Thursday gave a tight smile as she opened the door. 'Is he nude?' she asked coldly.
'Yeah he's nude.'
'Oh boy,' said Thursday.
Why do they happen to me, these numb, flushed, unanswerable, these pornographic things? Well, I guess if you're a pornographic person, then pornographic things happen to you.
I slanted west through the pretty East Side, with its decorative dustbins, the paunchy awnings of the low-slung stores, the smell of dark hot trash, and dined blind with Fielding Goodney and Doris Arthur in a loud and airless media restaurant just five blocks from bubbling Harlem. Doris's script was being gimmicked by the typists. I kissed her hand. I called for champagne. I demanded to see the rough. Teasingly they said I'd have to wait-see. There was a lot of teasing going on, I suspected. I was too smudged with booze and travel to be sure. Lorne had given me lots of nonagenarian whiskey. I'll say that for Lorne. With additional champagne we drank to Dot's dream script. The place was full of filmstars, more filmstars. Why do I hang out with filmstars? I don't even like filmstars. Jesus, the transparency of actors. The professionals, though, are seldom dangerous. It's the actors of real life you want to watch — yeah, and the actresses. I developed a bad case of hiccups, more like a series of jabbing uppercuts to the chin. One of these blows actually ricked my neck and I had to lie on the floor beneath the table until it was okay to come up again. The angle of the lamp cord on the bar made me think I saw a hearing-aid cable extending from Fielding's ear. My knee brushed Doris's, once, twice, and I thought how wonderful it was when two young people started falling in love. I kept banging my way to and from the can, where they had incredible pictures of nude chicks from magazines all over the wall. I found a woman talking unhappily into a telephone and tried to cheer her up and went on trying even after her boyfriend or husband appeared from somewhere. I disliked his tone. He hurt my feelings. We had an altercation that soon resolved itself with me lying face-down in a damp bed of cardboard boxes at the foot of a hidden staircase. This was bad luck on the lady, who was obviously dead keen. Refreshed, I said hi to a few filmstars, briefly joining them at their tables with a selection of apposite one-liners. Invited into a back room, I shot the breeze with a married couple who said they ran the place. She was obviously a madame of some kind, not that this bothered me too much. She denied it. As Fielding led me back to our table I made a powerfully worded verbal pass at a salacious waitress, who appeared to be all for it but then came down with some deep sorrow in the kitchen, and when I burst through the double-doors to console her two men in sweat-grey T-shirts assured me there was nothing I could do for the poor child. I signed an autograph. Doris looked cute in her sleeping-bag outfit. Under the mussed hair and mace clothes she was just a big-eyed honey, a sack-addict and dick-follower, same as all the rest. She denied it too. You know, I really don't like her. I hollered for fortified wines and drank quarts of tongue-frazzling black coffee. Doris cuddled me on the way to the door but she must have let go for an instant (perhaps I goosed her too eagerly) because I went off on a run that would have taken me all the way downtown—further, to the Village, to Martina Twain — if the dessert trolley hadn't been there to check my sprint. The whole restaurant cheered me on as I fought my way out into the night.
I leaned panting against a lamppost, while Doris tenderly removed the segments of toffee orange and chocolate cake that still clung to my suit. Fielding lingered to congratulate — or compensate — the proprietress. What a long bit of New York, I thought.
'Jesus, are you okay?' she asked.
'I know you're a faggot and everything but I'll tell you what the problem is: you just never met the right guy. It's that simple. Let's go back to my hotel and fool around. Come on, darling, you know you love it.'
'You asshole.' Doris smiled. Then her face changed and she told me something so terrible, so strange, so annihilating that I can't remember a word she said. Fielding and the Autocrat made their different entrances. People's faces swung sideways as I tunnelled backwards into my cab.
——————
And all this without much in the way of stress. Stress! How can people stand that stuff?
Waking bright and early the next morning I reached for a copy of Delicacy as the most economical means of establishing whether I was still alive. Other questions, no less pressing— such as who, how, why and when — would just have to wait their turn. Having come across no obvious Selina lookalike among the ladies, I found myself completing an editorial stress quiz, delete where inapplicable, in which your nicotine and alcohol consumption was set against various stress-donating hardships you might or might not be falling foul of. So far as Delicacy was concerned, I didn't have a care in the world, and yet I smoked and drank like a quadraplegic bankrupt. Then it hit me: stress — perhaps I need stress! Perhaps a good dose of stress is just what I'm crying out for. I need bereavement, blackmail, earthquake, leprosy, injury, penury ... I think I'll try stress. Where can you buy some?
You can buy stress, and that's what I've started doing. It's New York, I reckon, the thrust, the horsepower, the electrodynamics of the Manhattan grid. It just charges you up. Give me a problem, out here, and I'll crack it.
With a pleasant sense of maintaining the rhythm of the night before and its various successes and achievements, I went down to Mercutio's and bought four suits, eight shirts, six ties and a stylish lightweight mackintosh. These garments now await the guile of high-priced tailors before transfer to my hotel. Even the ties seem to need taking out. Cost: $3,476.93. I paid through US Approach.
At LimoRent on Third Avenue I hired a six-door Jefferson with cocktail bar, TV and telephone. I drove it straight round the corner and installed it in a costly carpark on Lexington and Forty-Third. This would come out better than $150 a day.
I had a hundred-dollar lunch at La Cage d'Or on Fifty-Fourth Street and a two-hundred-dollar massage plus assisted shower at Elysium on Fifty-Fifth. Running low on ideas, and tired of shopping, all shopped out, I bought four drunks and three strippers nine bottles of champagne in a topless bar on Broadway. I considered cabbing out to Atlantic City and dropping some dough at roulette.! have the perfect system. It always fails. But in the end I simply cashed my travellers' cheques and dodged the fuming puddles of Times Square handing out twenty-dollar bills to selected bums, whores, bagladies and time-cripples. Two policemen were obliged to quell the minor riot that ensued. 'You, you're fucking crazy,' one of them said to me, with maximum conviction. But I didn't bother to tell him just how wrong he was.
Back in my room, I sat at the desk and considered. Money worries aren't like other worries. If you're $10,000 in debt, it's twice as worrying as being $5,000 in debt but only half as worrying as being $20,000 in debt. Being $10,000 in debt is three-sevenths as worrying as being $23,333 in debt. And if you're $10,000 in debt, and $10,000 comes along — why, then all your worries disappear. Whereas the same can hardly be said of other worries, worries (for instance) about deception and decay.
I sank back on the bed and started worrying about money. I started to get very worried about money indeed. I yanked out my wallet and went through the credit slips and travellers'-cheque dockets. As of now, I don't have any money. And this is really worrying.
There was a knock on the door and I wriggled to my feet. An impossibly elegant young black scythed into the room with several polythene body-bags in his arms.
'On the bed, sir?' he asked.
'Yeah. No,' I said. 'I don't want them. I've changed my mind. Take them back.'
He looked at me quizzically, and raised his lordly chin. 'The terms of purchase are on your receipt, sir.'
'Okay. Sling them over here. I was only kidding.'
I gave him a ten and he left. A ten ... For the next hour I took delivery of many additional purchases, the vast majority of which I couldn't remember purchasing. I just lay on the bed there, drinking. After a while I felt like Lady Diana would no doubt feel on her wedding day, as the presents from the Commonwealth contingent started arriving in their wagon trains. A squat kit of chunky glassware, an orange rug of Iranian provenance and recent manufacture, a Spanish guitar and a pair of maraccas, two oil paintings (the first showing puppies and kittens asnooze, the second a nude, ideally rendered), an elephant's foot, something that looked like a microphone stand but turned out to be a Canadian sculpture, a Bengali chess set, a first edition of Little Women, and various other cultural treasures from all over the world. When it seemed to be over, I went to the bathroom and was explosively sick. Stress, it's expensive. There is great personal cost. But out it came, the lunch, the champagne, the money, all the green and folding stuff. When it seemed to be over, I went next door and called Fielding and asked him to give me an incredible amount of money. He sounded as though he'd been expecting my call. He sounded pleased. That evening a large envelope was brought to my room. It contained a platinum US Approach card, a brick of travellers' cheques, and a cash-facility authorization at a Fifth Avenue bank for a thousand dollars a day, if needed. I was so relieved I went to bed for two days. Actually, there wasn't much choice. Steady, I thought, steady. Money holds firm but you have no power. It seems that, whatever I do here in this world I'm in, I just get more and more money ...
——————
And more stress.
'Thanks again for the present,' I said. 'Just what I always wanted.' 'I'm trying to teach you something. Don't you understand?'
'Like what?'
'Many things. Compassion. Self-control. Generosity of spirit. Respect for womankind.'
'Go take a flying —Jesus,' I said, 'I'm beginning to see just how sick you really are.'
He laughed. 'Don't you love this?' he said. 'Say, that was so dumb that stunt you pulled. You can't give money away like that, man. You do it, you do it right.'
'Oh I get it, I've twigged at last. Okay, sickbag, how much do you want? What does it cost to keep you off my case?'
'Wrong. Wrong. I don't want your money.'
'Then what do you want?'
'1 want your life.'
'Thanks again for the present,' I said. 'Much appreciated.'
'Have you read it yet?'
'Uh? Well, not exactly.' I had read nine pages on the transatlantic flight, but there was still some way to go. 'I've been ill. Look, when can we meet?'
'What do you do all day when you're ill?'
'Mostly I just lie there. Being ill.'
'I'm pretty free,' she said. 'Ossie went off to London again.'
'Great. How about this evening?'
'Will that give you enough time? To read the book, I mean ... Hello?'
'I'm still here.'
'Come on, don't be feeble. I want a book report. I'm going to test you on it... Hello?'
'I'm still here.'
'Well then. You just call me when you've read that book.'
Wait. Watch ... Yes, here she comes again. I have to tell you that a woman is following me around New York. Yes she is. This woman is fortyish, forty-five, square in the ankles, more than six feet tall on her heels, on her high heels. She watches me through a black veil that hangs from a black hat. Her hair is short, gingery and electrical. Her chin is low and stubborn and insane.
She works at night. I wheel out of a bar and there she is, arms folded in a doorway across the street. I walk along and she keeps pace and distance. I duck from beneath the spastic neon of a porno parlour, spotlit and anonymous, and there she is, eating popcorn or chestnuts from a paper cone. Sometimes, at the intersections, she comes so close that I can feel her breath on the back of my neck. But I don't turn. She reminds me of someone. I can't think who. Now where have I seen that mad bitch before? Wait. Watch... Yes, here she comes again.
They make straight for me, these people. They always have. Like animals, they sniff me out, like dogs. When the baglady enters the hushed cafeteria and threads steadily past the skewered tables, when the derelict stands and faces the oncoming crowds and arrives at his soft selection, we all know who they have in mind. I meet their eyes — I can't help it. Something in me says something to something in them. Something in them says something to something in me. What? There is spare material, there are loose components in our heads. We recognize this and move towards it. I think one or two people or things are moving towards me quite fast now.
—————— 'Hey my man,' said Felix in the lobby, running a thumb down my thin lapel. 'You know, I like his style. With this guy, it's a week on and a month off. What's happening?'
Auditioning was what was happening. I came down the steps of the Ashbery that morning and burst out laughing at the heat. New York can't be serious about this. I have read, or television has told me, about parts of space where the manmade boomerangs fly. It's hot out there, several million degrees Fahrenheit. Psychopathic heat. In New York, in July, the heat is psychopathic. On bucking Broadway the cabs all bitched and beefed, ferrying robots, bad dogs, uptown, downtown. I grabbed my trap and joined the shunt.
New York is a jungle, they tell you. You could go further, and say that New York is a jungle. New York is a jungle. Beneath the columns of the old rain forest, made of melting macadam, the mean Limpopo of swamped Ninth Avenue bears an angry argosy of crocs and dragons, tiger fish, noise machines, sweating rainmakers. On the corners stand witchdoctors and headhunters, babbling voodoo-men — the natives, the jungle-smart natives. And at night, under the equatorial overgrowth and heat-holding cloud cover, you hear the ragged parrot-hoot and monkeysqueak of the sirens, and then fires flower to ward off monsters. Careful: the streets are sprung with pits and nets and traps. Hire a guide. Pack your snakebite gook and your blowdart serum. Take it seriously. You have to get a bit jungle-wise.
Now I was heading, in my hot cage, down towards meat-market country on the tip of the West Village. Here the redbrick warehouses double as carcass galleries and rat hives, the Manhattan fauna seeking its necessary level, living or dead. Here too you find the heavy faggot hangouts, the Spike, the Water Closet, the Mother Load. Nobody knows what goes on in these places. Only the heavy faggots know. Even Fielding seems somewhat vague on the question. You get zapped and flogged and dumped on — by almost anybody's standards, you have a really terrible time. The average patron arrives at the Spike in one taxi but needs to go back to his sock in two. And then the next night he shows up for more. They shackle themselves to racks, they bask in urinals. Their folks have a lot of explaining to do, if you want my opinion, particularly the mums. Sorry to single you ladies out like this but the story must start somewhere. A craving for hourly murder — it can't be willed. In the meantime, Fielding tells me, Mother Nature looks on and taps her foot and clicks her tongue. Always a champion of monogamy, she is cooking up some fancy new diseases. She just isn't going to stand for it.