Chris Mitchell Read online

  “And you would be?” The man behind the desk was so large he seemed to be overflowing out of his chair.

  “I’m a photographer,” I said. “We have a three o’clock.”

  He ducked his head so that he could peer at me over his spectacles. I counted one two three chins. “Meeting,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “You said ‘we have a three o’clock.’” He smiled proudly. “I finished your sentence.”

  I checked my watch—3:05. Either my pupils were contracting or the clouds were rolling in thicker, but the trailer walls were definitely sliding closer. “Is Orville here?”

  “Sure thing.” The man stood up and crossed the trailer. “Follow me.”

  He invited me to sit at a Formica workbench, then disappeared. The trailer was actually a compact lab about twenty feet square. It was quiet inside, only the purring of the air conditioner as a soothing soundtrack. It smelled of photo chemicals, a rank, pungent odor that was guaranteed to turn the stomach of nonphotographers but one that set me at ease. The center of the lab was occupied by a massive film-processing machine, which hummed and clicked and spat out photos more or less constantly. The rest of the lab consisted of a three-foot-wide walkway that separated the machine from dozens of filing cabinets and bookshelves around the perimeter.

  I opened my portfolio on the table and laid out tear sheets from some of my more successful shoots. When I looked up, I was surprised to see the same enormous man was easing himself into a chair next to me, surveying my work.

  “So you must be Orville,” I surmised.

  “Good lighting here.” He pointed to a headshot of a guy whose entire face was painted silver. “Did you use a gel to get that blue tint?”

  “I used a blue-based film,” I said. “And I had it cross processed.”

  He was already on to the next one. “How did you get this ghostlike image?”

  It was an action shot, a skater on a handrail, taken at dusk. “I used a slow shutter speed,” I explained, “and mounted the camera on a tripod.”

  “There’s a flash right about”—he pointed to a spot out of frame—“here. At quarter, maybe half power.”

  “Right on the money,” I said.

  He nodded and flipped through my shots, pausing every so often to ask about one detail or another. His brow was scored with thoughtful lines, his eyes quick to take in the details of each photo in my book. He turned the pages carefully, his sausage fingers tapping at the page just outside the images so as not to smudge the prints. Finally, he shut the book.

  “Very nice,” he said. He stood up to adjust the processing machine, then transferred a stack of photos to a folder by the door. Outside, the rain was falling harder, but inside the lab, it was cozy. As Orville moved around the room, he turned his body sideways to shuffle between obstacles, a maneuver that did little good since he was about the same width in every direction. Taking his seat again, his expression was inscrutable. “They’re called extreme sports, right?”

  “It’s just a sample,” I said. “I can have more photos sent from LA if you want to see them.”

  “That won’t be necessary.” He leaned back with his arms behind his head. His white-collared shirt was yellow in the armpits. “Why do you want to work here?”

  I was ready for this question. “Because I like photography,” I said. “And I like Disney.”

  His fleshy lower lip gave him the bearing of a spoiled child, pouting for another piece of pie. He blinked his watery eyes slowly behind his spectacles. “But you’re a sports photographer.”

  I was ready for this one too. I made a speech about the similarities between portrait and sport photography. “The way I see it,” I concluded, “a photographer needs to have sports experience to truly understand photography.”

  Orville nodded. “You think so?”

  I nodded enthusiastically. “And I’m hoping to learn more about portraiture from the other photographers here.”

  Again, the view over the top of the spectacles. Again the chins. One two three. “Bullshit.”

  I wasn’t ready for that one. “Excuse me?”

  “The photographers who work here need an instruction manual just to open a box of film. They don’t know exposure settings from sunblock. Half the time, they’re not even sure which way the lens faces. Now you come waltzing in here with your ‘three o’clocks’ and your cross-processed prints, and you tell me you like photography?” He wrinkled his nose as if he was looking over the edge of a box of kitty litter. “I don’t buy it.”

  I was at a total loss. I looked down at the photos fanned out on the desk and back up at his round face, glowering behind the spectacles.

  “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “Why are you here?” He crossed his arms across his chest. “What can I—what can Disney possibly do for you?”

  Six months before, I had been on top of the world. I was the editor of a wildly successful skate magazine; I had a network of friends that I would’ve killed or died for; my family was healthy; and I was in a relationship with my soul mate. I was unstoppable.

  Which was why it was so devastating when, one crisp December morning, my boss called me into his swank LA office and fired me. It seemed that some of my editorial content was, in the words of the Christian Coalition, “offensive, obscene, and patently disgusting.” Other critics pointed out that I was a “godless bastard,” a point I took as canny observation rather than malicious critique. As an example, he showed me the interview with Nick Elliot, which featured a photo of the prodigy wall riding a tombstone in a Florida cemetery. “I can appreciate an artistic statement,” he said in an unappreciative tone, “but you’ve crossed the line.” I was escorted out of the building and told that they would pack up my stuff and send it to me later.

  That weekend, while I was still reeling from my sudden loss of executive privilege, my girlfriend phoned to tell me that she had fallen in love with somebody else and would be moving out. She apologized profusely, but she had made up her mind. That was that. In fact, “that” wasn’t actually “that.” I stalked her for the next three days, sleeping in my Jeep, only to find out that the somebody she left me for was a guy who, up until that exact moment had been L on my speed dial, and for maybe five minutes longer, was number 2 in my Top 8.

  But the worst news had begun unfolding a few months prior. Sometime during the summer of that year, my mother had become very ill. It was a strange time for me because my parents never openly mentioned it to me, preferring instead to smile through the symptoms as if nothing serious was happening. The first time my mom went into the hospital, my dad said she was getting her appendix removed. The next time, it was a minor cosmetic procedure. Every time her energy sagged, they explained that she’d had a tough day or was coming down with something or just needed a nap. I was caught up in the rituals of my own twenty-something life, so I didn’t question any of the symptoms. I assumed a new diet might’ve been the reason for her weight loss and thinner hair.

  Then, on a day that was already strained to the point of breaking, I got a call from my older brother, Michael. “There’s something you need to know. And you’re going to want to sit down.” He explained that our mother was very sick. She had a deadly form of cancer known as lymphoma, which was already in the late stages by the time they detected it.

  I couldn’t understand a lot of his medical jargon, but I got the gist. Because lymphoma was based in the lymph nodes, the lymph was carrying the cancerous cells though the bloodstream to every organ in her body. Could they remove the lymph nodes? It was too far along. Could they treat each organ? It was too pervasive. In essence, there was no center of operations; hence, no easy surgery to remove the cancer.

  Our parents had known about the diagnosis for months, but they didn’t want to bother me with all the messy details. Mom and dad had asked him not to tell me, but he thought I should know.

  My guts turned to acid, then to worms, then to acid again. Instinc
tively, I looked for my shadow, but I was inside, naked. The words fought their way out. “Is she okay?”

  “Not really, no.”

  His scientific formality burned like frostbite. “Is she in pain?”

  “Yes.” He added, “A lot.” At that moment, I hated him as much as I ever had. He was talking about our mother the way he used to describe med school cadaver research over dinner—distant, cold—relishing my obvious discomfort. The asshole. Still, he was being honest with me.

  “Why didn’t they tell me themselves?” I asked.

  “You know how Mom is.”

  “I’m calling her.”

  “No!” he snapped. “You can’t tell them I told you.”

  I considered this. “You want me to pretend I don’t know?”

  “Only until she mentions it.”

  “Any idea how long that might be?”

  His voice became brittle, his paper-thin patience disintegrating completely. “Maybe never. Just do me a favor. Promise me you’ll wait for Mom to bring it up first.”

  I promised.

  I was crying even before I hung up the phone, childish tears I thought I’d outgrown were cascading down my cheeks. My mother had always been my champion. When my dad was working late or hidden behind his books, it was my mom who was there arranging McDonald’s French fries on a crayon-drenched placemat to explain the wonders of addition and subtraction; acting out character voices from The Jungle Book story while music rambled out of the living room record player; and dropping me off, picking me up, then dropping me off again at the beach. They were enchanting memories, but they were just snapshots, dusty sepia recollections, brittle and cracked with age. From the past ten years, I had nothing. I wanted to blame her for disappearing from my life, but I knew it wasn’t true. I was the one who had disappeared. I had skated away and never looked back.

  That night I lay awake in bed sweating, my head crowded with fears of mortality and questions about betrayal. In just three months, my entire wonderful life had fallen to pieces, and I didn’t have a single person to confide in. My brother and I had a fairly tempestuous relationship so our conversation made me feel, if anything, resentful that they had trusted him with the diagnosis. True, he was a doctor, but he was a pediatrician, not an oncologist, and he wasn’t that much older than I was.

  I was in a sort of suspended animation, gagged by my vow of silence, bound by my own sense of stubborn pride. I felt helpless to do anything for her, weak. And I was humiliated by what I was certain was my parents’ recognition of that weakness. It was a selfish and self-centered reaction, the response of a thoughtless child, but in my disoriented state, it made sense. Unable to run to her, I ran away, desperate only to run, to find a Never Land filled with Lost Boys like me who lived in a world without mothers.

  As a child, Disney had always embodied the promise of a better life, a pure world where good guys were noble and villains wore black, and the difference between the two was clear. Of course, I was older now and educated, too skeptical to believe in a land of Magic and pixie dust. But at that moment, I was desperate, and a desperate person can justify anything. What I needed, I rationalized, was a happy, hopeful place, a safe harbor with a group of people I could trust, people who would dive into a dirty lagoon to save an innocent life. Friends, family, a job—if this was going to work, I needed to start from scratch with only the purest influences.

  “What can Disney do for you?” Orville asked again.

  I felt the seconds tick away, but still, my mind was blank, and so I blurted out the first words that came to me. “I didn’t know where else to go. I never planned what I’d do if everything went to hell. And so when everything did, in fact, go to hell, I panicked and ran and here I am.” My fingers were clenched in my lap, palms aching from the serrated edges of my unevenly chewed fingernails. “I don’t want anything from Disney. I’m just trying to find…some Magic.”

  And just like that, the word was out there, hanging in the air between us, shiny and clean and fragile like a bubble. I had crossed a line, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was a godless bastard requesting a reprieve from St. Peter. Orville nodded and leaned back in his chair, and for a moment, there was just the sound of the rain on the roof of the trailer. Then he said, “How soon can you start?”

  I signed the contract right there in the photo lab using a Minnie Mouse pen. During the course of my interview, the rain had abated so that by the time Orville ushered me outside, the sky was clear and the air had a damp, clean scent like when you stick your head in a dryer before the load is finished. I felt lighter than air. If somebody had cut me loose, I would’ve floated up, away from the trailer, beyond the magical kingdom and into the Caribbean sky.

  Orville cheerfully pumped my hand, then turned his attention to a stack of books and papers by the door. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we’re gonna get you started at Disney’s Animal Kingdom.”

  “So I’ll be shooting animals?”

  His eyes went wide as wheels. “Oh, my ears and whiskers, no! Animals don’t buy pictures.” He motioned for me to hold out my hands, then started dispensing papers and booklets, thick manuals of information. “Your job will be to work with the characters. You’ll take pictures of Mickey and Minnie and Winnie the Pooh and Tigger and anybody else our beloved guests wish to meet. And you’ll try to capture a moment on their faces that doesn’t look like desperate misery, and then you’ll sell the photos back to them at a very reasonable price.”

  By this time, my arms were full, and the stack of information was getting heavy. “That doesn’t sound very magical,” I mumbled.

  “Magic,” he said, “has nothing to do with it.”

  When You Wish Upon a Star

  Walter Elias Disney died alone. According to the reports, there was a physician on duty and some hospital staff nearby, but neither his wife nor his two daughters were present when he finally succumbed to “acute circulatory collapse” on December 15, 1966. This fact is one of the little proofs I cite in my arguments for atheism.

  While he was alive and in charge of the theme parks, Walt was very particular about the appearance of his park staff, whom he re-branded Cast Members to make employment feel more like show biz. Among the many regulations in The Disney Look book I was violating were body piercing, facial hair, black nail polish. Men’s hair could not cover the ears or shirt collar, and sideburns could be no longer than the earlobes. After twenty-five years of stubborn rejection, Disney was finally allowing mustaches, but only the nonthreatening kind à la Tom Selleck, Keith Hernandez, or Ned Flanders. No beards. In my case, becoming a Disney Cast Member meant a transformation of near surgical proportions.

  First stop: the barber shop, where a thin wisp of a man hacked my artistic locks into a style that my father would approvingly call sensible. With a creepy sense of familiarity, I realized that I was now sporting the same hairstyle as my brother, the stunt monkey, Nick, Donald Rumsfeld, and pretty much every moral majority nut job who ever complained about indecency in my articles.

  Sensing an impending identity crisis, I headed back to the “World Famous” Budget Lodge in Kissimmee where I had secured an inexpensive roof over my head. The carpets reeked of suntan lotion and diaper powder, and I’m pretty sure the mattress was filled with stuffed woodpeckers, but it had hot showers and clean towels. Over a sink of soapy water, I extracted my labret for the last time and shaved my goatee. My reflection in the mirror looked like a twelve-year-old version of myself, before Glen Plake and Anthony Kiedis became fashion icons, before my brother transformed himself into an irreconcilable tool, and at the time when my mom would spend hours in the garden, tending her roses and humming tunes from Mary Poppins in an authentic English accent.

  On my first day of work at Animal Kingdom, I woke up before dawn, showered, shaved, and gelled my freshly shorn hair into place. In time, this would become subconscious ritual, but on this day, it felt exotic, like I was living the life of a real estate broker in suburban Shreveport. Th
e air outside was thick as bacon grease. It clogged my pores and streaked my windows as I raced down I-4.

  Before heading to the park, I had to stop at the costume warehouse to pick up my wardrobe. I was certain Disney would stick me in culottes and a gabardine blouse like some old-timey photographer, but the lady behind the counter surprised me with khaki shorts, a khaki, short-sleeved button-down, and a safari hat. I looked like Banana Republic circa 1986, but I was stoked. I immediately started planning ways to mod my outfit with personal touches—a Buzzcocks patch safety-pinned to the shoulder, a Warhol image stenciled on the shorts, a few well-chosen ska buttons on the crown of the hat.

  The ink was still wet on my time card when Orville cornered me. “I appreciate that you’re making an attempt to personalize your wardrobe, but there are a few details here that just won’t wash. First of all, tuck in your shirt.”

  I made a plea for fashion. “Don’t you think that’s just a little too neo-Con? Nothing says ‘my mommy dresses me’ like a tucked-in shirt.”

  “Don’t you think I’d come to work in sweats and Genie slippers if Disney allowed it? Second of all, shoelaces must be tied—don’t even try to argue that one. And for Pete’s Dragon’s sake, tighten your belt. Nametag goes on the left side of your shirt. You have to take off no less than one of those thumb rings. Lose the chain wallet and put away the sunglasses. Guests need to be able to see your eyes.”

  I made the wardrobe modifications, and presented myself to Orville, who eyed me like he was sizing up a potential avalanche chute. He ran an exasperated hand down his face. “It’s not even nine yet.”

  The photo lab was already humming with activity. Photographers in khaki uniforms streaked in, dumped canisters of film into the development machine, and ransacked a pile of camera parts before rushing back through the doors. Orville wasn’t kidding about the skill level of these amateur shooters; they handled lenses the way toddlers handle kittens, and Orville watched them in periphery, his dry lips drawn tight against his teeth, his fingers skipping across the debossed letters on his nametag every time a lithium battery cracked against the linoleum floor.