At the Ashbery I offered the driver a twenty.
‘No sir!’ he said. ‘That’s all taken care of. Would you call Mr Goodney, sir, when you’re settled in?’
I tried the twenty on him again. He wouldn’t take it, so I pressed it on Felix instead.
‘I hate to do this to you, Slick, but you got to go see Lorne Guyland— tonight.’
‘Oh man.’
He told me why. I was about to ring off when Fielding asked suspiciously, ‘Hey, how did you fly? Coach?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Slick, I’m going to have to talk to you very seriously about your expenses. Shape up, John. It’s an embarrassment. It looks bad to the moneymen. Take a floor at the Gustave. Hire a jet and have a weekend with Butch and Caduta in the Caribbean. Go buy a case of champagne and pour it all over your dick. Spend. Spend. You’re no use to me when you fly coach. Fly supersonic. Fly sharp-end. God damn it, Slick, fly right.’
I shaved, showered, changed, drank a mug of duty free and took a hot cab-ride into the East Eighties with Si Wypijewski at the wheel. Or maybe it was Wypijewski Si. New Yorkers will tell you that the surname comes first on the cabbie’s ID. But who says? Even with Smith John and Brown David, how can you really be sure over here? I once had a cabbie called Supersad Morgan. Or maybe it was Morgan Supersad. His eyes, at any rate, were brown and terribly melancholy. His eyes were Supersad …
My mission? To go reassure Lorne Guyland. According to Fielding, Lorne was seriously overdue for reassurance. He had been wanting reassurance for a long time now and hadn’t been getting any. ‘Do it now, John,’ Fielding had counselled. ‘You’ll save us a lot of sweat in mid-career.’ Lorne wanted reassurance about screen supremacy, line ratios and close-up time. Lorne wanted reassurance about his youthfulness, athleticism and general popularity. Lorne wanted reassurance about the nature of his role. Me too, pal Lorne, I sympathize.
Lorne’s role was that of Gary, the nogoodnik father. In my treatment I had, I thought, made it pretty clear what Gary was like. Gary was like Barry, like Barry Self: a lantern-jawed know-nothing, an unreflecting hedonist, a mastermould of brute conceit who none the less exploits a small but tenacious legacy of charm and luck… Why do I bother with my father? Who cares? What is this big deal about dads and sons? I don’t know — it’s not that he’s my dad. It’s more that I’m his son. I am aswirl with him, with his pre-empting, his blackballing genes. . . Gary, too, had a lot of my dad in him, just as I resembled Doug, the son. When the heroin shows up in the flour, Gary wants to return it to the mob. Doug wants to sell it at its street value, which is two million dollars. They’re both bad and greedy, but old Gary is a funker — yes, a lucky funker.
Fielding had told me to expect trouble from Lorne on several counts. Lorne wanted Gary upgraded. Rather than pub landlord or beanery boss, Lorne saw Gary as a celebrity restaurateur. The age question also vexed him. Fielding said that Lorne had even floated the idea that Gary and Doug should be brothers, as opposed to father and son. In this fashion did Lorne hope to make light of the forty-year age difference between himself and his co-star. Then, too, there was the sex.
‘I’m Thursday,’ said the girl at the door of Lorne’s penthouse. Til just buzz up.’
I watched Thursday mince across the hall to her desk. She wore a kind of schoolkid outfit—blouse and tie, cheerleader’s pleated skirt, bobbysox. She was six feet tall and looked like a gorgeous trans-vestite, possibly the beneficiary of some dirty-minded sex-change operation, over in California there. As she bent over the intercom the little skirt went peek-a-boo and you could see white pants cupping her buttocks like a bra. I wondered … Fielding maintained that Lorne was ‘all fucked out’, having gorged himself to the point of decrepitude during his first decade at the top, a common enough syndrome in the movie business. According to Fielding, Lorne hadn’t had a hard-on for thirty-five years. Of course one had to remember that Lorne, in his time, had been very big, enormous, colossal. While making Gargantuan in Spain during the Fifties (Fielding again), Bullion had chartered sex planes from New York, London and Paris just to keep Lorne in chicks for the five-month shoot. His boast had been that he could tackle a whole consignment with a bottle of brandy and a soft-on. Lorne had been big then all right. All my life I had seen him up there on the screen.