by David Eddie
“How old are you?” he asks, with interest.
“Well, I’m already in my mid-late-20s.”
“Which is to say?”
“I’m 28. Twenty-seven is your early-late-20s, I figure; 28 is your mid-late-20s; 29 your late-late-20s.”
“What’s 26?” Nan asked.
“Late-mid-20s,”
“What’s 30?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s over. Stop keeping track.”
“Quite so, quite so,” Jonathan Griffin says. He’s clearly in his 30s, and consequently not so interested in my chrono-arithmetical hairsplitting.
“And, apart from discussing your age, what do you do, now that you’re back in town?”
I figure now is as good a time as any to try out my new line (or rather Oscar Wilde’s old line, that I’m trying to resurrect).
“Nothing, I’m afraid.”
“I see. How do you earn a living, then?”
“I don’t, I’m afraid. I just borrowed $40 from my mother, and it’s all the money I have in the world.”
“Quite so, quite so,” Jonathan Griffin says. He’s clearly taken aback. That didn’t go over so well, I think, and make a mental note: work on your answers to follow-up questions.
“Actually,” I add hastily, “I’m hoping to earn a living as a freelancer.”
“Well, you won’t make it from us, dear boy, with the shockingly low fees we pay our writers. I’ve often spoken to the owner, Manny, about it, but he’s a dreadful tightwad, I fear.”
“That’s alright with me,” I said. “I’ll take whatever I can get.”
“Hmmm…yes, well, what sort of thing do you write?”
An odd question, I think, coming from the man who published my only-ever article, but I just say: “Whatever, anything, really.”
“Book reviews?”
“Sure, I’d love to do a book review.”
“Well, we can always use a good reviewer. Let’s see, we have an issue going to the printers Friday week, you won’t make it into that, however…”
“Hold it. How soon would I have to get a piece to you to make it into that issue?”
“Well, I suppose I could edit it over the weekend.” He says it like two words: week end. “But to do that I’d have to have it by the end of this week, and that seems…”
“Tell you what, I’ll have it to you Friday. And don’t worry, it’ll be brilliant.”
“I don’t know. Do you think you can read a book, and write about it, all in four days?”
“No problem. As I said, I don’t do anything, consequently I have plenty of free time.”
“Ah, yes, you’ve discovered one of the great advantages of idleness, my boy. You’re always available when opportunity knocks. Most people are too busy to be successful.”
Yes, I think, great aphorism, and p.s. I’ve also discovered one of the great advantages to being desperate and on the edge of destitution. You don’t hang around in your apartment waiting for opportunity to knock, you go out and fucking blackjack it in the alley.
“Later, we’ll go up and get you a book from the review shelf.” Jonathan Griffin says. “In the meantime, though, can I buy you a drink?”
“Is that a trick question?”
Nan left fairly early, I stayed talking and drinking with Jonathan Griffin. He was a good talker, and a good drinker, too. A tad pretentious, true. But what, after all, is mankind without its pretensions? Just another ape. First you pretend you’re something; later, with luck, you become it. It’s all a matter of which pretension you choose, and how you pull it off. Personally, I enjoyed Jonathan Griffin’s rendition of the debauched, possibly blue-blooded elder statesman of young literary hopefuls. It certainly was a refreshing change from the usual poses you see around town: Family Man, Sports Fan, Mr. Cellular Phony, etc.
And I’ll say one other thing in Jonathan Griffin’s favour: he was certainly very liberal, even heavy-handed, with the drink offers.
“Drink up, my boy, drink up,” he kept saying. “Let’s have another pint, what? Now where was I?”
Later, we’re standing swaying in front of a row of books. I can hardly read the titles. My only thought is: this review has to be done by Friday, I don’t have time to read War and Peace. I grab one of the slimmer volumes.
“Ah. You’re a fan of the Minimalists, I take it,” Jonathan Griffin says.
“Not exactly.”
I staggered home, threading and weaving my way between my late-night brothers and sisters. Then, at Les’s, there was some sort of problem with the lock. My key fit in it, but wouldn’t turn. I jogged it and jiggled it, but it was no go. Suddenly, it opened from the inside, and Les was standing there in her nightgown, sleepy-eyed and tousle-haired.
“Sorry, Les, I couldn’t seem to get my key to work.”
She grabbed my key-ring, looked at it like a curious animal.
“That’s the wrong key.”
I looked: so it was, so it was. The key to Ruth’s apartment. I still had it. All these women, you know, sometimes I get confused.
“Oh, sorry, Les.”
“That’s alright. Come on in.”
Inside, Les opened a bottle of wine, and lit a couple of candles. That threw me a bit. For one thing, like a marathon runner, I’d been pacing myself so I’d keel over just as I breasted the tape, the finishing line of Les’s doorjamb. Now I had to marshall my willpower, curb my slurred sibilants, focus my blurred vision, sit gingerly on one of her toy chairs and have a chat with Les. I sat down and sipped my wine.
“I gotta gig today,” I told her.
“Wow, you don’t waste any time, do you?”
“I don’t have any time to waste.”
“Who’s it for?”
“The Burnished Monocle. A book review.”
“What book?”
I took the Minimalist stories out of my pocket and slid the book across the table to her. She stared at it gravely, assessingly, as people tend to when confronted with Art. I sipped my wine and stared at her, hard, trying to stop her from splitting into double images of Les. As she bent over the book, her breasts swam into view, beautiful in the candlelight. Also, as I say, I was drunk, otherwise I don’t think I ever would have blurted out: “Les, I think I’m falling in love with you.”
She looked up from her book, at me. Thank God she didn’t say “What?” and force me to repeat myself. She heard me. A second passed, and then she laughed.
“You’re just drunk, Dave,” she said. “And on the rebound. I’m going to bed before you attack me.”
With that, she hopped up and trotted quick-like-a-bunny off to bed. As she turned the corner, I raised my fingers to my lips and blew a loving kiss to her disappearing derrière. I looked up, and locked eyes with Les.
“What are you doing?”
“Oh, nothing, Les,” I mumbled. “Goodnight.”
Hangovers are like walls, I find. Some, you climb over: you toss a grapple-hook over the top and rappel the fucking things; take showers, tank up on coffee, guzzle Bloodies, gobble aspirins, run around town. The main thing is to keep moving. If you slow down for a moment your hangover will catch up with you, wrap its itchy, hairy arms around your neck, breathe its hot breath in your face.
Some hangovers, though, are just too big to climb over. Some you have to tunnel under: pull the covers over your head, burrow deep into sleep, and pray you come out on the other side; in your striped pyjamas, searchlights sweeping the area, and the warden’s dogs yapping in the background.
This was one of those. I awoke early, with my hangover’s “false dawn.” Are you familiar with this phenomenon? You wake up preternaturally early, like a farmer, feeling oddly champlike, eerily perky, a little parched perhaps but generally ready to take on all contenders. Hey! you say to yourself. Even though I lapped up all that booze last night, I escaped without a hangover. What a constitution I have! I should hop out of bed right now, get some work done while the rest of the world slumbers. This could be a regular routine fo
r me, the beginning of a whole new life of early-morning productivity.
For God’s sake, don’t listen to yourself! That is actually the silver, forked tongue of Beelzebub, Prince of Lies, whispering in your ear. Whatever you do, don’t get out of bed. If you do, you’ll regret it immediately, your hangover will kick in like a mule, and your day will go downhill on greased wheels from there. Whatever action you perform, whatever task you undertake on this cursed day could come back to haunt you forever — you’ll chew out your boss, blurt out the truth to your spouse, take your eyes off the road to check your hair just at the moment a nun pushing a pram steps off the curb in front of your speeding grille…
Luckily, experienced boozer that I am, I recognized all these symptoms immediately, pulled the blankets over my head and tried to go back to sleep.
But the Protestant Work Ethic wouldn’t let me rest. I tossed and turned, thrashed, moaned and muttered while the two Colossi — my hangover and the Protestant Work Ethic — battled it out over my prostrate form, hurling thunderbolts, tossing tridents at each other. Finally, in the end, it was a truce, a rare collaboration: it was agreed this would be a “working hangover,” I could stay in bed, but I had to read my book and make copious notes towards my review.
After a while, Les poked her head in.
“You’re an early riser.”
I pointed out that I hadn’t actually arisen yet.
“How are you feeling?”
“I’m dead, Les. Just toss some dirt on me on your way out, I’ll be fine.”
“Hungover?”
“Carramba.”
“You’re a pretty big drinker, aren’t you, Dave?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Her clean brown eyes stared into my bloodshot blues.
“Why?”
“My mother always said my father was a very ‘thirsty man.’ I think I inherited that, except with me it’s booze.”
Les raised a sceptical eyebrow.
“Well, I have to get ready for work. Can I get you anything?”
“Would you? Something fizzy? And a couple of aspirins?”
“Sure. Why don’t I mix you up a Bloody Mary, too?”
“Thanks. Oh…you’re joking. Sorry, and thanks.”
Les fetched the requested items, then hopped in the shower. I could hear her humming and splashing. I allowed myself to imagine the scene on the other side of the wall in rich, almost pointillistic detail. Then I got down to work.
The Minimalist short stories were carefully crafted, subtle, poignant — and they bored the fucking shit out of me. For one thing, they were all about fishing, or Vietnam (’Nam, as he referred to it), two topics I don’t give a shit about. In their zeal to pare their stories down to the bone, the Minimalists cut out what makes literature important and useful, in my opinion: a description of a character’s thoughts, feelings, inner monologue or dialogue or whatever, ideas.
But the Minimalists were tough guys, “men of few words” (the characters were almost all male). But why, I thought, would a “man of few words” want to be a writer?
One thing was clear: these were Hemingway’s offspring. They all imitated Hemingway’s primerish prose: “I sat in the café. It was hot. A dog came up to my table. His name was Spot. I patted his head. Then he ran off. See Spot Run. Run, Spot, Run.” What they didn’t realize, though, was there was more to Hemingway’s prose than meets the eye. As he says somewhere (Death in the Afternoon, I think), “the stately motion of the iceberg comes from the fact nine-tenths of it is below the surface.” In other words, he wrote a lot, then cut a lot out. But it didn’t seem like these guys and gals put it in, then took it out. They just left it out in the first place, and as a result their stories were more like ice-cubes, bobbing on the surface, on “the spume of things.”
To compensate, to make their stories “heavy,” they employed stylistic tricks: one-word sentences, the one-sentence paragraph. One of the Minimalists was a fish-obsessed writer named Rick Pike. One of his one-sentence paragraphs was: “He used crawdaddies for bait.” So his story would go:
The old man squinted out over the lake. His features were craggy and leathery. He said nothing. He baited his hook.
He used crawdaddies for bait.
They fished for three hours. The craggy old man said nothing. He squinted over the lake. There was a tug on his line. He hauled it up.
But it was only a boot.
An old boot.
Etc., etc. I’m making the rest of it up, but “He used crawdaddies for bait” was an actual line from Rick Pike’s story. I stared at this line a long time, wondering what possible heaviness it could have that it should deserve its own paragraph. Eventually, I decided: none, it was just a big con, like so much modern writing. Christ, it’s no wonder no one reads any more. People open a book these days and it’s either some sort of neo-Joycean crossword-puzzle bullshit, or this sort of stylistic sleight-of-hand, taciturn tales full of bogus “moments.”
“Huh, I don’t get it,” people think. “Must be me.” And they drop the book, and pick up the channel converter. For every reader that dies, a viewer is born.
Thinking about all this made me mad, it got me steamed. In the end, I was steamed out of bed.
“This is the type of thing that’s killing literature,” I muttered to myself, whipping off the covers. I jumped out of bed, sat in front of the typewriter, and, with my hangover anchoring my ass to the seat, started typing my review.
Over the next four days, I worked hard on my review, meanwhile living on only two sandwiches a day, trying to make my mother’s cash last. Every morning, and every afternoon, I walked down to The Cheese Counter on Bloor, bought 100 grams of casalingo salami, a two-finger wedge of Brie, and a hard “panetti” roll. Then I took all these ingredients to the park and made myself a sandwich, using my knife. By means of this stratagem, I cut my food costs in half, because if the guy behind the counter made the sandwich for me, it cost $3.99. If I bought the ingredients and made it myself, it was only about two bucks (have I mentioned I’m one-sixteenth Scotsman?). Of course, I lost out on the condiments — lettuce, tomato, mustard — but I never had much use for any of that stuff anyway.
I don’t think the guy behind the counter at the Cheese Counter was crazy about me. He had to go through the charade of wrapping each of my puny purchases in wax paper, writing the price on the outside. I felt bad making him go through all this, but what could I do? Food is life, and I needed four more days of it to finish my article (in effect, I reversed the 20th-century North American formula: I consumed in order to produce).
I worked hard on my review, as I say. I even felt I’d pioneered a bold new journalistic hybrid: the “autobiographical book review.” I didn’t want to shove my opinions down the reader’s throat, so I wrote the review in the form of a story, the story of the fat, lazy fool I lived with in a shack on Long Island, the summer I was a reporter. A bloated, TV-addicted brute, he sped around in a Lexus, ate junk food, spent every free hour in front of His Lord and Master, the television. Once every few weeks he squeezed his buttery bulk into a sausage-tight lycra outfit, donned special booties, and tooled around the block. “Exercise.” Ignorant, selfish, addicted to consumption, too lazy to work, he was fired from his job on a fishing boat halfway through the summer, and split in the middle of the day, leaving me with a stack of bills.
This was more my image of the typical American, I said, than the lean, taciturn cowboys of the Minimalist short stories. He didn’t say nothing because he was “a man of few words,” he said nothing because he had nothing to say. He wasn’t haunted by ‘Nam — he probably couldn’t even point to Vietnam on a map. “If Art is a mirror to Life,” I wrote, “then the Minimalists are holding up a fun-house mirror to contemporary Americans, a mirror that makes Americans look leaner, tougher, and more attractive than they really are.”
In the end, as I say, I was proud of my work. But nervous, too. After all, how would you like to commission a youngish writer with a p
ublication track-record of a letter, only to receive in return a far-reaching autobiographical “think piece” on the true nature of America, the death of the novel, the decline of Western civilization, and all the woes of society? You’d probably have to axe his piece, kick him down the stairs with his kill fee, and fail to return all his calls henceforward.
Definitely a scenario that loomed large in my mind as I pedalled off to the Monocle to hand it in.
I needn’t have worried, though. Jonathan Griffin loved it. Nan, too.
“Excellent work, my boy, excellent,” Jonathan Griffin said. “You have a unique gift.”
We’re downstairs at the Monocle. Having a few drinks, on Jonathan Griffin. I’m 100 percent broke. Actually, I should probably stop saying “I’m broke” all the time. There comes a point (say, five years out of college) when you have to start calling a spade a spade and say: I am poor. I am a poor man. I think I hit that point. Yesterday, in a Hamsunesque episode, I went into the Cheese Counter to spend the last of my mother’s money on my usual. Before I can, though, the guy behind the counter points to a new sign above his head: “NO PURCHASES UNDER 150 GRAMS.” I didn’t have enough for 150 grams, so I slunk out after buying a pop and a bag of chips — the only solid to pass my lips for the last 24 hours.
“Thanks very much, Mr. Griffin,” I say now. “So I take it you’re accepting it?”
“Yes, yes, of course. It shall appear in the next number.”
“And didn’t you say, at some point, that you pay upon acceptance?”
“Ah, yes, I catch your drift, my boy. Finish your drink, we’ll go upstairs and see if we can persuade our lovely and talented receptionist to cut you a cheque.”
The “lovely and talented” receptionist turned out to be Milosz, a Czech man in his mid-40s. The Czech wrote me a cheque, my first as a full-fledged, full-time freelance writer. I snapped it between my hands. There’s nothing like seeing your name in print, is there? Especially when it’s preceded by the words “Pay to the order of.”
A hundred dollars. Not much, but it was a start. S.S. David Henry the Freelance Writer — really just a bathtub with a sheet stretched between two broomsticks — was launched. Avast and ahoy, me mateys. Fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy ride.