by Martin Amis
——————
How about that Caduta, though, eh?
Mind you, if you think she behaved strangely, you shouJd have seen me. I had an incredible crying jag. So did Caduta. So did two kids and one baglady. After a while, the dads trooped in. Everyone was beaming and weeping at this display, this proof of human richness. It was all crap too — I knew that. It was all bad art. But what can you expect from me? There are times these days when I feel so starved of warmth that the instructions on a painkiller packet or vitamin tub ('At the first sign of a cold developing be sure to...') can make me go all husky and brave. And I certainly appreciated the faceful that Caduta laid on me. I sniffed and rootled around down there for at least ten minutes, and got in several good licks and kisses. But it wasn't a sexual thing. I would never make a pass at Caduta — no, not Caduta — and if you made a pass at her, I'd beat you up. I was still brimming with plangency, chockful of feeling, when I arrived back at thehotel. Caduta's parting words to me—she delivered them like a war bride or mother, keeping pace with my cab as it pulled away—were as follows: 'Protect me, John! Protect me.' I knew what that meant. I seized the telephone and called Lorne Guyland, in high indignation.
'Now Lorne,' I began, after a female flunky had put the great man on, 'I've just had a meeting with Caduta Massi. Those scenes you suggested to her — she doesn't want to take her clothes off, and I have to say I —'
'WHAT DO YOU MEAN SHE WON'T TAKE HER CLOTHES OFF.' SHE'S ONLY A FUCKING TV ACTRESS/ I'LL RIP HER FUCKING CLOTHES OFF!'
I held the telephone at arm's length, and stared at it. What impressed me most, I think, was the sheer instantaneousness with which Lorne lost his temper. Suddenly, immediately: no temper — gone, long gone. I'm a short-fuse artist myself, but even I need a little longer than that. It takes at least a couple of seconds before I recognize the last straw. But to some people, clearly, every straw is the last straw. To some people, the first straw is the last straw.
'Lorne, Lorne,' I said, 'bear with me here. Look, there aren't any nude scenes in the script, not with Caduta. With Butch Beausoleil, yes, fine, go ahead, as many as you like. But with Caduta. She's —'
'What script? Nobody showed me no fucking script!'
'Doris Arthur is still working on it, Lorne. But I think I can say that there aren't going to be any nude scenes between you and Caduta. Semi-nude, maybe. But not nude. And that's final.'
While he talked I sank back gratefully with my duty-free. Lorne's superfury had run its course. He had a grip on himself. He was now merely incredibly angry. He said, 'Final? Final? Boy, you're really new at this. Now you listen to me, you piece of shit. This is Lorne Guyland man. Yeah. Me! Me! I got to have some beef in that role. You don't need me. Why don't you get some old fart like Cash Jones?' Lorne laughed. 'I don't know why I say that. I love Cash. Cash and I go way, he's one of my oldest, one of my closest friends. A dear friend, John. Very dear.' Lorne paused. 'Yeah, but when you got Lorne Guyland in a picture, you got to give him some beef, you got to give him some size, you got to give him some — it's got to be like big, you know? You saw my work in Pookie, John. I'm glad you called,' Lorne went on weirdly, 'because I want to tell you about another new idea I've gotten. Now I'm not a writer. I've written scenes, of course, in fact I, in fact the idea is this. The young guy, right? I don't know who the fuck you cast and I don't care, but him and I have this fight, right?'
'You and your son. That's right.'
'And in the outline, John, it says that he wins.'
That's right.'
'Now I don't think that's convincing dramatically, John.'
'Why not?'
'Well, it suggests to the audience that he's stronger than I am.'
'That's right. I mean, he's only twenty and you're — you're a mature man.'
'But I know that kid you've been testing. He's a punk! I could rip him to fucking pieces with my bare hands!'
'But people won't know you could do that, Lorne. They'll think he won because he's forty years younger than you are.'
'Ah! I get it. You think just because I'm not as young as he is, he's stronger than I am. Crap!'
7 don't think that, Lorne. But everyone else will.'
'Okay, okay. I'm a reasonable man. We'll do it this way. And, yeah, I want this whole scene in the nude, we're all nude, that's definite. I won't sacrifice that, that idea. Now. I'm fucking Caduta, right? And I mean really fucking her. The woman's in — Wait. No. This is Butch. I just fucked Caduta, now I'm fucking Butch, right? And I mean really fucking her. The woman's in tears, right out of control. She's hysterical, John. Then this young actor walks in—he's nude too — for the showdown. And I spring out of bed, naked as I am, and I just start to tear him to fucking pieces. I'm damn near killing the guy when Butch, in the nude, starts shouting, "Lorne! Lorne, baby! Honey, what are you doing! Stop, sweetheart, please stop!" And I realize I been — that the animal in me, because, John, it's a terrible world we're living in, John, it's a really crazy, awful... world. So Butch and Caduta lead me away. I'm damn near in tears on account of what I've done to the guy. Then this youngpunk comes up behind me and hits me on the head with a car-tool. John? What do you say.'
'Lorne? We'll see.'
'No. No! You'll see. Yes you will!'
Crack.
I replaced the receiver and stared at my lap. On it lay a cellophaned wallet of Guyland press handouts — this was where I'd scribbled his number. Running my eye down the page I saw that Lorne had, in his time, on stage or screen, interpreted the roles of Genghis Kan, Al Capone, Marco Polo, Huckleberry Finn, Charlemagne, Paul Revere, Erasmus, Wyatt Earp, Voltaire, Sky Masterson, Einstein, Jack Kennedy, Rembrandt, Babe Ruth, Oliver Cromwell, Amerigo Vespucci, Zorro, Darwin, Sitting Bull, Freud, Napoleon, Spiderman, Macbeth, Melville, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Methuselah, Mozart, Merlin, Marx, Mars, Moses and Jesus Christ. I didn't have the lowdown on every last one of these guys but presumably they were all bigshots. Perhaps, then, it wasn't so surprising that Lorne had one or two funny ideas about himself.
Oh, what a long day. Dah! what a day. You know what the time is, my time? Four o'clock in the afternoon. Hey, if you were here now, sister mother daughter lover (niece, auntie, granny), maybe we could talk a bit and cuddle down together—nothing dirty. Only spoons. Maybe you'd let me rest my great face in the gentle bracket between the wings of your shoulderblades. That's all I have in mind, believe me. I know you for a pure creature. You don't drink or smoke or screw around that much, I'll bet. Am I wrong? That is what I love in you ... Now the way I figured it I had six realistic options. I could sack out right away, with some scotch and a few Serafim. I could go back to the Happy Isles and see what little Moby was up to. I could call Doris Arthur. I could catch a live sex show around the corner, in bleeding Seventh Avenue. I could go out and get drunk. I could stay in and get drunk.
In the end I stayed in and got drunk. The trouble was, I did all the other things first. Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who is doing all the moving. I'm not the station, I'm not the stop: I'm the train. I'm the train.
——————
'Fill me in on the tits, Slick. Tell me about them in incredible detail.' 'No way. Back off, pal. This was a very personal thing between Caduta and me. I'm saying nothing. My lips are sealed.'
'You know, she has a similar set-up in Rome and also in Paris, a little creche where she can go and queen it once a year. It's a sweet deal for the families. All they have to do is keep the mothers out of the way whenever she shows up and to psych the kids into thinking Caduta's some kind of superwomb. Tell me a little about the tits, Slick. I take it they're bigger than, say, Doris Arthur's?'
Whose aren't? I thought tenderly. We strode on. This was Amsterdam Avenue, with the cross streets moving slowly by. There goes Eighty-Seventh. Here comes Eighty-Eighth. Maintaining a low profile, the Autocrat lurk
ed a steady block behind as we walked north. I had never been on the Upper West Side before, but it still reminded me of something. It reminded me how quiet my rocky tooth had been for at least a week or two now... Over a fanatically carnivorous lunch in an Argentinian joint on Eighty-Second Street my friend Fielding had been very reassuring on the whole Lorne— Caduta question. All the conflicts, he explained, would melt away the minute we had a screenplay in our hands. Moviestars invariably fucked you around like this until there was a script to defer to. Then they forgot about characterization and obsessed themselves exclusively with tilings like line-count, screen-time and close-up allocation. Doris Arthur was back in the States, typing away at her rented cottage in Long Island. I fondly imagined little Doris among her busy lizzies and lazy susans, in racoon hat and frontier dungarees, working the pump, fixing the roof, with half-a-dozen nails and a couple of briar pipes in her syrupy mouth. The first draft, Fielding promised, was only three weeks away.
'Where are we going? What's with all this walking?'
'It's a sunny Sunday, John. We're sightseeing. Tell me. How did Doris strike you? Physically, I mean,' he added, with such soft, sweet-tooth hooding of the eyes that my stride faltered and I said, 'You've been there, huh? Oh boy. What's she like?'
'Listen. You tell me about Caduta's tits and I'll tell you everything there is to know about Doris in the sack. Is it a deal?'
'Well they're big all right and low too but what they mainly are is very deep and heavy. They rest on the ribcage of course and span out a bit lower down but they're still very solid and they —'
'I get the picture, Slick. We can't use them. I thought she might have had them fixed. She likes them motherly. No use to us. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, We don't want some cant,i-levered old bimbo. We want someone real. But filmstars aren't real, John. It isn't in them. You'll see.'
'Right. Doris. Do it.'
'I'm afraid I misled you. I know all there is to know, which is nothing. Doris is gay, Slick.'
I stumbled to a halt and snapped my fingers through the air. 'So that was it. Jesus, I knew it was something like that. That bitch...'
'You made a play?'
'Well sure. Didn't you?'
'No, I knew all along. It was clear from the stories.'
'What stories? Tell me them at least.'
'The short stories, John. The Ironic High Style, remember?'
'Oh them.'
But here I saw the way the streets were going, how they darkened despite the sun, the juicy air, the innocence of the covering blue. Three blocks back there were canopied doorways, wealth-guards in livery and vistas of brownstone. Now the lanes were earless, lawless. We skirted the spreading sponge of split mattresses and jaw-busted suitcases facedown in the gutter, saw the dark excluded profiles behind windows and chicken wire — this was no-money country, coldwater, walkup. And so sudden, the breakdown, the feelable absence of all agreement, of all consensus — except for that money-hate or anger you get when cities wedge their rich and poor as close as two faces of a knife ... I marked the poverty and the poverty marked me. And I also sensed — perversely, unnecessarily, waste-fully — how gay Fielding and I must look, him in his sneakers and strontium rompers and flyaway hair, me with my butch suit, thin jekylls and proud-rounded shoes. Even the hardened faggots of Manhattan (I fancied) were gazing down at us with concern from their lofts and condos and thinking — we're pretty brazen, God knows, but these guys, they'll queer the whole pitch.
'Hey nigger brother!'
Ninety-Eighth Street. I turned my head. Two black guys with a big dog cocked on its leash.
'Fuck this shit, man. I think my dog go bite one of them white dudes.'
'Fielding,' I said tightly. 'Is this smart? Let's get the car. This is fucking pangerland.'
'Walk on, Slick, with your head high. Nothing's happening.'
He was wrong. Fielding was wrong. Something was happening, for sure. When you've brawled around for as long as I have your senses get to know the kind of fix that you can't just walk through or away from. You get to know when you have to give satisfaction. Less than a block ahead the scatterings of low-caste colours had begun to solidify into a group or gauntlet. I saw loud T-shirts, biceps, facial hair. These people, they had nothing to tell us except that we were white and had money. Perhaps they were also saying — you cannot go slumming, not in New York. You just cannot go slumming, because slumming pretends that slums aren't real. They were real. They would show us that much. By now I was obeying instinct or habit, checking the chain for strengths and weaknesses. Avoid the left. Stay kerbside — yeah, that sick-looking little guy there. Burst in with blending fists and run like a bastard for the green slope ahead. I let my eyes flick sideways. Fielding raised his right arm, an instruction to the Autocrat, but his gaze and stride were direct, unfaltering. The car surged up and then idled on snuffling treads. Fielding slowed. He made an elaborate gesture, explanatory, supercandid. And nothing happened. The path cleared and we walked on through.
'Columbia, Slick... Chicago, LA, wherever — in America our seats of learning are surrounded by the worst, the biggest, the most desperate ratshit slums in the civilized world. It seems to be the American way. What does this mean? What is its content? Now over here John, we get a really superb view of Harlem.'
I took a look at Columbia. I checked it out. I've seen these pillared, high-chinned buildings, their deep chests thrown out in settled cultural pride. The place had nothing to tell me that I didn't already know. With Fielding's wrist on my shoulder I now approached the castle's steep rampart. We leaned on the railing, and peered down through the littered lattice of cross-angled trees, their backs broken in their last attempt to scramble up the cliff. Beyond lay the square miles of Harlem — part two, the other, the hidden half of young Manhattan.
'What happened?' I asked, and lit another cigarette, still heavy from the unburnt fight fuel, the awakened glands.
'It was the car, that's all.'
'Did our guy have a gun on them? I didn't see.'
'Nah. Well, he had his gun ready, I guess. But it was no big deal. The car would do it for a minute or two. That's all we needed.'
I suppose I understood. The Autocrat, the chauffeur, the bodyguard: this showed them the gulf, the magical distance. How did Fielding's gesture go? One palm arched on the heart, the other turned in polite introduction towards the car, saying, 'This is money. Have you all met?' Then the hands brought together, face up, an offering of the simple proof. And they backed off in that stumbling, hurried, slightly reckless way that traffic pulls over for ambulances or royalty. I said, 'Why?'
'Sightseeing. Local colour. The car's all yours, Slick. I'm going to run on back.'
I watched him jog off, the head held high for the first twenty yards, to promote oxygenation, then tucked in low as he measured out the rhythm of his pace. I turned and looked out over the slanted, foreshortened wedge of streets and stocky tenements, and for once the strain in my ears found the appropriate line, the right score. With a low hum of premonition my eyes panned Harlem, as if out there among the smokestacks and flarepaths lay my damage, my special damage, waiting for birth or freedom or power.
——————
There is only one Earthling who really cares about me. At least, this human being loyally follows me around the place, keeps tabs on me and rings me up the whole time. No one else does. Selina's never there. All the others — it's just money. Money is the only thing we have in common. Dollar bills, pound notes, they're suicide notes. Money is a suicide note. Now this guy, he talks about money too, but his interest is personal. His interest is very personal indeed.
'You don't think about them,' he'll say. 'You don't think about them. You go slumming, but you never think about them — the others.'
'Who?' I asked him. 'You poor guys?'
'Listen. I've stolen food, out of hunger, just to stay alive. You can do it for a week. After a month you get the look. You look like the sort of guy who has to
steal food to stay alive. And that's it. All over. You can't steal food any more. Why? Because they can tell, the second you walk in the store. They can see no money in you. Not even the memory of money. Imagine.'
'Sounds rough. Just goes to show that it's a really dumb move, being poor. Listen, I've seen all that. This isn't news to me, pal. I've heard this stuff all my life.'
'You're poor. Still you're so poor.'
'You're wrong. I got stacks of dough and I'm going to make lots more. Now you, you sound seriously strapped for cash.'
Telephone Frank turns out to be not only a money expert, or an expert on not having any. He also talks about the chicks a good deal. For example:
'You just take women and use them. Then you toss them aside like a salad.'
'Wrong again. I keep trying to do that — but none of them will stand for it.'
'Women, for you, they're just pornography.'
'Listen, pal, I've got a date. Lots of rich pretty people are expecting me downtown.'
'We'll meet one day."
'I'm really looking forward to it ... Okay, Frank, I'll see you around.'
I arrived at Bank Street eight o'clock sharp, in the very last of the light. Overhead the sky still scintillated, but there was a film of green up there among the pinks and blues, an avocado tinge of beautifying city sickness ... My best suit, me — dark grey with a thin chalk stripe. I additionally sported a wide silver tie furled in buxom Windsor knot. The West Village, where the streets have names.
Bank Street looked like a chunk of sentimental London, black railings and pale blossoms girding the bashful brownstones, even a cautious whiff of twig and leaf in the night-scented air. As I strolled along I watched an elasticated black kid, Felix's age or maybe older, gangle past with his pretty little friend. Negligently he reached into a front garden and yanked a flower from its tree. He offered the pink blossom to his chick, who twirled it in front of her briefly lit face before dropping it to the ground. 'Hey,' he said. 'Hey, that was a beautiful thing I did. That was a beautiful thing I did — with the flower. What you throw it away for, cunt?' He walked on, his spring wound tight now, the shoulders stiff and sullen. She dropped back and crouched to retrieve the shattered thing, gathering dry petals in the dip of her dress.