Chump Change (15 page)

“Ooh, it’s so BIG, Mr. Henry,” Kim would say.

I’ve never had any illusions, it’s average, but of course His Royal Highness was mightily flattered. These types of compliments go straight to His head, and the next thing you knew I
would find myself wrestling with the Chinese puzzle of her underthings. “The stiff prick has no conscience,” as someone once said — but actually, through almost yogic self-control and a lifelong habit of thrice-daily masturbation, I’ve found I can pretty much do the right thing with a lazy-on, a half-chubby; even, half the time, with a full-bore erection. But when it starts to drool, forget it, all bets are off, I’ll skateboard over the blazing corpse of my grandmother to achieve my goal, to get my prize. Most men are the same that way, I believe.

Once, I woke up to see Kim standing at the foot of my bed, in white dress, white pumps, Joan Collins shades, and McDonald’s bag. I looked at the clock: 8:30 a.m. I blinked, shook my head, but she was still standing there. It was no dream.

“What are you doing here?”

“It’s time to get up, Mr. Henry. I brought you breakfast.”

She sat down on the side of the bed, watched me eat my Egg McMuffin, Tater Tot, sip my coffee. After a while, she reached over, started kneading my Johnson through the bedclothes. I pulled her towards me, she gave me a couple of her patented butterfly kisses, then pulled back.

“Not now, Mr. Henry. Morning is the time for work.”

I tried to pull her towards me again but again she resisted. Finally I laid back, gave up. Then she started kneading my member yet again. So, of course, I tried to pull her towards me, and again she pulled back.

“What the hell are you doing?” I finally spluttered.

“You must use that energy for writing, Mr. Henry. Later, if you work hard, you can get your reward.”

Ah, so that was it. The old “jism-conservation” school of literature, a theory particularly popular among Orientals, in my experience. My old grad-school friend, “Stan,” Chinese-Canadian, subscribed to the same school of thought. He wanted
to be a writer, too. Sometimes I’d come over to his little cubicle apartment to pick him up for class. He’d open the door, half-dressed; in the background, a woman would be sprawled on his pull-out bed.

“There goes another short story, Dave,” he’d say.

“Kim,” I said, trying to pull her to me. “You know what I’m doing all day, sitting at my desk? Writing letters. That’s not going to make me rich, or famous, or anything.”

“It doesn’t matter. Now, you write letters. Later, maybe you will write something bigger.”

I knew almost nothing about her. I never saw her apartment, never met any of her friends. One day, I found out I didn’t even really know her name.

We were heading out of the house one afternoon, after having sex. I wanted to buy some cigarettes. On the way to the variety store, Kim said: “This is Koreatown, Mr. Henry. You better watch out you don’t double-cross me. I know everyone in this area, the stores and restaurants are my eyes and ears. If you try to go out with some other woman, some big blonde girl, I will find out about it right away.”

As if to illustrate her point, the man behind the counter in the variety store, always impassive and taciturn with me, greeted her warmly. They chewed the fat in Korean while I flipped through magazines. I scored the smokes, then as we were leaving the guy behind the counter said: “See you later, Gloria.”

“Gloria?” I asked her, outside. “I thought your name was Kim.”

She shrugged.

“Kim or Gloria…whatever.”

“What are you talking about?”

She stopped in the street.

“Look, Mr. Henry. My Korean name is —” Here she said something impossible to render in English syllables. Her mouth worked like it had a harmonica in it, and emitted a similar range of tones. “But in English it’s Kim, or Gloria, whichever you prefer.”

I thought about this a moment.

“Well, I guess I prefer Kim.”

None of my friends ever met her. Max never saw her, she always scooted off before he got home. I never saw her at night, come to think of it; perhaps she was some sort of Oriental reverse Dracula. Sometimes I played Max her telephone messages to prove Kim wasn’t just a product of my overheated imagination.

Oh, one friend met her: Doug Seltzer. I knew him through Elliott Zimmerman, a friend from journalism school (my second M.A.). One day, Doug and I were out back at Palmerston playing “drink-pong.” You put your gin-and-tonic or whatever on the corner of the table and if the other guy hits it, it’s his point, and you have to down the contents. If you knock it over, you have to go make another drink. Suddenly, the Oriental Joan Collins appears from the laneway.

“Oh, Mr. Henry,” she said. “I didn’t realize you had a guest.”

She retreated. From the shadows of the laneway I heard her say: “Can I speak to you a moment, Mr. Henry?” I put down my ping-pong bat, headed into the laneway, where I found her fishing in her purse.

“I just wanted to give you this,” she said, handing me two $20s.

“What for?”

“I think you need it.”

The odd thing was, she was 100 percent right. That day, I’d spent my last cent, the last vestige of my advance from
This Land of Ours
. At first, I pretended to refuse, but then I thanked her and put it in my pocket. She gave me a “butterfly” kiss, and took off, promising to phone me later.

Doug looked like he’d seen a UFO.

“Who was
that?”

“I’m sort of seeing her,” I said. “Her name’s Kim, or Gloria, whichever you prefer.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

I explained. This took a bit of time.

“Why is she wearing a cocktail dress in the middle of the day?”

“I’m not sure. She’s not from an escort service, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Dave, if she was from an escort service I don’t think she’d be giving
you
money.” I still had the $40 in my hand. “Anyway, forget it. My serve.”

Then one day she went too far.

We were sitting in the backyard and Kim was talking, I had no idea about what, I had a hangover, I was tired, I wasn’t really listening. I sat slumped in my chair, half-dozing behind my Armani shade-attachments, sometimes burning myself awake as the end of my cigarette touched my naked leg.

Then she said something that made me prick up my ears.

“You know, Mr. Henry, sometimes I just want to shut you in my apartment, lock all the doors and windows, and keep you there, like a pet.”

I sat up straight. A little voice said:
do it now
.

“Kim, I just don’t think this is working out.”

“What?”

“I don’t think we should see each other any more. I’m sorry. I think we should be just friends from now on.”

At first, she didn’t understand, or pretended not to. Then she seemed to take it as a joke. Finally, something in my tone made her take me seriously and she became angry.

“You fool, Mr. Henry! I could have made you famous, a famous writer! But you love everybody, you go out all the time. Without me, you will always be nobody.”

Maybe so, I thought. But right now this “nobody” wants nothing to do with you. A one-sided argument ensued, she battered me with hail-balls of anger, but I kept up my cold front. Finally she cracked, realized it was over, that there was no point. She stood up and stalked out of the backyard. Not without a parting blow, though.

“You were a rousy ruvver, anyway.”

I’m not trying to make fun of her accent or her ethnicity, believe me. But that’s how she said it, that’s how I remember it, and so that’s how I pass it along to you.

Nothing but letters. Try as I might, that’s all I could write. I was intimidated, I guess. Supreme Court judges read
This Land of Ours
, cabinet ministers read it — the prime minister himself probably read it. Who was I to pontificate to them on the topic of Toronto?

So I’d take a little break, write a letter. Who was it who said: “If you want to get a flow going, first write a letter to someone you love.” Rilke, maybe. I’d write a letter and the pages would come flowing out. It was like dropping an axe into the ground and hitting a geyser of oil.

And that’s how I put the final nail in the coffin of my relationship with Ruth. I wrote a letter to our mutual grad-school friend Jennifer in Montreal. She was working as a reporter at the
Gazette
. In the letter, I made a couple of joking references to my misadventures with Kim-or-Gloria. Just my luck, Ruth was visiting her and found the letter. Jennifer says it was an accident, that Ruth found the letter on the dresser. I don’t know if I buy it, but if she showed it to Ruth, I don’t blame her for showing a little sisterly solidarity in the face of my caddish callousness. Ruth phoned me up from Montreal, and tearfully dumped me. That’s when I found out she believed my “necessary fictions” and had been waiting for me all along, all summer long. I felt terrible.

My advance was by now a distant memory. To stay alive I started borrowing from Max, so often that to keep track of it
all we installed a “Debt Clock” on the wall of my office, with two hands, one for hundreds, and one for increments of five dollars. I kept asking, he kept it coming, and pretty soon the big hand was rounding the $2,000 mark.

One day, Max came in after work.

“Man, you’re really going at it. I can hear you hammering that typewriter all the way out on the street. How’s the article going?”

“It isn’t.”

“Seriously, how much have you written?”

“Just the title.”

“Just the title? What have you been doing all these weeks? What do you do all day?”

“Write letters.”

“Dave, just write the article, man. Get it finished.”

“I just can’t seem to get going on it, Max. I don’t know where to start. I’m intimidated.”

“You’re too close to it, Dave. Why don’t you come out for a drink, take a break?”

“I can’t, Max, I’ve got to keep working—”

“My treat.”

“… I’ll get my jacket.”

We sat on the patio of the San George and had a few drinks. Max kept ordering more. Good old Max. After three or four tequila-gingers, I said: “You know, Max, this is great. I’m really glad I came back.”

“No regrets?”

“No. I’m much happier here. I never felt at home in New York. Toronto has an ambience like a civilized dinner party where all the best people are invited, all the guests go home early, and there isn’t too much to clean up in the morning. Whereas New York, New York’s like a party everyone found
out about, a party where everyone lies around drinking cheap rotgut and ripping everything off and leaving cigarette butts and empty beercans everywhere and passing out in their own vomit. New York has the ambience of those apocalyptic adolescent bashes like you and I used to have when our parents went away, where you know no one is going to leave until everything is either consumed or destroyed.”

“That’s good, Dave,” Max said. “You should put that in your article.”

To be perfectly honest, I had already written those observations in note form. I was “workshopping” them on Max. Still, I was encouraged. His reaction gave me the confidence boost I needed to write the article, finally. I think the tequila-gingers helped a bit too, loosened me up. I stayed up late that night writing it, using notes from my notebooks, various articles I’d photocopied, trying to cobble together one good draft. Finally, I fell asleep on the couch, woke up early, and rewrote it, retyped the whole thing. When Max came down for breakfast I showed it to him. He read it over, chuckling as he went along.

“It’s fine, Dave, it’s done,” he said when he finished. “Don’t change a word.”

“O.K. Thanks, Max.”

“One other thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Hand it in right away.”

Max never complained about the money I owed him, he had faith in me. “Just sell one article, Dave, you’ll pay me back the whole whack.” He had faith in me, sure, but I know he wouldn’t have minded also having money in his wallet.

“Alright, alright.”

I handed it in, and waited. And waited.

You know, writing, freelancing, would be an interesting, worthwhile, and rewarding profession if editors actually treated it like a profession, and not some sort of aristocratic hobby. If they got back to writers quickly, and paid promptly. But that only happens to a few at the top of the profession, and they already have plenty of cash.

I phoned the Great Editor. First once a week, then twice a week, then every other day, then daily. I developed a relationship with his secretary.

“Hello, Ms. Fitzwilliams,” I would say. “It’s me, Dave.”

“How are you, David?”

“Fine, thanks. How are your geraniums?”

“They’re coming along very well, thanks. How can I help you?”

“Is The Great Editor in?”

“He’s in a meeting. Can I take a message?”

“Sure. Just tell him I called again.”

“O.K. He has your number?”

“I hope so. You gave it to him yesterday.”

And the day before, and the day before, and the day before. He returned about one call in twenty. Once, he called to tell me he lost my article.

“It was in with a bunch of papers in my office,” he said. “I think the cleaning lady threw them all away.”

My beautiful, immortal words, fruit of my labour, inspiration, and procrastination, now languishing in the “circular file.” It seemed like a bad sign, an excuse. I steeled myself to getting it killed. I sent him another photocopy of the original, and went back to waiting.

Meanwhile, my student-loan creditors had caught up with me. All this moving around didn’t fool them for long.

I don’t mean to brag, but once upon a time the letters I received sounded like this:

That’s an actual paraphrased excerpt from a love letter I once received from Francesca. I can’t be objective about the merits of the poetry, but the emotion was sincere, heartfelt, a shining example of the genus
epistula amatoria
.