Chump Change (16 page)

Yes, those were the days, when I looked forward to my mail, opened it with trembling fingers, and was buoyed and cheered by the contents. But somewhere along the line, something went horribly wrong, with my mail and my life. Lately it was all starting to sound like this:

And that was the good old days. I didn’t advance the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation a plugged nickel, and the language of the letters grew progressively harsher. One
began with the salutation FEDERAL WARNING in red block capitals, and went on to threaten me with legal action, withholding my tax returns, and wage garnishment. Another one said if I didn’t find a full-time job immediately, the government would issue me one, and deduct my payments from that.

I have to admit, that one scared me. I pictured myself in a trailer home in the shadow of some huge satanic factory, coming home at night, eating kerosene-heated pork and beans by the light of a bare bulb, then flopping exhausted into bed. In the morning, I’d be awakened by a voice from a huge loudspeaker: “ATTENTION STUDENT-LOAN DEADBEATS! ARISE, AND MARCH IN SINGLE FILE TO YOUR STATIONS!” In the bleak dawn, we would shuffle in our leg-irons towards another day of painstaking drudgery.

It was all too much for my sensitive, artistic nature. I stopped opening my mail, I didn’t even look at it, just transferred it directly to the garbage from its spot on the floor.

This system worked smashingly for a while. Then my predator-creditors started to phone me up. Let’s call my first loan officer Ned Harris. He was an obvious greenhorn, a nervous, excitable type. He phoned me at all hours, and hysterically demanded that I cough up all the money immediately (within 30 days) in cash or by certified cheque. I patiently explained to him he was asking the impossible, he might as well demand I wave a wand and turn the entire state of Vermont into gold. I was a writer, of no small renown in Canada, I implied. But writing was a dicey profession, feast or famine. Surely he understood that?

“But Mr. Henry,” he would say, over and over again (it was his mantra), “you
owe
us the money.”

I agreed that, of course, objectively speaking, this was true, and I would most assuredly get in touch with him the moment
I had any discretionary dough. But at the moment it was out of the question.

On and on it went. From time to time, I considered sending a payment to Ned. The truth is I felt sorry for him. But before I could, he either quit or was fired, I don’t know. I think he was fired. Once, I made up my mind to pay an installment, I phoned the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation, explained who I was, and asked to speak to Ned Harris.

“Mr. Harris has been pulled from that account,” the secretary said.

“Could I speak to him anyway?”

“Mr. Harris is no longer with us,” she said darkly.

I sometimes wonder what happened to Ned Harris. I hope I didn’t have a negative effect on his debt-collection career. Other times, though, it seems to me he was temperamentally unsuited to the rigours of debt-collection, and the sooner he got out of it the better.

Ned Harris was replaced by a world-weary debt-collection veteran named Adam Cohen. He phoned me early one Saturday morning to introduce himself. He woke me up, I was disoriented, but immediately sensed I had met my match, a Holmes to my Moriarty, a Porfiry to my Raskolnikov. We spent the first 15 minutes of that first conversation discussing the weather in Vermont versus the weather in Toronto. He had a slight cold, brought on by a sudden change of the weather. With the ease of a master, he steered the conversation to my days as a student in Vermont. Had I not found the Vermont weather fickle back then? I agreed I had, but that was a chief charm of autumn in Vermont. And the turning of the leaves, was it not spectacular? I agreed it was. From there, we discussed my student days, the first-rate quality of my education, the liberal spirit of the
school, etc. He asked how my career was going. I gave him my spiel about big-shot editors, the unpredictability of the profession, and the decline of readership and literacy in general. He seemed to take only a passing interest in this; not once did he mention the sum of money I owed.

Then he asked me: “Do you have any hobbies?”

Surprised, wrong-footed, I said, no, I didn’t, not really.

“Do you like to cook, for example?”

Yes, I said, but lately I mostly ate out.

The words had just left my lips when I realized my mistake.

“Just burgers and stuff like that,” I hastily added, but it was too late.

“I suggest you review your budgeting priorities, Mr. Henry,” Adam Cohen said.

He pointed out that payments of $60 a month worked out to $15 a week, or about $2 a day. Would I agree I spent at least $2 a day eating out?

He had me, plain and simple; I was cornered. I longed for the halcyon days of Ned Harris.

I vowed to get back on track with my payments, and promised to start paying right away. Adam Cohen thanked me ironically, and hung up.

In the end, though, I never sent him any money, either. That’s the beautiful thing about money, it’s so versatile. The same $60 can go towards the relatively ascetic pleasures of debt repayment, or it can buy you a new shirt, a delicious meal in a restaurant, dozens of drinks. For me, the pleasures of the flesh always win out. Besides, I had other, more pressing financial matters to worry about. Rent Day was approaching, and I had no money, nothing coming in, no one to borrow from. Over the course of the summer, I’d been back to borrow money from my
mother not once but several times. The last time, she said gently, “You can’t just keep borrowing money from me, you know. You have to get your own income sometime soon.” Also, at lunch one day, I finally screwed up the courage to put the touch on the old man. He flatly refused, without explanation.

And I’d borrowed the max from Max, as he explained to me on Rent Day Eve.

I was lying on the futon on the floor of my room, pondering my ridiculous fate, when Max poked his head through the door.

“What are you doing?” he asked me.

“Nothing.”

“Thinking?”

“Trying not to.”

“Listen, Dave, I hate to ask you this, but are you going to be able to come up with your share of the rent tomorrow?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You don’t have it now, I take it?”

“No.”

“Listen, I’d lend it to you, but the truth is I’m just barely able to make my own share. I lent some to Sam, things are pretty tight for me right now. Do you think you can ask your mom for it?”

“Probably,” I lied.

He retreated, and I went back to the
sturm und drang
of my thoughts. If I couldn’t come up with the rent, we might both get booted out, then where would we be? A terrible problem, deserving of the most acute attention. I solved it by turning out the light and going to bed.

The next day I got up, did a push-up, brushed my teeth, saw blood on the brush, went downstairs. Splayed on the hallway floor was the usual stack of writs, threats, injunctions, and
court orders, including something from the Internal Revenue Service of the United States of America. What now? I wondered. What does the IRS want with me? True, I had failed to file a U.S. tax return this year, and then skipped the country. I guess I could see how they would want to be getting in touch with me.

Curiosity trumps fear; so I opened the envelope. To my surprise, out popped a cheque from the IRS, for $440 (U.S.).

I stared at it in disbelief. The attached letter explained the cheque was a replacement for my old, stolen tax-return cheque (the one signed “Henry David”). I’d almost forgotten — in compliance with my mother’s wishes, I’d written the IRS one last time to hassle them about it, but as soon as I dropped that letter in the box I wiped it out of my mind. I never thought anything would come of it.

As I turned the cheque over in my hand, and in my mind, I decided the whole thing was…a miracle! How else could you explain a cheque for exactly the amount of my rent plus a bit of spending money, popping through the slot out of the clear blue, on just the day I needed it most, the day I had exhausted all other options?

I refer to this incident as The Rent Day Miracle, and when I tell people the story, they just laugh and say: “Dave, how can you be so vain, naïve, and self-centred?”

Let them scoff. The moment that unexpected, almost absurdist cheque popped out of the IRS envelope, that’s when I knew some sort of higher power was watching over me — God, or at least a guardian angel.

It was hard to keep the faith, though, when my whole world was slowly crumbling. It’s all very well to pray for luck and miracles, but it’s another thing when people are phoning you every day, three, four, five times a day, all with the same question:
“Where’s our money?”

The phone became a two-way instrument of torture. I phoned the Great Editor, and hassled him. My creditors phoned me, and hassled me.

“Mr. Henry, I know you’re there. Pick up the phone, Mr. Henry. I’m very disappointed you didn’t make our last payment on schedule. Pick up the phone, Mr. Henry.”

First Josephson’s Opticians, then a collection agency representing Josephson’s Opticians, rang me up. The collection-agency lady assigned to my case came off all harsh and nasty, trying to intimidate me:

“I can assure you, Mr. Henry, if that money isn’t in my office by Friday, we will contact our lawyers, and the legal fees will be charged to you.”

I bounced back by telling her I didn’t have a job, nor a nickel in the bank.

“Are you physically disabled?” she asked me. “Are you telling me you can’t get a $10-an-hour job sweeping the streets?”

Just then someone in the background on her end of the line started screaming at someone else. He was really freaking out, giving the gears to some deadbeat.

“That’s a nice full-time job
you’ve
got there,” I said to her. “What are you, in some kind of basement boiler-room? I’d love to have a job in
your
office. I can yell at people and threaten them with the best of them. Want me to send you a resumé?”

“Have I yelled at you, Mr. Henry? Have I threatened you in any way?”

Kim-or-Gloria also phoned me endlessly, two, three, four times a day, leaving long, rambling messages. She kept going on and on about a subscription to the
Burnished Monocle
I had supposedly promised her at some point.

“Hello, Mr. Henry. Are you there? I was wondering, do you remember you promised to get me a subscription to the
Monocle?
Mr. Henry? Are you there? Oh, you’re a very silly boy… Mr. Henry. I wonder if you remember I gave you $40 to get me a subscription to the
Monocle
— Mr. Henry? Are you there? Oh, Mr. Henry, I wonder where can you be, maybe you’re writing and screening your calls — Mr. Henry? Are you there?”

On and on they went, sometimes for five minutes or more, while I sat in the next room, smoking, guts churning, screening my calls, thinking: why is it only crazy people and creditors ever call me
Mr.?

To try to conserve money, I went back to my two-sandwich-a-day routine. I lost quite a bit of weight, and I was also very tanned from my long, long walks in the sun.

“Wow!” people would say to me. “You’re looking great, Dave. Have you been working out?”

“No, I’m starving!” I wanted to say to them. “I’m not working out, and neither is my life!”

But I didn’t, of course. I merely batted my lashes demurely and said, “Thanks.”

It finally became obvious to me, what had been obvious
to everyone else all along, I guess: I had to get a job, any job.

I will “take” a shitty job, is how I put it to myself. But nowadays “taking a shitty job” is easier said than done. People are lined up around the block for shitty jobs. You see an ad in the paper:

You go in anyway, sit in a room with a hundred other hopefuls, clutching your briefcase, thinking: sitting above a vat of shit while a bunch of kids try to dunk me, for minimum wage? That sounds like a
great job
. I really hope I get it.

I never know where to begin to look for work. I know most people will advise you to make lists, schmooze, massage your contacts, but I’ve never been much good at any of that. Usually I just open the paper, check the ads, or cruise around in a daze looking for “Help Wanted” signs.

There was an ad in
Next!
, Toronto’s alternative weekly:

Shit, I thought, I can do that. I went in.

“You’re a bit overqualified for this,” the woman behind the desk said.

“I know, but I’m a writer, and it’s a dicey profession. Feast
or famine, you know? Mostly famine. I need something steady,” I said.

“How do we know you’ll stay at the job?”

I think I was still finding it tough to apply for such a lowly position. Me, David Henry, with two Master’s degrees. Otherwise I never would have said: “You don’t, I’m afraid.”

Next!

A few days later, I spotted an ad for something a bit more up my alley:

I’m no university prof, but I had an intuition about this ad. Whoever placed it had obviously been disappointed with previous tutors, and had said to him/herself, “This time I will accept no less than a university professor.” But what university prof would be bothered tutoring an administrative assistant, even for $25 an hour? This person was clearly a bit naïve, and therefore might be fooled into hiring me.