How Happy to Be (2 page)

I charged the thirty-dollar hangover-justified cab ride to my expense account and then – nice – got a fistful of chewed gum from rifling the depths of my bag for my security pass, which was now a relief map of bumpy peppermint Trident tucked away last night in some bar or other so I could – what? Drink more? Smoke more? Reuse it later and get my money’s worth? Whatever, the security pass proved useless,
demagnetized, and I had to enter the building via revolving door by catching a ride with Knee-Socks Steve from Sports, which required plastering my dank self to the back of his doughy baseball-hatted self and shuffling forward, one inch at a time, as if his security pass was my security pass and we were one big lumpen secure body. This seemed to piss him off a little, but hey, let’s face it, we’re all looking for some semblance of closeness and dude (this is the kind of high-fivin’ white guy who addresses his friends as “dude”; even his readers get called “buddy”) just got the real deal. In daylight. He should have been grateful.

Upstairs in my cubicle the size of a detergent box, I dropped my bag and knocked over an empty Diet Coke can pyramid on my desk, which won me a snotty look from Hard-Working Debbie, she of the Life pages, who honest-to-God in my six years of employment has only ever said one thing to me: “Is that my pen?” And then I spot these Post-its welcoming me back to work and I Heart Fridays.

The wake-me note is from Ad Sales, recognizable from his measured grade-school handwriting. I remove the square from the computer and promote it to my Post-it wall, lining this one up carefully under row upon row of the Post-its I most love and cherish. Sure those poindexters over in Technology can fill up the paper’s big blank pages with wordy wank-offs celebrating the age of the computer if they must, but nothing says “information superhighway” like a hostile yellow Post-it. At
The Daily
, they are a very popular form of passive-aggressive inter-office expression.
Where were
you?? U MSSD DEADLINE!! Why so jealous of Julia Roberts?
(that one in deeply indented ballpoint, like the author was pressing very heavily in a very dark, very lonely room).

I hunker down in the chair, so low to the floor that my knees nearly hit my chin; an unfortunate necessity if one wants to make lengthy personal calls during the workday. E-mail check. Voice-mail check. Movie screening, a TV ad campaign I’m supposed to appear in, a publicist with a story that would be
perfect
for me, and on and on. A stammering message from the Ex: “I just … uh … I’m in a show in a couple of weeks and uh … I’ll … uh … e-mail you the details.” Pause. “I should probably get off the phone … Elizabeth wants me to … uh … I’m going to hang up now, but I’m on a cellphone and I don’t know how it works. Hope you’re, uh –” Dead air. That belt around my heart tightens a few notches.

Without returning any calls, I make new ones in order to purchase some weekend substances for ritual abuse. I go into the shared files to find the day’s lineup for the paper:
Summit of the Americas protesters pepper-sprayed in Quebec City. Toronto homeless squat on toxic dump. Cellphone spontaneously combusts in Florida. Film festival will bring mega-bucks to mega-city
.

My head gets heavy. Log off. It’s 11:50, naptime in daycares across the city and I feel a solidarity with those dropping toddlers. The rock-stuffed head requires an instant resting place, so down it goes, pulling the body with it onto a nest of newspapers under the desk. I arrange my jacket to create the imperative fourth wall so no one will disturb me and my skull
and just then my one work friend and ally, Marvin, brutally tugs down the jacket. I blink in the fluorescent light, skinless as the
Eraserhead
baby.

“There you are! Didjya hear? Ohmygod!” Marvin snake-bellies under the desk.

Marvin covers TV, as evidenced by his pinwheel pupils and ability to laugh gut-deep at things that aren’t remotely funny. Most days, Marvin sits in a small room in the bowels of
The Daily
with the blinds drawn and the television radiating, occasionally drifting upstairs to steal unopened party invitations from the mailboxes of fashion reporters. On his laptop, somewhere near the boiler room, he pecks out brief, ironic treatises on why we need more violence and fewer undergarments on television. In the inverted universe of our paper, he’s interpreted as sincere and cheered as a truth-teller of the New Right. Marvin survives this killing life through a weekend scrim of clubbing and slippery-chested Latino boys.

“Our esteemed publisher is coming for drinks this afternoon. You have to be here! The Entertainment section is hosting and I’m serving my famous perogies.”

“Marvin, you know I don’t do Fridays any more.”

Marvin gives me a gentle whap on the head. He thinks I’m kidding. It’s a strange thing to try to leave your life. People say it so often that no one recognizes a sincere retreat.
I’m outta here. Really. Watch me. I’m quitting. I ain’t gonna work for the man no more. Eat my dust – just give me a minute to pack up these things over here, seriously, then I’m gone. Does anyone feel like grabbing a coffee first, or a drink?

Marvin pinkens a little when he gossips. “Oh please come! I can’t promise anything, but he might wear an ascot. And don’t you want to see the nasty sidekick?” Marvin pouts, and if there’s anything more coercive than a thirty-seven-year-old underemployed balding television critic propping up a triple-chin pout with a cream-coloured cashmere turtleneck – well, call me a sucker for cute, but I’m won over.

“I’ll go,” I tell him, at which point I try to sit up but feel my cheek seared to the carpet with Diet Coke dribble from the fallen pyramid.

Even more so than the rest of our countrymen, we at
The Daily
are the property of the English. We’re owned by Baby Baron, the youngest of several short, chinless sons born to a prominent London family headed by a liquor baron and his duchess wife. Baby Baron is the shortest, most chinless, and, reputedly, most disorderly of the progeny, an almost-thirty party boy often snapped by the U.K. tabloids outside a strip club at 4:00 a.m. looking like a lager-fuelled lad on a bender. Still, he is known for strangely octogenarian, sartorial flourishes: a bowler hat here, a seersucker suit there, offset by the occasional makeup-encrusted pimple where that chin should be.

As an unruly teen only a few years ago, Baby Baron was sent away to a prestigious boys private school in Canada. Those years paddling the lakes of Algonquin Park and playing lacrosse left an indelible impression, and he returned often as an adult for golf and fishing and drug-taking in a slightly more anonymous climate. But on one of his sojourns to Toronto, Baby Baron put down his drink, shoved the
models from his bed, and, looking around, discovered that the country he had so romanticized was actually lazy and lefty. He who spent most of his year in Geneva was appalled at the Scandinavian tax rates and sniffly editorials praising the social safety net that took up the opinion pages of most papers. He knew several Canadians, and very well, who appreciated the fiscal restraint of his father’s close friend, Margaret Thatcher. Why couldn’t their dinner conversations in Geneva (ones he listened to from a low seat at the far end of the table, so as not to shame the family) find a forum in Canada? These thoughts, some of his first, coincided with a minor scandal involving a porn star and the unusual use of a very expensive bottle of port, and Daddy Baron gently suggested he take an extended holiday somewhere very, very remote. So Baby Baron bought a mansion in Toronto and an estate in cottage country, north of the city. He liked it there so much – “Loons,” he said often in interviews, referring to the birds, one hoped – that he purchased the whole lake and, oh yes, a dying city broadsheet that he turned into
The Daily
.

And so, for a young man who will inherit distilleries and shipping lines, we are a hobby. If he were a middle-aged woman in a small town, we would be his knitting circle, something occasionally tended, a diversion. When he makes the trip up to see us in the suburbs, it is an event of sorts, a reminder that we are wanted, noted, like when the Queen visits Saskatchewan.

Marvin is obsessed with Baby Baron’s personal assistant, a handsome, scowling reed of a man who towers over the junior mogul, accompanying him everywhere. There is
much inter-office speculation that the assistant is the paper’s real publisher, concocting story ideas and e-mailing editors late-night directives from Baby Baron’s account.
What about bigger headlines? Shorter stories? Shorter headlines? More society gossip. More anti-union rants. Less use of the colour orange!
He has passwords and enters all data into his boss’s BlackBerry himself because though Baby Baron is a man of strict views, he is not accustomed to interrupting his amusements to direct the help. Baby’s only other job was a brief stint in the British military, another of his father’s failed plans to drill some sense into him, and so he knows absolutely nothing about running a newspaper except that it is very expensive.

At parties, the assistant becomes a manservant, bitterly keeping his boss’s glass filled, eyes rolling, wandering back and forth to the buffet at a cripple’s hobbling pace to load Baby Baron’s plate with angry, heaping helpings. The assistant shakes his head, lips envelope thin, when he feels his boss has imbibed enough, and Baby Baron shrugs and grins, never showing any embarrassment that his every move is reported back to daddy in London. He appears to enjoy the assistant’s disapproval like a naughty schoolboy in love with his ruler-happy headmaster. Sometimes Marvin sends me his haunting, half-erotic dreams about Baby Baron and the mysterious manservant, and the e-mails are some of his most lovingly crafted writing.

Marvin has the courtesy to reconstruct my jacket-fort after he slithers out and I’m about to let that sweet sleep lubricate my dry corpse when I hear a fakey throat-clearing sound and there they are, pointy little high heels in the
visible crack between my jacket and the polyester-blend beige carpet, right near my sticky face.

“Maxime?” quoth the heels.

“Yes?” I answer politely, if a little muffled by locale.

“Maxime? I’m Heather from marketing?” Heather is an up-talker. “I left you a message? In a few weeks, we’re going to be filming the ad for the new television campaign? We really want you to be part of it? Can we count on your participation?”

“We can?” I ask back.

“We can?”

“We can?”

Heather’s shoes are very still.

“Okay, then I’ll send you the details?”

“Okay? Thanks?”

My paper is “at war” with the other national paper –
The Other Daily
. It’s about two hundred years old and operates out of a twenty-storey art deco building in the heart of downtown that resembles a stack of birthday presents in descending sizes. The war is mostly polite and Canadian: sometimes
The Daily
gives out free copies at the subway and
The Other Daily
complains about inflated circulation numbers, and then
The Other Daily
starts popping up, unrequested, on people’s doorsteps and
The Daily
complains about inflated circulation numbers. The ugliest moment is when a disgruntled employee at one rag e-mails the front page to the other, an hour before going to press, which happens rarely. In this war, bodies don’t come home in coffins and
The Other Daily
appears to be taking the battle. Up here in
suburbia, ads are down, sales are down, all numbers small and smaller. The anti-communist, anti-health-care readership just isn’t what it used to be in Canada these days.

Most of the staff at
The Other Daily
are over sixty and write with quill pens, but compared to
The Daily
, it’s a socialist newsletter over there. I wonder, as I complete my mocking of the up-talker, if such behaviour might earn a reprimand at a paper with affirmative action policies and an editorial page that doesn’t refer to single moms as “greedy” and retroactively defend Pinochet on the grounds of sound tax policy. It’s hard to get fired in a libertarian climate. Every screw-you rebellious gesture is interpreted as just another triumphant expression of the individual. This makes
The Daily
oddly similar to a commune – and I speak from experience here – where a child is praised for stabbing another child in the shin with a hoe because said stabber is merely acting on an honest urge of the unchained spirit. One person’s pain is another person’s liberation; that’s how it was as a Marxist agrarian teen, that’s how it is in a neo-conservative newsroom.

Under my desk, I sleep for what seems like a long time. Sleep is oceanic when you’re watch-free. My body wakes my brain only because I need to be watered. Of course, the Editor sniffed out this possibility and is waiting for me by the water cooler, which here at
The Daily
isn’t so much a metaphoric meeting place as a leghold trap for hungover writers like myself.

Procrastinating, rehydrating, ogling the sexy mullet-head who replaces the tank – whatever the reason, you will find me at the water cooler more than in the cubicle. I elbow
aside a few red-eyed intern-types sucking at the tap and the Editor cries, “Theey-ah she is!” lips curled under her blue British teeth that come to a series of points like a package of leaking ballpoint pens. She has a hard-on for the third person, so I always think she’s referring to someone else. I pat my body to see if her certainty regarding my presence is justified.

“There she is,” I say.

“You are going to the film festival press conference Monday morning, you got that e-mail didn’t you? I know you did because my computer tells me which epistles have been received.”

I interpret this as a warning, a vague threat, which is the usual communication mode in an office full of embittered Brits less than happily removed from the really bloody newspaper wars and exiled to the peaceful colonies.

My Editor addresses her third-person edict to the space directly over her right shoulder, as if she has an assistant at her elbow jotting down her every thought. “So she’ll cover the press conference for Tuesday, and we’ll launch the festival with the Ethan Hawke interview for Friday, one day early to beat them.” She almost spits with glee at the prospect of scooping
The Other Daily
. The Brits are much more fired up over the war than their privates. Our blank faces and mild suggestions at story meetings always seem to leave the Editor incensed, a high-school cheerleader standing in front of quarter-filled bleachers.