3
I stood at the bar with the Morning Line. witch who lied for DR SEX. IT'S ONLY . . PUPPY LOVE. I BACK IRA — RED KEITH. MY SECRET LOVE BY TV'S MIDGE: SEE CENTRE PAGES. Now is this any Way to interpret the world? Seems there's a major rumble brewing in Poland. Solidarity is giving Moscow the V-signs and fight-intros. Russia will beat Poland up, I'm sure, if things go on this way. That's what I'd do. I mean, give them an inch ... The speculation about Lady Diana's trousseau continues. I have no strong views on the trousseau, but I wish they'd show that famous snap again, the one where she's holding the kid in her arms and you can see right through her dress. A barmaid who cudgelled her landlord boyfriend to death with a beer flagon has been sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment (suspended). How come? Because she pleaded Pre-Menstrual Tension. I'd have thought that PMT was enough of a male hazard anyway, without that kind of mollycoddling. Another granny has been mob-raped in her sock by black boys and skinheads. What is the new craze for grannies? This one's eighty-two, for Christ's sake. Getting raped at that age—Jesus, it must be the last thing you need. Here's another piece about that chick who's dying in her teens because, according to the Line, she's allergic to the twentieth century. Poor kid... Well I have my problems too, sister, but I don't have yours. I'm not allergic to the twentieth century. I am addicted to the twentieth century.
Terminal Three was in terminal chaos, the air and light suffused with last things, planet panic, money Judgment. We are fleeing Earth for a newer world while there is still hope, while there are still chances. I queued, checked in, climbed the stairs, hit the bar, I got frisked, X-rayed, cleared, I hit the bar, plundered duty-free, walked the chutes, paced the waiting room until we entered the ship, two by two, all types represented, to make our getaway ... Aboard the travel tube (a new kind of waiting room) we sat in lines, like an audience, to check out the art therapy on offer: toothache muzak, and, adorning the canvas curtain of the home-movie screen, a harbour view from a bracingly talentless brush. Next, the death-defying act from the stewardesses, those bashful girls and their oxygen mime. But the stalls gave the bird to this dance of doom. Unhooked from London, we boiled and shuddered and raced. Away! 1 thought, as we climbed through the air with the greatest of ease.
I looked down at the pretty patterns that streets don't know they make. Me, I was flying economy, but the plane, churning sideways now, was guzzling gas at seven gallons a mile. Even the Fiasco is more economical than that. I was flying economy, but I too needed my fuel. With cigarette and lighter cocked, I awaited the release of no smoking. Twisting my neck, I monitored the funereal approach of the drinks trolley. I wolfed down my lunch, charming a second helping out of the all-smiles stewardess. I love airline food and further suspect that there's money in it somewhere. I once tried to interest Terry Linex in the idea of opening an airfood restaurant. Obviously you'd need proper seats, trays, mayonnaise sachets, and so on. You could even have video films, semi-darkness, no-smoking sections, paper bags. Linex liked the way I was thinking, but he said that you'd never get the punters in and out quickly enough. The food would never be fast enough to make really fast money ...
Using the costly head-pincers, I watched the in-flight movie. The movie was a wreck, of course. The movie was a flapping, squawking, gobbling turkey. I hope my movie is better than that: I certainly hope it makes more money. (An airline sale within three months of release? This has to be a tragedy for everyone involved.) You know, the thing I want more than anything else — you could call it my dream in life — is to make lots of money. I would cheerfully go into the alchemy business, if it existed and made lots of money ... We travelled on through air and time. Still four hours to kill. Drinking and smoking, alas, do not claim one's undivided attention. That's the only fault I have to find with these activities. Some people, it seems to me, are never satisfied. Not content with her smart new chequebook, Selina now wants a Vantage card. Oh yeah, and a baby. A baby... I looked around the quarter-empty aircraft. Everyone appeared to be sleeping or reading. I suppose reading must come in quite handy at times like these. The tousled girl in front of me, she was reading a buxom magazine: its text was in French, I think, but even I could tell that the article she scanned was about fellatio technique — blowjob knowhow. The fur coat on the seat beside her was uncontrollably voluminous, like a distending liferaft. She wr,s flying to her man, or maybe she was flying away from him, to another one. The intent, bespectacled young lady to my left, in contrast, was reading a book called Rousseau's Philosophy. This gave me a neat opening. I fetched another fistful of miniatures and spent the rest of the flight telling her about my philosophy. It was tough, but we got through the time somehow.
——————
'I have travelled widely', said Fielding Goodney, 'in the world of pornography. Always endeavour, Slick, to keep a fix on the addiction industries: you can't lose. The addicts can't win. Dope, liquor, gambling, anything video — these have to be the deep-money veins. Nowadays the responsible businessman keeps a finger on the pulse of dependence. What next? All projections are targeting the low-energy, domestic stuff, the schlep factor. People just can't hack going out any more. They're all addicted to staying at home. Hence the shit-food bonanza. Swallow your chemicals, swallow them fast, and get back inside. Or take the junk back with you. Stay off the streets. Stay inside. With pornography ...'
'... Yes?' I said.
I sipped my crimson drink. I lit another cigarette. We were in an Italian restaurant, well south of SoHo — Tribeca somewhere. Fielding said it was a mob joint and I believed him: brocade, matt light, as quiet as a church. I am a standard, no-frills Earthling, but Goodney, in his white suit, suntan and sliding blond hair, stood out like a pink elephant among the sin-sick funeral directors lurking and cruising against the blood-coloured walls. These guys, they seemed to walk without moving their legs. Just then, a middle-aged, blow-dried villain — the usual opera-star face, woozy with loot and mother-love — urged a neon redhead past our table, our good table, to which Fielding had been instantly and officiously steered.
Fielding looked up. He paused. 'Antonio Pisello,' he said, 'Tony Cazzo — from Staten Island. He was shot in the heart five years ago. Know what saved him?' he asked, and jabbed his own ribs with a long straight thumb. 'Credit cards — kept in a deck, with a band. Used to be a bad boy, but now he's pretty well totally legit.'
'And the girl?'
'Willa Glueck. Smart lady. A grand-a-night hooker, semi-retired.
For ten years she worked the streets — you know, giving head and hand at a dollar a dick. Then five years at the top, the very top. No one knows how she made the switch. It just doesn't happen. Look at her, the eyes, the mouth — superb. No evidence. I can't figure it. I hate it when I can't figure things.'
Indeed, lamentably under-informed, Fielding Goodney. He smiled in innocent self-reproach, then swung sternly and made the reverse V-sign at the watchful waiter. Two more Red Snappers were on their way. We ordered. Fielding held the crimson menu (silken, tasselled and beautified, reminding me and my fingers of Selina and her secrets) in slender brown hands, the wrists cuffed in pale blue and the gold links taut on their chains. Over dinner Fielding explained to me about the lucrative contingencies of pornography, the pandemonium of Forty-Second Street, the Boylesk dealerships on Seventh Avenue with their prodigies of chickens and chains, the Malibu circuit with the crews splashing through the set at dusk for the last degrees of heft and twang and purchase from the beached male lead on the motel floor, the soft proliferations of soft core in worldwide cable and network and its careful codes of airbrush and dick-wipe, the stupendous aberrations of Germany and Japan, the perversion-targeting in video mail-order, the mob snuff-movie operation conceived in Mexico City and dying in the Five Boroughs.
And I asked him, 'These movies — they exist?'
'Sure. But not many, not for long and not any more.' Fielding (I noticed) cut his veal in the normal way, but then passed his fork to the right hand to prong the meat. '
Come on, Slick, be realistic. If there was money there, it had to be tried... The girls were vagrants.'
'Ever seen one?'
'You understand what you're asking me? You're asking me if I'm an accessory after the fact to first-degree murder. Not me, Slick. This was organized crime, superorganized. No other way. Snuff movies— now this is evidence.'
And then his manner, the force field he gave off, it changed, not for long. He became pointed, intimate. He said, 'Clinching, no? Evidence that it corrupts, pornography, wouldn't you say?' He relaxed, and so did his manner. 'Too hot, Slick. No one could use them. A distribution problem.'
We went on to discuss our distribution problem, which, according to my pal Fielding, was absolutely non-existent. We would simply lease out the finished product: that way, said Fielding, we preserved our artistic freedom while making much, much more money. I thought only the big boys could pull off a gimmick like this, but the kid had it all worked out. His contacts were extraordinary, and not just in movies either. As he talked, and as I hunkered down to a long train of grappa and espresso, I felt the clasp and nuzzle of real money. Money, my bodyguard.
'You know, Slick,' he said,'— sometimes business looks to me like a big dumb dog howling to be played with. Want to know my hunch for the next growth area in the addiction line? Want to make a million? Shall I let you in?'
'Do it,' I said.
'Cuddles,' said Fielding Goodney. 'Cuddling up. Two people lying down and generating warmth and safety. Now how do we market this. A how-to book? A video? Nightshirts? A cuddle studio, with cuddle hostesses? Think about it, Slick. There are millions and millions of dollars out there somewhere in cuddles.'
Fielding caught the unspectacular tab, leaving a twenty on the plate. His hired Autocrat was waiting on the street. At one point Fielding turned to me and said, with midtown flashing against his face, 'Oh, I misled you, Slick, earlier on there. It's murder two not murder one. New York, murder one is just for cops, prison officers, shit like that. Forgive me.' I slipped out near Times Square. I heard Fielding give the driver an address on feminine Park Avenue.
I walked unsteadily through the heat of the pornographic night. As for my own body-clock readings and time-travel coordinates, well, it was 6 a.m. in here, and fuming with booze. I had travelled far that day, through space and through time. Man, how I needed to crash. Among the alleys and rooftops near the Ashbery, Fielding tells me, a nimble maniac sprints and climbs at large. What he needs to do is drop slating and masonry on to the heads of strolling theatre-goers and diners. He has done it five times now. He has had five hits. One was fatal. Murder two. Ultraviolet policemen lie in wait up there but they can't seem to catch him, this rooftop psychopath, adept of eave and sill, of buttress and skyhatch, this infinite-mass artist. So he darts and shinnies his way through the gothic jaggedness of fire-escapes, drainpipes and TV aerials, while beneath him Broadway crackles in late-night styrofoam, and there is no money involved. There is no money for him up there at any point.
—————— Now you've seen me in New York before, and you know how I am out here. I wonder what it is: something to do with the energy, the electricity of the place, all the hustle and razz — it fills me with that get up and go. I'm a different proposition in New York, pulled together, really on the ball. I was at it again first thing this morning, straight down to business despite my jet-lag and the kind of hangover that would have poleaxed any lesser man — worse, even, I think, than the hangover I caught in California. The hangover I caught in California was now seven months old, and I still showed no signs of recovering from it. It'll probably be with me till my dying day ... I told you all about my LA lark, didn't I. It's a good one, isn't it. The big black guy with the baseball bat — remember? Jesus, the risks one takes for a couple of laughs. I often think that the staying-power of my Californian hangover has something to do with an inability to believe I'm still alive.
Lying in bed, with telephone, address book, ashtray and coffee-cup efficiently arranged on the pouffe of my gut, I now buckled down to the first item of business: Caduta Massi... Like everyone else, like you yourself, I had seen Caduta many times up on the big screen, in costume dramas, musicals, Italian sex comedies, Mexican westerns. I had seen Caduta cringe and prance and pout and sneer. I used to beat off nights about her when I was a kid — like everyone else. The more I thought about her, the nearer I got to beating off about her now. She had been a big brawny vision in her youth, with an encouraging hint of rural gullibility in the breadth of her eyes and lips. Over the passing years, time had been kind to Caduta Massi. Over the passing years, time had been cruel to nearly everybody else. Time had been wanton, virulent and spiteful. Time had put the boot in. Now, at forty-odd, she could still play the right kind of romantic lead, given a sufficiently elderly and/or bisexual co-star... I hadn't been quick to come around to Caduta, as you know. I would have preferred someone less gorgeous, happy and sane—Sunny Wand, or even Day Lightbowne. I'm not sure why. But Fielding argued that Caduta was crucial to the package, and you have to follow the money in a case like this. Caduta, wife of the erring Lorne Guyland, rival to the busty Butch Beausoleil, mother of the greedy, thieving, addicted Christopher Meadowbrook or Spunk Davis or Nub Forkner — or whoever the hell we ended up with. The role was passive yet quietly central. It was sad. I wanted someone more realistic ... You see, the impulse behind my concept, my outline, it was personal, it had to do with my life. Autobiographical. Yes, it had to do with this old life of mine.
I rang the Cicero, where Fielding had installed Caduta and her entourage. A man answered. Caduta asked me to come to an address in Little Italy at two o'clock that afternoon. I then threw in a call to my sock in London. Engaged. Engaged ... According to Fielding, Caduta was in need of reassurance. I was going to give her some, gladly. I just hope I've got a little to spare. Yesterday, after that tearful reunion with my suitcase, I tried to get a negro hand-slapping thing going with Felix. Why? I thought. It's for the touch, for the touch. After all we are only human beings down here and we could do with a lot more praise and comfort than we actually get. Earthling reassurance — it's in permanently short supply, don't you think? Be honest, brother. Lady, now tell the truth. When was the last time a fellow-Earther let you rest your head on their heart, caressed your cheek, and said things designed to make you feel deeply okay? It doesn't happen often enough, does it. We'd all like it to happen a lot more often than it does. Can't we do a deal? Oh boy (I bet you're thinking), that head-on-heart stuff, whew, could I use a little of that.
I yawned and stretched — and nearly spilt the coffee. Reaching to steady the cup, I unbalanced the ashtray. Reaching to steady the ashtray, I spilt the coffee, and also hooked my elbow in the telephone's lone dreadlock — so that when, with a final heroic convulsion, I burst out of the bed, the swinging casket somehow smashed into my shin and then dropped like a bomb on to the bare mound of my foot... Twenty minutes later, by which time the pain had done its worst, I unpeeled my way through the sodden address book. I sought reassurance that Martina's number wasn't listed there. This was one call, one lost date, one apology, that I begged to be excused. Here we are: Theresa's, TV Repair, Trans-American, Trexacarna — Martina Twain. Now wait just a goddam minute. That wasn't my handwriting. It was — Selina's! . . . Bitch. Was this a recrimination, or a taunt? Defiantly I squelched the book shut. Yes and then I made that call.
—————— And still I surfed on Manhattan static. YIELD say the traffic signs— but don't you listen! Not yielding, that's the thing. To strive, to seek, to butch it out — it's all a question of willpower. Thus midday discovered me with a second scotch in my hand, a Pakki nightie round my waist, and a half-naked sex-stewardess straddling my thighs. I was in the Happy Isles, on Third Avenue. I had read about the place in Scum magazine ... I felt all right in here: a circular, windowless room, tricked out in some lost pimp's image of a para-disal arbour — tendoned vines, plastic grape-clutches, bamboo ceiling, lagoon lights and canned birdsong. I
even found myself humming one of Fat Vince's favourites. What was it? — 'O Twine Me a Bower'. You know, there's a certain sort of man who would come to a joint like this in order to fuck the women in it. But self-improvement isn't nearly as hard as people make out. Take, for instance, a look at me. I'm only here for a handjob.
'Yeah, well what do you do?' I was saying. 'Use the blow-dry after the towels, or what?'
I was talking to this chick about her hair and the trouble she had with it. She was asking for trouble, mind you. Flattened by its own weight, its prisms as lively as oil stains or car blood, her solid black rug coursed down the length of her back. When she stood and turned to refreshen my drink, the bristly hem almost covered her double-fisted backside. Man, I wish I had an American rug, instead of this old dishtowel I live my life under... The lady had cordially assured me at the outset that I was free 'to party with anybody I liked the look of (this, except for the half-ounce bikini she wore, being her only hint that what we were sitting in wasn't a beauty parlour or seminar room but actually a brothel. I didn't let on either). I wondered then and I wondered now whether anybody included her. She'd sat on my lap in a friendly way, true, but that was just so I could get a better fix on her rug. Maybe she was simply a bargirl, a cashier, an all-purpose heft-dispenser . . . and maybe I had already got to know her a little too well. By my side nestled a water-proof, see-through plastic bag, containing my wallet: the money, the necessary. I had been obliged to take a blistering shower in a back room jovially serviced by two fat negroes in Hawaii shirts and frazzled straw hats. So I sat there, deloused, in the Happy Isles. Spurred by all this travel and transfer, the disease I have called tinnitus tunnelled deep and desperate into the corners of my head. Both ears were doing their jet imitation, with whistle and whine and the hungry rumble of underfloor fire. I held my new drink up to my forehead, as if to soothe my pulsing, my needing brow — plastic glass, plastic ice, an airplane drink. Yeah, I call this living good.