I leaned panting against a lamppost, while Doris tenderly removed the segments of toffee orange and chocolate cake that still clung to my suit. Fielding lingered to congratulate — or compensate — the proprietress. What a long bit of New York, I thought.
‘Jesus, are you okay?’ she asked.
‘I know you’re a faggot and everything but I’ll tell you what the problem is: you just never met the right guy. It’s that simple. Let’s go back to my hotel and fool around. Come on, darling, you know you love it.’
‘You asshole.’ Doris smiled. Then her face changed and she told me something so terrible, so strange, so annihilating that I can’t remember a word she said. Fielding and the Autocrat made their different entrances. People’s faces swung sideways as I tunnelled backwards into my cab.
——————
And all this without much in the way of stress. Stress! How can people stand that stuff?
Waking bright and early the next morning I reached for a copy of Delicacy as the most economical means of establishing whether I was still alive. Other questions, no less pressing— such as who, how, why and when — would just have to wait their turn. Having come across no obvious Selina lookalike among the ladies, I found myself completing an editorial stress quiz, delete where inapplicable, in which your nicotine and alcohol consumption was set against various stress-donating hardships you might or might not be falling foul of. So far as Delicacy was concerned, I didn’t have a care in the world, and yet I smoked and drank like a quadraplegic bankrupt. Then it hit me: stress — perhaps I need stress! Perhaps a good dose of stress is just what I’m crying out for. I need bereavement, blackmail, earthquake, leprosy, injury, penury … I think I’ll try stress. Where can you buy some?
You can buy stress, and that’s what I’ve started doing. It’s New York, I reckon, the thrust, the horsepower, the electrodynamics of the Manhattan grid. It just charges you up. Give me a problem, out here, and I’ll crack it.
With a pleasant sense of maintaining the rhythm of the night before and its various successes and achievements, I went down to Mercutio’s and bought four suits, eight shirts, six ties and a stylish lightweight mackintosh. These garments now await the guile of high-priced tailors before transfer to my hotel. Even the ties seem to need taking out. Cost: $3,476.93. I paid through US Approach.
At LimoRent on Third Avenue I hired a six-door Jefferson with cocktail bar, TV and telephone. I drove it straight round the corner and installed it in a costly carpark on Lexington and Forty-Third. This would come out better than $150 a day.
I had a hundred-dollar lunch at La Cage d’Or on Fifty-Fourth Street and a two-hundred-dollar massage plus assisted shower at Elysium on Fifty-Fifth. Running low on ideas, and tired of shopping, all shopped out, I bought four drunks and three strippers nine bottles of champagne in a topless bar on Broadway. I considered cabbing out to Atlantic City and dropping some dough at roulette.! have the perfect system. It always fails. But in the end I simply cashed my travellers’ cheques and dodged the fuming puddles of Times Square handing out twenty-dollar bills to selected bums, whores, bagladies and time-cripples. Two policemen were obliged to quell the minor riot that ensued. ‘You, you’re fucking crazy,’ one of them said to me, with maximum conviction. But I didn’t bother to tell him just how wrong he was.
Back in my room, I sat at the desk and considered. Money worries aren’t like other worries. If you’re $10,000 in debt, it’s twice as worrying as being $5,000 in debt but only half as worrying as being $20,000 in debt. Being $10,000 in debt is three-sevenths as worrying as being $23,333 in debt. And if you’re $10,000 in debt, and $10,000 comes along — why, then all your worries disappear. Whereas the same can hardly be said of other worries, worries (for instance) about deception and decay.
I sank back on the bed and started worrying about money. I started to get very worried about money indeed. I yanked out my wallet and went through the credit slips and travellers’-cheque dockets. As of now, I don’t have any money. And this is really worrying.