You. Free. Save. Money. Now

No one gets thrown out of Grossman's Tavern. But Dee and Ray did, the night we first met, when the junkie waiter ejected them for walking in with open beers. I found the two of them sitting on the curb, clutching empty Canadians.

"You got your first-and-last, Donna?" asked Ray. "Got any booze on you?"

I handed him my cheque and the three of us wandered down Spadina Avenue, looking for a late-night liquor store; not easy to find in Toronto in nineteen eighty-three, take my word for it. Liquor was sold by day, under the pitiless gaze of the Queen's official portrait. It seemed to say: "What...another bottle of Crown Royal?"

Ray and Dee are famous now, of course; you've probably seen Dee in that ad for St. Brendan's Hospital Foundation. She's the blonde scientist with her hair in a bun, peering into a test tube, saying, "My mission is to get more women interested in science." I'm sure Dee said that at one time or another but it was not the type of thing she would have said the night she got tossed from Grossman's. She mostly said things like "Gotta find a fucking booze can" and "What about that peach schnapps you had under your bed, Ray, any of that left?"

As for Ray: well, after events of the past year, everyone has an opinion about Ray. There was that news report about the mining stock everybody wanted to invest in. The photo showed Ray rushing out of a courthouse, holding a briefcase in front of his face.

Ray was the kind of man whose life was one long pissing contest.

He'd get up at five a.m. to do two thousand crunches and five thousand bicep curls followed by a 10K run. Then he'd come back and brag about his exercise routine and caloric intake. If you were eating in front of him, he'd say things like, "Do you have any idea how long you'd have to exercise to burn that off?"

I didn't want to live with him. But I was desperate. So were Dee and Ray. Most people found their house disgusting. Cockroaches skittered over the bloated, spongy carpets by day, swarming out at night; I learned to close my eyes for a few seconds after turning on lights. The roach bombs Ray set off coated the linoleum with a sticky insecticide. He'd vacuum up hundreds of carcasses, but the bugs always returned. Each closetless bedroom had a rusty sink and a broken stove, the remnants of a stint as a rooming house for Hungarian refugees during the nineteen-fifties. The house reeked of the past. No amount of bleach or bug spray could change that.

Ray was an M.B.A. student. Dee was a PhD candidate, doing medical research. Me, I wrote junk mail for a magazine publisher. Their biggest magazine -- "The jewel in our crown", my boss liked to say -- was Maple Life. Yeah, the one your mother reads. Maybe even your grandmother. It's one of those legendary magazines full of kitchen-tested recipes and articles about immune system disorders that medical science insists don't exist.

Comforting reads like Maple Life thrive during periods of stagflation. And yes, that's a real word: a period when the economy is stagnating but the price of goods continues to rise. Ray explained the concept to me.

You don't want to be young and unemployed during a period of stagflation.

When I first moved in with Dee and Ray, I was working in a diner. My mother would call and complain, in her Italian dialect: "If you're going to be a dishwasher, wash dishes in Fort Erie. Why did we send you to university?" And I'd say, "Ma, it's just until I find a real job."

Our only phone was in a dim alcove by the front door. Ray walked in once while I was speaking to my mother in Italian. Later, I heard him on the phone speaking what sounded to me like Russian.

"Polish," he explained when I asked him. "By the way, don't talk greaseball in front of Dee. She's a snob."

Ray and I rarely spoke about our ethnicity again, although he showed up after a trip home to Mimico with a dish of cabbage rolls.

"Help yourself," he invited Dee and me. "If you like this shit."

Then he went off to do his five thousand crunches.

Once, Dee walked in while my mother was in our kitchen, staring into the pantry.

"Cara, what is all this ...?" She used a dialect word that roughly translated to 'garbage'.

She was referring to the boxes of instant macaroni and cheese, the bottles of ketchup, and Ray's stockpile of Special K.

"That's what we eat, Ma."

Dee came in from feeding her mice in the lab. I introduced my mother. Dee politely shook her hand.

My mother turned to me and said in Italian: "Why is this mangiacake shaking my hand? Is this a business meeting?"

"My mother says she's delighted to meet you," I told Dee.

"Same here," said Dee.

After my parents were safely on the highway, Dee asked, "What was that your mother was speaking? Portuguese?"

"Italian. A dialect, anyway."

"Oh."

Dee's parents lived in Kingston and never visited, although her mother called occasionally.

"This is Joan Bentley. Is Deirdre there?"

"She's at the lab. Do you want to leave a message?"

There was always a pause; she would sigh and say to someone at her end, "She's at the lab again, Robert", then come back on the line and say, "No, thank you. I shall call back." She would hang up without saying goodbye.

After a few weeks of dishwashing, I was hired by an art gallery. My job was to sell junk. Posters, statuettes, overpriced jewellery.

This job led directly to being hired by Maple Life. The interview went something like this:

BOSS: Can you write?

ME: I have my B.A.

BOSS: Fine, but can you write to sell?

ME: Funny you should ask. I'm currently employed as a sales representative at the Royal Gallery of Art Gift Shop.

BOSS (Sitting back, making a little church steeple with his hands): Really! We'll get back to you.

When I left the office, I saw the other candidates sitting in the waiting room. Most were people in their thirties. One white-haired guy looked older than my father. Victims of stagflation.

When I got the job, Ray said, "You wanted it more than they did. And you probably came cheap, am I right?"

For three months, I was a trainee. I had to read a book called Principles of Direct Response Revealed! Then they gave me low level jobs, like writing headlines for those little cards that fall out of magazines. My best one was 'GET YOUR FIRST ISSUE FREE!'

Eventually, I moved up to writing letters that offered a free ultrasuede tote with a one-year subscription to Maple Life. Don't laugh. It worked like a charm.

Within six months, I had mastered the principles of direct response. "Whenever possible, use real names. Nobody likes being called 'Dear Valued Reader'," explained my boss. "Start sentences with 'you'. Stick in 'free', 'money, 'save' and 'now'."

I have built an entire career out of this small body of knowledge. Turns out, it would come in useful when I started writing for the Internet. All the same rules apply. You, free, money, save, now. I discovered that, using those words, I could convince almost anyone to do almost anything on the Internet.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. In nineteen eighty-three, the Internet hadn't been invented yet. We still read newspapers in those days. Every morning, Ray unfurled the business pages on our kitchen table.

"See this guy?" said Ray, pointing to a magnate who had just bought his fifth publishing company. "I'm going to be that guy someday."

The magnate was pork belly-smooth. Like duck fat packed into an expensive suit.

Dee glanced at the newspaper. "He's repellant," she said.

"He's rich," Ray said. "So what if he needs to lose a few pounds?"

"He's full of himself."

"He's my new boss," I said miserably.

Dee and Ray looked at me in surprise. "You're kidding!" they said, almost simultaneously.

"It's not like I report to him or anything. He bought the company. Everybody got a letter signed by him." I didn't tell them that mine had started with 'Dear Valued Employee'.

The next afternoon, we were herded into the lobby so that the magnate could address us. "Welcome, all of you, to our new regime," he began.

He sounded like a parody of an evil rich guy from a Depression-era radio play. He went on and on about editorial integrity and advertising revenues and then told us that, by the end of the month, half of us would be gone. This would get the dead wood out of the company and make Canada a better place to live. As it turned out, I was one of the so-called lucky ones.

"That's because you're young and work cheap," my boss said to me as he packed up his office.

On New Year's Eve, we threw a George Orwell-themed party to welcome in nineteen eighty-four. Ray vacuumed up the cockroaches. Dee invited the kids from the lab: geeky male scientists, suddenly trendy in their Devo glasses, and lab techs with moussed hair. She also invited a law student named Ernie who came dressed like one of the pigs in Animal Farm.

"You two have a lot in common," Dee said. "Ernie is ethnic, too."

"Italian?" I asked him.

"Portuguese," he answered, glancing around. "Dee, where can a guy get a beer in this dump?"

Ernie spent the rest of the party dancing with Mitzi Ng, a biochemist.

"She's cute and rich," shouted Ray to me, over the Talking Heads. "What do you expect?"

"I could care less," I shouted back.

"Yeah, well, Dee thought you and Mr. Dago would hit it off."

"What about you? Where are all your girlfriends?"

"I'm saving myself for Dee," he yelled back. "Not that her parents would ever put up with a Polack like me."

That was when I finally knew for sure that Dee and Ray weren't sleeping together. At least, not often.

That spring, we received a letter from our landlord that began 'Dear Valued Tenant(s)'. The period of stagflation was over and he planned to make a bundle on our cockroach-ridden Victorian.

Dee and Ray were about to finish grad school and could soon afford their own places. So we split up. Against all odds, we stayed in touch. Dee included me in her circle of medical research friends. Eventually, she settled down with a kinesiologist named David. Dee referred to him as a sports medicine specialist. Ray became a financial analyst. He regularly met me for lunch and offered up stock tips. Eventually, I started jotting them down.

"Ever think about getting into futures, Donny?"

"I think about the future all the time, Ray."

"Not the future, you moron. Futures. Grain, corn, pork bellies. You bet that the prices of commodities will go up and if they do, you win."

"And if they don't?"

"That's the price you pay."

Once, after another employee at Maple Life joined us for lunch, she asked if Ray was my brother.

"No! He was my roommate. Why did you think we were related?"

"It's the way he talks to you," she said. "Like a big brother talking to his kid sister. Mildly abusive."

.

That was nineteen eighty-four. When we were young. We're all turning fifty this year. These days, Dee saves people's lives by injecting them with a biomedical device that zooms around their bodies repairing rogue DNA, like the miniature spaceship in The Fantastic Voyage. She and David have two girls and one boy. Gifted, of course.

Me, I switched from junk mail to e-mail; not for Maple Life, which is now full of articles about self-pleasuring and cottage decorating, but for a magazine that used to be called Stylish Maturity. The publisher took it online and renamed it Boom-A-Logue. It's a cross between a catalogue and a magazine. You never have to try to figure out where the articles stop and the advertising starts; it's all advertising, really. I think that's a lot more sincere, especially for baby boomers who are shrewd enough to know that everybody is trying to sell them something twenty-four-seven.

They stopped calling me a writer. My job description became 'content provider'.

As for my personal life: no man, no kids. Tuscany every other year, a timeshare up north and a condo on the waterfront. Snugsville.

Ray used to drop in from time to time with a bottle of Pinot Noir. We'd talk about the economy and politics, agreeing more than we used to. After we'd finished the wine, he'd usually say something like, "Why didn't we ever fall in love, Donny?" I'd answer, "Because you were saving your sperm for Dee." And he'd say, "You always make me laugh, I guess you're good for something after all." And I'd tell him to go fuck himself and drive carefully.

After one of his visits, I watched him from my balcony, tramping through the slushy parking lot. He looked grey and tired, and I felt badly that I'd never properly thanked the stupid son of a bitch for setting me up financially, and for keeping up these rituals that we both depended on. There's something comforting about knowing that the conversation will unfold the same way every time:

You're good for something after all, Donny.

Go fuck yourself, Ray.

That was just before Ray started showing up in the business news with his briefcase over his face. And there was that interview with the elderly woman whose savings were wiped out when Ray put her into that phony mining stock that everyone was so hot on.

In the pictures, Ernie is clutching Ray's arm. His mouth is open as though he's saying, No comment. When Ray disappeared (went on the lam, went underground, skipped bail, whatever you want to call it), Ernie refused to give him up and was disbarred. But he'd married Mitzi, heiress to the Ng real estate empire. So, no biggie.

Where was I? Oh yes, Ray's disappearance. Sitting at Dee's kitchen table, I was telling the story about the last time I'd seen him. The bottle of Pinot, the conversation, "you're good for something", "go fuck yourself, Ray", etc., etc., and suddenly Dee stood up and announced, "Donna, if you know where Ray is, you have to tell him to give himself up. He sold that phony stock to my parents. And to David and me."

I was shocked. Ray's advice to me had always been as golden as the retriever lying adoringly at Dee's feet.

But I shook my head said, "I guess he screwed us all, then."

The last time Ray showed up at my place, he'd put on weight and grown a beard. He brought a bottle of Scotch. And he called himself 'Ben'.

"You're taking a bit of a risk showing up here," I told him. "Not that I'm not sort of glad to see you."

"Nah. Ernie's all over it. They stopped watching your place a long time ago."

"Dee thinks you should give yourself up. Maybe join your friend in jail." I was referring to my former boss, the magnate, who was in a minimum-security facility for cooking the books at Maple Life.

"Jail is strictly for chumps, Donny. Listen, I have a proposition for you."

He laid it all out for me, keeping it simple. I had the communication skills, he had the business skills. Sitting under a palm tree in some tax haven, we could make a lot of money over the Internet.

I watched the ice melt into my Scotch, trying to decide how to let him down.

So here we are in St-Zotique-sur-mer*. The locals know us as Joan and Robert Bentley.

Ray -- I mean Robert -- taught himself Flash and HTML so that we can keep the business strictly in the family. I write the e-mails. They go all over the world. The Internet is definitely the best thing that's ever happened to me.

A lot has changed since nineteen eighty-three, I guess. But life is still a pissing contest. And people still respond to the same words. You. Free. Money. Save. Now.

(*You didn't think I'd tell you where we really are, did you?)