Chump Change

by David Eddie

  “I told you, Mr…”

  “Cohen,” he said drily.

  “Mr. Cohen. As I said to you before, this isn’t David Henry, it’s Max Stapleton.”

  “That’s funny. I just spoke to Max Stapleton on the other line a few moments ago. He was at his office.”

  Pop! goes the weasel. Actually, I was more impressed than anything else. This guy was a real pro. He would go a long way in the debt-collection industry; he probably already had, come to think of it. I flatter myself that only the top debt-collection agents get a crack at the notorious “Henry account.”

  “Unless Max Stapleton can be in two places at the same time, I suggest we cut the crap. Shall we, Mr. Henry?” Adam Cohen asked sarcastically.

  “Alright, alright. Just tell me one thing. How did you get Max’s number at the office?”

  “That’s my business,” Adam Cohen said (though I thought I detected a touch of professional pride in his voice). “What I propose to discuss with you now is your business, Mr. Henry. If ‘business’ is really the right word. Funny business is more like it.”

  He launched into a 15-minute harangue, peppered with quasi-rhetorical, pseudo-Socratic questions. How would you like it if someone did that to you, Mr. Henry? Do you think that’s a good way to conduct your affairs, Mr. Henry? It reminded me of my parents, when I was a kid. “What do you think your punishment should be, David?” I don’t know, Mom, Dad: a banana split? A new skateboard?

  I sat there in my boxers, farting a blue streak, thirsty as Tantalus, generally having a terrible time. Finally, after extracting a series of extravagant promises from me (like a dentist extracting rotten teeth), and delivering himself of several Sahara-dry witticisms and homilies, Adam Cohen signed off.

  I groaned, rose out of the chair slowly, like an old man, and hit the can. After a sometimes frightening, occasionally painful, and ultimately deeply troubling 20 minutes in the washroom, I went downstairs to see if there was anything to eat. I was savagely hungry, dreaming of a cold chicken leg wrapped in tinfoil, or maybe a piece of pumpkin pie such as Samantha sometimes brought over.

  But there was nothing, just some condiments, milk, and a yogurt container containing… something, it had been in there so long no one could remember what. I shuddered, and shut the fridge door.

  Likewise, the cupboard was bare. Typical bachelor establishment. Not even any crackers. Nothing but a couple of bread heels and, way in back, overlooked and despised by all, a can of sardines “in their own juices,” as the can proudly proclaimed.

  I hate sardines. Little crunchy critters, with that oily, fishy smell, a smell that stays on your fingers for days, the smell of failure. “Well, Mr. Henry, allow me to say I was very impressed by your resumé, and you’ll be happy to know the board has made a unanimous decision to… [sniff, sniff] What’s that smell? Do you smell it? Something fishy? Anyway, as I say, we’re not hiring right now, but we’ll give you a call if anything should come up in the next few months.”

  I opened the can, spread some mayo on the bread heels, and laid some sardines side by side on their bed of bread, put the other bread-heel on top, and took a bite.

  As I munched the pungent fillets between my teeth, a wave of self-pity came over me. Welcome to reality, Dave, this is a reality sandwich, I said to myself. This is the Great Writer’s Brunch you always dreamed of. You took the road less travelled. What you didn’t realize is the reason it’s less travelled is because it’s only travelled by fools!

  On the spot, I composed a bitter autobiographical poem, dedicated to myself:

  I am a chump.

  I live in a dump.

  In New York, I was a bumpkin

  And for me the Big Apple turned into a pumpkin.

  Now I sit here eating sardines

  Sure isn’t how I pictured it in my teens.

  I found myself muttering a prayer. Not to God, God only helps those who help themselves, the virtuous and hardworking, I needed help from Elsewhere:

  “O Dark Lord of the Underworld, please spare me any more of the torments of the job search. I need a job immediately, preferably something easy, highly remunerative, and somehow writing-related. If you do this for me, I promise to give you in return…my eternal soul.”

  14

  The Cosmodemonic

  Broadcast Corporation

  Beelzebub answered my prayers with surprising speed. The next day, I’m having lunch with the old man. Cheapo Chinese, comme toujours. I’m starving, lapping up my hot-and-sour like a maddened beast. It’s the first food to pass my lips since the epiphanic sardines. I’m determined to hit him for a “bridging loan,” come what may, even if it means the heavens split open and Phat Ho’s is rent asunder. I need cash!

  We eat. A long silence is followed by another long, long silence. Then Dad says, out of the blue: “I was on television yesterday.”

  “Oh, really?” I ask, between slurps. This is the era of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. In a few short months, the Berlin Wall will fall. Suddenly my father, who has toiled in the vineyards of obscurity all his life as a professor of Eastern European economics, specializing in agrarian land reform in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is in heavy demand from media outlets all over the city. Yes, my creased, careworn, snowy-haired old man has become…a celebrity, of sorts. Editors and producers don’t know from Austro-Hungarian land reform, all they know is: Eastern Europe is collapsing and we don’t have a clue why! We need someone to explain it now, now, now! You there! Snivelling little intern-lackey! Get on the blower to the university! Get me a prof who can sort this shit out on the double or you’re fucking fired! A few hours later, my Dad comes trundling into the studio, suffers himself to be made up and coached, then tries to explain it all in a few simple sound-bites.

  “What show?”

  “The Saturday Evening News.”

  I’m impressed. The Saturday Evening News is one of the Cosmodemonic Broadcast Corporation’s flagship news programs, hosted by none other than Reed Franklin, the éminence grise of Canadian TV news, “the most trusted man in Canada.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “Very well.”

  Then he looks up from his soup and meets my eyes with a level gaze.

  “I told the producer you were looking for a job,” he says.

  I stared at my father in amazement, my spoon poised in mid-air, wondering: how did he know that? I hadn’t mentioned anything to him about looking for a job. Unless this is Your handiwork, my Liege?

  But then I caught myself, and remembered to whom I was talking. My father has been assuming I’ve been looking for a job all along. In his mind it’s a simple Socratic-style syllogism:

  All men either have a job, or want one.

  Dave is a man.

  Dave has no job.

  Therefore, Dave is looking for a job.

  From his giant wallet, he produces a business card, and slides it across the table towards me. It reads:

  Cynthia Butch

  PRODUCER

  THE SATURDAY EVENING NEWS

  With phone, address, and fax number.

  “I told her you went to Columbia,” he says. “She said they’re always looking for ‘casual writers.’”

  I take the card, mumble “thanks,” and slip it in my pocket.

  A couple of days later, I’m deep in the bowels of the gigantic Cosmodemonic Broadcast Corporation itself, television news division.

  I’m sitting outside the office of the head honcho, the executive producer of television news and current affairs programming, Bill Frizell. He has my resumé, as well as copies of “Letter From New York” and a draft of “Welcome to Toronto.” Right now, someone else is in his office. I stare at the secretary, smile, twiddle my thumbs, and look around the newsroom.

  Pandemonium prevails. The air is electric with tension and stress. On every wall, on every desk, a profusion of televisions are tuned to a cacophony of channels. The phone rings incessantly, BING-BONG, BING-BONG, it goes, on the overhead P.A. syste
m. Everywhere, people are running around frantically, clutching fistfuls of paper. Every once in a while, someone stands up at their desk, looks around angrily, and yells: “SPLIT!”

  I later found out “split!” is the command for one of the script assistants to split the script into seven copies. But back then, I was tempted to think it was a sign from above, God speaking through the Cosmodemonic airwaves, telling me to split, Dave, split! Flee the bowels of this terrible place! Save yourself while you still can!

  Cynthia Butch said they’re looking for “casual writers,” so I’m dressed casually: patched khakis, frayed sneakers, white T-shirt, all accessorized by a golden tan. Probably not the greatest look for landing a job, but, as you may have guessed, part of me didn’t really want this job. “Well, Dad, I gave it a shot, but they turned me down. Now can I borrow a thousand bucks?”

  In the end, though, I think my downbeat duds actually wound up working in my favour. Frizell took my ultra-casual attire for a symptom of superconfidence. I think he did, anyway. Later, I heard him say something in a meeting about interviewing job candidates who were “arrogant, as all the good ones are,” and I got the feeling he was referring to me.

  I enter his office, Frizell is reading through photocopies of my magazine articles, and chuckling to himself. A good sign, I feel.

  “Sit down, sit down,” he says, with a broad smile. I sit.

  “Well, one thing is certain,” he began. “You can write.”

  Never in my life has a job interview gone so smoothly. It was eerie. Normally, I get nervous, and wind up blurting out all kinds of terrible confessions. I’m very uncomfortable with self-promotion. My usual modus operandi in job interviews is to go in, tell them how much I suck and why they don’t want to hire me. I guess that’s part of the reason I wind up with such lousy jobs.

  In this one magical instance, though, even my ritual self-excoriation and -immolation gets a positive spin. Frizell is impressed by my candour, it seems. He finds my honesty “refreshing.”

  All in all, he seems to be a man very much like myself: bespectacled, philosophical, a little abstracted. A nice guy. So much so I found myself wondering how he had risen to a position of such prominence in the ball-breaking world of TV news.

  We chatted. At one point I said: “I know I don’t have much experience, but I can tell you one thing: I am committed heart and soul to the craft of writing, to getting good at it, and I will bring that same commitment to writing TV news, if you give me the chance.”

  That impressed him, I think.

  “Frankly, I’m interested,” he said after a while. “What I want you to do is watch a lot of information television, then come back in a week and we’ll see what we can do about putting you on the schedule.”

  The interview seemed to be at an end. I stood up and shook his hand.

  “Thanks. I appreciate it. You won’t regret this.”

  I left his office walking on air, nagged by only one gnawing doubt: had he really offered me the job? Just once, I wish someone would say to me: Congratulations, Dave, break out the champagne, you’ve got the job, report to work Monday at 9:00 a.m. But they never do that, do they? There’s always some sort of vagueness. That’s always been my experience, anyway.

  Frizell said watch a lot of TV, so I watched. On the strength of my (apparent) job offer, I borrowed another $200 from Max, and settled in to watch.

  It was ironic, really, that my old man should be encouraging me to get a job in television, because it was he (though he swears he doesn’t remember this) who once, long ago, locked the family set in the basement when we were kids.

  In retrospect, I must say I can see why he did what he did. We were way too into it, my brother and I — especially my brother. He was mesmerized, Svengalied, a tube-ula rasa sofaspud with all the trimmings: sour cream, bacon bits, chives. Every day, he power-walked home from school, planning his “viewing strategy” in his head. “Get Smart, Happy Days, Gilligan’s Island, Star Trek of course, then dinner, Charlie’s Angels…” Then he sat slack-jawed and pinwheel-eyed before the television for six, seven, eight hours straight, coming down only for his half-hour “dinner window” from 6:30–7:00 (when the news was on).

  You couldn’t take him anywhere: every time he saw a product “as advertised on TV” he threw a fit, stomped his feet, held his breath till he turned blue — until someone either bought him the fucking product (a rubber snake or whatever) or he had to be locked in the car in the parking lot, like a dog.

  Among his friends, he was a playground guru, a storehouse of TV-trivia nonpareil. At recess, they would gather around him and pepper him with questions: Who was “Charlie” and why were his detectives called “Angels”? What happened to The Fonz’s true parents? And the medium’s equivalent of the tree-falls-in-the-forest philosophical classic: If the Professor can make a radio out of a coconut, why can’t he fix the boat and get everyone off Gilligan’s Island?

  He was a television artist, my brother, if I may be allowed to use that word in connection with so fundamentally passive an activity as watching TV. He watched with passion, seriousness, and even inventiveness. For example, I believe it was my very own younger brother who (way back in the low-tech ‘70s, long before channel converters or remote control) invented what we now refer to as “channel grazing.” It looked like grazing, too, the way he did it back then, on all fours in front of the set, manually spinning the dial, sometimes even lowing with satisfaction or bellowing with chagrin at what he came across.

  Me he considered to be little more than a dilettante. I put in my hours, like everyone else, but I was too prone to distraction, from the parents, phone calls, sometimes even homework. He never said anything (my brother literally never said anything while watching TV). But sometimes, as we sat side-by-side, bathed in baby-blue cathode rays, I could sense his disapproval. It was all in the clench of his buttocks, in the disdainful way he flipped from my channel-choice to his choice, the obvious choice (that was usually just before I beat the fucking shit out of him).

  Yes, in retrospect I can see why the old man did what he did. Still, the way he did it was a tad precipitate, I feel. One day it was there, the next — poof! — gone. My brother and I came home, yelled “Hi, Mom!” over our shoulders as we bounded up the stairs two at a time to the TV room, flung open the door and there, where the tube used to be, just a square of dust-free wood on the cabinet top. My brother stood thunderstruck, swaying in the doorway. His jaw worked but no sound emerged from his lips. He turned to look at me, but his eyes were glazed over, he saw nothing. And then he was gone, galloping down the stairs, with me hot on his heels.

  Mom was in the kitchen as usual, stirring something inscrutable in a large pot.

  “Mom: where’s the television?” my brother demanded to know, his empurpled face inches from hers.

  “Yeah, Mom: what have you done with it?” I asked from her other flank.

  “Your father locked it in the basement last night after you went to bed,” she answered, unperturbed. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. Why don’t you ask him about it when he gets home tonight?”

  “Well, what time does he usually get home?” my brother asked her.

  “Yeah, Mom: what time?” I chimed in.

  She looked levelly from one of us to the other. “You mean, you don’t know what time your father gets home every night?”

  I caught my brother’s eye through the steam from the pot. He shrugged. All we knew was that Dad was always already in the kitchen, with drink and loosened tie, when we came down at 6:30 for dinner. But when he actually arrived home was a mystery. It could’ve been any time between 3:30 and 6:30, really.

  “Six,” our mutual mother said. “He gets home at six.”

  By the time Dad got home, my brother and I had settled on a plan. Good cop, bad cop, basically. Or, to be more accurate, prosecuting attorney, psychotic maniac. I would open with my best Perry Mason-type pseudo-legalistic mumbo-jumbo (this never failed to soften up the old man
, less I think because he was swayed by my impeccable logic than because he pictured me in lawyer’s robes someday). Then, if that didn’t do the trick, my brother would weigh in with his act: tearing out his hair, beating his breast, screaming at the top of his lungs. We’d used this routine many times before to good effect, to obtain everything from allowance increases to bedtime extensions.

  It didn’t work too well this time, though. I hit Dad with my spiel the moment he walked through the door: “Dad: it has come to our attention that, without any prior negotiation or familial consent, you have seen fit unilaterally to —”

  Before I could get properly into it, my brother jumped the gun and went into his act, but to no avail. Dad merely hung up his coat and hat with an aggrieved air à la Ward Cleaver and trudged into the kitchen. He kissed Mom on the cheek, and sat down with a heavy sigh to explain how it was going to be.

  In the bleak weeks that followed, my brother staged sit-ins, storm-throughs, freeze-outs, glare-fests. All in vain. Our father didn’t budge an inch. In retrospect, I must say my brother’s tactic of Ghandian “passive resistance” was poorly chosen. After all, he’d spent the last few years shut in the TV room, sometimes even ordering his dinner over the intercom. Giving our parents the silent treatment wasn’t exactly going to break them.

  Then he tried another tack. Claiming to go to the library, he went to his friends’ houses instead, and attached himself to their tubes like a barnacle. That came to an abrupt end when someone’s mother phoned and said: “Mrs. Henry, your son has been watching TV at our house for the last four hours straight. He keeps ordering me to bring him snacks, and we’re about to have some people over for dinner. I wonder if you could come and get him?”

  By sheer coincidence, on the same day this happened my mother found a baggie of pot in a pair of shorts I’d tossed down the laundry chute. My brother and I were both grounded indefinitely.

  We were faced with a perplexing new dilemma: how to kill the great yawning gaps of time between school and dinner, dinner and bedtime, without television. We tried cards, board games, various hobbies. My brother tried to put together an intricate model of a ‘67 Corvette, and spent many long hours gluing microscopic parts together, consulting the instructions, surrounded by newspaper on the floor of his bedroom. One day, he finally gave up, and with an inhuman howl of anguish, he brought his small fist down on the whole project, eventually jumping up and down on the remains until they were practically powder.