‘To music?’
‘Sure,’ he’d say, and reach for the tape.
‘I’m not really dressed for it.’
‘Come on, Maureen, or Euphoria, or Accidia. You’re an actress, right?’
And, revealing their teeth first, the girls would go through their hoops. I watched through a sheen of shame and fear, of lust and laughter. I watched through my pornographic sheen. And the girls submitted to it, to the pornography. Professional city-dwellers, they were experienced in the twentieth century. They didn’t dance, they didn’t tease — they didn’t strip, not really. They took most of their clothes off and gave you a lesson in their personal anatomy. One of them simply lifted her skirt, lay on the floor, and had a handjob. She was the best. We received two apologetic refusals in a busy three days. Fielding said it was the Shakespeare that got them going, something to do with the exaltation caused by the tendered handclasp of art.
Every now and then I wondered whether Fielding was promoting these girls in the other sense. But all he ever said was ‘Here’s her number, Slick’ or ‘John, she goes for you’ or ‘I think you might look good on her’.
‘How do you look on Doris?’ I asked him, during a lull.
‘On Doris? Doris is gay, John. You know that.’
‘Where’s her script, God damn it?’
‘Patience, Slick. Stay icy calm. Oh and — you got to meet with Spunk Davis tonight. You got to ask him something. I warn you, it’ll be a bitch.’
‘What?’
He told me.
‘No way,’ I said. ‘Ob no. No. You ask him.’
‘You’re the one he respects, Slick. He has a hard-on for you a yard long.’
‘Oh man,’ I said. But by then there was another sexbox cruising down the floor towards us, and I was too fuddled and clogged to argue.
So you see, over these last few days I’ve had no time for reading. I’ve been too busy auditioning.
——————
Mr Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, I read, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes… I still don’t know what pop-holes are. I’ve asked around. Fielding doesn’t know. Felix doesn’t know. The dictionary doesn’t know. Do you?
‘Hi,’ said a voice behind me.
I turned. ‘Ah fuck off,’ I said, and turned again.
I quit reading and looked round about me. This was no kind of place to be caught reading in: a macho gay bar in a five-fathom basement somewhere beneath the charred East Twenties. We were down so deep here, it felt like an inverted skyscraper. Maybe Manhattan would get like that one day — crustscrapers, corescrapers, a hundred storeys underground. Already certain less-than-fashionable New Yorkers have taken up residence in the sewers and subway shafts. They have. They’ve got little socks down there, with beds and chests-of-drawers. Money has driven them deeper into the planet, money has brought them down in the world … Round about me there was womanlessness, jawlines, crewcuts, hunks leathered up like frogmen, Adam in full stubble and muscle and sweat. All you needed in here among the shadows and sawdust was your maleness, your sour testosterone.
‘Hi,’ said a voice behind me.
I turned. ‘Ah fuck off,’ I said, and turned again.
Now this wasn’t one of the heavy hangouts. I suppose your standard Manhattan faggot might look in here for a final white wine en route to a dungeon appointment or death-pact rendezvous at the Water Closet or the Mother Load. But this was a dark place of gropes and whispers, of black silhouettes. Their shapes gave off no tremor or threat, more a priestly absorption in the radar of the appetites that had brought them there.
‘Hi,’ said a voice behind me.
‘Ah fuck off,’ I said, and turned. ‘Oh hi! Sorry about that. How are you doing?’
‘Good. You like this place? Look at you, you’re terrified. Okay. What do you want to talk to me about?’
I took a deep breath — and heard the tiny tide of protest from the enemies in my lungs. He sat on the stool beside me. T-shirt, veined, tendoned biceps. He ordered a glass of water. Tap water, not designer water. He wasn’t going to tangle with those bubbles, not Spunk.