Bright Lights, Big City

by Jay McInerney

  Praise for Jay McInerney’s

  BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY

  “A quarter-century after its publication, Bright Lights, Big City remains the sharpest and funniest of the many reprises of The Catcher in the Rye: the unhappy young footloose hero whose flaunted small miseries camouflage deeper unacknowledged ones; the suffocating pretensions of adults who enforce the tribal code with sadistic glee.”

  —THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  “Such a first novel…. Very funny and shrewd…. Great wind-sprint passages that leave tattered mystiques in their wake.”

  —THE VILLAGE VOICE

  “[Bright Lights, Big City] attests to the author’s comic gifts, his ear for street-smart dialogue, his instinctive feel for the rhythms of New York City.”

  —THE NEW YORK TIMES

  “Engagingly modest, funny, perfectly balanced.”

  —THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  “A rambunctious, deadly funny novel that goes right for the mark—the human heart.”

  —RAYMOND CARVER

  “Remarkable…. McInerney has an incredible ability to pack more substance into one sentence than most writers are able to convey in ten.”

  —MADEMOISELLE

  “Hilarious.”

  —THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

  “Terrific: remarkable, funny writing, a perfect power-to-weight ratio.”

  —THOMAS McGUANE

  “A triumph.”

  —THE TORONTO STAR

  “McInerney [is] the Truman Capote of a new generation.”

  —ST. PETERSBURG TIMES

  “The author is one of those rare writers who catches the moods, nuances and manners of a sub-culture with humor, finesse, skill and accuracy. A born stylist and remarkable discovery!”

  —GEORGE PLIMPTON

  “Bright Lights, Big City made its author a literary superstar, the hipster minstrel of after-hours Manhattan.”

  —ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

  “Jay McInerney’s voice is a lot of us, whether young New Yorkers or not—coolly accurate, but sobbing inside a little. Bright Lights, Big City makes eerie beauty out of that old dog truth.”

  —BARRY HANNAH

  “Bright Lights, Big City is one of the great comic novels of the 1980s, a contemporary Lucky Jim fueled by a sharp, second-person narrative and images as deft and blithe as they are vivid.”

  —WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

  “A smart, economical, beautiful first novel…. Think of it as a Catcher in the Rye for the MBA set.”

  —PLAYBOY

  “In its depiction of youth striving mightily to amuse itself, in the exuberance of its language and the antic shamelessness of its tale, Jay McInerney’s novel calls to mind such classics of knight-errantry as The Ginger Man and The Bushwhacked Piano. It is a dazzling debut, smart, heartfelt, and very, very funny.”

  —TOBIAS WOLFF

  “Bright Lights, Big City … succeed[s] in capturing, in fewer than 200 pages, an entire decade.”

  —SALON

  JAY MCINERNEY’S

  BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY

  Imagine having the life you always imagined having …

  In Manhattan is a young man who has everything: for a wife, a successful model; for work, a job at a prestigious magazine that fulfills his literary aspirations; for friends, witty and attractive young professionals like Tad Allagash, ad man and hedonistextraordinaire, with whom he misbehaves in New York City’s best restaurants, clubs and parties.

  Then all the lights go out. As we follow him through the course of a frenzied week, we discover that beyond the frolic and wondrous prospects this young man has, essentially, nothing. The question is, which is worse: living an illusion, or losing it?

  Events at once comic and vicious conspire against him, and his dazzling downward spiral through the heart of nighttime New York illuminates this peculiar world even as it dulls his senses. Amidst the vast confusion of his decline and fall, he runs amok and away from the self he so often dislikes, en route to discovering who, after all, he is.

  A VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES ORIGINAL

  ALSO BY JAY McINERNEY

  NONFICTION

  A Hedonist in the Cellar

  Bacchus and Me

  FICTION

  How It Ended

  The Good Life

  Model Behavior

  The Last of the Savages

  Brightness Falls

  Story of My Life

  Ransom

  Bright Lights, Big City

  FOR MY MOTHER

  AND FATHER, AND FOR MERRY

  “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

  “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

  —THE SUN ALSO RISES

  CONTENTS

  It’s Six A.M. Do You Know Where You Are?

  The Department of Factual Verification

  The Utility of Fiction

  A Womb With a View

  Les Jeux Sont Faits

  Coma Baby Lives!

  Pygmies, Ferrets and Dog Chow

  O Couture!

  Linguine and Sympathy

  Sometimes a Vague Notion

  The Night Shift

  How It’s Going

  Jay McInerney

  IT’S SIX A.M. DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?

  You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. You are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head. The club is either Heartbreak or the Lizard Lounge. All might come clear if you could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more Bolivian Marching Powder. Then again, it might not. A small voice inside you insists that this epidemic lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already. The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M. changes to six A.M. You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings. Somewhere back there you could have cut your losses, but you rode past that moment on a comet trail of white powder and now you are trying to hang on to the rush. Your brain at this moment is composed of brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers. They are tired and muddy from their long march through the night. There are holes in their boots and they are hungry. They need to be fed. They need the Bolivian Marching Powder.

  A vaguely tribal flavor to this scene—pendulous jewelry, face paint, ceremonial headgear and hair styles. You feel that there is also a certain Latin theme—something more than the piranhas cruising your bloodstream and the fading buzz of marimbas in your brain.

  You are leaning-back against a post that may or may not be structural with regard to the building, but which feels essential to your own maintenance of an upright position. The bald girl is saying this used to be a good place to come before the assholes discovered it. You don’t want to be talking to this bald girl, or even listening to her, which is all you are doing, but just now you do not want to test the powers of speech or locomotion.

  How did you get here? It was your friend, Tad Allagash, who powered you in here, and he has disappeared. Tad is the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. He is either your best self or your worst self, you’re not sure which. Earlier in the evening it seemed clear that he was your best self. You started on the Upper East Side with champagne and unlimited prospects, strictly observing the Allagash rule of perpetual motion: one drink per stop. Tad’s mission in life is to have more fun than anyone else in New York City, and this involves a lot of moving around, since there is always the likelihood that where you aren’t is more fun than where you are. Yo
u are awed by his strict refusal to acknowledge any goal higher than the pursuit of pleasure. You want to be like that. You also think he is shallow and dangerous. His friends are all rich and spoiled, like the cousin from Memphis you met earlier in the evening who would not accompany you below Fourteenth Street because, he said, he didn’t have a lowlife visa. This cousin had a girlfriend with cheekbones to break your heart, and you knew she was the real thing when she steadfastly refused to acknowledge your presence. She possessed secrets—about islands, about horses, about French pronunciation—that you would never know.

  You have traveled in the course of the night from the meticulous to the slime. The girl with the shaved head has a scar tattooed on her scalp. It looks like a long, sutured gash. You tell her it is very realistic. She takes this as a compliment and thanks you. You meant as opposed to romantic.

  “I could use one of those right over my heart,” you say.

  “You want I can give you the name of the guy that did it. You’d be surprised how cheap.”

  You don’t tell her that nothing would surprise you now. Her voice, for instance, which is like the New Jersey State Anthem played through an electric shaver.

  The bald girl is emblematic of the problem. The problem is, for some reason you think you are going to meet the kind of girl who is not the kind of girl who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. When you meet her you are going to tell her that what you really want is a house in the country with a garden. New York, the club scene, bald women—you’re tired of all that. Your presence here is only a matter of conducting an experiment in limits, reminding yourself of what you aren’t. You see yourself as the kind of guy who wakes up early on Sunday morning and steps out to cop the Times and croissants. Who might take a cue from the Arts and Leisure section and decide to check out an exhibition—costumes of the Hapsburg Court at the Met, say, or Japanese lacquerware of the Muromachi period at the Asia Society. The kind of guy who calls up the woman he met at a publishing party Friday night, the party he did not get sloppy drunk at. See if she wants to check out the exhibition and maybe do an early dinner. A guy who would wait until eleven A.M. to call her, because she might not be an early riser, like he is. She may have been out late, perhaps at a nightclub. And maybe a couple of sets of tennis before the museum. He wonders if she plays, but of course she would.

  When you meet the girl who wouldn’t et cetera you will tell her that you are slumming, visiting your own six A.M. Lower East Side of the soul on a lark, stepping nimbly between the piles of garbage to the gay marimba rhythms in your head. Well, no, not gay. But she will know exactly what you mean.

  On the other hand, almost any girl, specifically one with a full head of hair, would help you stave off this creeping sense of mortality. You remember the Bolivian Marching Powder and realize you’re not down yet. No way, Jose. First you have to get rid of this bald girl.

  In the bathroom there are no doors on the stalls, which makes it tough to be discreet. But clearly you are not the only person in here to take on fuel. Lots of sniffling going on in the stalls. The windows are blacked over, and for this you are profoundly grateful.

  Hup, two, three, four. The soldiers are back on their feet. They are off and running in formation. Some of them are dancing, and you must follow their example.

  Just outside the door you spot her: tall, dark and alone, half hidden behind a pillar at the edge of the dance floor. You approach laterally, moving your stuff like a Bad Spade through the slalom of a synthesized conga rhythm. She jumps when you touch her shoulder.

  “Dance?”

  She looks at you as if you had just suggested instrumental rape. “I do not speak English,” she says, when you ask again.

  “Français?”

  She shakes her head. Why is she looking at you that way, as if tarantulas were nesting in your eye sockets?

  “You are by any chance from Bolivia? Or Peru?”

  She is looking around for help now. Remembering a recent encounter with a young heiress’s bodyguard at Danceteria—or was it the Red Parrot?—you back off, hands raised over your head.

  The Bolivian Soldiers are still on their feet, but they have stopped singing their marching song. You realize that you are at a crucial juncture vis-à-vis morale. What you need is a good pep talk from Tad Allagash, but he is not to be found. You try to imagine what he would say. Backon the horse. Now we’re really going to have some fun. Something like that. You suddenly realize that he has already slipped out with some rich Hose Queen. He is back at her place on Fifth Ave., and they are doing some of her off-the-boat-quality drugs. They are scooping it out of tall Ming vases and snorting it off of each other’s naked bodies. You hate Tad Allagash.

  Go home. Cut your losses.

  Stay. Go for it.

  You are a republic of voices tonight. Unfortunately, that republic is Italy. All these voices waving their arms and screaming at one another. There’s an ex cathedra riff coming down from the Vatican: Repent. Your body is the temple of the Lord and you have defiled it. It is, after all, Sunday morning, and as long as you have any brain cells left there will be a resonant patriarchal basso echoing down the marble vaults of your churchgoing childhood to remind you that this is the Lord’s Day. What you need is another overpriced drink to drown it out. But a search of pockets yields only a dollar bill and change. You paid twenty to get in here. Panic gains.

  You spot a girl at the edge of the dance floor who looks like your last chance for earthly salvation. You know for a fact that if you go out into the morning alone, without even your sunglasses -which you have neglected to bring, because who, after all, plans on these travesties? -the harsh, angling light will turn you to flesh and bone. Mortality will pierce you through the retina. But there she is in her pegged pants, a kind of doo-wop Retro ponytail pulled off to the side, as eligible a candidate as you are likely to find this late in the game. The sexual equivalent of fast food.

  She shrugs and nods when you ask her to dance. You like the way she moves, the oiled ellipses of her hips and shoulders. After the second song, she says she’s tired. She’s at the point of bolting when you ask her if she needs a little pick-me-up.

  “You’ve got some blow?” she says.

  “Is Stevie Wonder blind?” you say.

  She takes your arm and leads you into the Ladies’. A couple of spoons and she seems to like you just fine, and you are feeling very likable yourself. A couple more. This woman is all nose.

  “I love drugs,” she says, as you march toward the bar.

  “It’s something we have in common,” you say.

  “Have you ever noticed how all the good words start with D? D and L.”

  You try to think about this. You’re not quite sure what she’s driving at. The Bolivians are singing their marching song, but you can’t make out the words.

  “You know. Drugs. Delight. Decadence.”

  “Debauchery,” you say, catching the tune now.

  “Dexedrine.”

  “Delectable. Deranged. Debilitated.”

  “Delinquent.”

  “Delirium.”

  “And L,” she says. “Lush and luscious.”

  “Languorous.”

  “Librium.”

  “Libidinous.”

  “What’s that?” she says.

  “Horny.”

  “Oh,” she says, casting a long, arching look over your shoulder. Her eyes glaze in a way that reminds you precisely of the closing of a sandblasted glass shower door. You can see that the game is over, although you’re not sure which rule you broke. Possibly she finds H words offensive. A purist. She is scanning the dance floor for a man with a compatible vocabulary. You have more: detumescence, for instance. Drowning and depressed; lost and lonesome. It’s not that you’re really going to miss this girl who thinks that decadence and Dexedrine are the high points of the language of Kings James and Lear. But the touch of flesh, the sound of another human voice… You know there is a special purgatory waiting for yo
u out there in the dawn’s surly light, a desperate half sleep which is like a grease fire in the brainpan.

  The girl waves as she disappears into the crowd. There is no sign of the other girl, the girl who would not be here. There is no sign of Tad Allagash. The Bolivians are mutinous. You can’t stop their treacherous voices.

  It is worse even than you expected, stepping out into the morning. The glare is like a mother’s reproach. The sidewalk sparkles cruelly. Visibility unlimited. The downtown warehouses look serene and restful in this beveled light. An uptown cab passes and you start to wave, then realize you have no money. The cab stops.

  You jog over and lean in the window. “I guess I’ll walk after all.”

  “Asshole.” He leaves rubber.

  You start north, holding a hand over your eyes. Trucks rumble up Hudson Street, bearing provisions into the sleeping city. You turn east. On Seventh Avenue an old woman with a hive of rollers on her head walks a German shepherd. The dog is rooting in the cracks of the sidewalk, but as you approach he stiffens into a pose of terrible alertness. The woman looks at you as if you were something that had just crawled out of the ocean trailing ooze and slime. An eager, tentative growl ripples the shepherd’s throat. “Good Pooky,” she says. The, dog makes a move but she chokes it back. You give them a wide berth.