‘Who are you? I don’t know you.’
‘The man says he doesn’t know me. How many guys’ lives you fucked up recently? Maybe you ought to keep score.’
Where was this coming from? Would the hotel telephonist know? Had I fucked up anyone’s life recently? Not that I could recall…
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘who needs this? I’m hanging up.’
‘WAIT!’ he said — and I thought, at once, with relief: Oh, he’s mad. So there’s no real problem. It’s not my fault. Everything’s fine, fine.
‘Okay. Say your bit.’
‘Welcome to New York,’ he began. ‘Flight 666, room 101. Thank you for flying Trans-American. Don’t mess with cabbies, don’t fight with drunks. Don’t walk Ninety-Ninth Street. Don’t go to topless bars. You want to buy Dawn a drink? Stay out of those porno stores you’ve been eyeing. They’ll wreck your head. Stay drunk for when we meet. And give me back my fucking money.’
‘… Wait. Hey. What’s your name?’
The line died. I put down the receiver and picked it up again.
‘It was a local call, sir,’ the girl told me. ‘Everything all right, sir?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you. Everything’s fine, fine.’
Wow, I thought — this is a new wrinkle. It was a local call, no question. It was very local indeed.
——————
Two-forty, and I was out on Broadway, heading north. Now, how bad do you assume I’m feeling?… Well, you’re wrong. I’m touched by your sympathy (and want much, much more of it: I want sympathy, even though I find it so very hard to behave sympathetically). But you’re wrong, brother. Sister, you slipped. I didn’t feel too great this morning, true. A ninety-minute visit to Pepper’s Burger World, on the other hand, soon sorted that lot out. I had four Wallies, three Blastfurters, and an American Way, plus a nine-pack of beer. I’m a bit full and sleepy, perhaps, but apart from that I’m ready for anything.
I wondered, as I burped up Broadway, I wondered how this town ever got put together. Some guy was dreaming big all right. Starting down in Wall Street and nosing ever upward into the ruins of the old West Side, Broadway snakes through the island, the only curve in this world of grids. Somehow Broadway always contrives to be just that little bit shittier than the zones through which it bends. Look at the East Village: Broadway’s shittier than that. Look uptown, look at Columbus: Broadway’s shittier. Broadway is the moulting python of strict New York. I sometimes feel a bit like that myself. Here the fools sway to Manhattan time.
Now what’s all this about me playing tennis with Fielding Goodney? Do you remember me making this ridiculous arrangement? Remind me. This morning, as I sat sobbing over my first cigarette, Fielding rang and said, ‘Okay, Slick. I fixed the court. Let’s do it.’
Well of course I kept quiet, and nonchalantly transcribed the address he gave. I happen to have an old pair of sneakers with me, and a T-shirt of sorts. Fielding will supply the trunks. As for tennis, I thought to myself — yeah, I can play that stuff. A mere four or five ‘summers back you could have seen me out there, gambolling around the court. I haven’t played since, but I’ve watched an awful lot of tennis on television.
Carrying my stuff in a plastic duty-free bag, I followed leaning Broadway up past the loops and circuses at the corner of the Park and into the West Side with its vacant lots and gaping car chutes. The numbered streets plodded slowly by. I kept expecting to see a sports complex or a gymnasium, or one of those shady squares of green that surprise you in the streets of London. ‘You’ve screwed up again,’ I thought, when I came to the building that Fielding had specified. It was a skyscraper, whose glassy lines climbed like a strip of film into the open blue. I went in anyway and asked the oldtimer.
‘A fifteenth,’ he said.
What was Fielding playing at? I rode the lift, which barrelled me up through the dead floors marked with an X. In the corridor I passed a familiar face — that of Chip Fournaki, a swarthy pro who usually flopped foul-temperedly in the semis of the major competitions. A few seconds later I passed Nick Karebenkian, Chip’s doubles partner.