Chump Change (3 page)

He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a couple of crumpled Zig-Zags. Thanks, I say, and mean it. He didn’t have to do that.

Later, I’m lying spreadeagled on a grassy knoll in Sheep’s Meadow, watching the slow arc of a kite across the beautiful blue sky. High as a kite myself… My heebie-jeebies have vanished, melted into the earth beneath my back. In a flash, it comes to me, what I have to do: get on a plane a.s.a.p., get out of this moneyworld, this Babylon, immediately. Leave it all behind. Soon it will all seem like a bad dream. Thinking that, I felt light, lighter than air.

The only things nagging me are the two classic side-effects of marijuana use: “cotton-mouth” and “the munchies.” My lips felt like they were Velcroed to my gums, my gut was rumbling and growling like a junkyard dog. Man, I thought, what I wouldn’t give for a…

“Cold beer! Bagels and cream cheese!”

I propped myself up on one elbow and gazed into the middle distance. A man with a cooler strapped to his giant juddering beerbelly was coming towards me through the heat-haze and the seven veils of my buzz. Good old New York, I thought. A city that not only gratifies your desires, it anticipates them.
A city that gratifies desires you didn’t even know you had, that gratifies desires for things you don’t even
want
. All you have to do (as long as you’ve got the cash) is lift a finger.

I lifted my arm, and pointed my index finger skywards: “Yo, my man. Over here.”

It’s surprisingly late by the time I get home. At least I’m surprised when I check my watch in the freight elevator: 12:10.

No, hang on, it’s 2:00.

Where did the time go? True, I hung out in the park for quite a while, and on the way home I looked in at a couple of bars, but always with the gnawing feeling of, “I should be getting home.”

Perhaps I spent more time at my penultimate stop than I thought, Billy’s Topless on 6th, right around the corner from our pad. I was loaded for bear by then, my memory comes back only in strobe-lit flashes. I remember I was sitting in the front row, and everyone was my pal, all clapping me on the back, calling me “Good old Dave,” “Crazy Dave.” Perhaps I was radiating some sort of all-embracing magnanimity, now I’ve quit my soul-sucking, synapse-sizzling job. I’m a lover of man and beast alike, and they’re drawn to me like ships in stormy seas to a beacon of light.

It’s also possible I was buying everyone drinks. Pitchers of beer kept appearing, someone must have been ordering them and paying for them. It could well have been me.

There’s another blank stretch, then a huge black woman clambered onstage. She’s an amateur, part of the crowd, overcome by the festive
joie de vivre
of me and my front-row crew. At least, I assume she was an amateur. I’ve never seen a pro operate like that. After a few perfunctory bumps and grinds she simply doffed her acid-wash jeans and rhinestone-studded
jacket, peeled off her bra and panties, as if she were getting ready for bed, then leaned over and started kissing everyone in the front row, one by one.

I’m not going to do it, I said to myself, as she worked her way towards me. I’m going to stay faithful to Ruth. Then when she came to me I turned my face up like a sunflower, to be kissed, like everyone else.

Pucker up…but she would have none of that. She grabbed the back of my head, forced a strong tongue past my lips, and as the crowd cheered, gave me a long, agonizing kiss. Finally, she released me (feeling lobotomized, tongue-sillectomized), grabbed the back of my head again, and shoved it between her Brobdignagian breasts.

It was warm in there, and dark, smelling of talcum powder and sweat. The sounds of the bar became muffled, and for the first time in what seemed like a long time, I had a moment to think. And my thought was: I should be getting home.

It seems to take about ten minutes to fit my key in the lock of the door. Finally, I burst through, with a silly, triumphant grin on my face. Ruth’s in the kitchen, at 2:00 in the morning she’s doing dishes, making a lot of clatter. She doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t have to. Skilled ass-man that I am, I can read my message in the clench of her buttocks. It says: Tread lightly.

I sit at the butcher-block table, pull out a cigarette, pat my pockets, discover I have no matches, tiptoe over to the stove, turn on the flame, and light up.

Something smells funny. Ruth glances over at me and screams. The next thing I know she is upending a pot of soapy water over my head.

“What did you do that for?” I ask her, blinking away the sudsy water.

“Your hair was on fire.”

Suddenly she’s laughing, doubled over, clutching her gut. It just rolls out of her. She sits down at the table, pounding it weakly, saying, “He kills me, he kills me.” After a moment or two, after the initial shock wears off, I see the funny side, too, and I start laughing along with her. But Ruth is a step ahead of me again. She is already in tears.

“Ruth…”

She lifts her red-rimmed eyes up to meet mine.

“Where were you?”

“I’m sorry, Ruth, I quit my job today. I went to the park, smoked a couple of joints, bought some beers off a guy with a cooler. Then I went to a couple of bars, I guess I lost track of the time.”

That speech had the effect of staunching her tears, partially by virtue of the fact it was patently the truth. I never lie to Ruth, I don’t even try. You can’t fool Ruth. Anyway, I’d wind up getting drunk later and then blurting out the truth.

“A fairly typical evening, in other words,” Ruth says wryly, shaking her head.

“There’s one other thing. I’m not proud of it.”

I tell her about the stripper.

“I don’t know why I did it, Ruth. I wasn’t even attracted to her.”

“Listen, Dave, don’t you realize I don’t care about any of that? Don’t you realize I worry about you? You wander all over the city with your head in the clouds, I never know where you are. I keep expecting to get a call from Harlem Hospital or something, some orderly telling me you’ve got a bullet in your gut. All I ever ask is that you call.”

“I’m sorry, Ruth, I meant to. I guess I just didn’t know what to say. I guess I needed to walk around a little, think things over.”

“Well, I’m glad you finally quit that stupid job. I guess I can’t really blame you.”

She got up, came over to where I was sitting, and — with a gesture similar to the stripper’s, but with infinitely more tenderness and compassion — drew my head to the soft cradle of her bosom. Suddenly she stops, pulls back.

“Wait a minute. You quit your job.
What does that mean?
”

That’s Ruth all over for you. You couldn’t fool her, not for a second.

“I have to leave New York. I’m sorry.”

Ruth drives me to the airport the next day. A mostly silent trip: me sitting slumped in the passenger’s seat, smoking out the window (Ruth didn’t like me smoking in the car, but she didn’t want to break her frosty silence to tell me to stop), Ruth sitting ramrod straight in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead, sometimes glancing in the rearview mirror, but never at me, never at me…There wasn’t much to say anyway. We hashed it all out the night before, in sadness and tears. Why? Why? she kept asking, but I had no answer. How could I explain it was an instinct, a direct order from the subconscious? Finally, somewhere around dawn, worn down by her tears, I started to backpedal, to prevaricate — well, to lie, basically. I told her it was only temporary, I just needed to leave for a few months “to get my head together,” after that we’d hook up again, in New York, or Toronto, or some as-yet-to-be-named third city, maybe Chicago.

I told myself it wasn’t a lie, it was a necessary fiction, a crucial illusion when the truth — I’m leaving, this is it — was impossible to face. Like the notion of an afterlife: it’s too unbearable to believe when the body dies, it’s lights out with so many injustices uncorrected, noble deeds unrewarded. So we invent heaven and hell.

At the airline counter, Ruth puts the ticket on her credit card. In other words, a new low: I have to borrow from my girlfriend in order to leave her. I muttered something about paying her back, but I think we both knew that was a “necessary fiction.”

We say our goodbyes at the metal detector. No tears: we both cried ourselves dry last night. I put my worldly possessions — portable manual typewriter, backpack, ghettoblaster — on the conveyor belt and watch them roll through the X-ray machine. As I step through the portals the alarm goes off. The security guard waves his electric wand over my body: the culprit is the change in my pocket. I empty my pocket onto the little plate, go through again. This time I get the green light. I put the change back in my pocket, turn to wave goodbye to Ruth, but she’s already gone.

So now here I sit, on a 727 in a thunderstorm at JFK, a plane in the rain, trying to figure out how my life went down the drain.

I know. Two ways: first slowly, then quickly.

We’ve been sitting here for an hour, waiting for the go-ahead from Air Traffic Control. Everyone in Economy is fidgety, restless, heaving heavy sighs, doing crossword puzzles, checking their watches, complaining loudly about the delay. Sitting next to me, in the next seat but one, is a balding, bespectacled man whom I’ve mentally dubbed Mr. Spreadsheet. He’s got his laptop out, and his briefcase is on the seat between us. It’s stuffed with papers covered in endless tiny rows and columns of numbers. Every once in a while, Mr. Spreadsheet peers at these numbers and enters his findings into his computer. He also has a cellular phone, and he makes a big show of placing calls on it. However, despite these histrionics, it’s clear to me that Mr. Spreadsheet is little more than a pest, low down on the money ladder. For one thing, if you’re such a hotshot, Mr. Spreadsheet, why aren’t you hobnobbing with the honchos and nabobs in First, or hanging with the suits in Business? Also, I notice, although Mr. Spreadsheet places many calls, no one ever calls him. He gets people’s voice-mails, or their answering machines, or secretaries. Mr. Spreadsheet leaves messages.

Three rows back, a baby with a beet-red face is screaming its head off. Two rows behind me, a retired couple in matching pastel romper-room jumpsuits are speaking at top volume about their package trip to New York, comparing the relative merits of
Cats
vs.
Les Miz
, MOMA vs. the Met. Their conversation is like nails scratched across the blackboard of my hangover. Can’t there be a special section for people like these two? (“Welcome to Air America. Will that be quiet and contemplative or loud and obnoxious?”)

That’s the scene in Economy, anyway. In First, they’re drinking champagne and nibbling on caviar canapés and, for all I know, chopping up fresh-off-the-boat quality Peruvian pink-flake cocaine with their titanium credit cards and snorting it off the stewardess’s naked belly. Earlier, the stewardess cruised through Economy bearing an armload of the finest French champers. As she passed my seat I had an all-too-real vision of sticking my leg into the aisle, tripping her up, and then, before anyone knew what was happening, grabbing one of the bottles and flash-guzzling the contents. Instead, she went into First and drew the curtain behind her, the Class Curtain, the maddening, fluttering Iron Curtain that separates the elegant ambience of First from the birth-giving, goatherding bowels of Economy. After that, everyone in Economy could hear the traditional festive pop of champagne corks being un-tethered, a round of murmured toasts, the tinkly music of champagne flutes clinking together.

It’s not fair. If planes were run according to Marxist principles — to each according to his needs, from each according to his means — the drinks-cart would be whisked to my side as soon as I sat down, with lights flashing and sirens blaring. But they’re not run according to Marxist principles, are they? Planes operate according to the tenets of capitalism — to each
according to his greed, from each according to his
spleen
— and as a consequence, the nabobs and honchos in First drink champagne as we wait for take-off, while in Economy, though our throats be as parched as a sun-bleached vulture skull in the middle of the desert, we get zip.

The reason I want/need a drink so badly is I have a terrible fear of flying. It’s more than a fear, really. Every time I go up in one of these flying coffins I simply assume we’re all going to die. As soon as the plane starts to taxi to the runway, in my mind’s TV screen I can already see the next day’s dire newscast: “Moments before take-off. That’s when
doomed
flight 107 became
damned
flight 107.” Many times, I’ve been tempted to stand up and shout: HOLD IT! STOP THIS PLANE! I DEMAND TO BE LET OFF! I read somewhere (or maybe I overheard it in a bar, or perhaps I dreamt it) that they have to let you off when you pull this stunt. But I’ve never been able to bring myself to do it. I’ve discovered that shame trumps fear; the organism would rather face certain death in a flaming fireball than appear even slightly ridiculous in front of a sardine-can full of total strangers.

To put it another way, whenever I go up in one of these tin cans, I don’t need an in-flight movie, I’ve got one of my own, thanks, and I pop it in the VCR of my brain just before take-off. It’s a low-budget docu-horror called “Recent Air Disasters,” a jump-cut tape-loop of all the airborne worst-case scenarios of the last few years: ticking ghettoblasters in the darkness of cargo-holds, sudden mid-air fireballs, plane hulls peeling away like banana peels, surprised stewardesses sucked into the clear blue (“Coffee, tea, or… AIEEEEE!”), body parts and chunks of metal falling like rain on city streets or farmers’ fields. Over it all, a shaky-voiced narrator reels off statistics about aging fleets, near misses, pilot error.

Booze is the only thing that seems to help. Booze, man’s greatest invention or discovery, works wonders. If I can sink enough cocktails before take-off it’s like flipping a switch, and I don’t give a damn any more. I think: It’s just a bus, it’s just a bus in the sky. I become like everyone else, in other words — after about a dozen drinks.

Take-off is the worst part, which is why you need drinks on the ground. But you can’t get drinks on the ground, in Economy, not even if you beg, as I found when the stewardess emerged from First.