'Well sure. Didn't you?'
'No, I knew all along. It was clear from the stories.'
'What stories? Tell me them at least.'
'The short stories, John. The Ironic High Style, remember?'
'Oh them.'
But here I saw the way the streets were going, how they darkened despite the sun, the juicy air, the innocence of the covering blue. Three blocks back there were canopied doorways, wealth-guards in livery and vistas of brownstone. Now the lanes were earless, lawless. We skirted the spreading sponge of split mattresses and jaw-busted suitcases facedown in the gutter, saw the dark excluded profiles behind windows and chicken wire — this was no-money country, coldwater, walkup. And so sudden, the breakdown, the feelable absence of all agreement, of all consensus — except for that money-hate or anger you get when cities wedge their rich and poor as close as two faces of a knife ... I marked the poverty and the poverty marked me. And I also sensed — perversely, unnecessarily, waste-fully — how gay Fielding and I must look, him in his sneakers and strontium rompers and flyaway hair, me with my butch suit, thin jekylls and proud-rounded shoes. Even the hardened faggots of Manhattan (I fancied) were gazing down at us with concern from their lofts and condos and thinking — we're pretty brazen, God knows, but these guys, they'll queer the whole pitch.
'Hey nigger brother!'
Ninety-Eighth Street. I turned my head. Two black guys with a big dog cocked on its leash.
'Fuck this shit, man. I think my dog go bite one of them white dudes.'
'Fielding,' I said tightly. 'Is this smart? Let's get the car. This is fucking pangerland.'
'Walk on, Slick, with your head high. Nothing's happening.'
He was wrong. Fielding was wrong. Something was happening, for sure. When you've brawled around for as long as I have your senses get to know the kind of fix that you can't just walk through or away from. You get to know when you have to give satisfaction. Less than a block ahead the scatterings of low-caste colours had begun to solidify into a group or gauntlet. I saw loud T-shirts, biceps, facial hair. These people, they had nothing to tell us except that we were white and had money. Perhaps they were also saying — you cannot go slumming, not in New York. You just cannot go slumming, because slumming pretends that slums aren't real. They were real. They would show us that much. By now I was obeying instinct or habit, checking the chain for strengths and weaknesses. Avoid the left. Stay kerbside — yeah, that sick-looking little guy there. Burst in with blending fists and run like a bastard for the green slope ahead. I let my eyes flick sideways. Fielding raised his right arm, an instruction to the Autocrat, but his gaze and stride were direct, unfaltering. The car surged up and then idled on snuffling treads. Fielding slowed. He made an elaborate gesture, explanatory, supercandid. And nothing happened. The path cleared and we walked on through.
'Columbia, Slick... Chicago, LA, wherever — in America our seats of learning are surrounded by the worst, the biggest, the most desperate ratshit slums in the civilized world. It seems to be the American way. What does this mean? What is its content? Now over here John, we get a really superb view of Harlem.'
I took a look at Columbia. I checked it out. I've seen these pillared, high-chinned buildings, their deep chests thrown out in settled cultural pride. The place had nothing to tell me that I didn't already know. With Fielding's wrist on my shoulder I now approached the castle's steep rampart. We leaned on the railing, and peered down through the littered lattice of cross-angled trees, their backs broken in their last attempt to scramble up the cliff. Beyond lay the square miles of Harlem — part two, the other, the hidden half of young Manhattan.
'What happened?' I asked, and lit another cigarette, still heavy from the unburnt fight fuel, the awakened glands.
'It was the car, that's all.'
'Did our guy have a gun on them? I didn't see.'
'Nah. Well, he had his gun ready, I guess. But it was no big deal. The car would do it for a minute or two. That's all we needed.'
I suppose I understood. The Autocrat, the chauffeur, the bodyguard: this showed them the gulf, the magical distance. How did Fielding's gesture go? One palm arched on the heart, the other turned in polite introduction towards the car, saying, 'This is money. Have you all met?' Then the hands brought together, face up, an offering of the simple proof. And they backed off in that stumbling, hurried, slightly reckless way that traffic pulls over for ambulances or royalty. I said, 'Why?'
'Sightseeing. Local colour. The car's all yours, Slick. I'm going to run on back.'
I watched him jog off, the head held high for the first twenty yards, to promote oxygenation, then tucked in low as he measured out the rhythm of his pace. I turned and looked out over the slanted, foreshortened wedge of streets and stocky tenements, and for once the strain in my ears found the appropriate line, the right score. With a low hum of premonition my eyes panned Harlem, as if out there among the smokestacks and flarepaths lay my damage, my special damage, waiting for birth or freedom or power.
——————
There is only one Earthling who really cares about me. At least, this human being loyally follows me around the place, keeps tabs on me and rings me up the whole time. No one else does. Selina's never there. All the others — it's just money. Money is the only thing we have in common. Dollar bills, pound notes, they're suicide notes. Money is a suicide note. Now this guy, he talks about money too, but his interest is personal. His interest is very personal indeed.
'You don't think about them,' he'll say. 'You don't think about them. You go slumming, but you never think about them — the others.'
'Who?' I asked him. 'You poor guys?'
'Listen. I've stolen food, out of hunger, just to stay alive. You can do it for a week. After a month you get the look. You look like the sort of guy who has to steal food to stay alive. And that's it. All over. You can't steal food any more. Why? Because they can tell, the second you walk in the store. They can see no money in you. Not even the memory of money. Imagine.'
'Sounds rough. Just goes to show that it's a really dumb move, being poor. Listen, I've seen all that. This isn't news to me, pal. I've heard this stuff all my life.'
'You're poor. Still you're so poor.'
'You're wrong. I got stacks of dough and I'm going to make lots more. Now you, you sound seriously strapped for cash.'
Telephone Frank turns out to be not only a money expert, or an expert on not having any. He also talks about the chicks a good deal. For example:
'You just take women and use them. Then you toss them aside like a salad.'
'Wrong again. I keep trying to do that — but none of them will stand for it.'
'Women, for you, they're just pornography.'
'Listen, pal, I've got a date. Lots of rich pretty people are expecting me downtown.'
'We'll meet one day."
'I'm really looking forward to it ... Okay, Frank, I'll see you around.'
I arrived at Bank Street eight o'clock sharp, in the very last of the light. Overhead the sky still scintillated, but there was a film of green up there among the pinks and blues, an avocado tinge of beautifying city sickness ... My best suit, me — dark grey with a thin chalk stripe. I additionally sported a wide silver tie furled in buxom Windsor knot. The West Village, where the streets have names.
Bank Street looked like a chunk of sentimental London, black railings and pale blossoms girding the bashful brownstones, even a cautious whiff of twig and leaf in the night-scented air. As I strolled along I watched an elasticated black kid, Felix's age or maybe older, gangle past with his pretty little friend. Negligently he reached into a front garden and yanked a flower from its tree. He offered the pink blossom to his chick, who twirled it in front of her briefly lit face before dropping it to the ground. 'Hey,' he said. 'Hey, that was a beautiful thing I did. That was a beautiful thing I did — with the flower. What you throw it away for, cunt?' He walked on, his spring wound tight now, the shoulders stiff and sullen. She dropped back and crouched to retrieve the shattered thing, gathering dry petals in the dip of her dress.
I had about a half-hour to kill, I reckoned. Taking a couple of rights, I found myself on the ramp of lower Eighth Avenue — a medium-poor people's district, I assumed. Shoe Hospital, Asia de Cuba Luncheonette, Agony and Ecstasy Club, ESP Reader and Adviser, Mike's Bike World, also LIQ, BEE and BA. Are the clips on the sidewalk grills meant to look like the soles of giant feet? Young men playing chess on the hoods of parked cars. A pale tattoo on a pale old arm. Here they come again, young and old, health and distemper mixing like American prodigies of money and no money, beauty and malformation, Manhattan miracles of heat and cold. Some of the people are in terrible disrepair. Boy, could they use a little investment, a little gentrification. But I love the dense variety. Yes, it stirs me. After this, London feels watery and sparse... Now I idled in the yellow light of closed banks, municipality and bad business all done for the day. Why aren't banks as diverse and improvisational as every other American concern? Why can't we have Mike's Bank World? I don't know, but I feel steadier. I've drunk nothing all day. I drank nothing at lunch, despite the horrendous Malvinas Surprise I ordered (a triple mixed grill swaddled in steaks). I want to be at my very best tonight. I've showered and everything and I don't look too bad. That hike with Fielding, that uptown safari really did me good. I need it, I need to be strong. You think I'm paranoid but I tell you, man, there is something going on. Are you in on it? I've had this terrible feeling ever since I came to New York last time, a feeling of — a feeling of ulteriority. I fry to convince myself that it's conditioning, the poor boy and his fears of success. It's not the film. The film is fine. It'll happen. But something else is not fine, something bigger. It is bigger than what Frank the Phone is doing to me, whatever that is. It is bigger than what Selina is doing to me, whatever that is. It is bigger than what I am doing to me... Turning from a storefront window — and why must this always be the way? —I was confronted by a six-foot woman with ginger hair, bobble hat and tadpole veil frilling her chin. Her leaning presence was deliberate, challenging: I think I'd even felt the play of her breath on my neck. 'Yeah?' I said. But she just stood and stared through her mask ... Now where have I seen that mad bitch before? Look. Here she comes again. Somewhere, I've seen her somewhere.
I doublebacked through the faggot district, Christopher Street. I skirted the dike district too—or at any rate two big chicks denied me entry to their purple sanctum. Then I found a place that was clearly headlined as a singles' bar, and no one tried to keep me out... Now I'd read about these VD workshops in Scum and Miasma, both of which adopted a markedly high-handed line. Word was a year or two ago that the joints were popping with air-hostesses, models and career women: five minutes, a couple of lite beers, and you'd be in a hotel room or service flat with some little darling doing the splits on your face. Not so! says Scum. It might have been that way for a while, Scum argued, but after a couple of weeks the Boroughs shitkickers moved in, and the game was up. The chicks moved out. Miasma even sent a squad of personable male reporters out on a sweep, and not one of them scored ... Well, this place looked okay to me, the only hitch being that there weren't any women in it. They were all in the butch bars and the diesel discos. So I joined the half-dozen speechless loners and got to work on the Sidecars. Eight-twenty: no sweat. Here's to you, Martina, I said to myself, and flattened out a twenty on the moist zinc.
You remember Martina, Martina Twain? Now don't tell me you've forgotten. How is the memory, pal? Sister, what's the recall like? You remember her, surely. I know I do. She and I go way back. The thing about Martina is — the thing about Martina is that I can't find a voice to summon her with. The voices of money, weather and pornography (all that uncontrollable stuff), they just aren't up to the job when it comes to Martina. I think of her and there is speechless upheaval in me — I feel this way when I'm in Zurich, Frankfurt or Paris and the locals can't speak the lingo. My tongue moves in search of patterns and grids that simply are not there. Then I shout ... Consider the people I've been around all my life, stylists, models, actors, producers, seat-warmers, air-sniffers, knee-crookers, cue-card-readers, placemen, moneymen — funny men, not straight men. Funny women too, juggling sex, time and dough. Who's straight? I'm not. I am bent gouged pinched and tugged at, and squeezed into this funny shape. Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned and skewered and zugzwanged... But here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines, and they are terrible examples. They're rich, usually.
Her English husband Ossie, now he's rich-for-life but he works in money, in pure money. His job has nothing to do with anything except money, the stuff itself. No fucking around with stocks, shares, commodities, futures. Just money. Sitting in his spectral towers on Sixth Avenue and Cheapside, blond Ossie uses money to buy and sell money. Equipped with only a telephone, he buys money with money, sells money for money. He works in the cracks and vents of currencies, buying and selling on the margin, riding the daily tides of exchange. For these services he is rewarded with money. Lots of it. It is beautiful, and so is he.
I switched from Sidecars to Old Fashioneds. I'm always early for these dinner parties anyway. I leave it late, but never late enough. Barkeep, let's do it again. As I feasted on my drink I sensed the hum, the confectionery of a feminine presence. I turned to find that a girl had joined me at the bar. Now she asked for white wine in her -charged voice. I diversified with a Manhattan. New York is full of heart-stopping girls with potent colouring, vanilla teeth, and these big tits they all seem to be issued with as a matter of course. There must be a catch. (There is. Most of them are mad. It pays you to remember this.) The chick on the stool — she looked like Cleopatra. I don't know what it was, but I instantly fingered her for an obvious goer, sack-artist, dick-idolator, and so on. I can always spot them. I glanced at my watch: eight-thirty—no, nine-thirty. Hey there! Time to be moving on.