by David Eddie
“Dave!” Samantha says, laughing.
“The next thing he could be selling on the streets might be my kidneys, or my liver.”
“I don’t think he’d get much for those items, Dave,” Max interrupts. “Maybe as a scientific curiosity. The pre-pickled liver. No need for formaldehyde, it will stay preserved in its own brine for centuries.”
“Anyway, nothing happens,” I continue. “We complete the transaction, then as an afterthought I ask him where he got the tree. A shifty look crosses his face and he says, ‘Well, I do some work for this guy, right? And sometimes he pays me in cash, sometimes he pays me in, like, plants and stuff.’”
Max, Sam, and Les all get a good laugh out of this line. Max grabs the bottle of scotch and holds it over my glass.
“Say when.”
“Thanks. The next day I open the paper and there’s a story under the headline, THREE TREES STOLEN FROM HOTEL LOBBY. With the exact description of my new tree.”
“Where’s the tree now?” Les asks.
“It’s still in our apartment. I mean, Ruth’s apartment.”
This clumsy reference to my current romantic difficulties has the effect of casting a pall over our little party. I catch Max and Sam exchanging a “significant” glance. Max slaps his thighs, and stands up.
“Can you imagine staying up this late?” he asks. “I have to go to bed.”
“Me, too,” Sam says, getting up. Everyone looks over at Les.
“I’m going to stay up for a while, listen to a few more of Dave’s stories,” she says.
We sat up drinking and talking, watching the fire slowly dying. Inspired by Les, fuelled by the drinks, and warmed and soothed by the fire, I feel I’ve never been wittier, more charming and engaging. But there’s nothing in the air, no chemistry between us. Her body language says it all, really: she’s way down at the other end of the couch, wrapped in a quilt, cocooned, mummified, self-contained. We chat for a while, eventually she gets up, yawns, stretches — her breasts jutting (forgive me, ladies) like the proud prow of an intercontinental cruise-liner — and, with a chaste peck on the cheek for yours truly, trots off to bed, alone.
Well, what did you expect? I ask myself, after she’s gone, crossing to the bar to pour myself another hefty drink. That Les would jump your bones your first night back? Oh, Dave, I’m so happy to see you, and now I give you the gift of my body.
True, there was Max’s testimonial about the lost weekend with a fridge full of food, but — as Max had also taken great pleasure in pointing out — I was not all that attractive a package, physically, at the moment. Perhaps Les expected something more along the lines of my former self, a little more collegiate, more Ivy League-ish, than the fat, pale monster who climbed out of Max’s parents’ station wagon.
However, I’ve found over the years, boys, that with women physical appearance isn’t as big a deal as it is with us. Fat, short, thin, handsome, ugly: for the most part, women don’t seem to give a damn. Patrick Stewart is a case in point. Patrick Stewart is the fiftysomething Brit who plays Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation. He was declared “Sexiest Man on Television” in a TV Guide readers’ poll. Now, Stewart isn’t exactly ugly, but with his pugilist’s nose, Mongolian features, gleaming chrome-dome, he isn’t exactly what you’d call “classically handsome,” either. For the sake of argument, let’s call him “old, bald, and homely.” I’ve asked around about this, and women all agree with the poll. He “exudes an aura of authority,” they’ll say; “he has inner strength.” They also like the fact he’s the captain of his own starship.
Note, gentlemen, all the qualities attracting women to Picard are intangibles. Except, perhaps, the starship. Let’s say, they’re all non-physical features of the man. Any physical features women are attracted to are usually emblematic of some inner quality: “strong” hands, “sensitive” eyes, that kind of thing. Only one woman I asked talked about a physical quality when it came to Picard, she said (and I quote): “His zygotal system sends shivers up and down my spine.” What’s that? I asked her. His cheekbone/temple area, apparently. But, again, that symbolizes self-discipline, passion held in check.
By the way, in the same poll, the guys overwhelmingly voted Cindy Crawford “Sexiest Woman on Television.” And if that isn’t as succinct a summary of the difference between male and female sexuality as you’re going to get, I don’t know what is.
But let’s face it, Dave: you’re no Jean-Luc Picard, or even a Telly Savalas or Karl Malden, at the moment. You’re more like a young Don Knotts, or Don Adams (in a crazy caper movie, starring “the three Dons”: Don Knotts, Don Adams, and Dom DeLuise! O.K., so one of them’s not really a Don! Still, check your brains at the door, and prepare for a non-stop rollercoaster ride of laugh-a-minute hijinks with the three Dons!).
The only way you can hope to score with Les, I told myself, sipping my drink and staring into the fire, is in the “handy-woman’s special” category.
Yes…sometimes a formidable/ attractive woman like Les will take on a broken-down loser like myself as a special project, if she sees some potential. She’ll buck him up, put some iron in his rubbery backbone, light a fire under his flabby ass, and (ideally) turn him into a success. Then, when he hits it big, she gets a mate who is not only successful, but also profoundly grateful, faithful, if not downright emotionally dependent on her.
In theory, anyway. In the real world, unfortunately, “handy-woman’s specials” have a way of backfiring. Sylvester Stallone comes to mind. His wife, Sasha, helped him go from Palookaville to superstardom. They were living in a coldwater basement apartment in Chicago when she typed his rambling thoughts into what later became Rocky. Then he hit the big time, and dumped her, as we all know, for a Scandinavian starlet/model who sent a fan letter with a naked picture of herself attached.
Still, you wind up with the alimony, ladies, which in the case of someone like Sly can be quite significant. I know it’s not adequate recompense for your time and efforts, but at least you can fume and stew in style.
I found I wasn’t tired, not in the least. Somehow, all the booze, lies, lack of sleep, drugs, lack of food, lust, fear, tears and beers of the last 36 hours combined to create a powerful adrenalinlike stimulant, some mysterious alchemy transmogrified the poisons and toxins in my system into an elixir that made me feel well-rested, clear-headed, alert, awake, even…fit. I must be in really bad shape, I think. I’m hallucinating health, I’m experiencing the DTs in the form of a simulacrum of sobriety. Some people brush red ants off their sleeves; I feel like I just ran 30 laps, had a steam bath, rub-down, and cold shower.
I checked out old man Lawson’s bookshelves to see if there was anything to help lower me into sleep. He wanted to be a writer himself, once, Les has informed me. But he got married, had children, went into advertising, and — in part because of his facility for phraseology — quickly rose through the ranks. Wound up forming his own firm. It’s still there, at Bloor and Church, Winston Lawson, Ltd.
He became rich: did the right thing by his family, but he never wrote a thing. The only way his name will be remembered is through his children, and the corporation he founded. Not such a bad thing but that’s not the route I want to take.
His collection is fairly pedestrian. The canon, basically, heavy on the Brits — the Brontës, the Austens, Hardy, Joyce, Lawrence, etc., along with a sprinkling of Europeans and Americans, and a fairly heavy medicinal dose of Canadian writers. Also a disproportionate number of books by and about fighter pilots.
Finally, I spot Hunger by Knut Hamsun. I’ve heard about him, but never read him. Won the Nobel Prize, later threw in his lot with Hitler and his gang of thugs. The introduction is by I.B. Singer. Funny that a Jew should write the introduction to a book by a Nazi sympathizer, but Singer’s very forgiving, saying only that Hamsun “was guilty of a tragic mistake,” and that his role in modern literature is pre-eminent.
Well, I thought. I’ll bite. I slid into the big leather Barca-
lounger, angled the lamp over my shoulder and began to read.
“All this happened while I was walking around starving in Christiania — that strange city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him,” I read.
Soon I was transfixed.
I woke up the next morning on fire. What a book! More like an experience than a book, and a harrowing one at that. But funny, too — Hamsun’s hero trying to sell his blanket and his vest-buttons at the pawnshop, begging the butcher for a bone for his “dog,” checking into jail so he can get a decent night’s sleep, telling his jailers he’s a journalist out on a spree who lost his wallet.
If only I could write a book like that! All else would be forgiven, all my flaws, faults, and foibles would be looked upon as merely the eccentricities of a great writer.
The thing to do was get started right away. I leapt out of bed, pulled on my pants, came downstairs, grabbed my portable manual and went out onto the porch so I wouldn’t disturb anyone. Put a piece of paper in the platen. As usual, I was assailed with procastinatory thoughts: look at those nails! Shocking! Go get a clipper! And while you’re up, how about a cup of coffee? Aren’t you tired? Maybe you should take a shower first? Get dressed, have a little breakfast. But I did what I always do, made a deal with myself: self, I’ll do all those things later, just let me get started first, let me build up a head of steam. Works like a charm. I started typing, trying to tell myself the story of Ruth, how it all went wrong.
That’s how Max found me, typing away furiously, when he came down a couple of hours later in his bathrobe, with a newspaper under his arm. I heard the door slide open behind me. Shhhhit! But I had some momentum going, I was in the middle of a train of thought, I didn’t want to turn around. Max’s shadow fell across the page, he sipped his coffee noisily.
“What’s happening, Dave?” he asked me. “Never mind, it’s all too obvious. Writing the great Canadian novel, is that it?”
“Actually, I’m American.”
“Well, the great American Novel-in-Exile, then. Dave, Dave, Dave,” he says, in a downward arpeggio. “When are you ever going to learn? Hey, I just had an idea. You know what you should be doing? You know what you should do starting right now, this morning?”
“No.”
“Write a sitcom pilot. You’re a funny guy, you could do it standing on your head. You know how much those guys make? Three grand a week! You’d make more in a year than you would in a lifetime of writing novels, and that’s if you’re lucky enough to get published, if you’re one of the luckiest, luckiest bastards. Don’t forget what I do for a living.” Max worked for the vast Cosmodemonic Broadcast Corporation as a script development officer (funny job title, I always thought: WEE-DO, WEE-DO, alright, pull over buddy, let’s see your script development licence). He approved or rejected sitcom and drama pilots for a living. “But I wouldn’t be doing you a favour. You should see the type of stuff I get in the mail — it’s unbelievable. It’s not just that the writing’s bad. Half the time I don’t even know what they’re trying to say.”
I knew what he meant. I’d just spent a year and a half reading letters from average Americans, and they were sheer madness.
“Forget it, Max,” I said. “I’m not selling out to TV.”
“Oh, the thoughts of the Great Genius are too lofty, he has no need of mere cash, he doesn’t soil his hands with the handling of filthy lucre. Tell me something, Dave: do you like sex?”
“Naturally.”
“How would you like, for example, to have sex with Leslie Lawson?”
“Sure!”
“Well, you never will, do you realize that?”
“But you said…”
“I know what I said. But that was before she saw what a financial basket case you are. Don’t you realize men have been showering her with presents, fancy dinners, invitations to spend the weekend on a yacht or private island ever since she turned 16? What do you have to offer her? Nada. You couldn’t even afford to take her out for a hot dog. You don’t have a pot to piss in, you’re on skid row, you’re shipwrecked, you’re a…”
“Alright, alright. Can we change the subject already?”
“Whatever you say, Dave. Just trying to do you a favour. All this chit-chat’s making me hungry, anyway. How does eggs, bacon, and toast, all washed down with champagne and O.J. sound to you, eh?”
“Excellent!”
“Well, whip it up, man.” He snaps the paper open in front of his face. From behind the rustling pages, he says: “Make yourself useful for a change. I like my bacon crispy, but not too crispy. Know what I mean?”
I like to cook. It’s one of the great arts, I think; it roots you in the earth; in the fruits and vegetables and meats and grains and tubers of Mother Nature. It’s also a great way to get girls. Frankly, I don’t understand any bachelor who doesn’t cook. Any cheeseball can take a woman to a restaurant, but when you make a meal for a woman: a) she’s impressed by your competence and self-reliance; b) you control the music and atmosphere; c) it’s cheaper; d) she’s already in your apartment. If anything’s going to happen, there’s no will-she-won’t-she tango at the doorstep.
Old lady Lawson kept a great kitchen, too. Copper pots, strings of garlic and drying herbs, a huge old gas range, food-crammed fridge. I rooted around and found all the ingredients for my famous apple-and-Brie omelette. An easy dish — just fry apple wedges in a little butter, fold them in with the Brie when the time comes — but it always makes a big impression on your breakfast guests. I tossed some bacon in a pan, whipped out the bread, and got cracking on the eggs.
First things first, though: the first step in making any meal, I feel, is to have a nice stiff drink or two. It loosens you up, gets the creative juices flowing. For me, this applies to breakfast, too, though I realize for some it’s still a bit early in the day. I whipped up a couple of champer-and-O.J.s, brought one out to Max, and received a grunt of thanks for my efforts.
The smell of bacon cooking — Nature’s alarm clock — lured the girls from their cozy quilts. They came down in their nightgowns, sleepy-eyed and tousle-haired. Need I mention, at this point, that Les looked more fetching than ever? I don’t think so. I believe it’s clear by now why Les was put on this earth: to torture me, and make me suffer, while God and Beelzebub, in a rare collaboration, watch the whole show on their celestial/ infernal couch with their arms around each other’s shoulders, laughing till the tears roll down their cheeks.
“Here’s some nice fresh coffee,” I said. “Bacon and eggs coming up in a few minutes.”
“You seem pretty chipper this morning,” Sam said. “Did you sleep well?”
“Actually, I hardly slept at all.”
“Why? What was the matter?”
“Nothing. I was reading, that’s all.”
This seemed to strike them both as a novel idea.
“Wow, reading usually puts me straight to sleep,” Sam said.
“Well, I was pretty into this book.”
“What was it?” Les asks.
“Hunger, by Knut Hamsun. I found it in your Dad’s bookcase.”
“Was it good?”
“I thought it was amazing.”
“What’s it about?”
“The torments of a starving writer. He barely earns enough to eat, he’s always pawning things, sometimes he has to suck on a wood chip to convince his stomach he’s had something to eat.”
Les snickered. “Sounds familiar, Dave.”
“Why doesn’t he get a job?” Sam asks.
“Well, as Isaac Bashevis Singer says in the introduction, he starves out of spiritual necessity, that he is one of those who ‘must rise above their fellow creatures or perish.’”
Sam raises a sceptical eyebrow.
“Nutty.”
“I’m hungry,” Les says.
Breakfast was an excellent meal, if I do say so myself. We ate outside, on the verandah. Everyone read sections of the paper, so there wasn’t much conversation, just pass this, p
ass that, compliments to the chef. Which is as it should be. Breakfast is no time to try to be witty or interesting, and my three friends understood that, thank God.
In the afternoon, we went for a tromp around “the property,” as Sam referred to it. One thing was abundantly clear: old man Lawson had snapped up a pretty piece of real estate with all his advertising dough. Rolling fields, handmade fences, a picturesque pond overlooked by a huge willow. It sounds corny to say, but it was a real storybook farm. It even had a name: “Darlington.” So old man Lawson might say to his friends: “How would you like to come up to Darlington for the weekend?”
We squelched around in the mud, in borrowed rubber boots. Max and I hopped on one of those huge cylindrical hay-bales, and tried to get it rolling. Soon it became a competition to see who could stay on longest. Finally, Max aborted with an oath. I kept rolling (why? to impress Les with my “balesmanship,” I guess) until I hit some sort of snag in the ground and pitched face-first in the mud.
Inside, I had a bath in the big clawfoot tub, and took a long nap. I drew the blinds, crawled into the bed, and with the smell of fresh-laundered sheets in my nostrils, I sank into a deep, dark hole.
I awoke from my sarcophagal snooze feeling refreshed, yet groggy and disoriented. With a towel around my waist, I staggered toward the shower like some sort of undersea creature. Clearly I had sunk, for six hours, to the lowest depths of sleep, to the bottom of the sea, where strange eyeless creatures scuttle across the sand and huge prehistoric leviathans slide silently through the inky blackness.
That shower really perked me up, though. First hot, then cold, then hot again. I came out feeling like a champ. I dressed, to impress Les, really. I’m a bit of a dandy, a fop, a Macaroni, a Count D’Orsay or Beau Brummel. Actually, I wish I could dress like those legendary 19th-century exquisites, especially the great Beau, “the greatest dandy of all time.” Not that he dressed showily, far from it. Beau spent hours in front of the mirror to achieve an effect, in the words of an astonished contemporary, “exactly like that of every other gentleman.” The difference was apparent only to the initiate, it was all in the details: the way only three links of his watch-fob ever showed, the way he polished the soles as well as the uppers of his Hessian boots to the same mirror-like sheen, the brilliance of his linen, the careful elaboration of his famous-throughout-Europe cravat.