Felix the bellhop turned out to be a good pal to me here. He ran errands to the pharmacy and liquor store. With his quick presence, his careless intensity of life, he dotted the wastes of the afternoon. He grew assertive. He even bawled me out when he found me shitfaced in front of The Money Game at ten-thirty one morning, and looked as though he might prove difficult about ferrying in the booze. I bawled him out back. 'Fuck you, Felix,' I said. 'I'll use room service.' So he did my bidding, restlessly, with averted eyes. I was touched. Felix was getting money for this — I'd already passed the kid a twenty. But he would have made a lot more if I'd been liquored up all the time. In my reduced state I couldn't bear the rub of his disapproval and so I tried to take it fairly easy, on the whole.
I had fever. And I had Selina fever too. Lying in that slipped zone where there is neither sleep nor wakefulness, where all thoughts and words are cross-purposed and yet the mind is forever solving, solving, Selina came at me in queries of pink smoke. I saw her performing flesh in fantastic eddies and convulsions, the face with its smile of assent and the complicit look in the flattered eyes, the demonology of her underwear suggesting spiders and silk, her sharp shoulders, her fiery hair, the arched creature doing what that creature does best — and the thrilling proof, so rich in pornography, that she does all this not for passion, not for comfort, far less for love, the proof that she does all this for money. I woke babbling in the night — yes, I heard myself say it, solve it, through the dream-mumble—and I said, I love it. I love her ... I love her corruption.
The telephone was a one-way instrument, an instrument of torture. Caduta rang. Lorne Guyland rang. A trio of nutters called Christopher Meadowbrook, Nub Forkner and Herrick Shnexnayder — I had them on the line too. That madman, that real madman, that accredited devo crazoid, he checked in again, three times, four times, son of a bitch. He's really got to me, I admit it. I turn hot now when I hear the empty sound at the end of the line, just before he starts his spiel. His voice is abject, bitter, poor—his voice is so mean. You can hear self-hatred and shame and suffering there. He maunders. He cries. His graphic and detailed threats come as a big relief. I can deal with threats. 'What do I call you?' I once asked him. 'I'll be Frank,' he said, and laughed for a long time, with no pleasure.
He knew about the tennis, and crowed at length over my humiliation. I assume he was glaring down from the glass gallery, having tailed me to the court. 'Black socks,' he said. 'Man, did you look sick.' His general theme? His theme was that I had ruined his life. I had tricked and cheated him many times. Nothing I could do would ever make it up to him. Only my own ruin could ever do that. I didn't argue. I didn't say much at all. I kept wishing he would ring when I had a decent drunk on: then I'd give him a piece of my mind. Sometimes he sounded big, sometimes he sounded small. Often he sounded damaged. If it came to it — who knows? With a few brandies down me I could probably handle him with my brief but nasty repertoire of sudden street stunts. You never can tell, though, with mad guys. I once got bopped by a mad guy and it was like no blow I have ever felt — qualitatively different, full of an atrocious, a limitless rectitude. Their internal motors are all souped up. They can lift buses and things if they're feeling mad enough.
Fielding rang several times too. He was gentle and solicitous, and scolded himself for having run me ragged on the court. It was my own fault, and I said so. He wasn't toying with me. He was just playing his natural game. Christ, he didn't even break stride.
'Hey,' I said. Those guys at the court. In the gallery. Who were they?'
'Why, I really couldn't tell you, Slick. I think they can just come in off the street. Maybe friends of the players, I don't know. Why do you ask?'
'One of them rang me up,' I said vaguely.
'Who was he, Slick? A talent scout?'
'Oh yeah,' I said, and made a long arm for the scotch.
Fielding then offered to send over his personal physician to take a look at me, but I saw no good reason to put the doc through that ordeal.
Someone else rang. Someone else rang me here in New York. In my fever, out of the babble, one day, came a human voice.
By now I had learnt to think of the telephone as something hysterical and malevolent in itself, this dumb doll with its ventrilo-qual threats and wheedles. Do that, think this, pretend the other. Then came a human voice.
I was lying on the bed, hugely, malely, in my winded Y-fronts. Boy am I butch. I was just lying there sweating and swearing and searching for sleep. Then the telephone did its act, its number. One of my big beefs about Selina was that her disappearance obliged me to answer this thing whenever it rang. And it also might be Fielding, I supposed, aiming more and more money my way.
'Hello?' said the knowing voice. 'John?'
'... Selina! Ooh, right, you bitch. Now you just tell me where the—'
'Bad luck. It's Martina. Martina Twain.'
I felt — I felt several things at once. I felt the flinch of shameful unpreparedness. I smiled, and felt my facial flesh ease out of its recent mould. I felt my abscess for a second, lightly tickled by the strange creasing of my cheek. I felt my head-static quieten — and I felt that I really wasn't up to this, not now, maybe never.
She laughed at my silence. The laugh somehow established me as a waster or gadabout—but not unkindly, I thought. By this time I was sitting up straight and smoking and drinking and generally pulling myself together. For I have to tell you right off that Martina Twain is a real boss chick by anyone's standards — even by your lights and scales, your shadowy values and mores, you, the unknown Earthling, unknown to me. Pal, she's class, with a terrific education on her, plus one of those jackpot body-deals whereby a tall and slender-framed girl somehow ends up with heavy tits and a big tush. She has a lively tongue in her lively mouth, and deep-flavoured colouring. American, but English-raised. I've always had a remote and hopeless thing for her, ever since film school.
'Martina... How are you this year? How did you know I was in town?'
'My husband told me.'
'Oh really,' I said sadly.
'He's in London. He just called this minute. So. Why are you here?'
'Oh I get over pretty often these days. I'm getting a film off the ground at last.'
'Yes, Ossie told me. I'm having some people over for dinner tonight. Do you want to come?'
'Oh yeah? Who'll be there?'
'Mostly writers, I'm afraid.'
'Writers?' I said. A writer lives round my way in London. He looks at me oddly in the street. He gives me the fucking creeps.
'That's right. Writers. There's a lady reviewer from the Tribeca Times. There's a Nigerian novelist called Fenton Akimbo. And Stanwyck Mills, the critic.'
'Tonight I can't do,' I said. 'I have to go to this dumb party—with uh, with Butch Beausoleil and Spunk Davis.'
She sounded impressed, or at least her silence did. 'Well I thought you'd probably be busy.'
'Wait a minute. How about breakfast? Things are tight but breakfast I think I can manage.'
We arranged to meet the following morning in the Bartleby on Central Park West. Nine o'clock. At once I grimly instigated my miracle flu cure. You go to bed, wrap up warm, and drink a bottle of scotch. Technically it's meant to be half a bottle, but I wanted to make absolutely sure. I cancelled all calls, put the Don't-Disturb docket on the latch — and I was sleeping like a baby well before ten.
My travelling-clock told me eight-fifteen. I leapt out of bed feeling full of fight, really tiptop, apart from the sweats, the jerks, the shivers, a pronounced dizziness — and a sensation, hard to describe and harder to bear, that I had missed my stop on the shuttle and was somehow due yesterday at the next planet but one. Through the back window I warily inspected the span of the morning pale ... My coffee arrived as I lay smoking in the tub, one leg atremble on the cold white shelf. I slashed myself shaving, then had a big rumble with my rug. I like to recede right out in the open but the slate-grey hanks kept doing bashful curtseys over the scooped zigza
g of my brow. So I soaked the brush and plastered it all back. Next door I drank coffee in thick panting gulps. Eight-forty. Best outfit: long flared jacket, sharply tapered strides, chunky black brothel-creepers. I didn't take a drink but as I locked my door I rehearsed the way in which I would say hi to Martina and laughingly call for champagne.
I headed east, then north. Whew, the day certainly had a funny colour to it — a harp light, but livid, bilious, as if some knot of eco-scuzz still lingered in its lungs. Go on, cough it out. And the shops were still sleeping ... Where was the noise, where were the noisemakers? Only thin traffic with thin gimlet eyes. Suddenly feeling much stranger I stopped an old hardhat in his rompers of municipal blue.
'What's up, pal?' I said rockily, and I think I even grasped his arm. 'Where is everybody? Is this a bank holiday? Jesus, it's so dark! Is there some kind of eclipse deal or something?'
'What time you got? It's nine o'clock.'
'That's what I got too.'
'Nine p.m., sonny. It always gets dark here around now. People all gone home.'
I couldn't take this, I don't know why. So I started crying, not easily either but very tight and needing lots of work from the pumps of the chest. With extraordinary forbearance the old man stood his ground, his hands on my shoulders, saying, 'Hang on to it, kid. You're all right, I reckon. Yeah, you'll do. You ain't got a problem here. Listen — there'll be another day.'
——————
And the man was right. On the third morning I woke to find the sheets were dry. Cautiously I opened my eyes and sat up straight. Yes, it had transferred, it had passed over, it had moved on to another place and was now busy somewhere else. And I thought: home, go home.
I slid out of the bag and rang room service. For over a minute I jogged on the spot. Now this is what waking up is supposed to be like. Was it my fancy, or had I lost a little bit of weight? I shampooed my rug. I found a bottle of disinfectant and took a swig of it. I did a press-up. I called the airline.
Half way through the first pint of coffee I torched a cigarette. Mmm, tasted good. Fags and fever really don't mix. I reproach myself for lack of self-discipline, but you've got to hand it to me when it comes to cigarettes. During my sickness, I realized, I had maintained my snout-count by sheer willpower. There was a slight downcurve or shortfall on the second carton, but nothing I couldn't fix if I smoked two-handed.
I touched my toes. I poured more coffee and unpeeled the fifth carton of sticky half-and-half. I yawned contentedly. Well then, I asked myself — how about a handjob?
I flipped a couple of men's magazines out of my suitcase and returned to the sack to check them out. Let's see here... The whole idea was obviously a very serious mistake. It wasn't any fun at all and gave me an unbelievable neck-ache. Besides, pornography is habit-forming, you know. Oh yes it is. I am a pornography addict, for instance, with a three-mag-a-week and at-least-one-movie habit to sustain. That's why I need all this money. I've got all these chicks to support... While I ruefully rubbed my neck in front of the bathroom mirror, and withstood the gaze of my blasted face, I also received another memory from the gibber of my nights of fever here in hot New York. Someone had come to the end of the long passage outside Room 101, once, twice, perhaps many more times, someone had come and mightily shaken the door, and not with the need for entry but in simple rage and warning. Did it happen, or was it just a new kind of dream? I'm getting new kinds all the time now, sadness dreams, drunk dreams, boredom dreams with me or someone else going on and on for ever — and dreams that I can liken only to the strains of search that poets must endure as they wait for their lines to form. I say this tentatively. I don't know what it's like to write a poem. I don't know what it's like to read one either ... About me and reading (I don't really know why I tell you this — I mean, do you read that much?): I can't read because it hurts my eyes. I can't wear glasses because it hurts my nose. I can't wear contacts because it hurts my nerves. So you see, it all came down to a choice between pain and not reading. I chose not reading. Not reading — that's where I put my money.
I rang Fielding at the Carraway.
'Lorne wants reassuring,' he told me.
'Yeah, well you reassure him for a while. I'm going home.'
'Slick, so soon!'
'I'll be back. I got to sort some things out.'
'What's the problem? Women or money?'
'Both.'
'It's the same problem. When's your flight?'
Ten.'
'So you leave for the airport at 8.45.'
'No. I arrive at the airport at 8.45. I'm flying Airtrack.'
'Airtrack? What do they give you on Airtrack, Slick? A spliff, a salad and a light-show?'
'Well, that's what I'm doing.'
'Listen ... I want you to meet Butch Beausoleil before you wing out. Can you get to my club around seven? The Berkeley,West Forty-Fourth. Leave your bags at the door and just walk on through.'
Yes and I rang Martina too. She accepted my apologies. They always do, at first. Actually she was very sympathetic. We're meeting for a quick one at the Gustave on Fifth Avenue, six o'clock. I levelled with the girl, and told her how ill and lonely and fucked up I'd really been.
——————
Now this was turning into a busy day. Noon saw me queueing at the stall on Sixth Avenue, queueing with the studes and lumberjacks for a cheap thin seat on the wide-bodied, crash-prone aircraft. This is the people's airline: we are this airline's people. They brought the prices down across the board and now only the abject fly Airtrack. A uniformed girl with tomato-red hair and an incredible gobbler's mouth disappeared for an ominous few minutes to check out my US Approach card, then bustled back, her moist teeth refreshed by my sound credit rating. I asked, 'What's the movie?'
She tapped out the query with her red nails. 'They got Pookie Hits the Trail,' she said.
'Really? Who's in it?'
The tolerant computer knew this too. 'Cash Jones and Lorne Guyland.'
'Come on. Who do you like best?'
'I don't know,' she said. 'They both suck.'
I looked in on a crepuscular but definitely non-gogo bar on Fiftieth Street. For a while I read my ticket. On the next stool a trembling executive sank three dark cocktails quickly and hurried off with a dreadful sigh... White wine, me: trying to stay in shape here. It's my first piece of alcohol for — what? — nearly two days. After all that tearful confusion, after feeling like a one-year-old out on the street last night, I couldn't get anything down me. I tried. It tasted of poison, of hemlock. So I just sacked out with a fistful of Serafim. I don't know what J would have done without the old guy in his boiler suit. I really think I might have died, without that human touch . .. Thoughtfully chewing on a pretzel, I suddenly skewered my dodgy back tooth. Knowledge is painful, and I knew then beyond all question that Selina had some other prong on her books. Come on, of course she has. She's smart. She's practical. She'll have some property developer or spaced-out rich kid, some moneyman. She might not even be banging him yet, just keeping him quiet with the odd spangled glimpse of her underwear, the odd audience at the bathtub — yeah, and the odd handjob too, no doubt. After all, this was how she processed me to begin with, when she still had her sugar-daddy ad-exec, plus a twenty-year-old location researcher on the side. Selina knows how to fend them off fondly, she knows how to keep them stacked above her tarmac — she is an old hand at air-traffic control. Then, one day, you get the lot... Where is she now? It is six o'clock over there, when the dark conies down. She is dressing herself for the evening, and she is worried. She is worried. The night is young over there, but Selina Street is not so young, not any longer. You know something? I've got to marry her, marry Selina Street. If I don't, probably no one else will, and I'll have ruined another life.
I finished my wine and settled the tab — surprisingly high. But then it seemed I had had six glasses, or vases, of the friendly Californian cordial. I walked back to the hotel through the crowds (here they come again) of
Manhattan groundlings, extras and understudies, walk-ons and bit-part players, these unknown Earthlings. Hugely the cast swelled into the street. Incensed cabs cussed and sulked. Then I saw banners—brits out of belfast and i love the ira and who killed bobby sands? Bobby Sands, the dead hunger-striker. Hunger-striking must look particularly dire to these guys, each of whom has a neck like a birthday cake. 'You talking to me?' I shouted at one of them. 'Stay out of it. Yeah, what do you know.' Then I remembered that the Prince of Wales was in town too. It was probably him they had in mind. Some of the banners actually said as much, I now saw. Well, hang on to it, Prince, I thought. Don't listen to these bums. You're all right, I reckon — yeah, you'll do.
Back at the hotel I firmed up a deal with the man behind the desk. In exchange for ten bucks and as many minutes' chat about Lorne Guyland and Caduta Massi, he gave me my room until six without charging an extra day's whack. A lifelong Caduta fan, he also had a lot of time for old Lorne. 'He's been at the top for thirty-five years,' he explained. 'That's what he's got my respect for.' The unloved room looked on in quiet martyrdom as I packed my stuff. Mindful of my meeting with Martina, and determined to keep up the good work of the last two days, I had lugged back a quart of Chablis to keep me lightly fuelled throughout the afternoon. But the room was full of scotch and gin and brandy, and I deplore waste. Why, an African family could stay drunk for a month on the gear I'd be leaving behind. I didn't try Selina. I wanted to give her a nice surprise.