Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers

Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers by Marcello Di Cintio is a compilation of fourteen stories from all across Canada. Di Cintio concentrated on the subjects outside of the confines of their cabs and thus spared us the seedy stories that one might have expected to find in the cars’ back seats. We learned what brought each man–and a few women–to find his or her career as a cab driver. Some fled unstable or war-torn countries while others needed to make a living while waiting for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn. The chapters that worked best were the shorter ones, as I found the author’s lengthier cabbie profiles to be boring to the point where I no longer cared who he was writing about.

The overwhelming number of cab drivers are recent immigrants. They have to put up with all kinds of passengers, and being in a cab seems to give some of them licence to be openly racist. I never realized how much verbal abuse cab drivers face in order to earn a living. Most of them have learned to ignore it. Di Cintio then exposed a chilling fact:

“A 2012 Statistics Canada report revealed that taxi drivers are murdered on the job at a higher rate than workers of any other legal profession. Even police officers are killed less often.”

On the lighter side of cab driving, I chuckled as each driver told the author his immigrant story because:

“Almost every taxi driver I met who had come from somewhere else, especially from tropical climes, told a similar story of landing during the cold dead of winter. No one ever seems to arrive in Canada in the summer, as if there were an official government policy to cruelly haze new Canadians with weather.”

The best chapter was about the women of Ikwe, a group of Winnipeg women drivers who serve a female clientele. After feeling the abuse and discrimination from male drivers, Winnipeg women had had enough. Ikwe, an Ojibwe word meaning woman, is their non-profit taxi service. I also enjoyed the chapter on Rawi Hage, a driver turned award-winning author.

Di Cintio included a pandemic postscript, to document how COVID decimated the taxi industry. Drivers lost customers and had to work longer shifts to earn the same each day. Cabs were outfitted with barriers and some drivers no longer felt safe handling their passengers’ baggage.

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Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops

 

Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops by Shaun Bythell was a small book of 120 pages, wherein Bythell, the owner of a Scottish second-hand bookstore, takes a humorous look at those who patronize his store. He divided his customers into seven types (and subtypes within each chapter): Expert; Young Family; Occultist; Loiterer; Bearded Pensioner; The Not-So-Silent Traveller; and Family Historian. He himself was not immune to criticism as his final chapter was all about the various kinds of bookstore staff.

For such a short book I had numerous laugh-out-loud moments, as I recognized many such customers in my own book-buying trips. I couldn’t place myself into any of his categories, even among the most favorable type, the “perfect customer”, which he tagged on at the very end in a post-script chapter. I am the kind of customer who never haggles over prices which is in keeping with my preference to avoid dealing with any staff while I’m shopping. I like to browse and wander and do not need direction, unless I am in a hurry and don’t have the luxury of spending hours in the store. These are rare bookstore moments, as I usually allow myself plenty of time to find what I’m looking for. However if my time is limited I will ask the first staff person I see to point the way to foreign languages or local history and I will be off like a dart.

I loved the story about book-loving children, which Bythell had seen plenty of times where parents have a hard time dragging their kids out of the store. That’s exactly the way I reacted whenever I had to leave a bookstore–and often still do. My “give me five more minutes, I promise” is Craigspeak for needing an additional half hour.

In a story within the chapter on Bearded Pensioners, I liked the author’s imagery in describing the wardrobe of the “female of this species”:

“It’s a sort of green tartan waistcoat, made from the hardiest of tweed. It looks like the sort of thing that’s tough enough to drag through a hedge backwards without damaging a single stitch.”

Among the not-so-silent travellers are customers who whistle, hum or fart. What could be more annoying than hearing a whistler broadcast some tuneless pop song/TV theme song mishmash throughout the entire store?

I like to go hunting when I shop. Whether I’m looking for second-hand books or, back in the 1990’s when I would look for Christmas music in Sam the Record Man’s enormous holiday section, it paid to have the patience to dig through stacks of books or CD’s. I always found one-of-a-kind gems that had been overlooked. Like the customers below, our perseverance rewarded us with cheap loot:

“They’re clearly married, because the moment they enter the shop they split up and avoid one another for at least an hour while they ferret away, but when they come to the counter they will each have found at least five books in the shop which have been there since 1970, and which nobody has bothered to change the price of since then. These are books which ought to be £20 each, but which–by virtue of idleness on my part, combined with the fact that we have 100,000 books in the shop–have remained priced at £1 each. I have no idea how they hunt them out, but they do so with such determination–like pigs hunting for truffles every time they visit–that I feel that I should probably offer them each a job.”

Bythell ranks fiction collectors, railway collectors, sci-fi fans and those who are open to good advice as his best kind of customers. Those, as well as anyone who doesn’t haggle over his prices are tops in his book.

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Hockey Card Stories

 

Hockey Card Stories is the third book I have read by Ken Reid, following One Night Only: Conversations with the NHL’s One-Game Wonders and One to Remember: Stories from 39 Members of the NHL’s One Goal Club. I found this one to be the funniest of the bunch, and as a hockey card collector from the seventies I surely recognized all the cards he profiled from that period. Since my collection is within easy reach, and not buried in a box in the garage or unfortunately thrown out by an overzealous tidier of a mother, I could reach in and take a look at these cards myself. Reid provided life-size shots of the front and back of each card he talked about.

Before I saw any hockey cards, though, when I opened the cover my eyes were greeted by a double-sided page of pink. I have to admit that it took me a few seconds to figure out what this page was (was it a misprint or ink error?) and then it dawned on me: it was a piece of dusty hard hockey card gum. Priceless!

Reid divided his stories into eleven chapters based on card theme, such as Goalies, Rookies, Hall of Famers and WHA cards, but by far the most amusing chapters dealt with topics such as Strike a Pose (for the best card posers), Making it Look Mean (for the meanest faces ever to adorn a card) and my favourites, Airbrush and Error Cards. Unquestionably the worst cut-and-paste job in hockey card history has to go to the 1971-72 O-Pee-Chee for Rogie Vachon. He had just been traded from the Montreal Canadiens to the Los Angeles Kings and a card was hurriedly pieced together to create this:

That is Rogie’s head but definitely not his body. According to Reid, everything from the neck down belongs to Ross Lonsberry.

In the chapter on Colorado Rockies player Jack Valiquette, Reid wrote:

“Confession: I love the Colorado Rockies uniform…I loved pulling out the odd Rockies card from a wax pack. I loved the way they looked: the blue, red, gold and white just worked for me.”

I have to agree with him. In the 1977-78 O-Pee-Chee series, the team logo card, below, was one of my favourites:

Reid has written a second volume of hockey card stories and I will have to request it via interloan.

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Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan

Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan by Erika Fatland (translated by Kari Dickson) looked as if it was going to be a daunting brick of a book of 477 pages, but it surprised me by being an alarmingly rapid read. Fatland wrote it in her native Norwegian and Dickson produced such an excellent translation that, barring only a couple turns of phrase a native English speaker would never say, it was difficult to tell that this book wasn’t originally written in English. For 477 pages, that’s pretty good.

I was hooked as I read about Fatland’s treks through the five former Soviet republics of Central Asia in the early 2010’s. She made the trip on her own yet with obligatory guides and drivers where necessary. Turkmenistan, covered in the first chapter, is the most bizarre of the Asian republics in its paranoia and personality cult of a regime. A comparison to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea would be accurate in that Fatland was never let out of sight (or when she thought she was, she knew someone was watching or listening). The only part where the book d-r-a-g-g-e-d was the section entitled The Great Game within the chapter on Tajikistan where Fatland spent far too long outlining the failed attempts to conquer Central Asia, most recently by the British and Soviets. I was lulled to sleep at times, but the history of the Wakhan Corridor revived me. Aside from those pages, she wrote with a degree of intellectual curiosity that was infectious. Unlike some travel storytellers, Fatland didn’t look down on the people or places she visited. She didn’t use cultural differences as a way to ridicule those that were different from her. Her language skills worked to her advantage, as she attempted to speak to the people she met in their native tongue, falling on Russian as a lingua franca.

Among her many adventures within each republic, my favourites were travelling down the empty multi-lane highway in downtown Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, among the white marble buildings and statues of its late dictator. I also enjoyed her trek across the salty bed of the former Aral Sea. She talked to Kyrgyz women who were kidnapped into marriage, who, surprisingly, didn’t mind being abducted. That section had the best of all subchapter titles: “Don’t Cry, You are My Wife Now”. The history of cotton production in Uzbekistan, and the evaporation of the Aral Sea there to divert its water for irrigation, was also of great interest.

Since the book had no index it was difficult to relocate passages (such as that about the Wakhan Corridor) and although the pagination left roughly 95 pages to each republic it was still no easy task to find things, in spite of the subchapter titles. I always keep notes when I read and I realized how important it was to do so without an index. I found a few editing gaffes that should be corrected by the next printing, such as the confusion of the years on p. 46. Fatland wrote that Saparmurat Niyazov was born on February 19, 1949, yet in the very next sentence stated that his father died during the Second World War, and in the sentence after that she wrote that his mother died in an earthquake in 1948. So was Niyazov born after both his parents had died? The imprint I read was meant for a British audience as British spellings such as tyre were used, so I suppose the UK indecisiveness over the metric versus imperial systems allowed the author to alternate between kilometres and miles. And in discussing the sheer size of Russia and Kazakhstan, she erred in stating “The Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, today’s Kazakhstan, accounted for twelve per cent of the total area of the Soviet Union, which was a staggering 22,402,200 square metres.” (emphasis mine). Perhaps this was a translator error or a slip of the printer. I’d like to see what the original Norwegian text said.

I thoroughly enjoyed Sovietistan, and the author’s bibliography has led me to request two books via interloan.

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Outrageous Misfits: Female Impersonator Craig Russell and His Wife, Lori Russell Eadie

 

Outrageous Misfits: Female Impersonator Craig Russell and His Wife, Lori Russell Eadie by Brian Bradley came out in 2020. It was a hefty and substantial biography of the couple, beautifully laid out with text and photos. I grew up knowing who Russell was and I own the DVD of his most famous film, outrageous! Despite being gay Craig married Lori in 1982. Lori herself didn’t like labels yet her marriage surprised many people because they all thought that she was a lesbian. Bradley used extensive resources–just look at the lengthy bibliography and list of source material at the end of the book–including Lori’s own journals. He had an insight into the psychological makeup of two needy people who were desperate to be loved.

Craig was an overweight effeminate boy who from an early age liked to dress up in women’s clothing and accessories. His own grandmother recognized this and gave him earrings when he was five. Craig drowned his sorrows from teasing and low self-esteem in his idols, famous women stars and singers, and mastered the art of impersonation. He copied every subtle mannerism, twitch and turn to make you feel that you were actually watching Judy Garland, Tallulah Bankhead, Peggy Lee, Carol Channing or Bette Midler onstage. But no one impressed Craig more than Mae West. Craig eventually lived with West for a short time as her personal secretary, but was fired after the legendary actress discovered he had been taking liberties with her wardrobe.

Craig’s ability to transform into these women was uncanny: the generous photos show how he made himself look identical to West, Lee and Channing. Craig never lip-synched to their songs or dialogue. He was a true impressionist who copied their vocal delivery as well. He dreamt of stardom and achieved it. In the early seventies Craig was one of the first drag stars, however he preferred the terms female impersonator or female impressionist to drag queen. When onstage he was adored and the teasing and bullying stopped. Fans mobbed him backstage for photos and autographs. Bradley reported that Craig rarely left character offstage, even when at home. While this annoyed many people, it was easy to see why he did this. As long as he acted as one of his beloved ladies, the public adored him. He no longer had to deal with his insecurities. Therefore if he held a phone conversation with you while talking like Bette Davis, he felt you couldn’t hurt him:

“His impressions made him feel happy and they were a place to hide. There was no place to feel and talk about sensitivities and emotions if you were doing impressions of a movie star all the time.”

Bradley wrote two full biographies and treated both Craig and Lori with equal space. While Craig was certainly the star, the author didn’t frame Lori’s story always in the perspective of her husband. Lori grew up in an abusive household, tormented by a mother who rejected her. She found comfort in the performing arts, spending her time lost among the actors onstage in movies and live theatre. Lori developed an attraction to Craig, perhaps by seeing how the act of transformation can make an entire audience love you. She attended many of his performances and met him backstage. There was an immediate attraction of souls and the two were inseparable. Lori attended to Craig’s every need and eventually was hired as his dresser, in charge of his wardrobe, and accompanied him to shows.

Both Craig and Lori dealt with their own mental issues: Craig was manic-depressive and Lori was bipolar. In the late seventies they dealt with these issues not by psychotherapy and licenced prescriptions but through drinking and drugs. While no stranger to boozing and snorting coke, Craig’s decline started only after he made the film outrageous! Although he was lauded with awards and praise for his groundbreaking role as a female impersonator as the star of a movie, he felt that he was always under pressure to do something even more outrageous than the last. He had a reputation to live up to and the drinking and drugs helped move him along. He missed shows–sabotaged them even while onstage–and it wasn’t long before booking agents refused to deal with him. He was losing his star calibre. After a string of bad news stories and show disasters, the public needed some good news about Craig to start off 1982. Craig knew how to ring in the new year right: he announced that he was going to be married.

Outrageous publicity stunt it might have seemed, Craig and Lori did live together–at first–and then, without Lori, he left for a tour of Europe that lasted four and a half years. The constant strive to ever be more “outrageous” took its toll as Craig got into fights, ruined gigs and sunk deeper into the mire of booze and drugs. I had little to dislike about this book aside from Bradley’s overuse of the word outrageous, when he clearly didn’t have to. A film sequel, Too Outrageous! in 1987 and a return to the Imperial Room at the Royal York Hotel were not successes. The public and critics had grown tired of his act since he had not updated his impressions or repertoire. Reviewers felt he should be impersonating more modern entertainers. Craig’s comeback was a failure and he never recovered professionally as HIV was weakening him. Lori, devoted to Craig unconditionally, cared for him until the end.

Lori took the role of wife seriously and while she may seem to be an obsessed fan awarded with the ultimate prize, she always honoured Craig during his life and after his death fought–rightfully so–for her place in history as his widow. She herself died of melanoma in 2008 and is buried alongside Craig with his mother and stepfather.

Bradley wrote a biography of a remarkable couple that I could not put down. It chronicled the theatre and gay scenes in Toronto in the early seventies and also paid tribute to drag history. I would love to see this book turned into a movie.

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The Clean Body: A Modern History

The Clean Body: A Modern History by Peter Ward covered the habits of personal hygiene, or lack thereof, in Europe and North America from the nineteenth century onward. Ward was exhaustive in his coverage, not merely listing the products that were used, whether soap, shampoo, toothpaste and laundry detergent, but the social conditions and daily habits that led to the evolution in cleanliness practices. It would be hard to bathe regularly if your house wasn’t equipped with a private room; likewise those who lived in houses that didn’t even have running water were less likely to have a bath at all. Thus house design was influenced by this change in attitude towards personal hygiene.

Ward exposed the disparity between class and cleanliness, and also how urban and rural living affected one’s tendency to wash. Western society of the past fifty years has bred overall clean body habits, where the majority of people shower or bathe, brush their teeth and wash their hair every single day. This was unheard of two hundred years ago. The bathing habits back then focussed on washing only the skin that was exposed, so people concentrated on their faces and hands. There was a disconnect between hygiene and good health. This changed as scientific discoveries proved the connection between uncleanliness and disease. Early soap advertisements promoted good health as the result of using their products. Now with all people taking a daily shower and washing their hands we do not need to promote health via hygiene. The advertising of today promotes clean bodies as more attractive and desirable than healthy, thus aesthetics is the new goal of hygiene. Yet by the 1800’s:

“Before the end of the nineteenth century, then, the idea of regular bathing had come to be embedded in leading notions of hygiene. The German hygienic reformer Oscar Lassar established it as the defining goal of his crusade during the 1880s, and he was only one of many champions of cleanliness for whom it became a core objective. Public bath promoters like Lasser [sic] wished to imbue the lower classes with bourgeois standards of body care: the new hygiene would improve the habits of the poor, animate their sense of self-control, and uplift their physical and moral condition. Bathing was a discipline that, once accepted, would prompt them to embrace the duty of their own body care and, in turn, their own general welfare. Many proponents wrapped the cause in the rhetoric of advancing social progress.”

Thus cleanliness, a characteristic of only the rich–who after all could afford the time and space to bathe–was promoted among the lower classes. Ward often described how slowly it was for new hygiene habits to become regular, and western Europe lagged behind the squeaky-clean USA. The author supplemented the text with figures and tables that showed washing machine usage, time spent doing laundry work, and soap and detergent consumption to back up these claims.

I needed two weeks to finish this book. Its 66 pages of endnotes–in a book that was only 308 pages long, excluding the index–made for a tiring read at times. As one who always reads notations such as endnotes, footnotes, acknowledgements and the bibliography, facing these 66 pages was daunting. The Clean Body was a slow read though meticulously researched. You might end up shaking your head wondering how people a couple centuries ago managed to stand each other living amongst the literal unwashed. I suppose mutual stink cancelled the others out.

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Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession

Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession by Gavin Francis was a psychological trip into my own island obsession. I read eerie similarities between the author and myself in analyzing our mutual preference for taking holidays to insular destinations. I had a feeling that I would be reading deep into my own mind when I encountered, on the very first page, the author’s earliest memories of visiting libraries and what he enjoyed most about them:

“Thinking of islands often returns me in memory to the municipal library I visited as a child. The library was one of the grandest buildings in town–entered directly from the street through heavy brass doors, each one tessellated in panes of glass thick as lenses. By age eight or nine I’d exhausted the children’s library and been given an adult borrower’s ticket. But as my mother browsed the shelves, often as not I’d sit down on the scratchy carpet tiles and open an immense atlas, running my fingers over distant and unreachable archipelagos as if reading Braille. I hardly dared hope I’d reach any of them; that I have reached a few is something of a relief. And so the love of islands has always, for me, been inextricable from the love of maps.”

Francis and I shared the exact same story, although I was a little older when I discovered the National Geographic Atlas of the World. What draws us to these destinations? Surely there are other places that are just as interesting yet easier to get to. Why spend extra time and expense hightailing it to a dot in the water? Francis elaborates on a possible answer:

“But through adolescence, medical school, and working as a doctor in speciality training, it began to dawn on me that I sought out islands to recalibrate my sense of what matters. Their absence of connection, their isolation, was therapeutic in a way I found difficult to articulate.”

During my travelogue presentations on my trips to Tristan da Cunha, I give a brief history of the island and my particular attraction to it. Knowing that people who attend my shows are there to see photos from my trips and not to sit there listening to some guy talking in front of a blank screen, in my opening monologue I defer to the excuse “I’d have to lie down on a psychiatrist’s couch in order to explain in depth my psychological attraction to islands as vacation destinations”. For Francis is correct: it is difficult to articulate the reasons we find islands so appealing. I find it therapeutic as well, as I use islands as a way to get away from people and the proverbial hustle and bustle of my everyday life. How else to explain my penchant for visiting isolated islands or ones that have low populations? You don’t find me taking trips to Indonesia, Japan or the Philippines, for example. Yet my own travel blog is filled with vacation reports–and often repeated trips–spent in the Åland Islands, Ile de Batz, Bornholm, Christiansø, the Faroe Islands, Grímsey, Iceland, McNabs Island, Nightingale Island, Pelee Island, Tristan da Cunha, Vardø, and Vestmannaeyjar. Last year I had planned a trip to Europe which included a stop in the Isle of Man.

While I have to use vacation time to visit these islands, Francis was a doctor and made his obsession a part of his job by taking temporary medical assignments to remote islands the world over. In Island Dreams, we follow him as he travels the world but his story is not a chronological narrative. In fact, his book is heavy on the maps and low on the text. The book is only 246 pages long but printed on thick paper–perhaps in homage to the exploration maps of centuries ago. Francis gave the reading experience the conscious feeling of containment, as the text was descriptive and informative yet brief, captured on pages with wide margins and headers and footers. Pages therefore resembled islands of text surrounded by moats of margins. The words themselves were contained, as I never saw a hyphenated word split across two pages and with rare exception each page ended with complete sentences, anchored by periods.

Francis wrote some evocative descriptions of his travels, such as this memory of the aurora borealis:

“A wash of swirling luminescence rose and fell, like marbled endpapers spread over the book of the sea.”

While visiting the Andaman Islands, my temples started to throb when Francis wrote:

“On the ground the heat was like a migraine, pounding and shimmering, fracturing the light.”

Francis filled his book with maps, almost all of which were historical in context and thus may not have even referred to the places he was discussing by their current names. Maps flanked the text so the reader never had to flip ahead or back to find out where he was writing about. Some maps weren’t even in English. In spite of these forms of disguise, I found it a pleasure to try to find the islands from these small maps, as it wasn’t always easy and I often used a magnifying glass. It is fitting that he used Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island as the map on the book cover; each antiquated map Francis supplied yielded its own treasure to the reader with the patience to search within it.

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