‘Man, I sure could use some of the bc. I wouldn’t want to go back too long.’
‘Yeah. A couple of weeks, maybe.’
‘Two, maybe three. I wouldn’t want to go back too long. But oh man I sure could use some of that bc.’
Five minutes later I was in a gogo bar on Broadway, discussing inflation with an off-duty stripper called Cindi. If you’d asked me how I felt, I would have told you that it was a big relief—to be back in civilization again.
‘I want to thank you, John,’ said the telephone, ‘for our date the other night.’
‘Which night was that?’
‘Saturday night. Or Sunday morning. Don’t tell me you don’t remember. We met. Kind of. You were very nice to me, John. You didn’t try and kill me or anything. No, you were very dear.’
‘Don’t talk crap,’ I said.
Frank the Phone again, giving me a hard time. Actually I was still deeply curious about Saturday night. The harder I tried to remember — or, let’s be accurate, the harder I fought to keep memory away — the more convinced I became that something really bad had happened, something definitive, something life-wrecking. I think that was why I had drunk myself to pieces all through Sunday. To keep that memory away, away. But Frank the Phone I could handle. This wimp couldn’t worry me.
‘You find a bookmatch in your pocket?. .. Go find it again, John. I wrote a message for you inside.’
‘Oh yeah? What?’
‘Go find it, John. I want you to see the proof.’
I went to the wardrobe and frisked my suit. I had thrown nothing away. I never throw anything away. Here, the telltale bookmatch, valentine-pink, the colour of sweet lipstick: Zelda’s — Dinner and Hostess Dancing. I snapped it open, and I got the message.
‘Oh you sick bat,’ I said. ‘You poor idiot. Will you tell me something? Why are you doing this? Tell me again. I keep forgetting.’
‘Oh it’s motivation you want. You want motivation. Okay. Here. Have some motivation.’
Then he made his longest speech to date. He said to me, ‘Remember, in Trenton, the school on Budd Street, the pale boy with glasses in the yard? You made him cry. It was me. Last December, Los Angeles, the hired car you were driving when you jumped that light in Coldwater Canyon? A cab crashed and you didn’t stop. The cab had a passenger. It was me. 1978, New York, you were auditioning at the Walden Center, remember? The redhead, you had her strip and then passed her over, and you laughed. It was me. Yesterday you stepped over a bum in Fifth Avenue and you looked down and swore and made to kick. It was me. It was me.’
The Ashbery, Room 101, I sit with my big croc face flickering to the last veils of the late, late movie. I don’t — I don’t remember the pale boy with glasses crying in the playground — but no doubt there were one or two, and I was a mean kid. There always are those pale boys — I was in LA last December, and I hired a car all right. There were near things, there were skids, emergency stops, emergency sprints. There always are those near things… I did hold auditions in the Walden Center in ’78, checking out some models for the big-bim role in a Bulky Bar commercial. There must have been the odd redhead among them, and I was my usual working self (I’m an altogether different proposition when I’m working—I’m not very nice at all). There always are those redheads … I was a mean kid in 1978. I was a mean kid last year. And this.
Yesterday I was walking up golden Fifth Avenue towards the tawny gulf of the Park. The powerful stores were in full exchange, drawing people in, easing people out, superintended by the lean Manhattan totems, these idols or rock-statues that stare straight ahead in grim but careless approval of the transactions compounded in the street beneath. It was pouring money. On the pavement the monkeynut operatives and three-card trick artists, the thimble-riggers, hot-handbag dealers, contraband bandits — they all plied their small concerns. A lot of dinky women taking the goods and the air today … there’s no shortage of big tits in Manhattan. It’s not a problem. Nearly everyone seems to have them over here … Then I saw something you see pretty often over here too: a have-not, a real flat-earther, a New York nomad lying face down on the flagstones like a damp log, sideways-on to the streaming spenders in their waves and sheets and racks. As I stepped over him I looked down (the rug as stiff as bark, an ear the texture of pomegranate peel) and said, rather affably I thought, ‘Get up, you lazy bastard.’ I walked on — and hailed Fielding as he strolled out of a bookstore. Arm in arm we gained the Carraway and met with two more of our moneymen, Buck Specie and Sterling Dun. They were both very excited by the venture and were alike convinced that I had a big future in our industry. Then they all went off nightclubbing in the Autocrat, but I was already massive and speechless with rice wine, and so I…