by Martin Amis
Fielding had told me to expect trouble from Lorne on several counts. Lorne wanted Gary upgraded. Rather than pub landlord or beanery boss, Lorne saw Gary as a celebrity restaurateur. The age question also vexed him. Fielding said that Lorne had even floated the idea that Gary and Doug should be brothers, as opposed to father and son. In this fashion did Lorne hope to make light of the forty-year age difference between himself and his co-star. Then, too, there was the sex.
'I'm Thursday,' said the girl at the door of Lorne's penthouse. Til just buzz up.'
I watched Thursday mince across the hall to her desk. She wore a kind of schoolkid outfit—blouse and tie, cheerleader's pleated skirt, bobbysox. She was six feet tall and looked like a gorgeous trans-vestite, possibly the beneficiary of some dirty-minded sex-change operation, over in California there. As she bent over the intercom the little skirt went peek-a-boo and you could see white pants cupping her buttocks like a bra. I wondered ... Fielding maintained that Lorne was 'all fucked out', having gorged himself to the point of decrepitude during his first decade at the top, a common enough syndrome in the movie business. According to Fielding, Lorne hadn't had a hard-on for thirty-five years. Of course one had to remember that Lorne, in his time, had been very big, enormous, colossal. While making Gargantuan in Spain during the Fifties (Fielding again), Bullion had chartered sex planes from New York, London and Paris just to keep Lorne in chicks for the five-month shoot. His boast had been that he could tackle a whole consignment with a bottle of brandy and a soft-on. Lorne had been big then all right. All my life I had seen him up there on the screen.
'Mr Guyland. Sir, your director's here!' said Thursday in her singing-telegram voice. She laughed raunchily. 'Sure, lover. You got it.' Then she turned. 'I'm sorry if I seem a trifle flushed. Lorne's been balling me all day. He's right up there.'
I climbed a padded spiral staircase. I climbed from the stalls to the gods. Lorne surged across a cloud of carpet, seventh heaven, dressed in a white robe and extending a broad-sleeved arm through the conditioned air. With silent urgency he swivelled, and gestured towards the bank of window—this was his balcony, his private box, over sweating Manhattan. He poured me a drink. I was surprised to taste whiskey, rather than ambrosia, in the frosted glass. Then Lorne gazed at me for a very long time, in ripe candour. I delivered what was to be my longest speech of the evening, saying that I gathered he was keen to talk about his role, to talk about Gary. Lorne gazed at me for a very long time again. Then he started.
'I see this Garfield as a man of some considerable culture,' said Lorne Guyland. 'Lover, father, husband, athlete, millionaire — but also a man of wide reading, of wide ... culture, John. A poet. A seeker. He has the world in his hands, women, money, success— but this man probes deeper. As an Englishman, John, you'll understand what I'm saying. His Park Avenue home is a treasure chest of art treasures. Sculpture. The old masters. Tapestries. Glassware. Rugs.
Treasures from all over the world. He's a professor of art someplace. He writes scholarly articles in the, in, in the scholarly magazines, John. He's a brilliant part-time archaeologist. People call him up for art advice from all over the world. In the opening shot I see Garfield at a lectern reading aloud from a Shakespeare first edition, bound in unborn calf. Behind him on the wall there's this whole bunch of oils. The old masters, John. He lifts his head, and as he looks towards camera the light catches his monocle and he ...'
I stared grimly across the room as Lorne babbled on. Who, for a start, was Garfield? The guy's name is Gary. Barry isn't short for Barfield, is it. It's just Barry, and that's that. Still, this would no doubt be among the least of our differences. Lorne now began mapping out Garfield's reading list. He talked for some time about a poet called Rimbo. I assumed that Rimbo was one of our friends from the developing world, like Fenton Akimbo. Then Lorne said something that made me half-identify Rimbo as French. You dumb shit, I thought, it's not Rimbo, it's Rambot, or Rambeau. Rambeau had a pal or contemporary, I seem to remember, with a name like a wine ... Bordeaux. Bardolino. No, that's Italian ... isn't it? Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It's so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You're given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour, you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how hard, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.
Yes, all in all, a dreadful little show was being staged for me, up here on the twenty-first floor. I knew that at least. In his gilt sandals Lorne walked with poised uncertainty from one window to the other, his rapt face upturned, the hands both summoning and offering the revelations which the gods now fraternally distributed. Like all filmstars Lorne was about two foot nine (something to do with the condensed, the concentrated presence), but the old prong was in good nick, you had to admit, with that tan-and-silver sheen of the all-American robot-kings. Yeah, that was it: this isn't a man, I kept thinking, it's a mad old robot, all zinc and chrome and circuitry coolant. He's like my car, he's like the fucking Fiasco — way past his best, giving everyone grief, and burning up money and rubber and oil.
Lorne had gone on to explore Garfield's sumptuous lifestyle, the art galleries he superintended in Paris and Rome, his opera-nut vacations in Palma and Beirut, his houses in Tuscany, the Dordogne and Berkeley Square, his Barbadian hideaway, his stud ranches, his Manhattan helicopter pad ... And as this fizzy old dog bayed and barked into the night, I spared a tender thought for my project, my poor little project, which I had nursed in my head for so long now. Good Money would have made a good short, with a budget of, say, £75,000. Now that it was going to cost fifteen million dollars, though, I wasn't so sure. But I must keep a grip on my priorities here. A good film didn't matter. Good Money didn't matter. Money mattered. Money mattered.
'Lorne,' I said. 'Lorne! Lorne? Oh Lorne?'
'Rubies, diamonds, emeralds, pearls, and an amethyst worth one-and-a-half million dollars.'
'Lorne.'
'Speak your mind, John.'
'Lorne. If Gary's so rich, who cares if he's got a couple of million dollars' worth of heroin in the kitchen?'
'Pardon me?'
'It cuts down on the drama, no? Think a minute. Think a second. If Gary is rich, then so is Doug. Of course they give the heroin back. No problem. No film.'
'Bullshit! Garfield wants to give the heroin back. But the other guy, Doug you call him, he wants to keep it. Why?'
'Yeah, why.'
'Jealousy, John, jealousy. He's jealous of Garfield.'
For twenty minutes Lorne talked about jealousy, how powerful and widespread it was, and how a man like Garfield (I think he even said Sir Garfield at some point) was especially likely to promote such a feeling in one as low, as weak, as vile as Doug—Garfield, with his connoisseurship, helicopter pad, erudition, Barbadian hideaway, and all the rest. This took another twenty minutes.
'Plus,' said Lorne, 'he's jealous of what I do for Butch.'
'Why? He can't be that jealous if he's fucking her too.'
'I'm glad you raised that. You know, John, I don't think — and I never have thought — that it's dramatically convincing that he should, that he should fuck her too, John.'
I stared heavily at him.
'It makes no sense. It just doesn't add up.' Lorne laughed. 'If Butch is fucking Garfield, how could she risk that happiness, that fulfilment, John, on a young punk like ...' He shook his head. 'Okay.
Over that we can argue. But my scenario still holds. The way I see it, Butch has never had an orgasm before she meets this wonderful guy, who shows her a world she's only dreamed of, a world of Othello jets and Caribbean mansions, a world of...'
I stared on. Time passed. Abruptly Lorne halted in mid-sentence, in mid-spangle, and said, 'I think it's time we talked about the death scene, John.'
'... What death scene?'
'Why, Lord Garfield's,' said Lorne Guyland. 'This is how it happens. The mob guys, they're torturing
me, naked as I am. I fought like crazy but there were fifteen of the bastards. They want the heroin — they also want my cultural treasures from all over the world. But I tell them nothing. Now. As these cocksuckers torture me, Butch and Caduta are forced to watch. Maybe they're nude too. I'm not sure. John, you might think about, about that. And these two women, as they see me, suffering, silent, naked, this guy who's given them everything and who's the greatest fuck they ever had in their goddam lives — these women, these simple, nude women, they forget their rivalry and weep in each other's arms. Credits.'
'Lorne,' I said, 'I've got to run.'
In fact it was another hour before Thursday let me out. The script conference ended with Lorne shrugging his robe to the floor and asking me, with tears in his eyes, 'Is this the body of an old man?' I said nothing. The answer to Lorne's question, incidentally, was yes. I just flourished an arm and clattered down the stairs.
Thursday gave a tight smile as she opened the door. 'Is he nude?' she asked coldly.
'Yeah he's nude.'
'Oh boy,' said Thursday.
Why do they happen to me, these numb, flushed, unanswerable, these pornographic things? Well, I guess if you're a pornographic person, then pornographic things happen to you.
I slanted west through the pretty East Side, with its decorative dustbins, the paunchy awnings of the low-slung stores, the smell of dark hot trash, and dined blind with Fielding Goodney and Doris Arthur in a loud and airless media restaurant just five blocks from bubbling Harlem. Doris's script was being gimmicked by the typists. I kissed her hand. I called for champagne. I demanded to see the rough. Teasingly they said I'd have to wait-see. There was a lot of teasing going on, I suspected. I was too smudged with booze and travel to be sure. Lorne had given me lots of nonagenarian whiskey. I'll say that for Lorne. With additional champagne we drank to Dot's dream script. The place was full of filmstars, more filmstars. Why do I hang out with filmstars? I don't even like filmstars. Jesus, the transparency of actors. The professionals, though, are seldom dangerous. It's the actors of real life you want to watch — yeah, and the actresses. I developed a bad case of hiccups, more like a series of jabbing uppercuts to the chin. One of these blows actually ricked my neck and I had to lie on the floor beneath the table until it was okay to come up again. The angle of the lamp cord on the bar made me think I saw a hearing-aid cable extending from Fielding's ear. My knee brushed Doris's, once, twice, and I thought how wonderful it was when two young people started falling in love. I kept banging my way to and from the can, where they had incredible pictures of nude chicks from magazines all over the wall. I found a woman talking unhappily into a telephone and tried to cheer her up and went on trying even after her boyfriend or husband appeared from somewhere. I disliked his tone. He hurt my feelings. We had an altercation that soon resolved itself with me lying face-down in a damp bed of cardboard boxes at the foot of a hidden staircase. This was bad luck on the lady, who was obviously dead keen. Refreshed, I said hi to a few filmstars, briefly joining them at their tables with a selection of apposite one-liners. Invited into a back room, I shot the breeze with a married couple who said they ran the place. She was obviously a madame of some kind, not that this bothered me too much. She denied it. As Fielding led me back to our table I made a powerfully worded verbal pass at a salacious waitress, who appeared to be all for it but then came down with some deep sorrow in the kitchen, and when I burst through the double-doors to console her two men in sweat-grey T-shirts assured me there was nothing I could do for the poor child. I signed an autograph. Doris looked cute in her sleeping-bag outfit. Under the mussed hair and mace clothes she was just a big-eyed honey, a sack-addict and dick-follower, same as all the rest. She denied it too. You know, I really don't like her. I hollered for fortified wines and drank quarts of tongue-frazzling black coffee. Doris cuddled me on the way to the door but she must have let go for an instant (perhaps I goosed her too eagerly) because I went off on a run that would have taken me all the way downtown—further, to the Village, to Martina Twain — if the dessert trolley hadn't been there to check my sprint. The whole restaurant cheered me on as I fought my way out into the night.
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 indee
d. 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.
There was a knock on the door and I wriggled to my feet. An impossibly elegant young black scythed into the room with several polythene body-bags in his arms.
'On the bed, sir?' he asked.
'Yeah. No,' I said. 'I don't want them. I've changed my mind. Take them back.'
He looked at me quizzically, and raised his lordly chin. 'The terms of purchase are on your receipt, sir.'
'Okay. Sling them over here. I was only kidding.'
I gave him a ten and he left. A ten ... For the next hour I took delivery of many additional purchases, the vast majority of which I couldn't remember purchasing. I just lay on the bed there, drinking. After a while I felt like Lady Diana would no doubt feel on her wedding day, as the presents from the Commonwealth contingent started arriving in their wagon trains. A squat kit of chunky glassware, an orange rug of Iranian provenance and recent manufacture, a Spanish guitar and a pair of maraccas, two oil paintings (the first showing puppies and kittens asnooze, the second a nude, ideally rendered), an elephant's foot, something that looked like a microphone stand but turned out to be a Canadian sculpture, a Bengali chess set, a first edition of Little Women, and various other cultural treasures from all over the world. When it seemed to be over, I went to the bathroom and was explosively sick. Stress, it's expensive. There is great personal cost. But out it came, the lunch, the champagne, the money, all the green and folding stuff. When it seemed to be over, I went next door and called Fielding and asked him to give me an incredible amount of money. He sounded as though he'd been expecting my call. He sounded pleased. That evening a large envelope was brought to my room. It contained a platinum US Approach card, a brick of travellers' cheques, and a cash-facility authorization at a Fifth Avenue bank for a thousand dollars a day, if needed. I was so relieved I went to bed for two days. Actually, there wasn't much choice. Steady, I thought, steady. Money holds firm but you have no power. It seems that, whatever I do here in this world I'm in, I just get more and more money ...