The Homeless Millionaire - Volume 1 Chapter 102 November 18th 1972

The next day – Saturday – reversed the morning sequence at the Noyce family home. While they slumbered in bed, I quietly went about my bathroom business and left the house at half past eight. I wanted to be at the office a few minutes early: Klein and Robinson had both warned me Saturday was the busiest day of the week.

Halfway to the office it began to rain – a thin drizzle that tasted sour when a raindrop hit my lip. I discovered that I had forgotten my umbrella at home, and half-ran the rest of the way. As a result I arrived fifteen minutes early, and found the office door locked.

I was just about to turn away and look for a place to shelter from the rain when I saw Robinson’s Rolls-Royce gliding down the street. It parked some distance away, and I didn’t get a look at Robinson until he got out. He was wearing a borsalino hat and a three-piece marengo suit with a beautiful dove-grey tie that had to be silk. He had no overcoat, and no umbrella. It was clear that weather was something that affected lesser humans. I could easily imagine him wearing the same getup somewhere deep in the Congo jungle, tapping the local chief’s leg with his cane and telling him to sharpen up a bit.

Robinson liked it very much that I was early. After he’d let me in and I’d helped him with his coat, he said:

“It’s heart-warming to see such dedication on your part, my boy. Positively heart-warming.”

I thanked him and made him tea and sat on the chair in the annex while he made phone calls sitting at his/my desk. I was too far away to make out what he was saying, but he seemed to be discussing a menu of some sort. I was sure I heard him mention sandwiches and prawns and deviled eggs.

He was on the phone for a long time: I sat on the chair and smoked cigarettes and tried to look as if I was working. I had the thought that when Robinson and Klein had told me Saturdays were extra busy, they’d meant they were busy for them, not for me.

Klein pranced in just after ten. He practically danced up to the slothes stand and hung up his hat and coat with exaggerated flourishes. Then he came close to blowing my mind by blowing a kiss at Robinson, who raised an admonishing finger. He quickly concluded his phone conversation and said:

“Everything all right, old boy?”

“More than all right,” said Klein. “Much, much more. They’ve bought all three units on the spot.”

“Really?”

“I’ve got the check in my pocket.”

“Show me.”

Klein did. They spent the next minute admiring the check on Robinson’s desk, clucking over it like a pair of hens admiring a prize egg.

“Well that should keep the wolf away from the door,” Robinson said. “Congratulations.”

“Don’t congratulate me. You set them up beautifully. They were eating out of my hand.”

“Did they? How unsanitary.”

Klein laughed and put the check back in its envelope and in his pocket. He glanced at me and said:

“Look at our poor boy over there, we’re keeping him from work.”

“My goodness. Of course.” Robinson got up, and waved at me to come over. When I did, he said:

“My dear boy. We shall be both gone now for, for – ” he looked questioningly at Klein, who said:

“We’ll be back by noon. Man the fort, answer the phone, take messages. Do not masturbate, regardless of circ.u.mstances.”

“Abel, really,” said Robinson. “Please.”

He left and Klein winked at me and grabbed his hat and coat and left, too. I waited to make sure they were really gone and went over to Klein’s and John Macdonald’s desk and found the top drawer as empty as it had been the day before. Then I wandered around the office smoking a cigarette and wondered about Klein’s mood, specifically if it involved enhancers in powdered or any other form. But maybe closing a really big deal had an effect stronger than cocaine. I wouldn’t know, I hadn’t closed any really big deals in my unproductive life.

This started me thinking about the whole gallery thing. In just a couple of weeks, my stuff would be on display. Maybe I’d finally get lucky, and close a good deal or two myself. I started wondering about that, and spent the next couple of hours in a rosy haze. It had been a while since I’d allowed myself to daydream about all the nice things that could happen to me. I knew my pal was watching all this with a wry smile, but I didn’t care.

My reverie was broken by a strange young guy in a white uniform entering the office without knocking, and asking me where I wanted the stuff. I stared at him like a retard and he explained that he was from the catering service and that they’d just brought Robinson’s order. I told him to dump everything on the big coffee table intended for visitors and he shook his head and said he needed more space. He left me to solve that problem on my own while he and another white-uniformed guy started carrying in huge trays all wrapped up in aluminum foil.

I worried about letting them put that stuff on the desks until I saw that they had big white paper tablecloths, with stencilled decorative edging to make them resemble the real thing. I had a brainwave and had a look inside the fridge in the annex and lo and behold, it contained at least half a dozen bottles of champagne. The real thing: Moet Chandon. It seemed there was a major party in the offing.

After the catering service guys had left, I cautiously parted the wrapping on one of the trays and looked right into the yellow eye of a deviled egg. I replaced the foil and retreated to my chair in the annex and lit a cigarette.

I hadn’t even managed to smoke half of it when Robinson and Klein returned. They informed me, a little belatedly, that some of the firm’s most important clients would be arriving shortly for a little friendly get-together. Then they sent me out to get some ice, and when I did they proceeded to make my life living hell.

For the next three hours, I slaved away as a combined maitre d’hotel/cloakroom attendant/waiter. Around ten people arrived, singly and in pairs, and soon the office was pretty crowded. I was getting all the tableware ready for the event and rushing to the front door to greet people and deal with their coats and refilling glasses with champagne in the meantime. There was one skeletal matron with an imperious eye that kept tapping her empty glass with a bony finger every single time I looked at her. A guy in a brown suit and with receding ginger hair was continuously asking me to refresh his plate with this and that – a couple of leaves of lettuce, half a dozen of those excellent prawns, a piece of toast please, but make sure it’s wholewheat – I could swear he was enjoying himself, torturing me like that.

I ran around like a bitch in heat, but managed to score new points with Robinson when he found I could open a bottle of champagne and refill glasses with a certain degree of skill. He began calling me his dear boy after his fourth glass. Klein didn’t bother me. He was a self-service type of guy. He strategically placed a bottle of champagne right at his elbow right at the start of the revelry, and helped himself every couple of minutes or so.

By two o’clock, voices were raised high enough to merge into a droning din. There was hope though, because I’d already opened the last bottle of champagne. That hope kept me going for another hour, while the assembled Vancouver aristocracy went at the food like a horde of starving peasants. The brown suit alone gobbled down enough to feed a family of four for a whole day.

Robinson ate very sparingly: he seemed to be smiling and listening to other people most of the time. Klein, after he’d successfully emptied his personal bottle of champagne, plugged his mouth with a cigar, which provoked cries of distress from a couple of females. He obligingly put it back in his pocket, and lit an offered cigarette instead.

Both Robinson and Klein were doing something very, very right: by the time everyone had left around half past three, they had each set up a couple of meetings to discuss potential business. They were very pleased with that, and falsely contrite that they had kept me for so long.

“Good stuff,” said Klein, beaming at me as he slipped a folded ten-buck note into the b.r.e.a.s.t pocket of my jacket. “He did well, didn’t he, Jack?”

“Oh yes,” said Robinson absent-mindedly, contemplating the debris on one of the food trays with a fork hanging from his hand. After a while, he stabbed a deviled egg and put it in his mouth.

“Hey, you want to help yourself to something before the guys come to clear it away?” asked Klein.

I did. I ate a plate of very good chicken salad followed by another of potato salad. It was four in the afternoon and getting dark when I finally got out of the office.

It wasn’t raining, and I walked all the way to the Park pub on autopilot. I broke Klein’s ten on a pint of Toby, and followed it with three more. The pub kept busier all the time, and by the time I was ordering my fourth pint it was really crowded. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, I was enjoying my full stomach and the taste of booze going down my throat.

I hit the can, got four bottles of Toby to take home, and called Harry on an impulse just as I was leaving the pub.

He wasn’t home, and neither was his mother. I saw I had a whole bunch of quarters, so I called Roch next. But he too wasn’t there. His newly connected phone rang and rang, and he didn’t pick it up.

I got home around nine. I didn’t want to run into the Noyces, and was greatly relieved to find they weren’t home. My room felt as if it had been waiting for me, pining for me.

“You and your booze,” I said, and did something stir in the corner? But when I looked, there was no one and nothing there.

I arranged the bottles I’d brought into a neat line on the table, retrieved my bag of pot, rolled a joint and lit it, and before I knew it I was drawing again. I drew the four bottles standing in the row first, I was using charcoal and it took maybe three minutes. Then I opened a bottle, and drew the remaining three. Then the remaining two. Then a single bottle. Then the space where it had stood, empty except for a bent bottle cap.

I was pretty drunk and stoned by then, but it seemed to me I was onto something good. It was a good series, the mood shifted just as I had wanted it to with the disappearance of each bottle. By the time I looked at the solitary bottle, I wanted to tell it to run and save itself.

I was wavering between the single bottle and the bent bottle cap as the right ending for the series when I heard the Noyces return. I switched off my light and froze still without thinking, as if I were a fugitive hiding in someone’s house. When I became aware of my own behavior, I shook my head.

“Save yourself,” I whispered.

I sat and smoked in the darkness for another hour. Then I relieved myself into the plastic bottle I had pressed into service as my pisspot, and went to bed.

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