Chump Change Read online

  Outside, it’s a beautiful early-April day. How can I tell it’s a beautiful day in midtown Manhattan? Because as I sail through the revolving doors of the Newsweek building I crank my head up, and there, between the peaks of Madison’s mighty skyscrapers, is a patch of purest azure blue. Sometime during the morning it rained, and while Manhattan never gets that fresh-washed feel some cities get after a spring rain, at least some of the surface grime was rinsed off.

  Madison’s packed as usual, its banks swollen now with the lunchtime crowd. Like so many salmon, I think, looking at them. All with the same markings — blue suit, tan coat, black shoes — all swimming against the current, jumping over puddles, landing with a splash!

  All around me, lunchbound Newsweekers pour out of the building, nudging and jostling me as they go by, sometimes throwing an elbow into my ribs for good measure. C’mon, kid, choose a direction and get a move on. Madison is not an avenue for daydreamers. I remember once, as I was walking along with my head in the clouds, a man stuck his pockmarked face close to mine and said “WAKE UP!” The denizens of Madison like you to be in the here and now. If too many people went around constructing their own worlds in their heads, Madison would disappear — POOF! — like the bad dream it is.

  I take a deep breath of spring air — for I, David Henry, still breathe with my lungs (though I can feel the beginnings of a dorsal fin poking between my shoulderblades) — and toss myself into the crowd.

  Swimming upstream, uptown…Suddenly, there’s a tug on my sleeve, a strong one, like the pull of a big bass on the end of a 20-lb test line. I turn and find myself face-to-face with one of Manhattan’s roving army of down-and-outers, have-nots, don’t-wannabes. His face is the colour and texture of old orange peel, his hair as stiff as bark, his eyes a special painted-on blue, like paint on chipped old china.

  He’s clutching my sleeve with a drowning-man death-grip, holding on for dear life, his knees pitching and buckling under him as if he were on the poop-deck of a ship in high seas. He stares at me with unseeing eyes.

  “Money,” he croaks.

  “Sorry,” I say, comme toujours. I try to shake him off but his grip only tightens. Then a big wave hits him amidships, he pitches forward, his barnacled face an inch from mine.

  “Please,” he says, enveloping my head in a cloud of booze-fumes, stale tobacco, other unidentifiable odours.

  “I said no! Fuck off!” With a mighty shove, I send him spinning back into the crowd.

  Sounds a bit harsh, I know. Listen, when I first got to Manhattan I gave to almost everyone who asked. That’s how I was brought up: “If he needs it that badly, you should give him something, dear.” But in Manhattan, you get hit a dozen, two dozen times a day. I realized if I kept it up, pretty soon it would be me barging onto the subway car, banging on a garbage-can lid with my fist, singing “Take me home, country road.”

  So you develop a new policy: “I’m not giving any more cash to anyone, ever.” But that doesn’t work, either. One day you’re sitting on the subway car, reading the paper, and a guy comes along, a Vietnam vet, Thalidomide baby, AIDS victim, paraplegic all rolled into one — a little kid’s pulling him along in a wagon, and the kid says, “Please, sir, would you put a quarter on his flipper?” And you give, for Christ’s sake you dig deep, you give him the money you were going to spend on lunch. You have a feeling you won’t be needing it any more anyway.

  To tell you the truth, my man here, with the thousand-yard stare and oxyacetylene breath, almost made the grade, he almost made the New York Cut. But in the end his timing was lousy. Shit, I had my own problems. There wasn’t that much between me and him, I had no job, no bank account — the Chase Mother-fucking Manhattan Bank closed it over the Christmas holidays. I went home, back to Toronto, for Christmas, came back, stuck my card in the bank machine, the machine spat it out, saying: ACCOUNT CLOSED. CONTACT YOUR BRANCH. I contact my branch, the smug and superior teller informs me it was closed due to “lack of funds.” The bank’s policy, he tells me, is to close all accounts that show zero balances on New Year’s Day.

  “But I’m sure I left some money in that account,” I said, as if it were all just some international oversight on my part. “At least ten bucks.”

  “That went towards processing,” he informs me drily (with what I could swear is the ghost of a smile on his lips).

  “Processing what?”

  Here the teller can’t help himself: his face splits into a broad grin.

  “The closure of your account.”

  There’s something fishy about this financial Möbius loop, I know, and my first instinct is to call the manager over, and throw a fit. But the clerk knows, and I know he knows, it would be futile. After all, what am I going to do? Sue them? A guy who doesn’t even have a bank account?

  Like I say, you get hit all the time for cash in Manhattan. But this particular encounter has given me the heebie-jeebies, the willies, the Willie Hortons. What have you done, Dave, I ask myself as I walk along. You must be nuts! Look around you! This is a city thrown up in a hurry, built by hungry, greedy people. The architects’ guts were rumbling as they drew up the plans, the builders’ mouths were watering as they laid the foundations… This is Mammon, Babylon, a city created by, for, and about money. And you don’t have any. Now there’s nothing between you and the savage, snapping streets —

  Except Ruth. Maybe I should give Ruth a call? But that would mean telling her about quitting my job, setting a time for dinner, etc. I can’t handle that, just now. I need time to wander, and to think.

  I follow my feet to Central Park, 68th Street entrance, cross the bandstand area, head towards Sheep’s Meadow, hands in pockets, eyes on the ground, thinking: man, what I need right now is a bit of…

  “Smoke?”

  The word pops like a bubble from my subconscious, but it’s external, purely external. I look up and see a shady guy in a baseball cap giving me “the long look.”

  “What you got?” I ask him.

  “Sensie, man, good stuff, check it out.”

  “I got to smell it first, my man.”

  You have to say that or they try to palm off oregano on you. He slips me a little baggie, glances around agitatedly. “Hurry up, man, cops, man.”

  I look at him drily. What do I look like, a tourist? I’ve conducted hundreds of similar transactions, sometimes practically on the hood of a cop car, and never once have the police evinced the slightest interest. Once in Washington Square I was surrounded by a half-dozen black guys, all holding out their dope, saying: “Check my shit out, man, it’s better than his shit.” Twenty feet away, two cops were lounging in their car, in the middle of the park, staring into space.

  I pop the Ziploc under my nose. It isn’t sensimilla — never is — but it’s respectable brown street pot. Gets you ridiculously high. I reach into my wallet and pull out a ten-spot.

  “Next time have the money ready,” he says, walking away.

  Yeah, yeah… “Oh, hey!” I say. “You don’t have any papers, do you?”

  He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a couple of crumpled Zig-Zags. Thanks, I say, and mean it. He didn’t have to do that.

  Later, I’m lying spreadeagled on a grassy knoll in Sheep’s Meadow, watching the slow arc of a kite across the beautiful blue sky. High as a kite myself… My heebie-jeebies have vanished, melted into the earth beneath my back. In a flash, it comes to me, what I have to do: get on a plane a.s.a.p., get out of this moneyworld, this Babylon, immediately. Leave it all behind. Soon it will all seem like a bad dream. Thinking that, I felt light, lighter than air.

  The only things nagging me are the two classic side-effects of marijuana use: “cotton-mouth” and “the munchies.” My lips felt like they were Velcroed to my gums, my gut was rumbling and growling like a junkyard dog. Man, I thought, what I wouldn’t give for a…

  “Cold beer! Bagels and cream cheese!”

  I propped myself up on one elbow and gazed into the middle distance. A man with a coole
r strapped to his giant juddering beerbelly was coming towards me through the heat-haze and the seven veils of my buzz. Good old New York, I thought. A city that not only gratifies your desires, it anticipates them. A city that gratifies desires you didn’t even know you had, that gratifies desires for things you don’t even want. All you have to do (as long as you’ve got the cash) is lift a finger.

  I lifted my arm, and pointed my index finger skywards: “Yo, my man. Over here.”

  It’s surprisingly late by the time I get home. At least I’m surprised when I check my watch in the freight elevator: 12:10.

  No, hang on, it’s 2:00.

  Where did the time go? True, I hung out in the park for quite a while, and on the way home I looked in at a couple of bars, but always with the gnawing feeling of, “I should be getting home.”

  Perhaps I spent more time at my penultimate stop than I thought, Billy’s Topless on 6th, right around the corner from our pad. I was loaded for bear by then, my memory comes back only in strobe-lit flashes. I remember I was sitting in the front row, and everyone was my pal, all clapping me on the back, calling me “Good old Dave,” “Crazy Dave.” Perhaps I was radiating some sort of all-embracing magnanimity, now I’ve quit my soul-sucking, synapse-sizzling job. I’m a lover of man and beast alike, and they’re drawn to me like ships in stormy seas to a beacon of light.

  It’s also possible I was buying everyone drinks. Pitchers of beer kept appearing, someone must have been ordering them and paying for them. It could well have been me.

  There’s another blank stretch, then a huge black woman clambered onstage. She’s an amateur, part of the crowd, overcome by the festive joie de vivre of me and my front-row crew. At least, I assume she was an amateur. I’ve never seen a pro operate like that. After a few perfunctory bumps and grinds she simply doffed her acid-wash jeans and rhinestone-studded jacket, peeled off her bra and panties, as if she were getting ready for bed, then leaned over and started kissing everyone in the front row, one by one.

  I’m not going to do it, I said to myself, as she worked her way towards me. I’m going to stay faithful to Ruth. Then when she came to me I turned my face up like a sunflower, to be kissed, like everyone else.

  Pucker up…but she would have none of that. She grabbed the back of my head, forced a strong tongue past my lips, and as the crowd cheered, gave me a long, agonizing kiss. Finally, she released me (feeling lobotomized, tongue-sillectomized), grabbed the back of my head again, and shoved it between her Brobdignagian breasts.

  It was warm in there, and dark, smelling of talcum powder and sweat. The sounds of the bar became muffled, and for the first time in what seemed like a long time, I had a moment to think. And my thought was: I should be getting home.

  It seems to take about ten minutes to fit my key in the lock of the door. Finally, I burst through, with a silly, triumphant grin on my face. Ruth’s in the kitchen, at 2:00 in the morning she’s doing dishes, making a lot of clatter. She doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t have to. Skilled ass-man that I am, I can read my message in the clench of her buttocks. It says: Tread lightly.

  I sit at the butcher-block table, pull out a cigarette, pat my pockets, discover I have no matches, tiptoe over to the stove, turn on the flame, and light up.

  Something smells funny. Ruth glances over at me and screams. The next thing I know she is upending a pot of soapy water over my head.

  “What did you do that for?” I ask her, blinking away the sudsy water.

  “Your hair was on fire.”

  Suddenly she’s laughing, doubled over, clutching her gut. It just rolls out of her. She sits down at the table, pounding it weakly, saying, “He kills me, he kills me.” After a moment or two, after the initial shock wears off, I see the funny side, too, and I start laughing along with her. But Ruth is a step ahead of me again. She is already in tears.

  “Ruth…”

  She lifts her red-rimmed eyes up to meet mine.

  “Where were you?”

  “I’m sorry, Ruth, I quit my job today. I went to the park, smoked a couple of joints, bought some beers off a guy with a cooler. Then I went to a couple of bars, I guess I lost track of the time.”

  That speech had the effect of staunching her tears, partially by virtue of the fact it was patently the truth. I never lie to Ruth, I don’t even try. You can’t fool Ruth. Anyway, I’d wind up getting drunk later and then blurting out the truth.

  “A fairly typical evening, in other words,” Ruth says wryly, shaking her head.

  “There’s one other thing. I’m not proud of it.”

  I tell her about the stripper.

  “I don’t know why I did it, Ruth. I wasn’t even attracted to her.”

  “Listen, Dave, don’t you realize I don’t care about any of that? Don’t you realize I worry about you? You wander all over the city with your head in the clouds, I never know where you are. I keep expecting to get a call from Harlem Hospital or something, some orderly telling me you’ve got a bullet in your gut. All I ever ask is that you call.”

  “I’m sorry, Ruth, I meant to. I guess I just didn’t know what to say. I guess I needed to walk around a little, think things over.”

  “Well, I’m glad you finally quit that stupid job. I guess I can’t really blame you.”

  She got up, came over to where I was sitting, and — with a gesture similar to the stripper’s, but with infinitely more tenderness and compassion — drew my head to the soft cradle of her bosom. Suddenly she stops, pulls back.

  “Wait a minute. You quit your job. What does that mean?”

  That’s Ruth all over for you. You couldn’t fool her, not for a second.

  “I have to leave New York. I’m sorry.”

  Ruth drives me to the airport the next day. A mostly silent trip: me sitting slumped in the passenger’s seat, smoking out the window (Ruth didn’t like me smoking in the car, but she didn’t want to break her frosty silence to tell me to stop), Ruth sitting ramrod straight in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead, sometimes glancing in the rearview mirror, but never at me, never at me…There wasn’t much to say anyway. We hashed it all out the night before, in sadness and tears. Why? Why? she kept asking, but I had no answer. How could I explain it was an instinct, a direct order from the subconscious? Finally, somewhere around dawn, worn down by her tears, I started to backpedal, to prevaricate — well, to lie, basically. I told her it was only temporary, I just needed to leave for a few months “to get my head together,” after that we’d hook up again, in New York, or Toronto, or some as-yet-to-be-named third city, maybe Chicago.

  I told myself it wasn’t a lie, it was a necessary fiction, a crucial illusion when the truth — I’m leaving, this is it — was impossible to face. Like the notion of an afterlife: it’s too unbearable to believe when the body dies, it’s lights out with so many injustices uncorrected, noble deeds unrewarded. So we invent heaven and hell.

  At the airline counter, Ruth puts the ticket on her credit card. In other words, a new low: I have to borrow from my girlfriend in order to leave her. I muttered something about paying her back, but I think we both knew that was a “necessary fiction.”

  We say our goodbyes at the metal detector. No tears: we both cried ourselves dry last night. I put my worldly possessions — portable manual typewriter, backpack, ghettoblaster — on the conveyor belt and watch them roll through the X-ray machine. As I step through the portals the alarm goes off. The security guard waves his electric wand over my body: the culprit is the change in my pocket. I empty my pocket onto the little plate, go through again. This time I get the green light. I put the change back in my pocket, turn to wave goodbye to Ruth, but she’s already gone.

  3

  Goodbye, Manhattan

  So now here I sit, on a 727 in a thunderstorm at JFK, a plane in the rain, trying to figure out how my life went down the drain.

  I know. Two ways: first slowly, then quickly.

  We’ve been sitting here for an hour, waiting for the
go-ahead from Air Traffic Control. Everyone in Economy is fidgety, restless, heaving heavy sighs, doing crossword puzzles, checking their watches, complaining loudly about the delay. Sitting next to me, in the next seat but one, is a balding, bespectacled man whom I’ve mentally dubbed Mr. Spreadsheet. He’s got his laptop out, and his briefcase is on the seat between us. It’s stuffed with papers covered in endless tiny rows and columns of numbers. Every once in a while, Mr. Spreadsheet peers at these numbers and enters his findings into his computer. He also has a cellular phone, and he makes a big show of placing calls on it. However, despite these histrionics, it’s clear to me that Mr. Spreadsheet is little more than a pest, low down on the money ladder. For one thing, if you’re such a hotshot, Mr. Spreadsheet, why aren’t you hobnobbing with the honchos and nabobs in First, or hanging with the suits in Business? Also, I notice, although Mr. Spreadsheet places many calls, no one ever calls him. He gets people’s voice-mails, or their answering machines, or secretaries. Mr. Spreadsheet leaves messages.

  Three rows back, a baby with a beet-red face is screaming its head off. Two rows behind me, a retired couple in matching pastel romper-room jumpsuits are speaking at top volume about their package trip to New York, comparing the relative merits of Cats vs. Les Miz, MOMA vs. the Met. Their conversation is like nails scratched across the blackboard of my hangover. Can’t there be a special section for people like these two? (“Welcome to Air America. Will that be quiet and contemplative or loud and obnoxious?”)

  That’s the scene in Economy, anyway. In First, they’re drinking champagne and nibbling on caviar canapés and, for all I know, chopping up fresh-off-the-boat quality Peruvian pink-flake cocaine with their titanium credit cards and snorting it off the stewardess’s naked belly. Earlier, the stewardess cruised through Economy bearing an armload of the finest French champers. As she passed my seat I had an all-too-real vision of sticking my leg into the aisle, tripping her up, and then, before anyone knew what was happening, grabbing one of the bottles and flash-guzzling the contents. Instead, she went into First and drew the curtain behind her, the Class Curtain, the maddening, fluttering Iron Curtain that separates the elegant ambience of First from the birth-giving, goatherding bowels of Economy. After that, everyone in Economy could hear the traditional festive pop of champagne corks being un-tethered, a round of murmured toasts, the tinkly music of champagne flutes clinking together.