I doublebacked through the faggot district, Christopher Street. I skirted the dike district too—or at any rate two big chicks denied me entry to their purple sanctum. Then I found a place that was clearly headlined as a singles’ bar, and no one tried to keep me out… Now I’d read about these VD workshops in Scum and Miasma, both of which adopted a markedly high-handed line. Word was a year or two ago that the joints were popping with air-hostesses, models and career women: five minutes, a couple of lite beers, and you’d be in a hotel room or service flat with some little darling doing the splits on your face. Not so! says Scum. It might have been that way for a while, Scum argued, but after a couple of weeks the Boroughs shitkickers moved in, and the game was up. The chicks moved out. Miasma even sent a squad of personable male reporters out on a sweep, and not one of them scored … Well, this place looked okay to me, the only hitch being that there weren’t any women in it. They were all in the butch bars and the diesel discos. So I joined the half-dozen speechless loners and got to work on the Sidecars. Eight-twenty: no sweat. Here’s to you, Martina, I said to myself, and flattened out a twenty on the moist zinc.
You remember Martina, Martina Twain? Now don’t tell me you’ve forgotten. How is the memory, pal? Sister, what’s the recall like? You remember her, surely. I know I do. She and I go way back. The thing about Martina is — the thing about Martina is that I can’t find a voice to summon her with. The voices of money, weather and pornography (all that uncontrollable stuff), they just aren’t up to the job when it comes to Martina. I think of her and there is speechless upheaval in me — I feel this way when I’m in Zurich, Frankfurt or Paris and the locals can’t speak the lingo. My tongue moves in search of patterns and grids that simply are not there. Then I shout … Consider the people I’ve been around all my life, stylists, models, actors, producers, seat-warmers, air-sniffers, knee-crookers, cue-card-readers, placemen, moneymen — funny men, not straight men. Funny women too, juggling sex, time and dough. Who’s straight? I’m not. I am bent gouged pinched and tugged at, and squeezed into this funny shape. Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned and skewered and zugzwanged… But here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines, and they are terrible examples. They’re rich, usually.
Her English husband Ossie, now he’s rich-for-life but he works in money, in pure money. His job has nothing to do with anything except money, the stuff itself. No fucking around with stocks, shares, commodities, futures. Just money. Sitting in his spectral towers on Sixth Avenue and Cheapside, blond Ossie uses money to buy and sell money. Equipped with only a telephone, he buys money with money, sells money for money. He works in the cracks and vents of currencies, buying and selling on the margin, riding the daily tides of exchange. For these services he is rewarded with money. Lots of it. It is beautiful, and so is he.
I switched from Sidecars to Old Fashioneds. I’m always early for these dinner parties anyway. I leave it late, but never late enough. Barkeep, let’s do it again. As I feasted on my drink I sensed the hum, the confectionery of a feminine presence. I turned to find that a girl had joined me at the bar. Now she asked for white wine in her -charged voice. I diversified with a Manhattan. New York is full of heart-stopping girls with potent colouring, vanilla teeth, and these big tits they all seem to be issued with as a matter of course. There must be a catch. (There is. Most of them are mad. It pays you to remember this.) The chick on the stool — she looked like Cleopatra. I don’t know what it was, but I instantly fingered her for an obvious goer, sack-artist, dick-idolator, and so on. I can always spot them. I glanced at my watch: eight-thirty—no, nine-thirty. Hey there! Time to be moving on.