The Big Vivid

By Gary Montague

Based on a true story, The Big Vivid stumbles with a buck reporter and his ranging philosophic mind into a small town's newspaper war, a bevy of rich characters, humour, a hot romantic bond; scandals, both political, one criminal; and a brutal murder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Jun 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9780228808732

Gary Montague

Gary Montague's artistic heart grew up early with drawing, painting for which he was awarded, and a nip of the writing muse. All hijacked by playing in a group of already accomplished young musicians he helped begin out of Regina, recording in the U.S., while working himself through high school; then as a busy drummer on the West Coast putting himself through university where he studied philosophy. With a background in journalism and a varied life, he now lives on Vancouver Island and loves to play jazz funk.

Book preview

Chapter One

Piglets, that’s it. Squint your eyes …

Stubby little white ones. Squiggly piglets if you pinched them. Snouts down, rumps up, backsides stained a molasses-brown and a dusted-grey. Huddled in that circular beamy-black trough, the dense mass, defused, spent, belying health, takes a collective sigh, seemingly waiting for a smouldering other to arrive to be jammed in with what’s left of squat remains or left teetering on the edge, spilling its innards on one or more of its like, only to fall and lie inert, forgot.

Innumerable grey flecks had alighted about as well, with dropped fragile clumps to shoulder down amid the wretched piggies and break up, sift in with the jostling of conscripts. The flecks spread from the shallow thick-glassed hole, diminishing as they landed, primarily to the man’s left, across strewn newspapers (weeklies—one from the competition in town and others, by subscription, from around the province); bits of unfinished typing on cheap newsprint (later to become known as copy); a race-scribbled notepad, folded back; a dictionary with finger-brushed dust visible by the light of the window (after years of hard writing in this warren of the business, the man had probably concluded that dictionaries had become too word repetitious to consult but occasionally); a pencil; a couple of ballpoint pens with blotted hairy nibs; two crumpled pink message slips; a roll of film, likely dropped on a couple of black-and white contact sheets weighted by a manual 35 mm camera, its shoulder strap hanging over the edge of the desk; next to the camera, a roll of film, ready for the darkroom; a half mug of cold, creamed coffee; the standard heavy black telephone. Next to the desk, on the unkempt indoor-outdoor carpet, lay a few more twisted piggy carcasses, mute for who knows how long. Had that ashtray and its overflowing contents not been such a grotesque signal of personal mutilation, it would have passed simply as one part of a very active workspace.

His perpetual cigarette, hanging in long fingers, quivering with its own rhythmic blip as if at a slow idle under one dead piston, would flit ash as he spoke and mulled over the effects on his desk. Bony, sallow and despite perhaps a naturally dark complexion, he seemed consumed with anaemia to the point of jaundice. Heavy nicotine stains on his fingertips blended with his jaundiced hue. The only features that broke his tint were his full head of oily short jet-black hair combed straight back and his very clean large black-rimmed glasses.

The man probably stood about five foot nine, but he looked shorter behind his desk. It didn’t help that his thick, expensive light-brown tweed jacket lifted off his shoulders as he sat. It stretched the imagination to think that at one time the man must have filled out this jacket. He wore a yellow shirt, dark-brown tie and flared polyester pants that flapped over stick shinbones when he walked briskly under the pressure of deadline. If he was a lucky man, he was beyond his mid-forties.

He knew the editor had actually glimpsed him moments earlier, coming down the thirty-foot-long but one-at-a-time-without-turning-sideways hall. Through the door-less opening to his office, the man had an unobstructed view of approaching visitors. The lengthy hall began off the small area at the reception counter located immediately inside the entrance to the building. The reception area was made even smaller by a large shipment of boxes. He had barely opened the front door before it clipped a couple. The boxes, stacked mostly two-high, virtually filled the floor space and encased the counter of the tiny reception area. The receptionist was imprisoned by boxes. And with the low ceiling, it would have been unbearably claustrophobic save for the garish fluorescent lights from what may have been a former vacuum cleaner store or furniture store outlet. Leaning over the counter, phone in one hand, pen in the other, she was writing on an order form when he had come in. Explaining his name was Clayton Sil, The receptionist had been too busy to announce him and motioned where to find the editor, Nathan Krauly.

The long hall to the editor’s office led him along a medium-brown veneered wall off his right shoulder, while to the left were two minikin stalls serving as reporters’ offices. Before the young man was halfway down the hall, the editor happened to glance up in an aloof scan—immediately dropping his eyes back to the desk upon sighting him. Somewhere in a psychology 101 class, not many short years before, he remembered it had been mentioned once that a person who looked down upon meeting could be couching a dominating personality.

Ello, came a slow, deep Oxford accent, surprisingly resilient for a slight and obviously ill man. Heavy smoking may have deepened his throat. Please sit down. Clear, round, even soothing, but his manner too proper. No expression on his face except a slight rise of the eyebrows over a stare fading somewhere just off the front of the desk. They hadn’t yet met or spoken. The young man was expected but unannounced.

It felt good to sit; besides he was a little too desperate to blow it by standing, looking nervous. Momentary distractions like the filthy ashtray—festering abuse there on the desk corner less than a reach from his face—ironically helped to plug cuts of silence during this, his first, job interview. Employment was an unavoidable commitment now that he was in the real world. Little did he know, as he sat there, that the incredulously stuffed, filthy ashtray would come to a stop in his memory many times over the coming years.

You wouldn’t happen to be looking for a reporter, would you? It was a line he’d chosen to open with, and he delivered it with a wisp of jocularity to hide his vulnerability. He had dropped in on just enough small-town newspaper editors to know they all felt understaffed. Community newspapers generally couldn’t afford adequate help, although some papers who could afford it, just refused to pay for it.

I don’t have experience, but I do have a university degree and a hell of a desire to learn about the business of journalism.

He delivered that second line quickly after the first to show eagerness, and more importantly to deflect his lack of practical experience—zilch; couldn’t even type. (He had graduated when it was still acceptable to submit essays in longhand, just prior to the next little crop of materially richer pubertal students with personal electric typewriters and even portable television sets for their room away from home, compliments of Mummy and Daddy.

Still, the conventional rumour was that longhand cost you at least a grade point. He refused to believe that. Besides, when a prof had indicated typing a paper was absolutely necessary, he had always nabbed some lady friend to type it for him, aided by the suggestion of beer and dancing.

But at least he had a degree. And from what he could discern, there were many self-made editor/publishers out on the frontier who’d never seen the inside of a lecture hall, so they might assume he knew what he was doing. Truth was, he took naturally to things with malleable entry standards: things one could play into, rather than slot into, like writing essays as opposed to exams.

And he was perfectly aware of the fib behind his follow-up line. All he really wanted to do—at least thought he really wanted to do, if only to appease the throes of an uncertain universe lurking beyond the cradle of school existence—was law. He’d probably be good at it. He liked theory through language. He’d eat the pedantic clawing for paper grades and then take his chances in the practical life of legal practice. Having an adept foot in the street had come somewhat naturally to him. Growing up on the prairies, running his own band, much of it on the road, he’d at least some street experience. To be successful, he had had to be practical as well as idealistic. Law, too, would demand that: to be awake. And the other stuff, the conceptual stuff, well he’d just earned a BA with a heavy double-major in philosophy. Legal theory would feel like a break. So, if he could take the shit they threw at you in law school, and a playpen laden with colour-coordinated poli-sci students (he didn’t like political science students—too many opportunists with no political maturity using a trendy light subject on their way to law school—the culture produced them), he’d probably end up being a pretty snappy, happy, financially-secure, professional-type person with prestige even, important when you’re young.

Hell, he would be one of those honest lawyers, duelling it out in the stuff of substance. Environmental law was just becoming big. Green Peace had not long been birthed by the generation through the initial penning of letters by longhairs on little round beer-soaked, terrycloth-topped tables, quaffing affordable twenty-cent glasses of chemical-smelling draft in the grotty bars of East End Vancouver.

Integrity was something he respected. His father was like that... Yet would law and all that be enough? Probably not, and he knew it. He’d like to write literature, eventually, if he could, but he knew the arts were one damn brutal way to try and make a living.

It was the first week in November and he was very blond to neck length (remnants of sheer platinum lit in the Mediterranean sun) with a naturally streaked, neatly cropped full beard and skin still bronzed from spending the past year in the sun and sea salt of the South of France. A break after graduating, he had financed it by working his last summer as a student on oil rig airstrips in the High Arctic. He’d needed it. He’d put himself through school being a very busy musician, a drummer. That, the university social life and the grip of an at once enthralling yet demanding discipline of study called philosophy, for the first time in his fresh life he’d burnt himself out. His father and sister had brought him to realize it. So, he took their advice and screwed off.

What he had carried abroad with him turned out to be a quaint naive query as to whether or not a foreign language, in this case French, and its grammatical structure would have the same or similar reasoning facilities as English.

Hah, firsthand exposure? No doubt one of those spring-out-of-the-window, dreamy-sunny-afternoon heady musings sceptically pricked during a required class in logic, that stuff of classical sentential calculus. The French, in their educational lexicon of course, had the same algebraic directives (the vectors, squiggles, squarks, squirps and boogles) he’d flip in his mind for the symbols of pure mathematics, hey in all the romance languages, or hell any other linguistic communication on the planet. Well, how much does the structure of language have to do with how we perform thinking? No problem, let’s throw some mathematics at it – see if anything comes out, he’d mocked. We’ve been developing that since the 4th century and look at all this dazzling stuff of logic we now have come up with for certainty’s wisdom? Sheesh. There was a difference though.

The French had this fervour (the culture, the ol’ Latin blood thing?) for arguing in circles, at least as far as Clayton strove to be neutral about it (and he did). He found out during a lively disagreement with his property manager in France, as it happened on the street outside the real estate office, about something or other having to do with his rented apartment...

Ah, yes. What to do with the damage deposit? Clayton wanted to leave it as a gift for a young couple from the neighbourhood who had befriended him. They had asked him if they could take over his cosy little place when he returned to Canada. A nice young couple of modest class, from out of the darkness of the evenings, their parents not remotely aware of their throes of late passionate puberty, first burning moist devotion. The landlord, Le Maire, from a small village in the mountains behind Nice, had just died of a stroke, according to the young couple who had taken it off the grapevine. The property agent was of course not yet aware of the death—a hopelessly complicating factor for the lourd procedural mind of the French.

Through the indispensable aid of an interpreter, an acquaintance of Clayton’s, une mademoiselle jolie Niceoise, he detected a technique of argument by attrition. It was seemingly based on an onslaught of verbiage, delivered with utmost passion and pace, and essentially repeated until the opponent tired and walked off...

Clayton decided to dig in with dispassionate on-the-spot recall and astute fleet-of-foot retort. As it turned out, from the independent arbitration of a growing gathering of onlookers uttering those so very French moans of recognition, Clayton seemed to have won the day. Then, to boot, there appeared to be something of a snap recess as if into another box of the Frenchman’s mind, the man switching channels, as it were, or rather like a chicken’s split-peck at an errant seed on some other bearing. For his countenance immediately transformed him from repudiation in all of its resplendent bluster, to as if having never taken place... Poof, his resignation was instantaneous with that typique shrug of the shoulders.

Later, on a lazy Mediterranean afternoon, sitting at a sidewalk bistro on the Promenade des Anglais not far from access to the vieille village, Clayton struck up a conversation with a middle-aged, grey-bearded Canadian named Peter, a linguistics professor on sabbatical from the University of Ottawa. Clayton recounted his frustrating episode with the Frenchman who had the impervious habit of repeating his thinking. Peter turned his head from looking out over the road to the sea and with a smile quietly offered, I think it’s the Cartesian influence in their system of education.

Of course! Clayton slapped his thighs. Hadn’t thought of that, silly me.

They both knew of good old René Descartes, the huge thinking seventeenth-century native son of proud France. Descartes had been a man of science and letters, who had invented coordinate geometry, had written prolifically and was espoused as the father of modern Western philosophy for his technique into thinking itself, termed today as philosophical investigation.

The cogito, said Peter.

The legendary cogito ergo sum; I think therefore I am, stated Clayton. The proof of his own existence and that of God, for that matter. You scratch most religious thinking and you find its reasoning at the bottom. Then you may even find it in the use of ‘common sense.’ Take your pick, something like: Now that I exist, and I know that because I think, I could not have conceived of God unless He exists to have created these conditions. Kind of concentric? It’s been subtle throughout the ages.

The problem is … it’s circular, Peter affirmed.

Logic on a loop, smiled Clayton. Two hundred years later, a couple of mathematicians—A.N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell—identified the cogito as a tautology. It says the same thing over again in the same sentence, just with different words. It talks only to itself. ‘Logically’ true to form, but only that; useless because it tells you nothing about the literal world.

Means zip, seconded Peter. And I bet the French are still pissed off that it was a couple of Brits who figured that out. A quick guffaw from both.

But that’s it, Clayton went on. He could not think if he didn’t exist. All right, he is able to think because he exists; hey, deny that. But it’s a closed setup. And how far can you take that to the bank? Thinking itself is the issue. I know lots of people who obviously exist, yet I certainly wouldn’t rely on their thinking.

But you have to give it to Descartes, Peter said, shaking his head. He sat alone in his dressing gown and had a super serious talk with himself.

You bet. A reflection for all of history, heeded Clayton. He questioned everything from his own senses to his actual ability to accurately perceive say, the table, the chair, the window, and even his ability to reliably know one’s very self... He beat the shit out of deductive reasoning!

What I like, said Peter, is that he famously posited there could be a godlike evil genius playing with us, reversing any judgment without our even knowing!

A metaphor for all uncertainty, weighed Clayton. "Of course, it’s silly to question the chair, the table, but what René stumbled across for us is that we do have a problem with the idea of reality. Forget the senses being imprecise; no one can deny existence. That was his truth. And then maybe, maybe, he could save himself and humanity from the evils of philosophical gridlock through thinking. But he didn’t step out of his tautology to ‘What is existence?’"

It reminds me, said Peter, of the ancient Greeks who were the first to wrestle with ‘What is perception?’ Scary stuff, too, when they took it on. The father of Greek scepticism, Pyrrho of Ellis, who died I think in 272 B.C., finally gave up on all reliability. He determined thinking could be like an opiate, like a mirage and a dream over time, that causality itself may be no more than a state of mind, and that the senses don’t guarantee sanity. Pyrrho finally said screw it. He decided the only way to happiness was to suspend all judgment; quit thinking about it, get on with your day, jeez.

Clayton reflected on that.

Peter, I’m thinking Machiavelli is maybe more important in the history of Western thought than Descartes. Maybe Machiavelli should be the deep dad of Western deliberation. Not for his technique in the deductive investigation into thought, but because of his astute observance to a practice. Hell, it was the Renaissance Florentines who revived the old Sumerian trick of double-entry or over-and-under-the-table bookkeeping to later surface, I think, in such distinctions as the conscious and the unconscious. That, maybe, is the influence of raw idea over technique, whatever the symbiosis is of all of that shit.

It’s a point, agreed Peter.

Clayton popped out, How do you know about this stuff, anyway?

I majored in the humanities as an undergraduate.

Clayton appreciated that.

It’s an old problem, said Peter, the perception mind-knot. We do have something called psycholinguistics.

And we share an overlap in philosophy with mind-body identity theory or meaning in language, added Clayton, but ol’ René had an answer, for a while."

Oops, back to uncertainty, joked Peter.

Cheeky though knowledge can be, added Clayton.

They sat back for a moment taking in pedestrians, cars, palm trees, the azure horizon.

Lifting his glass of red provençal, Clayton asked the professor, So, what are you drinking?

That’s an espresso, and that’s a cognac. Great for an afternoon break. One picks you up, the other smooths you out. Learned it from the French—very civilized.

Clayton looked around for the waiter...

Studying French with international students at the University of Nice did the relax-and-rejuvenation trick for Clayton. There was a practical element to learning the language as well. Someday he might need it if he found himself applying for a federal job back in Canada. Who knows?

It was an invigorating cultural exchange—wine, women and song, and more women—which was equally damned handy as far as the ladies were concerned. A wild and lovely time. Learning the language was a challenge though, particularly since most of the ambitious young French saw it as an opportunity to practice their English. Clayton noted a Greek student he had met who spoke French with ease, contrary to his ancients who were known to not speak the languages of others; and indeed, their later Roman rulers had to learn Greek in order to communicate with their Greek slaves. The greater French could not be faulted for loving their beautiful language, but the empire had given way to a McLuhanesque world. The Scandinavians, in particular, were functionally multilingual. The North Americans, well, were either quite good at French or, often the unwitting yanks, very bad at it.

It made the adage The best way to learn French is on your back something of a saving grace for Clayton. His easy Canuck-egalitarian-prairie charm fell all round, especially for the lot of European women who, at that time, were often used to accommodating varying degrees of male chauvinism. Those notoriously snobby yet impressionable French girls thought he looked like a romantic character from an American western. It was not without its drawbacks. He got the dose, actually from an American girl. And very American she was, daftly swallowing a line from a South African with, of course, diamonds in his family, about a further romantic rendezvous in, of course, some other country, while he proceeded to give her the clap.

When Clayton had gone to the clinic in a hospital, he passed a nurse in the second-floor main corridor. With a lit cigarette in her hand and noticeably unwashed hair, it reminded him of a newspaper article he had happened across before going overseas. That article sighted statistics that the French now showered on average once a week, finally upping the English in personal hygiene. He made a mental note not to be caught alive again in a conventional French public hospital.

Chapter Two

But alas, it was now. He needed a job.

Journalism … Well, it wasn’t long after Watergate and Richard Nixon’s resignation that, upon hearing the news, the American students living in France said they partied like they had never done in their lives! Yep, journalism looked kind of romantic. Maybe it would stand him in good stead to later wedge himself into law school. And wasn’t it some wag in an English lit class who quipped that journalism remotely resembled writing? Besides, there simply are no jobs thinking heavy thoughts from nine-to-five.

Michael, our reporter, said Nathan Krauly nodding to the stall immediately behind Clayton on the other side of the veneer slap-board separation, as it happens will be leaving us the day after tomorrow.

Wednesday is when we publish each week. He is going up the street... to the competition. One vaguely annoyed eyebrow returned to position. But he has agreed to stay over a few days to help us out, which is very decent of him. What I would like to see...

The telephone rang.

The editor’s eyes darted to it with disdain, cleaving for an instant the constant quivering. The phone high on the desk to his right, cigarette in the other hand, he plucked the receiver off its stand.

...Oh, ’ello dawling! came the protracted Oxford in relish, his head and body folded into the chair as he swivelled his back to Clayton, leaving him sitting suspended.

Then he cut it short, raised his head, placed his hand over the receiver, and swivelling back around to his interviewee, said, "Excuuse me..." His decorous drawl barely concealed his bother through another brief stare ending somewhere off the edge of his desk.

Clayton was caught dumb, feeling more awkward and vulnerable in this situation where one should go begging without showing weakness. The snap pretence on the phone made him sure it was a girlfriend. This sort of animation couldn’t be for a wife or this guy would have been dead long ago. Then it dawned on him—he was being shooed out.

He got up from the chair and took a few clumsy steps backwards through the open doorway. Looking ahead at the man engrossed on the phone and then behind him down the hall, he could see there was nowhere to wait in that one-at-a-time-without-turning-sideways thirty-foot-long hall.

Not much more than a stride to the side was Michael, looking up at him, having been listening from where he sat at his big grey pig of a Smith-Corona. What Clayton would come to lament as a grunt-and-finger-shove manual typewriter sat onerously in front of the reporter on a square wooden slab nailed to the partition wall just inside the from the hall, and held up by two pine struts running forty-five degrees from the base. The keys jarred everything. That was the stall’s desk, little bigger than the pig itself. It required placing your notepad elsewhere, on a second chair if there was one, for which there was barely enough room between the pig on the slab and the windows. Indeed, the only saving grace about the two stalls for reporters was the ceiling-to-floor display windows running the face of the building. This made one wall of a stall awash with natural light out to the sidewalk and a busy north-end strip development highway. Today was heavily overcast.

Michael had a slightly thickset five-foot-nine frame with scruffy neutral hair and beard, running shoes, jeans and a heavy cotton plaid shirt like the local loggers wore. In their brief acquaintance, the reporter would come to strike Clayton as bright and friendly, while preoccupied and speedy. Human, but busy with habituated cynicism is what seemed to come with the territory. This had been Michael’s first legitimate job in the actual business. He was about the same age as Clayton but looked older, having jumped the strait to small-town Vancouver Island from being editor of the Simon Fraser University Peak.

The receptionist would say she could see him pacing—three steps and turn—in the hall outside the stall under a lot a pressure writing. Clayton would come to appreciate that such was a young reporter pulling in angst for the elusive lead line: the beginning of each story capping the factual essence in the style of the day by a mere twenty or preferably ten words. The rest was to fall all so neatly and naturally from the most to least important, in the event the story had to be chopped for space. Although on small-town newspapers, stories generally didn’t get chopped. They usually needed as much fill as you could produce. And while you were at it, right up front in the first couple of paragraphs you needed to be sure to get the Who, What, When, Where and Why in there, eh. Oh yeah, better see if you could make it grab their attention, too. And keep it in the present: write he says, not he said. Oh and yeah, try to cut down on any superfluous articles like: this-s, that-s, these-s, those-s and the-s, for brevity, eh. While not to mention, they need it now.

This is one part of what nudges a buck reporter along to become like his peers: chain-smoking, coffee swilling and after hours at the watering hole drinking. Tomorrow be damned until tomorrow. You made your deadline (that thing which accompanies death and taxes—only daily—if you get that far).

Nailing leads was the first big hurdle for a reporter and could take what felt like a toll of fear and loathing under pressure before the instinct really emerged. It would weed out the survivors from the stargazers, often on the first day of the job, including temporary reporters and journalism-school graduates. Clayton would mature to remember one senior reporter, an Englishman, who’d worked newsrooms around the world and said the one he liked the most was in Cape Town, South Africa, because It felt good to be there. It was the people.

That senior reporter would come to give Clayton the best advice on lead lines: Take a sheet, put it in your typewriter, and write your first lead. If it’s no good, write another, and keep writing leads down the page until you’ve found the right one. Then put in a new sheet and start your article. Clayton learned it was invaluable time to take, even on an understaffed sweatbox daily when one poor fried bastard is cleaning out his desk, while the next sacrifice is standing there with notepad, freshly sharpened pencil, sleepy eyes, socks and cock in hand.

It was to read all so simply, as if the public wasn’t expected to understand much. And actually, they weren’t. People were to be fed to consume, not just the stories of course, but the ads. Rookie reporters and journalism students were taught to write for an illiterate public. The rule of thumb when learning to scribe for newspapers: keep it simple. Convenient, Clayton would think, seeing as how American television was based on the vocabulary of a twelve-year-old male.

Funny, this Krauly character would remark as a throwaway, It is not as easy as it looks. Requires nothing to read the news. He was referring to the glamorous television anchors, many of whom he said didn’t even write their own copy. But Clayton took it both ways: if the writing was hard, it was so the reading could be easy.

It was with discovery and relief that he would see for the first time an endeavouring reporter’s finished copy. It happened to be Michael’s gracious, but no doubt rushed more than usual, last assignments. They had stroked-out restarts, lines of X’s stamped as deletes, slashes separating words, inverted S’s reversing letters, arrows from which to that, and circles with slashes through them confirming typos. It was newspaper-editing shorthand. Curious how typesetters never went berserk.

Krauly said he liked Michael, as much as Krauly could like anyone or anything, because he produces a lot of copy.

Some years later Clayton would hear from a reporter, who’d stumbled off the Saltspring Island Driftwood onto a labour/management-horror-show weekly on the Lower Mainland, that Michael was supposed to be with the Canadian Press in Vancouver. That was the last Clayton would hear of his first real live reporter. He never found out what happened with Michael’s then pregnant amour, who inhabited a no-shower teepee on the closest Gulf Island which Michael wasn’t too excited about moving to, nor commuting to work on the ferry.

It was 1976 and the Gulf Islands off the British Columbian coast were rife with hippies, American draft dodgers and gentle hangers-on squatting in the lush rain forest, at one with an existential cosmos.

Right now though, standing there looking at this Michael guy, Clayton didn’t have the faintest idea what in hell the first thing was that a reporter did. As a matter of fact, Clayton had never thought much about newspapers; they’d barely acknowledged themselves in his life. Perhaps from the quick convenience of the electric media and the historical romance of far off places, he had something of