Chump Change (11 page)

“This is the type of thing that’s killing literature,” I muttered to myself, whipping off the covers. I jumped out of bed,
sat in front of the typewriter, and, with my hangover anchoring my ass to the seat, started typing my review.

Over the next four days, I worked hard on my review, meanwhile living on only two sandwiches a day, trying to make my mother’s cash last. Every morning, and every afternoon, I walked down to The Cheese Counter on Bloor, bought 100 grams of casalingo salami, a two-finger wedge of Brie, and a hard “panetti” roll. Then I took all these ingredients to the park and made myself a sandwich, using my knife. By means of this stratagem, I cut my food costs in half, because if the guy behind the counter made the sandwich for me, it cost $3.99. If I bought the ingredients and made it myself, it was only about two bucks (have I mentioned I’m one-sixteenth Scotsman?). Of course, I lost out on the condiments — lettuce, tomato, mustard — but I never had much use for any of that stuff anyway.

I don’t think the guy behind the counter at the Cheese Counter was crazy about me. He had to go through the charade of wrapping each of my puny purchases in wax paper, writing the price on the outside. I felt bad making him go through all this, but what could I do? Food is life, and I needed four more days of it to finish my article (in effect, I reversed the 20th-century North American formula: I consumed in order to produce).

I worked hard on my review, as I say. I even felt I’d pioneered a bold new journalistic hybrid: the “autobiographical book review.” I didn’t want to shove my opinions down the reader’s throat, so I wrote the review in the form of a story, the story of the fat, lazy fool I lived with in a shack on Long Island, the summer I was a reporter. A bloated, TV-addicted brute, he sped around in a Lexus, ate junk food, spent every free hour in front of His Lord and Master, the television. Once every few
weeks he squeezed his buttery bulk into a sausage-tight lycra outfit, donned special booties, and tooled around the block. “Exercise.” Ignorant, selfish, addicted to consumption, too lazy to work, he was fired from his job on a fishing boat halfway through the summer, and split in the middle of the day, leaving me with a stack of bills.

This was more my image of the typical American, I said, than the lean, taciturn cowboys of the Minimalist short stories. He didn’t say nothing because he was “a man of few words,” he said nothing because he had nothing to say. He wasn’t haunted by ‘Nam — he probably couldn’t even point to Vietnam on a map. “If Art is a mirror to Life,” I wrote, “then the Minimalists are holding up a fun-house mirror to contemporary Americans, a mirror that makes Americans look leaner, tougher, and more attractive than they really are.”

In the end, as I say, I was proud of my work. But nervous, too. After all, how would you like to commission a youngish writer with a publication track-record of a
letter
, only to receive in return a far-reaching autobiographical “think piece” on the true nature of America, the death of the novel, the decline of Western civilization, and all the woes of society? You’d probably have to axe his piece, kick him down the stairs with his kill fee, and fail to return all his calls henceforward.

Definitely a scenario that loomed large in my mind as I pedalled off to the
Monocle
to hand it in.

I needn’t have worried, though. Jonathan Griffin loved it. Nan, too.

“Excellent work, my boy, excellent,” Jonathan Griffin said. “You have a unique gift.”

We’re downstairs at the Monocle. Having a few drinks, on Jonathan Griffin. I’m 100 percent broke. Actually, I should
probably stop saying “I’m broke” all the time. There comes a point (say, five years out of college) when you have to start calling a spade a spade and say: I am poor. I am a poor man. I think I hit that point. Yesterday, in a Hamsunesque episode, I went into the Cheese Counter to spend the last of my mother’s money on my usual. Before I can, though, the guy behind the counter points to a new sign above his head: “NO PURCHASES UNDER 150 GRAMS.” I didn’t have enough for 150 grams, so I slunk out after buying a pop and a bag of chips — the only solid to pass my lips for the last 24 hours.

“Thanks very much, Mr. Griffin,” I say now. “So I take it you’re accepting it?”

“Yes, yes, of course. It shall appear in the next number.”

“And didn’t you say, at some point, that you pay upon acceptance?”

“Ah, yes, I catch your drift, my boy. Finish your drink, we’ll go upstairs and see if we can persuade our lovely and talented receptionist to cut you a cheque.”

The “lovely and talented” receptionist turned out to be Milosz, a Czech man in his mid-40s. The Czech wrote me a cheque, my first as a full-fledged, full-time freelance writer. I snapped it between my hands. There’s nothing like seeing your name in print, is there? Especially when it’s preceded by the words “Pay to the order of.”

A hundred dollars. Not much, but it was a start. S.S. David Henry the Freelance Writer — really just a bathtub with a sheet stretched between two broomsticks — was launched. Avast and ahoy, me mateys. Fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

I started hanging around the Monocle. Wouldn’t you? Jonathan Griffin introduced me to all and sundry as a “brilliant young writer,” his “discovery,” all that. I was sort of a house mascot, a museum display: the starving writer. People bought me drinks, or if not I sat around ostentatiously drinking water until someone did. Sometimes someone offered to buy me dinner, but I drew the line at food. That seemed too much like charity.

Meanwhile, living under the same roof with the legendary Leslie Lawson was slowly driving me out of my fucking mind. We’re “friends,” now, she feels comfortable around me, therefore she hangs around the apartment in nothing but her nightgown or baggy T-shirt and panty combo, and the woman seems to do nothing but bend over to pick things up or stand on her tiptoes to reach things off the top shelves.

I always seem to have an erection around her. Even her voice on the phone, even her handwriting gives me an erection.

It reminds me of high school, another time in my life when I always seemed to have an erection. The girls back then made out with all my friends, but never with me. Me they treated like a big, cuddly teddy bear, wiggling around in my lap, rubbing themselves all over me like a cat, generally sending me into a white-hot frenzy of lust it’ll probably take me a lifetime to work off.

Every night, as I drift off, I’m haunted by the same scenario: Les appears in the doorway, her body a dark shape in her nightgown, against the hall light. “Dave, I can’t keep up this charade any more,” she whispers into the darkness of my room. “I’m going crazy, I…can I join you?”

In the mornings, after Les goes to work — it’s part of my morning routine — I slip into her room, lie face-down on her bed, and inhale the fragrance on her pillow. I’ve got it bad.

And if I’d always been sober around Les, I would have been able to keep my little crush on her a secret. But I’m not always sober, as you know. I don’t know what it is with me and booze: the booze molecules instantly bond with the confession-centres of my brain, creating an almost unstoppable blurt-urge. I don’t puke when I drink, but I do tend to spill my guts.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m very grateful to booze, I’m very thankful for everything that booze has done for me over the years. If it weren’t for booze I’d be a virgin today. Every relationship I’ve ever had began with a drunken lunge. But in this case my combination of chemicals wasn’t working. Not once but several times, drunk, late at night, I would blurt out “the truth” to Les. She’d just laugh and scamper off to bed. And I’d sit up and drink and think: what am I doing wrong?

I wasn’t used to all this courtship business. For the last two years, with Ruth, the only courtship I had to perform was to roll over in bed and nibble her neck in a way I knew she liked. Now I had to develop schemes, pick my way through the maze of defences every beautiful woman must construct around her heart, find the door to the secret cave, attempt to cross the rickety bridge over the giant gulf separating human beings, answer the troll’s riddle and if I say the wrong words, plunge screaming to my doom.

*  *  *

It’s a measure of how fucked up and freaked out I must have been that I actually considered a disastrous piece of advice from

Max.

Max dropped by a lot. Sam’s apartment was just down the hall from Les. Les had, in fact, gotten her the apartment. Cheap, charming, right downtown, the apartments in Howland Court were highly sought-after, with a waiting list hundreds of names long. But the resourceful Les, a great favourite with her landlord for her responsible ways, had gotten her friend on the top-secret, special private list — in practice, the only list on which there was any motion. Sam paid $540 a month for her two-bedroom apartment. Les’s slightly smaller pad was an even better deal, $440 a month for a two-bedroom.

Max was just back from work, still in his Cosmodemonic get-up, jeans and a sweater, his briefcase on the floor by the door.

“I can’t seem to find the key, Max,” I complained. “I need the magic words that say Open Sesame to Les’s affections.”

“Dave, Dave, Dave, how many times do I have to tell you? She’s somatatonic. You have to find some way to touch her. Your approach is too literary.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I know you, Blurt Boy. I assume you’ve laid several drunken confessions on her already?”

“Yeah, well…”

“Words, words, words, Dave. I’ve been thinking about your case a lot lately, actually,” he continued, sounding like some kind of concerned country doctor. “And I believe I’ve come up with a plan.”

“What?”

“First, you write her a poem.”

“Isn’t that just words, words, words?”

“No. Poetry is only the start. Write a poem, a love poem, leave it on her kitchen table. Then go for a walk. That’ll give her a chance to read it. Then wait till she’s doing the dishes.”

“How do you know I don’t do the dishes?”

“Please, Dave. I’m trying to construct a realistic scenario here. Anyway, wait till she’s doing the dishes, then sneak up behind her and start to massage her breasts. Her hands will be soapy, so she won’t know what to do. By the time she figures out what’s happening, she’s yours. Or else,” here he laughed, “she’ll hit you on the head with a soapy pot. It’s a make-it-or-break-it plan.”

He sat back and took a drag off his cigarette with a self-satisfied air, as if he’d just laid a strategy of Napoleonic genius on me. And it’s a testimonial to Max’s powers of persuasion that I actually thought his scheme over for about five seconds before saying: “Max, that is the single worst piece of advice anyone has ever seriously offered me.”

Max could be right on about certain things. He could also be way off. Either way, he sounded exactly the same. It paid to remember that.

I hung around the Monocle so much they finally gave me my own office. Actually, it was more of a closet, really, that I shared with the postage machine. But for the first time in my life I had the honour of a door I could shut on the world.

From there I wrote — letters, mostly. I wrote to everyone under the sun: my old college roommate, ex-girlfriends, even a one-night-stand ex from a drunken wedding. And they were long, long letters, 10, 20, 30 pages a pop. I had a mania for self-explication, I guess. The only person I couldn’t bring myself to write was Ruth. “Ruth, I am guilty before you.” That idiotic refrain kept going through my mind, but I found I couldn’t
write her a letter. Sometimes we spoke on the phone, but they were strange, cross-purposed phone calls; the question “why?” hung over them like a cumulonimbus cloud. Now there was a new why. Why don’t I ever call her? I told her I didn’t want to rack up a long-distance phone bill, I had no money to pay it with. She thought that was just an excuse. In 20th-century North American society, no one accepts “no money” as an excuse for anything, not even from me.

I also wrote numerous letters to editors, not forgetting to include a photocopy of “Letter From New York” and the galley proofs to “Fish Stories,” as my Minimalist review was now titled. It embarrasses me a bit, now, when I think of those letters I wrote to various and sundry editors, the grandiose claims I made in them. “I want to write a series of articles for you,” I remember writing in one, “that will make us both so famous that crowds will wait on the docks for fresh installments. Then, after they’ve read them, we will be carried through the streets of Toronto on their shoulders.”

My only stipulation was I didn’t want to write about politics or pop culture; I didn’t want to interview anyone or do any research. I wanted to write essays, not articles, on topics of an interpersonal nature, mostly centring around me, my exploits, my growth as a human being, etc. I especially didn’t want to do any celebrities. “I’m tired of hearing celebrities’ thoughts on everything,” I wrote in one letter. “Let’s hear some thoughts from people who actually think!”

Not many editors even bothered to get back to me. Those who did politely refused my services, though a couple of fashion magazines encouraged me to send in more ideas.

I did get one gig. To write the captions for a photo spread in a magazine called
Fashion File
. I went in, looked at the photos of various outfits, then went home to write something. It
took me nearly a week to write the first draft; they rejected it. I wrote the second in three days with a blinding headache the whole time; they rejected it. I wrote the last in one 48-hour, teeth-grinding frenzy; they rejected it.

I handed the third draft in in person. The editor, a young gay man (the only man who worked at the magazine), re-wrote the whole thing in front of me in 15 minutes. One of the lines, I remember, was: “This year’s party dress is an invitation to shine: the golds are a-glitter, the silver’s a-twitter, the reds r-r-r-RSVP, and the little black dress sends its regrets.”

“I don’t get the r-r-r-RSVP,” I said.

He showed me, growling like a lion. “R-r-r-r-r-RSVP. Get it?”

I didn’t, but I had a premonition freelancing was going to be trickier than I thought.