I yawned and stretched — and nearly spilt the coffee. Reaching to steady the cup, I unbalanced the ashtray. Reaching to steady the ashtray, I spilt the coffee, and also hooked my elbow in the telephone’s lone dreadlock — so that when, with a final heroic convulsion, I burst out of the bed, the swinging casket somehow smashed into my shin and then dropped like a bomb on to the bare mound of my foot… Twenty minutes later, by which time the pain had done its worst, I unpeeled my way through the sodden address book. I sought reassurance that Martina’s number wasn’t listed there. This was one call, one lost date, one apology, that I begged to be excused. Here we are: Theresa’s, TV Repair, Trans-American, Trexacarna — Martina Twain. Now wait just a goddam minute. That wasn’t my handwriting. It was — Selina’s! . . . Bitch. Was this a recrimination, or a taunt? Defiantly I squelched the book shut. Yes and then I made that call.
—————— And still I surfed on Manhattan static. YIELD say the traffic signs— but don’t you listen! Not yielding, that’s the thing. To strive, to seek, to butch it out — it’s all a question of willpower. Thus midday discovered me with a second scotch in my hand, a Pakki nightie round my waist, and a half-naked sex-stewardess straddling my thighs. I was in the Happy Isles, on Third Avenue. I had read about the place in Scum magazine … I felt all right in here: a circular, windowless room, tricked out in some lost pimp’s image of a para-disal arbour — tendoned vines, plastic grape-clutches, bamboo ceiling, lagoon lights and canned birdsong. I even found myself humming one of Fat Vince’s favourites. What was it? — ‘O Twine Me a Bower’. You know, there’s a certain sort of man who would come to a joint like this in order to fuck the women in it. But self-improvement isn’t nearly as hard as people make out. Take, for instance, a look at me. I’m only here for a handjob.
‘Yeah, well what do you do?’ I was saying. ‘Use the blow-dry after the towels, or what?’
I was talking to this chick about her hair and the trouble she had with it. She was asking for trouble, mind you. Flattened by its own weight, its prisms as lively as oil stains or car blood, her solid black rug coursed down the length of her back. When she stood and turned to refreshen my drink, the bristly hem almost covered her double-fisted backside. Man, I wish I had an American rug, instead of this old dishtowel I live my life under… The lady had cordially assured me at the outset that I was free ‘to party with anybody I liked the look of (this, except for the half-ounce bikini she wore, being her only hint that what we were sitting in wasn’t a beauty parlour or seminar room but actually a brothel. I didn’t let on either). I wondered then and I wondered now whether anybody included her. She’d sat on my lap in a friendly way, true, but that was just so I could get a better fix on her rug. Maybe she was simply a bargirl, a cashier, an all-purpose heft-dispenser . . . and maybe I had already got to know her a little too well. By my side nestled a water-proof, see-through plastic bag, containing my wallet: the money, the necessary. I had been obliged to take a blistering shower in a back room jovially serviced by two fat negroes in Hawaii shirts and frazzled straw hats. So I sat there, deloused, in the Happy Isles. Spurred by all this travel and transfer, the disease I have called tinnitus tunnelled deep and desperate into the corners of my head. Both ears were doing their jet imitation, with whistle and whine and the hungry rumble of underfloor fire. I held my new drink up to my forehead, as if to soothe my pulsing, my needing brow — plastic glass, plastic ice, an airplane drink. Yeah, I call this living good.
‘The second wash,’ I persisted, ‘can be a big mistake. It expands the follicles and then the cleaning agents dry and harden.’