Wet Traffic

            On Monday morning I finished another freefall poem:

The traffic is wet and sucking along the street where it has sounded the same in the city for so long that it’s familiar as the names of kin and its sonorous chorus comforts when it’s steady and flowing and builds musically with a rhythm and pitch that soothes the nerves unlike when sirens pass in daytime but at night with the breathing shushing traffic it comes from a distance and rises to an elastic crescendo below my window then fades away and when several vehicles are doing the same thing but starting at different times it’s like a symphony of polyrhythms and tones like that of the deep voiced truck that just grumbled by or the thundering streetcar and then the soft cars are alone again with the resonance of  hurrying ghosts dragging their damp ectoplasm along the road.

I had to work at midday so I took my laptop along to work on a poem during my long break. On the way there I passed a homeless Chinese woman sitting on the curb at Spadina and Dundas. When I was on the street I was young and I kind of enjoyed it but I can’t imagine being out there all the time in middle age. She seemed like she might be mentally ill and that some connections had been severed between her mind and the world. There don’t seem to be any safeguards to keep the mad from sinking into the depths of the city.

            I was early getting to OCADU as usual and when I signed in I was surprised to see that I would be working with another model whose name I didn’t catch at that time. We used to have two models to a studio fairly often back in the 80s before they decided that the best way to save money at the art college was to have less people to draw. I found the instructor, Echo Railton, who is replacing Diane Pugen, writing the assignment on the blackboard with her back turned. I said hello and then so did she. She explained to me that the students would be having a test at 13:20 in which they would be drawing portraits of both me and the other model on the stage, but until then they would have us both to practice with. She had arranged some drawing horses in a circle around a space on the floor and asked me if that would be enough for one model to do short poses. I asked if it would be naked and she said “preferably”. I reminded her that the floor is cold, so she went and got some pillows.

            Shortly after starting time the other model arrived. When Echo asked which of us wanted to do the short poses, the other model said that she only sat for portraits. I didn’t know that a model could be on the payroll at OCADU and be that picky. So I got the job of doing short sittings until the test, except that there were no students in that section so she told me to just have a seat and wait. I felt uncomfortable just sitting there while the other model worked. Twenty minutes went by until a young blonde woman came and put her stuff down on one of the horses. I went over there and stood while she spent more than five minutes getting her things ready, then she stood up with her sketchpad and went over to take a seat in front of the stage to draw the other model. Echo was doing a portfolio assessment with one of her students and when she was finished she announced that I was available for short drawings. At first only the guy she’d just assessed wanted that option, so I posed just for him.

            This gig had originally been listed as all nude, but last week the model coordinator had emailed to inform me that it had changed to just a costume portrait of the head. I joked back to her that I was glad she’d told me because I’d planned on showing up naked and headless. With that change in mind I was looking forward to not having to remove my clothing this time, but it turned out that I had to after all.

            A little later another student sat down to draw me but only for one ten-minute pose. After about an hour it was time to start the test, so I put my clothes back on and sat in the chair beside the other model. She kept a different time than I did but it didn’t really matter because students were either drawing her or me. She posed for 25-minute sets while I always follow the fact that our contract states that we don’t have to pose longer than 20 minutes without a break.

            When we were finished I turned to my colleague and exclaimed, “We did it!” Then I introduced myself and found out that her name is Valeria.

            I looked at the work of one of the students and it was very well done but I told her that it was much better looking than me. Echo declared, “It looks just like you!” The student told me not to be so hard on myself.

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home to buy as many tomatoes as I could get for the $1.05 that I had in my pocket. I found the two smallest ones and weighed them very carefully. I walked away with ten cents.

            That night I watched an episode of Leave It To Beaver in which Eddie Haskell, after every time he did something shitty, started singing, “C’est Si Bon”.