I ungummed myself from the seat, climbed out and paid the driver through his side window— a London habit, and a bad one for New York. The old cabbie sat there unresponsively in his cage.
'Can't change the ten,' he said.
'What?'
'You read?' He pointed to the yellow sign — the one about the driver's helplessness in the face of any bill larger than five. 'Can't do it.'
'That sign must be ten years old. You never heard of inflation?'
'Can't do it.'
'Ah, keep the change. You guys have got to face up to things. You're just not being realistic.'
The cab moved wearily away. I looked up, across the street, and saw a series of sloped garage gangways, minded by the hulks of trucks. On the fendered pot belly of one of these dead or fossilized machines sprawled the tanned torsoes of three young men. Two were stripped to the waist, slabby, downy, while the third was just a leaning patchwork of studded leather and jean rag. The entrance to Fielding's loft, I now noticed, lay directly beyond them, through them, a numbered door between the big black slats ... With a flourish I fastened the middle button of my new suit (off-white with charcoal seaming: I'm not sure about It—I wish you were here, I wish you were here to tell me it looked okay), eased my hands into my trouser pockets, and ambled loosely across the street.
Now I've never been given any bother by the gays. To an almost hurtful degree, I don't seem to be their type. It just doesn't come up. It just isn't a problem. But as I walked across the jarred and cratered road and sensed the usual quickenings of irony and aggression I also sensed something further — I sensed that my weight, my mass, my meat was being appraised, registered, scaled, not with lust, no, but with a carnal speculation I had never felt before. Christ, is this how you chicks feel? I stared dead ahead at the doorway, with the stirring men present but unpinpointed in my sight.
I walked past them.
'Reader,' someone seemed to say.
I paused. I hung my head. You can walk away but I cannot walk away. I turned, and asked with real interest, 'What did I hear you call me?'
'Breeder,' said the man. He held a kind of grappling hook between his legs. 'Big breeder.'
My head was full of good things to say — but I just snorted, and erased him with the flat of my hand, and walked on. Even this wasn't smart. Even this was jungle-dumb ... I came through the door. Half-blinded by shadow I made out a steep wall of steps and moved towards it. Then behind me I heard the sounds of footsteps and stiff hinges and the death-rattle of shivering chains. I tell you, I went up those steps faster than a scalded faggot, propelled by a barbarous diuretic terror on behalf of my exposed rear end... The heavy door at the top didn't give until the fifth push, but by then I had turned, and seen the shrugging figures as they retreated into the light, and now I could hear only laughter.
I chested my way through and stood panting and blinking in a glass-walled theatre of spacious light, the air so dustless and oceanic that it showed you only the dirt in your human eyes. I steadied. Among the pine supports in the far corner stood Fielding Goodney, looking ridiculously suave and decisive — and somehow air-conditioned — in his jeans and fresh white shirt, in his suit of youth, and his money colour. He was issuing instructions to three workmen or caterers in tublike blue overalls. He acknowledged me with a flat palm upraised.
Waiting for my breath to find its heavy keel I took a turn around the hired loft, I lit a cigarette, whose first jab doubled me up with an unmufflable bark of outrage from my lungs. A tearful itch tickled my lids as spoked hangovers flashed past. Whew, this drinking deal, this drinking life-choice, it's very hard on those who choose it. I wandered on, striving to enjoy the light, passing hospitalic drapes and hoods, loose sections of electromagnetic silverboard, a workbench, a winded pinball table. Hung on the back wall were half-a-dozen milky seascapes. Whoever painted them saw life as clean as toothpaste, or pretended to. I turned, taking the sun full in the face. Up here with the high windows, Manhattan was hidden and you saw only twin shafts of the World Trade Center, two gold lighters against the strong and pressing blue of the outer air. I shook my head. The mote in my eye, that dead spot where no light lives, wiggled its black finger at me.
'Hey, John. That's some suit. Where you headed? Alabamy?'
'Uh?'
'Anything the matter, Slick?'
'No. I just got razzed by some faggots. On the way in here.'
Fielding laughed, then thickened his brow attentively. 'And?'
'They called me a breeder, Fielding. What the hell is that supposed to mean?'
'Isn't it beautiful?'
'Come on, this is no place to audition. There are going to be little actresses walking through that breakers' yard down there.'
'No, John, they'll come up through the front,' said Fielding, his arm on my shoulder now as he steered me across the floor. 'There's just a gentle little cookie store down there, and a nice elevator. I had you come up the back way.'
'What for?'
'It's educational. Now relax with a drink, Slick, and get yourself ready for the girls.'
This was Fielding's best possible response. We moved on to the shallow stage, where Fielding had installed a raft of video equipment (with two pistol-grip cameras), a stereo, a coffee-table space game, a fishtank, two sofas facing two low steel desks, and a fat little fridge. I like new furniture. I like brand-new furniture. I had my fill of fucking antiques when I was growing up in Pimlico, and in Trenton, New Jersey. But it has to be plain, you know? Fielding knelt and ticked a fingernail against the sedimented glass of the fishtank. I look into that fishtank, me, and all 1 see is new furniture of a different kind, studs and beads and zebra flashes, bouncy frills and fruity bobbles, Barry's lounge, Vron's boudoir.
'All the fish respond to the manoeuvres of the alpha fish,' said Fielding, his valved face reflected in the glass. 'That's the alpha fish — there, with the black tail.' He looked at his watch, and straightened. 'Now today we cast the girl, the stripper.'
'The dancer?' I said. 'What about Butch?'
'You know Butch is in. I know Butch is in. You know she's a dancer. I know she's a dancer. These girls, they don't know nothing. You read me, Slick? We're going to have some fun.'
And we did too. What with the jug of Red Snappers that Fielding had prepared, I was feeling no pain when the first candidate came flouncing across the floor. She was a big dark honey with the best... no, hang on. Maybe we kicked off with that hot blonde who took her ... No. It was the black chick whose ... Anyway, after a while, during that sun-bleached, snowblind vigil of booze and lies and pornography, the girls tended to mangle and dismember in my mind. The routine was the same, and Fielding had them in and out of that door like a chainline vaccinator. It's a time-honoured custom in our industry, the easy-going atmosphere you try to create while auditioning young women for roles of an erotic nature. Terry Linex of C.L. & S., for example, has a particularly telling line. He just says, 'Right. This is a sex scene. I'll be the man' ... Boy, were they ever eager, these mad, happy, Manhattan girls.
Across the floor they came, edgy as hell but mortally excited, the nerves spiralling to the ends of their hair, each with her special details of shape and shadow, of torque and thrust. We sat them down and gave them a drink and asked them the usual stuff. They didn't need prompting: you see, they really did think it was possible, likely, certain that money and fame had fingered them, that exceptionality had singled them out. They talked about their careers, their crack-ups, their prongs, their shrinks, their dreams. Fielding would let them drawl or quack away for five minutes, before asking, with a strategic glint:'— And Shakespeare?' Well, even I got a few laughs from their replies to that one. 'Yeh, I really wanna do Mrs Macbeth. Or Anthony and Cleopatra. Or The Comedy of Errs.' One girl, I swear, thought for some reason that Pericles was about a car-manufacturer. Another evidently believed that The Merchant of Venice was set in greater Los Angeles.
'That's very interesting, Veroica, or Enid, or Serendipity,' Fielding would say. 'Now. We'd like to have you take your clothes off please.'
'To music?'
'Sure,' he'd say, and reach for the tape.
'I'm not really dressed for it.'
'Come on, Maureen, or Euphoria, or Accidia. You're an actress, right?'
And, revealing their teeth first, the girls would go through their hoops. I watched through a sheen of shame and fear, of lust and laughter. I watched through my pornographic sheen. And the girls submitted to it, to the pornography. Professional city-dwellers, they were experienced in the twentieth century. They didn't dance, they didn't tease — they didn't strip, not really. They took most of their clothes off and gave you a lesson in their personal anatomy. One of them simply lifted her skirt, lay on the floor, and had a handjob. She was the best. We received two apologetic refusals in a busy three days. Fielding said it was the Shakespeare that got them going, something to do with the exaltation caused by the tendered handclasp of art.
Every now and then I wondered whether Fielding was promoting these girls in the other sense. But all he ever said was 'Here's her number, Slick' or 'John, she goes for you' or 'I think you might look good on her'.
'How do you look on Doris?' I asked him, during a lull.
'On Doris? Doris is gay, John. You know that.'
'Where's her script, God damn it?'
'Patience, Slick. Stay icy calm. Oh and — you got to meet with Spunk Davis tonight. You got to ask him something. I warn you, it'll be a bitch.'
'What?'
He told me.
'No way,' I said. 'Ob no. No. You ask him.'
'You're the one he respects, Slick. He has a hard-on for you a yard long.'
'Oh man,' I said. But by then there was another sexbox cruising down the floor towards us, and I was too fuddled and clogged to argue.
So you see, over these last few days I've had no time for reading. I've been too busy auditioning.
——————
Mr Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, I read, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes... I still don't know what pop-holes are. I've asked around. Fielding doesn't know. Felix doesn't know. The dictionary doesn't know. Do you?
'Hi,' said a voice behind me.
I turned. 'Ah fuck off,' I said, and turned again.
I quit reading and looked round about me. This was no kind of place to be caught reading in: a macho gay bar in a five-fathom basement somewhere beneath the charred East Twenties. We were down so deep here, it felt like an inverted skyscraper. Maybe Manhattan would get like that one day — crustscrapers, corescrapers, a hundred storeys underground. Already certain less-than-fashionable New Yorkers have taken up residence in the sewers and subway shafts. They have. They've got little socks down there, with beds and chests-of-drawers. Money has driven them deeper into the planet, money has brought them down in the world ... Round about me there was womanlessness, jawlines, crewcuts, hunks leathered up like frogmen, Adam in full stubble and muscle and sweat. All you needed in here among the shadows and sawdust was your maleness, your sour testosterone.
'Hi,' said a voice behind me.
I turned. 'Ah fuck off,' I said, and turned again.
Now this wasn't one of the heavy hangouts. I suppose your standard Manhattan faggot might look in here for a final white wine en route to a dungeon appointment or death-pact rendezvous at the Water Closet or the Mother Load. But this was a dark place of gropes and whispers, of black silhouettes. Their shapes gave off no tremor or threat, more a priestly absorption in the radar of the appetites that had brought them there.
'Hi,' said a voice behind me.
'Ah fuck off,' I said, and turned. 'Oh hi! Sorry about that. How are you doing?'
'Good. You like this place? Look at you, you're terrified. Okay. What do you want to talk to me about?'
I took a deep breath — and heard the tiny tide of protest from the enemies in my lungs. He sat on the stool beside me. T-shirt, veined, tendoned biceps. He ordered a glass of water. Tap water, not designer water. He wasn't going to tangle with those bubbles, not Spunk.
Now I had to remember that this was a complicated young guy. He didn't drink. He didn't smoke. He didn't sniff. He didn't eat. He didn't gamble. He didn't swear. He didn't screw. He didn't even do handjobs. He did handstands. He did push-ups. He did meditation and mind control. Born again, a true believer, he did charity work: he cared about the poor and the disadvantaged ... Yes, all my man-management skills would be needed here. I looked into his clenched face and said, 'Spunk? It's about your name.'
'Yeah? What about it?'
'You're probably going to hate me for this.'
'I hate you already.'
'The thing is, Spunk,' I said, 'in England —'
'I know what you're going to say. I know what you're going to say.'
I waited.
'You want me to put an e in Davis. Well forget it, Self. Go get a whole new idea. I ain't doing it. No chance.'
'No,' I said, 'the Davis bit is fine. Spunk, you can keep Davis exactly as it is. Davis is fine. It's the other bit we have the problem with.'
'The other bit?'
'Is the problem, yeah.'
'You mean Spunk?'
'That's the bit I mean.'
He looked surprised, wrong-footed. I ordered another scotch and lit another cigarette.
'The thing is,' I said, 'in England, it means something else.'
'Sure. It means grit, pluck, courage.'
True. But it also means something else.'
'Sure. It means fight. Guts. Balls.'
'True. But it also means something else.'
'What?'
I told him. He was devastated.
'I'm sorry, Spunk, but that's the way it is.'
His young face dipped and trembled, with toothache creasing in the corners of the eyes. Why hadn't anybody told him this before? They probably never dared, I thought, and shrugged, and drank my drink.
'I mean,' I went on, 'if you were working with an English actor called, I don't know, Jizz Jenkins or something, you'd have to —'