Chump Change (2 page)

By the end of a year doing this I was so bored I was paying the guy sitting behind me, Marek Waldorf, to do my job for me, while I loafed around my desk, read the paper or a novel, talked on the phone, and ate junk food. When I’m bored, I eat. Every day I made four or five trips down the elevator to the newsstand on the first floor, returned each time loaded with chips, cheesies, chocolate bars, ice-cream bars, and a Diet Coke. When I began at
Newsweek
I weighed 185 lbs. After a year I weighed 225.

It started with bets.

“What’s the capital of Peru?” I’d ask him, bored.

“Lima,” he’d say.

“Bullshit, it’s something else.”

“I’ll bet you a one-inch stack of CUs it’s Lima.”

“You’re on.”

But Marek went to Harvard, he never lost; eventually it wound up I just paid him to do my job for me. I paid him by the inch. So much for a one-inch stack of CUs, so much for a two-inch stack, and so on. I paid him well — I’m not one to exploit my employees — and Marek flourished at this piecework, so much so that after a while I realized I was actually paying him more than I was earning myself. In other words, I was losing money every day I dragged my ass into the office.

So I set about getting myself fired. I started coming in later and later, leaving earlier and earlier, taking longer and longer lunches, making longer and longer long-distance phone calls, and going on shopping sprees in the middle of the day — shopping safaris, they were really. It usually started with me running around the corner to Sak’s at lunch, then taking a cab across town to Bloomingdale’s. Several hours later, in a haze of guilt, I’d be sifting through the bargain bins on Canal Street, thinking: “I should be getting back, this is crazy.”

I now realize these shopping safaris were symptoms of my malaise; like my country itself (I was born in the U.S. but moved to Canada when I was twelve), I consumed instead of produced, I substituted the cheap high of a new shirt or whatever for the deep satisfaction of a life’s work, solidly begun and persistently pursued.

Then, as the late afternoon sun slanted through the venetian blinds of the letters department, I’d return to my desk with an armload of logo-emblazoned bags from various uptown and downtown emporia, and wait for the axe to fall.

Why bother? you might be wondering. Why go to all this
trouble to get yourself fired? Why not just quit? Well, it’s easier said than done to quit your job in Manhattan.
Psychologically
, I mean. Everywhere you go are living, breathing reminders of how you could wind up if your luck runs out. They call Manhattan “the city that never sleeps,” but everywhere you go, people are sleeping: on park benches, in doorways, cardboard boxes, sometimes flat-out, face-down on the sidewalk. And when a New Yorker sees a street person, they don’t think: There but for the grace of God go I. No, they’re too smart for that, they know no graceful God would put such festering suffering on such naked display just to provide a moment of
Schadenfreude
for the Yuppoisie. They think: There but for the grace of my boss, and a stacked-deck social system that allows bland, talentless people such as myself to succeed and prosper while others starve in the gutter, go I. And I’d better
get going
.

Every day, you emerge from your apartment and you see bums and limos, bums and limos. Which is it going to be, kid? There’s no middle ground in Manhattan, no buffer, just the gutter.
No buffer, just the gutter
: that was my New York mantra, and I repeated it to myself every day as I hustled my butt to work.

Finally, though, I did quit. I’ve always been a big believer in listening to your “little man,” the voice in your head that tries to guide you. My little man had been practically screaming at me to quit my job for the last few months. Finally, he rented a plane and dragged one of those signs you see at football games or the beach behind him saying: QUIT YOUR JOB NOW! I obeyed. As if in a trance I arose, walked over to Madeleine’s office, and knocked on the door.

“Come in,” said the voice from behind the door.

I entered. Madeleine was hunched over her desk, looking over a crossword puzzle through a pair of little half-specs.
When I sat down across from her, she looked at me over the tops of the specs.

“How can I help you, David?”

“I don’t know how to put this, Madeleine, I really like working here…what I mean to say is, I appreciate you hiring me in the first place, but I’m afraid I have to quit.”

“Why? What’s the problem?”

“No problem — that is,
I’m
the problem, I guess, really.”

And then it all came tumbling out. With my face on fire, staring at my shoes (in shocking shape, I noticed), I confessed all: Marek, the shopping safaris, the long-distance phone calls.

“So I guess you can see,” I concluded, “I wouldn’t really be doing you any favours by continuing to work here.”

I looked up, to see how she was taking it all. To my surprise, she seemed hardly to be listening. She was gazing at an undefined point on her desk, preoccupied.

“Do you have another job lined up?” she asked, after a couple of moments.

“Oh, no —”

“What are you going to do?”

“Well, I’ve always wanted to write a novel.”

“No, I meant, what are you going to do for
money?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you keep on working here, and write on the side?”

She still liked me, apparently, despite everything.

“I’ve tried, Madeleine. I try to wake up early, write before work, but I always wind up hitting the snooze button until the last minute. After work, I’m so wrung out I can hardly read, let alone write.”

“It sounds as if you’ve made up your mind.”

“I have. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too, David. I always enjoyed your letters. They were very funny.” She stood up and extended her hand. “Good luck.”

“Thanks, Madeleine,” I said as we shook hands.

On my way out, hand on the knob, I said: “Say, Madeleine. Would you mind very much if I forgo the usual two-week waiting period and leave today?”

“Whatever suits you best, David.”

“I won’t be leaving you in the lurch?”

She laughed savagely, reached over to her shelf, and pulled down a folder bulging with papers.

“These are the resumés I’ve received in the last month alone. Let’s see, here’s a Ph.D in medieval studies, here’s an archaeologist. Here’s a former mayor.”

Man, times are tough, I thought. Well, you can have it. I’m outta here! I thanked her again, and left.

Outside, at my desk, I gathered up my papers, stuffed them into my bag, and looked around the room one last time. Everyone was typing away. No one looked up; they probably thought I was off on another extendo-lunch or shopping safari.

“So long, suckers!” I thought, but I didn’t actually say goodbye to anyone. Why bother? I wouldn’t miss them, they wouldn’t miss me. Well, Marek might miss me. He would certainly miss the extra income.

Outside, it’s a beautiful early-April day. How can I tell it’s a beautiful day in midtown Manhattan? Because as I sail through the revolving doors of the
Newsweek
building I crank my head up, and there, between the peaks of Madison’s mighty skyscrapers, is a patch of purest azure blue. Sometime during the morning it rained, and while Manhattan never gets that fresh-
washed
feel some cities get after a spring rain, at least some of the surface grime was rinsed off.

Madison’s packed as usual, its banks swollen now with the lunchtime crowd. Like so many salmon, I think, looking at them. All with the same markings — blue suit, tan coat, black shoes — all swimming against the current, jumping over puddles, landing with a
splash!

All around me, lunchbound
Newsweek
ers pour out of the building, nudging and jostling me as they go by, sometimes throwing an elbow into my ribs for good measure. C’mon, kid, choose a direction and get a move on. Madison is not an avenue for daydreamers. I remember once, as I was walking along with my head in the clouds, a man stuck his pockmarked face close to mine and said “WAKE UP!” The denizens of Madison like you to be in the here and now. If too many people went around constructing their own worlds in their heads, Madison would disappear — POOF! — like the bad dream it is.

I take a deep breath of spring air — for I, David Henry, still breathe with my lungs (though I can feel the beginnings of a
dorsal fin poking between my shoulderblades) — and toss myself into the crowd.

Swimming upstream, uptown…Suddenly, there’s a tug on my sleeve, a strong one, like the pull of a big bass on the end of a 20-lb test line. I turn and find myself face-to-face with one of Manhattan’s roving army of down-and-outers, have-nots, don’t-wannabes. His face is the colour and texture of old orange peel, his hair as stiff as bark, his eyes a special painted-on blue, like paint on chipped old china.

He’s clutching my sleeve with a drowning-man death-grip, holding on for dear life, his knees pitching and buckling under him as if he were on the poop-deck of a ship in high seas. He stares at me with unseeing eyes.

“Money,” he croaks.

“Sorry,” I say,
comme toujours
. I try to shake him off but his grip only tightens. Then a big wave hits him amidships, he pitches forward, his barnacled face an inch from mine.

“Please,”
he says, enveloping my head in a cloud of booze-fumes, stale tobacco, other unidentifiable odours.

“I said no! Fuck off!” With a mighty shove, I send him spinning back into the crowd.

Sounds a bit harsh, I know. Listen, when I first got to Manhattan I gave to almost everyone who asked. That’s how I was brought up: “If he needs it that badly, you should give him something, dear.” But in Manhattan, you get hit a dozen, two dozen times a day. I realized if I kept it up, pretty soon it would be me barging onto the subway car, banging on a garbage-can lid with my fist, singing “Take me home, country road.”

So you develop a new policy: “I’m not giving any more cash to anyone, ever.” But that doesn’t work, either. One day you’re sitting on the subway car, reading the paper, and a guy comes
along, a Vietnam vet, Thalidomide baby, AIDS victim, paraplegic all rolled into one — a little kid’s pulling him along in a wagon, and the kid says, “Please, sir, would you put a quarter on his
flipper?”
And you give, for Christ’s sake you dig deep, you give him the money you were going to spend on lunch. You have a feeling you won’t be needing it any more anyway.

To tell you the truth, my man here, with the thousand-yard stare and oxyacetylene breath, almost made the grade, he almost made the New York Cut. But in the end his timing was lousy. Shit, I had my own problems. There wasn’t that much between me and him, I had no job, no bank account — the Chase Mother-fucking Manhattan Bank closed it over the Christmas holidays. I went home, back to Toronto, for Christmas, came back, stuck my card in the bank machine, the machine spat it out, saying: ACCOUNT CLOSED. CONTACT YOUR BRANCH. I contact my branch, the smug and superior teller informs me it was closed due to “lack of funds.” The bank’s policy, he tells me, is to close all accounts that show zero balances on New Year’s Day.

“But I’m sure I left some money in that account,” I said, as if it were all just some international oversight on my part. “At least ten bucks.”

“That went towards processing,” he informs me drily (with what I could swear is the ghost of a smile on his lips).

“Processing what?”

Here the teller can’t help himself: his face splits into a broad grin.

“The closure of your account.”

There’s something fishy about this financial Möbius loop, I know, and my first instinct is to call the manager over, and throw a fit. But the clerk knows, and I know he knows, it would be futile. After all, what am I going to do? Sue them? A guy who doesn’t even have a bank account?

Like I say, you get hit all the time for cash in Manhattan. But this particular encounter has given me the heebie-jeebies, the willies, the Willie Hortons. What have you done, Dave, I ask myself as I walk along. You must be nuts! Look around you! This is a city thrown up in a hurry, built by hungry, greedy people. The architects’ guts were rumbling as they drew up the plans, the builders’ mouths were watering as they laid the foundations… This is Mammon, Babylon, a city created by, for, and about
money
. And you don’t have any. Now there’s nothing between you and the savage, snapping streets —

Except Ruth. Maybe I should give Ruth a call? But that would mean telling her about quitting my job, setting a time for dinner, etc. I can’t handle that, just now. I need time to wander, and to think.

I follow my feet to Central Park, 68th Street entrance, cross the bandstand area, head towards Sheep’s Meadow, hands in pockets, eyes on the ground, thinking: man, what I need right now is a bit of…

“Smoke?”

The word pops like a bubble from my subconscious, but it’s external, purely external. I look up and see a shady guy in a baseball cap giving me “the long look.”

“What you got?” I ask him.

“Sensie, man, good stuff, check it out.”

“I got to smell it first, my man.”

You have to say that or they try to palm off oregano on you. He slips me a little baggie, glances around agitatedly. “Hurry up, man, cops, man.”

I look at him drily. What do I look like, a tourist? I’ve conducted hundreds of similar transactions, sometimes practically on the hood of a cop car, and never once have the police evinced the slightest interest. Once in Washington Square I
was surrounded by a half-dozen black guys, all holding out their dope, saying: “Check my shit out, man, it’s better than his shit.” Twenty feet away, two cops were lounging in their car, in the middle of the park, staring into space.

I pop the Ziploc under my nose. It isn’t sensimilla — never is — but it’s respectable brown street pot. Gets you ridiculously high. I reach into my wallet and pull out a ten-spot.

“Next time have the money ready,” he says, walking away.

Yeah, yeah… “Oh, hey!” I say. “You don’t have any papers, do you?”