Chump Change Read online

  David Eddie was born in Boston in 1961, and has lived in the Philippines, England, Hungary, and Canada. He is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and has worked as a reporter for the East Hampton Star, letters correspondent for Newsweek magazine, a TV newswriter for the CBC, and as a film extra. He has written for several publications, including Saturday Night, Toronto Life, Books in Canada and Flare. He is currently a weekly columnist for Hamptons magazine and a book critic for Global TV. He lives in Toronto.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Chapter 1 - Man of Letters

  Chapter 2 - A “Necessary Fiction”

  Chapter 3 - Goodbye, Manhattan

  Chapter 4 - Max

  Chapter 5 - Darlington

  Chapter 6 - Les, and the ’Rents

  Chapter 7 - The Burnished Monocle

  Chapter 8 - Levin

  Chapter 9 - A Buck A Word

  Chapter 10 - Howdy, Stranger

  Chapter 11 - A Lousy Lover

  Chapter 12 - The Rent-Day Miracle

  Chapter 13 - The Sardines of Poverty

  Chapter 14 - The Cosmodemonic: Broadcast Corporation

  Chapter 15 - Rise

  Chapter 16 - R-E-S-P-E-C-T

  Chapter 17 - The Dude Code

  Chapter 18 - Cyrano De Faust

  Chapter 19 - Fourteen Killed

  Chapter 20 - Fall

  Copyright

  “I am always content with that which happens;

  for I think that what God chooses is far

  better than what I choose.”

  — EPICTETUS

  It’s funny how life works — much more subtle and complex than it would be if designed by our poor brains. I thought writing a book would get me women: who knew that I would meet the woman of my dreams just as I was starting out, and that it would be impossible to write this book without her moral and financial support, and gentle — yet firm — editorial guidance? That woman became my wife, and this book is dedicated to her.

  I couldn’t have done it without Doug Pepper, either, my excellent editor and beloved friend. I don’t think even if I were to spend my lifetime studying to be a warlock I could cook up a better editor in my basement cauldron. Over the years, he’s not only helped and encouraged me with the writing, but he’s also fed me excellent meals, ice-cold Gibsons, and fine wines.

  I would also like to thank Carl Knutson, who has been there for me and with me since the beginning; Linda Frum, my first and ideal reader; Leslie Lester, who put me up when I had nowhere to go; Patrick Dickenson, who has bought me such a volume of drinks over the years I think by now you could blow up a rubber raft and float around on it; my parents, for all they’ve had to put up with over the years; and to everyone at Random House and Knopf for befriending this giant, lumbering, 225-lb waif and making me feel at home while I used your computers. And to anyone who ever lent me money, invited me to their party, gave me a job or even just offered a kind word of encouragement, thanks, and sorry about everything.

  D.E.

  Toronto 1996

  1

  Man of Letters

  I am a failure.

  Don’t get me wrong, I say this without bitterness, without self-hatred, without irony. Also without pride, in case you’re wondering about that. I state it as a fact merely, without editorial comment. It happens, that’s my attitude. Nature tosses out all kinds of variants and crazy experiments to try their luck in the planetary battle for survival. Some succeed, some fail. The ones who fail die off or, at least, become bachelors-for-life, their branch of the evolutionary tree withers and dies, and they are never heard from again. The ones who succeed, on the other hand, establish an ecological niche dropping out of trees on unsuspecting birds, snaring fish in their poisonous tendrils, or, in the case of our own species, practising law. They feather their nests and pass the genetic torch off to healthy, robust offspring.

  What’s the secret of their success? In other words, what’s the secret of success on planet Earth?

  It is the ability to adapt.

  And I have failed to adapt; to my milieu, to my culture, and most of all, to my century. Everything about this century frightens me. World wars, nuclear weapons, concentration camps, global warming, desertification, the hole in the ozone layer, the Internet, Madonna, computers, credit cards. Sometimes I wish I’d been born in an earlier, simpler time. Of course, I wouldn’t want to go too far back, to the Middle Ages, say, when everyone’s hair was alive with lice and they died at 30 and had sex with all their clothes on. No, I’d only want to go back 100 years or so, to late 19th-century England. That sounds like my kind of time and place, with its gas lamps, horse-drawn hansoms, twice-daily mail service. Naturally, I’d have to have been born into a wealthy, titled family. Oh, yes, that goes without saying. The poor had it rough in the 19th century, and the only serfing I ever want to do is high atop a gnarly wave off the coast of Cali or Oahu, not in a loincloth, following an ox down a furrow on some feudal estate, shagging my ass back to the lean-to and my little serfin’ girl.

  “Lord Davington.” “Lord Davington of Fleet.” That has a nice ring to it, don’t you think? Your morning coffee, Lord Davington. Why thank you, Cheevers, just set it on the settee. Oh, and Cheevers? Yes, m’Lud? Will you set out my punting clothes? I have a date on the Cam this aft with the Countess Veuve-Cliquot.

  But those are just pipe dreams, cloudy figments in the crystal ball of my imagination. It’ll never happen, not to me anyway.

  I had such high hopes for myself, too, growing up. Wanted to be a writer and all that. After remaining an inordinate amount of time in school — getting not one but two Master’s degrees in an orgy of academic overkill, leaving my old man practically in a barrel — I finally emerged at age 27, heavily in debt, and headed to Manhattan to realize my grandiose dreams of literary superstardom.

  My plan was simple. Shack up with my grad-school sweetheart Ruth, get a job, write on the side, and through a combination of luck, talent, and personal charm, soar straight to the top of the literary heap. I gave myself two, three years tops; after that, I would be toasted, I would be fêted, I would ride everywhere in a limousine, starlet on either side of me, laughing and spilling champagne as we rode through the bumpy streets of the West Village on our way to the latest club or black-tie-only gala. On a typical day, dawn would find me half-asleep in a fountain, still in my tux, a half-full bottle of champagne bobbing in the water at my elbow, a smile playing on my lips. By noon I’d be brunching with my publisher in some chic uptown restaurant, discussing international rights and screenplay options. At dusk, I’d collect my tux from the cleaners, and begin the whole round of celebrity-crammed parties all over again.

  Needless to say, it didn’t work out that way. In Manhattan, I was burned, but never toasted; I was fetid, but never fêted. I didn’t realize my dreams there, but life was dreamlike. Wandering alone in a mob of strangers, pursued by some nameless dread, suddenly someone surges out of the crowd brandishing a pair of shoes, a fork, a piece of cheese on the end of a stick. What do you want? you want to ask, but no words emerge from your lips. Later, you wake up in a cold sweat and realize: Oh, I see. He wanted to sell that to me.

  Like Madonna, I got off the bus at Times Square with about $50 in my pocket, big ambitions, and no talent or marketable skills. Unlike Madonna, though, I didn’t become one of the most famous people in the world. Instead, I sank like a stone straight to the bottom of society.

  My third day in the city I got a job at Newsweek magazine, in the letters department. Writing letters back to people who write in to the magazine, according to the card on the journalism school job-board. Well, I can handle that, I thought. It’s not getting published, but at
least it’s practice. In those days I looked at everything in terms of how my future biographers would view it, and this seemed like a good fit: “Upon arriving in Manhattan, David Henry took a lowly job as a letter-writer for Newsweek magazine. Little did anyone realize that during these years he would develop the epistolary style for which he would later become so famous.”

  The card on the job-board also said the job title was “Letters Correspondent,” but that wasn’t quite true, either. I’ll never forget my first day. A little wall-eyed elf named Donna — a ten-year Newsweek veteran — is showing me the ropes, taking me over to see the various points of interest, including the largest bank of filing cabinets I’ve ever seen. There must be 500 drawers.

  “Damn, that’s a lot of filing cabinets,” I say.

  “Yes,” she says thoughtfully, almost to herself. “There’s quite a bit of filing on the job, more than most of us would like to admit, really. Hence the ‘clerk’ in the title, I guess.”

  “Clerk? What do you mean?”

  “That’s your job title, didn’t you know? Letters clerk.”

  So it’s come to this, I thought. After all my teen cheese-dreams of champagne-soaked limo rides and cocaine-dusted parties, this is the reality: I am a clerk. I may even have muttered it to myself to see how it sounded: “I am a clerk.”

  Oh, well, I said to myself. I won’t stay long at this job. Just a few weeks, until I get on my feet.

  I stayed nearly a year and a half.

  The job didn’t have much to do with writing letters, either. Even in that humble expectation I was cruelly deceived. There were twelve of us in the letters department, all with advanced degrees, all sitting in two rows of desks in a room on the seventh floor of the world-famous Newsweek building on Madison Avenue, and what we mostly did all day was type addresses on postcards.

  Newsweek gets about 1,000 letters a week, from all over the world. A few VIPs — former astronauts, congresspersons, presidents of large countries or corporations — received personalized replies to their letters, drafted by one of us, the letters clerks, edited and approved by Madeleine Edmonds, the letters editor. People with unusual comments or requests received one of Newsweek‘s dizzying array of form letters, designed to cover almost any occasion, from requests for information to racist rants to letters written only in heiroglyphs to requests for money (and you’d be surprised how many of these there were, mostly from deluded Third World students who thought Newsweek would pay their tuition and book costs). These were filed alphanumerically in one of the cabinets along the wall.

  But by far the vast bulk of our mail, general comments from the general population, received in reply a special preprinted postcard, called a “CU” for some reason lost in the mists of time. Our job was to check the return address on the reader’s letter, type it on the CU, put the CU in the “out” basket and file the reader’s letter.

  By the end of a year doing this I was so bored I was paying the guy sitting behind me, Marek Waldorf, to do my job for me, while I loafed around my desk, read the paper or a novel, talked on the phone, and ate junk food. When I’m bored, I eat. Every day I made four or five trips down the elevator to the newsstand on the first floor, returned each time loaded with chips, cheesies, chocolate bars, ice-cream bars, and a Diet Coke. When I began at Newsweek I weighed 185 lbs. After a year I weighed 225.

  It started with bets.

  “What’s the capital of Peru?” I’d ask him, bored.

  “Lima,” he’d say.

  “Bullshit, it’s something else.”

  “I’ll bet you a one-inch stack of CUs it’s Lima.”

  “You’re on.”

  But Marek went to Harvard, he never lost; eventually it wound up I just paid him to do my job for me. I paid him by the inch. So much for a one-inch stack of CUs, so much for a two-inch stack, and so on. I paid him well — I’m not one to exploit my employees — and Marek flourished at this piecework, so much so that after a while I realized I was actually paying him more than I was earning myself. In other words, I was losing money every day I dragged my ass into the office.

  So I set about getting myself fired. I started coming in later and later, leaving earlier and earlier, taking longer and longer lunches, making longer and longer long-distance phone calls, and going on shopping sprees in the middle of the day — shopping safaris, they were really. It usually started with me running around the corner to Sak’s at lunch, then taking a cab across town to Bloomingdale’s. Several hours later, in a haze of guilt, I’d be sifting through the bargain bins on Canal Street, thinking: “I should be getting back, this is crazy.”

  I now realize these shopping safaris were symptoms of my malaise; like my country itself (I was born in the U.S. but moved to Canada when I was twelve), I consumed instead of produced, I substituted the cheap high of a new shirt or whatever for the deep satisfaction of a life’s work, solidly begun and persistently pursued.

  Then, as the late afternoon sun slanted through the venetian blinds of the letters department, I’d return to my desk with an armload of logo-emblazoned bags from various uptown and downtown emporia, and wait for the axe to fall.

  Why bother? you might be wondering. Why go to all this trouble to get yourself fired? Why not just quit? Well, it’s easier said than done to quit your job in Manhattan. Psychologically, I mean. Everywhere you go are living, breathing reminders of how you could wind up if your luck runs out. They call Manhattan “the city that never sleeps,” but everywhere you go, people are sleeping: on park benches, in doorways, cardboard boxes, sometimes flat-out, face-down on the sidewalk. And when a New Yorker sees a street person, they don’t think: There but for the grace of God go I. No, they’re too smart for that, they know no graceful God would put such festering suffering on such naked display just to provide a moment of Schadenfreude for the Yuppoisie. They think: There but for the grace of my boss, and a stacked-deck social system that allows bland, talentless people such as myself to succeed and prosper while others starve in the gutter, go I. And I’d better get going.

  Every day, you emerge from your apartment and you see bums and limos, bums and limos. Which is it going to be, kid? There’s no middle ground in Manhattan, no buffer, just the gutter. No buffer, just the gutter: that was my New York mantra, and I repeated it to myself every day as I hustled my butt to work.

  Finally, though, I did quit. I’ve always been a big believer in listening to your “little man,” the voice in your head that tries to guide you. My little man had been practically screaming at me to quit my job for the last few months. Finally, he rented a plane and dragged one of those signs you see at football games or the beach behind him saying: QUIT YOUR JOB NOW! I obeyed. As if in a trance I arose, walked over to Madeleine’s office, and knocked on the door.

  “Come in,” said the voice from behind the door.

  I entered. Madeleine was hunched over her desk, looking over a crossword puzzle through a pair of little half-specs. When I sat down across from her, she looked at me over the tops of the specs.

  “How can I help you, David?”

  “I don’t know how to put this, Madeleine, I really like working here…what I mean to say is, I appreciate you hiring me in the first place, but I’m afraid I have to quit.”

  “Why? What’s the problem?”

  “No problem — that is, I’m the problem, I guess, really.”

  And then it all came tumbling out. With my face on fire, staring at my shoes (in shocking shape, I noticed), I confessed all: Marek, the shopping safaris, the long-distance phone calls.

  “So I guess you can see,” I concluded, “I wouldn’t really be doing you any favours by continuing to work here.”

  I looked up, to see how she was taking it all. To my surprise, she seemed hardly to be listening. She was gazing at an undefined point on her desk, preoccupied.

  “Do you have another job lined up?” she asked, after a couple of moments.

  “Oh, no —”

  “What are you going to do?�
�

  “Well, I’ve always wanted to write a novel.”

  “No, I meant, what are you going to do for money?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why don’t you keep on working here, and write on the side?”

  She still liked me, apparently, despite everything.

  “I’ve tried, Madeleine. I try to wake up early, write before work, but I always wind up hitting the snooze button until the last minute. After work, I’m so wrung out I can hardly read, let alone write.”

  “It sounds as if you’ve made up your mind.”

  “I have. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too, David. I always enjoyed your letters. They were very funny.” She stood up and extended her hand. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks, Madeleine,” I said as we shook hands.

  On my way out, hand on the knob, I said: “Say, Madeleine. Would you mind very much if I forgo the usual two-week waiting period and leave today?”

  “Whatever suits you best, David.”

  “I won’t be leaving you in the lurch?”

  She laughed savagely, reached over to her shelf, and pulled down a folder bulging with papers.

  “These are the resumés I’ve received in the last month alone. Let’s see, here’s a Ph.D in medieval studies, here’s an archaeologist. Here’s a former mayor.”

  Man, times are tough, I thought. Well, you can have it. I’m outta here! I thanked her again, and left.

  Outside, at my desk, I gathered up my papers, stuffed them into my bag, and looked around the room one last time. Everyone was typing away. No one looked up; they probably thought I was off on another extendo-lunch or shopping safari.

  “So long, suckers!” I thought, but I didn’t actually say goodbye to anyone. Why bother? I wouldn’t miss them, they wouldn’t miss me. Well, Marek might miss me. He would certainly miss the extra income.

  2

  A “Necessary Fiction”