“What?” I said. “What do you mean by that?”
“You know what I mean,” he said. “When they get juiced up, they start wandering all over the hotel and knockin’ on doors.” He stared wistfully at a group of bare-shouldered young beauties across the lobby. “It worries me. Terrible things have happened in this hotel.”
“I know,” I said. “And they’ll happen again. You can’t stop it.”
He hung his head, then smacked his fists together. “I know,” he said quietly. “Thank God I don’t have any daughters.”
“You’re right,” I said. “They’re out of control. They’re evil.” Then I gave him a $50 bill and hurried away to the elevator.
Tobias was already in the room, sorting through a pile of messages. “George Stephanopoulos called,” he said. “He’s not going to the ball. He says he’s too nervous.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “He has nothing to worry about—except maybe Deborah Couples.” Of course, I was speaking about the most famous woman in polo, and the only female patron.
Just then the phone rang. Tobias picked it up, then cursed and slammed it down. “Stephanopoulos again,” he muttered. “What the hell’s wrong with him?”
“He is drunk,” I said. “He’s been making an ass of himself.”
Tobias laughed. “Well, get ready,” he said. “He’s down in the lobby, fooling around with those girls. He’ll be here in a minute.”
“Oh, God!” I moaned. “Don’t answer the door.”
I picked up the telephone and called the manager, who knew me by name. “There’s a pervert down there,” I said. “A wiry little Greek named George. He’s already sold two of those little girls you’re so worried about. Get after him!”
“You bet!” he barked. “I see him now. We’ll get him, yeah, thanks for the tip.”
“Good work,” I said. “Beat the shit out of him.”
IV
When my homeboys beat the Redlegs on Saturday, people made the sign of the stinkeye at each other behind the bleachers. Once more I heard ugly whispers of a fix. But no matter: on Sunday we will play White Birch for the championship, and I have bet many thousands of dollars. We will drive them like crippled geese across the ripped-up turf of the Bethpage polo field—me and Carlos and Memo and Doug and Tiger. “Aspen über alles,” that is our cry. They will not even go to the Polo Ball on Friday night. It is the event of the year in our world, but there is still a genuine risk of being poisoned. It was a black-tie event, extremely private and exclusive. Only three hundred insiders were invited for dinner, and many feelings were hurt . . . but not mine. No. I was with my home-boys, and we were riding high. But I was dressed correctly nonetheless. Appearance is very important in polo. The dress code looks to be casual, but, in fact, it is very rigid, not unlike yachting. Those rumpled tan long-coats and flimsy yellow jackets they wear are not from the Gap: they are Burberry camel’s-hair coats with linings of $12,000-a-yard ecru silk and supertech Gore-Tex survival jackets with French titanium zippers. It is a down-style kind of look, but it is extremely functional, and the fabrics will last forever.
It was almost eleven by the time we finally found the unmarked entrance to the Meadowbrook Club. I had whipped the big Lincoln through traffic on the turnpike for thirty or forty minutes at speeds up to 110, past an endless maze of strip malls and row homes and pizza parlors.
It was Fitzgerald’s valley of ashes seventy years later and fifty times uglier. I felt an overwhelming sense of doom as we drove through it with the windows rolled up to keep out the poison gas. A brownish cloud seemed to hang over everything as far as the eye could see. Even inside the car the air smelled of deadly carbon monoxide, and a strange chemical film was forming on the windshield.
I felt frantic, and just then I spotted the darkened entrance to my club. It looked like a service road to some abandoned farm, but I turned in to it anyway. Somehow I sensed that this was the place. It felt right. It was the only driveway on the turnpike without a neon sign above it.
The small road led downhill and through a dark vale of trees. There was no sign of life anywhere—no cars, no people, no road signs—and finally I stopped the Lincoln on the side of a long, quiet hill to calm down and get my bearings.
It was a nice place to be lost, a silent forest of tall elm trees and moonlight and finely manicured grounds. I rolled down the windows and stepped out of the car. The sky was full of stars, and the air smelled sweet. I felt giddy. In the distance I could see a dense bright glow in the sky that was probably Manhattan, only eighteen miles away. But I felt a sense of great distance from it, like I’d wandered off the turnpike and gone straight through the Looking Glass and into a different time. I felt like Jay Gatsby, lost in some primitive forest on the fresh green breast of the New World.
I got back in the car and drove on, up a long hill and past two or three darkened carriage houses—and suddenly I crested a rise and came face to face with the glittering vision that had to be the Polo Ball. I was stunned. It was one of those magic moments that those of us afflicted with the Romantic Sensibility tend to nurse forever in memory. I was looking across a valley at a shimmering cluster of peaked tents, swollen with what appeared to be the most elegant party in the world. As I drew closer I could hear clarinet music and the soft laughter of women. Blue lanterns glowed in the trees around the clubhouse, and tall men moved in the shadows, sipping gin highballs and smoking thin cigars. Gatsby would have felt right at home.
I parked in the trees on the edge of the golf course, and I saw Harriman at the bar, standing alone and staring balefully out at the dancers. A wall of trees blocked my access, but I easily slipped through them, then strolled across the lawn to the tent. People smiled warmly and nodded hello, then the orchestra struck up a New Age waltz.
He was sitting with a sleek blond woman in a clinging red dress who turned out to be Deborah Couples. She was no stranger to scandal, and we bonded immediately. She was seeking a sponsor for her all-female team, and I said Rolling Stone would cover it.
The rest of the night was relentlessly suave. The people were very gracious, and we all drank heavily. I refused to dance with Ms. Couples for reasons of my own, so she left and began to dance wildly with a string of swarthy suitors and Argentine polo types. Harriman tried to cut in on her, but he was too drunk to dance. I decided to leave and abandon him.
The Lincoln made short work of the Jericho Turnpike at that hour of the morning, and the Polo Lounge was still open when I got back to the hotel. I saw Hugo behind the bar, hunched over the spigots like some hairy troll in a cage, and I decided to do my nightcaps by myself upstairs in the suite. Hugo lunged at me as I passed too near the railing, but I ducked and ran to the elevator. I was afraid of him.
I was weak and trembling by the time I got out of the elevator, and the hall was empty, as always. I hurried inside and quickly chained both doors, then I fell on the couch and passed out in a double-helix position for many hours.
It rained all day on Saturday, and I dropped off the polo circuit to hunker down in the suite and get involved in the football games on TV. I turned off the phones and refused to answer the door. Harriman left a message around midnight, saying he would meet me at the box before game time. The message was oddly disjointed, but I chalked it up to fatigue. I knew he had many dark things on his mind—and besides, he didn’t like football. Fuck him, I thought. He’s crazy. The big game was tomorrow, and I was getting very cranked up.
V
I could already see the lead: Outlined against a gray September sky, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse rode again. In the Book of Revelation they were Famine, Pestilence, Destruction, and Death . . . But these were only aliases: On that frantic afternoon in the dim gray smog of Long Island, they were called Memo, Carlos, Tiger, and Doug.
A crowd of five thousand or so had gathered to witness the championship match. We arrived early, but not early enough. The turf had turned to mush, and limos were spinning their wheels in the muddy road to the VIP
entrance. Drunken gate-crashers were fighting with the police at the gate.
“Get away from here, you scum!” shouted one of the off-duty cops. “If you’re looking for trouble, we’ll give it to you!” He smacked one of the drunkards with a huge flashlight, and the others fell back. I aimed the big Lincoln through the opening, spinning the wheels in low gear and sending up rooster tails of mud on the crowd around the gate.
“Keep driving,” said Tobias. “Don’t slow down.”
There was a lot of screaming behind us, and I heard whistles blowing. I turned on the windshield wipers and eased into a spot between the Gracida brothers’ horse trailers. The match was about to start. I noticed Carlos standing alone in the rain, staring blankly out at the playing field, where a marching band was strutting around on the sod.
I approached him calmly and wished him good luck. “Don’t worry,” I said cheerfully. “We can’t lose. It’s in the bag. It’s arranged.”
“What?” he snapped. “What are you talking about?”
He seemed nervous, so I pulled out my wallet and gave him a $100 bill. “Take this for luck,” I said. “This is a wonderful day for the home-boys, eh? Yes, sir, we are champions.”
He nodded and walked to where his horse was waiting. Bugles sounded, and a roar went up from the crowd. The magic moment had come. Players galloped onto the field and held their mallets aloft like warriors charging to battle.
There were no empty seats on this day. The grandstands on both sides overflowed with the jetset cream of international polo society. The tournament had been going on for three weeks in Greenwich, as well as on Long Island, and many shocks had occurred. Most of the favorites had been eliminated: the Black Bears from Switzerland were gone, and so were the heavily favored human peacocks from Ellerston White, the fraudulent pride of Australia. The whole aristocracy of American polo had been eliminated: Pegasus, Revlon, and even the glamorous white-hat front-runners from Calumet Farm, in Kentucky. The black hats had prevailed in both brackets, but only one would survive this savage final test. The only gang that stood between my homeboys and victory was what Harriman called “those arrogant criminal swine from White Birch.”
Harriman had a flair for embellishment, but his cynical, bile-fueled sentiments were widely shared by pillars of the polo establishment. Many of the oldest and most powerfully inbred families in America were mortified by the spectacle of what they called “two gangs of jailbirds” going mallet to mallet in public for the top prize in U.S. polo. “Who are these people?” one asked. “Where did they come from? We don’t even know their families.”
“That’s because they’re all curs,” a woman from Palm Beach replied. “It’s like having to turn your home over to a pack of colored people.”
I was shocked by some of these outbursts, but Harriman said I was ignorant. “These are extremely wealthy people,” he said. “Intolerance is a virtue among them, and extreme intolerance is godlike.”
“That’s rich,” I told him. “Yesterday you said polo was the sport of Gods and Kings. No wonder you limp-wit horse freaks end up in debtors’ prison.”
“Please,” he said. “Try not to be coarse. You embarrass me. Let’s drive over to the beach and find some teenage girls.”
“What?” I said. “Are you nuts? The game is about to start.”
He nodded thoughtfully and then shrugged. “Oh, well,” he said. “More’s the pity. Maybe tomorrow.”
I turned away. Harriman had given me the creeps more than once since we’d met, and the profoundly squalid image of a 102-year-old criminal man stalking innocent teenage girls on a foggy Long Island beach while they dally and laugh on the way home from school made him even more repugnant to me.
Or maybe he was only 72; it made no difference. There was something cruel and lascivious about the way he talked sometimes, and there were nights when he gave me The Fear. I was no longer sure who he was or what he was doing with me, and his incessant, violent ranting about the president screwing his wife was beginning to get on my nerves. I wanted no part of it. It is bad business to get involved in other people’s domestic squabbles, and he was not the first man I’d met who thought the president was fucking his wife.
My homeboys hit the field at top speed and jumped out to a 3–1 lead after two seven-minute chukkers. Memo ran wild, scoring all three of the Aspen goals, and Tiger Kneece played defense like Deion Sanders on a good day. Even Doug Matthews was a hero.
We ran up a comfortable lead in the first half, and I spent most of the third chukker in my box, sipping absinthe and discussing the Meaning of Sport with a man named Lipsyte from the New York Times. He refused to gamble with me because he said he’d heard it was fixed.
“Nonsense,” I told him, “you must be out of your mind. These people are pure as the driven snow. The only thing they can win here is a cheap silver cup. It is worthless.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “Nobody in his right mind would spend a million dollars to win anything that cheap.”
“Welcome to polo,” I said. “It is a sport of Gods and Kings.”
By halftime the thugs from White Birch were reeling from constant attack and appeared to have lost confidence. They were acting spastic and demoralized. I figured the game was over and began working the crowd in an effort to double up on my bets. It was a wonderful feeling, and I wallowed in it, but I was careful to be discreet.
I spent most of the languid halftime break in a Lamborghini jeep parked under the VIP tower, smoking opium and eating strawberries in Devon cream with a sultry woman called Jane and some girls from Saudi Arabia.
Just then my friend Earl Biss knocked on the thick bulletproof window of the jeep. He was out on work release and had plunged deeply back into gambling. I opened the door, thinking to ask him in, but he seemed confused, and he was motioning for me to get out.
“They’re ripping us to pieces,” he shouted. “We’re losing everything.”
I hurried back to the game with him and saw to my horror that White Birch had somehow taken the lead. The score was 4–3, and my homeboys were coming apart at the seams. Memo had fouled, Tiger had missed a tap in, and Matthews was being heckled by the crowd. Our morale had collapsed. I could sense drastic change in the air. The worm had turned with a vengeance. My dream of victory seemed doomed.
The game was getting wild, and the crowd was becoming undisciplined. I went down for more gin, and when I came back to the box, I found a stranger in Harriman’s seat. He looked like a foreigner, and he was so intent on the game that I had a hard time getting through to him. “Get out,” I said. “This seat is taken.”
He looked at me strangely, as if I were some kind of toad.
“Get out,” I said again. “You don’t belong here.”
He continued to stare at me but said nothing. He was a handsome boy with a look of wandering royalty about him, and I could see by the glint in his eyes that he wanted to have me killed. But then he stood up and slithered lazily over the rail like a rat gone down a pipe. I felt vaguely guilty for some reason, but just then a roar went up from the crowd as Bautista Heguy, a small, speedy man sporting dreadlocks and riding a tiny horse, burst out of the pack and scored a goal for White Birch, putting them ahead 7–6 with just 1:06 on the clock. I abandoned all hope at that point and slumped down in my seat as the crowd began chanting triumphantly: “White Birch!!! White Birch!!!”
As the clock ticked down, I thought of leaping off the grandstand and running into the woods to avoid the fate of a Loser—which is no longer death but certain degradation . . . And then it happened—one of those magic moments in sport that no human being who saw it can ever forget. My man Carlos captured the ball and raced upfield while Memo came from the other side. The Gracida brothers were off on a Fast Break, and it was an elegant sight to see. Separately, they were each world-famous ten goalers—together they should be rated about thirty, far more than the sum of their parts.
Carlos got ridden into a corner by Mariano Aguerre and appeared to be trap
ped, but with eighteen seconds remaining, Carlos whirled his pony and bashed a perfect long shot at the White Birch goal some 150 yards away—across a field of torn-up sod and through the legs of seven galloping horses—that almost scored, but it drifted wide right and seemed to be going out of bounds.
We all watched it roll, utterly hypnotized, as it wandered away from its destiny and the pursuing riders slowed down to avoid mangling the crowd in the end zone. The jig was up. My homeboys had lost by a whisker—and it was at that exact moment that Carlos caught up with the ball and hit an impossible right-angle cut shot between the legs of his own horse that Doug Matthews later described as “the most exciting goal ever scored in the 2,500 years polo has been played.” It curled through the goalposts like a snake going sideways. The crowd was stunned into silence, and the White Birch lads went instantly crazy with grief. They howled at each other and stabbed their mallets down into the mud.
They knew, as I did, that God was not on their side. They were doomed. Big Darkness, Soon Come; it was only a matter of time.
The sudden-death overtime period was quick and naked of drama. Memo was allegedly fouled, and Carlos lofted an easy penalty shot that won the game for my homeboys.
The crowd did not go wild—but I did, and I collected many dollars, which I quickly squandered on whips, raw silk, horse blankets, and other expensive gimcracks in the paraphernalia tents. One of the shysters conned me out of $900 for a set of gold-plated polo china that still has not been delivered. It remains a foul bone in my throat and a nasty stain in my memory. Caveat Emptor is the rule of the polo market. They are horse traders, tribal people by nature, and they wake up greedy every day of their lives. Beware.
The rest of the day was a nightmare. When I went back to the press tent to inquire about Harriman, they told me he’d been involved in a violent fracas with local police before halftime, then arrested for murder and taken away to jail. Nobody could explain it. He was apparently very well known in polo circles, and people called him a gentleman.