by Martin Amis
The Ashbery, Room 101, I sit with my big croc face flickering to the last veils of the late, late movie. I don't — I don't remember the pale boy with glasses crying in the playground — but no doubt there were one or two, and I was a mean kid. There always are those pale boys — I was in LA last December, and I hired a car all right. There were near things, there were skids, emergency stops, emergency sprints. There always are those near things... I did hold auditions in the Walden Center in '78, checking out some models for the big-bim role in a Bulky Bar commercial. There must have been the odd redhead among them, and I was my usual working self (I'm an altogether different proposition when I'm working—I'm not very nice at all). There always are those redheads ... I was a mean kid in 1978. I was a mean kid last year. And this.
Yesterday I was walking up golden Fifth Avenue towards the tawny gulf of the Park. The powerful stores were in full exchange, drawing people in, easing people out, superintended by the lean Manhattan totems, these idols or rock-statues that stare straight ahead in grim but careless approval of the transactions compounded in the street beneath. It was pouring money. On the pavement the monkeynut operatives and three-card trick artists, the thimble-riggers, hot-handbag dealers, contraband bandits — they all plied their small concerns. A lot of dinky women taking the goods and the air today ... there's no shortage of big tits in Manhattan. It's not a problem. Nearly everyone seems to have them over here ... Then I saw something you see pretty often over here too: a have-not, a real flat-earther, a New York nomad lying face down on the flagstones like a damp log, sideways-on to the streaming spenders in their waves and sheets and racks. As I stepped over him I looked down (the rug as stiff as bark, an ear the texture of pomegranate peel) and said, rather affably I thought, 'Get up, you lazy bastard.' I walked on — and hailed Fielding as he strolled out of a bookstore. Arm in arm we gained the Carraway and met with two more of our moneymen, Buck Specie and Sterling Dun. They were both very excited by the venture and were alike convinced that I had a big future in our industry. Then they all went off nightclubbing in the Autocrat, but I was already massive and speechless with rice wine, and so I...
Zelda's — Dinner and Hostess Dancing. Inside was the message, the hand forward-sloping, tremulous, not unlike my own. Here in the States, in my day, writing lessons began with you tipping your pad forty-five degrees to the left, in order to promote this wavy, tumbling style. 'Frankie and Johnny were lovers', sealed with a kiss, a full lip-print in sweetest pink.
All in all, I'm none too clear what this guy means by motivation.
——————
The new televisual intercom on the steel desk gave off its throttled bleep. Fielding pressed the button and waited for the picture to form. He looked mildly startled.
'Who's this?' I asked him.
'That's fine, Dorothea. Thank you. No, you just wait for our call.' Fielding sat down and said, 'Nub Forkner.'
'Good,' I said. With Spunk Davis going AWOL, with Spunk sulking and failing to return our calls, Fielding and I had decided to check out Nub Forkner as a possible reserve. I made a note of the name on my pad, for something to do.
'That's o-r-k, Slick,' said Fielding.
I glanced down at the page. 'That's what I've got.'
'... You read much, John?'
'Read what?'
'Fiction.'
'Do you?'
'Oh sure. It gives me all kinds of ideas. I like the sound and the fury,' he added enigmatically.
That's what reading does to you: you start saying things like that. 'Yeah,' I said, 'well I've been reading a novel by George Orwell. Animal Farm. Re-reading it, actually. Yeah and 1984 too.' Me and 1984 were getting along just fine.
'Animal Farm?' said Fielding. 'No kidding.'
Dorothea or whoever waved goodbye and clicked off to the far doorway buttoning up her shirt. We saw her shrink back momentarily before hurrying out into the hall. Nub Forkner ducked slowly through the entrance and paused with a sigh to re-amass his weight ... Now I was far from familiar with Nub's work. True, I had dozed and belched my way through two films in which he featured—but at thirty thousand feet, in the refugee darkness of transatlantic airplanes. The press handout on my lap confirmed that Nub had played a Pawnee vagrant in Whisky Sour and a deaf mute in last year's cackle-factory spectacular Down on the Funny Farm. Both the vagrant and the mute, I seemed to remember, were outsize psychotics given to sudden and indiscriminate violence — big mothers, primal-scream specialists. Well, as Nub creaked across the joists towards us, with oil-strike hair shawling his shoulders, throwback knuckles grazing the floor, Fielding and I were clearly meant to think there was something unshirkably elemental about him, his cave shave, primal jeans, noble-savage beerbelly. You didn't need much of an eye for nutcases to tell that Nub was a real fizzer, all set to pop. He was about six five, 300 pounds. Yes, Nub looked pretty useful.
'Hi, Nub,' said Fielding drily. 'Why not take a chair.'
Why not indeed? Nub took a chair and sent it twirling sideways end over end with a negligent whipcrack of his wrist. Next, he picked up Fielding's snazzy egg-timer (used to pace the strippers) and stomped it to the floor. He bent down and extended an arm across the desk, ready to swipe it sideways over the high-tec tabletop. He looked up quickly and I saw that his face was full of expectant ingratiation.
Fielding climbed sharply to his feet. 'Easy, Nub,' he said.
Nub frowned and straightened. 'This is a fury scene, right?' he said in a deep calm voice. 'Male rage. I'm a method actor. I got to get furious first.'
The whole thing was a farce from the start. Nub was a one-role guy, a bearded lady. He was hopeless for us. Who'd believe that Caduta Massi could have produced this room-filler? How would he contrive to lose a fight to Lorne Guyland? Could you see him in the arms of Butch Beausoleil? Forget it. Nub would just have to hang around until the next fat-whacko part came along... But we had to test him, and he had to test us. He had to come here to see if his particular brand of rogue chemicals, his particular slant or version, was good for another few bucks. I suppose we sell whatever we have. Actors are strippers: they do it all day long. Fielding gave him the usual bullshit and at last he shuddered off across the floor.
'Great,' I said. 'Back to square one.'
'Don't be so easily discouraged, Slick. You know, Nub and Spunk are both with Herrick Shnexnayder. I'm going to give Herrick a call. You fix the drinks. It's your turn.'
Fielding called Herrick Shnexnayder. He said he loved Nub's work and wanted to know what his availability looked like. Sums of money, low down in the six figures, were cautiously mentioned.
'Nub's availability looks good,' said Fielding, as he replaced the telephone and turned to the intercom.
'Yeah, I bet.'
'Ah come on, he might do for a heavy — the arm-breaker. Now will you take a look at that. Celly Unamuno. Mexican. Nineteen.
Word is she's really hot.'
'Christ,' I said, 'I hope Butch Beausoleil doesn't find out about all this.'
'Relax. Hey, what do you make of Butch? Personally.'
'Don't tell me. You've checked her out.'
'I'm too young for her, Slick. She likes mature men. It's you she goes for.'
'The big thing about Butch — well, as she says herself, you know, just because you're young and talented and beautiful doesn't mean you can't be intelligent too. The big thing about Butch is that she's not just .. .' I paused.
'You guessed, huh?'
'What?'
'She's a moron,' said Fielding. 'The big thing about Butch is her ass. Hi there, Celly. Now you just sit down and make yourself at home. John? Where are those drinks.'
Twenty minutes later, as Celly was getting dressed again (she looked like a pornographic cartoon, a comic strip, except for the eyes, which weren't even twenty yet and could hardly be expected to hide their fear or helplessness), I stood up and moved like a ghost to the white window. I held the cold steel of the cocktail-shaker, and, watching the way my should
ers worked, you might have thought that I was shaking it. But I wasn't. I was just wondering, I'm in hell somehow, and yet why is it hell? Covered by heaven, with its girls and deceptions and mad-acts, what is the meaning of this white tent? I keep looking at the sky and saying, Yeah, I'm like that, so blue, so deeply blue. How come? I've done it before and I'll do it again. There are no police to stop you doing it. I know that people are watching me, and you aren't exempt or innocent, I think, but now someone else is watching me too. Another woman. It's the damnedest thing. Martina Twain. She's in my head. How did she get in there? She's in my head, along with all the crackle and traffic. She is watching me. There is her face, right there, watching. The watcher watched, the watched watcher — and this second pathos, where I am watched by her and yet she watches me unknowingly. Does she like what she is seeing? Dah! Oh, I must fight that, I must resist it, whatever it is. I'm in no kind of shape for the love police. Money, I must put money round me, more money, soon. I must be safe.
'Fielding,' I said, 'what are you doing to me? What? It's been twelve days. God damn it, where is that script?'
'Tomorrow morning, John. I guarantee it.'
The telephone rang, and I swore brutally — but it was the call that Fielding had been waiting for. Spunk Davis. I returned to the window as Fielding soothed and coaxed.
'Just like I figured. Shnexnayder was straight on to him. You see, Spunk hates Nub with a passion. A long story.' Fielding shrugged limply. 'Yeah, he's in. And Herrick's out.'
That's good,' I said, and meant it.
'On one condition. Get this. He wants it to be a vegetarian restaurant.'
'In the film.'
'In the film. These guys ...'
I laughed, and Fielding laughed too, his lovable, his loving laugh. As he showed me his clean back teeth (plump, kiddish, uninjured), I thought numbly, Christ, what a goodlooking guy. When I wing out to Cal for my refit, when I stroll nude into the lab with my cheque, I think I know what I'll say. I'll say, 'Lose the blueprints. Scrap those mock-ups. I'll take a Fielding. Yeah, give me a Goodney. Do me one just like him.'
——————
As I've already mentioned, 1984 and I were getting on famously. A no-frills setup, run without sentiment, snobbery or cultural favouritism, Airstrip One seemed like my kind of town. (I saw myself as an idealistic young corporal in the Thought Police.) In addition, there was the welcome sex-interest and all those rat tortures to look forward to. Stumbling into the Ashbery late at night I saw with a jolt that the room I had hired was Room 101. Perhaps there are other bits of my life that would take on content, take on shadow, if only I read more and thought less about money. But I had no time for reading the next day. I was too busy reading.
At eleven o'clock Felix woke me with four smartly-bound volumes of Good Money, a screenplay by Doris Arthur based on an original idea by John Self. I ordered six pots of coffee and did my bathroom routines simultaneously, like a one-man band. I D-noticed all calls. I settled down, with the new anglepoise lamp staring interestedly over my shoulder. Reading—it's all I ever do these days. All I ever do is sit about the place reading. But this was different. This was work. This was money '1. INT. NIGHT,' I read, and pressed on, feeling dangerously excited.
An in-form reader, an old hand at reading, I flapped through Good Money in just under two hours. Then I burst into tears, smashed a straightbacked chair, threw a full coffeepot at the door and kicked the base of the bed with such savage power that I had to run round the room with a pillow in my mouth until at last I staunched my screams. I couldn't fucking believe it... Fielding was right in a way. Good Money was a dream script, wonderfully coherent, with oodles of rhythm and twang. The dialogue was fast, funny and seductively indirect. The pacing was beautiful. You could have gone out and shot the whole thing in a month. I sat at the desk with complimentary pen and pad. I started reading again.
1 couldn't fucking believe it. Who's doing this to me? Who? First: Gary, the dad, 'Garfield' — the Lorne Guyland role. In the pre-credit sequence Lorne is glimpsed wearing dank pyjamas, carrying his clothes in a bundle as he is jeered from the marital bedroom. This is pretty well Lorne's best moment. After that it's all downhill. Although Lorne boasts constantly about his erudition, wealth and youthfulness, in reality (we find) he is illiterate, bankrupt and more or less senile. Yes, on his very last legs, is old Lorne. When he eventually blackmails the young dancer into the cot (a richly comic episode), old Lorne can't raise it. Raise it? He can't even find it. In his weepy frustration he takes a swipe at the sneering young beauty. She replies with a kick in the balls, and Lorne cracks like a broken stick. In the fight scene proper, an anoraked Lorne Guyland is given the hiding of his life, despite the fact that he surprises his sleeping co-star with a car-tool. His last, abject few lines are delivered from under a mummy-suit of plaster in an intensive-care unit. As for the son, Doug — as for Spunk Davis — well, to start with, his motive for hanging on to the mob heroin is as follows: he needs to fan the wildfire, the sparkling gorse, of his own narc habit, priced at a thousand dollars a day. A chain-smoker, a compulsive gambler, a hopeless lush and (what was Doris up to here?) a haggard handjob artist, Spunk also turns out to be a veritable guru or sorcerer of junk food, presiding over the vats in the restaurant kitchens with various lethal additives and glutinous flavourings. We are left to guess at the full extent of his sexual delinquencies, though in one haunting digression Spunk pays a 'charitable' visit to an orphanage with his mother: in a series of tight close-ups we see him doling out candy bars as he gooses and fondles the staring waifs.
Now for the ladies. If you were searching for a word to encapsulate the Caduta Massi character, then sterility would spring to your lips. The key to Caduta lay in how fantastically sterile she was. Boy, was she ever sterile! No extra kids for Caduta. No kids at all: Spunk himself (it crucially transpires) is her adopted son. Despite her husband's well-established impotence, and despite the on-screen celebration of her fifty-third birthday, Caduta kept talking about how many children she would one day bear. There were many symbolic moments in which Caduta gazed desolately at playgrounds full of laughing children or composed herself near jugs of wilted flowers. There was the visit to the orphanage. There was even a dream sequence where the fallow Caduta wandered alone in a boundless grey desert. How sterile can a woman get? Yes, you really felt for Caduta, what with this unbelievable sterility of hers. And Butch Beausoleil — the mistress, the dancer? I had expected Doris, as a fellow feminist, to honour Butch's single proviso. I had expected Butch to be spared the stock domestic chores, the dish-washing, the floor-sweeping, the bed-making. But no. So far as the Arthur screenplay was concerned, Butch could have been a representative figure called Drudgery in a commercial for labour-saving appliances. She peeled potatoes, lined dustbins, swabbed toilets. Even in the nightclub scenes Butch was forever rinsing glasses and ironing G-strings. Her chief dance routine featured a mime with mop and pail. And the other big thing about Butch? You guessed. You were there before me. A confident talker, full of ideas, Butch was none the less a person of sensationally low intelligence. A bushy-tailed, big-breasted meatball. A classic, a textbook dumb blonde: that was the big thing about Butch.
'Someone's fucking me around,' I said out loud, and felt my boil burst.
Then I was off and running again.
I moved at speed through the first-floor vestibule where a dozing flunkey stirred too late, through the antiques and gadgetry of the tall inner chamber, and right up to the double doors of the bedroom. I seized both knobs—and tugged... Fielding sat at the foot of the bed in a black dressing-gown, unstartled. Behind him, naked on the sheets, face averted, lay the hard dark body of a young boy.
Now I'm as shocked as the next guy when I get a glimpse of another's true appetites, but I was all fired up by then and I just thought, So he's a faggot too, is he? Right.
'Come here.'
'Something the matter, Slick?'
He didn't look fazed, I'll give him that. He even
yawned and scratched his hair as he closed the door behind him. 'The script,' I said.
'Yeah, don't you love it?'
'It's a disaster and you know it.'
'... How so?'
'The stars, the stars! They'll never touch that shit. It's all over.'
'Forgive me, Slick,' he said, pouring coffee from the tray, 'but you're betraying your inexperience here. You want some? Take a drink. The stars are all signed up. They'll do it. Or our attorneys move in on this. You just have to assert yourself, John. You wanted the realism. God damn it, that's why I went with you.'
'That's not realism. That's — it's vandalism.'
'Don't you see what we're sitting on here, Slick? Good Money will be the only movie of the year, the decade, the era that will show the real delirium of film, the nakedness of actors, what it does to —'
'You've got the wrong guy. I can't work like this. Now I'm not fooling around. Doris goes. That bitch is in turnaround. She's sick in the head. I'll get the script I need — I'll get my man in, don't worry. Give Doris her dough and kick her down the stairs.'
Fielding paused and looked away. Here was a man who sees his deepest and most mysterious plans undermined, messed up, blundered with. He said lightly, 'Don't you think Doris should hear this?'
'Sure. Call her.'
'I'll do that.' And he called her. 'Oh, Doris?' he said.
And Doris Arthur came out of the bedroom wearing nothing but a pair of cool pants ... Now, lit up as I was, this had to be registered and absorbed — and a compelling sight it was too. She walked over to the breakfast trolley, loosely swinging her arms with the ease of a seaside nine-year-old. For she had nothing to hide, nothing, nothing. The pants, on the other hand — and these were useful pants I'm talking about, useful by fetishist standards, let alone feminist ones— the pants contained a good deal: the high trembling rump, the frontal tussock with its own curious pendency, like a plum in a handkerchief waiting to be shined and shared. I suppose (I thought), I suppose she'll get proper tits when she has children, and then the, and then the whole —