Fielding signed the check. I signed some contracts, directing more and more money my way.
He dropped me off on Broadway. Eleven o’clock. What can a grown male do alone at night in Manhattan, except go in search of trouble or pornography?
Me, I spent an improving four hours on Forty-Second Street, dividing my time between a space-game arcade and the basement gogo bar next door. In the arcade the proletarian ghosts of the New York night, these darkness-worshippers, their terrified faces reflected in the screens, stand hunched over their controls. They look like human forms of mutant moles and bats, hooked on the radar, rumble and wow of these stocky new robots who play with you if you give them money. They’ll talk too, for a price. Launch Mission, Circuit Completed, Firestorm, Flashpoint, Timewarp, Crackup, Blackout! The kids, tramps and loners in here, they are the mineshaft spirits of the new age. Their grandparents must have worked underground. I know mine did. In the gogo bar men and women are eternally ranged against each other, kept apart by a wall of drink, a moat of poison, along which mad matrons and bad bouncers stroll.
At eleven-thirty or thereabouts the old barmaid said to me, ‘See? She’s talking to you, Cheryl’s talking to you. You want to buy Cheryl a drink?’
I paid the ten and said nothing. The old barmaid in her brown condom, she might have been last night’s sister. That’s my life: repetition, repetition. True, the chicks on the ramp provided some variety. None of them wore any pants. At first I assumed that they got paid a lot more for this. Looking at the state of the place, though, and at the state of the chicks, I ended up deciding that they got paid a lot less.
Two hours later I was wheeling around Times Square, looking for damage. I found some too. A very young prostitute approached me. We caught a cab and rode thirty blocks, downtown, west, Chelsea way. I glanced at her only once in the bucking car. She was dark, with lips the colour of blood and Spanish hair too tangled to shine. I consoled myself with the thought that, along with a bottle of Je Rêve, a carton of Executive Lights, and a punch in the tits, I’d be taking back a real wowser of a VD for Selina—Herpes I, Herpes II, Herpes: The Motion Picture. I can recall the rudimentary foyer of some thriving flophouse. I paid for the room, up front. She led me there. The figure of forty dollars was mentioned by her and approved by me. She started getting undressed and so did I. Then I stopped.’… But you’re pregnant,’ I remember saying in childish, open-ended surprise. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. I stared at the strong gleaming belly. You expect it to be so soft but it looks so strong. ‘It’s not all right,’ I said. I made her get dressed and sit on the bed. I held her hand and listened to myself talking crap for an hour and a half. She did a lot of nodding. I had paid her the money. She even listened to some of it: this was easy work, really. Towards the end I thought I might even try and wangle a handjob out of her. She would have obliged readily enough, no doubt. She was like me, myself. She knew she shouldn’t do it, she knew she shouldn’t go on doing it. But she went on doing it anyway. Me, I couldn’t even blame money. What is this state, seeing the difference between good and bad and choosing bad — or consenting to bad, okaying bad?
Nothing happened. I gave her a further ten for carfare. She went off to find more men and money. I returned to the hotel, and lay down fully clothed, and backed off into sleep for the second night running in this town where the locks and lightswitches all go the wrong way, and where the sirens say ‘you’ and whoop! and ow, ow, ow.
——————
My head is a city, and various pains have now taken up residence in various parts of my face. A gum-and-bone ache has launched a cooperative on my upper west side. Across the park, neuralgia has rented a duplex in my fashionable east seventies. Downtown, my chin throbs with lofts of jaw-loss. As for my brain, my hundreds, it’s Harlem up there, expanding in the summer fires. It boils and swells. One day soon it is going to burst.