“Do you have any cash?” I asked her.
“Don’t overdo it, baby,” she warned, lowering her sunglasses, scanning the room.
I took my sunglasses off and checked my reflection in the lenses.
She snapped her fingers at me. “Hey, why don’t you just start chewing with your mouth open. Why don’t you just start licking your fingers after meals.”
“I don’t intend to take you anywhere nice,” I told her.
“Nice butt,” she murmured, ogling a Brazilian guy she hadn’t fucked yet but would a week later as he passed by, bouncing a soccer ball on his knee as he crossed the length of the room while eating a bagel, his jeans perfectly ripped, wearing a tank top with a gym logo on it.
I agreed, teasingly.
“You fag,” she yawned, taking the last swallow of Molson.
“He wears socks with sandals,” I pointed out. “He still wears his high-school graduation ring.”
“You, too, are in dire need of a maturity alert, my friend,” she said.
“I don’t wear Members Only jackets.”
“Contrary to popular opinion this is not enough to not make you evil,” she said.
“Evil?” I faux-gasped. “Black light posters are in. Bongos are in.”
“Pervert,” she said gleefully. “You have potential.”
Sean Bateman, whom she had fucked, joined us, offered a distracted smile, nodding even though no one had said anything that required a nod. He wondered aloud if any of us had pot, mentioned something about Rupert getting arrested in Albany late last night or early this morning. Sean pulled a beer out of the jacket he had just taken off and handed it to Jamie, who opened it with her teeth. I noticed how nice Bateman’s forearms were and someone was sadly strumming Led Zeppelin—I think it was “Thank You”—on a guitar and any light that had been streaming through the window we were all sitting next to disappeared and Sean whispered in my ear, “All the boys think she’s a spy .…”
I nodded and managed to smile.
Jamie was eyeing me carefully.
“What?” I asked, confused.
“You’re easy to unfold,” she said to me in front of Sean.
“What’s the story, baby?” I was asking, worried, blank-faced.
“You have potential,” Jamie said, grinning. “You definitely have potential.”
0
The camera slowly pans around my apartment, Smashing Pumpkins’ “Stumbleine” pours out over the sound track: a vintage industrial fan, an empty fish tank, dried flowers, a candelabra, a bicycle, a kitchen custom-made from several kinds of stone, a glass-door refrigerator, a food processor unwashed and stained with the grain and pulp from a health shake, a set of martini glasses. In the bathroom there’s a poster of Diana Rigg in “The Avengers” and candles from Agnès b. and in the bedroom there’s a down comforter lying on a futon that was hand-carved in a Japanese forest and the original poster for La Dolce Vita that Chloe gave me for a birthday hangs over it and in the closet in that bedroom is a black Paul Smith suit, a black turtleneck, jeans and white shirts, vests, an open-weave pullover sweater, a pair of brightly colored Hush Puppies, black desert boots. On my desk: free drink tickets, a Cohiba cigar still in its container, a Clash CD—Sandinista!— unopened, a check to Save the Rainforest returned because of insufficient funds, last year’s Social Register, a Baggie of psilocybin mushrooms, a half-empty Snapple, a roll of Mentos, an ad ripped from a magazine of Tyson promoting a new lip balm and the dragon tattoo etched on his bicep has a Chinese inscription on it that translated means “don’t trust anyone” and an old fax machine and falling out of the fax machine at this moment is a slip of fax paper that I pick up and read.
On it:
nie Marais, Christopher Lambert, Tommy Lee, Lauren Hutton, Claire Danes, Patty Hearst, Richard Grieco, Pino Luongo, Steffi Graf, Michael J. Fox, Billy Crudup, Marc Jacobs, Marc Audibet, the Butthole Surfers, George Clinton, Henry Rollins, Nike, Kim Deal, Beavis and Butt-head, Anita Hill, Jeff Koons, Nicole Kidman, Howard Stern, Jim Shaw, Mark Romanek, Stussy, Whit Stillman, Isabella Rossellini, Christian Francis Roth, Vanessa Williams, Larry Clark, Rob Morrow, Robin Wright, Jennifer Connelly, RuPaul, Chelsea Clinton, Penelope Spheeris, Glenn Close, Mandie Erickson, Mark Kostabi, René Russo, Yasmen, Robert Rodriguez, Dr. Dre, Craig Kallman Rosie Perez, Campion Platt, Jane Pratt, Natasha Richardson, Scott Wolf, Yohji Yamamoto, L7, Donna Tartt, Spike Jonze, Sara Gilbert, Sam Bayer, Margaret Cho, Steve Albini, Kevin Smith, Jim Rome, Rick Rubin, Gary Panter, Mark Morris, Betsey Johnson, Angela Janklow, Shannen Doherty, Molly Ringwald, O. J. Simpson, Michael DeLuca, Laura Dern, Rene Chun, the Brady Bunch, Toni Braxton Shabba Ranks, the Miller Sisters, Jim Carrey, Robin Givens, Bruno Beuilacqua di Santangelo, Huckleberry Finn, Bill Murr
I’m about to reread it for a fourth time, wiping tears off my face, when I hear someone outside the front door and a key slipped into the lock, unlocking the door, and the door opens and someone playing the building’s superintendent—“a young gorgeous guy”—peers in and spots me, wasted on the beanbag chair beneath a giant framed poster of the Replacements’ Pleased to Meet Me LP, and the actor seems bewildered and finally he apologizes for missing his cue.
“I thought I heard voices, man,” he says. “I thought I heard voices.”
2
16
Everything surrounding the ship is gray or dark blue and nothing is particularly hip, and once or maybe twice a day this thin strip of white appears at the horizon line but it’s so far in the distance you can’t be sure whether it’s land or more sky. It’s impossible to believe that any kind of life sustains itself beneath this flat, slate-gray sky or in an ocean so calm and vast, that anything breathing could exist in such limbo, and any movement that occurs below the surface is so faint it’s like some kind of small accident, a tiny indifferent moment, a minor incident that shouldn’t have happened, and in the sky there’s never any trace of sun—the air seems vaguely transparent and disposable, with the texture of Kleenex—yet it’s always bright in a dull way, the wind usually constant as we drift through it, weightless, and below us the trail the ship leaves behind is a Jacuzzi blue that fades within minutes into the same boring gray sheet that blankets everything else surrounding the ship. One day a normal-looking rainbow appears and you vaguely notice it, thinking about the enormous sums of money the Kiss reunion tour made over the summer, or maybe a whale swims along the starboard side, waving its fin, showing off. It’s easy to feel safe, for people to look at you and think someone’s going somewhere. Surrounded by so much boring space, five days is a long time to stay unimpressed.
15
I boarded the QE2 still wearing the Comme des Garçons tux and I was so stoned by the time the driver Palakon had sent dropped me off at the passenger terminal on West 50th Street that how I actually got on the ship is a blur of images so imprecise you couldn’t really even classify them as a montage: red, white and blue balloons floating in midair, crowds of photographers that I assumed were paparazzi but weren’t, a porter assuring me that my luggage—faded Gucci bags hurriedly and badly packed—would be in my cabin when (“and if,” he added) I got there, a live band playing “The Lambeth Walk.” In my haze I vaguely realized that “things” had already been taken care of, since I moved through the whole embarkation process—security, passport, receiving a QE2 VIP Gold Card—swiftly and with no hassles. But I was still so wasted that I barely made it up the gangway, and then only with the help of a couple of production assistants dressed as extras, one on either side of me, and a triple espresso from Starbucks, force-fed, as the band began playing a jaunty version of “Anything Goes.”
In my cabin I opened a complimentary split of Perrier-Jouët and downed two crumbled Xanax with it and then slumped into an overstuffed armchair. My eyes were sore and glazed and only by squinting could I take in my surroundings: a telephone, a minifridge, an okay bed, an unopenable porthole blurred opaque by the salt air, baskets of fresh fruit and flowers that I glumly stared at. Impassive
ly, I noticed a television and turned it on with a remote control it took me fifteen minutes to find, the prop sitting (inconspicuously, I thought) on top of the TV. I tried to focus and read a “Welcome Aboard” letter but started hyperventilating when I saw an invitation requesting my presence for cocktails with the ship’s “cruise director.” My maid, a cute little English thing, a tiny Courteney Cox maybe, introduced herself, and eyeing the bright new oversized orange felt Versace overcoat I’d unpacked and thrown across the bed, she smiled proudly and said, “I see you’ve already gotten acquainted with your life jacket,” and I just mumbled whatever I was supposed to mumble at that point, which was, I think, “Just respect yourself, baby,” then glared at her until she left and I relaxed back into my stupor.
As we started moving down the Hudson River I wrapped my head in a fluffy towel, started to sob inauthentically and then used one of the gift-box lotions I found when I hobbled into the bathroom to jerk off with but I was too wasted even to get half hard or to conjure up a fantasy about Lauren Hynde or Chloe Byrnes or, for that matter, Gwen Stefani. On the TV screen was a live feed of the horizon from the prow of the ship and now skyscrapers were passing by and then we were under the Verrazano Bridge and then the sky was darkening and another world was taking over as it always does in times like these and then I was dreaming of things that I couldn’t really remember later: I was making various Bart Simpson noises, Heather Locklear was a stewardess, I kissed and made up with Chris O’Donnell, the sound track was remixed Toad the Wet Sprocket and the special effects were cool and the filmmakers had hired a topnotch editor so the sequence really zipped and then there was a final shot—the camera moving closer and closer into the black hat Lauren Hynde gave me until the image was distorted by the hat’s tiny red rose.
14
The first couple days “at sea” I was in a stupor, still recovering. Was it Saturday? Was it Tuesday? Was I disappointed either way? I compensated by sleeping all the time until alarms blared late one morning and I woke up, panicking, the reality that the Details piece was never going to run hitting hard, and I vaguely remembered something about a lifeboat drill—a reminder I barely noticed had been slipped under my door the night before when I came back from a crummy dinner in the Queen’s Grill. Exhausted, I found the life jacket locked in some kind of coffin in my bathroom, grabbed my sunglasses and ran-walked, hungover, along dozens of empty corridors and down two flights of stairs trying to follow the directions on a badly Xeroxed map until I found a deck filled with old people who were huddled in masses and staring rudely, annoyed by my tardiness as I muttered “Oh, give me a break” and muttered and muttered. “It’s backwards, son,” I was told by an officer, who struggled, fumbling, to untie the life jacket I had sloppily put on. While I stood there, the officer said, “Don’t worry”—patting me on the shoulder as I flinched a dozen times—“you probably won’t need it.” I offered him a Mentos, told him he was a dead ringer for Kurt Loder, which he wasn’t.
I wandered around on what was left of my Xanax and made an appointment for a massage that I actually kept. I did a little rehearsing, nailed a couple of scenes down, but they had already been shot, someone had already commented favorably on the dailies, so that whole enterprise could be construed as kind of a waste. The elderly and Japanese were everywhere, surrounded me at miserable dinners I ate alone in the Queen’s Grill while staring at an issue of last month’s Interview magazine because there were new photos by Jurgin Teller of Daniela Pestova contemplating a plate of spring rolls and a Corrine Day photo essay on martini glasses and the entire issue was filled with bruises and scars and underarm hair and beautiful, shiftless-looking guys lounging improbably in front of empty 7-Elevens at dusk somewhere in the “heartland” and all I could think about, holding back tears and wincing, was: that should have been me.
Jurassic Park was the only movie playing in the ship’s Dolby-equipped auditorium so I ended up in the casino a lot, uselessly gambling away the money Palakon had left me, dropping a thousand dollars’ worth of chips at the 21 table in what seemed like a matter of minutes. In the Queen’s Lounge old couples sat on long couches everywhere, trying to complete massive jigsaw puzzles that they were getting absolutely nowhere with, and I was always getting lost and I couldn’t find anything anywhere. I’d finally locate one of the ship’s many bars and sit down, knock back a Mai Tai or four and smoke a pack of cigarettes until the strength to resume looking for my cabin wandered back to me. At one of these bars I was so bored I even flirted with a young German guy who in hushed tones kept inviting me to accompany him the next day to the gym—“da voorkoot stashoon”—and I politely declined by telling him that I had just recovered from a humongous heart attack. His response: “Ja?”
The next time I saw the German guy I was floating near the rim of the huge whirlpool bath in the spa and after that I sluggishly moved to the thalassotherapy pool and when I saw him saunter over, wearing a silver thong a little too confidently, I bolted toward a private inhalation booth, where I daydreamed about what I was going to do with the $300,000 F. Fred Palakon had offered me to find Jamie Fields. I came up with so many things that I almost passed out and had to be revived with a facial and an aromatherapy session administered by someone who looked like the Crypt-Keeper, as a Muzak version of “Hooked on a Feeling” was piped through the spa’s sound system.
Occasionally the crew converged and the camera would follow me at a discreet distance, shots mainly of Victor on the upper-deck starboard railing, trying to light cigarettes, some rolled with marijuana, sunglasses on, wearing an oversized Armani leather jacket. I was told to look sad, as if I missed Lauren Hynde, as if I regretted my treatment of Chloe, as if my world were falling apart. I was encouraged to try and find Lauren in Miami, where she was staying with Damien, and I was given the name of a famous hotel, but I feigned seasickness and those scenes were scrapped since they really weren’t in character anyway.
The Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash into Me” played over the montage, not that the lyrics had anything to do with the images the song was played over but it was “haunting,” it was “moody,” it was “summing things up,” it gave the footage an “emotional resonance” that I guess we were incapable of capturing ourselves. At first my feelings were basically so what? But then I suggested other music: “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails, but I was told that the rights were sky-high and that the song was “too ominous” for this sequence; Nada Surf’s “Popular” had “too many minor chords,” it didn’t fit the “mood of the piece,” it was—again—“too ominous.” When I told them I seriously did not think things could get any more fucking ominous than they already were, I was told, “Things get very much more ominous, Victor,” and then I was left alone.
“I’m … a party person,” I muttered to no one.
Innumerable old people passed by, limped through miles of corridors, slowly lifted themselves up dozens of broad staircases, the lost wandered the decks pretending they weren’t, the ship sailed on.
13
The second night of the voyage I had another boring dinner in the Queen’s Grill. The sommelier I’d befriended by ordering a $200 bottle of semi-decent red wine asked if I wanted to join the Mashioki family at the captain’s table instead of sitting alone and I told Bernard that I simply couldn’t, hinting at an indiscretion I’d committed with the Mashiokis’ eldest daughter, a fat, dour teenager who was always wandering near the ship’s kennels wearing an up WITH LIFE T-shirt, visiting her “cat.” The sommelier nodded gravely, brought me another small tin of Beluga, recommended the foie gras, went back to the business of his life while I slipped into my noncommittal dining mode. Afterwards, I dropped another grand of Palakon’s at the 21 table and found the cinematographer, Felix, at the Captain’s Bar, hunched over a giant snifter of brandy and chain-smoking Gauloises. I sidled up next to him and we had the obligatory “ominous” conversation.
“What’s the story?” I asked, after ordering a split of champagne, maybe my tenth on that partic
ular evening. “You’re the guy shooting this, right?”
“You could say that,” Felix said in a thick, not-quite-traceable accent.
“I just did,” I pointed out. “How’s it going? I just want your professional opinion.”
“It is going better than the last one I did,” Felix muttered.
“Which one was that?”
“A picture called Shh! The Octopus.” He paused. “It was the third part of a soon to be completed quartet funded by Ted Turner that began with Beware! The Octopus, which was followed by Watch Out! The Octopus. The fourth part is called, tentatively, Get the Hell Away from That Octopus.” Felix sighed again, distracted, and stared into his snifter. “The third one had a good cast. A very bitter Kristin Scott Thomas, an equally bitter Alan Alda, and Al Sharpton had signed on to play Whitney Houston’s extremely bitter father—the bitter harpoonist.” Felix paused. “David Hasselhoff is the first victim of the octopus.” Pause. “Isn’t it ironic, huh?”
A long pause occurred while I tried to process this information. Confused, I broke it hesitantly. “So-o-o … the octopus’s name was … Shh?”
Felix glared at me, then finally sighed, waved to the bartender for another, even though he hadn’t finished the brandy sitting in front of him.
“How am I doing?” I asked expectantly.
“Oh, you’ll do,” he sighed and then paused before phrasing carefully: “You have a … kind of … nonspecific … fabulosity—oh my god …” He groaned as his head dropped onto the bar.