‘Hey, John. That’s some suit. Where you headed? Alabamy?’
‘Uh?’
‘Anything the matter, Slick?’
‘No. I just got razzed by some faggots. On the way in here.’
Fielding laughed, then thickened his brow attentively. ‘And?’
‘They called me a breeder, Fielding. What the hell is that supposed to mean?’
‘Isn’t it beautiful?’
‘Come on, this is no place to audition. There are going to be little actresses walking through that breakers’ yard down there.’
‘No, John, they’ll come up through the front,’ said Fielding, his arm on my shoulder now as he steered me across the floor. ‘There’s just a gentle little cookie store down there, and a nice elevator. I had you come up the back way.’
‘What for?’
‘It’s educational. Now relax with a drink, Slick, and get yourself ready for the girls.’
This was Fielding’s best possible response. We moved on to the shallow stage, where Fielding had installed a raft of video equipment (with two pistol-grip cameras), a stereo, a coffee-table space game, a fishtank, two sofas facing two low steel desks, and a fat little fridge. I like new furniture. I like brand-new furniture. I had my fill of fucking antiques when I was growing up in Pimlico, and in Trenton, New Jersey. But it has to be plain, you know? Fielding knelt and ticked a fingernail against the sedimented glass of the fishtank. I look into that fishtank, me, and all 1 see is new furniture of a different kind, studs and beads and zebra flashes, bouncy frills and fruity bobbles, Barry’s lounge, Vron’s boudoir.
‘All the fish respond to the manoeuvres of the alpha fish,’ said Fielding, his valved face reflected in the glass. ‘That’s the alpha fish — there, with the black tail.’ He looked at his watch, and straightened. ‘Now today we cast the girl, the stripper.’
‘The dancer?’ I said. ‘What about Butch?’
‘You know Butch is in. I know Butch is in. You know she’s a dancer. I know she’s a dancer. These girls, they don’t know nothing. You read me, Slick? We’re going to have some fun.’
And we did too. What with the jug of Red Snappers that Fielding had prepared, I was feeling no pain when the first candidate came flouncing across the floor. She was a big dark honey with the best… no, hang on. Maybe we kicked off with that hot blonde who took her … No. It was the black chick whose … Anyway, after a while, during that sun-bleached, snowblind vigil of booze and lies and pornography, the girls tended to mangle and dismember in my mind. The routine was the same, and Fielding had them in and out of that door like a chainline vaccinator. It’s a time-honoured custom in our industry, the easy-going atmosphere you try to create while auditioning young women for roles of an erotic nature. Terry Linex of C.L. & S., for example, has a particularly telling line. He just says, ‘Right. This is a sex scene. I’ll be the man’ … Boy, were they ever eager, these mad, happy, Manhattan girls.
Across the floor they came, edgy as hell but mortally excited, the nerves spiralling to the ends of their hair, each with her special details of shape and shadow, of torque and thrust. We sat them down and gave them a drink and asked them the usual stuff. They didn’t need prompting: you see, they really did think it was possible, likely, certain that money and fame had fingered them, that exceptionality had singled them out. They talked about their careers, their crack-ups, their prongs, their shrinks, their dreams. Fielding would let them drawl or quack away for five minutes, before asking, with a strategic glint:’— And Shakespeare?’ Well, even I got a few laughs from their replies to that one. ‘Yeh, I really wanna do Mrs Macbeth. Or Anthony and Cleopatra. Or The Comedy of Errs.’ One girl, I swear, thought for some reason that Pericles was about a car-manufacturer. Another evidently believed that The Merchant of Venice was set in greater Los Angeles.
‘That’s very interesting, Veroica, or Enid, or Serendipity,’ Fielding would say. ‘Now. We’d like to have you take your clothes off please.’