pencil was the first time I asked myself what if—what if this elephant-man doubled as a secret agent like some detective in a noir film? What if my doctor had superpowers, able to jumble up people’s limbs and stop bad guys on the weekends? What if Little Hazel was actually raised by monkeys, flinging shit at all of her friends at her party? I would draw those characters based on those what if backstories I often constructed in my head. The what ifs kept me going as an artist, and every personal project I ever accomplished began as a question. Until recently that is. Lately it seemed as if the what ifs had run dry. As anyone with a creative bone in their body can tell you, that’s an uncomfortable feeling. A kind of creative constipation that’s hard to break. And that’s exactly how I felt going into that birthday party.   

Needless to say I scrapped the sketch. I very adamantly tore it in two in front of her and hunkered down to draw Plain Helen. By the end her daughter was satisfied. The mother thanked me. Sent me the e-transfer and I left, ego bruised and hanging by a pathetic thread bobbing behind me.

I guess something else happened to me that day before the other thing. Leaving that party, I was on my last nerve. I was so far from my dream of becoming an animator by that point that it totally felt like a pipedream. I guess that birthday party kinda sealed the deal—I decided on my walk home that I was going to quit. Or maybe not quit, but maneuver a little bit, change course. Maybe I'd only exclusively do high end portraits. Monotonous and time consuming (and creatively unfulfilling) though they were, they paid the bills. And if I couldn't get work doing that, maybe I'd just get into teaching. Mom always wanted me to—summers off, pension! Plus, visual art teachers are always in short supply, so I'd be able to nab work no problem.

I reasoned with myself that at least in those fields I'd still be able to say I could work alongside my passions. But there was always that other voice, the proverbial devil on my shoulder asking if I would be passionate about those other jobs.

The answer, I’m afraid to admit, was a total mystery.

For years I had grown dissonant to the conversations surrounding my future. “If you don’t get work, how are you going to make a living?” my parents said on the daily. Or my mom’s favourite line: “Maybe you need to go back to school.” That was an idea that petrified me. But the worst conversations certainly came while in the room with family friends; or else at family dinners when you and your cousins go around the table boasting about some typical office job you were working towards with your degree. 

Ten-year-old-me would say she wanted to be an artist.

Fifteen-year-old-me would say she wanted to be a graphic designer.

Eighteen-year-old-me would say a cartoonist.

Twenty-year-old-me, an animator.

All different occupations, all achieved differently. And still, there was an inkling of sameness about all of those jobs. Elements and principles that transcended rudimentary titles and career paths. I had no fucking idea what I wanted to be, I just wanted to draw, to create things. It's society that tells us what label we need to fit under. To find a job, to make money, with little to no care for our passions. And I was ready to give up on all of it.

It was in that state of dissolution that the other, more inane thing happened. Mississauga is a rather plain city (there’s that word again—plain. Except this time, it’s true). Apart from a few outliers, the metropolitan area pales in comparison to Toronto’s more robust lifestyle. Residential by nature, I guess the only thing really going for it is its proximity to Toronto; in the opposite end it’s a gateway to the city from other parts of Western Ontario. I guess what I’m really trying to say is that for an artist, there isn’t much inspiration to it. At least not to me, anyway. But there are hidden pockets of the city that boast at least some character, and it was towards these parks, buildings and avenues that my attention often dwindled.

Today, on my way home from Probably-Hope’s birthday party, it was the Absolute Towers that caught my attention. Known to many as the Monroe Towers, this set of residential condos certainly looked interesting—at least in comparison to many of the other buildings in the area. Their wavy nature being their prime draw. Visually, they were unique, and though I couldn’t even afford to step foot into one of those towers, you just knew they had a unique interior as well. They also had their isolation going for them. There was nothing else really around them, so your eye was typically drawn towards them (in search of something different to look at, I’d imagine, to break the monotony of the surrounding architecture). 

I have seen the Monroe Towers a hundred times before. Thousands, in fact. But I never saw them the same way I did today. Turning onto Hurontario from Burnhamthorpe to catch the bus was secondary nature to me—I could make that walk with my eyes closed, or glued to my phone, which in today’s case, they were. I was in the middle of depositing the money from the birthday party when I came into view of the towers. Subconsciously I knew they were there, and I had no reason to believe they would look any different from their regular visage, so at first I didn’t look. I made sure the cash was securely placed into my account before closing the app, and while I was getting ready to switch the song I was listening to, all of a sudden a loud beep screamed from behind me and startled me to attention.

“Watch where you’re going!” a woman yelled from her car. I was nearly on the road. My heart was skipping a hundred miles an hour. My face blushed. Sweat was beginning to form on my back, as it normally did in confrontational situations like this. I pursed my lips into one of those stupid thin lines and nodded my head awkwardly, even throwing a lazy right hand at her for good measure in apology. She shook her head and kept on. When I was sure her car disappeared into the traffic, I breathed again for the first time. I rolled my eyes at my own stupidity, and turned to find my stop across the street.

At first the towers seemed normal. My eyes went straight for the bus stop—but seconds later they reverted back to the sky, caught by an unimaginable effect laying bare against it.

The towers weren’t standing still, they were moving—waving, in fact, like the hem of a dress or the body of a jellyfish—in a downward fashion. 

There were clouds hanging loosely in and around the tops of the towers, and all around them were blue skies. Nothing in my peripheral vision was blocking my view of the towers, and certainly nothing obscuring them from me seemed to identify the strangeness of what I saw. I couldn’t have imagined it, there was no way. You’d think I was crazy—I certainly thought I had gone insane for a good minute watching those towers in front of me. But the same undulating effect persisted for seconds, then minutes. I must have stood there for at least a good fifteen minutes, blinking like a madwoman trying to determine whether or not I had finally lost it. When I looked around nobody else seemed to notice the odd demeanor that the buildings had adopted. It was as if they had come alive. A few passersby even looked in the direction of the towers, but of course nobody else acknowledged the peculiar behavior. I was too afraid to ask if anybody else was seeing this. So I did what any other sane person would do in the 21st century—I took out my phone and tried to record the anomaly.

When I placed the towers in the center of the composition, I noticed that their unusual dance ceased. I was even more astonished. I lowered my phone, and I watched as their ripples continued to crash down onto the pavement like waves in the ocean. This time I rubbed my eyes—really rubbed them, so much in fact that I could feel the burn around my eyelids and the pain shooting into my temples. And still, those towers continued to curve in and out from top to bottom. An optical illusion adamant in proving itself not an illusion at all.

Unable to capture the phenomenon digitally, a rush of electricity coursed through my body, awakening something in me that had fallen dormant. As it does whenever an idea comes to me, my foot starts tapping on the pavement. I chew the side of my lip. My fingers run rampant, taking their turn tapping the tip of my thumb as they begin to feel a familiar itch for a pencil. Unfortunately, I don’t have one. And the sketchbook in my bag is full. The yearning for a blank page overwhelms me. I use that energy to fasttrack my way home.

The journey seems incredibly long. My patience wears thin as I wait for the bus and ride it to the final stop. My mind rushes with a million ideas, ready to form a hypothesis on the page, ready to test whether or not the tools I have at my disposal—and the talent I’ve managed to scavenge throughout my experiences—is enough to do this justice. Once home, I fling my bag into the hallway and head straight for the nook I’ve carved out in the apartment for my desk. The spine of the sketchbook gives that satisfying crack as I open it. The paper is smooth and familiar as I run my finger down the crease of the first page. My favourite pencil sits valiantly next to me, ready to start asking questions with lead. 

Questions. For a moment, I let the tip of the pencil hover over the page. It, and the hand currently holding the stem, are vibrating with a tension so great that I can barely contain my excitement. As a powerful smile flashes across my face, a question forms in some uncharted area of my brain—now reactivated with an uncompromising vitality—a question that begins with what if…?