Chump Change

by David Eddie

  The Great Editor likes the way I’m thinking. However, my ideas don’t grab him. So now he’s trying to cook up a few of his own. Finally, he turns from the window and looks at me.

  “I liked ‘Letter From New York,’” he says. “Why don’t you try writing something like that about Toronto?”

  “O.K. When do you need it by?”

  This was David Henry the seasoned, trench-coated journalist, veteran of two articles, talking. What’s my deadline, Chief?

  “There’s no hurry. Walk around a bit, get to know the city first. Do some research, talk to a few people before you start writing.”

  “O.K. How long do you want it to be?”

  “Column length.”

  “Thank you very much, sir. You won’t regret it. I appreciate the chance you’re giving me.”

  Outside, I went over to Levin’s cubicle. It surprised me that even as managing editor, Levin only had a cubicle.

  “I got the gig,” I told him.

  “Excellent,” he said. “What are you writing about?”

  “Toronto.”

  “What about it?”

  “Something along the lines of ‘Letter From New York.’”

  “That sounds perfect for you.”

  Yeah, I thought.

  “How much are you getting?”

  “I forgot to ask.”

  “How long is it?”

  “‘Column length.’”

  “That’s 2,500 words. And our rate is a buck a word.”

  “Seriously? A buck a word?”

  Levin’s face split in a conspiratorial grin, and I caught a glimpse of the kid within. He was, after all (I reminded myself), about the same age as me.

  “I could probably get you $3,000 if there’s a lot of research involved,” he said.

  I thought this over a moment.

  “Levin, I’d like to have a word with your cheque disbursement department. And that word is ‘advance.’”

  “Well, you know, advances are one of my duties as a managing editor,” he said, adjusting his extra-starchy cuffs. “How much do you want?”

  “Say, half?”

  Then Levin did a wonderful thing — or, rather, a series of wonderful things. He took me to the cheque disbursement department, used his clout to get them to write me a cheque for $1,500 on the spot, then we went together to the magazine’s bank on the first floor and cashed it.

  “Levin, you’re a prince,” I said, outside the bank. “I won’t forget this, I won’t forget who gave me my start.”

  I haven’t, either. It’s unlikely I’ll ever be in a position to do Levin a favour, or that he’ll ever need one from me, but if he does, if by some strange twist of fate I’m cruising along in my limo and spot Levin huddled shivering in a doorway, clutching his ragged overcoat close for warmth, I’d take him in and instruct my butler to show him every courtesy until he’s back on his feet.

  A role-reversal that, let’s face it, could only happen in The Bizarro World…Shortly after he got me this gig, Levin was tapped for a job at the Wall Street Journal, and The Great Editor took over the handling of my article.

  9

  A Buck A Word

  Fifteen hundred dollars! Money talks, they say. Certainly, as I sailed into the air and sunshine of Toronto Street, I could hear a muffled voice from the region of my back pocket:

  “Hola, señor! You and I are but strangers in the night, destined to part ways after a few brief weeks together, but in that time, oy carramba, how we will live!”

  Tonight I would take my goddess Les out to a fancy dinner. My way of saying both “thanks” and “please.” First things first, though: new threads. I hopped a cab to Kensington Market, poked through the musty racks of second-hand clothes for an hour and a half before hitting pay dirt. A rare find, a suit in my size, 46L, circa 1940. Man, they don’t make them like they used to, I thought, checking myself out in the mirror. It was made of an odd shiny yellowy-green fabric, but I could pull it off, I felt. I also bought a newish white shirt and a purple floral tie.

  “Can I wear all this stuff out?” I asked the clerk behind the counter.

  “Sure. You want a bag for your old clothes?”

  “Nah, just toss ’em in the garbage. Or, if you want, dry clean them and sell them. I don’t care, I never want to see those clothes again.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yep. This new suit has made my old wardrobe obsolete.”

  That’s just the sort of whimsical and obviously wealthy youngish man that I am, I thought as I hit the street. I like to walk out of a store a new man, leaving my old clothes, my old self, behind forever. I felt like a million bucks in my new suit, crispy, snappy, energized.

  With a pleasant sensation of moving from one triumph to another, I hit the liquor store on Spadina, in the middle of Chinatown, and picked up a large bottle of Lagavulin. $60. Outside the liquor store, I hailed a cab.

  At Les’s, I poured a scotch, checked myself out in the mirror. Not bad, if I do say so myself. Was it my imagination, or had I lost a bit of weight? I had a bit of time to kill before Les got home. I poured myself another scotch, and sat down to the typewriter. The title of my article came to me immediately:

  WELCOME TO TORONTO

  I wondered if the title was part of the overall word-count. If it was, I’d just made three dollars in about ten seconds. I could get used to this “buck a word” business. A buck a word. In other words, if I wrote: “Toronto is an interesting city,” I could buy myself lunch. If I wrote: “Toronto is a very, very, very, very, very interesting city,” I could buy myself dinner.

  Unfortunately, though, Toronto isn’t all that interesting a city, and after the title I was stumped. One of the things I love about Toronto is how dull it is. I can live without excitement in a city, like people driving by spraying the sidewalk with bullets from an AK-47. The duller a place the happier I am (up to a point, of course). But “Happiness writes white,” as de Mother-lant says, and after the title I found I had nothing more to say about Toronto.

  I heard a knock on the outer door.

  “Open up, Dave, it’s me, Max.”

  “Nice suit,” he said, when I opened the door. “Where’d you get it? Goodwill?”

  “That shows how much you know about haberdashery, you boor. I had this suit especially tailored for me by Crump & Periwinkle of Savile Row, and flown here this morning by Concorde jet.”

  “Seriously, what’s the occasion?”

  “I’m taking Les out to dinner.”

  “ Where? Burger King?”

  “The finest restaurant in the city, if she so desires. Wherever she wants.”

  “Oh, really? And what are you going to use to pay? Monopoly money?”

  “No…this.”

  I hauled out my wallet, fanned what was left of the $1,500 in front of his astonished eyes.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “I got a gig with This Land of Ours. Today. Three thousand dollars for an article. This is my advance.”

  “You’d better let me take care of that. Don’t worry, I’ll pay you a regular allowance.”

  He made a grab for the cash but I was ready for him, and snatched it back.

  “Forget it, buddy. This money is all mine. I’m rich. I’m a fifteen-hundred-aire. Want a scotch?”

  I gestured to the bottle of Lagavulin on the table.

  “Mr. Big Spender… sure.”

  I poured him one. Just then, Les came home.

  “Hey Max. Hey, Dave — looking good. Nice suit; I especially like the ‘fistful of dollars’ accessory. What’s the occasion?”

  “Well, I’m hoping to take you out to dinner, Les.”

  “Really?” she asked, interested. “Where?”

  “Wherever you like. Your favourite restaurant.”

  “You mean Vittorio’s?”

  “Wherever you like. I got a gig today, from This Land of Ours, and I want to blow a bit of it.”

  Les thinks about it a moment, then sa
ys: “I’m going to jump in the shower, then get dressed. What time should we go? About seven?”

  What can I say about dinner that night with Les? Just this: women have their own internal checklists, and if you don’t fulfil their secret criteria, it doesn’t matter how dapper your haberdashery, how much cash you drop on dinner, what cologne you wear — you’ll never get anywhere, pal. You’re wasting your time, energy, and money.

  Unfortunately, the only way to find all this out is to waste a lot of time and money. You really have to throw the cash around, tell yourself in advance the sky’s the limit. Which is what I did. First dates are important, you can’t do them by halfway measures.

  So after living together a month and a half, Les and I went on our first date.

  The kitchen at Vittorio’s is open concept, and while we were waiting for our tables we sat, basically, in the kitchen, sipping our drinks, watching a fat, bearded fellow prepare the food, con mucho gusto, with bursts of flame and shouts of “Uppah.” The waiters also sang snatches of opera as they delivered the food to the tables, the type of thing that could easily get on your nerves, unless you were in the mood for it. I was, sort of. Les was wearing a blood-red dress, some sort of silky fabric, perhaps silk itself, that clung to her body. Everything was in place for a romantic dinner, except, as I say, romance.

  We were shown to our table. I looked at the menu. The prices were staggering, shocking. I pretended I wasn’t hungry and had only an appetizer — no dinner — in a doomed bid to save money. Doomed because, nervous as I was, I kept ordering drinks while Les ate her dinner, a delicious-looking veal scallopini, and sipped her wine. In the end my half cost more than hers.

  Total cost of the dinner: over $150. Well over, after I’d greased the coat-check operative, the waiter, the busboy, the cabbie, the doorman. I’m not counting costs, ladies, and I certainly didn’t “expect” anything in return for all this outlay; that would be sheer boorishness. Still, I was sad, because it was that night I finally realized I didn’t have a hope with Les, and a man without hope is…I’m not sure what he is, but he feels lousy, take it from me.

  Back at home, Les stretched, said she was tired, gave me a peck on the cheek, said thanks for dinner, and went straight to bed.

  I poured myself a scotch, sat at the kitchen table, and ruminated on my fate. You deserve every bit of this, Dave, and more, I said to myself. This is pure karmic backlash. Ruth wanted you, you didn’t want her. Now you’re chasing after a woman who isn’t so interested in you.

  I had the lower hand. It reminded me of college, the last time I had the lower hand, with my first girlfriend, Francesca di Caesare, my first love and first experience of regular sex.

  I mention these two facts in conjunction with one another because they were of roughly equal importance in my spiritual development. Regular sex was a revelation to me. Up to that point, I basically thought of myself as a “mind” hovering in mid-air or stalking around on a pair of awkward stilts. Now suddenly, I felt rooted, in my body, in the chthonic rhythms of the earth, sun, moon — especially the moon, the moon’s monthly cycle. I discovered that women’s periods sync up when they’re under the same roof, and other secrets. I felt chosen. You know, they say it isn’t a matter of the top spermatazoa battling its way into the egg, but the egg reaching out and choosing her favourite from the top few hundred contenders. That’s how I felt now. As if the women said: “We like him, let’s make him a success.”

  I remember that Christmas, she was going back to Italy, and I was going to Toronto. We stayed up all night waiting for the cab to take her to the airport, bawling like babies, all because we were going to be separated for three weeks.

  Then she turned the tables on me! That spring, she got in a play, and suddenly started coming over all ambitious and actressy. She always had to go to rehearsal, she started flirting with the male lead of her play, Thomas Alter, “the greatest actor on campus.”

  I came apart at the seams like a cheap suit. I took to stalking around campus, muttering to myself: That bitch. That’s it, I’m dumping her. She can’t do this to me. If anybody came up to talk to me, I brushed them off. I needed to concentrate. I always “wanted to talk,” I tried to argue her into having sex with me, which, of course, turned her off even more, which in turn turned me on even more, and so it went in an endless downward spiral.

  The all-time low came on a day in June. We were sitting outside, tanning. She was in a little green bikini, I was lying next to her, propped on an elbow. Out of my mind with lust, confusion, despair, I put my hand on her stomach, just to touch her.

  “Please, Daffid,” she said in her aristocratic Italian accent. “You’re blocking my rays.”

  You know what saved me? Literature. That’s right, my beloved books. I was taking a freshman survey course in Continental literature, and it happened I’d put off reading the two books on the course — D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina — that dealt with this very topic, having the “lower hand.” I crammed both books in one 24-hour period, alloting so much time for each page, so much time for breaks; but still, the greatness of these books got to me. Anna Karenina, you’ll recall, throws herself under the wheels of a train for love of Vronsky. Gerald freezes himself to death.

  Shit, this could be serious, I realized. The books didn’t give any tips on how to deal with the situation. I had to formulate my own plan, which was: if I couldn’t actually be cool and indifferent to Francesca, I had to act cool and pretend I didn’t want her, didn’t care if I didn’t see her for a couple of days, and so on. What torments I went through, what forces of will I marshalled, boys, as I rolled over at night and went to sleep, her brushing her big, firm, silky 20-year-old breasts against my back, saying, teasingly, “Are you sure you want to go to sleep right now, Daffid?”

  “Yes, I’m tired Francesca, I’ll see you in the morning,” I’d say, faking a yawn, clenching my teeth, praying to the god of restraint for the power to abstain.

  And you know what? It worked! Suddenly, she was always the one who wanted to talk, she was wondering what I was up to all the time. And of course, the more she became interested in me, the less I became interested in her. Finally, at lunch one day, I met a beautiful blond hippie named Kate, my second great love, and summarily dumped Francesca.

  Sounds cruel and harsh, I know. But to this day, I feel as if I narrowly evaded serious personal tragedy. I’ve seen people get the short end of the stick and snap like a twig, they never get it back, they become like wraiths, ghosts of their former selves, they lose all power and vitality.

  I felt a bit of that now, with Les. Oh, well, I thought, “the lover is closer to God than the beloved.” I tried to console myself with that thought, sitting in Les’s kitchen, after she’d gone to bed, but it didn’t help much. I poured myself another large scotch, and took a big drink.

  That helped, a bit.

  My “thank-you” dinner with Les turned out to be pretty much my farewell dinner, as well. Shortly after that, I moved into a house with Max. He was getting booted out of his apartment — his landlady’s kid was boomeranging back from college, and needed a place to live. This time, when he asked me to live with him, I didn’t say no. It was time to go. Certain items in Les’s apartment had been broken, others ruined. One night, I tried to cook black bean soup for her, with a ham hock in it. But something went horribly wrong, the soup congealed into a cement-like substance that bonded with the molecules of the pot and couldn’t be scraped off. Les had to throw out the pot, her favourite. She tried not to be pissed off about it, as Sam informed me later, but she couldn’t help it.

  Max and I looked at several dumps and finally settled on a dive on Palmerston Avenue. Not on the fashionable stretch between College and Bloor, but the strip just above Bloor. A low, bunkerlike structure with slits for windows; windows more suited, it seemed to me, to poking a machine gun out of than letting light in.

  As the less solvent of our two-way partnership, I got the worst ro
om, the joke room, a room in the back with a tilting floor and cheesy, raised-velvet wallpaper depicting nymphs and satyrs chasing each other through Elysian fields.

  That wallpaper reminded me of the apocryphal story of Oscar Wilde’s last words. He died in 1900 in a Paris fleabag. Supposedly, he looked around at the wallpaper, said “One of us has got to go,” and expired. Good old Wilde: witty to the last…

  As for why I never got anywhere with Les, I guess I’ll never know. It could have been any number of things, obviously. Shortly after this, Les started going out with a guy named, appropriately enough, Romeo. Perhaps you’ve heard of him: he’s the leader of Romeo’s 14-piece Latin Orchestra. He’d worshipped Les for even longer than I, it turns out, from afar, seemingly without a shadow of hope. Maybe the sincerity of his worship was better than mine; maybe it was the 14-piece Latin orchestra. Who knows? Go figure; crazy salad.

  10

  Howdy, Stranger

  With my commission from This Land of Ours under my belt, I could fulfill a lifelong dream. Now, when women at parties or whatever asked me what I did for a living, I could look them straight in the eye, hold my head high, and say with full honesty: “Me? I’m a writer, actually.”

  From there I figured it’d be pretty much a matter of puckering up and getting ready to catch them in case they swooned.

  Not so, though, I discovered to my surprise. Women don’t fall for that old “I’m a writer” schtick any more. It’s too outdated a profession. I might as well have said, “I’m a lamplighter” or “I’m a bootblack.” Oh, so you’re a writer, eh? Where do you work? Black Creek Pioneer Village? This is the 20th century; all it did was set off all their internal alarm systems: “WRITER! NO CASH! WRITER! NO CASH! WARNING! THIS IS THE VIPER SECURITY SYSTEM. BACK AWAY FROM THE OFFENDING UNIT!”

  “Oh, really, a writer, eh? That must be so… would you excuse me a moment?”