'The second wash,' I persisted, 'can be a big mistake. It expands the follicles and then the cleaning agents dry and harden.'
'Really?' said the girl. 'Is that a fact.'
'Yup,' I said. Hair is one of the things I do know something about. I may not know much about anatomy, but I am rug-smart. It's all those stylists, wardrobe girls and make-up technicians I've hung out with, plus my own pricey psychodramas on the topic. I nodded and drank my drink. I looked around. Where were the other candidates? Anyway, I assumed that this unit here in the white bikini was relishing the banter and the rug-wisdom. Chatting with me was presumably a lot more fun than going to bed with me for money — though less profitable, it had to be said. I too was pretty pleased by the way things were going. I was pleased to be sitting here with a strong drink, pleased that I wasn't staked out on the basement floor, playing the romantic lead in a snuff movie. No, it was all very civilized, very civilized indeed.
Now her head dipped as she pried at the fissure of a half-split nail. With that backdrop of hair the small round shoulders gained in defencelessness and pallor— but come on, the Isles was no place for local contrasts. The girl, the lean teenager with W-shaped folds in the vent of her shut armpits, she would suit me right down to the ground. Being the being I am, though, and no other (not yet anyway), I wanted full brothel privileges, the old male deal of dough and careless choice.
'Where are your friends?' I said.
She shrugged, and surveyed the empty bower. Where were mine? Then she raised her face to me and said with sad seriousness, 'Hey. What's your name.'
'I'm Martin,' I said at once... I hate my name. I mean, you have a kid, a little baby boy, and the best you can do with it is to name it John? I'm called John Self. But who isn't?
'And what's yours?'
'They call me Moby. You married?'
'No. I guess I'm not the marrying kind.'
'What do you do, Martin?'
'I'm a writer, Moby.'
'But that's really interesting,' she said sternly. 'You're a writer? What do you write?'
'Uh. Fiction. Stuff like that.'
'John roar mainstream?' she seemed to say.
'Pardon?'
'I mean are they mainstream novels and stories or thrillers or sci-fi or something like that?'
'What's mainstream?'
She smiled appraisingly and said, 'That's a good question . .. I'm fucking my way through college? English Literature, at NYTE? You write novels? That's what you do? What did you say your name was?'
By this time I was more than ready to ask Moby what she did, and how much it cost — but then I felt the full-thighed waft of a new female presence. I turned. A big bimbo in cool pants and bra came swaying from the shadows of the rear corridor. She was built on the Selina model, with several dirty-minded enlargements, the emphasis all on protuberance, convexity. And I thought: I want. Me, for me. She sat with a sigh on a black plastic mushroom by the bar. A few seconds later a smug, exhausted man in an impeccable business suit went staggering past.
'Take care now, She-She,' he said richly.
'You too, sir,' said She-She, in the brisk commercial tones of hostesses everywhere. 'I'd like to thank you for stopping by. See you again, sir.'
'Oh yes.'
She-She's trick staggered on. His slack, slaked face seemed about to drop off with sheer gravity of dissipation. He obviously hadn't' stinted himself with She-She back there. No. He had given his senses all kinds of presents and treats with She-She back there.
'Hey, She-She,' said Moby. 'Martin here's an English writer.'
'Yeah?' said She-She.
'Yeah,' I said. I stood up, in my grey skin, stacked gut and floral wraparound, my hair the colour of London skies — under the bam, under the boo.
——————
'Aren't you excited?' I was asked, ten minutes later.
'Yes and no.'
'Come on. Ooh, you must be so excited.'
'Well yeah,' I said, 'I suppose I am quite.'
True, I was now lying naked in a locked and candlelit cabana, alone with the industrious She-She, whose fleshy right hand made smoothing motions on the hair-dotted slope of my inner thigh ... For a while, back there under the bam, I had hesitated before arriving at my selection. Perhaps little Moby would be hurt by my preference for her talented colleague — would walk out, burst into tears, commit suicide. But there doesn't seem to be a self-pity problem in the Happy Isles. You know, I suspect I'm not cut out for brothels. I can't help getting engaged on the human scale, minimal though this is, fight it though I do. I just can't get off the scale ... Moby and I swapped fond farewells as She-She led me away. I shadowed her down the tapering passage, all its planes carpet-covered, like four floors. She-She then parked me in the aromatic cubicle. Standing at the door with her knuckles on her hips, she bade me recline on the high wall bed, as if for a medical inspection. Yeah, that's what it felt like: a much-dreaded, long-overdue and sinisterly ritzy visit to the dick-doctor. 'Why don't you make yourself more comfortable?' she asked, with a touch of joshing indignation. Obligingly I leaned back an additional inch or two into the firm and furry pillows. 'No — take off your sarong! Now I'll be with you in just one minute.' So I lay naked in the rinsed airlessness of the room, waiting for She-She's return, and wishing pretty earnestly that Ihad taken my chances with Moby.
'If I was you,' resumed She-She, 'I'd be very excited.'
'You would, would you.'
'I'd be just wild.'
'Well I'm looking forward to it, certainly.'
'I'll bet.'
'Yes, it should be fun.'
'I'd just be so excited.'
I frowned and said, 'About what, exactly?'
She-She gave an incredulous pout.
'I mean, you're a great-looking chick and everything,' I said, but—'
'Not me, God! Your new Princess!'
'Oh her.'
So for some time She-She and I talked very seriously about the future Princess of Wales. The future Princess of Wales is evidently a big hit with the hookers on Third Avenue. She-She was full of admiration of Lady Diana's hairstyle, dress-sense and poise. She also had a lot of time for Prince Charles. She liked Prince Andrew. She liked Prince Edward. She even fancied the Duke of Edinburgh. After an increasingly eerie half hour of this I clapped my hands together and said, rather abruptly perhaps, '— Right then. So what are you selling?'
'Oh anything you want,' she said, with no change in the speed of her voice. 'What kind of tip you want to give?'
'Well let's see now. What's on offer?'
'Straight French English Greek Turkish. Or Half'n'Half.'
' ... What's Half'n'Half?'
'Straight with French.'
'What's English?'
'Correction.'
'What's Turkish? — No, don't tell me. Let me have, just give me a — I think I'll just have a handjob.'
'A handjob?' She-She stiffened. 'Okay. If you want. What kind of tip you want to give?'
Naked as I was, I still had my condom-like moneybag on my lap. I had already coughed up forty bucks at the door. How much is a handjob? Come on, what do you reckon? With a shrug I said, 'Fifty dollars?'
'Listen,' She-She told me. 'Why don't you put your clothes on right now and get down to Seventh Avenue or Forty-Second Street. You want to spend fifty dollars, maybe they can help you out. Fifty dollars? Nobody gives me fifty dollars.'
'Wait a minute — hey, take it easy,' I said. I confess I was a little shaken by my playmate's tone. For a moment there she had looked and sounded like a rockhard loan-shark reclaiming an ugly debt. 'I'm new to all this, I'm sorry. Why don't you make a suggestion?'
She-She: 'If you give the fifty cash, then seventy-five on the card plus the credit supplement which is 15 per cent else we lose on the rental or we have a spa-cheque policy which works out the same minus the 15 per cent with a ten-dollar supplement. It makes no difference with a gift this size.'
'. .. A hundred and seventy-five dollars? For a handjob?'
'Listen, this is Third Avenue, not Seventh. Why don't you put on your clothes and —'
'Yeah yeah.'
Oh, they've worked this one out: some male thought has gone into this all right — more, probably, than went into that bamboo shitbox, the birdsong, the lagoon lights. There you are, naked, and tagging your needs with the sex inspector. It's not that she wants to make you feel cheap. She wants to make you feel the cheapest ever,. . Spryly She-She left the room. But she soon came back again. She bore the sliding brace of a credit-card franker. What was going into that crushing ratchet—my US Approach card, or my Johnson? Now, sir, I'M just take an impression of your penis here ... There was some more budget-baJancing over the question of She-She's underwear. The top came off at once. The pants, she said, had not been part of the deal.
'You certainly know how to turn a guy on,' I said, all passion spent, and flicked another twenty into the pool.
To put it at its highest, I was in no more than so-so shape by the time I reached Caduta's. I'd had a couple of drinks, lapped up some fast food, and jumped into a cab. I only had time for fast food. I'm going to kick fast food too, one day. The time has come to kick fast food. Time to fast from it... That session with She-She had done me no good at all. Although I had tarried in the Happy Isles for well over an hour, the actual handjob was the work of a moment — forty-five seconds, I'd say. I had to rack my brains to remember a worse one. 'You must have been really excited,' said She-She quietly, as she started plucking tissues from the box. Yes and no. Between ourselves, it was one of those handjobs where you go straight from limpness to orgasm, skipping the hard-on stage. I think She-She must have activated some secret glandular gimmick, to wrap it up quickly. She then attempted a drowsy recap on the Royal Family but I shouldered my way out of there as soon as I could. The trouble with all this is — it's so unsatisfactory. Regular handjobs are unsatisfactory too, but they don't cost five bucks a second. Overheads are generally low. Say what you like about handjobs, they don't cost eighty-five quid.
The cab journey downtown was an anguish of effort, of clogged and doddering crisis. When I first came to New York even a traffic jam was interesting. Nowadays, though, I can take or leave a traffic jam in New York. I wish I could work out how to use the subway. I've tried. No matter how hard I concentrate I always end up clambering out of a manhole in Duke Ellington Boulevard with a dustbin-lid on my head. You cannot get around New York and that's the end of it... I looked at my watch. I sat sweating and swearing on the sticky back seat. It's heating up here already, yes it's stoking up here nicely for the scorch-riots of August. Of the many directives gummed to the glass partition, one took the trouble to thank me for not smoking, I hate that, I mean, it's a bit previous, isn't it, don't you think? I haven't not smoked yet. As it turned out, I never did not smoke in the end. I Jit a cigarette and kept them coming. The frizzy-rugged beaner at the wheel shouted something and threw himself around for a while, but I kept on not not smoking quietly in the back, and nothing happened.
Local rumour maintains that Little Italy is one of the cleanest and safest enclaves in Manhattan. Any junkie or Bowery red-eye comes limping down the street, then five sombre fatboys with baseball-bats and axe-handles stride out of the nearest trattoria. Well, Little Italy just felt like more Village to me. The zeds of the fire-escapes looked as though they were used in earnest twice a week—they were grimed to a cinder. In these clogged defiles they could never wash off all the truck-belch and car-fart bubbling upwards in vapours of oil and acid and engine coolant. What is the spangled Caduta doing in a dump like this? She's got a suite at the Cicero, tabbed by Fielding Goodney, with a hairdresser, a bodyguard, and a seventy-three-year-old boyfriend ... I ran back and forth across the street until I found the dirty door.
'Now, Mr Self, "John": our movie!' said Caduta Massi. 'I see from the outline that the lady is from ... Bradford. I do not find this convincing at all.'
'Well the outline you saw, Caduta — that was the English version. Now we've switched to New York we can —'
'I prefer Florence. Or Verona.'
'Sure. Okay. Take your pick.'
'And what is the title of the movie?'
'Good Money,' I said. Actually, we weren't sure yet. Fielding liked Good Money. I liked Bad Money. Fielding suggested calling it Good Money in the States and Bad Money in Europe, but I couldn't see the percentage in that.
'Good,' said Caduta. Tell me, John. This Theresa. How old is she?'
'Uh ... thirtyish?' Yeah, thirty-nine. I gazed at Caduta warily.
'Excuse me, but I understand she has a son of twenty.'
'That's true. I suppose she's a little older than that.'
'I myself am forty-one,' said Caduta.
'No kidding,' I said. 'Well, that's perfect.'
'So could you tell me? Why should a woman of this age be taking her clothes off and demanding sex all the time?'
I sat with a cup of coffee on my lap, still half-asphyxiated by what I took to be Neapolitan warmth. The place was crawling with kids — bundles, toddlers, nippers, loping adolescents. There were at least three dad-figures, wearing vests and overalls, in the kitchen next door, hunched over bottles of unlabelled wine and steaming pasta in arterial sauce. They even had a couple of black-clad bagladies sitting silently on straight chairs by the door. I couldn't see any mums about the place. Apart from that, though, the whole crew might have just come in from Ellis Island ... Caduta herself was clearly the queen-bee here. She kept clapping her hands and unleashing her imperious Italian. Like a department-store Santa she shuffled the kids on her lap: the kids, they did their shift, then climbed off. Every now and then a dad would swagger in and talk to her with reverence but also with a certain courtly gaiety. The one-tooth-apiece bagladies murmured and nodded and crossed themselves. Caduta frequently addressed me in Italian too, which didn't make things any clearer.
I coughed and said, 'I'm sorry, Caduta, but what is all this?'