Me and my sore back have had several meetings now with Fielding’s moneymen. We had dinner in La Cage d’Or with Steward Cowrie, Bob Cambist and Ricardo Fisc. We went night-clubbing at Krud’s and Parlour 39 with Tab Penman, Bill Levy and Gresham Tanner. They’re an odd crew, these moneymen, Miami hotel barons, Nebraskan ranching bosses, Marylander oil kings. Their only topics are moviestars and money. They talk about money in that sharky American style, as if money were the only gauge of anything, the only measure. They’re pretty relaxing company, 1 find. Fielding picks up the checks. Fielding picks up the cheques, too. Each meeting ends with the moneymen all saying things like I’m in or I want in on this or You got it or Let’s do it. Fielding is already making plans to cut one or two of the smaller guys out of the action.
Oh yeah and me and my sore back got hold of little Selina late one night. It was seven in the morning over there in my sock. Her voice was thin and cold, the way 1 like it. After a while she cooed and cursed me into peace, I have to tell you that these hotline, Jong-distance blowjobs are another of our regrettable routines … This particular perversion, I notice, like every other, has been set up on a professional basis in go-getting New York. The small-ad columns of Scum magazine are full of remote-control hookers who just sit by a telephone all day for money, like Ossie Twain. You ring them up, give your credit-card number, and they talk dirty to you for however long you can afford. They’re probably cheaper than Selina, come to think of it, what with the hotel mark-up. They’re here and she’s there, after all … I was on the point of signing off when Selina started telling me, in accents of alarmingly genuine arousal, about this rich new boyfriend of hers, this transatlantic moneyman, how he took her to hotels and dressed her up and fucked her on the floor like a dog. This was fairly standard stuff, but I deplored her tone. Quit it, I said. Her thin voice teased on. She said that when she wasn’t here she was there — with him, doing that. Enough, I said. ‘Then marry me,’ said Selina, but not nicely.
——————
Fielding smoothed his back against the scalloped seat of the limousine, like a cat. He straightened his cuffs and said firmly.
‘I say we go with Spunk.’
‘He’s not really called that, is he?’
‘Sure,’ said Fielding, and went on to tell me about two Southern actors called Sod MacGonagall and Fart Klaeber. He gave his laugh, his rich, his million-dollar laugh, reluctant, like all the most lovable laughter. You long to hear this sound. You would do almost anything to inspire it. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘maybe for the British market we can call him Scum.’
‘It’s a problem, you’ve got to admit.’
‘I talked with his agent. He knows Spunk’s going to have to have his name fixed sometime. Thing is, he was christened that way, and he hates the whole moviestar bit. He’s a tough Bronx kid but he acts up a storm. You want a drink?’
‘No thanks.’
‘What’s the matter? It’s five o’clock.’
‘No thanks.’
I had my reasons. Do you want to hear the good news first, or the bad news? The good news is that Martina called this morning and we’re having lunch tomorrow. The bad news is that the good news made me feel so relieved and excited that I ran out to a bar and drank a bunch of big ones. Yeah? you’ll say. And? Nothing new in that. Agreed, but the bad thing about the bad news is that the alcohol had a really bad effect on me. It didn’t make me drunk, which was what I was confidently expecting it to do. It made me hungover instead. It did. I kept incredulously ordering more drinks, in a doomed bid to stave off this conclusion. That’s why I had so many. All the more ironic, too, because I woke up this morning feeling bloody marvellous after a really late and heavy night with the TV and the ß & F. Was the phenomenon a new jet-lag deal, or the terminal mutiny of my whole bodybag? Oh man, I’d better get to California soon, while the transplant people still have something to work on. Maybe I’d better wing out there right away and have them fix me up with a temporary. And the mind was suffering too. Yes, the mind had its sufferings also. It was crammed with sin and crime, the thoughts nowhere, all in freefall and turnaround. I’ve got to get this stuff out of my system. No, more than that, much more. I’ve got to get my system out of my system. That’s what I’ve got to do.