Money: A Suicide Note (2 page)

I hit a topless bar on Forty-Fourth. Ever check out one of these joints? I always expected some kind of mob frat-house policed by half-clad chambermaids. It isn't like that. They just have a few chicks in knickers dancing on a ramp behind the bar: you sit and drink while they strut their stuff. I kept the whiskies coming, at $3.50 a pop, and sluiced the liquor round my upper west side. I also pressed the cold glass against my writhing cheek. This helps, or seems to. It soothes.

There were three girls working the ramp, spaced out along its mirrored length. The girl dancing topless for my benefit, and for that of the gingery, hermaphroditic figure seated two stools to my right, was short and shy and puppyishly built. Well, let's take a look here. Her skin showed pale in the light, waning sorely to the eye, as if she were given to rashes, allergies. She had large woeful breasts, puckered at the heart, and an eave of loose flesh climbed over the high rim of her pants, which were navy-blue and fluff-flossed, like gym-briefs. Yes, the upper grips of her breasts bore soft crenella-tions, even whiter than the rest of her. Stretchmarks at twenty, at nineteen: something wrong there, the form showing fatigue, showing error, at a very early stage. She knew all this, my girl. Her normal tomboy face tried to wear the standard sneer of enraptured self-sufficiency and yet was full of disquiet—disquiet of the body, not the other shame. If you want my considered opinion, this chick had no kind of future in the gogo business. She was my girl, though, for the next half-hour anyhow. Her two rivals further down the ramp looked a lot more my style, but my face throbbed knowingly each time I turned their way. And I had my girl to consider, her own feelings in the matter. I'm with you, kid, don't worry. You'll do me fine. She smiled in my direction every now and then. The smile was so helpless and uncertain. Yes the smile was so ashamed.

'You want another scotch?' said the matron behind the bar — the old dame with her waxed hair and scrapey voice. The body-stocking or tutu she wore was an unfriendly dull brown or caramel colour. It spoke of spinal supports, hernias.

'Yeah,' I said, and started smoking another cigarette. Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I'm always smoking another cigarette.

I nursed my cheek for a while with the glass. I muttered and swore. By the time I looked up again my girl was gone. In her stead there writhed a six-foot Mex with wraparound mouth, hot greasy breasts, and a furrow of black hair on her belly which crept like a trail of gunpowder into the sharp white holster of her pants. Now this is a bit more fucking like it, I thought. In my experience you can tell pretty well all you need to know about a woman by the amount of time, thought and money she puts into her pants. Take Selina. And these pants spelt true sack knowhow. She danced like a wet dream, vicious and inane. Her tooth-crammed smile went everywhere and nowhere. The face, the body, the movement, all quite secure in their performance, their art, their pornography.

'You want to buy Dawn a drink?'

I levelled my head. The old dame behind the bar gestured perfunctorily towards the stool beside me, where Dawn indeed perched —

Dawn, my girl, now swaddled in a woolly dressing-gown. 'Well what's Dawn drinking?' I asked.

'Champagne!' A squat glass of what looked like glucose on the rocks was smacked down in front of me. 'Six dollars!'

'Six dollars . . .' I flattened another twenty on the damp wood.

'Sorry,' said Dawn with a wince. She used the long Boroughs vowel, the out-of-towner vowel. 'I don't like to do this part. It's not nice to a girl.'

'Don't worry.'

'What's your name?'

'John,' I said.

'What do you do, John?'

Oh I see — a conversation. This is some deal. There's a wriggling naked miracle five feet from my nose, but I pay good money to talk with Dawn here in her dressing-gown.

'I'm in pornography,' I said. 'Right up to here.'

'That's interesting.'

'You want another scotch?' The old boot, this headmistress in her therapeutic singlet, loomed over us with my change.

'Why not,' I said.

'You want to buy Dawn another drink?'

'Christ. Yeah, okay — do it.'

'... Are you English, John?' asked my girl, with deep understanding, as if this would answer a lot of questions.

'Tell you the truth, Dawn, I'm half American and half asleep. I just climbed off the plane, you know?'

'Me too. I mean the bus. Yesterday. I just climbed off the bus.'

'Where from, Dawn?'

'New Jersey.'

'No kidding? Where in New Jersey? You know, I grew up —'

'You want another scotch?'

I felt my shoulders give. I turned slowly. I said, 'How much does it cost to keep you away from me for ten minutes? Tell me something,' I asked her. But I said a good deal more. She stood her ground, this old dame. She was experienced. I gave her all my face, and it's a face that can usually face them down, wide and grey, full of adolescent archaeology and cheap food and junk money, the face of a fat snake, bearing all the signs of its sins. For several seconds she just gave me her face too, full on, a stark presentation of the eyes, which were harder than mine, oh much harder. With her small fists on the bar she leaned towards me and said:

'Leroy!'

Instantly the music gulped out. Various speckled profiles turned my way. Hands on hips, older in the silence, her breasts standing easy now, the dark dancer stared down at me with weathered contempt.

'I'm looking for things.' This was Dawn. 'I'm really interested in pornography.'

'No you're not,' I said. And pornography isn't interested either. 'It's okay, Leroy! Relax, Leroy. Pal, there's no problem. I'm going. Here's money. Dawn, just you take care now.'

I slid to my feet and found no balance. The stool wobbled roundly on its base, like a coin. I waved to the watching women — get your staring done with — and made my diagonal for the door.

——————

Everything was on offer outside. Boylesk, assisted showers, live sex, a we-never-close porn emporium bristling in its static. They even had the real thing out there, in prostitute form. But I wasn't buying, not tonight. I walked back to the hotel without incident. Nothing happened. It never does, but it will. The revolving door shoved me into the lobby, and the desk clerk bobbed about in his stockade.

'Hi there,' he said. 'While you were out tonight, sir, Mr Lorne Guyland called.'

Daintily he offered me my key.

'Would that be the real Lorne Guyland, sir?'

'Oh, I wouldn't go that far,' I said, or maybe I just thought it. The elevator sucked me skyward. My face was still hurting a lot all the time. In my room I picked up the bottle and sank back on the bed. While I waited for the noises to come I thought about travel through air and time, and about Selina... Yes, I can fill you in on that now. Perhaps I'll even feel a little better, when I've told you, when it's out.

Earlier today — today? Christ, it feels like childhood — Alec Llewellyn drove me to Heathrow Airport at the wheel of my powerful Fiasco. He's borrowing the car while I'm away, that liar. I was smudged with drink and Serafim, for the plane. I'm scared of flying. I'm scared of landing too. We didn't talk much. He owes me money ... We joined the long queue for standby. Something in me hoped that the flight would be full. It wasn't. The ticking computer gim-micked my seat. 'But you'd better hurry,' said the girl. Alec jogged at my side to passport control. He tousled my rug and shooed me through.

'Hey, John,' he called from the other side of the fence. 'Hey, addict!' Beside him an old man stood waving at no one that I could see.

'What?'

'Come here.'

He beckoned. I came panting up to him.

'What?'

'Selina. She's fucking someone else — a lot, all the time.'

'Oh you liar.'' And I think I even took a weary swipe at his face. Alec is always doing things like this.

'I thought you ought to know,' he said offendedly. He smiled. 'Round from the back, one leg up, her on top. Every which way.'

'Oh yeah? Who? You liar. Why are you — who, who, who?'

But he wouldn't tell me. He just said that it had been going on for a long time, and that it was someone I knew pretty well.

'You,' I said, and turned, and ran ...

There. I don't feel better. I don't feel better at all. I'm rolling over now, to try and get some sleep. London is waking up. So is Selina. The distant fizz or whistle or hiss in the back of my head is starting again, modulating slowly, searching for its scale.

——————

Oh man sometimes I wake up feel like a cat runover.

Are you familiar with the stoical aspects of hard drinking, of heavy drinking? Oh it's heavy. Oh it's hard. It isn't easy. Jesus, I never meant me any harm. All I wanted was a good time.

The disease I host called tinnitus — more reliable and above all cheaper than any alarm call — woke me promptly at nine. Tinnitus woke me on a note of high exasperation, as if it had been trying to wake me for hours. I let my sapless tongue creak up to check out the swelling on my upper west side. About the same, yet tenderer. My throat informed me that I had a snout hangover on, too. The first cigarette would light a trail of gunpowder to the holster, the arsenal inside my chest. I patted my pockets and lit it anyway.

Ten minutes later I came out of that can on all fours, a pale and very penitent crocodile, really sorry about all that stagnant gook and offal I went and quaffed last night. I'd just rolled on my back and was loosening my tie and unbuttoning my shirt when the telephone rang.

'John? Lorne Guyland.'

'Lorne!' I said. Christ, what a croak it was. 'How are you?'

'Good,' he said. 'I'm good, John. How are you?'

'I'm fine, fine.'

That's good, John. John?'

'Lorne?'

'There are things that worry me, John.'

'Tell me about them, Lorne.'

'I don't happen to be an old man, John.'

'I know that, Lorne.'

'I'm in great shape. Never better.'

'I'm glad, Lorne.'

'That's why I don't like it that you say I'm an old man, John.'

'But I don't say that, Lorne.'

'Well okay. You imply it, John, and that's, it's, that's about the same thing. In my book. You also imply that I'm not very sexually active and can't satisfy my women. That's just not true, John.'

'I'm sure it's not true, Lorne.'

'Then why imply it? John, I think we should meet and talk about these things. I hate to talk on the telephone.'

'Absolutely. When?'

'I'm a very busy man, John.'

'I respect that, Lorne.'

'You can't expect me to just drop everything, just to, just to meet with you, John.'

'Of course not, Lorne.'

'I lead a full life, John. Full and active. Superactive, John. Six o'clock I'm at the health club. When my programme's done I hit the mat with my judo instructor. Afternoons I work out with the weights. When I'm at the house, it's golf, tennis, water-skiing, scuba-diving, racquet-ball and polo. You know, John, sometimes I just get out on that beach and run like a kid. The girls, these chicks I have at the house, when I run in late they scold me, John, like I was a little boy. Then I'm up half the night screwing. Take yesterday ...'

It went on like this, I swear to God, for an hour and a half. After a while I fell silent. This had no effect on anything. So in the end I just sat through it, smoking cigarettes and having a really bad time.

When it was over, I took a pull of scotch, dabbed the tears away with a paper tissue, and rang down to room service. I asked for coffee. I mean, you have to take it easy on yourself sometimes.

'Coffee how?' came the suspicious reply.

I told him: with milk and sugar. 'How big are the pots?'

'Serve two,' he said.

'Four pots.'

'You got it.'

I lay back on the cot with my frayed, fanlike address book. Using the complimentary pad and pencil, I started making a list of all the places where I might expect to find the nomadic Selina. That Selina, she gets around. I wondered, out of interest, how much these calls were going to cost me.

I undressed and ran a tub. Then the impeccable black bellhop arrived with my tray. I came over, initialled the check and slipped the kid a buck. He was in good shape, this kid: he had a pleasant agitation in his step and in his smile. He frowned innocently and sniffed the air.

He could take one look at me — at the ashtray, the bottle, the four pots of coffee, my face, and my gut set like a stone on the white band of the towel — he could take one look at me and be pretty sure I ran on heavy fuel.

There is a dog tethered in the steep airwell beneath my room. A talented barker, he barks boomingly well. I listened to him a lot while I sat there being talked to by Lorne. His half-hourly barking jags reverberate in monstrous warning up the length of the canyon walls. He needs that nether fury. He has big responsibilities — he sounds as though he guards the gates of hell. His lungs are fathomless, his hellhound rage is huge. He needs those lungs — what for? To keep them in, to keep them out.

——————

I'd better give you the lowdown on Selina — and quick. That hot bitch, what am I letting her do to me?

Like many girls (I reckon), and especially those of the small, supple, swervy, bendy, bed-smart variety, Selina lives her life in hardened fear of assault, molestation and rape. The world has ravished her often enough in the past, and she thinks the world wants to ravish her again. Lying between the sheets, or propped at my side during long and anxious journeys in the Fiasco, or seated across the table in the deep lees of high-tab dinners, Selina has frequently refreshed me with tales of insult and violation from her childhood and teenage years — a musk-breathing, toffee-offering sicko on the common, the toolshed interrogations of sweat-soaked parkies, some lumbering retard in the alley or the lane, right up to the narcissist photographers and priapic prop-boys who used to cruise her at work, and now the scowling punks, soccer trogs and bus-stop boogies malevolently lining the streets and more or less constantly pinching her ass or flicking her tits and generally making no bones about the things they need to do... It must be tiring knowledge, the realization that half the members of the planet, one on one, can do what the hell they like with you.