Lights! Camera! Dissatisfaction...

by Kim Cayer

  They had Christmas garland up still. That red ropey-looking stuff. I waited twenty valuable minutes in line and finally approached a bank teller. She yelled “Next, please!” as I was five steps from her.

  “Yes, I’d like to find out how much money I have in my account,” I said.

  “Your account number?” she asked.

  I rattled it off by heart. Heaven knows I should’ve remembered it; I used to deposit so much money into the account.

  “Oh, this one,” the teller murmured into her computer screen. “One minute, please,” she told me and went over to a Chinese woman. They consulted a moment and the Chinese lady walked over to me.

  “May I see you at the counter, please?” she asked me.

  “Sure,” I said and walked parallel to her over to another area – the counter. “How much money do I have?” I asked again when we faced one another.

  “As you know, we’ve been paying your bills…”

  “Yes, so I found out, thank you so much. How much money do I have?” I again enquired, my patience wearing thin.

  “You still have 600 dollars left,” the Chinese lady reassured me.

  “Oh, great!” I said. “Six hundred bucks to start a new life. Just great!” I briefly considered fleeing to Toronto but I’d still have to find a place to live there and pay my bus fare on top. No, I needed a place in the next hour. I glared at the lady. “I want my money out of my account and then I no longer wish to do business with this bank.”

  “Do you wish to close your account?” she asked.

  “Yes! Learn English, for cryin’ out loud!” OK, I was rude. But I don’t recall giving the bank permission to throw my money around like they were Santa Claus. She counted out my money and placed it on the counter.

  “648.27,” she said. “You are a very bad customer.”

  I grabbed my money. “Merry Chinese Christmas,” I bid her as I pulled a section of the garland down. I stormed out.

  On the street, I regained my rationality. Place to live, Alice. How much can we spend? Think of food. Think of getting your stuff out of your sweet apartment. I didn’t know where to find a place to live for…I figured…$300 a month in New York. Raunda’s cockroach-filled dump cost $1200 a month.

  I started at a rundown house that advertised it housed boarders. The carpets were threadbare. There was no tub in the bathroom; just a shower. The lightbulb was located in the shower stall. It was a tiny room with no windows but two radiators going full blast. Surely I could afford this! “How much?” I asked.

  “$700 a month,” came the reply.

  The next place was worse. Heading downtown in a bit of a panic, I saw a cardboard sign taped in a store window. ‘Room for Rent’. I walked into the store, which specialized in leather apparel. They had some fancy gay-men duds on display. I walked past a mannequin wearing a pair of ass-baring chaps, a studded arm band, a motorcycle cap and nothing else. “Helloo?” I called out.

  “Can I help you?” the mannequin spoke. I jumped about six feet. He really did have an artificial look about him, what with the red lips and eyeliner.

  “I’m wondering about that room for rent…?” I began, when a customer walked in.

  “Stephen!” the proprietor greeted him. “How was the Fag Ball last night?”

  “Oohh, you missed it?!” the customer, Stephen, replied. “How cooommmme?”

  “Oh, Peter had an earache,” the owner replied. “And I had the most divine gown! So how was it?”

  “Just fabulous! I didn’t stop dancing! And the drag queens there? Honey…” Stephen batted his lashes.

  “Uh…that room?” I reminded them.

  The owner barely glanced at me. “Go up the stairs at the back. The room’s at the top.” He turned back to Stephen. “So did you take anybody home, hhmmm?” I didn’t want to stay and find out. I took the stairs up to the room.

  At one glance, I knew I didn’t want it. In one thought, I knew if the price was right, I’d have to take it. There was a single room with a cot very similar to the one I’d had in the ward. Paint was peeling off the walls. Right above the bed, on the ceiling, was a great water stain and a bulge. I suspected the roof would collapse at any moment. There was a stained sink, a fridge that needed eight years’ worth of defrosting and an antique stove with the oven door missing. I couldn’t find a bathroom and walked out of the room. I saw another door with a sign reading ‘Reserved for Tenant and Customers Only’.

  I walked back downstairs where Stephen was giving a play-by-play account of the Fag Ball. “How much?” I nervously asked.

  “$600 a month,” he replied. I shook my head, walked past the nipple ring display and exited.

  I was sunk. I’d never find a place for $300 a month. I was in the Times Square area when I glanced up at a club. My eyes went above the marquee advertising GIRLS!GIRLS!GIRLS! to a small neon-lit sign saying ‘Rooms to Rent’. Without hesitation, I walked into the lobby.

  “I need a room,” I said to the Chinese man seated behind the counter.

  “20 dollars an hour,” came his reply. 20 bucks an hour! That’d work out to about 12,000 a month for the dump!

  “I wanted it for more than an hour,” I informed him.

  “Oh. Then 60 dollar a night,” the Chinese man said.

  “How much a month?” I wearily asked.

  “A month?” he asked, astonished. “You want room for month?”

  “Yeah, for a month,” I repeated. “Is there something wrong with that?”

  “Very unusual,” he said. “I look for you.” He flipped through some cards. “We have room with hotplate and fridge. You take that room.”

  “Wait!” I said. “How much is it?”

  “500 dollar. You take?”

  500 dollars was about the best I could hope for, so I took it. I wearily nodded and handed over the bulk of my ready cash. In return, I was handed the key to room 315.

  If you could call it a room. It was more of a roomlet. My fridge was the size of a picnic cooler, my hotplate had two settings – hi and lo – the bed had an inch-thick mattress and my new view consisted of the brick building a foot away from my window. There was no sign of plumbing anywhere in the room and I suspected the latrine was down the hall. Well, it was home now. I left to go get my belongings which I was now thankful were meagre, judging by the amount of space I had in the new place.

  What a stab to the heart it was, walking back to my old apartment. I saw the lovely exterior from a distance, then my beloved doorman, and finally my boxes in the lobby. I ran to the manager’s office. “Now what are you doing with my stuff?!” I yelled.

  “There are new tenants,” she said. “It past four o’clock.”

  “Man, you’re killing me,” I sputtered. “Just leave my stuff ALONE. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Where are your keys?” she asked, again in an angry state.

  “Relax, here’s your stupid keys.” I threw them on the desk.

  She pulled out the form I’d signed when I first rented the apartment. “You sign here,” she said.

  “What’s this?” I asked, picking it up. It was a declaration saying I’d left the place in good order. I was about to sign when I glanced further up the form and saw that I’d left a damage deposit when I’d paid my first month’s rent – a grand total of 2000 bucks. “Hey! I should get my damage deposit back!”

  “We send it to you,” the Chinese manager said.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Two weeks,” she said and gestured for me to sign the form.

  “What’s your rush?” I asked. She was making me suspicious so I re-read what I was about to sign. Yup, it said I’d be getting my money back, every cent of it. Right now, 2000 bucks sounded as good as 1,000,000.

  “Past four o’clock! I want to go home! You sign!” the manager almost screamed at me.

  I signed before she karate-chopped me. “I’ll be back here in two weeks exactly for the check,” I said as I handed the form back to her. “Take a ginseng.” />
  It took three cab rides to get all my stuff over to my new address. My room was filled to overflowing. The only space I had to move was on my bed. Sitting there, I counted my money. Eighty bucks and change. Sure I could make it last two weeks. Surely.

  * * *

  I had a budget of $13 a day. At this rate, I’d be able to bank $2 at the end of two weeks. The first day, I splurged and spent the entire amount on food. I was able to find Chinese noodle packages, 3/$l. Even though I currently had a beef against Chinese people, I still appreciated their cheap food prices. After buying 24 packages of noodles, I went to a thrift store and bought a bowl, fork, pot, cup and plate. All I’d need to make my noodles.

  The next day I was going to buy fruit but I got woman troubles. There went that day’s budget.

  The next day I was BORED. I had no TV and the view didn’t offer much so I decided to buy something to read. First I purchased more groceries; my body was already demanding a change from noodles. I bought lots of rice, which is also pretty cheap. With $5 to spend, I walked into a used bookstore and bought a thick, juicy, sexy, steamy novel for $4. I wondered how I could constructively spend my last buck. If I bought a newspaper, I could read it from cover to cover and then use it to line my cupboard under the hotplate. I’d found droppings of some sort in there.

  Back on my thin mattress, I started reading Desperate for Love. I finished it by 8 a.m. on the fourth day. It was such good reading; just chockfull of perverted sex. And now it was even an investment because I could sell it back to the bookstore for half of what I originally paid.

  After a long sleep, I woke up and wondered what I should do. I was becoming extremely lethargic. I didn’t care for the streets of New York and I didn’t care for the hotel I was in. All day and night, I could hear the faint music coming up from the strip club below. The tenants changed by the hour. There was only one girl I saw a lot and she had a different man with her every time. I knew she was a hooker because, with ease, she climbed three flights of stairs in five-inch heels. The hallways smelled of urine and vomit and old bums. I suspected I was the only real resident. The washroom at the end of the hall was unspeakable. Often drunks were passed out on the toilet. I must confess, one night I woke up and was too scared to go down the hall to take a leak. I raised the window in my room, hung my ass out and in freezing winter temperatures, created a three-foot icicle.

  Lying there, I picked up the Daily Times. I was flipping through the pages when a heading under ‘The Editor’s View’ caught my eye. It read ‘New York Rent Hikes Seem Acceptable’. The headline alone caused me to sputter. I read the Editor’s View with growing astonishment.

  It seemed the editor, Mr. MacGregor, owned his own home plus a vacation home in Florida and a cottage by the lake two hours out of the city. BUT his son, an aeronautics engineer, rented an apartment in Manhattan. His rent had only gone up 30% in the last five years, while his salary had doubled in the eight years he’d been out of school. The son, Gavin, has been able to afford a Porsche and a month in St. Tropez every year. Gavin was even managing to save money. All in all, obviously Mr. MacGregor Senior thought that since his son was doing so well, it must be because he was able to afford the rent on his apartment.

  Well! I didn’t stop to think. I grabbed a pen and a brown paper bag that had held a dozen oranges (for $2). I started writing a letter to that editor.

  How DARE he presume that everyone was as fortunate as his son! Did he stop to think that there were people whose lives had taken a turn for the worse? That a flea-infested, freezing, 5’x 8’ cubicle in a flophouse costs $500 a month? Some of us don’t have 12 years of university and an influential parent to help us. Some of us are downright poor and if my rent were to go up by 5%, there would go my total food budget. I congratulated him and his son on their affluence but I suggested they rather flaunted it in our faces. Perhaps their newspaper wasn’t geared to the faithful two-million low-income readers after all, and I didn’t think I would be buying the Daily Times anymore.

  I calmed down by the end of my letter. I felt better. For fun, I re-read it. Damn good, Alice. You stated your view with eloquence, even though you did get pretty steamed at points. I thought about sending it. But I didn’t want to attach my name to the letter. The editor would read this great missive and then see ‘Yours truly, Alice Kumplunkem’. He’d say, “Oh, joke letter!” and throw it out. Also, I’d made a little bigoted statement about Chinese people taking over the real estate. I wanted to get in a dig at the Chinese because I’ve been in a rage against them ever since I got poor. Now they were giving me a hard time at the market and my Chinese hotel manager accused me of having men over. I wish. So now I made a remark against them – call it payback – but it made me feel better.

  So what name should I sign it with? I wanted this name to reflect the state of my letter, which was frenzied, angered, carried away. Aretha Gallant? Joan D’Arc. Hhmmm, I liked the idea of an accent in my name. Let’s see…the letter…it’s frenzied…angered…carried away. I wracked my brain. Frenzied, angered, carried away…

  Carrie D’Away! Without a second thought, I scrawled my fictional signature to the letter and went out to blow some dough on a stamp.

  * * *

  I became a bed-ridden hermit. I lived for the day after tomorrow, which had come to be known as Damage Deposit Day. Two thousand dollars! The first thing I was going to do was go to a dentist. I had a wicked toothache, probably brought on by stress. The second thing I was going to do was walk into a restaurant and order a huge steak and three baked potatoes and an order of fries with an all-you-can-eat salad bar. I had finally reached my desired weight (cost me a quarter to find out, but I also got a fortune saying ‘A friend in need is a friend indeed’) and was now plummeting beneath it. I never knew I had such shapely arms. My rump didn’t split seams anymore; my panty-line was finally under control. I hadn’t been this weight since I was nine.

  I suppose I was quite healthy. I was subsisting on a dollar’s worth of oranges a day. This wait-and-see attitude had simply descended on me. It seemed that my life could only begin after I got that damage deposit check and for now, I’d just pass the time away getting bedsores.

  I was re-reading Desperate for Love for the third time when a knock came at my door. I froze. Who could be wanting me? I no longer had the feeling I was a criminal; the institution had cured me of that. Although I still had two weeks left on my rent, the only person who knew where I lived was the hotel manager, so what could he want? Forgetting I lived in New York City, I foolishly opened my door.

  A couple of suits stood there. Both were well-groomed, well-attired men of obvious importance. I stared at them. “Alice Kumplunkem?” one asked.

  “Yeaaahhh….,” I cautiously replied.

  “We’re from the Daily Times,” the same guy said.

  They’d tracked me down! It wasn’t possible! “How’d you find me?” I asked.

  “We had the letter dusted for prints,” the Daily Times guy said. The other one had only been nodding for punctuation every time his partner spoke. “Seems you’re a Canadian citizen working here…”

  “It’s legal!” I interrupted. “I have a working visa. There’s two months left to go!”

  “Yes, we know,” the man said, the other nodding. “We matched the prints to your visa. We hired a private investigator to locate you.”

  Fuck, man, they really wanted me found. I MUST have committed a crime. “Am I under arrest?” I timidly asked.

  They both guffawed, so I knew the silent one wasn’t a mute after all. I gave an insulted look and they immediately stopped. The speaker held out a card. “I’m Dave Galloway, an assistant editor,” he said. “Let me tell you why we’re here. Maybe you noticed that the Daily Times printed your letter to the editor?”

  “No,” I primly said. “I said I wasn’t going to buy that paper anymore and I haven’t.”

  “Well, it was printed and what an avalanche of replies we got! You had a lot of people rooting for you
and the paper’s circulation, believe it or not, increased for a few days. Now we’re back to normal, if not a shade lower. We had a meeting about it, and one idea brought up was that it was because the readers wanted another letter from Carrie D’Away, and there was none. We believe our readers enjoy conflict and we’d like to conduct a little experiment. Alice,” Dave kindly asked, “could you write another letter to the editor?”

  What a stupid thing to bother me about. “Well,” I yawned, “maybe I’ll pick up the Daily Times now and then and if I see something worth writing about, I will.”

  “We’re prepared to offer you $200 for every letter we print,” Dave offered as incentive.

  “Really?” I asked incredulously. I was going to add that I wasn’t much of a writer – that letter had just been a lucky strike – but I didn’t want to jeopardize my chance at a new job.

  “Yes,” Dave confirmed. “We hope you’ll be writing soon. There’s a lot of contentious issues of importance going on right now.” I nodded along with El Silento, making a mental note to look up contentious in a dictionary. “Animal welfare, abortion, U.S. military involvement in Iraq…” he suggested. Again, I intelligently nodded. Inside, I was ready to die. There went my job. I realized I knew basically nothing about everything going on in the world.

  “Sure, I’ll see what interests me,” I think I cleverly replied.

  “Just send correspondence to me, at the address on the card,” Dave said. “Nice meeting you, Alice. Write soon now!” he added as a little joke. We all laughed. They left, passing Penny and her latest john coming up the stairs.

  I watched them leave. What did the other guy do? Was he some kind of enforcer? What if I had turned down the job? Would I have been made to write against my will?

  But write I would! Two hundred bucks a pop? I’d send them a dozen letters a day! But what should I learn to do first? Find out what’s going on in the world or how to write? I was thrilled; I had a meaning to my life once more. I devised a plan – I would spend my days at a local library, reading their Daily Times the first part of the day, read how-to-write-properly-constructed-letters the second part and then rip off a few letters to the editor in the evening.