In the Autocrat I turned to Fielding and asked huskily, ‘Can he talk? I mean properly?’
‘Spunk? Sure. He did Richard the Second off Broadway last fall. He was kind of nervous about his accent, but the articulation? Superb. Okay, Slick. What do you say?’
‘I say we go with Spunk.’
We drove straight to a panelled restaurant in the dining district between Fifth and Sixth for an exploratory meeting with Christopher Meadowbrook. It was depressing, after Prehistoric. One look at Meadowbrook and I knew he was hopeless for us. The sharp-shouldered chairs in this joint, which reminded me of Selina’s torso and its erect triangularity, seemed specifically designed to give clients with sore backs a really rough ride. In the end I did at least as much squirming as Christopher Meadowbrook, and he squirmed a lot. The guy was in shocking shape—that was clear. He didn’t look like a goodie. He didn’t look like a baddie either. He looked like a weakie, unmanned, pure victim. I once saw this same beseeching looseness of eye and mouth in the face of a ragged little faggot on Sunset Boulevard, scorched and peed-on and limping back for more. After drinks and introductions and a few minutes of jangled Smalltalk, as if the three of us were gods or apes or spacemen, Fielding did the bad thing. He left for a light supper with Butch and Caduta at the Cicero. He would later swear that he had cautioned me about this the previous night. No doubt he had, no doubt he had. I looked at him helplessly and he vowed to return at ten.
As soon as we were alone Meadowbrook took my hand, hunkered forward and said, ‘I have to have the part, sir. Sir, you have to let me have it.’ Then he burst into tears. Now this I didn’t need… Money, of course. The actor was out for seventy-five big ones. Cocaine debts, he said — though he’d kicked it long ago. A dear friend (oh so very dear) had run out on him. His mother needed an operation. He needed an operation. And on it went. I suppose, in theory, I’ve had worse times, but not many, and not much worse. Jesus, am I ever as bad as this? Do I ever show such concerted and repetitive frailty? He sank four cocktails. He instigated a meaningless rumble with the maître d’. A waiter bounced back by handing him a molten soup-plate. Meadowbrook upended the whole fiery mess into his lap and let out a scream of such inhuman power that the restaurant cat (a sleepy, sloth-flattened Persian) kamikazeed through a glass screen into the startled shards of the lobby. Then he went to the John for twenty minutes and squelched back clicking and ticking like a geiger-counter. At this point I noticed that he had only one nostril. Abuse has a habit of smacking you in the nose like that, for all to see. Back home there’s a guy who works in my nearest off-licence: he’s got a conk like a haemorrhaged strawberry. I avoid him. I go to the next off-licence along, where the guy’s nose is still okay … Now Meadowbrook started making with the Shakespeare. To be or not to be. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Never never never never never. In despair, and despite the zags and zigs, the lagjag, the alphabet chowder of my own alcothon, I hit the scotch. Fielding returned. Semaphoring his credit card, Meadowbrook made a big thing of catching the tab. ‘And lose that soup!’ he warned. The card was borne back on a silver tray. It was snipped into four pieces.
‘I’m dying here,’ said Meadowbrook.
‘No rating,’ grinned the waiter.
‘Jesus, let’s go.’
That was me. I stood up.
So did Fielding. ‘You’re out, Chris,’ he said, and drew two fifties from his golden clip.
——————
There is a sense, as you sit in your cab and tunnel through the grooves and traps, there is a sharper sense (there must be) of the smallness of human concerns — in New York, where you always feel the height and weight of the tall agencies. Control, purpose, meaning, they’re all up there. They’re not down here. God has taken columned New York between the knuckles of his right hand — and tugged. That must make the ground feel lower. I am in the cab, going somewhere, directing things with money. I have more say than the people I look out on, nomads, tide-people. They have no say. Twenty-Third Street, and its running dogs.