PART THREE 1 страница

PART TWO

ALTHOUGH THINGS BEGAN to get a little blurry later on, looking back now – from my wicker armchair in the Northview Motor Lodge – I can remember the next day, which was a Thursday, and the two days after it, as just that… days – distinct entities of time that had beginnings and endings… you got up and then x number of hours later you went to bed. I took a dose of MDT-48 on each of these mornings, and my experience of it was pretty much the same as it had been during the first session, which is to say that I came up on it almost immediately, remained in my apartment the whole time and worked productively – very productively – until its effects wore off.

On the first day, I fielded a couple of invitations to go out with friends, and actually cancelled something I’d had on for the Friday evening. I finished the introduction – a total of 11, 000 words – and planned out the remainder of the book, in particular the approach I was going to take with the captions. Naturally, I couldn’t write these until I had a clear idea of which illustrations I’d be using, so I decided to get the laborious process of selecting the illustrations out of the way as well. This took me several hours to do. It should have taken me about four to six weeks, of course, but at the time I thought it best not to dwell on such matters. I gathered the relevant material – cuttings, magazine spreads, album covers, boxes of slides, contact sheets – and arranged it all on the floor in the middle of the room. I started sifting through it and made a sustained series of confident, resolute decisions. Before long I had a provisional list of illustrations and was in a position to start writing the captions.

But when I’d got that done, it suddenly occurred to me – and I didn’t envisage it taking more than another day – wouldn’t I then have the whole book done? A complete draft, and in only something like two days? OK, but I’d been thinking about it for months, gathering the material, turning it over in my mind. I’d devised a scheme for it – of sorts. I’d done a certain amount of research. I’d thought of the title.

Hadn’t I?

Maybe. But there was no getting around the fact that for an endomorphic slug like me – central to whose belief system was the notion that a severe lack of discipline was somehow a thing to be cherished – accomplishing this much in two days was extraordinary.

But why fight it?

On the Friday morning I continued writing the captions and by about lunchtime I could see that I was indeed going to get them finished that day, so I decided to phone Mark Sutton at Kerr & Dexter to tell him what stage I was at. The first thing he wanted to know about was the telecommunications manual I was supposed to be copywriting.

‘How’s it coming along? ’

‘It’s almost done, ’ I lied. ‘You’ll have it on Monday morning. ’

Which he would.

‘Great. So what’s on your mind, Eddie? ’

I explained about the status of Turning On, and asked him if he wanted me to send it over.

‘Well-’

‘It’s in good shape. Possibly needs a little editing in parts, not much, but-’

‘Eddie, the deadline on that’s not for another three months. ’

‘I know, I know, but I was thinking that if there are any other titles in the series up for grabs, maybe I could do… another one? ’

‘Up for grabs? Eddie, they’ve all been assigned, you know that. Your one, Dean’s, Clare Dormer’s. What is this? ’

He was right. A friend of mine, Dean Bennett, was doing Venus, a most-beautiful-women-of-the-century thing, and Clare Dormer, a psychiatrist who’d written a few popular magazine articles about celebrity-associated disorders, was doing Screen Kids, about the way children were portrayed on classic TV sit-coms. There were three others in the pipeline, as well. Great Buildings, I think, was one.

I couldn’t recall the others.

‘I don’t know. What about phase two? ’ I asked him. ‘If these things do well-’

‘No plans for phase two yet, Eddie. ’

‘But if these do well? ’

I heard a quiet sigh of exasperation at this point. He said, ‘I suppose there could be a phase two. ’ There was a pause, and then a polite, ‘Any suggestions? ’

I hadn’t actually thought about it, but I was anxious to have another project on hand, so cradling the receiver on my shoulder I cast an eye over the bookshelves in my living-room and started reeling off some ideas. ‘How about, let me see…’ I was staring at the spine of a large grey volume on a shelf above the stereo now, something Melissa’d given me after a visit to a photography thing at MoMA, and a fight. ‘How about one on great news photos? You could start with that amazing shot of Halley’s Comet. From 1910. Or the Bruno Hauptmann picture – remember… at the execution? Or the train crash in Kansas in 1928? ’ I had a sudden flash of the mangled railway carriages, the dark billowing clouds of smoke and dust. ‘Also… what else? … there’s Adolf Hitler sitting with Hindenburg and Hermann Goering at the Tannenberg Monument. ’ Another flash, this time of a distracted Hermann Goering holding something in his hands, gazing down at it, something that looks curiously like a laptop computer. ‘And then you’ve got… stick bombs over Paris. The D-Day landings. The kitchen debate in Moscow, with Khrushchev and Nixon. The napalm kid in Vietnam. The Ayatollah’s funeral. ’ Still staring directly at the book’s spine, I could literally see these images now, and vividly, one after the other, scrolling down as they would on a microfiche. I shook my head and said, ‘There must be thousands of others. ’ I looked away from the bookshelves and paused. ‘Or, I don’t know, you could do anything, you could do movie posters, advertisements, twentieth-century gadgets like the can opener or the calculator or the camcorder. You could do automobiles. ’

As I threw out these suggestions – reaching over to the desk at the same time to steady myself – I also became aware of a second tier of ideas forming in my mind. Up until that point I’d only ever been concerned about my own book. I hadn’t thought about the series as a whole, but it struck me now that Kerr & Dexter were really being quite slapdash about it. Their twentieth-century series was probably only a response to a similar project that was being done by a rival publishing house – something they’d gotten wind of and didn’t want to be trounced on. But it was as if once they’d decided to do it, they felt that was it – they’d done the work. To survive in the marketplace, to keep up with the conglomerates – as Artie Meltzer, K & D’s corporate vice-president, was always saying – the company needed to expand, but off-loading a project like this on to Mark’s division was just paying lip-service to the idea. Mark didn’t have the resources, but Artie knew he’d take it anyway, because Mark Sutton, who was incapable of ever saying no, took everything. Then Artie could forget about it until the time came to apportion blame after the series had flopped.

What Artie was missing out on here, however, was the fact that the series was actually a good idea. OK, others would be doing similar stuff, but that was always going to be the case. The thing was to do it first, and better. The material – the iconography of the twentieth century – was there, after all, ready-made and waiting to be window-dressed, but as far as I could see Sutton had only managed to put together half a package, at best. His ideas lacked any focus or structure.

‘Then you’ve got, I don’t know, great sporting moments. Babe Ruth. Tiger Woods. Fuck, the space programme. There’s no end to it. ’

‘Hhmm. ’

‘And shouldn’t all of these books have similar titles? ’ I went on. ‘Something identifiable – mine for instance is Turning On: From Haight-Ashbury to Silicon Valley, so Dean’s could be, instead of just Venus, it could be… Shooting Venus: From… Pickford to Paltrow, or From Garbo to Spencer, something along those lines. Clare’s, if she confined it to boys, could be… Raising Sons: From Beaver to Bart. I don’t know. Give it a formula, make it easier to sell. ’

There was a silence on the other end of the line, and then, ‘What do you want me to say, Eddie? It’s Friday afternoon. I’ve got deadlines today. ’

I could picture Mark in his office now, lean and geeky, struggling to stay on top of his workload, an un- or half-eaten cheeseburger on his desk, a secretary he was in love with ritually humiliating him every time their eyes met. He had a windowless office on the twelfth floor of the old Port Authority Building on Eighth Avenue, and spent most of his life there – including evenings, weekends and days off. I felt a wave of contempt for him.

‘Whatever, ’ I said. ‘Look Mark, I’ll talk to you on Monday. ’

When I got off the phone I started making some notes on a possible shape for the series and within about two hours had come up with a proposal for ten titles, including a brief outline and a list of key illustrations for each one. But then – what was the next step going to be? I needed to be commissioned to do this. I couldn’t just work in a vacuum.

Mark’s attitude and lack of interest was still bugging me, so I decided to call up Meltzer and put the idea to him. I knew Mark and Artie didn’t get along too well and that Artie would be happy for an opportunity to lean on Mark, but as to whether Artie would actually go for the proposal itself or not was another question.

I got through to him straightaway and started talking. I don’t know where it all came from but by the end of the conversation I practically had Meltzer restructuring the whole company, with the twentieth-century series the centrepiece of its new spring list. He wanted to meet me for dinner, but he and his wife had been invited to the Hamptons for the weekend, and he couldn’t get out of that – his wife would kill him. He seemed agitated, though, unwilling to hang up, as if he felt this great opportunity was already beginning to slip out of his hands…

Next week, I said, we’ll meet next week.

I spent the rest of the day copywriting the telecommunications manual for Mark and expanding on the notes for Artie – without seeing any contradiction in this, without giving any thought to the fact that perhaps, just maybe, by my actions, I might have endangered Mark Sutton’s job.

In terms of the MDT hit itself, though – on that Thursday and Friday – there was nothing markedly different about it, no particular pleasure thing going on, but there was – as before – what I can only describe as this unrelenting fucking surge of having to be busy. There was nothing for me to do in the apartment, because all of that had been done – unless of course I wanted to redecorate the place, change the furniture, paint the walls, tear up the old floorboards, which I didn’t – so I had no choice but to channel all of my energy into the copywriting and notes. And you must bear in mind what that kind of work normally involves. It might, for instance, involve watching Oprah, or sitting idly on the couch with a magazine, or even being in bed, asleep. Work did get done, eventually, but not in any way that you’d notice if you were only around for a day or two, observing.

I slept five hours on the Thursday night, and quite well too, but on the Friday night it wasn’t so easy. I woke at 3. 30 a. m., and lay in bed for about an hour before I finally surrendered and got up. I put on a pot of coffee and took a dose of MDT – which meant that by 5 a. m. I was back in full gear, but with nothing concrete to do. Nevertheless, I managed to stay in all day and occupy myself. I pored over the Italian grammar books I’d bought but never studied when I lived in Bologna. I’d picked up enough Italian to get by on, and even enough to get away with doing simple translations, but I’d never studied the language in any formal way. Most Italians I’d known wanted to practise their English, so it had always been easy to skate along with minimal skills. But I now spent a few hours picking through the tense system, as well as other key grammatical stuff – the subjunctive, comparatives, pronouns, reflexives – and the curious thing was, I recognized it all, realized I knew these things, found myself continually going Yeah, of course, that’s what that is.

I did a series of advanced exercises in one of the books and got them all right. I then dug out an old number of a weekly news magazine I had, Panorama, and as I scanned the snippets about local politicians and fashion designers and soccer managers, and went through a lengthy article on Viagra, I could feel whole glaciers of passive vocabulary shifting loose and floating up to the forefront of my conscious mind. After that, I took down a copy of Alessandro Manzoni’s classic novel I promessi sposi that I’d bought with the best of intentions but had never tackled, never even opened. I wouldn’t have had a hope of understanding it in any case, much like an elementary student of English trying to read Bleak House, but I started into it regardless, and was soon surprised to find myself enjoying its remarkably vivid reconstruction of early seventeenth-century life in Lombardy. In fact, when I put the book down after about 200 pages, I barely noticed at all that I’d been reading in a foreign language. And the reason I stopped wasn’t because I’d lost interest, but because I was continually being distracted by the notion that my spoken Italian might now be on a par with this – with my new level of reading comprehension.

I paused for a few moments and then took out my address book. I looked up the phone number of an old friend of mine in Bologna and dialled it. I checked the time as I waited. It would be the middle of the afternoon over there.

‘Pronto. ’

‘Ciao Giorgio, sono Eddie, da New York. ’

‘Eddie? Cazzo! Come stai? ’

‘Abbastanza bene. Senti Giorgio, volevo chiederti una cosa …’ – and so on. It wasn’t until we were about half an hour into the conversation – and had discussed the Mexico situation in some depth, and Giorgio’s marriage break-up, and this year’s spumante – that Giorgio suddenly realized we were speaking in Italian. We’d nearly always spoken in English, with whatever conversations we might have had in Italian being about pizza toppings or the weather.

He was amazed, and I had to tell him I’d been taking intensive lessons.

When I got off the phone with Giorgio, I continued reading I promessi sposi and had it finished by midday. After that I plundered a book on Italian history – a general survey – and got caught up in a trail of references and cross-references about emperors, popes, city states, invasions, cholera, unification, fascism… This, in turn, led me to a series of more specific questions about recent history, most of which I couldn’t answer because I didn’t have the relevant reading material – questions about Mussolini’s deal with the Vatican in 1929, CIA involvement in the elections of 1948, the P2 Masonic lodge, the Red Brigades, Aldo Moro’s kidnapping and murder in the late 1970s… Bettino Craxi in the ’80s, Di Pietro and tangentopoli in the ’90s. I had a visceral sense of the huddled, eventful centuries rapidly succeeding one another, then toppling like pillars, crashing helplessly down towards the present and breaking up into the anxious, fevered decades, years, months. I could feel the webs of conspiracy and deceit – the stories, the murders, the infidelities – spindling back and forth across time, spindling back and forth, virtually, across my skin. I was convinced, too, that with an intense enough concentration of will all of this could be held together in the mind, and understood, perceived as a physical entity with an identifiable chemical structure… seen almost, and touched, even if only for a fleeting moment…

By early on Saturday evening, however, as I sensed the MDT beginning to wear off, it has to be said that my zeal for understanding the complex polymers of history became somewhat muted. So I took another tablet. But by doing this, of course, I changed the dynamic of the whole thing and fragmented any sense of time or structure I had in my life at that point. Taking the drug again without a break also seemed to have the effect of increasing its intensity, with the result that I soon realized I couldn’t stay in the apartment any longer and simply had to go out.

I phoned Dean and met him an hour later at Zola’s on MacDougal. It took me a while to modulate my voice, to modulate the rate at which I was producing labyrinthine syntax, to modulate myself, basically – because apart from the couple of telephone conversations I’d had, this meeting with Dean was my first serious encounter with anyone since I’d started taking the MDT, and my first face-to-face encounter, so I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel, or how I’d be coming across.

Over drinks we quickly got on to discussing Mark Sutton and Artie Meltzer, and I threw out my ideas for the expanded twentieth-century series. But I could see Dean looking at me oddly. I could see his eyebrows furrowing, as doubts about my current state of mental well-being formed in his mind. Dean and I were both freelancers at K & D, having met there a couple of years earlier. We had a healthy disrespect for everything about the company and shared a kind of slacker work ethic, so this talk on my part of editorial proposals and sales projections was unusual to say the least of it. I backed off somewhat, but then found myself expounding paranoid theories about Italian politics to him, and with a little more passion and detail than he would have been used to receiving from me on any subject. The other thing I saw him catching me out on – but which I think prevented him from accusing me of being coked up to my eyeballs – was the fact that I wasn’t smoking. I then decided to add to his confusion by taking a cigarette from him, but just one.

After a while, a few friends of Dean’s arrived and we all had dinner together. There was a middle-aged couple I’d met once before, called Paul and Ruby Baxter, who were both architects, and a young Canadian actress called Susan. Over dinner, we discussed lots of subjects, and it quickly became apparent to everyone present, myself included, that elaborate, scarily articulate views on just about everything were going to be emanating from my end of the table. I got into a protracted argument with Paul about the relative merits of Bruckner and Mahler. I gave them my ’60s spiel, including a brief aside on Raymond Loewy and streamlining. I followed this with further ruminations on Italian history and the nature of time, which in turn developed into a lengthy expostulation on the inadequacies of Western political theory in the face of rapid global change. Once or twice – and it was as though from outside my body, as though from above – I became acutely aware of myself sitting at the table, talking, and for those fleeting moments, as I went on hacking a path through the knotty thickets of syntax and Latinate vocabulary, I had no real sense of what I was saying, no real idea if I was being coherent. Nevertheless, it all seemed to go down quite well – whatever it was – and despite being a bit worried that I was coming on too strong, I detected in Paul the same thing I’d detected earlier in Artie Meltzer, a kind of agitated need to keep talking to me, as though I were buoying him up somehow, empowering him, supplying him with regenerative energy waves. Neither was it my imagination, a bit later, when Susan started flirting with me, casually brushing her arm against mine, holding my gaze. I was able to side-track her by returning to the Bruckner-Mahler debate with Paul – though don’t ask me why, because I was certainly getting bored with that subject, and she was strikingly beautiful.

After dinner, in any case, we went to a string of nightclubs – first to the Duma, then to Virgil’s, then to the Moon and later to Hexagon. I don’t remember exactly when, but I took another dose of MDT in a bathroom somewhere. What I do remember is that harsh, neon-bright toilety atmosphere, people reflected in mirrors all around me, some locked into teeth-grinding, out-of-focus conversations, others slumped up against white tiles, staring at themselves – drunk, wired, bewildered – as though they’d accidentally fallen out of their own lives.

I remember feeling electric.

An increasingly bewildered Dean went home some time after two, as did Susan. Other friends of Paul and Ruby’s arrived, followed a while later by friends of theirs. Then Paul and Ruby dropped out. Another hour or two passed and I found myself in a huge apartment on the Upper West Side with a bunch of people I’d never met before. They were all sitting around a glass table doing lines of coke – but still, I was the one out-talking them. Standing up and walking around at a certain point, I caught sight of myself in a large ornate mirror that was hanging above a fake marble fireplace, and realized that I was the centre of attention, and that whatever I was talking about – and God knows it could have been anything – everyone in the room, without exception, was listening to me. At around five o’clock in the morning, or five-thirty, or six – I don’t remember – I went with a couple of guys to a diner on Amsterdam for breakfast. One of them, Kevin Doyle, was an investment banker with Van Loon & Associates and seemed to be saying that he could throw some information my way, good information, and that he could help me set up a portfolio. He kept insisting that we meet during the week, in his office, for lunch, even for coffee, any day that suited.

The other guy just sat there the whole time staring at me.

Eventually – because sooner or later everyone had to go to bed – I found myself alone again. I spent the day criss-crossing the city, mostly on foot, looking at stuff I’d never really paid that much attention to before, like those mammoth apartment buildings on Central Park West, with their roof-towers and Gothic cornices. I wandered down to Times Square, over to Gramercy Park and Murray Hill. I went back in the direction of Chelsea and then down to the Financial District and Battery Park. I did the Staten Island Ferry, standing out on the deck to let the fresh, invigorating wind cut right through me. I caught a subway back uptown, and went to museums and galleries, places I hadn’t been to in years. I went to a recital of chamber music at Lincoln Center, ate brunch at Julian’s, read the New York Times in Central Park and caught two Preston Sturges movies in a revival theatre in the West Village.

Later on, I hooked up with a few people back in Zola’s and got home to bed, finally, some time in the early hours of Monday morning.

AFTER THAT, THE FOLLOWING three or four weeks fused into one another, into one long stretch of… elasto -time. I was permanently… what? Up? High? Stoned? Out of it? Tripping? Buzzed? Wired? Chillin’? None of these terms is appropriate, or adequate, to describe the experience of being on MDT. But – regardless of what term you use – I was a certified MDT user now, taking one, sometimes two, doses of the stuff a day, and just about managing to snatch the odd hour of sleep here and there. I had a sense that I – or, rather, my life – was expanding exponentially and that before long the various spaces I occupied, physical and otherwise, were not going to be sufficient to contain me, and would consequently be put under a great deal of strain, maybe even to breaking point.

I lost weight. I also lost track, so I don’t know over what period of time I lost the weight exactly, but it must have been about eight or ten days. My face thinned out a little, and I felt lighter, and trimmer. It’s not that I wasn’t eating, I was – but I was eating mostly salads and fruit. I cut out cheese and bread and meat and potato-chips and chocolate. I didn’t drink any beer or sodas, but I did drink lots of water.

I was active.

I got my hair cut.

And bought new clothes. Because it was as much as I could bear to go on living in my apartment on Tenth Street, with its musty smells and creaky floorboards, but I certainly didn’t have to put up with a wardrobe that made me feel like an extension of the apartment. So I took out two thousand dollars from the envelope in the closet and wandered over to SoHo. I checked out a few stores, and then took a cab up to Fifth Avenue in the Fifties. In the space of about an hour, I bought a charcoal wool suit, a plain cotton shirt and an Armani silk tie. Then I got a pair of tan leather shoes at A. Testoni. I also got some casual stuff at Barney’s. It was more money than I’d ever spent on clothes in my entire life, but it was worth it, because having new, expensive things to wear made me feel relaxed and confident – and also, it has to be said, like someone else. In fact, to get the measure of myself in the new suit – the way you might test-drive a car – I took to the streets a couple of times, and walked up and down Madison Avenue, or around the financial district, weaving briskly in and out through the crowds. On these occasions, I would often catch glimpses of myself reflected in office windows, in dark slabs of corporate glass, catch glimpses of this trim-looking guy who seemed to know precisely where he was going and, moreover, precisely what he would be doing when he got there.

I spent money on other things, as well, sometimes going into expensive shops and seeking out pretty, elegantly dressed sales assistants, and buying things, randomly – a Mont Blanc fountain pen, a Pulsar watch – just to have that infantile and vaguely narcotic-erotic sensation of being wrapped in a veil of perfume and personal attention – Would sir like to try this one? With men I would be more aggressive, getting into detailed questions and information-swapping, such as the time I bought a boxed-set of Beethoven’s nine symphonies recorded live on original instruments, and locked the assistant into a debate about the contemporary relevance of eighteenth-century performing practice. My behaviour with waiters and barmen, too, was uncharacteristic. When I went out to places like Soleil and La Pigna and Ruggles – which I’d started doing fairly regularly now – I was an awkward customer… there’s no other word for it. I’d spend an unconscionable amount of time poring over the wine list, for example, or I’d order stuff that wasn’t on the menu, or I’d invent some complicated new cocktail, on the spot, and expect the barman to mix it for me.

Later, I’d go to sets at Sweet Basil and the Village Vanguard and start chatting with people at adjoining tables, and while my extensive knowledge of jazz usually ensured that I came out ahead in any conversation, it would also sometimes get people’s backs up. It’s not that I was being obnoxious, exactly, I wasn’t, but I engaged with everyone, and in a very focused way, on whatever level, about whatever subject, squeezing each encounter for its last possible drop of what might be on offer – intrigue, conflict, tedium, trivia, gossip… it didn’t matter. Most people I came across weren’t used to this, and some even found it quite unnerving.

Increasingly, too, I was aware of the effect I was having on certain women I met – or sometimes not even met but just saw… across a few tables, or a crowded room. There appeared to be this curious, wide-eyed attraction that I couldn’t really account for, but which led to some intimate, revealing conversations, and occasionally, too – because I was unsure of the parameters here – some fairly fraught ones. Then one time, during a Dale Noonan gig at Sweet Basil, this pale, thirtyish redhead I’d noticed came over between numbers and sat at my table. She smiled, but didn’t say anything. I smiled back and didn’t say anything either. I summoned a waiter and was about to ask her what she’d like to drink when she shook her head slightly and said, ‘Non. ’

I paused, and then asked the waiter for the check. As we were leaving, with the frenetic Dale Noonan just starting up again, I saw her glancing back at the table she’d originally been sitting at. I glanced back as well. Another woman and a man were at the table, looking towards us, perhaps gesturing uncertainly, and in this fleeting tableau of body language I thought I detected a rising sense of alarm, maybe even of panic. But as soon as we got outside, the red-haired woman took me by the arm, almost pushing me along the street, and said, ‘Oh my God’ – in a very strong French accent – ‘that screaming brass shit, I couldn’t stand it any longer. ’ Then she laughed and squeezed my arm, drawing me towards her, as though we’d known each other for years.

Her name was Chantal and she was here on vacation, from Paris, with her sister and brother-in-law. I tried to speak to her in French, not very successfully, which seemed to charm her no end, and after about twenty minutes I felt as though I had known her for years. As we walked along Fifth Avenue towards the Flatiron Building, I gave her the 23 Skidoo spiel, tales of cops shooing away young men who used to gather on Twenty-third Street to see passing women’s skirts billowing up in the gusts of wind. These gusts were caused by the narrow angle at the building’s northern end, an explanation which then degenerated into a lecture on wind-bracing and early skyscraper construction, just what you’d imagine a girl in such circumstances would want, but I somehow managed – apparently – to make talk of K-trusses and wall-girders interesting, funny, compelling even. At Twenty-third Street she stood in front of the Flatiron Building herself, waiting for something to happen, but there was barely a breeze that evening and about the only thing detectable in the folds of her long navy skirt was a gentle rippling movement. She seemed disappointed and looked as if she was about to stamp her foot.

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