On my way downstairs, I calculated that I hadn’t slept in nearly forty hours, and had probably, in any case, only slept a total of six hours in the seventy-two previous to that, so although I didn’t feel it and didn’t look it, I realized that at some level I must have been in a state of complete and utter physical exhaustion.
It was early evening and traffic was heavy, just like on that first evening when I’d come out of the cocktail lounge over on Sixth Avenue. I walked, therefore, rather than taking a cab – floated, in fact – floated through the streets, and with a vague sensation of moving through a kind of virtual-reality environment, a screenscape where colours contrasted sharply and perception of depth was slightly muted. Any time I turned a corner the movements I made seemed jerky and angular and guided, so after about twenty-five minutes, when I found myself lurching sideways all of a sudden and entering a bar in Tribeca, a place called the Congo, it was as though I were entering a new phase of play in some advanced computer game, and one with pretty realistic graphics – there was a long wooden bar to the left, wicker stools, a railed mezzanine at the back and enormous potted plants everywhere that reached right up to the ceiling.
I sat at the bar and ordered a Bombay and tonic.
The place wasn’t too crowded, though it would probably be filling up fairly soon. There were some people to my left, two women sitting at stools – but facing away from the bar – and three men standing around them. Two of these were doing the talking, with the others sipping drinks, pulling on cigarettes and listening carefully. The subject of conversation was the NBA and Michael Jordan and the huge revenues he’d generated for the game. I don’t know at what point it started again, exactly, that trip-switching forward thing, or click-clicking forward like on a faulty CD, but when it did I had no control whatsoever and could only observe, witness, each segment and each flash, as though each segment and each flash – as well as the greater, unrevealed whole – were happening to someone else and not to me. The first jump was very abrupt and came as I was reaching out to pick up my drink. I’d just made contact with the cold, moist surface of the glass, when suddenly, without any warning or movement, I found myself on the other side of the group, standing very close to one of the women – a thirtyish brunette in a short green skirt, not excessively slim, distinctive blue eyes… my left hand hovering somewhere in the airspace above her right thigh…
… and I was in mid-sentence…
‘… yeah, but don’t forget that ESPN was set up in 1979, and with $10 million of seed money from Getty Oil for Christ’s sake…’
‘What’s that got-’
‘It’s got everything to do with it. It changed everything. Because of a shrewd business decision college basketball players were suddenly becoming household names overnight…
For a split second I was aware that one of the men – a chubby guy in a silk suit – was glaring at me. He was tense and sweaty and his eyes were drawn irresistibly to my left hand – but then… click, click, click… the barman was in front of me, waving his arms around, blocking my view. He looked Irish and had tired eyes that said pleeease, enough. Meanwhile, behind him – and only partially visible now – the chubby guy in the silk suit was holding a hand up to his face, trying to stop the flow of blood from his nose…
‘Fuck you, pal…
‘Fuck you…’
The cool evening air touched the hairs on the back of my neck as I staggered away from the barman and out on to the street. The woman in the short green skirt was there too, just inside the door, pushing away someone who was behind her. She said something I didn’t catch and then quickly manoeuvred herself around the barman, dodging his arms, but half a second later – inexplicably – she was linking arms with me a couple of blocks down the street.
Then we were in a cubicle together, a stall in the bathroom of a nightclub or a bar, and I was pulling away from her, withdrawing – her legs spread out against a backdrop of chrome, and white porcelain, and black tiles… her green skirt torn and dangling from the toilet seat, her blouse open, beads of sweat glistening between her breasts. As I leant back against the door, hurriedly doing up my trousers, she remained in position, with her eyes closed and head swaying rhythmically from side to side. In the background, there was some kind of pulsating music, as well as the periodic roar of electric hand-dryers and raised voices and manic laughter, and from the next cubicle what sounded like the flicking of lighters followed by sharp, rapid inhalations of smoke…
I closed my eyes at that point, but when I opened them a second later I was moving across a crowded dance floor – pushing past people, elbowing them, snarling at them. In another few moments, I was out on the street again, negotiating my way through more crowds and through heavy streams of traffic. Soon after that I seem to remember climbing into the familiar comfort of a yellow cab, sinking into the cheap plastic upholstery of the back seat and gazing out at the tawdry streaks of neon that stretched the city out, pulled it this way and that, like so many strands of multi-coloured chewing-gum. I also remember being acutely aware of my right hand, which was sore, throbbing in fact, from having punched that guy back at the Congo – something, incidentally, I couldn’t believe I’d done. At any rate, the next thing I knew I was in the lobby of an Upper West Side restaurant – a place I’d read about called Actium – insinuating, pushing, my way into another conversation with another set of complete strangers, this time half a dozen members of some local art-gallery crowd. Posing as a collector, I introduced myself as Thomas Cole. Like before, I perpetually seemed to be in mid-sentence – ‘… and already in eighteen hundred and four the Noble Savage has become the Demonic Indian, it’s there in Vanderlyn’s Murder of Jane McCrea, the dark, rippling musculature, the ogre’s raised tomahawk ready to strike at the woman’s head…’ I was probably as surprised by what I was saying as anyone else, but I couldn’t press pause, couldn’t do anything except endure it, and watch. Then it was click, click, click again and all of a sudden we were sitting around a table together having dinner.
To my left was an intense guy with a salt-and-pepper beard wearing a carefully crumpled linen jacket, probably an art critic, and to my right was a Bernice-bobs-her-hair type of woman with bony bits sticking out of her every time she moved. Directly opposite me was a heavy Latino guy in a suit who was talking non-stop. He spoke in English, but it was norteamericano this and norteamericano that, and in a fairly disparaging tone. I realized after a few moments that the man I was looking at was Rodolfo Alvarez, the celebrated Mexican painter who’d recently moved to Manhattan and undertaken to recreate, from notebooks, the destroyed Diego Rivera mural originally destined for the lobby of the RCA Building in 1933.
Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a Better Future.
The dark-haired and very beautiful woman in a black dress, sitting to his left, was the sultry Donatella, his wife.
I’d read a profile of them in Vanity Fair.
How the fuck had I ended up with these people?