Chump Change (24 page)

While we drank, she told me her life story. Booted out of the house at 16, she worked as a dishwasher for two years (two years! I did it for six weeks once, and by the end I wanted to commit hara-kiri by attaching the supersprayer to the deep-fry vat and giving myself a boiling-oil enema). Eventually, she was promoted to busgirl, then waitress, and now they were giving her occasional shifts as a bartender.

Lola had some hash, she rolled a spliff, we smoked it. As often happens, the joint seemed to double my drunk buzz. I
started to slur, slipped into spoonerisms and malapropisms, full phrase substitutions, incomplete sentences, passing bad information, employing faulty logic… Meanwhile, she chatted away merrily, apparently unaffected.

Finally I rose heavily to my feet.

“Lola, I godda hidda hay,” I said.

Lola stood up, too, and stretched.

“O.K.” she said. “The only thing is, I came here on my bike and now I think I’m too drunk to ride home.”

“No problem, you can sleep here,” I said.

“O.K. Thanks.”

“First we should get Señor Piquante here up on the couch.”

I grabbed his head, Lola grabbed his feet. Together we gingerly lifted him onto the couch. He didn’t even wake up.

“Well, that’s it, then,” I said, dusting off my hands. We stood across from each other.

“Where do you want me to sleep?”

“Well, there are several options. You can sleep down here on the couch, and there’s also a couch in the kitchen. Or… you can crash in my room, with me.”

I didn’t need courage to say that. I was that drunk, it just came out naturally.

“I think I’ll take door #3,” Lola said with a smile. Just then Andrew sat up, stared around the room with unseeing eyes.

“I’m the type of nigger that’s built to last,” he said. “If you fuck with me I put my foot up yo’ asszzzz…”

His eyes rolled back into his head, the lids closed, and his head snapped back to the carpet. He started sawing logs. I put a blanket over him. Then Lola, his recent ex, and I, his good friend, headed upstairs to have sex.

Actually, my plan was not to have sex with Lola, to pull the old “let’s-just-sleep-together” routine on her. I’ve used this
approach numerous times, with excellent effects. All it takes is a bit of self-control, and the rewards are multifold: you’re relieved of first-night performance anxiety, you establish trust, feel comfortable together, then one night it just happens naturally.

The whole concept went out the window, though, the minute Lola unselfconsciously peeled off her bike shorts and unzipped her scuba-top to reveal the most beautiful body I’d ever seen, and slithered between the sheets.

I’d gone to bed demurely clad in boxers and T-shirt, but these garments seemed simply to melt off my body. Lola slid a big, meaty thigh between mine, grabbed my hair, and jammed her tongue down my throat. Before I really knew what was happening she was on top of me. Then I was inside her, she was straddling me and was sliding a silken sealskin breast in and out of my greedy, gobbling mouth. I babbled like a baby: “Oh, yes, Lola, oh, man, oh that’s great, oh yeah, fuck me Lola…” And I never talk dirty during sex, it just came babbling out of my lips, I couldn’t help myself.

“Whew,” Lola said afterwards, climbing off. “Are you always this horny?”

“Are you always this sexy?”

The next morning, when we came down, Andrew was gone.

I eventually told Andrew about it, of course, and he forgave me, or at least he said he did. Sometimes, when he was drunk, he’d say things like: “Hey, here’s Dave, the guy who doesn’t mind sloppy seconds.” Or: “I’d like you to meet my friend Dave. He’s fucking my girlfriend.”

All of which was good knockabout stuff, I felt. I could handle it. After all, he had dumped her. I’ve always felt the Dude Code was too strict on these matters. Anyway, Lola was a piece of candy I wasn’t willing to give up just yet.

Meanwhile, the money rolled in.

You should see the salaries everyone pulls in at the Cosmodemonic fact-factory. You should get a load of their Beemers, cottages, condos, Costa Rican properties; the perks, privileges, and gourmet buffets everyone enjoys as if by divine right. “And it’s nothing like the old days,” the old-timers will tell you, their eyes misting over as they recall the European junkets, lavish hotel rooms, and buffet tables of the ’60s and ’70s. Back then, there was a lot more cash floating around. That’s when they all hired on, and you should see their contracts. It’s like getting tenure. Especially the techies, with their unions. You
could
fire a Cosmodemonic techie, but you’d better have a fucking good lawyer. A techie could fuck a ten-year-old boy in front of his boss and all the other Cosmodemonic bigwigs, sign a
confession, piss in a potted plant, and go down bawling for more drink, he still wouldn’t be fired. He’d be sent for “counselling.”

Don’t get me wrong. My tone is not disapproving. On the contrary, I loved it, I bellied up to the trough like everyone else, smacking my lips, napkin tucked into my shirt-front. Government fat tastes just like chicken, as I often said to people. In a southern-fried accent: “Jes’ lahk
chicken.”

Fifteen hundred dollars every other week! Fattening my bank account, beefing up my lifestyle.

I started travelling in cabs, picking up tabs. I snapped up some snazzy new duds, and rented a groovy new pad. About this time, Max and Sam decided to take the plunge and move in together. Touchingly, they invited me to live with them, but I quickly realized I would be a fifth wheel, and I set about finding my own place.

I checked out the ads in the paper, for apartments in my newfound price range, $600-$700/month. Even with that much cash to burn, most of the places were dumps, an interior decorator’s nightmare: mirrors on the closets, tile on the ceiling, shag carpets. Being poor can be romantic in other cities, world capitals, places like Paris, where a “garret” (as I’ve always pictured it anyway) is an attic room with hardwood planks in a 13th-century building at the end of a cobblestone street. In a burg like Toronto, though, you soon discover that cheap pads are that way because they’re so cheesy. It gets to you after a while: one night you wake up in a cold sweat thinking, “Maybe I am a cheeseball, after all.”

Some of the places were so different from the way they were described in the ads I wanted to take a swing at the guy showing me around. I remember one described as “SPLIT-LEVEL IN ST. LAWRENCE MARKET AREA.” In the first place, it was a good 20 minutes’ walk from the St. Lawrence Market.
I looked around with the guy, then finally said: “What’s split-level about this place?” He showed me: there was a
single step
between the kitchen and the living room. “You asshole,” I said to him, and left.

But I kept looking and one day I came across a decent-looking ad in the paper: LARGE KENSINGTON BACHELOR.

“That could be me!” I thought. I’d always wanted to live in Kensington Market—“the breadbasket of Toronto”—with its outdoor markets, the cultural and ethnic mix, cheap bars and restaurants, vintage clothing emporia. Kensington was filled with artists, junkies, drunks, immigrants, alcoholics, the poor; in other words, my kind of people.

It was love at first sight: a big, space above a store called “The Get It On Boutique” on Augusta Avenue. “The Get It On Boutique” sold various knick-knacks, African masks, rattan furniture, and a dazzling array of Bart Simpson hybrid T-shirts. Remember those? A strange pop-cultural cross-pollination: Rasta Bart (“Underachiever and Proud of it, Mon”), Rasta

Clint Bart (“Make my Day, Mon”), Air Rasta Bart (“It’s the Shoes, Mon”). Every once in a while, they got busted for copyright infringement for selling these T-shirts. But as the store’s owner — a tiny Vietnamese man named Johnny — told me, “Bart and rattan put dinner on my family’s table.”

“It’s a funny name for your store,” I said to him. “At first, I thought it was going to be a sex shop.”

“Why?”

“Well, ‘get it on,’ you know, is slang for ‘have sex.’”

He stared at me for a couple of seconds, then threw back his head and roared with laughter.

“Oh, I had no idea,” he said, after a while, wiping the tears off his cheeks. “I thought, you know, ‘buy a shirt and get it on.’”

“I guess you haven’t been here a long time.”

“A year,” he said proudly.

“I’m surprised no one has ever mentioned anything to you.”

We laughed together about this for awhile, then he told his wife, who was dressing a mannequin at the back of the store. She didn’t seem to find it as funny as her husband, the look on her face said: Oh, no, another disaster in the new world.

On the application form, in the place for “salary,” I wrote down $40,000. At work the next day, the receptionist called me over and said, “Someone called yesterday and asked if you really made $40,000 a year. A Chinese guy?”

“What did you tell him?”

“I said that sounded about right.”

I moved in a taxi. I still didn’t have much: futon, backpack, ghettoblaster, typewriter, box of books. Johnny sold me a writing desk, what used to be called a “secretary,” from his basement, for $100. My mother contributed a two-seater couch from her cornucopic basement. Max gave me a microwave, and a full set of kitchen utensils (since Sam already had all that stuff). Almost everything in that apartment was a donation, a hand-me-down from family or friends, except a beautiful red-velvet armchair I bought at a garage sale down the street.

I arranged these few items in a Japanese minimalist effect, dictated mostly by necessity, but also by inclination. “To make a virtue of necessity,” I often think that should be the motto of my generation. We were given less; but that could be for the best, we could live simpler, more spiritual lives than the greedy, gobbling Yuppoisie.

I could see leading a simpler, more spiritual life in my new pad. I could picture myself eating rice out of a single bowl, then washing the bowl when it was finished. Of course, with my new salary burning a hole in my pocket, I’d also probably want
plenty of octogenarian scotch, a little snuff-box of cocaine, fine wines from the hills of Abruzzi, and the finest herb from the mountains of Jamaica. “A life of simple virtues and complex vices,” is how I put it to myself. As a final touch, Lola bought me a bird, a canary named Georgie. She also bought a cage for it, but I left it open, let Georgie fly freely around, a living symbol of my newfound freedom and independence. He quickly learned to fly back to his cage for food and water. Every morning, at exactly 8:00, Georgie, perched on a lamp, his chest puffed out, woke me up with his sweet song.

How I loved that apartment. My first and only solo pad. Solitude is a form of freedom, and when you’re alone you can do whatever you want. If I wanted to dance around nude, covered in chocolate pudding, with a hollowed-out pumpkin on my head, singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” no one would ever know the difference, as long as the shades were drawn. As long as the shades were drawn, I was king of all I could see. I could furnish to my own taste, listen to my own music.

At night, I would turn on the hallway light downstairs, like a huge night-light, it filtered up through the banisters reassuringly. I felt so good in my new pad that I
hugged
myself to sleep. Thinking: they say money can’t buy happiness — but it sure can
rent
it for a while.

It never rains but it pours. Money also came in from a couple of unexpected quarters. First, the Great Editor called, said he read my article, loved it, and was going to publish it without changing a word.

“Sorry it took so long,” he said casually.

I stared at the phone. You mean all this time you haven’t been putting me off? You’ve just been too lazy and disorganized to read my article? I didn’t know whether to thank him or give
him a piece of my mind. I decided the former route was the wiser. And it was, because before I knew it, a cheque for the balance of my fee — $1,500—was winging my way.

Then one Saturday morning my mother phoned, waking me up.

“Did you remember today was your father’s birthday?”

“Oh…um, yeah, sure.”

“Did you have any plans?”

“Not really, just maybe call him or send him a card or something.”

“I bet he would really appreciate it if you called, and cooked him dinner or something.”

“O.K., Mom, I’ll do it.”

I called the old man at home. Cautiously, suspiciously — but with an unmistakable note of pleasure in his voice — he agreed to come over for dinner, perhaps the first meal I had hosted or sponsored in either of our lifetimes.

Well, hell, I thought, after hanging up. Why not do it up? The old man’s put up with a lot of grief and anxiety authored by yours truly, why not pay him tribute for once, show him how you feel? I would throw the old man a feast. I had a recipe for “Mediterranean Fisherman’s Soup” in an old cookbook I picked up in a second-hand store, and decided to make him that.

I headed into the hubbub of Kensington Market, lightly stoned. On Augusta, I bought tomatoes, onions, garlic, herbs and spices. I headed down to Baldwin Street, fish central, and bought clams, shrimp, rockfish, Red Snapper, even a couple of live lobsters that snapped and writhed in the bag. On Kensington Street, at Global Cheese, I picked up baguettes, pâté, salmon mousse, French champagne cheese, capers, crackers. At the liquor store on Spadina, I bought a bottle of Lagavulin, plus two bottles of beautiful, meaty Bordeaux. In the end, I spent
the last of my paycheck (even with my fabulous salary I was still living week-to-week, and probably always will), and there were still five days left to go until my next one. Oh, well, I thought. I’ll make a gigantic vat of the soup, and live on the leftovers. Won’t be the first time I’ve had to stretch a pot of food. When one pot is all you have to last several days, that pot becomes holy to you.

By the time the old man rang the bell, and mounted the stairs with heavy tread, I was ready. Candles lit, incense burning, apartment gleaming and dust-free, wine open and breathing, hors d’oeuvres laid out on the coffee table.

When he saw the spread, a big smile split his creased and careworn face.