'Buy you a drink?' I said.
Her face slackened. She gave a tremble of negation.
'White wine?' I said.
'No thanks.'
'What's with all this no thanks? Can't you read? This is a singles' bar.'
'Excuse me!' she said. 'Bartender! Sir! This man is bothering me.'
'Damn right I'm bothering you.' I tapped her shoulder. 'What d'you expect, kid? Why d'you come here anyway? You like the Californian Chablis or these plastic ducks they have on the wall?'
'Hey. Hey. You. Shut up or get out."
This was the bartender.
'What is this? Am I the only guy in here who can read? It says singles' bar out there, in neon. I'm single. She's single. What's the problem?'
'He's drunk.'
This was one of the loners.
'Okay, who said that?'
I slithered lithely from my stool. This deed somehow necessitated a second manoeuvre, that of picking myself up off the floor.
'He just had ten cocktails, for Christ's sake.'
'Here he's ... Put him ... Get the ...'
I felt several hands on my arms, a knee in my back and a tug on my rug. Well, time was travelling anyway, and I thought I might as well be moving on.
Fifteen minutes later, or it may have been twenty, I stood staring at a caged lift: the chest-flexing iron lattice, the accordion doors. I swivelled and strode up to the end of a passage. I rang the bell. I was drunk, okay, but I was getting my second wind by now. That's the thing about drink: some of us can take it, and some of us can't. Put another few down me and I'll be as right as rain. I straightened my tie and guided my hair back with my hands. I rang the bell — a good long ring. Someone clattered down a wooden staircase. The door sucked open.
Ossie was standing there in waistcoat and shirtsleeves. I could see Martina down the end of the passage, aproned, with plates in her hand.
'Hey my man!' I croaked. 'Was coming down a track!'
He took one step forward. 'It's late,' said Ossie. Martina's curious face appeared beyond his shoulder. Ossie said, 'Go home, John. Just go home.'
The door cracked shut. What's with him? I wondered. Some guys ,.. Okay, so I'm running a bit behind schedule, but... I looked at my watch. It said one-fifteen. Then I remembered something. I wasn't only late to arrive — I was late to leave, too.
That's right. I had already been to the dinner party. And something told me I hadn't behaved too well.
——————
Today is my birthday. I am thirty-five years old. According to the last good book I read, this means that I am half way through my time travel, my travel through time. It doesn't feel like that — it doesn't feel like half way. The prestige number-plate on my Fiasco says OAP 5. I've got the mind of a kid, but I'm a pretty senior partner over at Rug & Gut & Gum. It feels as though I have just started out. It feels as though I am just about to end, just about to end. That's what it feels like.
Morning came, and I got up ... That doesn't sound particularly interesting or difficult, now does it? I bet you do it all the time. Listen, though — I had a problem here. For instance, I was lying face-down under a hedge or bush or some blighted shrub in a soaked allotment full of nettles, crushed cigarette packs, used condoms and empty beercans. It was quite an appropriate place for me to be born again, which is what it felt like. Obviously it hurts, being born: that's why you scream and weep. Next, I had to frisk myself, to make sure I still had my wallet, limbs, face, dick, being. Next, I had to run crying through the concrete concourses in dawn rain until my panic slowed and I recognized the city and myself in the matt and muffled streets. Then I had to find a cab and get back here. The guy wouldn't take me until I showed him money. I didn't blame him. I had dreamed — and who needs dreams with this kind of nightlife? — of torture, laughter, pincer-grips on the frail-tubed spine.
In the bathroom I stripped slowly before the mirror. Face first: there was a grey swelling over my left eye, and my rug was quite badly singed on the same side. A fight? I didn't think so. If there'd been a fight, then I must have won it. My body was all there, trembling, whimpering in the graphic light, but all there. I turned — and gasped. Dah. .. Oh, Christ. My back, my great white back was scored with thirty or forty sharp red welts, regularly patterned, as if I'd slept on a bed of nails. Taking a two-fisted grip on my spare tyre, I was able to wrench round some flesh and get a good look at one of these bloodless wounds. An indentation, a red hole: I could insert my quivering pinkie to half-nail depth. I stepped back. No other damage. No new damage. My bumf-crammed wallet was intact:
credit cards, eighty-odd dollars, thirty-odd pounds. My hangover was fine. My hangover had come through okay.
So. I had spent the night, or part of it, on a patch of earth in alphabet-land — Avenue B, deep down on the East Side. After an evening of pleasure and profit with my friends in Bank Street, I had clearly gone out for a drink or two. Bad idea! Oh very bad! Someone, at some stage, had worked me over with a tool, a spike or a blunt shiv. My shirt was punctured in places, but not my jacket — my good, my best jacket. It was now eight-thirty. I bathed my face with water and felt hot fingers beginning to tickle my back. For ten minutes I vomited elaborately, with steamhammer convulsions that I had no strength to resist or contain. Then for twice that long I sat twitching on the shower's deck, the silver snout tuned to full heat and heft but doing nothing much to wash off my rot. I must be very unhappy. That's the only way I can explain my behaviour. Oh man, I must be so depressed. I must be fucking suicidal. And I wish I knew why.
Look at my life. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: But it's terrific! It's great! You're thinking: Some guys have all the luck! Well, I suppose it must look quite cool, what with the airplane tickets and the restaurants, the cabs, the filmstars, Selina, the Fiasco, the money. But my life is also my private culture — that's what I'm showing you, after all, that's what I'm letting you into, my private culture. And I mean look at my private culture. Look at the state of it. It really isn't very nice in here. And that is why I long to burst out of the world of money and into — into what? Into the world of thought and fascination. How do I get there? Tell me, please. I'll never make it by myself. I just don't know the way.
——————
Nothing much happened for a couple of days, which was fine by me. Nothing happened. Well, I say that, but of course me and my sore back got up to all kinds of stuff.
Me and my sore back composed a letter to Martina. Yes, a letter. I even went out and bought a dictionary on Sixth Avenue to assist me in the project. You know those hangovers where you can't spell I'm or you're, let alone sorry or again? It took me about a day each to write, seal, stamp and post this letter of mine, but I managed to get the thing off in the end. I apologized for my behaviour (you know how it is: a few drinks, a few laughs, you step out of line), and asked if I could buy her lunch some time. After all, I pointed out, lunch was the one date we hadn't yet tried. Drinks, breakfast, dinner— but not lunch. I said I would 'quite understand' if she wanted to cut her losses and call it a day. I wouldn't let me buy me lunch, I said, and I meant it. Jesus, would you?
Me and my sore back had cocktails with Butch 6eausoleil. There was no mention of the debacle at the Berkeley Club, thank Christ. Butch looked beautiful—a cauldron of youth and health—and she seems docile enough at this stage. That makes sense. She's getting $750,000. Her only proviso is that she won't do any housework. In the film. She won't sweep a floor. She won't even rinse out a coffee cup. Chicks' liberation. Who do you want to play opposite you? I asked her. Christopher Meadowbrook, Spunk Davis or Nub Forkner? Butch said that she would favour a dark-complected co-star. The big thing aboutButch is that she isn't just a dumb blonde, as she herself stressed. I agreed. She might look like one. She might even behave and talk like one on occasion. But she isn't just a dumb blonde. That's the big thing about Butch.
Me and my sore back have had several meetings now with Fielding's moneymen. We had dinner in La Cage d'Or with Steward Cowrie, Bob Cambist and Ricardo Fisc. We went night-clubbing at Krud's and Parlour 39 with Tab Penman, Bill Levy and Gresham Tanner. They're an odd crew, these moneymen, Miami hotel barons, Nebraskan ranching bosses, Marylander oil kings. Their only topics are moviestars and money. They talk about money in that sharky American style, as if money were the only gauge of anything, the only measure. They're pretty relaxing company, 1 find. Fielding picks up the checks. Fielding picks up the cheques, too. Each meeting ends with the moneymen all saying things like I'm in or I want in on this or You got it or Let's do it. Fielding is already making plans to cut one or two of the smaller guys out of the action.
Oh yeah and me and my sore back got hold of little Selina late one night. It was seven in the morning over there in my sock. Her voice was thin and cold, the way 1 like it. After a while she cooed and cursed me into peace, I have to tell you that these hotline, Jong-distance blowjobs are another of our regrettable routines ... This particular perversion, I notice, like every other, has been set up on a professional basis in go-getting New York. The small-ad columns of Scum magazine are full of remote-control hookers who just sit by a telephone all day for money, like Ossie Twain. You ring them up, give your credit-card number, and they talk dirty to you for however long you can afford. They're probably cheaper than Selina, come to think of it, what with the hotel mark-up. They're here and she's there, after all ... I was on the point of signing off when Selina started telling me, in accents of alarmingly genuine arousal, about this rich new boyfriend of hers, this transatlantic moneyman, how he took her to hotels and dressed her up and fucked her on the floor like a dog. This was fairly standard stuff, but I deplored her tone. Quit it, I said. Her thin voice teased on. She said that when she wasn't here she was there — with him, doing that. Enough, I said. 'Then marry me,' said Selina, but not nicely.
——————
Fielding smoothed his back against the scalloped seat of the limousine, like a cat. He straightened his cuffs and said firmly.
'I say we go with Spunk.'
'He's not really called that, is he?'
'Sure,' said Fielding, and went on to tell me about two Southern actors called Sod MacGonagall and Fart Klaeber. He gave his laugh, his rich, his million-dollar laugh, reluctant, like all the most lovable laughter. You long to hear this sound. You would do almost anything to inspire it. 'Maybe,' he said, 'maybe for the British market we can call him Scum.'
'It's a problem, you've got to admit.'
'I talked with his agent. He knows Spunk's going to have to have his name fixed sometime. Thing is, he was christened that way, and he hates the whole moviestar bit. He's a tough Bronx kid but he acts up a storm. You want a drink?'
'No thanks.'
'What's the matter? It's five o'clock.'
'No thanks.'
I had my reasons. Do you want to hear the good news first, or the bad news? The good news is that Martina called this morning and we're having lunch tomorrow. The bad news is that the good news made me feel so relieved and excited that I ran out to a bar and drank a bunch of big ones. Yeah? you'll say. And? Nothing new in that. Agreed, but the bad thing about the bad news is that the alcohol had a really bad effect on me. It didn't make me drunk, which was what I was confidently expecting it to do. It made me hungover instead. It did. I kept incredulously ordering more drinks, in a doomed bid to stave off this conclusion. That's why I had so many. All the more ironic, too, because I woke up this morning feeling bloody marvellous after a really late and heavy night with the TV and the ß & F. Was the phenomenon a new jet-lag deal, or the terminal mutiny of my whole bodybag? Oh man, I'd better get to California soon, while the transplant people still have something to work on. Maybe I'd better wing out there right away and have them fix me up with a temporary. And the mind was suffering too. Yes, the mind had its sufferings also. It was crammed with sin and crime, the thoughts nowhere, all in freefall and turnaround. I've got to get this stuff out of my system. No, more than that, much more. I've got to get my system out of my system. That's what I've got to do.
'Concentrate, Slick,' said Fielding. 'This is semi-crucial. The entire package pivots on this. Money wise, Meadowbrook's the safe choice. I think Nub Forkner would play well with Butch. But Davis is the gamble, the longshot, and that attracts me. Put your instincts to work on it, Slick. I say we go with Spunk.'
'You better give me a scotch.'
This would entail some self-inspection, alas, since the character was loosely based on me, on myself — Doug, the Sonj the greedy berk, the addict, the betrayer. It now looked like a straight playoff between Christopher Meadowbrook and Spunk Davis, with maybe Nub Forkner as an outside possibility. Meadowbrook I knew all about, a steady ensemble man but no headliner. You've seen him. He's the guy with the freckly yankee-doodle face and the hint of comic spindliness in his floppy-limbed frame. He usually plays older brothers, blushing patsies, jumpy sidekicks, all-smiles Ivy Leaguers. As Doug, Meadowbrook would be cast violently against type, but that was exactly the sort of doubletake effect I was interested in. The other guy, this Davis character, I had heard of but never seen in action, a Broadway boy with one film in the can. Prehistoric was still at the editing stage. We were going to see the roughcut. The word was very good. According to Fielding, Davis was hot.
We alighted at an address on doublebarrelled Park Avenue. Our greeter, who looked like a presidential bodyguard, led us through the lobby and into the executive screening parlour—a six-seater with an air of luxury interrogations, one-way mirrors, corporation propaganda. Davis's agent was there, Herrick Shnexnayder, a desperate human being who wore a French smock, a prosciutto cravat and the most complicated double pate-job I have ever come across in ten years of show business. One yellowy hank was swiped forward from the nape of his neck, while the other originated from his luxuriant left sideburn. His head looked like a fudge sundae—I swear to God, he could have put a spoon in his ear and a maraschino cherry on his crown and looked no worse. I drank the limitless champagne on offer (most of it soaked without fuss into the parched coral of my tongue) and listened to Herrick's obsequious banter. Agents, these days, they look like corporation men—but Herrick was more showbiz than Coco the Clown. At one point Fielding mentioned money. The agent smiled like a death-dealing doctor and said, 'Oh I think, after Prehistoric, we're looking at five.' In other words, Spunk's fee was now half a million dollars. Fielding just nodded and said, 'And what does his availability look like?' His availability looked good, partly because, after Prehistoric, no one could afford to hire him. Prehistoric started with a long pan over a series of cave murals: a man, a woman, a fight, a fuck, a tiger—a spaceship. We backed off. A gang or tribe of pre-fire apepeople were huddled about the place: there was Spunk, sharpening his spear. Square-headed, square-lipped, the dark face dense and sinewy. The next morning—or soon, anyway — Spunk was beamed up on to the bridge of the low-lying spaceship by the mischievous, conical, beep-voiced aliens, who then travelled through time and beamed Spunk down again into Greenwich Village, 1980. It was a summer night, so Spunk didn't look at all conspicuous in his bodyhair, warpaint and loinskin. After staring around and grunting a lot, Spunk reflexively saved a drunken girl from being roughed up in a sidewalk fracas outside a singles' bar. She takes him home to her swish apartment. More grunting. She assumes he is Lithuanian or Albanian or whatever — Christ knows there are some pretty perfunctory Earthlings on the streets of New York. Spunk accepts a glass or two of firewater and is led to the sack, where he proceeds to give her the pasting of a lifetime. Come dawn, the chick has checked out, but Spunk is still hanging in there— bad diet, presumably... There followed a brilliant scene, as Spunk staggered out to confront the girl's flatmates. The flatmates are used to the girl's rugged pick-ups, but Spunk (cracking nuts with his teeth, eating unshelled eggs and raw sausages) is a new wrinkle. With various delicate transitions that left me sighing in assent, the film now turned into a gentle parodic love story, the girl civilizing Spunk — teaching him how to dress, eat, speak — and Spunk decivilizing her: teaching her to kick the booze, the pick-ups, the self-destruction, the money (they go primitive for a while, after Spunk has an urban breakdown. Even I, in my exalted state, could detect some sentimentality here). Throughout Spunk wore a silent gaze of uncomplaining bafflement and reserve, comic but dignified, formidable. He was especially good at the end, when the aliens (who have been monitoring the whole joke, helping Spunk out at awkward moments) beam him back to BC. He knows what's about to happen, more or less, and tries to explain to the girl with his pitiful resources of gesture and language. Thus Spunk stands bereft on the stark crag, with old winds whistling. He frowns, he tenses — he peers into a sloping hollow. The girl sits there muttering and shivering, with her last cigarette and an electric lighter. Credits. I was deeply moved. Moved? I had a nervous breakdown. The tears were still pissing from my eyes when I fled to the can. No doubt about it, no doubt at all: Davis was going to be a big, big name.