Besides, I’d probably butt you long before it ever occurred to you to butt me. There’s only one rule in street and bar fights: maximum violence, instantly. Don’t pussyfoot, don’t wait for the war to escalate. Nuke them, right off. Hit them with everything, milk bottle, car tool, clenched keys or coins. The first blow has to give everything. If he takes it, and you go down, then you get all he has to mete out anyway. The worst, the most extreme violence — at once. Extremity is the only element of surprise. Hit them with everything. No quarter.
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Well I really beat myself up out on the court there, I’ll tell you that. For seventy-two hours I just lay in my pit at the hotel. The tinnitus was operational pretty well full time, and that toothache of mine got much more complicated: it would kick me awake with sirens of pain, loud, inordinate, braiding, twisting, like currents in a river. I’d fucked my back, too, out on the deck—and there was this incredible welt up the rear of my thigh where I’d fallen and tobogganed across the mat on my can for a few yards, wrong-footed by Fielding. Last but not least, I seemed to have developed an acute gastric condition, maybe from all those frazzled junkfurters. Or maybe it’s just a compound hangover, I don’t know. For the first day I was pure turbo power, a human hovercraft over the bowl. Oh, I had lift-off… The maid lurked but never got a look in, and soon the room was really showing its age.
Felix the bellhop turned out to be a good pal to me here. He ran errands to the pharmacy and liquor store. With his quick presence, his careless intensity of life, he dotted the wastes of the afternoon. He grew assertive. He even bawled me out when he found me shitfaced in front of The Money Game at ten-thirty one morning, and looked as though he might prove difficult about ferrying in the booze. I bawled him out back. ‘Fuck you, Felix,’ I said. ‘I’ll use room service.’ So he did my bidding, restlessly, with averted eyes. I was touched. Felix was getting money for this — I’d already passed the kid a twenty. But he would have made a lot more if I’d been liquored up all the time. In my reduced state I couldn’t bear the rub of his disapproval and so I tried to take it fairly easy, on the whole.
I had fever. And I had Selina fever too. Lying in that slipped zone where there is neither sleep nor wakefulness, where all thoughts and words are cross-purposed and yet the mind is forever solving, solving, Selina came at me in queries of pink smoke. I saw her performing flesh in fantastic eddies and convulsions, the face with its smile of assent and the complicit look in the flattered eyes, the demonology of her underwear suggesting spiders and silk, her sharp shoulders, her fiery hair, the arched creature doing what that creature does best — and the thrilling proof, so rich in pornography, that she does all this not for passion, not for comfort, far less for love, the proof that she does all this for money. I woke babbling in the night — yes, I heard myself say it, solve it, through the dream-mumble—and I said, I love it. I love her … I love her corruption.
The telephone was a one-way instrument, an instrument of torture. Caduta rang. Lorne Guyland rang. A trio of nutters called Christopher Meadowbrook, Nub Forkner and Herrick Shnexnayder — I had them on the line too. That madman, that real madman, that accredited devo crazoid, he checked in again, three times, four times, son of a bitch. He’s really got to me, I admit it. I turn hot now when I hear the empty sound at the end of the line, just before he starts his spiel. His voice is abject, bitter, poor—his voice is so mean. You can hear self-hatred and shame and suffering there. He maunders. He cries. His graphic and detailed threats come as a big relief. I can deal with threats. ‘What do I call you?’ I once asked him. ‘I’ll be Frank,’ he said, and laughed for a long time, with no pleasure.