Chump Change (22 page)

Just then, Max stuck his oar in.

“He’s making 40 grand a year, Mom.”

Her mouth opened, and snapped shut. This odd-shaped piece of information didn’t fit into the jigsaw puzzle of her
Weltanschauung
. She was used to thinking of me as a zero, career permanently stalled in neutral. How had I gone from 0 to 40 so fast?

“What do you do there?”

“I write the news. I write the words the anchor reads over the air.”

“Oh, really. For which show?”

“The
Saturday Evening News
, with Reed Franklin.”

“Reed Franklin? You write for Reed Franklin?”

“Yep. I write every word he says, right down to ‘Good evening, I’m Reed Franklin.’”

That finished her, that was the
coup de grâce
for Mrs. Stapleton. You mean Reed Franklin, “the most trusted man in Canada,” was really just a puppet, a sort of animated dummy who was manipulated from behind the scenes by her oldest son’s drug-fiend friend?

From then on, I was the centre of attention; at first I fielded technical questions, then questions about TV generally and what certain personalities were like. I ruled that dinner-party table for the rest of the night, scintillating (I felt) with observations, witticisms, anecdotes. Mrs. Stapleton stayed mostly silent.

It wasn’t just women, either. Men, too, were awash in respect and deferential behaviour. TV writer, eh? Here, have a scotch. Can I get you anything else? What do you think of the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh?

My father brimmed and beamed with pride, he invited me to dinner parties at his house in the uber-boondocks, and introduced me to all and sundry as a TV writer, a journalist. I half-expected him, at some of these occasions, to pass around cigars.

People deferred to me, flattered me, asked my opinion, asked for career advice. Like Les’s friend, “Mr. Y.U.”

I call him “Mr. Y.U.” because I can’t remember his name. I don’t even remember what he looked like. He had curly brown hair, that’s all I remember. Anyway, he was a bore, and a boor. Who cares what his name was, or what he looked like?

The three of us — me, Les, Mr. Y.U. — met at Dooney’s, on Bloor Street, at about 5:00 one afternoon. Les had tea, Mr. Y.U. had a cappuccino. I was drinking tequila-gingers. Mr. Y.U. didn’t beat around the bush. As soon as the waitress left, he dispensed
with the preliminaries and formalities, including courtesy, and launched straight into his interrogation.

“So, Les tells me you write for the
Saturday Evening News.”

“That’s right.”

“That’s great, that’s amazing. How did you get that job?”

“I sent in my stuff, I went in for an interview. The usual way you get a job, I guess.”

He leaned in closer to me.

“No, what I mean is, why you? You’ve never worked in TV news before, Les tells me. Is that right?”

“Yes. I mean, no, I haven’t.”

The waitress came with our drinks. I took her aside. “Could you bring me another one right away? Make it a double, actually.”

“Have you ever worked in radio?” Mr. Y.U. asked.

“Nope.”

“See, that’s what I don’t get, to be perfectly honest with you. Why you? When there are so many experienced journalists around they could hire? Why you, instead of someone with TV experience?”

I stared at Mr. Y.U. in amazement. At first, his envy was flattering, even touching. But now he was getting on my nerves. Where was he brought up, a barn? Did he know how insulting he was being, openly implying I was unworthy of my job? I considered leaning forward, saying: Why me? Why me, motherfucker? Because I’ve got talent, you fool. Something you’ll never have in a million years. Things aren’t always given out fairly. I got lucky.

But I kept my trap shut. You’re doing this for Les, don’t forget, I told myself. You owe her, Dave. Put up with it.

Later, I found out that Mr. Y.U. worked on the early-morning show at another, private network. Actually, he didn’t
even really work there, he was “on call,” an ultra-casual. If they wanted him to work on a particular day, they called him at 4:30 in the morning, like a migrant farm labourer. If they didn’t need him, no call. But he had to go to bed early every night, just in case.

Hearing all that, later, from Les, I felt sort of sorry for the guy — but not that sorry. If he wanted some help, a leg up, he went about it all wrong. If he had been nice about it, polite, I might have put in a good word to my man Frizell, helped him clamber out of his early-morning rut.

As it was, though, I answered his questions curtly, with the minimum of elaboration allowed by courtesy. I drank as many T&Gs as I could in the shortest amount of time, then split, sticking Mr. Y.U. with the tab.

But by far the best prize I got in exchange for my immortal soul was Lola, the girl with the immortal body.

Not that she cared about my position in the Cosmodemonic world, she wasn’t the type. Still, I don’t think it hurt that we went out to dinner all the time, took cabs everywhere, that I bought her expensive little gifts, and always presented myself in the latest non-vintage haberdashery. How could it?

I met her through an old college friend, Andrew du Laurier. I hadn’t seen him for some time when I bumped into him one day on Bloor Street.

I knew we were going to be good friends, Andrew du Laurier and I, almost from the moment I laid eyes on him at a freshman dorm-room party. He was the “Ether Bunny,” wearing a pair of rabbit ears and handing out face-mask hits from a gigantic steel cylinder that someone had stolen from the infirmary. He had an infectious
joie de vivre
, Andrew, and also a bulletproof self-confidence, the type you only get from being loved by everyone and irresistable to the opposite sex, from childhood onwards. I remember once, third year, we were sharing a house off-campus with a bunch of other people. It was Saturday morning, I was taking a shower, when suddenly, without an iota of compunction, Andrew strode in the bathroom, ripped open the curtain, and said: “Let’s play!”

Play — that’s all we seemed to do that year. Our typical weekend went something like this. Friday night: put on your drinking boots and wade in. Saturday morning: Bloody Caesars and bong hits, compare hangovers. Saturday afternoon: start to wind it all up again. Saturday night: repeat Friday night. Sunday: repeat Saturday. The only way I was able to make it through school with a decent grade-point average was, on Sunday nights, after everyone else had crashed, I would wrap a wet towel around my head (a trick I learned from Sydney Carton in
A Tale of Two Cities)
and study late into the night. I did the same thing every weeknight. Thus I was able to maintain the crucial illusion of never studying, yet continue to pull straight As and even occasional A-pluses. The rest of my housemates barely hung on with “Gentlemen’s Cs.” It was baffling to them.

Unfortunately, Andrew wasn’t much of a letter-writer, and we lost touch after school. He lived in Boston for a while, working for a bank, but was fired from that, and last I heard he was in Montreal, living with his parents, working as a bike courier. Then I lost track of him.

So I was surprised to see him again in Toronto. I almost ran right into him. He was standing outside the Bloor Cinema, talking to two girls.

“Andrew!”

“Dave!”

“What are you doing here? Last I heard you were in Montreal.”

“I live here,” Andrew said. “I’ve been here a year.”

He introduced me to the two girls. “Nice to meetcha,” they both said. Then they excused themselves, and went inside to catch a film.

“What are you doing here? Last I heard you were in New York.”

“I left.”

“Why?”

“Ah, well, it’s a long story, and I’ve been walking in the hot sun all day. I don’t think I could tell it properly with my throat all parched and dry like this.”

“How about a drink?”

We strolled across the street to Pauper’s and, basically, didn’t come back out for several months.

I started hanging out at Pauper’s, with Andrew and his friends; I switched hangouts from the Monocle to Pauper’s.

I liked Pauper’s for three reasons: 1) they had free phones nailed to the bar, for local calls; 2) they had an excellent selection of imported and domestic draft beer, and 3) they had cigarette delivery to the table. You can pretty much tell the calibre of a bar by their smokes policy, I feel. The lowest level is where they say: “We don’t sell cigarettes here, but there’s a variety store around the corner.” Mid-range is where they have a machine, or sell cigarettes behind the bar. The highest and loftiest type of bar is where you order smokes from the waiter/waitress, and they bring them to your table. At Pauper’s, they not only brought them to your table, they opened the pack, and pulled one cigarette out for your enjoyment and delectation.

The only thing that was hard to take about Pauper’s was the clientele. Boorish frat-boys and their post-collegiate counterparts: cellular phone salesmen, junior executives, articling lawyers, sitting around in their suits trying to pick up their colleagues, assistants, secretaries.

Not that we were any better. In fact, all told, I guess you’d have to say we were considerably worse. Andrew and I were the only ones with jobs. He was in advertising now, a small firm. There was Ned (Z-man) Zeman. He sold drugs. Well, actually,
he didn’t sell them, he was some kind of middleman, he “picked things up and dropped them off,” in his Gran Torino with the smoked-glass windows. There was Scott Robertson. His grandfather was
the
Robertson who invented Robertson screwdrivers (with the square head): no Robertson would ever have to work again unto numerous generations, unless he or she wanted to, of course, and Scott manifestly didn’t want to. What the handsome, blond, saturnine Scott Robertson liked to do instead of work was sleep till noon, perform a few errands, then use his gloomy charm and hints about his fortune to try to get a different woman to go to bed with him every single night.

The only thing all of us had in common, really, was our thirst. “Thirst-day” night was our high holiday, and our names for the other days of the week reflected our growing excitement as it approached: Twos-days-till-Thirst-day, When’s-Thirst-day-coming, etc.

Lola was our waitress, she served us drinks. A big girl, large-boned, with a hennaed hairdo, cut Cleopatra-style. The Cleopatra effect was enhanced by liberal doses of kohl around the eyes, always a little smudged. Her lipstick was smudged, too, and overall her makeup gave the effect of a (big) little girl dressing up in her mother’s clothes.

Andrew was the first to hit on Lola, mostly out of boredom, I guess, and inebriation, suggesting pressing engagements at his place or hers, shared showers, mid-afternoon massages, etc. As a waitress, she was the most obvious, easy target for his drunken importuning. I felt sorry for her, having to fend off drunken patrons all night long; but she took it pretty well, on the whole, deftly parrying Andrew’s thrusts with light-hearted quips.

And it seems she didn’t mind it all that much, after all, because one day, after setting down all our drinks, getting the
usual leer and banter from Andrew, she straightened up, put her hands on her hips and smiled. “Listen, you want me to give you a blowjob?” she asked him.

She asked it in the same way she asked: “You want another round?” There was a stunned silence. Andrew stared at her like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an oncoming car.

“… sure,” he said finally.

“Well, meet me after work. I get off at two, or is that too late for you?”

“No,” Andrew said, meekly.

“Good.”

She walked off. No one was sure if it was a joke, or what. Andrew didn’t take the chance. After we all left, he stuck around to collect his prize.

“She’s your type, Dave,” Andrew said to me a couple of days later. “You’d like her.”

We were sitting at his place late one afternoon, out back under a huge maple tree, smoking and drinking.

“What do you mean?”

With his two index fingers he traced an hourglass figure in the air.

Yeah, yeah, was all I thought then. Later, though, I had occasion to confirm his statements.

One morning, after a particularly late and drunken evening, I tried to phone him at his office.

“He’s not here,” the receptionist said.

“When do you expect him in?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He was supposed to be in two hours ago.”

I didn’t think she should be giving out that information. What if I were a client? I phoned his house, but there was no
answer there either, just the machine. It seemed odd, so I decided to hop on my bike and check it out.

Andrew lived only a few blocks over, on Bedford, on the first floor of a beautiful old Victorian house. I rode over, knocked on the door. No answer. I knocked harder, hammering with my fist. Still no answer. I went around to the side, into the alley. There was some sort of box there, for holding logs or whatever. I climbed on it, and peered in the bedroom, between the slats of the half-open venetian blind. Sure enough, there was Andrew, face down, out cold, Lola lying beside him on top of the twisted-up blankets. In the crepuscular gloom of the room I could see Andrew’s skinny little white ass, and Lola’s big round one next to it. Now that’s an ass, I thought. I allowed myself to stare at it for a few moments, the naked ass of my good friend’s girlfriend. My blood began to stir.

“Andrew,” I said.

He stirred, groaned, rolled over.

“Andrew,”
I said, a little louder this time.

He sat up, blinked.

“Who’s there?”

“It’s me, David. David Henry.”

“What’s the matter?”

“You’re late, man. You’re fucking up at work.”

I knew I was being his worst nightmare, but what else could I do? He looked at his watch.

“Oh, shit.”

He jumped out of bed, and scooted out to the bathroom, the little rabbit-cheeks of his ass working overtime. Slowly, Lola rolled over, shading her eyes. Now those, I thought, are some breasts. Big, heavy, meaty, a little pointy. Breasts you could really sink your teeth into. She made no effort to cover up, she was unembarrassed before me.