Trent’s short film Including Everything won at Sundance this season. And Cannes. It won at Los Angeles, too. And Berlin. And everywhere else that mattered and everywhere else that didn’t. Trent, a twenty-five-year-old New Yorker of such gilt and chiselled good looks as to amount to a self-parody, is currently under contract to the remarkable Harriet Marsh of Nexus Films. He looks like a cross between an aerobic Apache and a Californian surf god. His fingernails and teeth appal with a whiteness that would shame the snows of Aspen. Trent, whose youthful brush with even modest celebrity has lifted him to heights of vanity that would make Gunn look shy, is what you might call ’poised’ for conquest. Harriet is going to launch him. Launching young men is one of Harriet’s pastimes; she considers herself a kind of watermark they’ll carry out into the world, visible in future only when the young man is held up against a strong light . . . The only thing missing from this picture is the picture. The feature that’s going to put Trent on Hollywood’s A-list and a planet-sized wedge into Nexus’s coffers. The feature, the picture, the movie, the film. The story. The one I pitched post-coitally to Harriet over three bottles of Bolly and eight lines of the Very Reverend Charles Cocaine.
Oh I know it’s frivolous. So deshed frivolous. But once Harriet took me seriously I couldn’t but run with it. She picked up the blower there and then. LA. Tokyo. Paris. Mumbai. Twenty-five words or less? Less. ’“Lucifer”,’ she said. ‘Creation. Fall. Eden – Julia – battle on Earth with Christ. Effects up the arse. Controversy.’ She capped the pitch with pure anti-logic. ‘The most expensive film ever made.’ They loved it. You can’t blame me, can you? Obviously set the record straight before the end of time, obviously unveil the Real Me – but think of the merchandising. That and we leak a story that now-reclusive scriptwriter Gunn was Actually Possessed by Lucifer to write the script. Bump off a couple of sour grapes critics to give the thing some momentum. Maybe decapitate Julia half-way through shooting and roll in Penelope Cruz. ’. . . members of the crew are beginning to believe the rumour that writer Declan Gunn made some Faustian pact. . .’ Lucifer’s going to be the pop culture icon for the final days of pop culture. And the final days of everything else, now that you mention it. Move over Madonna. The Caths, the Fundamentalists, the Baptists, Jumpin’ Jeehosophet’s Witnesses – Christ, anyone who’s anyone on the overlarge map of Christianity is going to be picketing movie theatres worldwide. And the kids? The kids are going to love it.
Honestly, I looked in the mirror this morning and thought: You know what you are, don’t you? You’re cocky. Your trouble, Lucifer, your irresistible and invidious trouble, is that you’ve always got to go the extra yard. Not content to accept Declan’s soul self-delivered by the mortal sin of suicide, you want to put him back into play with a new set of conditions that are going to freshen his appetite for life and lead him away from the Old Man all over again. ‘I had this soul already,’ you want to say to Him, between sips of Remy and insouciantly expelled smoke-rings, ‘I already had it, but I put it back. I’d like you to observe, Old Fruit, as, with his new lease of life, snatched from the very doorstep of certain Hell, your boy spends what remains of his liberty walking straight back into my arms . . .’ Confidence? This is meta-confidence, Toots.
So there you have it. Coming to a theatre near you. What kills me is this quaint business of me coming back here to Gunn’s hovel to write. Don’t laugh. Can’t squeeze a word out at the hotel. I’m not complaining, really: the poverty of Gunn’s former life provides a titillating counterpoint to the extravagant one I’m living on his behalf at the Ritz. A counterpoint in small doses, let me stress, in very, very small doses.
Life among the hotel’s loaded suits me. I’m a Name: the clairvoyant who pretends to be the Devil. Celebrity, you see, on a scale Declan could (and regularly did) only dream about. They’re used to celebs there, obviously. Staff are prohibited on pain of dismissal from making a fuss. I mean they’re polite, of course – they are supposed to recognize you – but none of that ‘Oh, Mr Cruise I just loved you in the one with the retard’ nonsense. Word of the Film Deal is out. There’s a whispery buzz about us, me, Trent and Harriet, when we park at the bar. The Lucifer Rising is the best-selling cocktail in the house. I wake up these mornings with a grin on my gob and pep in my prick. The sun comes in the window and embraces me. Those champagne breakfasts Harriet insists on practically guarantee a Feelin’ Groovy sort of day. Gunn’s bones seem finally to be coming into some kind of right alignment. I sing in the shower (Giddupah giddorn up – like a sex-machine – giddorn up) and take the stairs three at a time. This is how one should live. This, let me repeat, is how one should live.
(You know, it’s true. Work had really been getting me down latterly. Of late. The predictability. The routine. The absence of even the ghost of a challenge. With nice symmetry, my newly acquired corporeal threads provide material for the analogy: I’d felt heavy, sluggish, fevered now and then, stiff of joint, leaden of head, sour of guts, immaterially peaky and generally under the angelic weather. This getaway’s just what I needed. A change, as they say, is as good as a rest.)
The clairvoyance gimmick’s magnetic. Jack Eddington wants to give me my own show. Lysette Youngblood wants me on the road with Madonna. Gerry Zooney wants me to go head-to-head with Uri Geller. Todd Arbuthnot wants to hook me up with his contacts in Washington. Who are these people? They’re members of my Ritz coterie.
‘Do you have any idea, Declan, of the sort of money you could make with this?’ Todd Arbuthnot said to me last night, after I’d told him a thing or two about Dodi and Di that made his toenails curl.