"That," Enderby said, "I still have to see."
"You better believe it. Right. That fag Silverass is on his way and you gotta have words to give him. Songs, baby. So I want you to steer your pinko ass into that elevator and get up to your room and start writing."
"Gladly," Enderby said. "After dinner. I thought," he thought for the first time, "we might have dinner together."
"That's nice, that's real nice. Like in old movies. Not tonight, baby, some other time."
"You," Enderby said, "have already arranged to dine with some other ah guy. I see."
"No, you don't see." She sipped at her fresh whisky sour and Enderby at his. The tumescence was terrible. "You see nothing. Ah has mah prahvit lahf."
"At least," Enderby said, "you've stopped saying shit all the time. That's a word I've heard Americans use even at table. They don't take in the referent of the word. It's become just a neutral expletive."
"Okay, no shit." And then a great handsome man of her own colour, though much darker, bore down on their table. She rose in shrill ecstasy and they fondly embraced. Baby honey-bunch and then an unintelligible duet in what Enderby took to be Black English. He drained his whisky sour unnoticed and unintroduced and stole off with his coat and packages. His shlong settled to neutrality. Black bitch and so on. Christ, jealousy, a dark wine long untasted. He hadn't come all this way to be jealous. He would leave it to her, bitch, to sign for the whisky sours.
But up in his room, strengthened by mahogany tea, he got out his yellow legal pad and started to scribble to her will. Lyrics, seeing her in a richly crimson silk farthingale belting them out, brown bosom fully exposed in the Tudor manner to proclaim, like the Queen herself, putative virginity. This vision was physically very painful. He had to cart the engorged shlong three times into the bathroom and, on a face towel monogrammed with a fanciful S, fiercely discharge his heat. He saw himself fierce in the lighted mirror doing it and nodded fiercely at the fierce reflection. Then, less fierce, indeed encalmed, he went down to dinner and ordered a beefsteak and a half bottle of some ruby Californian muck, both restorative, indeed freshly inflaming. The waiter, a frail Viennese PhD immigrant, seemed to ask him what dressing he would take with his salad. No dressing because no salad. Green stuff was not good for you. April Elgar and her co-coloured fancy man were not there. Swiving like rattlesnakes some place. He, Enderby, willed himself not to care, finishing his french frieds with his fingers, ordering apple pie with ice cream on it. Then he belched his way back up to make tea.
The white man's knavery
Sold me in slavery
To an unsavoury
Household.
I slept in an attic all
Foully rheumatical,
Bedbugged and cobwebbed
And mouseholed.
I slaved like the slave I was,
Ripe for the grave I was,
But I was brave, I was
Ready
For my master's remorse and my
Freedom of course and my
Carriage and horse and my
Monetary source
Safe and steady.
Now see me here in London,
Ready for revenge -
All England will be undone
From Carlisle to Stonehenge
On the dayyyyyyyy
I get my wayyyyyy.
But here, by God, was corruption. You cease to celebrate the greatest poet in the world's history and ennoble nothing but lust of one kind or another. Goats and monkeys. Toplady was, after all, no fool.
I'll screw some sex into Essex,
I'll scourge Walter Raleigh's raw hide.
I'll make Francis Drake
Chase a duck on a lake
And eat Francis Bacon fried.
I'll inject the shakes into Shakespeare
And stick in the spear as well,
Wrench out Queen Bess's
Carroty tresses
And make her bald as a bell.
Right under your gaze
I'm going to raise
Elizabethan hell.
Enderby groaned, but not now with lust, that foul fundamental whose harmonics were admiration, awe and even the most dangerous word in the language. He had been drawn into the celebration of America, not Shakespeare. What voice from the dead had condoned the travesty to come? Robert Greene, perhaps, putting on the tame tiger's hide in his cunning. One in the eye for Shakescene. Enderby got blearily off his bed (lyricizing was bloody hard work) and dug his contract out of the dusty suitcase. He should have read the small print before signing. Sold into slavery, by God. Suable if he reneged. Best to embrace one's enforced corruption. He started to write one more song before sleep.
To be or not to be
Smitten by you
Bitten by you
Teased as a ball of wool is teased by a kitten by you:
That is the question
Which harms my digestion
Marry, à propos. He swallowed six Whoosh tablets with chlorinated water and got ready for troubled slumber.
The next day Enderby left them all to it. Let the bastards get on with it. He tried to work in the hotel lounge, but perpetual sedative music got in the way of his rhythms. He went to see the bell bald manager about it, but the manager did not easily comprehend his complaint. Anaesthetization of the ear or something. Offwhite noise. He returned to his room to find the bed yet unmade, but he was used to unmade beds. He stuck the DO NOT DISTURB notice up outside and made himself more tea. Fed up, fucked up and far from home. He dragged Ben Jonson grumbling from his long sleep and made him sing:
Ale and Anacreon,
Beer and Boethius,
Sack and Sophocles, these
Please my heart
More than the farting littleness,
Borborygmic brittleness,
Jokes and japes
Of the apes and jackanapes
One sees
Courting the great
At court, on estate -
Fleas!
He foreheard the bemerding response to that and crumpled the yellow legal paper up. Yet he needed Ben Jonson to sneak in a few extra blank verse lines to make the revival of Richard II relevant to the Essex rebellion which immediately followed and thus have poor Will bemerded. Keep out of the great world, sirrah, stick to your word games. I, your Queen, tell you so. Lucky for you your head rolleth not like his, that runagate traitorous earl, on Tower Hill. Get you gone from my royal sight. Will was turning out to be a very bemerdable character.
Then he wrote lines to April Elgar:
Edwardian brass, O enigmatic kingdom,
Apostolic musicmaker, nobilmente
Clashes the green roots, outyells returning swifts,
Derides the cuckoocall. I cannot go on I
Cannot go on
Cannot
Enderby
He folded them into a Sheraton envelope, scrawled her name on, went downstairs overcoated, told the reception clerk to put it into her box. Surely surely. Then he went out to get drunk. He settled at length into a low bar behind the Board of Trade building. An old man whined to the bartender, who consoled him surely surely. Enderby ordered Scotch linked and beer to pursue it. Workmen came in in hard hats. They heard Enderby's accent on his third ordering of the same again and derided his Britishry with what what and all that son of rot jolly good eh old chap. They seemed to have watched a fair quantity of old films on television. Enderby grinned at them, unoffended. Then one man said that the Queen of England was a whore. Enderby grinned at him, unoffended. Then, Orpheus with his lute, he came out with:
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war -" Then he took a drink. The workmen looked solemn, as in church: Lincoln 's speech was a powerful cantrip. They bought Enderby the same again. He was told that it was only kidding about the Queen of England being a whore. He said: "Her circumstances hardly allow it. Of course, your President Kennedy was a whoremaster or lecher, but that son of thing is expected in a male leader. A double standard, you know." Somebody put a dime or quarter into the jukebox hidden in the corner in deep shadow. It illuminated itself and thumped and twanged. Unformed male voices pitched high excreted nonsense with bad rhymes. Kennedy, he was told, slept with Marilyn Monroe. Now they were conveniently dead, both assassinated by the FBI, and were screwing away in heaven. No such place as heaven. It's got to be heaven if you're screwing Marilyn Monroe, you better believe it. Then the disc changed and Enderby heard a known voice: