Fifty Shades of Black

 

 

Fifty Shades
of Black

 

 

 

 

Fifty Shades
of Black

 

 

 

Arthur Black

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright © 2013 Arthur Black

 

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].

 

Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.

P.O. Box 219

Madeira Park, BC, Canada V0N 2H0

www.douglas-mcintyre.com

 

Edited by Margaret Tessman

Print edition text design by Mary White

Cover photograph by Howard Fry

 

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

ISBN 978-1-77162-019-2 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-77162-020-8 (ebook)

 

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To Cathy Ward,
without whom this book would have been called
. . .
God knows what.

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

I
'm walking down the main street of my home town when Cathy Ward, a delightful woman of my acquaintance, brazenly accosts me.

“Hey, Arthur,” she says, “I've got the title for your next book.”

I resist the urge to sweep her into my arms, bend her backwards and smother her with Sheik of Araby style kisses. Book titles are my personal albatross, my hand-hewn Sisyphean boulder, the monkey that grins over my shoulder, securely saddled to my back.

My personal
b
ê
te noire
, if you will.

Here's the deal. I've written fifteen books; they all have my name in the title. They include
Looking Blackward
,
Basic Black
,
Back to Black
,
Pitch Black
,
Black Gold
,
A Chip Off the Old Bla
. . . you get the idea. The point is, what started out as a clever gimmick graduated to tricky, then burdensome and finally nightmarish. I had run out of ways to work “black” into my titles. What to do? Start a contest? Engage an advertising agency? Quit writing books?

None of the above, because one fine day, strolling down the main street of my home town Cathy Ward buttonholed me and said “You should call it
Fifty Shades of Black
.”

Bingo!

Later, someone asked me if I was worried that somebody might get
Fifty Shades of Black
mixed up with that other
Fifty Shades of
. . . book.
You know, the one that features whips and chains and handcuffs and riding crops and that, at last count, has sold seventy-five million copies worldwide. What if several hundred thousand readers bought my book by mistake?

I replied that naturally I was terrified of the prospect, but willing to take a chance.

 

—Arthur Black

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part One

Hello, It's Me!

 

 

 

Extra! Extra! Read All About Me!

H
EY! MY NAME IS ARTHUR BLACK! I HAVE A NEW BOOK OUT! IT'S CALLED
FIFTY SHADES OF BLACK
! IT'S PUBLISHED BY DOUGLAS & MCINTYRE! IT'S HILARIOUS! YOU SHOULD BUY A COPY! RIGHT NOW!!!

Please forgive my un-Canadian pushiness. I've just come from a workshop for writers entitled “How to Be Your Own Publicist.” Here is what I learned:

 

1. I am not just a writer; I am a brand.

2. I need to max out my credit cards and start travelling all over Canada to “meet and greet” with bookstore owners from Haida Gwaii to Joe Batt's Arm.

3. I need to chat up bookstore customers, subtly steering them by the elbow over to the Canadian Humour section and asking them if they see any names that look familiar, nudge, nudge.

4. I need to attend booksellers' conventions in a rented tux and throw myself at the feet of booksellers and publishers' agents.

5. I need to enlist fifty friends and/or family members to talk up my book and strong-arm local bookstores into featuring it in their windows.

6. I need to join Facebook, create a blog, master Twitter and overhaul my website to reach the teeming masses who would all buy my book if only I tweeted, blogged and Facebooked about it.

 

It was at about this point in the workshop that I wanted to stand up and shout that I would prefer a colonoscopy by Roto-Rooter to engaging in any of the aforementioned stunts.

I didn't stand up and say that of course, because (a) I'm Canadian and (b) dammit, that is not writerly behaviour. Writers are detached. Aloof. Introverted. Okay—shy and awkward. We don't wear lampshades at parties or dazzle the crowds with our tango moves. We aren't cool. We trend geekwards.

Hey, that's why we became writers in the first place. Do you think if we could dance or do stand-up or be otherwise socially dynamic we'd be wasting our time making scribbles on paper or pecking away on laptops?

We certainly don't do it for the money. Do you know what the average annual salary is for a Canadian writer? Two thousand seven hundred and twenty-five bucks. (Okay, I made that up—but statistics show that 80 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.)

The very attraction of being a writer (aside from the princely sums you haul down) is that you don't have to go to an office to do it. Writers may be underpaid, but on the plus side, we're pretty much totally ignored. We can write in our pyjamas at the kitchen table with three days of stubble on our chins or our hair in curlers. Writers don't have to worry about the boss barging in on them, contributions to the office birthday fund or showing up late for work.

As for the downside, well, nobody ever put it better than Bennett Cerf, one of the founding publishers of Random House:

“Bunyan spent a year in prison, Coleridge was a drug addict, Poe was an alcoholic, Marlowe was killed by a man he was trying to stab. Pope took a large sum of money to keep a woman's name out of a vicious satire and then wrote it so she could be recognized anyway. Chatterton killed himself, Somerset Maugham was so unhappy in his final thirty years that he longed for death . . . do you still want to be a writer?”

The answer is, oddly enough, yeah. Being a writer isn't so much an occupation as a condition. An itch that needs to be scratched.

You want to be rich? Be a hockey player. Famous? Invent a cure for baldness. Powerful? Go suck up to somebody in Stephen Harper's office.

The writing business isn't about any of those things—unless your name is Bill Shakespeare or J.K. Rowling. For the rest of us, motivation is very simple. As a Greek fella named Epictetus put it a couple of thousand years ago: “If you wish to write, write.”

Oh, and don't forget to advertise!

HEY! MY NAME IS ARTHUR BLACK! I HAVE A NEW BOOK OUT! IT'S CALLED
FIFTY SHADES OF BLACK
! IT'S PUBLISHED BY DOUGLAS & MCINTYRE! IT'S HILARIOUS! YOU SHOULD BUY A COPY! RIGHT NOW!!!

 

 

Caution: Klutz on the Loose

I
'm thinking of taking chainsaw lessons.

Which is weird because I like chainsaws the way I like underarm rash. If there's one sound I hate more than chalk scrawking on a blackboard, the blatting of an amateur bagpiper or the yowl of an alley cat in heat, it's the sound of a chainsaw roaring to life.

And yet, and yet . . . there's this thirty-foot arbutus in my backyard that just hit the dirt and is begging to be bucked up into firewood. Yeah, I suppose I could do it with a swede saw. I could trim the front lawn with toenail clippers too, but I'm not going to.

The undeniable saving grace about chainsaws is: they work. Slicker than a Karen Kain pas de deux, a Christopher Plummer soliloquy. Roberto Luongo on a good night.

More important, I've got a chainsaw maestra living just up island from me. Her name is Mearnie Summers and she not only gives chainsaw lessons, she does chainsaw art. And I don't mean that hokey bear cub out of a tree trunk stuff—I mean real art. And crafts. Like mobiles and tables and chairs.

You might think that a Husqvarna or a Stihl chainsaw is a relatively unsubtle paintbrush for an artist to employ, but Mearnie brings a delicate touch to her work—which she claims has next to nothing to do with her anyway. She doesn't impose her vision on the chunk of cherry or cedar or arbutus she's working on. She claims she just “goes the way the wood goes.”

It figures Mearnie would say something shrubby like that because she's about as typical as Salt Springers get—which is to say highly untypical. In previous incarnations she ran construction crews in the Interior, floated barges along the coast and ran the general store in Surge Narrows. She was also the first woman to circumnavigate Vancouver Island by sail, crewed a thirty-two-footer to Tahiti and back, gave dance lessons and played pro baseball in the States. So teaching greenhorns like me how to chainsaw timber is as easy for her as, well, falling off a log.

Or should be.

Someone should maybe forewarn Mearnie that as a student I have an MA in Advanced Klutz. When it comes to things mechanical I make Woody Allen look like Mikhail Baryshnikov. As for mechanical things with teeth, I'm not even allowed to operate the electric can opener at home.

I mentioned my misgivings to my pals down at the coffee house. “Don't be ridiculous,” one of them scoffed. “Chainsaw's just another tool. There's nothing to it. A five-year-old child could run a chainsaw and never get a scratch.”

Maybe he's right. I'm just overreacting. But I'd feel a lot more confident if my pal's nickname wasn't Stumpy.

 

 

Ownly the Loanly

Y
ou ever been dead broke? Neither have I. Oh, back when I was younger and stupider I received my share of snarky phone calls and envelopes plastered with PAST DUE in fluorescent capitals. But I never had to shinny down a flophouse drainpipe in the middle of the night and I've never answered a knock to find a tall dark stranger named Guido lounging against the door frame cracking his knuckles and inquiring about “the vig.”

It's not because I'm wealthy (ask my bank manager) or fiscally nimble. My entire economic strategy boils down to a motto espoused by the Dickens character Mr. Micawber: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.”

Sounds crude and simplistic, but it works at least as well as the collected wisdom of Goldman Sachs.

All debt is relative. As some wag once said, if you owe the bank a hundred dollars, you've got a problem. If you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank's got a problem. Me? I owe some guy in a Moroccan village twenty cents. It's not really a problem but it's a debt I'll never forget.

Decades ago, as a teenager hitchhiking across North Africa, I found myself stranded one day in a tiny town in the Atlas Mountains. What passed for the bank was closed for Ramadan, ATMs were as yet undreamed of and I was down to my very last dirham—a small coin worth something less than two bits. Accommodation was no problem as long as I didn't mind smelling goatish—but I was hungry. Very hungry. Around sundown I found a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that sold nothing but stew. Price per bowl, one dirham. I lined up with a sketchy-looking string of customers, nervously fingering my last coin. I arrived at the stew cauldron at the same moment as a scowling, ­djellaba-clad Tuareg. He glowered at me; I motioned for him to go ahead, even as my stomach voted otherwise. The stranger disdainfully swept ahead, got his stew and left without a thank you or a backward glance. When I got my bowlful and offered to pay, my coin was refused. The stew dispenser indicated with a flick of his head that Mr. Nasty had paid my tab.

I can still taste that stew. And I still think of the stranger I owe for it.

Being in debt isn't always just about the money. Early in his career, comedian Jackie Gleason had an engagement at a burlesque house in Atlantic City. The gig ended, the cheque from the burlesque house bounced and Gleason couldn't pay his room and board. Intending to skip town, Gleason packed up his clothes, lowered his suitcase out a window to a waiting accomplice then waddled casually past the reception desk wearing nothing but bathing trunks and carrying a towel. “Just off to the beach,” he assured the landlady.

Years later when Gleason was flush, guilt propelled him back to the boarding house to make good on his debt.

The landlady shrieked at the sight of him.

“Oh, my Lord!” she cried. “We thought you'd drowned.”