… I like to think of my West London flat as a kind of playboy pad. This has no effect on my flat, which remains a gaff, a lair, a lean-to— a sock. It smells of batch, of bachelordom: even I can nose it (don’t let batch into your life, into your bones. After a while, batch gets into your bones). Like an adolescent, throbbing, gaping, my poor flat pines for a female presence. And so do I. Its spirit is broken, and so is mine. (Her dressing-gown, her moisturizing creams, the treasure-chest of her knicker drawer—they’re not here any longer, they’re all gone now.) My pad has tousled cream carpets, a rhino-and-pylon sofa and an oval bed with black satin counterpane. None of this is mine. The voile walls are not mine. I hire everything. I hire water, heat, light. I hire tea by the teabag. I’ve lived here for ten years now and nothing is mine. My flat is small and also costs me a lot of money.
Standing in the nordic nook of the kitchen, I can gaze down at the flimsy-limbed joggers heading south towards the Park. It’s nearly as bad as New York. Some of these gasping fatsos, these too-little-too-late artists, they look as though they’re running up rising ground, climbing ground. My generation, we started all this. Before, everyone was presumably content to feel like death the whole time. Now they want to feel terrific for ever. The Sixties taught us this, that it was hateful to be old. I am a product of the Sixties — an obedient, unsmiling, no-comment product of the Sixties — but in this matter my true sympathies go further back, to those days of yore when no one minded feeling like death the whole time. I peer through the spectral, polluted, nicotine-sodden windows of my sock at these old lollopers in their kiddie gear. Go home, I say. Go home, lie down, and eat lots of potatoes. I had three handjobs yesterday. None was easy. Sometimes you really have to buckle down to it, as you do with all forms of exercise. It’s simply a question of willpower. Anyone who’s got the balls to stand there and tell me that a handjob isn’t exercise just doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I almost had a heart-attack during number three. I take all kinds of other exercise too. I walk up and down the stairs. I climb into cabs and restaurant booths. I hike to the Butcher’s Arms and the London Apprentice. I cough a lot. I throw up pretty frequently, which really takes it out of you. I sneeze, and hit the tub and the can. I get in and out of bed, often several times a day… Ah, you saw me at my best in New York, at my most disciplined, decisive and dynamic. Over here, I find I have a tendency to go downhill. There’s nothing to do and no one to do nothing with. I never do anything. I wish I could find someone to be unfaithful to Selina with. I thought little Doris, for instance, was dead keen. Women! Drink! It puts you at a big disadvantage with the ladies, being drunk all the time — though Fielding astounded me on the phone the other day by saying what a hit I’d made with Butch Beausoleil. Yes, you saw me at my very best, at my most suave and attractive, over there in New York. Oh for some of that New York spirit! Over there, you can look all fucked-up and shot-eyed and everyone thinks you’re just talented and European. I made my mistakes, I admit, as we all do when we go over there to try it on. Like bawling for more drink at two-fifteen in thinning restaurants. Like instigating singsongs in bars and falling over all the time in nightclubs and discos. One morning, two trips ago, I attended a breakfast meeting with Fielding and three preliminary moneymen in the office suite of a velvet hotel off Sutton Place. Half way through my synopsis the cork of nausea abruptly popped in my throat. I only just made it to the adjacent can, which was large and acoustical: my imitation of an exploding hippopatamus through the closed door in full quadraphonic (as Fielding later explained). I got one or two funny glances on my return, but I just butched it out and I don’t think it did me any harm. If I were them, I’d enjoy the spectacle. It does my poor old ticker good to see someone really totalled — by his own hand, mind you. Not blasted by outside nature or misfortune, which only frightens me. But they’re a bit more puritanical in the States, hence the looks of incredulous solicitude, that morning over juice and scrambled eggs and coffee gurgling in heavy silverware, as I attempted to talk on. I started making an extraordinary noise — I heard that noise again the other day, while trying to force the last drops of ketchup from a plastic tomato. It was no big deal. I simply coughed myself into a crying-jag and had to be helped downstairs and into the Autocrat. All good knockabout stuff. I don’t like seeing women in this state. You don’t see it so much in women, and I’m glad. You see it round my way sometimes, the dead blondes in the scarred pubs … What happened that night, that night in the Berkeley? What happened? Something did… I’ve solved one minor mystery. I now know how I managed to make my flight from New York. Fielding rang JFK and informed Trans-American that there was a bomb on board my flight. ‘It’s no big thing, Slick,’ Fielding told me on the phone. ‘I always do it when I’m running late. They grill the latecomers but not if you’re first-class. It’s not economical’… And then there is the second mystery, the mystery that lingers.