Chump Change (8 page)

“Temping’s great,” she says. “You only work as long as you want to, and you can stay out of office politics.”

“Just make sure your temp doesn’t turn into a perm,” I tell her.

“She may need to get a perm just to keep her temp job,” Max puts in.

“Hilarious,” Sam says sarcastically, then turns to me. “So: what are you going to do, Dave?”

The dreaded question. However, I’ve been thinking about it. Over the last 24 hours it’s been in development, and I think I’ve come up with a slightly better answer than: Duh, just write, I guess.

“I’m going to try to earn a living as a ‘freelancer.’”

“No,” Sam says. “I meant: where are you going to stay?”

“Oh. Dad’s. At least until I can find something better.”

“Nonsense. He’s going to stay at my place,” Les says.

Silence on all sides greets this bolt from the blue. I don’t know who’s more flabbergasted: me, Max, Sam, or Les herself.

“Why not?” Les asks, as if someone had raised an objection. “My apartment’s small, but technically it’s a two-bedroom. It’ll be good for me, too. We can split the rent.”

Max is on his feet, pacing back and forth in front of the fire.

“Les, you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. He’s helpless, he’s a dreamer. Every morning, you’re going to have to pin a note on his shirt saying, ‘If lost, please return to 320 Howland Avenue.’”

“That’s nonsense. He can take care of himself, if he has to. He can write magazine articles. The main thing is, he can’t live with his father. It would destroy him —
as an artist.”

This was the longest string of sentences I’d ever heard from Les. Max shrugs. Everyone turns to look at me.

“Les, it’s a lovely offer. I really appreciate it,” I said. “And I accept.”

To this day, I don’t know why she made me that offer. If I’m honest with myself, I suppose I should face the fact that pity probably entered the formula somewhere. But she was right: staying with Dad would have been a killer. How could I explain to him the thought that was beginning to germinate in my brain, a thought which he would have exterminated as a noxious weed, namely, that sometimes you have to fail before you can succeed? That sometimes you have to sink beneath the waves, go gurgling to the bottom of the sea, down to Davey Jones’s locker, and settle there, fish and octopi darting in and out of your barnacled ribs, until people no longer ask how’s Dave these days, until they just shake their head and keep mum. You have to come to a point where, like an Oscar Wilde character, when people ask you what you do for a living, you can say, with perfect equanimity: “Nothing, I’m afraid.”

A notion I remain fully convinced of to this day. Still, it’s a difficult thought to explain, wouldn’t you agree — to a father?

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before but I’m a big man, 6′5″, 225 pounds, a Gentile giant, and I bear my outsize bulk around the world with neither poise nor grace. I’m very clumsy, forever treading on people’s toes, wringing bloodcurdling cries of pain from their lips, sitting in chairs and “two-dimensionalizing” them. Things crumble, tear, shatter, and snap in my great clumsy paws. At a party, someone will pass me a family heirloom, I’ll murmur “how interesting,” and the next thing you know the hostess is in tears in the bedroom.

Well, one look at Les’s dollhouse apartment, with its toy furniture, rattan chairs, antiques, framed pictures, knick-knacks, curios, and, I swear to God, a glass menagerie, and I knew I was in trouble. Gingerly, I entered, a bull on tiptoe in a china shop.

“It’s not much, but it’s home,” Les said, with a touching combination of humility and house-pride.

“Oh, no, Les, it’s great,” I murmured, and with the accompanying gesture — a magnanimous, all-inclusive sweep of the hand — sent a half-full wineglass cartwheeling through the air, to shatter against the wall, spilling red, red wine everywhere.

“Sorry, Les, here, let me…”

I turned, and the corner of my backpack caught a flowerpot resting on the table in the kitchen nook. Les and I watched,
frozen in horror, as the pot rolled in super-slo-mo across the table, then dropped off the edge and broke on the floor with a chunky, chockful sound.

“Oh, Les, I don’t believe it, here, I’ll…”

“FREEZE!” Les barked in a tone of command that brooked no disobedience. I froze.

“Sorry to yell at you like that, Dave” she said. “It’s just you were about to knock this over.”

She held up a framed picture of the nine- or ten-year-old Les, a seaside girl in a polka-dot one-piece, with a plastic shovel and wise eyes. “My grandmother framed this for me, and it’s all I have to remember her by.”

“It’s alright, Les. Sorry about the other stuff.”

“Don’t worry about it, Dave. Here, let me take this.” She eased the backpack off my back. “You sit down over here. Have a drink, I’ll clean up. How’s that sound?”

“Great.”

Les steered me into a chair, poured a glass of wine, and started flitting around the kitchen with broom, dustpan, and mop, bending from the waist, like a dancer.

I sipped my drink, and watched. Les worked as a stage-manager for the theatre,
and now she’s stage-managing me
, I thought, putting props in my hand, showing me where to sit, where to stand. If I forget my lines, she’ll prompt me from the wings. I liked it. As Les swept, mopped, and wiped, I allowed myself an elaborate fantasy: Les my lover/amanuensis, typing up my cocktail-napkin notes, shaping, critiquing, locking me in my room, forcing me to rewrite and rewrite, taking the finished manuscript around to publishers, playing hardball, and finally winning me a record-breaking advance. When I become famous, she’ll calibrate my celebrity, counter all calumnies, and, finally, celebrate my coronary. And at night, of course — and
sometimes in the mornings and maybe even the afternoons — helping me keep the old creative juices flowing.

All finished, broom and dustpan stowed, pleased with herself, Les turned to me.

“How about the grand tour?”

I’m not great at descriptions, basically the layout of her apartment was this: as you entered, the kitchen nook was to your right, the breakfast nook to your left. Straight ahead, the living/dining area. Beyond the breakfast nook, off to the left, there was a small archway. As you entered the archway, Les’s bedroom was to the left, the bathroom was right in front of you, and off to the right the spare room, “my” room.

I followed Les into her bedroom. The room was bathed in rose-tinted, late-afternoon sunlight, filtered by Chinese red paper shades. On the floor in the corner there was a futon covered with pillows and stuffed animals. The animals all stared blankly into space. I imagined they were once real animals, capering and cavorting around the apartment, but after seeing Les naked, they’d turned into speechless zombies, frozen, transfixed, staring into space.

Nothing breakable in this room, which was handy karma, I felt, in case, in our passion, Les and I rolled off the futon and onto the floor; or if I grabbed her by the legs and walked her “wheelbarrow-style” around the room, or swung down on her from a low-flying trapeze.

The bathroom was filled with jars and bottles, oils and unguents, rinses, conditioners,
crème de la crème
creams and ointments, all no doubt made from rare herbs, roots and extracts from all over the world, mixed up in gigantic steel vats by unsmiling men in white coats, high in the Swiss Alps. Here, perhaps, was some of the secret to Les’s special glow.

My new room was Spartan: just a few cardboard boxes, a
trunk, a cot, an architect’s drafting table, and a window looking out onto the courtyard for which the apartment complex was named: “Howland Court.” The leaves of a big maple tree brushed against the windowpane.

“It’s pretty basic…” Les started to say.

“Nonsense, Les, it’s perfect,” I said, and meant it. I could see getting a lot of work done here, in this room, after Les had gone off to work. There were two large windows — the room faced east — it would be very bright in the mornings, when I would work. Later, after Les and I became lovers, I would move into Les’s room, and this would become my study.

To “move in” took about five minutes. I upended the contents of my pack into the trunk, put my portable manual on the desk, and my radio on the windowsill. Voilà: Home Sweet Home.

That night, it was windy, and I fell asleep listening to the tap-tap-tapping of branches against the window. Thinking: here you are again, in another woman’s spare room. Where would you be without all these women?

I shuddered at the thought, drew the blankets tighter around myself, and drifted off.

The next morning, there was a note for me on the kitchen table.

No “Dear Dave,” or “Love Les XOXOX,” still it was something. And attached to the note, with a paper clip, was a ten dollar bill. Thank you, Les.

It had been a while since I’d laid eyes on the colourful, festive currency of my adopted homeland. It looked odd, unserious, this purple bill with its elaborate scrollwork; it was funny money, joke-shop cash. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I like it so much up here, I thought. Financial transactions seem so much less serious; we pass our Monopoly money back and forth with a wink, just going through the motions, imitating the Americans. Whereas American money, genuine U.S. military-backed greenbacks, revered around the world, it even looks serious.

Fuck bagels and coffee, I thought tenderly. I wanted a real breakfast, something to start the first day of the rest of my life on: a meal, not a snack. I needed something from all four basic food groups: starch, grease, caffeine, and sugar. Also, I wanted someone else to make it, and another person to bring it to me while I read the paper and listened to the jukebox.

I wanted to have breakfast in a diner, in other words. Luckily, one of Toronto’s great diners, People’s Foods, was right around the corner. It’s the quintessential diner, I would say, open 24 hours, complete with fast-fry Greek cook who never sleeps. Also, if you ask me, their burgers are the best in the city, they have a uniquely delicious flavour. I think they mix a bit of lamb in with the ground beef, or something.

Outside, everyone’s off to work, firing up their cars, marching down Howland Avenue with their briefcases in their hands, wearing their Monday-morning faces: grim, joyless, determined, resigned.

Hey! I wanted to yell out to them. Cheer up! Life’s too short! Man is just a corpse on vacation, as some philosopher said. Don’t spend your whole vacation from oblivion, your brief sojourn on this earth, in sorrow and worry!

But they have places for people who yell out crazy things in
the street, so I kept my own counsel and walked along Dupont to People’s.

This “corpse on vacation” slid into a booth, ordered a Greek omelette and a banana smoothie, put a quarter in the jukebox, selected “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix and “This is the End” by the Doors, and opened the paper.

Reading the paper really brought it home that I was in a different country, a different culture. There was one particular item in the paper that morning that caught my eye: WANTED: MAN WHO KICKED THREE PUPPIES. Man, I thought, can you imagine what a joke that would be in New York or Chicago, or even Philadelphia or Boston or Cleveland? Torontonians are always complaining about their city becoming too big, too violent. But in what other metropolis of this size would a puppy-punter, a Fido-booter, conceivably prompt a city-wide manhunt? Good old Toronto. From the plane it looked like a wooded glade, through which the Don River wound like a bubbling brook. A city with a large and robust raccoon population, where people stop at Ped-Xing signs and return your wallet, sometimes cash intact, when you lose it on the subway. I’ve always felt you could measure the health of a community by what happens when your briefcase splits open in the middle of a street. In Toronto, your fellow-citizens instantly form into teams of ferreters, messengers, collators. In New York, a little knot forms to laugh and gawk while you pirouette in the hurtling traffic, trying to retrieve your papers. With a start, I realized I had, in effect, gotten my wish — to travel back in time, to a kinder, gentler nation the U.S. no longer was and perhaps would never be again. A land of universal free health care, where they still believed everything should be fair and equal for everyone, and if not, the government should fix it. Good old Canada: perhaps the last truly idealistic nation on earth.

Of course, it could get a tad chilly up here, at times. But, as with so many things in life, it’s all a matter of knowing how to dress properly. And that, I thought, as I paid my bill and left (catching a glimpse of myself in the wall-size mirror), I most indubitably do.

The next step in my brilliant master plan for world domination was to phone my old man and ask to borrow some cash.

I had hoped to put off this ordeal for as long as possible, at least a few weeks. But breakfast had been quite expensive: with tax and tips it sucked up my whole ten bucks, my entire worldly fortune, and once again I was down to the eternal pocketful of change. I hated to put the touch on the old man, almost as much as he hated me doing it. But what could I do? I fished a quarter out of my pocket, stepped into the phone booth outside People’s, and rang him at his office.

His secretary/girlfriend answered. I disguised my voice by pinching my nose, so I sounded like a particularly weedy and snivelling student. “May I speak to Professor Henry, please?”

She didn’t recognize my voice, thank God; she put me through.

“Hello?” Dad asked in his suspicious, defensive way.

“Hi, Dad, it’s Dave.”

“Hello, David, how are things in New York?”

“I’m not in New York right now, Dad. I’m in Toronto!”

“I see. How long are you visiting for?”

“Actually, it’s not a visit, I’m back for good. I mean, indefinitely.”

For a moment there’s nothing but static crackle over the airwaves. Then he says:

“You quit your job?”