How Happy to Be (3 page)

“Ahh-ight,” I say in a kind of ghetto-speak that started out camp and has become habit.

The water isn’t going down as smoothly as the crantinis of the night before, and suddenly I’m pushing past the Editor and the buzzing interns and it’s not so pleasant in the bathroom cubicle, my hands holding up my hair, careful not to touch anything parasitic. Not so pleasant to be pushing up wave after wave of air, but with my eyes closed, I can almost imagine this as something honourable: I pretend there’s a neo-Nazi combat boot kicking me in the gut.

The convulsions die down. I lean against the bathroom door and wipe my mouth with toilet paper, wait for the heart to stop boxing in my chest. Am I dying? I think, pulling a Southern belle, back of the hand on forehead.

No, this is bad, but this is not what dying is like – put the hand down – because I remember my mother dying, yes I do, I can still go back that far (a smell, a date on a calendar, oh, it’s easy to go) and see her there, truly buckled and drained. That was illness of a different order. Serious. It occurs to me that seriousness must still be out there, free-floating around the universe, even sometimes touching down.

T
HE CAB IS CHARGING ONTO THE HIGHWAY TOWARD
the city and the driver can’t get the heat to work so the inside windows are frost-streaked and the radio is blaring a dispatcher who thinks he’s a comedian: “So then the fare goes, ‘Not
Bloor
Street,
Blur
Street!’ ”

The cab driver grips the wheel. “All day, every day, I must listen to these jokes on the radio. Not funny jokes,” shouts Mohsen, smacking the radio with a fist. No matter what time of day, if I call 1-800-TAXI, I get Mohsen and his airless cab and his fury.

“Did you hear?” he asks, smoking and driving without his hands on the wheel. “Now you have to dial the area code. I live here eight years, just one area code for the city, one for the suburbs. Now when you’re already in the city, you dial the city code. Is stupid. Why is this happening? I will tell you why.”

“Yes, you will.”

“World-class city,” he says with scorn. “Mayor tell us we’re world class. I tell you what makes a city world class. Not area codes.”

The Toronto feeling is like living in a photocopy of a real city, or a photocopy of a photocopy, since Chicago is a version of New York and we’re blurred Chicago. I’d like to know how to live in three dimensions as much as the next guy so I ask, “What’s the secret?”

“Olympics. We must get Olympics. Good for business.”

“Don’t you think it could be bad for the uh” – I try to conjure up a contrarian compound momlike stance – “homeless people?” Also, I love the cabbie freak-out, and expressing sympathy for the poor usually gets one. Sure enough, Mohsen is off: He works hard, eighteen-hour shifts, supports a family, came from nothing, escaped in the dead of night eight years ago. Do I know what it’s like to have my country invaded by Russians? Do I know what it’s like to have to smuggle videotapes of American movies from house to house because some totalitarian regime says
Rambo
is bad for the comrades? Do I know what a bomb sounds like metres from a baby’s nursery? Don’t talk to Mohsen about homeless people who cash abundant welfare cheques and sleep in the comfort of palatial bank-machine foyers.

“Now, your paper. That’s a paper. Truth! Not soft on communists!”

Grey skyline taking shape against a grey sky.

I’m a bit drunk because Baby Baron materialized, as promised. Post-purge, I had been feeling rested and was enjoying some hard-hitting research Googling Ethan Hawke (“Ethan is a vegetarian who enjoys skiing …”). A bit bleary, maybe, but goddamn it I was okay, running over the sober mantra as I wandered aimlessly around the corridors of my computer, opening window after window of the World Wide Web, its knowledge spanning the globe so we can all share cat pictures and Ethan Hawke: dear God, grant me the serenity to get it together, the ability to know that things aren’t so bad (“Ethan is married to the talented and gorgeous Buddhist actress Uma Thurman …”), the wisdom to think that anything is possible, the ability to get up in the morning. That’s not exactly right, but when you can name the designers of Julia Roberts’s last three Oscar gowns, when you know the exact date of Frances Bean Cobain’s birth (August 18, 1992), when the trivia gains mass and expands to fill the brain cavity, then who can remember exactly the details of those Cambodian bombings or how that AA prayer goes, and come to think of it, is that even a prayer at all, or some kind of Crosby Stills and Nash song?

The big question: How did I end up drunk in the afternoon when I came in drunk in the morning?

At 4:00 p.m., the e-mail ping went off, echoing across the newsroom, sparking a flame of human energy like
when the DJ throws down everyone’s favourite track and the whole club wriggles.

Marvin wrote the e-mail: “The Entertainment department wants you to live and love with the cool kids. Big w(h)ine and big cheese, outside the office of the Big Cheese.”

The entire newsroom lifted itself, a sheet of thirsty butterflies migrating toward the alcohol. The Editor won’t buy beer (too Canadian), so she stood slowly filling plastic cups with cheap red wine, barely hitting the halfway mark, while jonesing writers and editors hopped from foot to foot in a single-file line. Then Baby Baron appeared, the brass buttons on his suit gleaming, the assistant marching crossly behind. I felt obligated, as a semi-loyal entertainment writer and a more dedicated drinker, to help the Editor get this so-called party started. My help took the form of a jazzy, free-form riff of pouring one plentiful drink for you, drinking one plentiful drink for me, and even before the cluster of Style people were in front of me, all spine in their skinny jeans and stilettos, I was already a bit wonky on my feet.

This could be firing material at a place where people get fired. But no one with firing power noticed my slurred state because anyone with it was already off to one side, gravitationally pulled toward Baby Baron and his bitter shadow. The Editor went over to the power circle, and I hung with Marvin, making dead-celebrity jokes.

“Marvin, what was John Denver’s last hit?”

“The Pacific Ocean,” said Marvin, bored. “Everybody knows that.”

In the middle of the group stood the reason I’m here, the Big Cheese himself,
The Daily’s
editor-in-chief. The Big Cheese was wearing a windbreaker because it’s Friday, casual day, the day he dresses like a big baby bundled up, hoping for a sailing trip, and Marvin was outdoing me on the dead-celebrity jokes front (Q: How is Bill Gates going to die? A: He’ll fall out a Window), and suddenly I dropped into a rabbit hole remembering what it was like to get hired for this place, six years ago, before the paper existed and this floor was a mess of empty wires and unpacked computer boxes.

The Cheese had asked, “What’s your dream job?” All the laziest, worst parts of me bobbed right up to the surface, the parts that had written fan letters to Jaclyn Smith at a tender age and gasped at the sight of Susan from
Eight Is Enough –
in the flesh – walking down Robson Street in Vancouver when I was thirteen years old. The parts that lied to my young compound acquaintances that no, I couldn’t participate in the socialist board games (Panopoly) after school because I was taking a boat to
The Brady Bunch
set, where I had just been promoted to Jan. Really, I was making like a bloodhound toward any television on the island.

Dream job
. I pressed down, down, deep inside those better years of literature and poetry and turtlenecks, compacted all that intellect into a little nut to be stored permanently away, right alongside my days at the downtown news bureau where I first met the Big Cheese and he’d lectured me about “off the record” and sent me to City Hall for my first scrum and I was high just to hit
Send
on the computer at 4:30 every day.

I blurted it out: “Entertainment” and now this is what it is, and in a matter of weeks, I will be thirty-five, a thirty-five-year-old woman who makes a living asking John Travolta how he finds his character’s motivation when playing a plastic-eyebrowed alien invader named Terl.

I looked over at the Big Cheese, who has always been an elusive force. While clearly aligned with Baby Baron and his anti-welfare, anti-air policies, Cheese is also a movie buff looking for a viewing pal. He used to call me once in a while, from his Town Car in the parking lot around four o’clock, and his driver would take us downtown to a dirty rep cinema for a Marx Brothers matinee. On the drive back to my apartment, Cheese would dissect
Monkey Business
with the joyless precision of a film scholar, only occasionally asking my opinion before letting me out curbside with a nod. We never discussed this ritual with anyone. Most of the time, he is a workaholic of the first order, in the office before anyone arrives, would lock up with Jacob Marley’s big brass key long after everyone left if they made big brass keys any more. He’s many generations Toronto, though for a decade as the voice of the right at
The Other Daily
, he lived in Europe, and he wrote about the Berlin Wall coming down like he’d personally willed it. Meanwhile, his third wife was packing her bags and babies for a man who came home at 5:30 each night.

Suddenly, the Big Cheese swept his gaze my way, went too far, then backtracked, stopped, and locked me in place – just as my tongue was circling the plastic rim of my cup in
search of the last drop of Chilean swill. He looked – swear to God – a little disappointed.

I turned and started trucking away before we were trapped inside some horrible moment, and I ran right into the formidably muscled chest of Ad Sales, who had somehow separated from the advertising flock – an unprecedented mutiny.

“You missed the meeting this morning,” he said, looking over my shoulder. He once told me that refusing to focus on the person in front of him was a strategy he learned from a management book. It makes him seem busy and powerful, and far-sighted.

“I got in late. Nice note, by the way,” I said, annoyed that I was annoyed. We’d been sleeping together, without the sleeping part, since the Halloween party, but I can’t take any man seriously who has tassels on his shoes.

“We should talk,” he said in his muffled office voice, the one designed to make people lean in and listen (this tactic from a seminar, not a book). It made me speak louder.

“WHAT ABOUT?”

Ad Sales scanned the crowd, probably wondering if he could escape me by ducking into the nimbus of food encircling Baby Baron as he scarfed down his cheese plate. Suddenly, something on my face distracted him.

“Maxime, Jesus,” he peered closer. “What’s that crusty thing on your face?”

“Diet Coke …,” I said, picking it free.

Ad Sales shook his head. “Wine and Diet Coke addictions are so 1990s, Maxime. We’re in the ‘Oughts’ now. Have you
thought of getting yourself a good antidepressant for your little disorder?”

You know when you’re trying to think of some lacerating comeback, but you’ve had too much wine and there’s that balled-up sock where your good timing used to be?

“I don’t have as much of a disorder as” – I paused. I reached into the depths of my wit, which must be somewhere around here, just give me a second – and this is the retort I pulled out – “your
personality!
” Nearby, Marvin winced.

I wobbled away, past Baby Baron, past the Big Cheese, only lightly knocking the assistant, jostling ever so slightly the platter of snacks he was begrudgingly bringing to his boss.

The other big question is: If I hate it so much, why don’t I just quit?

Because of some split second I caught on some high-number digital channel, lately I’ve been contemplating the Darlinghurst Gaol in Sydney. The prisoners built the prison themselves, marking the walls with thumbprints and small x’s to show how much work they’d done, and some of them began to take a perverse pride in the cage they had constructed, so much so that they didn’t really want to leave. The braver left their names on some of the bricks, and you can read them still. So there’s a bit of that.

And then there’s addiction, the dedication to feeding that singular desire. Celebrity addiction is uncomplicated, and when you’re tired – did I mention how tired I am? – uncomplicated is good. It requires so much less effort than charting the differences between Liberia and Nigeria, or
letting the mind swivel toward the Afghani women head to toe in their burkas getting their hands cut off for dashing out the door to get flour without their husband’s consent – that’s going on right now, right now, in daylight – and isn’t the president of the United States not really the President of the United States? And did you know that baby boys born near Lake Ontario are born with smaller heads and genitals than the national norm because of toxins floating in the water and – exhausting, isn’t it?

So you make the trade. You lay down the African dictator card and pick up Jennifer Lopez. Make no mistake, however, it’s a trade: you can’t have both. You think you can, for months and months and years and years you try to play smart and ironic as you feed your desire. But you’re hooked. Cravings make your skin itch, your tongue puff and scratch. You indulge and linger over
Us
magazine while the letters on the front cover of
The Economist
(the same twenty-six letters) swim and separate, impenetrable to you, a dead language uncovered at the bottom of the sea. And though you know you should get out of it, and though sometimes you make feeble, girl-slappy gestures at the dangling meat of your daily life – you try to quit, you swear to God you are trying to quit – you are really just waiting, just watching, the one thing you know how to do.

And now I’m in this cab winding down the Don Valley Parkway toward downtown. The suburbs shrink behind me and Mohsen rages in front, grey hair twisting from his
nostrils, and Sunera’s name comes up on the cellphone to arrange drinks for later – she’s bringing some guy she’s considering – and I can barely make her out through the dispatcher’s comic stylings so I ask Mohsen to turn down the radio. He pretends he doesn’t hear me. I get off the phone and look out the window as the city comes into view, low brick and resigned, a meekness that somehow always surprises me in a skyline, even after all this time.