Screaming. The perfect metaphor for what was happening inside our souls. Screaming on the floor all day long, hungry to turn the deal that would cheat a fellow worker and a friend out of a lousy thousand bucks.
We had come, by and large, from modest backgrounds. Houses composed of less square footage than the lofts we now occupied. Our parents would have been ashamed of us if they knew what we did all day long. They would have been mortified if they knew what we paid for some genius to come to our lofts and cut our hair once a week. They would have been terrified to see us wake up at six, lying next to somebody whose name we couldn’t quite recall, those we hadn’t managed to scoot out the door in the cold light of dawn, used and discarded like opened soup cans. We didn’t even walk them down to help them get a cab in the rain.
They were anonymous, already gone from my life, facing the long ride back uptown. Walking into their apartments and slinking by their roommates—also just home from evenings just like theirs—realizing, for the first time perhaps, or the thousandth, that this night just past and the others like it were who they had become. These nights they would try hard to forget, the scrawled numbers they would throw away, knowing that if they called, we wouldn’t even remember who they were. And they would sleep for an hour, and then go off to their jobs in publishing houses, at Sotheby’s, at Vogue, where they spent all day choosing bracelets for their bosses to review.
And we, standing under the scalding shower, realizing that we had gone to all the trouble to seduce these beauties, only to wash their smells off our skin as soon as the door closed behind them, the memory of them vanishing in lather and running down the drain.
The nights when it was just easier to order Chinese and the dealer and a hooker, who at least knew the score, who didn’t have to have it explained to them, who at least gave value for the money.
This was us, this was who we were.
Viciousness. Mendacity. Manipulation. Promiscuity. Pour on a little milk, and that is what we ate for breakfast. The trainer at six, who ran his finger across our brow and tasted the sweat, then told us what and how much we had to drink the night before.
And, because we so hated the way we made the money we made, we did our best to get rid of it as fast as we could. If you made $1.5 million a year, you spent $1.7, which, as any Dickensian will tell you, is a formula for misery and degradation.
Forty or forty. Our theme song. Our banner. Our indictment. We didn’t care how we got there, we didn’t care about collateral damage.
My parents in Virginia would not have recognized me, even though Wharton had been my father’s idea in the first place. They lived on in the house where my mother was born, where she had polished the banister for forty years. I hired a housekeeper for them, and of course the housekeeper did nothing right, didn’t do anything the way my mother liked, and she was gone after six weeks.
They kept my bedroom for me, thinking I would come to stay with them for Christmas, a room that was filled with my track and field trophies, my letter jacket hanging in the closet, a picture of me and a girl named Ashleigh Conaway, head of the cheerleading squad, on the desk, she in a strapless gown, her hair done up in a French twist, a corsage of crimson and white carnations on her wrist, our school colors, off to the prom, which meant nothing to me except that I might get the chance, if I got her drunk enough, to fuck her in my father’s car. In the picture, I am wearing a tuxedo in which there are condoms in the pocket, but you can’t see that, you see only two young people, arms around each other’s waists, off to a prom maybe or maybe not to get lucky.
My mother forwarded to me a letter she got addressed to me, and it was from a girl in my class who wrote movingly of a clear memory she had of a homecoming dance she went to alone, because she was obese, and thanking me because I was the only boy there who asked her to dance, shaming me with the heated realization that there was once in me a kindness that I had effectively killed on the trading floor. She told me she had lost a hundred pounds. That she was happy now, married with three, and with a view of the Rockies out her kitchen window. I never answered. The person to whom the letter was written no longer existed.
I told my parents there was a room for them in my loft, knowing that they would never come. New York frightened them. When it came down to it, I frightened them, even more than the filthy, teeming city.
They didn’t understand a life in which home was simply the place to which you went to change your shirt and phone for the limo. In the entire five thousand square feet, there was not one comfortable chair. It wasn’t to be lived in, it was to be photographed, to open its doors only to lonely girls or crowds of a hundred, who came to watch the Super Bowl.
And I can’t express how thrilling it all was. Watching white-coated waiters, any one of whom could have been in a contest to choose the most beautiful waiter in the world, serving mojitos to men and women, any one of whom might have graced the cover of Vogue or Men’s Health. My mother imagined me with a girl who would have been on the cover of Good Housekeeping, and here I was with women whose IQ often was equal to twice their weight, brilliant, slender girls on their way up, girls who were like racehorses in their beauty, if not their lineage. So sleekly groomed. Such silky hair.
Here I was, knowing that deep in the bowels of my building was parked a Lamborghini of which there were only twelve in the world. Knowing that in London there were shoemakers and tailors who had my measurements on file, my tables at Christmas littered with cards, most of them from shopkeepers.
It couldn’t last. We were bright enough to know that. We accepted that. The pace was too fast. The fire was too hot not to burn out. But, God, who, in our position, wouldn’t walk around with an erection twenty-four hours a day? We were in our late twenties and early thirties.
Forty or forty. It was our curse. It was our blessing. It was our mantra. We were simply the people we were described as being. Big Swinging Dicks. And we hated ourselves and we loved ourselves and the world would survive our shenanigans no matter how much destruction we sowed.
And the thing, the thing I had meant to say, got forgotten, leaving me mute as a stone in the gilded desert.
CHAPTER TEN
Fanelli Does Funtown
So, Fanelli wanted to go to Vegas for the night in the worst kind of way. I stopped by his office for a smoke and heard him on the phone with the travel agent. He was yelling.
“Listen, hon,” he bellowed. “Doll. Maybe I didn’t make myself clear. I want to rent, I want waiting at the curb at the airport, a white convertible El Dorado. Did you get that? White. I want the biggest, baddest Cadillac fucking El Dorado there is to be had, and it better be there the second the plane lands and it better be fucking white.” He slammed down the phone. “I love dealing with the simple American public!”
“Fanelli,” I said. “I can understand wanting a Cadillac. I can understand the convertible part. But why white?”
He looked at me with that gesture of his hands, wide away from his body, that indicated my-God-you-can-be-so-stupid-it-appalls-me, and he said in his most condescending tone. “Black for Tahoe. White for Vegas.”
The reason Fanelli wanted to go to Vegas was that Fanelli was arranging his own bachelor party. Fanelli was getting married, and as he said, he didn’t trust the rest of us mindless jerks to arrange it. “I mean, Cubans and steaks in the cigar room at Frank’s and then on to Billy’s Topless. What kind of shit is that?”
Fanelli was getting married because he had fallen in love during the Hamptons summer with an English girl named Anthea. Anthea worked in an advertising agency, which seemed incredibly glamorous to us, although she said she did it mainly because she could wear painter’s pants and ripped men’s T-shirts to work and nobody said a thing. Obsessed as we were with the finer points of Italian tailoring, this seemed like a good deal to us, although, when he met her, she was standing at the bar in a gold lamé microskirt and a sheer golden blouse through which you could see the dark aureole of her nipples, and she looked like a mo
del, which is what she used to be before she went back to school and became an art director. “Standing around all day in other people’s clothes,” was all she had to say about the modeling profession in general.
I think she played the English girl thing a little too hard, and she looked like she had chopped off her hair with a pair of dull paper scissors, but she was a good thing and she could smoke cigars with us and drink almost anybody under the table.
She never went to work before eleven because she had such a strenuous nightlife, and she said that, when her bosses remarked that she was late, she always simply said, “Yes, I am, actually.” She said making up excuses was the way to hell because she had to make up so many of them and she had to remember what she’d said the time before and there were only so many times you could say you had to take the dog you didn’t have to the vet, or wait for the plumber, and that, anyway, part of her job was to suck up the culture as it was happening at that very moment and then spew it back out in the pages of magazines and flickering TV screens in the half-dark living rooms of Cleveland and Mobile and it wasn’t her fault if so much of the culture happened to take place at two in the morning.
Anthea made it through the radar because she was like all the girls who made it through the radar. She was tall. She was thin. She wasn’t a total moron. And she brought something to the party, what with her cigar-smoking, Remy-swilling ways. Referring to her weight and her remarkable bone structure she said, “I am a girl composed entirely of dairy products.”
So Fanelli had spent $50K on a ring and taken her to Chantarelle and they were going to be married in two weeks. I was going to be a groomsman.
They were in fact, going to be married twice, once in New York and once, the following summer, in England, where of course her parents were some sort of landed gentry and lived in some enormous, drafty pile and everybody would show up in hats and morning jackets and drink sherry on the lawn before the wedding, which would be performed by dear Vicar somebody or other.
She knew everybody in the fashion world. Geoffrey Beene was making her wedding dress. Kevyn Aucoin was doing her makeup. He’s dead now. Painkiller overdose, after making so many cadaverous girls look so fabulous.
So steaks and topless bars seemed a little underwhelming to Fanelli. He was in love, and vowed that once he was married he was going to change his ways and become a regular person and move to Greenwich and have children who would have two middle names in that English way and he just wouldn’t be available on the let’s-go-to-William’s-on-Carmine-Street-and-pick-up-an-eight-ball circuit anymore. So he wanted Vegas for one night.
He wanted Vegas and everything it had to offer in the way of illicit, drunken, lewd behavior.
Anthea, who hauled in $200K a year just to make girls’ hair shine, not bad cash for a twenty-six-year-old visitor to our shores, was going to Jamaica with three friends for the weekend to dance with Rasta boys and smoke big spliffs and come home completely unnerved by the whole experience. She was really just like one of the guys and that’s why we liked her and didn’t feel so badly that Fanelli was moving away from us.
So it was Trotmeier, and Frank, who was so large and not small-boned—so big in fact that he had a special clause written into his contract that said he could take a limo to work every morning because he couldn’t fit into an ordinary cab, and had to fly first class whenever he traveled on business—
and, of course, there was Fanelli and me.
We landed in Las Vegas at three on Saturday afternoon. I was a little peaked, since I’d been up all night the night before with Carmela, having the usual you-don’t-love-me-enough discussion, but a couple of gin and tonics and a power nap on the plane had put a little color back in my cheeks. I just didn’t feel ready to be festive enough, so I knew I’d have to dig deep and suck it up to get through all the carnage.
Sure enough, there was a big white El Dorado parked at the curb, with a cowering little girl from Hertz holding the keys for Fanelli. He gave her fifty dollars. “See?” said Fanelli. “We’re having fun already!”
We pulled up at Caesar’s Palace in a big hoopla of vulgarity and testosterone. They’d seen it all before. They didn’t raise an eyebrow. Fanelli said Vegas was the only town in the world where you could land, rent a car, stay the weekend, and return the car with less than five miles on it.
We could have taken a cab for a lot less, but Big Frank wouldn’t fit, and he would have whinged all the way. That was an English thing Anthea had taught us. “Oh, stop whingeing,” she would say, when Frank made a ruckus because his steak wasn’t really black and blue.
At the desk they gave me a key to my room, and I asked how to get there. “First you go through the casino,” said the key keeper. In Vegas, at Caesar’s Palace, to get anywhere you have to go through the casino. “And then you turn right at Cleopatra’s Barge, our floating restaurant, and then you walk down the hall until you come to the eighteen-foot statue of Joe Louis and then you turn left and take the elevator up to Room 1812 in the Fantasy Tower.” And he was absolutely right.
When we checked in, Fanelli gave us each an envelope and said, “Welcome to Vegas boys. See you for dinner at eight. Look sharp.”
This is what Room 1812 looked like: it was really big. It was aqua. It was on two levels.
On the upper level, there was an eight-foot round bed, covered in a burgundy velvet bedspread. There was one chair. On the night table, there was a clock radio that was literally broken in half, as though the previous tenant had taken a pickax to it after a bad night.
There was a single small window, through which you could look out across the desert, except that the window was covered with a cement trellis, so you could just get these tiny little glimpses through the interstices. The window didn’t open. They really didn’t want anybody to get a notion to jump out the window of Room 1812 after a bad night at the tables. No matter how desperate you were, you were not about to jump out of Room 1812 in the Fantasy Tower.
But here’s the incredible part. Next to the bed, literally six feet away, on the lower level, there was an eight-foot octagonal, three-foot-deep Jacuzzi, like an above-ground pool. Eighteen stories above ground. I guessed that was the fantasy part of the Fantasy Tower.
I had to search to find the toilet, a tiny closet hidden away on the other side of the room. Everything in there was petite—a tiny toilet, a minuscule shower and sink.
I opened Fanelli’s envelope. Inside, there were six condoms, a gram of cocaine, and ten one-hundred-dollar bills, along with a note that said, “Thanks for sharing my last night on earth as we know it.” Fanelli was a generous guy.
I tried to lie down for a while and it was then I noticed that directly over the bed there was an equally large mirror. I wouldn’t have believed it either, except I was there.
Sleep wouldn’t come. I kept thinking of myself floating on the mirrored ceiling, I kept trying to take in the whole of it, the gestalt, and it was just too mind-boggling. I guess Vegas just isn’t a nap kind of town.
So I got up, did a few lines of Fanelli’s excellent coke, and that perked me right up. I decided to go prowl.
In the casino, there was every kind of craven face you could imagine. There were a lot of fat people. There were a lot of Asians. It smelled like sweat—and money, of which there were vast amounts exchanging hands.
At the slots, there was a seventy-year-old woman at a slot machine in a thin housedress and bedroom slippers relentlessly pulling the handle with a bucket of quarters in front of her and a cigarette dangling from her withered lips.
I thought, how could a habit that is so sexy and attractive in young people be so dirty and repellent in the old? Note to self: Give up smoking at forty. You can behave badly and still be charming and people get over it. Behave unattractively and just watch the velvet ropes go up all over town. I would be the only person in history to give up smoking not for health but for fashion. But I thought: What the hell, I didn’t come to Vegas to give up smoking.
I didn’t bet in the afternoon. I just wandered around, scoping out the joint. It was vast, and there were no clocks, like in the office, and people were basically behaving like they did on the trading floor. I felt perfectly at home.
I drank cocktails and watched the action. The cool silence of the blackjack table. The heated frenzy of a hot craps table, the sweaty drear of a cold one. The timid bettors, the ones who couldn’t not play even knowing they couldn’t afford to lose. The expansive ranchers with stacks of black chips sitting in front of them. The honeymoon couples, playing with Daddy’s money.
My life seemed so large to me, wandering through the casino; young, with a lot of future and a lot of money and a lot of girls and a gram of cocaine upstairs in the Fantasy Tower. I could feel the pulse of the room. I knew I was going to win and I had time.
There were hookers everywhere. Beautiful girls. But I didn’t feel like sex at the moment. I just wanted to be an ordinary American who had flown to Vegas with his best friends and arrived in a white El Dorado with three other rich, good-looking young men to take in the sights. I got sentimental for Fanelli, for his generosity, for his expansive good nature, for the night after night we had sat together drinking and talking about things, not the first one of which I could recall. And laughing. Always laughing at the little people.
I didn’t play because I didn’t want to lose. I only wanted to win and that would come later. I could feel it in my blood.
I looked at my watch. It was seven o’clock. There was no other way to gauge time. You couldn’t look outdoors. At Caesar’s Palace, there was no outdoors, and no time.
On my way to my room, I saw a couple in tennis whites come in through one of the smoked glass doors. I looked at them, astonished that there were tennis courts at the hotel, that anybody would come to Vegas to play tennis. The brief glimpse of sky through the sliding doors showed bloodred and pale blue.