Chump Change (18 page)

For my terrible day as an extra, I earned $77, enough to last me maybe two weeks on my two-sandwich-a-day regimen. I had to get something quick. I combed the paper, hit the
streets looking for signs. I applied for jobs, but either I was overqualified or they were underwhelmed. Briefcase in hand, tie on, shoes polished, I sat across from desk after desk as middle-aged men and women shook their heads: no, nothing, no, no, I’m afraid not, sorry, nothing available right now.

Finally, I became desperate.

I remember it like yesterday. You don’t soon forget the day you finally knuckle under, say “world, you win,” and sell your soul to the devil.

Of course, it doesn’t really work that way, you don’t sell your soul all at once, you barter it off bit by bit over the years until one day you find yourself turning to the camera, face covered in pancake makeup, saying: “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.” It’s a slow, imperceptible process, so slow most people don’t even realize when it’s happening to them.

But I like to remember it as happening to me all on a single day in early autumn.

I awoke from dreams of torture, madness, demented dentists revving their drills and laughing hysterically, feudal lords ringing for me, the serf, to fetch them more brandy: RINGRING, RING-RING…

I sat up with a start, covered in sweat. “Phew, it was only a nightmare,” I said to myself. I was back in reality: lying on a futon on the floor of my cheesy room with the raised-velvet wallpaper. Somewhere, far away, the phone was ringing. Why wasn’t the answering machine picking it up? Some damn fool, probably me, had obviously left it off.

I lurched out of bed. I was hungover, I knew that in a flash. I felt like Frankenstein’s monster, a creature made of grave-robbed body-parts, stitched together by a hunchback, with bolts in my neck and formaldehyde for blood…and in my skull, the wrong brain, the brain of a madman, the result of a
horrible switcheroo. I was so hungover, in fact, I broke Rule #1 of the Deadbeat’s Code:
never answer the phone
.

“Hello?”

“May I speak to David Henry,
please?”

In a flash, I recognized the adenoidal drawl of my arch-nemesis, Adam Cohen. I should have known. “Only relatives or creditors ever ring in that Wagnerian manner,” as Oscar Wilde says. I coughed, and changed my voice.

“He’s not here right now. May I take a message?”

“Who’s this?” was the suspicious reply.

“This is his roommate, Max Stapleton.”

“I’ve spoken to Max Stapleton before. This doesn’t sound like him.”

“I have a cold.”

“I see, ‘Max.’ Would you mind holding for a moment?”

He clicked off. I like that, I thought. He phones me, then he puts me on hold. I waited. My temples throbbed, my guts churned. A terrible stew of poisons was bubbling and brewing deep in my intestinal tract. Finally, Adam Cohen came back on the line.

“Hello again, Mr. Henry,” he said.

“I told you, Mr…”

“Cohen,” he said drily.

“Mr. Cohen. As I said to you before, this isn’t David Henry, it’s Max Stapleton.”

“That’s funny. I just spoke to Max Stapleton on the other line a few moments ago. He was at his office.”

Pop! goes the weasel. Actually, I was more impressed than anything else. This guy was a real pro. He would go a long way in the debt-collection industry; he probably already had, come to think of it. I flatter myself that only the top debt-collection agents get a crack at the notorious “Henry account.”

“Unless Max Stapleton can be in two places at the same time, I suggest we cut the crap. Shall we, Mr. Henry?” Adam Cohen asked sarcastically.

“Alright, alright. Just tell me one thing. How did you get Max’s number at the office?”

“That’s my business,” Adam Cohen said (though I thought I detected a touch of professional pride in his voice). “What I propose to discuss with you now is your business, Mr. Henry. If ‘business’ is really the right word. Funny business is more like it.”

He launched into a 15-minute harangue, peppered with quasi-rhetorical, pseudo-Socratic questions. How would you like it if someone did that to you, Mr. Henry? Do you think that’s a good way to conduct your affairs, Mr. Henry? It reminded me of my parents, when I was a kid. “What do you think your punishment should be, David?” I don’t know, Mom, Dad: a banana split? A new skateboard?

I sat there in my boxers, farting a blue streak, thirsty as Tantalus, generally having a terrible time. Finally, after extracting a series of extravagant promises from me (like a dentist extracting rotten teeth), and delivering himself of several Sahara-dry witticisms and homilies, Adam Cohen signed off.

I groaned, rose out of the chair slowly, like an old man, and hit the can. After a sometimes frightening, occasionally painful, and ultimately deeply troubling 20 minutes in the washroom, I went downstairs to see if there was anything to eat. I was savagely hungry, dreaming of a cold chicken leg wrapped in tinfoil, or maybe a piece of pumpkin pie such as Samantha sometimes brought over.

But there was nothing, just some condiments, milk, and a yogurt container containing… something, it had been in there so long no one could remember what. I shuddered, and shut the fridge door.

Likewise, the cupboard was bare. Typical bachelor establishment. Not even any crackers. Nothing but a couple of bread heels and, way in back, overlooked and despised by all, a can of sardines “in their own juices,” as the can proudly proclaimed.

I hate sardines. Little crunchy critters, with that oily, fishy smell, a smell that stays on your fingers for days, the smell of failure. “Well, Mr. Henry, allow me to say I was very impressed by your resumé, and you’ll be happy to know the board has made a unanimous decision to… [sniff, sniff] What’s that smell? Do you smell it? Something fishy? Anyway, as I say, we’re not hiring right now, but we’ll give you a call if anything should come up in the next few months.”

I opened the can, spread some mayo on the bread heels, and laid some sardines side by side on their bed of bread, put the other bread-heel on top, and took a bite.

As I munched the pungent fillets between my teeth, a wave of self-pity came over me. Welcome to reality, Dave, this is a reality sandwich, I said to myself. This is the Great Writer’s Brunch you always dreamed of. You took the road less travelled. What you didn’t realize is the reason it’s less travelled is because it’s only travelled by fools!

On the spot, I composed a bitter autobiographical poem, dedicated to myself:

I found myself muttering a prayer. Not to God, God only
helps those who help themselves, the virtuous and hardworking, I needed help from Elsewhere:

“O Dark Lord of the Underworld, please spare me any more of the torments of the job search. I need a job immediately, preferably something easy, highly remunerative, and somehow writing-related. If you do this for me, I promise to give you in return…my eternal soul.”

Beelzebub answered my prayers with surprising speed. The next day, I’m having lunch with the old man. Cheapo Chinese,
comme toujours
. I’m starving, lapping up my hot-and-sour like a maddened beast. It’s the first food to pass my lips since the epiphanic sardines. I’m determined to hit him for a “bridging loan,” come what may, even if it means the heavens split open and Phat Ho’s is rent asunder. I need cash!

We eat. A long silence is followed by another long, long silence. Then Dad says, out of the blue: “I was on television yesterday.”

“Oh, really?” I ask, between slurps. This is the era of the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. In a few short months, the Berlin Wall will fall. Suddenly my father, who has toiled in the vineyards of obscurity all his life as a professor of Eastern European economics, specializing in agrarian land reform in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is in heavy demand from media outlets all over the city. Yes, my creased, careworn, snowy-haired old man has become…a celebrity, of sorts. Editors and producers don’t know from Austro-Hungarian land reform, all they know is: Eastern Europe is collapsing and we don’t have a clue why! We need someone to explain it now, now, now! You there! Snivelling little intern-lackey! Get on the blower to the university! Get me a prof who can sort this shit out on the double or you’re fucking fired! A few hours later, my Dad comes trundling into
the studio, suffers himself to be made up and coached, then tries to explain it all in a few simple sound-bites.

“What show?”

“The
Saturday Evening News.”

I’m impressed. The
Saturday Evening News
is one of the Cosmodemonic Broadcast Corporation’s flagship news programs, hosted by none other than Reed Franklin, the
éminence grise
of Canadian TV news, “the most trusted man in Canada.”

“How’d it go?”

“Very well.”

Then he looks up from his soup and meets my eyes with a level gaze.

“I told the producer you were looking for a job,” he says.

I stared at my father in amazement, my spoon poised in mid-air, wondering: how did he know that? I hadn’t mentioned anything to him about looking for a job. Unless this is Your handiwork, my Liege?

But then I caught myself, and remembered to whom I was talking. My father has been assuming I’ve been looking for a job all along. In his mind it’s a simple Socratic-style syllogism:

From his giant wallet, he produces a business card, and slides it across the table towards me. It reads:

Cynthia Butch
PRODUCER
THE SATURDAY EVENING NEWS

With phone, address, and fax number.

“I told her you went to Columbia,” he says. “She said they’re always looking for ‘casual writers.’”

I take the card, mumble “thanks,” and slip it in my pocket.

A couple of days later, I’m deep in the bowels of the gigantic Cosmodemonic Broadcast Corporation itself, television news division.

I’m sitting outside the office of the head honcho, the executive producer of television news and current affairs programming, Bill Frizell. He has my resumé, as well as copies of “Letter From New York” and a draft of “Welcome to Toronto.” Right now, someone else is in his office. I stare at the secretary, smile, twiddle my thumbs, and look around the newsroom.

Pandemonium prevails. The air is electric with tension and stress. On every wall, on every desk, a profusion of televisions are tuned to a cacophony of channels. The phone rings incessantly, BING-BONG, BING-BONG, it goes, on the overhead P.A. system. Everywhere, people are running around frantically, clutching fistfuls of paper. Every once in a while, someone stands up at their desk, looks around angrily, and yells: “SPLIT!”

I later found out “split!” is the command for one of the script assistants to split the script into seven copies. But back then, I was tempted to think it was a sign from above, God speaking through the Cosmodemonic airwaves, telling me to split, Dave, split! Flee the bowels of this terrible place! Save yourself while you still can!

Cynthia Butch said they’re looking for “casual writers,” so I’m dressed casually: patched khakis, frayed sneakers, white T-shirt, all accessorized by a golden tan. Probably not the greatest look for landing a job, but, as you may have guessed, part of me didn’t really want this job. “Well, Dad, I gave it a shot, but they turned me down. Now can I borrow a thousand bucks?”

In the end, though, I think my downbeat duds actually wound up working in my favour. Frizell took my ultra-casual attire for a symptom of superconfidence. I think he did, anyway. Later, I heard him say something in a meeting about interviewing job candidates who were “arrogant, as all the good ones are,” and I got the feeling he was referring to me.

I enter his office, Frizell is reading through photocopies of my magazine articles, and chuckling to himself. A good sign, I feel.

“Sit down, sit down,” he says, with a broad smile. I sit.

“Well, one thing is certain,” he began. “You can write.”

Never in my life has a job interview gone so smoothly. It was eerie. Normally, I get nervous, and wind up blurting out all kinds of terrible confessions. I’m very uncomfortable with self-promotion. My usual
modus operandi
in job interviews is to go in, tell them how much I suck and why they don’t want to hire me. I guess that’s part of the reason I wind up with such lousy jobs.

In this one magical instance, though, even my ritual self-excoriation and -immolation gets a positive spin. Frizell is impressed by my candour, it seems. He finds my honesty “refreshing.”

All in all, he seems to be a man very much like myself: bespectacled, philosophical, a little abstracted. A nice guy. So much so I found myself wondering how he had risen to a position of such prominence in the ball-breaking world of TV news.

We chatted. At one point I said: “I know I don’t have much experience, but I can tell you one thing: I am committed heart and soul to the craft of writing, to getting good at it, and I will bring that same commitment to writing TV news, if you give me the chance.”

That impressed him, I think.

“Frankly, I’m interested,” he said after a while. “What I want you to do is watch a lot of information television, then come back in a week and we’ll see what we can do about putting you on the schedule.”

The interview seemed to be at an end. I stood up and shook his hand.

“Thanks. I appreciate it. You won’t regret this.”

I left his office walking on air, nagged by only one gnawing doubt: had he really offered me the job? Just once, I wish someone would say to me: Congratulations, Dave, break out the champagne, you’ve got the job, report to work Monday at 9:00 a.m. But they never do that, do they? There’s always some sort of vagueness. That’s always been my experience, anyway.