Chump Change

by David Eddie

  “It’s a funny name for your store,” I said to him. “At first, I thought it was going to be a sex shop.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, ‘get it on,’ you know, is slang for ‘have sex.’”

  He stared at me for a couple of seconds, then threw back his head and roared with laughter.

  “Oh, I had no idea,” he said, after a while, wiping the tears off his cheeks. “I thought, you know, ‘buy a shirt and get it on.’”

  “I guess you haven’t been here a long time.”

  “A year,” he said proudly.

  “I’m surprised no one has ever mentioned anything to you.”

  We laughed together about this for awhile, then he told his wife, who was dressing a mannequin at the back of the store. She didn’t seem to find it as funny as her husband, the look on her face said: Oh, no, another disaster in the new world.

  On the application form, in the place for “salary,” I wrote down $40,000. At work the next day, the receptionist called me over and said, “Someone called yesterday and asked if you really made $40,000 a year. A Chinese guy?”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I said that sounded about right.”

  I moved in a taxi. I still didn’t have much: futon, backpack, ghettoblaster, typewriter, box of books. Johnny sold me a writing desk, what used to be called a “secretary,” from his basement, for $100. My mother contributed a two-seater couch from her cornucopic basement. Max gave me a microwave, and a full set of kitchen utensils (since Sam already had all that stuff). Almost everything in that apartment was a donation, a hand-me-down from family or friends, except a beautiful red-velvet armchair I bought at a garage sale down the street.

  I arranged these few items in a Japanese minimalist effect, dictated mostly by necessity, but also by inclination. “To make a virtue of necessity,” I often think that should be the motto of my generation. We were given less; but that could be for the best, we could live simpler, more spiritual lives than the greedy, gobbling Yuppoisie.

  I could see leading a simpler, more spiritual life in my new pad. I could picture myself eating rice out of a single bowl, then washing the bowl when it was finished. Of course, with my new salary burning a hole in my pocket, I’d also probably want plenty of octogenarian scotch, a little snuff-box of cocaine, fine wines from the hills of Abruzzi, and the finest herb from the mountains of Jamaica. “A life of simple virtues and complex vices,” is how I put it to myself. As a final touch, Lola bought me a bird, a canary named Georgie. She also bought a cage for it, but I left it open, let Georgie fly freely around, a living symbol of my newfound freedom and independence. He quickly learned to fly back to his cage for food and water. Every morning, at exactly 8:00, Georgie, perched on a lamp, his chest puffed out, woke me up with his sweet song.

  How I loved that apartment. My first and only solo pad. Solitude is a form of freedom, and when you’re alone you can do whatever you want. If I wanted to dance around nude, covered in chocolate pudding, with a hollowed-out pumpkin on my head, singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” no one would ever know the difference, as long as the shades were drawn. As long as the shades were drawn, I was king of all I could see. I could furnish to my own taste, listen to my own music.

  At night, I would turn on the hallway light downstairs, like a huge night-light, it filtered up through the banisters reassuringly. I felt so good in my new pad that I hugged myself to sleep. Thinking: they say money can’t buy happiness — but it sure can rent it for a while.

  It never rains but it pours. Money also came in from a couple of unexpected quarters. First, the Great Editor called, said he read my article, loved it, and was going to publish it without changing a word.

  “Sorry it took so long,” he said casually.

  I stared at the phone. You mean all this time you haven’t been putting me off? You’ve just been too lazy and disorganized to read my article? I didn’t know whether to thank him or give him a piece of my mind. I decided the former route was the wiser. And it was, because before I knew it, a cheque for the balance of my fee — $1,500—was winging my way.

  Then one Saturday morning my mother phoned, waking me up.

  “Did you remember today was your father’s birthday?”

  “Oh…um, yeah, sure.”

  “Did you have any plans?”

  “Not really, just maybe call him or send him a card or something.”

  “I bet he would really appreciate it if you called, and cooked him dinner or something.”

  “O.K., Mom, I’ll do it.”

  I called the old man at home. Cautiously, suspiciously — but with an unmistakable note of pleasure in his voice — he agreed to come over for dinner, perhaps the first meal I had hosted or sponsored in either of our lifetimes.

  Well, hell, I thought, after hanging up. Why not do it up? The old man’s put up with a lot of grief and anxiety authored by yours truly, why not pay him tribute for once, show him how you feel? I would throw the old man a feast. I had a recipe for “Mediterranean Fisherman’s Soup” in an old cookbook I picked up in a second-hand store, and decided to make him that.

  I headed into the hubbub of Kensington Market, lightly stoned. On Augusta, I bought tomatoes, onions, garlic, herbs and spices. I headed down to Baldwin Street, fish central, and bought clams, shrimp, rockfish, Red Snapper, even a couple of live lobsters that snapped and writhed in the bag. On Kensington Street, at Global Cheese, I picked up baguettes, pâté, salmon mousse, French champagne cheese, capers, crackers. At the liquor store on Spadina, I bought a bottle of Lagavulin, plus two bottles of beautiful, meaty Bordeaux. In the end, I spent the last of my paycheck (even with my fabulous salary I was still living week-to-week, and probably always will), and there were still five days left to go until my next one. Oh, well, I thought. I’ll make a gigantic vat of the soup, and live on the leftovers. Won’t be the first time I’ve had to stretch a pot of food. When one pot is all you have to last several days, that pot becomes holy to you.

  By the time the old man rang the bell, and mounted the stairs with heavy tread, I was ready. Candles lit, incense burning, apartment gleaming and dust-free, wine open and breathing, hors d’oeuvres laid out on the coffee table.

  When he saw the spread, a big smile split his creased and careworn face.

  “This looks very nice,” he said in tones of unguarded pleasure.

  “Want a scotch, Dad?”

  He did. I poured him a Lagavulin with a single cube. The night went like a dream, and when I brought out the stew, in heated bowls with garlic bread on the side, Dad was flabbergasted. The wine was delicious, and his cheeks glowed with pleasure in the flickering light. I finished him off with some apple pie, ice cream, and strong coffee.

  After dinner, we repaired to the “conversation nook,” where Dad sat on the two-seater couch and I on a chair, both taking conservative sips from liberal scotches, and doing something uncharacteristic, right out of the ordinary for the two of us: talking. Just having a little chat, a tête-à-tête, talking easily and contentedly about I can’t remember what. It may not seem like much to you, I’ll bet, but it was unusual enough for me that I’ll probably remember the event for the rest of my life.

  Suddenly, the evening took a bizarre, magic-realism turn. Dad leaned back, dispatched a mouthful of scotch, and said:

  “You know, I’ve been thinking. You’re making good money now, but you’re going to need a bit of capital to set yourself up in this apartment, buy some furniture, a stereo, and so on. I’m prepared to lend you a bit of capital, and you don’t have to worry about paying me back.”

  I stared at him, stunned. Who are you and what have you done with my father? I felt like asking him. Then I in turn did something right out of character: I refused his offer.

  “Nah, thanks, Dad, I appreciate it but I’m O.K. for now,” I heard myself saying.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I am, Dad, keep your money. I’ll save up from my salary and buy th
ings one at a time.”

  Surprised and pleased, we fell refreshed into a couple more scotches. After a while, Dad checked his watch and announced that it was time to go. I ushered him out the door, wished him happy birthday, and watched him walk into the darkness. When I went upstairs to clean up, I found, attached to the fridge, a cheque for $2,000. Dad must have left it there on his way back from a trip to the bathroom.

  I glanced over at the soup. What the hell did I put in there? That’s some sort of magic soup, capable of making people behave nobly, virtuously, selflessly — i.e., the opposite of their normal selves. Carefully, I covered the pot with Saran Wrap and slid it into the fridge without spilling a drop. You never knew when something like that might come in handy.

  Everything was going my way: great pad, pacified Dad, babe-a-licious girlfriend, cash-flow supreme. The only cloud on my horizon, the only ink-blot on the fresh new shirt of my happiness, was the nagging of my conscience.

  “Dave, Dave, Dave,” it would say. “What’s become of you? Whatever became of David Henry? What would your 17-year-old self say if he could see you now? I know: fucking sell-out. How could you work for a medium you detest? You’re not a writer, you’re a Cyrano de Bergerac, that is, Cyrano de Faust: you sold your soul to the devil to feed clever lines to talking haircuts who probably make quadruple what you do. Why, Dave, why?”

  But who isn’t a Cyrano, these days? Around this time, I happened to read an article entitled “Writing for Roseanne,” about a humour columnist for the Long Island section of the New York Times who gets a call to write for the Roseanne show. One of the producers liked her stuff, phoned her up, offered her three grand a week to start. She said sure, naturally, and flew down to Burbank.

  At her first meeting, Roseanne herself showed up two hours late, and proceeded to chew out all the writers.

  “I’m the top star on TV!” she yelled at them. “And I should be walking around here with a goddamn crown on my head and you should all be kissing my fucking ass.”

  The crux of her tirade was, none of them had caught her “voice.”

  “My voice does not come through at all! I could get good writers to replace all of you tomorrow, and I have every intention of throwing all of you out of here!”

  The writer, shaken, eventually went back to her old job. Since when, I wondered, is it the writer’s job to capture the “voice” of an actor? It’s all assbackwards, it should be the other way around.

  Once, writers and poets bestrode the earth like Colossi. Probably the biggest celebrity of the 19th century was Charles Dickens. At the height of his fame, you could write a letter addressed to “Charles Dickens, Europe,” and it would get to him. When he visited America in 1842, he wrote to a friend:

  “I can give you no conception of my welcome. There never was a king or emperor on earth so cheered and followed by the crowds, and entertained at splendid balls and dinners and waited upon by public bodies of all kinds… If I go out in a carriage, the crowd surrounds it and escorts me home; if I go to the theatre, the whole house…rises as one man and the timbers ring again.”

  Likewise, when Oscar Wilde visited America, his quips made headlines on three continents: “OSCAR WILDE ‘DISAPPOINTED’ IN ATLANTIC OCEAN,” the papers trumpeted. “WILDE HAS NOTHING TO DECLARE, AT CUSTOMS, BUT HIS GENIUS.”

  Now, though, of course, we live in a visual age. TV rules, TV makes the rules, everyone on the planet has a tube or wants one soon. Equatorial mud huts shake with canned laughter; igloos glow cathode-ray blue; caves have cable. Every year, a billion people watch the Academy Awards.

  I never used to understand the Second Commandment. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth.” Why not? I always used to wonder. What’s the problem? Was Jehovah saying we shouldn’t sculpt, shouldn’t paint? What was the Second Commandment doing next to all the other common-sense Commandments advising against murder, adultery, covetousness, etc.?

  It helps when you discover that this Commandment, and the story of Moses and the golden idol, symbolize the victory of the ancient logocentric Hebrews over the pictorial-based Sumerians, a victory that made abstract thought, monotheism, and civilization as we know it, possible. And now we’re reversing this 4,000 year-old trend, returning to a visual-based society. Once again, mankind worships a little graven golden idol. It even has a name: Oscar.

  Yes, sometimes as I sat around in the kitchen of my charming new apartment, wearing my lordly new bathrobe, sipping single-malt scotch and smoking gold-filtered cigarettes, I would hear the faint, faint voice of my conscience. Then I might hear a stirring, and Lola would appear in the doorway, naked, all that bounty and beauty on full display, her hands on her hips: “Dave, aren’t you coming to bed?” And all thought would fly out the window, the window of opportunity. Lord have mercy, someday I’ll quit and go back to writing, I promise. I just need a bit more of this first: la dolce vita, a respite from the cold-sweat complications of poverty, a surcease from sardines. Like St. Augustine, my fervent prayer was: “Lord, make me good — but not yet.”

  19

  Fourteen Killed

  I continued seeing Lola and it was great. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier. After all, a zaftig 19-year-old bartender, what could be more ideal as a girlfriend for yours truly? In the afternoons, after work, I’d hang around Pauper’s reading the paper and sipping free drinks while Lola worked. When things were slow, she’d come over, sit on my lap (which never failed to get me going), and proudly introduce me as her boyfriend to her co-workers and regular customers. Most nights, I’d hang around until last call, then go in the back room with the staff and kibitz while they counted their tips. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sexier sight than Lola, pencil behind her ear, expertly riffling a giant stack of bills, efficiently totting up sums from credit-card chits.

  Then, one night, Lola announced she was “off sex.” She meant it, too: no matter how many times I laid seige to her ramparts, the answer was always the same: no, not now, I don’t feel like it. I was completely cut off. After work, I followed her to booze cans, or sat across from her in late-night restaurants, listening to her happy chatter, the typical self-involved chatter of a 19-year-old, waiting for my reward.

  Which never came. Finally, around dawn, we’d go to bed. I’d sleep for a couple of hours, a light sleep, tortured by terrible dreams, of huge, painted hookers laughing, bouncing up and down on top of me, only to wake up, in a cold sweat, with four ugly realities staring me in the face: a) the alarm was ringing; b) it had been ringing for a long time; c) I was late for work; d) I was fucked. Jump out of bed, dress, kiss Lola (“Mm, bye,” she’d say, roll over and go back to sleep), dash off to work, no shower, no shave, no coffee. The next night, repeat.

  “Why, Lola, why?” I kept asking her. “What’s the problem?”

  Finally, one night, it all came out.

  Somewhere between Andrew and me, she had been date-raped by a customer at the bar. After Andrew, she fishtailed into a shame-spiral, had a string of casual encounters, mostly with customers — trying to perk up her mood. One night she brought home a guy who had been making passes at her at the bar, but changed her mind on the way home. However, they were drunk, she allowed him to stay, but “just to sleep together.” She stripped down to T-shirt and panties, he crawled in in his boxers, and suddenly he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He overpowered her, and stuck it in.

  “I kept staring in his face, saying, ‘I don’t want this.’ But he didn’t care,” Lola told me angrily.

  “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “I didn’t want to. But if he ever comes into the bar again, I’m going to slap his face and yell out to everyone: THIS MAN IS A RAPIST!”

  Poor Lola. She reminded me, in a way, of the flower in The Little Prince, that brandishes its thorns, like fearsome weapons. Call the police, bust the guy, I told her. Call them now,
it’s not too late. That’s what I’d do. But Lola didn’t want to, for her own reasons.

  I sympathized with her, I really did. But it’s one thing to sympathize with someone during the day, quite another to sympathize when you wake up in the middle of the night with your dick sandwiched between the cheeks of that person, and she just happens to be a big, beautiful, 19-year-old Danish-derived sex-bomb. It’s tough to be Mr. Sensitive Guy at such a moment. Still I didn’t force myself on her, boys. No, I took the high road: I begged. I pleaded, wheedled, and cajoled her, but I never raped her.

  “Please, Lola, please. I want you, I love you. I want to show you how I feel for you.”

  Sleepily, she would brush me off.

  “C’mon, please, it’ll only take about a minute.”

  No, no, no. I even tried the Magic Soup out on her one night, but it must have lost some of its powers in the fridge because it only half-worked this time.

  I invited Lola over for leftovers. There were candles, hors d’oeuvres, drinks. Again I served the Magic Soup in bowls with garlic bread. After dinner, more drinks; by the end of the night we were completely loaded. Georgie was getting on my nerves, flying around manically, chirping like a crazed thing, sometimes dive-bombing the table. I chased him around, trying to get him back into his cage but he kept eluding my grasp. Finally, he flew behind the bookshelf. Ah, fuck him, I thought drunkenly, and went back to trying to beg and cajole Lola.

  That night, Lola put me off as usual. Finally, though, worn down by my wheedling and whining, Lola said: “You can boink my butt if you want to.” Horribly, I knew exactly what she meant — rub it between the cheeks of her ass until I came — and even more horribly still, I was grateful. Oh, you lucky, lucky bastard, I thought, as I climbed on and devoted myself to this travesty. The fact Lola was half-asleep, lying there like a sack of hammers, didn’t dampen my ardour a bit, didn’t stop me from saying: “Oh, wow, oh, Lola, I love you.”