Chump Change

by David Eddie

  Shit, I thought, I can do that. I went in.

  “You’re a bit overqualified for this,” the woman behind the desk said.

  “I know, but I’m a writer, and it’s a dicey profession. Feast or famine, you know? Mostly famine. I need something steady,” I said.

  “How do we know you’ll stay at the job?”

  I think I was still finding it tough to apply for such a lowly position. Me, David Henry, with two Master’s degrees. Otherwise I never would have said: “You don’t, I’m afraid.”

  Next!

  A few days later, I spotted an ad for something a bit more up my alley:

  UNIVERSITY PROF. WANTED for tutoring/

  proofreading for Admin. Assist. $25 an hour!

  I’m no university prof, but I had an intuition about this ad. Whoever placed it had obviously been disappointed with previous tutors, and had said to him/herself, “This time I will accept no less than a university professor.” But what university prof would be bothered tutoring an administrative assistant, even for $25 an hour? This person was clearly a bit naïve, and therefore might be fooled into hiring me.

  I phoned the number in the ad.

  “Central Toronto Developmental Institute for the Physically and Mentally Challenged, how may I help you?”

  A big enough mouthful for anyone to say, but the woman on the other end of the line had some sort of speech impediment; she spoke slowly, with a clacking, hissing lisp, as if through loose false teeth. How many times a day, I wondered, does she have to gargle her way through that toothsome telephone greeting? Fifty? One hundred? Couldn’t her bosses at the Central Toronto Developmental Institute for the Physically and Mentally Challenged shorten it a bit, to ease the torments of her handicap?

  “I’m calling about an ad in the Globe? For a proofreader?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line; then she dropped her voice to a conspiratorial undertone.

  “Yes, I placed that ad. You’re the first person to respond. Unfortunately, now isn’t a good time for me to talk. Can you call me at home tonight?” In a louder voice, she said: “Yes, Mrs. Powers, I’ll have that on your desk a.s.a.p.”

  “O.K., I’ll call you tonight then, Ms…?”

  “It’s Miss, actually,” she said, sounding a trifle miffed. “Miss Dorothea Buttle.”

  “O.K. I’ll call you tonight.”

  “I think that should be an appropriate arrangement,” she said in the same loud, false-sounding voice. Then, musically: “Good-bye.”

  Click. Bzzzzzz… Miss Dorothea Buttle really put me through the paces to get that gig. I had to fax her my resumé, writing samples, then she phoned both my references — Max and Doug Seltzer — and grilled them thoroughly. Had I written much? Was I efficient, punctual, dependable? Did I have any business experience? Doug told her I was writing a book; Max painted a picture of a one-man freelance-writing empire, constantly faxing and Fed-Exing, well-known in almost every circle but hers.

  She bought it, and a few days later I was hired.

  “I hope this works out, Mr. Henry. I’ve had trouble with tutors before,” she said over the phone, just as I guessed.

  It didn’t take long to find out why she had “trouble” with tutors before. She called me two or three times a day, and in a hushed voice read me her memos, business letters, resumés, birthday cards, even love letters to her “Darling Shep” in Vancouver. I had to transcribe them, “correct” them, and phone her back with the changes.

  Her writing was mind-boggling, a jumbled muddle of pidgin English and haute bureaucratese, randomly punctuated, sprayed willy-nilly with semi-colons, commas, and apostrophes. So a memo to her boss might go:

  As per your inquiry’s to the Administrative Assistant (Miss Dorthea Buttle) of the; Central Toronto Developmental Centre for the Physically and Mentally Handicapped (CTDCPMH) on Friday, August 14, at 11:14 a.m. I would be regrettably informing you of the following advisory’s re: bagel for the staff lunch room. The Chief Cook, Mr. Daniel J. Seymour, telephone’d the Administrative Assistant (Miss Dorothea Buttle) on Tuesday, August 18, 1:04 P.M. To instruct me of the following quotation: he will be ‘unable’ to do so.

  You may think I’m exaggerating; I wish I were. Her memos went on and on about the most trivial minutiae of life at The Central Toronto Developmental Centre for the Physically and Mentally Handicapped. And because her memos created so much confusion, they multiplied endlessly; a fairly simple problem, like switching water-cooler supply companies, necessitated a veritable mountain of paper. Whole forests fell if there was a problem with the insurance company or bank.

  Often it was impossible even to tell what she was trying to say, but if I ever asked for amplification or clarification, she would say, in an extra-haughty manner: “I should think, Mr. Henry, with your expertise you would be able to figure it out for yourself.”

  Watch it, Miss Buttle, I thought. Just because I’m your tutor, doesn’t mean you can tutoyer me. But in all our dealings, Miss Buttle became increasingly seigneurial. One time, she wrote a 38-page memo to her boss about her perceived slights and mistreatments at the hands of the photocopy machine serviceman. It was too long to read over the phone, so she couriered it to me; I agreed to deliver it to her in person, the next day, on my bike. However, since I technically wasn’t supposed to exist, we agreed to meet on a street corner near her office at 5:05 p.m. the next day.

  She didn’t show. I waited on that corner for more than an hour, sitting on a low wall, tanning and reading. Finally, I gave up and pedalled home.

  That night, when I phoned her, she said, without a trace of contrition: “It couldn’t be helped, Mr. Henry. I was detained in a meeting.”

  Her superior tone irked me, but I tried to keep mine mild as I said: “Well, I think at least you owe me an apology for wasting my time.”

  “Mr. Henry, I do not apologize for everything that happens.”

  “But it didn’t just happen, Miss Buttle. You did it.”

  “It was a regrettable but unavoidable situation.”

  “The least you could have done —”

  “I do not have to listen to these kinds of abuse from you, Mr. Henry,” she said, and then she hung up on me.

  “ — is phone and cancel,” I said to the dead receiver.

  There’s nothing I hate more than being hung up on. It really burns me. I wanted to quit right then, but I guess I was feeling a little desperate, a little downtrodden and down on myself, like this was the type of treatment I deserved. “You know why she treats you like a slave and a serf, rather than a respected tutor?” I asked myself, after my anger subsided. “For the same reason a dog licks its balls: because she can.” Because you, David Henry, are her social and professional inferior. After all, she had a job, and I didn’t — and she had something else, something even more important, that I manifestly lacked: the instinct for survival. She’d proved that by hiring me, a subordinate organism, a pilot fish, to more or less do her job for her for about $50 a week.

  It was brilliant. She’d call me two, three, four times a day, to go over memos to her boss, letters to the bank, her resumé, her boss’s resumé, plans for the company picnic, the cancellation of the company picnic, the reinstatement of plans to the company picnic. If I was out, she’d ask me to call her as soon as I got in. Everything was urgent. “I must get this out right away Mr. Henry,” she would always say. Dealing with her would more or less consume my entire day, and often part of my evening too. “Will you be available between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. this evening, Mr. Henry? I have an urgent matter to discuss with you,” she would say to me. If she didn’t call by 8:00, I would call her and she would say, “I’m sorry, something has come up, can I call you back in one hour?” Sure, I’d say — then she’d call me back in an hour and a half. “I’m sorry, Mr. Henry, I haven’t quite finished this memo yet, can I call you back in 20 minutes?” Thus she would effectively pin me to the house. It came to the point where I couldn’t go out without thinking: “I’d
better get back home quickly, maybe Miss Buttle called and has an urgent message.” It was a 24-hour thing, but often, at the end of the day, when I added up the five minutes here, ten minutes there, fifteen minutes there I’d actually spent correcting her material, I’d realize, argh, I only made $12.50.

  It all started to drive me a little batty. One of the first signs of madness, I believe, is when you start talking about people in your life as if everyone knows them. Like: “Aunt Betty always says,” when no one you’re talking to has any idea who your Aunt Betty is, or even that you had one. Now I was starting to do this with my friends. My old grad-school friend, Paul Richman, came up for a visit from Oregon, and almost as soon as he was off the plane, I started ranting and raving about “Miss Buttle, my crazy administrative assistant.”

  “She’s driving me nuts, Paul,” I kept telling him. “I mean it, I’m going to quit any day now.”

  “Wait a second,” he said in his slow Oregonian drawl. “Let me get this straight: if she’s your administrative assistant, what do you mean you’re going to quit? Don’t you mean you’re going to fire her?”

  At first I didn’t see what he was getting at. Then I realized my situation was beyond, or beneath, his comprehension, that I had sunk to a level he, Paul Richman, couldn’t even understand.

  “Ah, no, Paul, I see the confusion,” I said. “You see, I’ve reversed the traditional formula. Instead of employing an administrative assistant, I am employed by one.”

  I started laughing — a trifle hysterically, perhaps, because he just looked at me seriously and said: “Dude, you have to pull yourself together. You must relinquish this relationship immediately. You are in serious danger of compromising your psychological integrity.”

  Paul talks that way. But he had a point, I knew. Shortly after that, I phoned Miss Buttle and told her I wouldn’t be returning her calls any more.

  I kept looking… One ad I noticed in the paper, day after day:

  WANTED: extras for movies/television.

  All ages. No experience necessary.

  It seemed too good to be true, and it was. I went in to their Yorkville office (the office and the gorgeous redhead receptionist were clearly intended to intimidate, and they succeeded), filled out a form, and was interviewed by a portly, swarthy, balding man with a diamond pinkie ring. At the end of the interview, he said: “Do you have an 8×10 photo of yourself?”

  “No.”

  “You’re going to need one.”

  He gave me the card of a photographer who would take my “head shot,” and only then would he be able to sign me up.

  “How much does he charge?” “$300.”

  I stared at him. If I had $300 to throw around, what would I be doing here?

  “I’ll tell you what. I’ll get my own 8×10. There must be a way to get it cheaper than that.”

  “Well, we really like this photographer’s work,” he said. “We only really like to use his headshots.”

  I get the picture, I thought; I see how the world works now. The photographer and the agency split the fee, file your photo, and you never hear from them again. A lot of people probably gave them their last $300. Congratulations, Dave! Through your adventures on the bottom of the barrel, you’ve discovered yet another unsavoury facet of human nature, viz. the more desperate you are, the more people will try to take advantage of you.

  When I told Max the story, he confirmed that most of these extra agents were scam-artists, but he said he knew of a legitimate agent, the best in Toronto, through his Cosmodemonic connections.

  “Will she ask me for an 8×10 photograph?” I asked him.

  “Nah, she doesn’t care about that. All you need is a snapshot — like the kind you get at Woolworth’s. What does she care? You’re only an extra, for God’s sake.”

  “Hook me up,” I said.

  I was only an extra for one day, and it was one of the worst of my life. We reported for work at 5:00 a.m. and they took us in a bus out to a field in the middle of nowhere. There were tents set up at one end of the field, and at the other, the set: a turn-of-the-century fairground or market, outside a big old Edwardian hotel. We had some coffee and donuts in one of the tents, then shooting began. Sure enough, the scene was meant to be a summer fair, we were told to mill about pretending to judge jams and hams and baskets of strawberries. The highlight of the scene was when two of the principal characters, a young woman and her mother, rode up to the front of the hotel in a horse-drawn buggy, and the girl says to her mother, “I can’t wait to get out of these clothes and into a nice warm bath.”

  They shot the scene over and over and over and over. The lighting wasn’t right, the sound wasn’t right, the buggy didn’t come in at the right moment, there were 1,001 details to the scene, and each one had to be perfect or else — retake. It was early September, a cold and cloudy day, but it was supposed to be a summer scene, so we were all dressed in these thin summer outfits, issued by Wardrobe. I had on a pair of lederhosen-type shorts and a short-sleeved “peasant” shirt. All the walkie-talkie toting ADs and assorted crew were wearing toques and these huge parkas. By the time we broke for lunch, I was freezing, my teeth were chattering.

  Films are hierarchical, feudal affairs; and extras are the lowest of the low, scum of the earth. Serf-like, we had to stand aside as the cast, crew, and unionized extras ate first; we were only permitted to eat once they were finished. We shuffled in silence, collected our slop, and went back to our tent, known as, believe it or not, the “extra holding pen.”

  We were animals — lower than animals, it turned out. In the afternoon, it started to rain, a cold, soaking rain, and I’ll never forget the moment when they brought blankets for the horses, but nothing for us, standing around in our summery clothes. We stood chattering, take after take.

  It was only when one of the cameramen said “I’m picking up some blue on the faces of some of the background performers,” that they brought out blankets for us — even then, unlike the horses, we had to share. I shared mine with a little ferrety guy who was very worried about the implications as we snuggled and huddled for warmth. We were only able to keep it on for a few minutes between takes, then had to whip it off.

  They kept shooting as the sun set in the west, and I started getting seriously cold…It was like a recurring nightmare, a tape-loop nightmare you can’t wake out of. Repeating the same motion over and over again (I was pitching hay), the carriage pulling up, and the aristocratic girl saying: “I can’t wait to get out of these clothes and into a nice warm bath.” Suddenly I had an idea. It was between takes, the director and the cameraman were having a long, involved colloquy about some detail of the shot, and I was standing near the hotel. Who would notice if I slipped inside, got warm, and came out again? They probably had a nice toasty fire in there. I could watch through the window to see when they resumed shooting.

  Great idea. I started shuffling towards the hotel, slither-sliding crabwise, opened the door, dashed inside — except I wasn’t inside, I was still outside. It was a fake, a prop, held up by angled 2×4s. “AAARGH!” I said, face to the heavens, rain streaming down my freezing cheeks.

  For my terrible day as an extra, I earned $77, enough to last me maybe two weeks on my two-sandwich-a-day regimen. I had to get something quick. I combed the paper, hit the streets looking for signs. I applied for jobs, but either I was overqualified or they were underwhelmed. Briefcase in hand, tie on, shoes polished, I sat across from desk after desk as middle-aged men and women shook their heads: no, nothing, no, no, I’m afraid not, sorry, nothing available right now.

  Finally, I became desperate.

  I remember it like yesterday. You don’t soon forget the day you finally knuckle under, say “world, you win,” and sell your soul to the devil.

  Of course, it doesn’t really work that way, you don’t sell your soul all at once, you barter it off bit by bit over the years until one day you find yourself turning to the camera, face covered in pancake makeup, saying: “I’m not a
doctor, but I play one on TV.” It’s a slow, imperceptible process, so slow most people don’t even realize when it’s happening to them.

  But I like to remember it as happening to me all on a single day in early autumn.

  I awoke from dreams of torture, madness, demented dentists revving their drills and laughing hysterically, feudal lords ringing for me, the serf, to fetch them more brandy: RINGRING, RING-RING…

  I sat up with a start, covered in sweat. “Phew, it was only a nightmare,” I said to myself. I was back in reality: lying on a futon on the floor of my cheesy room with the raised-velvet wallpaper. Somewhere, far away, the phone was ringing. Why wasn’t the answering machine picking it up? Some damn fool, probably me, had obviously left it off.

  I lurched out of bed. I was hungover, I knew that in a flash. I felt like Frankenstein’s monster, a creature made of grave-robbed body-parts, stitched together by a hunchback, with bolts in my neck and formaldehyde for blood…and in my skull, the wrong brain, the brain of a madman, the result of a horrible switcheroo. I was so hungover, in fact, I broke Rule #1 of the Deadbeat’s Code: never answer the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “May I speak to David Henry, please?”

  In a flash, I recognized the adenoidal drawl of my arch-nemesis, Adam Cohen. I should have known. “Only relatives or creditors ever ring in that Wagnerian manner,” as Oscar Wilde says. I coughed, and changed my voice.

  “He’s not here right now. May I take a message?”

  “Who’s this?” was the suspicious reply.

  “This is his roommate, Max Stapleton.”

  “I’ve spoken to Max Stapleton before. This doesn’t sound like him.”

  “I have a cold.”

  “I see, ‘Max.’ Would you mind holding for a moment?”

  He clicked off. I like that, I thought. He phones me, then he puts me on hold. I waited. My temples throbbed, my guts churned. A terrible stew of poisons was bubbling and brewing deep in my intestinal tract. Finally, Adam Cohen came back on the line.

  “Hello again, Mr. Henry,” he said.