Hello Julia!”
He sometimes thought it was this version of “hallelujah,” not his insatiable appetite for booze, drugs, and younger women, that had caused the famous actress to push him into the pool during a drunken press conference at the Be]-Air hotel.. . and then to take her emeralds elsewhere.
That incident hadn’t marked the beginning of his 2 decline, but it had marked the point where the decline had become impossible to ignore—he wasn’t just having a bad day or a bad year anymore, he was sort of having a bad life. The picture of him climbing out of the pool in his sopping white suit, a big drunk’s grin on his face, had appeared in Esquire’s Dubious Achievements issue, and after that had commenced his more-or-less regular appearances in Spy magazine. Spy was the place, he’d come to believe, where once-legitimate reputations went to die.
At least this afternoon, as he stood facing north and pissing with his shadow stretched out long to his right, these thoughts didn’t hurt as much as they sometimes did. As they always did inNew York , where everything hurt these days. The desert had a way of making Shakespeare’s “bubble reputation” seem not only fragile but irrelevant. When you had become a kind of literary Elvis Presley—aging, overweight, and still at the party long after you should have gone home—that wasn’t such a bad thing.
He spread his legs even wider, bent slightly at the waist, and let go of his penis so he could massage his lower back. He had been told that doing this helped sustain the flow a little longer, and he had an idea that it did but he knew he would still have to take a leak again long before he got toAustin , which was the next littleNevada shitsplat on the long road toCalifornia . His prostate clearly wasn’t what it used to be. When he thought about it these days (which was often), he pictured a bloated creneliated thing that looked like a radiation-baked giant brain in a fifties drive-in horror movie. He should have at checked, he knew that, and not as an isolated event but as part of a complete soup-to-nuts physical.
Of course he should, but hey, it wasn’t as if he were pissing blood or anything, and besides— Well, all right. He was scared, that was the besides There was a lot more to what was wrong with him than just the way his literary reputation had gone slipping through his fingers during the last five years, and quitting the pills and booze hadn’t improved things as he’d hoped. In some ways, quitting had made things worse.
The trouble with sobriety, Johnny had found, was that you remembered all the things you had to be scared of. He was afraid that a doctor might find more than a prostate roughly the size of The Brain from Planet Arous when he stuck his finger up into the literary lion’s nether regions; he was afraid that the doctor might find a prostate that was as black as a decayed pumpkin and as cancerous as as Frank Zappa’s had been. And even if cancer wasn’t lurking there, it might be lurking somewhere else.
The lung, why not? He’d smoked two packs of Camels every day for twenty years, then three packs of Camel Lights for another ten, as if smoking Camel Lights was going to fix everything somehow, spruce up his bronchial tubes, polish his trachea, refurbish his poor sludge-caked alveoli. Well, bullshit. He’d been off the cigarettes for ten years now, the light as well as the heavy, but he still wheezed like an old carthorse until at leastnoon , and sometimes woke himself up coughing in the middle of the night.
Or the stomach! Yeah, why not there? Soft, pink, trusting, the perfect place for disaster to strike. He had been raised in a family of ravenous meat-eaters where medium-rare meant the cook had breathed hard on the steak and the concept of well-done was unknown; he loved hot sauces and hot peppers; he did not believe in fruits and salads unless one was badly constipated; he’d eaten like that his whole fucking life, still ate like that, and would probably go on eating like that until they slammed him into a hospital bed and started feeding him all the right things through a plastic tube.
The brain? Possible. Quite possible. A tumor, or maybe (here was an especially cheerful thought) an unseasonably early case of Alzheimer’s.
The pancreas? Well, that one was fast, at least. Express service, no waiting.
Heart attack’? Cirrhosis? Stroke?
How likely they all sounded! How logical!
In many interviews he had identified himself as a man outraged by death, but that was pretty much the same old big-balls crap he’d been selling throughout his career. He was terrified of death, that was the truth, and as a result of spending his life honing his imagination, he could see it coming from at least four dozen different directions and late at night when he couldn’t sleep, he was apt to see it coming from four dozen different directions at once. Refusing to see the doctor, to have a checkup and let them peek under the hood, would not cause any of those diseases to pause in their approach or their feeding upon him—if, indeed, the feeding had already begun—but if he stayed away from the doctors and their devilish machines he wouldn’t have to know. You didn’t have to deal with the monster under the bed or lurking in the corner if ~OU 7 never actually turned on the bedroom lights, that was the thing. And what no doctor in the world seemed to know was that, for men like Johnny Marinville, fearing was sometimes better than finding. Especially when you’d put out the welcome mat for every disease going.
Including AIDS, he thought, continuing to stare out at the desert. He had tried to be careful—and he didn’t get laid as much as he used to, anyway, that was the painful truth—and he knew that for the last eight or ten months he had been careful, because the blackouts had stopped with the drinking. But in the year before he’d quit, there had been four or five occasions when he had simply awakened next to some anonymous Jane. On each of these occasions he had gotten up and gone immediately into the bathroom to check the toilet. Once there had been a used condom floating in there, so that was probably okay. On the other occasions, zilch. Of course he or his friend (his gal-pal, in 7 tabloid-ese) might have flushed it down in the night, but you couldn’t know for sure, could you? Not when you’d progressed to the blackout stage. And AIDS— “That shit gets in there and waits,” he said, then winced as a particularly vicious gust of wind drove a fine sheet of alkali dust against his cheek, his neck, and his hanging 2 organ.
This latter had quit doing anything useful at least a full minute ago.
Johnny shook it briskly, then slipped it back into his underpants. “Brethern,” he told the distant, shimmering mountains in his earnest revival preacher’s voice, “we are told in the Book of Ephesians, chapter three, verse nine, that it matters not how much you jump and dance; the last two drops go in your pants. So it is written and so it is—”
He was turning around, zipping his fly, talking mostly to keep the megrims away (they had been gathering like vultures just lately, those megrims), and now he stopped doing everything at once.
There was a police-cruiser parked behind his motor-cycle, its blue flashers turning lazily in the hot desert daylight.
It was his first wife who provided Johnny Marinville with what might be his last chance.
Oh, not his last chance to publish his work; shit, no. He would be able to go on doing that as long as he remained capable of (a) putting words on paper and (b) sending them off to his agent. Once you’d been accepted as a bona fide literary lion, someone would be glad to go on publishing your words even after they had degenerated into self-parody or outright drivel. Johnny sometimes thought that the most terrible thing about the American literary establishment was how they let you swing in the wind, slowly strangling, while they all stood around at their ass- hole cocktail parties, congratulating themselves on how kind they were being to poor old what’ s-his-name. No, what Terry gave him wasn’t his last chance to publish, but maybe his last to write something really worthwhile, something that would get him noticed again in a positive way. Something that might also sell like crazy. . . and he could use the money, there was no doubt about that.
Best of all, he didn’t think Terry had the slightest idea of what she had said, which meant he wouldn’t have to share any of the proceeds with her, if proceeds there were. He wouldn’t even have to mention her on the Acknowledgements page. if he didn’t want to, but he supposed he probably would. Sobering