Doing it on the sly

What follows is an excerpt from my autobiography and a reading scheduled for July 19th 2008 before the members of the Writers and Editors Network in Toronto.

It was during 1957 when I lived in the City of Winnipeg that I got a job with the Winnipeg Tribune working in the composing room operating a linotype machine. Four months later, I was asked to report to the managing editor in the editorial department. He asked me if I would like a job as a copy writer. That job entailed me to rewrite some of the news coming over the telex machine by reducing the news into articles of five hundred words in case the city editor later needed them as fill-ins. The good news was that I would get a raise to fifty dollars a week. Hey! That was a lot of money then. The bad news was that my shift would be from four in the afternoon until twelve midnight beginning Sunday afternoons and ending Fridays at midnight. That sucked.

Generally around eight in the evening, I was finished with my work and there was nothing left for me to do. Despite that, I had to remain in the editorial department as everyone else had gone home or was out on a job as a reporter and someone had to answer the phone in case of an emergency. I was it.

Now you know what they say about people who have time on their hands; they are up to no good.

I noticed that the managing editor had a fairly large painting of his wife above the cadenza behind his desk. Now in my early years, I was an above average portrait painter so I thought to myself, why don’t I make some alterations on the painting; after all, it’s not like I didn’t have spare time to do it. NO! I wasn’t going to paint a mustache below her nose.

I decided to paint a fly on the tip of her nose. The problem was, what kind of fly should I put on her nose? Originally I thought of a blue bottle fly. That’s the one with the bright blue metallic looking body but that would be spotted within days of it appearing on the woman’s nose. I settled for an ordinary dirty brown housefly.

I chose to paint the fly on her nose ever so slowly so that no one would recognize the time consuming gradual changes in the painting. I spent a month painting the fly on her nose.

First, I began with the legs, then the thorax and the head and finally the fly’s wings.

Now I don’t know if you know this but a fly has a long snout and it regurgitates its food and the enzymes in the fly’s vomit softens up the food it wants and then it sucks up the vomit and the food not unlike a small kid slurping up a thick milkshake through a thin straw.

In order to make the picture of the fly more realistic, I decided to paint some fly’s vomit on the surface of the woman’s nose. I have never seen fly’s vomit so I wasn’t sure what colour it is so I made up the colour and painted a small gob of bright green vomit on the surface of the woman’s nose where the fly’s snout touched it.

Did the managing editor see the fly on his wife’s nose? “No, he didn’t. After all no one looks at a portrait of his wife all the time, especially when he is rushed for time.

About a week later, I realize that there was something missing in the picture. Think of it. If you had a fly on the tip of your nose, would you ignore it? Hardly! Your eyes would turn inward and focus on that disgusting creature that has the temerity to squat on your nose and squirt its vomit on your nose.

It took me a month to re-focus the woman’s eyes. She now looked cross-eyed. I decided to change the colour of her eyes from brown to sickly-looking green fly’s vomit. I chose that colour because I learned in my earlier lessons in painting that you should balance colour and what better way to balance the colour of her eyes than with that which that disgusting creature had planted on the tip of her nose.

Another month went by before it suddenly dawned me that again something was missing. No woman who is staring cross-eyed at a dirty house fly on the tip of her nose would be smiling.

I changed the shape of her mouth so that if that was all that was altered on her face, you would conclude that she has just been informed that her husband has been having an affair; with a three-hundred and fifty pound man; who is gay.

Long before the painting was finished, word got around that some gradual changes were being made on the boss’ wife’s portrait. Employees were constantly going into the boss’ office to discuss some mundane matters with him.

It didn’t dawn on him that anything was amiss, even when his employees were not staring directly at him.

However, sometime later in the year, he discovered the horrible truth. Some nasty, crud-faced, creep had altered the face of his beautiful wife. He had spent almost five hundred dollars to commission a portrait artist to paint the likeness of his wife on canvas and now he couldn’t display it ever again.

Being a former investigative reporter, it didn’t take him long to find out who that wonderful, charming, talented artist was. First, he concluded that whoever he was, he had to have the editorial department all to himself. Second, he looked at my employment application form and there under the heading of hobbies, was printed the words, portrait painting. I was fired on the spot. Something to do with mischief.

Painting is a wonderful hobby, especially if you have a lot of time on your hands, which I then had right after I was fired.

I have compared that painting episode in my life, with that of porcupines making love. They do it ever so carefully, ever so slowly, with precision, when they are alone and of course, on the sly.