Authors: David Eddie
Chump Change (13 page)
Unfortunately, though, Toronto isn’t all that interesting a city, and after the title I was stumped. One of the things I love about Toronto is how dull it is. I can live without excitement in a city, like people driving by spraying the sidewalk with bullets from an AK-47. The duller a place the happier I am (up to a point, of course). But “Happiness writes white,” as de Mother-lant says, and after the title I found I had nothing more to say about Toronto.
I heard a knock on the outer door.
“Open up, Dave, it’s me, Max.”
“Nice suit,” he said, when I opened the door. “Where’d you get it? Goodwill?”
“That shows how much you know about haberdashery, you boor. I had this suit especially tailored for me by Crump & Periwinkle of Savile Row, and flown here this morning by Concorde jet.”
“Seriously, what’s the occasion?”
“I’m taking Les out to dinner.”
“ Where? Burger King?”
“The finest restaurant in the city, if she so desires. Wherever she wants.”
“Oh, really? And what are you going to use to pay? Monopoly money?”
“No…this.”
I hauled out my wallet, fanned what was left of the $1,500 in front of his astonished eyes.
“Where’d you get that?”
“I got a gig with
This Land of Ours
. Today. Three thousand dollars for an article. This is my advance.”
“You’d better let me take care of that. Don’t worry, I’ll pay you a regular allowance.”
He made a grab for the cash but I was ready for him, and snatched it back.
“Forget it, buddy. This money is all mine. I’m rich. I’m a fifteen-hundred-aire. Want a scotch?”
I gestured to the bottle of Lagavulin on the table.
“Mr. Big Spender… sure.”
I poured him one. Just then, Les came home.
“Hey Max. Hey, Dave — looking good. Nice suit; I especially like the ‘fistful of dollars’ accessory. What’s the occasion?”
“Well, I’m hoping to take you out to dinner, Les.”
“Really?” she asked, interested. “Where?”
“Wherever you like. Your favourite restaurant.”
“You mean Vittorio’s?”
“Wherever you like. I got a gig today, from
This Land of Ours
, and I want to blow a bit of it.”
Les thinks about it a moment, then says: “I’m going to jump in the shower, then get dressed. What time should we go? About seven?”
What can I say about dinner that night with Les? Just this: women have their own internal checklists, and if you don’t fulfil their secret criteria, it doesn’t matter how dapper your haberdashery, how much cash you drop on dinner, what cologne you wear — you’ll never get anywhere, pal. You’re wasting your time, energy, and money.
Unfortunately, the only way to find all this out is to waste a lot of time and money. You really have to throw the cash around, tell yourself in advance the sky’s the limit. Which is what I did. First dates are important, you can’t do them by halfway measures.
So after living together a month and a half, Les and I went on our first date.
The kitchen at Vittorio’s is open concept, and while we were waiting for our tables we sat, basically, in the kitchen, sipping our drinks, watching a fat, bearded fellow prepare the food,
con mucho gusto
, with bursts of flame and shouts of “Uppah.” The waiters also sang snatches of opera as they delivered the food to the tables, the type of thing that could easily get on your nerves, unless you were in the mood for it. I was, sort of. Les was wearing a blood-red dress, some sort of silky fabric, perhaps silk itself, that clung to her body. Everything was in place for a romantic dinner, except, as I say, romance.
We were shown to our table. I looked at the menu. The prices were staggering, shocking. I pretended I wasn’t hungry and had only an appetizer — no dinner — in a doomed bid to save money. Doomed because, nervous as I was, I kept ordering drinks while Les ate her dinner, a delicious-looking veal scallopini, and sipped her wine. In the end my half cost more than hers.
Total cost of the dinner: over $150. Well over, after I’d greased the coat-check operative, the waiter, the busboy, the cabbie, the doorman. I’m not counting costs, ladies, and I certainly didn’t “expect” anything in return for all this outlay; that would be sheer boorishness. Still, I was sad, because it was that night I finally realized I didn’t have a hope with Les, and a man without hope is…I’m not sure what he is, but he feels lousy, take it from me.
Back at home, Les stretched, said she was tired, gave me a peck on the cheek, said thanks for dinner, and went straight to bed.
I poured myself a scotch, sat at the kitchen table, and ruminated on my fate. You deserve every bit of this, Dave, and more, I said to myself. This is pure karmic backlash. Ruth wanted you, you didn’t want her. Now you’re chasing after a woman who isn’t so interested in you.
I had the lower hand. It reminded me of college, the last time I had the lower hand, with my first girlfriend, Francesca di Caesare, my first love and first experience of regular sex.
I mention these two facts in conjunction with one another because they were of roughly equal importance in my spiritual development. Regular sex was a revelation to me. Up to that point, I basically thought of myself as a “mind” hovering in mid-air or stalking around on a pair of awkward stilts. Now suddenly, I felt rooted, in my body, in the chthonic rhythms
of the earth, sun, moon — especially the moon, the moon’s monthly cycle. I discovered that women’s periods sync up when they’re under the same roof, and other secrets. I felt chosen. You know, they say it isn’t a matter of the top spermatazoa battling its way into the egg, but the egg reaching out and choosing her favourite from the top few hundred contenders. That’s how I felt now. As if the women said: “We like him, let’s make him a success.”
I remember that Christmas, she was going back to Italy, and I was going to Toronto. We stayed up all night waiting for the cab to take her to the airport, bawling like babies, all because we were going to be separated for three weeks.
Then she turned the tables on me! That spring, she got in a play, and suddenly started coming over all ambitious and actressy. She always had to go to rehearsal, she started flirting with the male lead of her play, Thomas Alter, “the greatest actor on campus.”
I came apart at the seams like a cheap suit. I took to stalking around campus, muttering to myself: That bitch. That’s it, I’m dumping her. She can’t do this to me. If anybody came up to talk to me, I brushed them off. I needed to concentrate. I always “wanted to talk,” I tried to argue her into having sex with me, which, of course, turned her off even more, which in turn turned me on even more, and so it went in an endless downward spiral.
The all-time low came on a day in June. We were sitting outside, tanning. She was in a little green bikini, I was lying next to her, propped on an elbow. Out of my mind with lust, confusion, despair, I put my hand on her stomach, just to touch her.
“Please, Daffid,” she said in her aristocratic Italian accent. “You’re blocking my rays.”
You know what saved me? Literature. That’s right, my beloved books. I was taking a freshman survey course in Continental literature, and it happened I’d put off reading the two books on the course — D.H. Lawrence’s
Women in Love
and Leo Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
— that dealt with this very topic, having the “lower hand.” I crammed both books in one 24-hour period, alloting so much time for each page, so much time for breaks; but still, the greatness of these books got to me. Anna Karenina, you’ll recall, throws herself under the wheels of a train for love of Vronsky. Gerald freezes himself to death.
Shit, this could be serious, I realized. The books didn’t give any tips on how to deal with the situation. I had to formulate my own plan, which was: if I couldn’t actually
be
cool and indifferent to Francesca, I had to
act
cool and pretend I didn’t want her, didn’t care if I didn’t see her for a couple of days, and so on. What torments I went through, what forces of will I marshalled, boys, as I rolled over at night and went to sleep, her brushing her big, firm, silky 20-year-old breasts against my back, saying, teasingly, “Are you sure you want to go to sleep right now, Daffid?”
“Yes, I’m tired Francesca, I’ll see you in the morning,” I’d say, faking a yawn, clenching my teeth, praying to the god of restraint for the power to abstain.
And you know what? It worked! Suddenly, she was always the one who wanted to talk, she was wondering what I was up to all the time. And of course, the more she became interested in me, the less I became interested in her. Finally, at lunch one day, I met a beautiful blond hippie named Kate, my second great love, and summarily dumped Francesca.
Sounds cruel and harsh, I know. But to this day, I feel as if I narrowly evaded serious personal tragedy. I’ve seen people get the short end of the stick and snap like a twig, they never get it
back, they become like wraiths, ghosts of their former selves, they lose all power and vitality.
I felt a bit of that now, with Les. Oh, well, I thought, “the lover is closer to God than the beloved.” I tried to console myself with that thought, sitting in Les’s kitchen, after she’d gone to bed, but it didn’t help much. I poured myself another large scotch, and took a big drink.
That helped, a bit.
My “thank-you” dinner with Les turned out to be pretty much my farewell dinner, as well. Shortly after that, I moved into a house with Max. He was getting booted out of his apartment — his landlady’s kid was boomeranging back from college, and needed a place to live. This time, when he asked me to live with him, I didn’t say no. It was time to go. Certain items in Les’s apartment had been broken, others ruined. One night, I tried to cook black bean soup for her, with a ham hock in it. But something went horribly wrong, the soup congealed into a cement-like substance that bonded with the molecules of the pot and couldn’t be scraped off. Les had to throw out the pot, her favourite. She tried not to be pissed off about it, as Sam informed me later, but she couldn’t help it.
Max and I looked at several dumps and finally settled on a dive on Palmerston Avenue. Not on the fashionable stretch between College and Bloor, but the strip just above Bloor. A low, bunkerlike structure with slits for windows; windows more suited, it seemed to me, to poking a machine gun out of than letting light in.
As the less solvent of our two-way partnership, I got the worst room, the joke room, a room in the back with a tilting floor and cheesy, raised-velvet wallpaper depicting nymphs and satyrs chasing each other through Elysian fields.
That wallpaper reminded me of the apocryphal story of Oscar Wilde’s last words. He died in 1900 in a Paris fleabag. Supposedly, he looked around at the wallpaper, said “One of us has got to go,” and expired. Good old Wilde: witty to the last…
As for why I never got anywhere with Les, I guess I’ll never know. It could have been any number of things, obviously. Shortly after this, Les started going out with a guy named, appropriately enough, Romeo. Perhaps you’ve heard of him: he’s the leader of Romeo’s 14-piece Latin Orchestra. He’d worshipped Les for even longer than I, it turns out, from afar, seemingly without a shadow of hope. Maybe the sincerity of his worship was better than mine; maybe it was the 14-piece Latin orchestra. Who knows? Go figure; crazy salad.
Howdy, Stranger
With my commission from
This Land of Ours
under my belt, I could fulfill a lifelong dream. Now, when women at parties or whatever asked me what I did for a living, I could look them straight in the eye, hold my head high, and say with full honesty: “Me? I’m a writer, actually.”
From there I figured it’d be pretty much a matter of puckering up and getting ready to catch them in case they swooned.
Not so, though, I discovered to my surprise. Women don’t fall for that old “I’m a writer” schtick any more. It’s too outdated a profession. I might as well have said, “I’m a lamplighter” or “I’m a bootblack.” Oh, so you’re a writer, eh? Where do you work? Black Creek Pioneer Village? This is the 20th century; all it did was set off all their internal alarm systems: “WRITER! NO CASH! WRITER! NO CASH! WARNING! THIS IS THE VIPER SECURITY SYSTEM. BACK AWAY FROM THE OFFENDING UNIT!”
“Oh, really, a writer, eh? That must be so… would you excuse me a moment?”
And poof ! They’d disappear, never to return. Later, as they were being squired out of the party by some suave young marketing exec or articling lawyer, they’d turn to me and deliver the
coup de grâce:
“Bye, and hey: good luck with the writing.”
There was one exception to the overall trend in that sexual
Sahara of a summer: Kim, or Gloria (I’ll explain about her name later).
I like to think it was Les-induced horniness that drove me into her arms; that I was out of my mind with sexual frustration,
non compos mentis dementia praecox
, otherwise, surely I would have noticed some of the early-warning signs, and backed off, making the sign of the cross.
“Walk around a bit,” the Great Editor said, so I walked; I became a champion pedestrian, Toronto’s #1 practitioner of the lost art of bipedal locomotion. Seriously, I think I walked more than anyone else in the city, unless there was some bum or tramp who walked around more than me. Every day, I sat in front of the typewriter until noon, then took off, armed with a water-bottle, my trusty knife, a notebook, pen, and a couple of paperbacks. I walked all over the city and sometimes outside it, to the flat, dull suburbs. Sometimes, footsore and weary, I’d fall asleep on some park bench in the middle of nowhere, then wake with aching limbs to see the sun set over the city far, far away. I’d get up, stretch, and start the long march home.
Not that any of this helped much in front of the typewriter. In truth, I’m a terrible journalist. Mostly I walked around in a daze, in my own world, imagining how it would be some day when I was famous and some young punk reporter was forced to interview me.
“So, Mr. Henry, what’s your theory of prose?”
“Ah, interesting question, young man, I was just thinking about that the other day…”
Sometimes these internal monologues or dialogues would become so heated and intense I’d gesticulate and mutter to myself as I walked along. A surprised glance from a fellow pedestrian would bring me up short, but soon I’d be at it again. At night, after walking five, six, seven hours at a stretch, I’d open
my notebook to find maybe two lines of notes: “Toronto — city of neighbourhoods?” Or: “Toronto — flat, dull suburbs.” I couldn’t bring myself to write anything but letters.
One day, I was walking along Bloor Street when something in a shop window caught the corner of my eye. A pair of specs, not just any specs but the most beautiful specs I’d ever seen, faux-antique Armanis with tortoiseshell frames, rubber-coated ear-grabbers and engraved nose-pincers. They also came with special clip-on shade-attachments so in other words, the wearer, or bearer, of these specs, looked cool and hip outdoors, studious and intellectual indoors, i.e., the perfect one-two chick-magnetizing combination. Behind their display was a picture of a stubbled, rock-jawed male model reclining in a lawnchair at the beach, reading
À la Recherche Du Temps Perdu
in the original and wearing these specs.
I stepped back and observed my reflection in the spec-shop window. My own specs, black-plastic orthopaedic Buddy Holly face-grabbers, I bought under a strange sort of delusion back when I was editor of the campus paper. The delusion was that they said to the world: “I am a no-nonsense, ball-breaking, journalistic-type character, but I don’t have time to talk about any of this! Rewrite! Where the hell is rewrite?”
But now, observing my reflection in the window, I realized in reality they said to the world: “I am an impulse buyer, perhaps even a bit of a fool. Some silver-tongued spec-salesperson saw me coming, and I’ve been paying for it ever since — with my face, with my sex-life.”
I didn’t have much money left from my
This Land of Ours
advance. First-and-last on the Palmerston place had eaten up most of it. I had maybe $200 left. But I thought what the hell? Can’t hurt to check it out.
The chimes bing-bong as I enter. The lone spec-clerk is busy with another customer, thank God. In general, I like to browse in peace, I hate clerks and their unsolicited opinions. “Those look good on you.” “That fits perfectly.” I know it’s part of their job, their bosses force them to pester all shoppers, but I prefer to be left alone and browse in peace. Just for laughs, I pause in front of the Free Frame section and try on a pair of disco-era aviators. Back in high school I had a pair of oversize octagonal wire-frames that I accessorised with a blond afro, skintight orange velour bellbottoms with 27-inch bells (in other words, each bell was only one inch less in circumference than my waistline), and a Sgt. Pepper band-uniform top. I wore that outfit
every day
.
I chuckle at the memory, then get down to serious business over at the designer section. Even here, the specs I’m checking have their own halogen-lit display shelf. I try them on, and turn to the mirror. I look sort of like the young Yeats, as he appears on the cover of my copy of
Selected Poems
. I can picture me stepping up to the podium, the light glinting off my new tortoiseshell specs. A hush comes over the audience as I crack open a copy of my latest work, brush a stray forelock from my lofty brow (you can almost hear a collective sigh rise from the women in the audience) and begin to read in my deep, sonorous, musical voice…
“Those look good on you.”
I glance in the mirror. It’s the spec-clerk, hovering at my elbow, wearing a smile that manages to be both obsequious and supercilious at the same time.
His own specs are ludicrous, preposterous: white-plastic upside-downers, such as you sometimes see snooker players wear so they can see the balls better as they bend over the table. I’m supposed to accept aesthetic advice from
him
?
“How much are they?”
His slack-jawed face goes suddenly serious.
“Walk this way,” he says.
He motions me to sit down, then taps some keys on a computer keyboard.
“Do you have your prescription with you?”
As a matter of fact, I do. I fish through all the paperwork in my bag: receipts, letters, envelopes, an old cheque-book, passport, a used airplane ticket, notebooks, scraps of paper. Finally, I find the scrip. He looks it over.
“Hmmm, that’s odd. The prescription is extremely high in the left lens, but is practically glass in the right lens.”
“Well, I have a (mumble) in my right eye.”
“A what?”
“A blind spot.”
“So your left eye is your good eye?”
His face is a mask of incredulity.
“Yes, yes.”
“Well, with such an unusually high prescription, you might want to consider Seiko Superthin lenses. They’re ground in a special way that makes them 25 percent thinner than regular lenses. That should help you get away from that Coke-bottle effect.”
“Well, that sounds good.”
“Of course, with a prescription this high, you’ll still get quite a bit of reflection. I suggest you also get anti-glare coating.”
This guy’s starting to get on my nerves with his cracks about my prescription, but all I say is: “O.K.”
He taps a few more keys on his keyboard.
“And naturally you’ll want a scratch-proof coating.”
“Naturally.”
Sure, whatever. Give me all the bells and whistles: rearview mirrors, wipers, defrosters, AM/FM earpieces. It’s all academic,
anyway. I could already tell it would be years, perhaps decades, before I would be able to afford these specs.
“O.K. With Seiko Superthins, anti-glare coating, and scratch-proof lenses, the total comes to $465, not including tax.”
Well, that was a fun little game. Time to head back to the Free Frame section where I belong. Then suddenly I’m struck by inspiration:
“Do you take cheques?”
My conscious mind didn’t see it, but my subconscious spotted my old teenager’s cheque-book in my bag, with my mother’s address still on it. There’s no money in that old bank account, I assume it’s been closed long ago. But what can I say?
I had to have those specs
. Editors would start taking me a lot more seriously around this town if I had those specs. In fact, specs like these would probably pay for themselves within a matter of weeks, with increased dollar-a-word gigs. Then I’d pay back the spec-shop.
“Sure, as long as you have a major credit card,” the spec-clerk said.
“I don’t, actually.”
“Well, do you have any I.D.?”
“Yes, yes I think I do.”
I whip out my old
Newsweek
I.D., lay it on the counter. The clerk eyes this artifact doubtfully. Out-of-town I.D.?
“I just got back to Toronto, from New York,” I explained. “I used to live here, but now I’m back for a three-month stint. I’ve been commissioned to write an article about Toronto for
This Land of Ours.”
“What about it?”
“Oh, various things. The facilities and services the city has to offer.”
I lay subtle stress on the word services, hinting that there
might be a section in my article on spec-shops, and this is all just research.
“Well, do you have any other I.D.?”
“Hmm. Let’s see,” I say, rummaging through my bag.
Finally I unearth my old expired library card. “That’s about it, I’m afraid,” I say. I also had my U.S. passport with me, but I didn’t want to give him that. Too much of a skip-town feel.
“Well, that ought to be fi-ine,” the clerk says finally.
I felt a bit guilty. The clerk was clearly bending the rules accepting a cheque with such flimsy I.D. When it came back N.S.F. his boss would probably call him onto the carpet, and then, when he found out he’d accepted a cheque based on an out-of-town I.D. and an expired library card, fire him on the spot. The spec clerk would apply for other jobs, but it’s tough when you’ve been fired. He could wind up on the street, rooting through garbage cans, sleeping on steam grates, and it’d be all my fault.
On the other hand, getting fired can often be the best thing that happens to a person. It wakes you up, gives you a kick in the ass, forces you to reassess your direction in life. Maybe the clerk would end up writing a bestseller about his experiences on the street; thinking about it, I even got a little jealous. At the very least, getting fired would make the spec-clerk humbler, wiser, more sensitive to other people’s foibles and high prescriptions.
I signed the cheque with a flourish.
But suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I spot another pair of specs, just like mine, only with gold frames and tortoiseshell shade-attachments.
“Hang on a sec,” I say to the spec-clerk, slipping the cheque in my pocket. “I want to try these other ones.”
I try them on. They’re equally cool, but in a completely
different way. I can’t make up my mind. I try on first one pair, then the other.
This goes on for some time, possibly even half an hour, while the clerk hovers around me in a cloud of agitation.
“I like the tortoiseshell ones on you better,” he volunteers.
If I want your opinion, I’ll beat it out of you, I think calmly, and continue trying on first one pair, then the other. Behind me, the door opens —
bing-bong
— and a perfume-scented breeze wafts into my nostrils. My antennae perk up:
woman
. I glance in the mirror: a stunning Oriental woman, dressed to the nines, wearing a white cocktail dress, white stockings, Joan Collins shades. That’s what I need, a woman’s opinion. She passes by where I’m sitting. I turn towards her.
“I wonder if you could help me? I can’t make up my mind. I can’t decide between these two pairs of glasses. Which do you like better? These, or these?”
She drops everything and studies me intensely, looking like a surgeon performing a particularly delicate and complicated operation.
She
understands the gravity of this fashion decision. I mean, it’s your face, after all.
And as she studies me, I study her. Almond eyes, porcelain skin, kewpie-doll lips, surprisingly large breasts for an Oriental woman.
“I like the gold ones better,” she says finally. “They make you look like… a writer or something.”
“Well, that’s good, because I am a writer.”
“Really? Who do you write for?”
“I write for a number of publications in Canada and the U.S. Right now, I’m working on something for
This Land of Ours.”
“Really. What sort of things do you write?”
“Features, mostly. The occasional book review. I think I have a copy of something in my pack.”
I whip out “Letter From New York” and hand it to her. This artifact, proof positive that I’m an actual writer and not lying, impresses her deeply. How could I tell? Her face. It’s not true what they say about the Oriental face, at least not in her case. Her face was an open book, I could read every thought and emotion that passed over it. Seeming almost to hold her breath, she asks me:
“Do you ever write about art?”
“Not yet. However, I am quite interested in art.”
A stinking, steaming lie, my friends. I don’t give a fucking shit about art. Glorified interior decoration, that’s all art is to me.
I feel guilty lying to her like that but what could I do? Those breasts of hers were talking to me. They were saying: “Howdy, stranger. We’d love to come out and play, slap you silly, but first our mistress has to pose several skill-testing questions. If you pass, we’re yours to do with as you will. If you fail… well, we want you to know it was nice meeting you, anyway. Good luck!”
