Money: A Suicide Note (26 page)

Barry has since acquired a video recording of the race and still gloats over it even now. Bumboy not only won: it was more or less the sole survivor. There was one of those churning, drowning pile-ups at the penultimate jump. Bumboy tripped snorting through the chaos — and was clear with one fence to beat. The lone horse pranced flimsily on. It didn't leap that last hedge: it just munched its way through. Then, with only flat green ahead, ten yards from the post, Bumboy fell over. The jockey, who was all whipped out by now, tried to remount. Some of his grounded colleagues got the same idea. After about ten minutes — several riderless horses had skipped over the line by now, and another contender had cleared the last jump, and was gaining — Bumboy was finally scourged out of a series of circles and flopped over the line, home by half a length.

Now this bookie was a middleman, not legal, and my dad took Morrie Dubedat, Fat Paul and two shooters when he went to collect his winnings. Also, I had sobered up by then and caused some complications by trying to stop the cheque — until my father came squealing on to the line. He got his money, after a month of gang warfare — not the full whack by any means, but enough to pay his debts, buy out the brewery, gut the Shakespeare, instal the pool table, the stripper and the strobes... He says he's going to repay me, one of these days. Who cares? It doesn't matter. I'll never get over the grief of that wound. And I don't think he ever meant me to.

I settled the bill — a pretty useful one, what with the line of brandies I had moodily consumed. I returned to my flat and packed a case and started going back to America.

5

THE AUTOCRAT moved fast and softly through chintzy prefabs and the continuing scenes of black family life, with its leagues of brothers and stand-offs in the basketball courts, and mothers' shapes behind the insect mesh, calling. Spooked planes buzzed the limo roof at the black spread of water near La Guardia. Ped Xing, No Shoulder, Unlawful To Cross White Line, Traffic Laws Strictly Enforced, Stay In Lane, Upgrade — Maintain Speed. Does My Chauffeur Need To Be Told All This? Wouldn't DRIVE do the trick? We came out of the beach-hut belt and slid down on to the barrelling freeway. Now — here it comes again — the gnashed, gap-toothed skyline, the graphics, the artwork of New York.

At the Ashbery I offered the driver a twenty.

'No sir!' he said. 'That's all taken care of. Would you call Mr Goodney, sir, when you're settled in?'

I tried the twenty on him again. He wouldn't take it, so I pressed it on Felix instead.

'I hate to do this to you, Slick, but you got to go see Lorne Guyland— tonight.'

'Oh man.'

He told me why. I was about to ring off when Fielding asked suspiciously, 'Hey, how did you fly? Coach?'

'Yeah.'

'Slick, I'm going to have to talk to you very seriously about your expenses. Shape up, John. It's an embarrassment. It looks bad to the moneymen. Take a floor at the Gustave. Hire a jet and have a weekend with Butch and Caduta in the Caribbean. Go buy a case of champagne and pour it all over your dick. Spend. Spend. You're no use to me when you fly coach. Fly supersonic. Fly sharp-end. God damn it, Slick, fly right.'

I shaved, showered, changed, drank a mug of duty free and took a hot cab-ride into the East Eighties with Si Wypijewski at the wheel. Or maybe it was Wypijewski Si. New Yorkers will tell you that the surname comes first on the cabbie's ID. But who says? Even with Smith John and Brown David, how can you really be sure over here? I once had a cabbie called Supersad Morgan. Or maybe it was Morgan Supersad. His eyes, at any rate, were brown and terribly melancholy. His eyes were Supersad ...

My mission? To go reassure Lorne Guyland. According to Fielding, Lorne was seriously overdue for reassurance. He had been wanting reassurance for a long time now and hadn't been getting any. 'Do it now, John,' Fielding had counselled. 'You'll save us a lot of sweat in mid-career.' Lorne wanted reassurance about screen supremacy, line ratios and close-up time. Lorne wanted reassurance about his youthfulness, athleticism and general popularity. Lorne wanted reassurance about the nature of his role. Me too, pal Lorne, I sympathize.

Lorne's role was that of Gary, the nogoodnik father. In my treatment I had, I thought, made it pretty clear what Gary was like. Gary was like Barry, like Barry Self: a lantern-jawed know-nothing, an unreflecting hedonist, a mastermould of brute conceit who none the less exploits a small but tenacious legacy of charm and luck... Why do I bother with my father? Who cares? What is this big deal about dads and sons? I don't know — it's not that he's my dad. It's more that I'm his son. I am aswirl with him, with his pre-empting, his blackballing genes. . . Gary, too, had a lot of my dad in him, just as I resembled Doug, the son. When the heroin shows up in the flour, Gary wants to return it to the mob. Doug wants to sell it at its street value, which is two million dollars. They're both bad and greedy, but old Gary is a funker — yes, a lucky funker.

Fielding had told me to expect trouble from Lorne on several counts. Lorne wanted Gary upgraded. Rather than pub landlord or beanery boss, Lorne saw Gary as a celebrity restaurateur. The age question also vexed him. Fielding said that Lorne had even floated the idea that Gary and Doug should be brothers, as opposed to father and son. In this fashion did Lorne hope to make light of the forty-year age difference between himself and his co-star. Then, too, there was the sex.

'I'm Thursday,' said the girl at the door of Lorne's penthouse. Til just buzz up.'

I watched Thursday mince across the hall to her desk. She wore a kind of schoolkid outfit—blouse and tie, cheerleader's pleated skirt, bobbysox. She was six feet tall and looked like a gorgeous trans-vestite, possibly the beneficiary of some dirty-minded sex-change operation, over in California there. As she bent over the intercom the little skirt went peek-a-boo and you could see white pants cupping her buttocks like a bra. I wondered ... Fielding maintained that Lorne was 'all fucked out', having gorged himself to the point of decrepitude during his first decade at the top, a common enough syndrome in the movie business. According to Fielding, Lorne hadn't had a hard-on for thirty-five years. Of course one had to remember that Lorne, in his time, had been very big, enormous, colossal. While making Gargantuan in Spain during the Fifties (Fielding again), Bullion had chartered sex planes from New York, London and Paris just to keep Lorne in chicks for the five-month shoot. His boast had been that he could tackle a whole consignment with a bottle of brandy and a soft-on. Lorne had been big then all right. All my life I had seen him up there on the screen.

'Mr Guyland. Sir, your director's here!' said Thursday in her singing-telegram voice. She laughed raunchily. 'Sure, lover. You got it.' Then she turned. 'I'm sorry if I seem a trifle flushed. Lorne's been balling me all day. He's right up there.'

I climbed a padded spiral staircase. I climbed from the stalls to the gods. Lorne surged across a cloud of carpet, seventh heaven, dressed in a white robe and extending a broad-sleeved arm through the conditioned air. With silent urgency he swivelled, and gestured towards the bank of window—this was his balcony, his private box, over sweating Manhattan. He poured me a drink. I was surprised to taste whiskey, rather than ambrosia, in the frosted glass. Then Lorne gazed at me for a very long time, in ripe candour. I delivered what was to be my longest speech of the evening, saying that I gathered he was keen to talk about his role, to talk about Gary. Lorne gazed at me for a very long time again. Then he started.

'I see this Garfield as a man of some considerable culture,' said Lorne Guyland. 'Lover, father, husband, athlete, millionaire — but also a man of wide reading, of wide ... culture, John. A poet. A seeker. He has the world in his hands, women, money, success— but this man probes deeper. As an Englishman, John, you'll understand what I'm saying. His Park Avenue home is a treasure chest of art treasures. Sculpture. The old masters. Tapestries. Glassware. Rugs.

Treasures from all over the world. He's a professor of art someplace. He writes scholarly articles in the, in, in the scholarly magazines, John. He's a brilliant part-time archaeologist. People call him up for art advice from all over the world. In the opening shot I see Garfield at a lectern reading aloud from a Shakespeare first edition, bound in unborn calf. Behind him on the wall there's this whole bunch of oils. The old masters, John. He lifts his head, and as he looks towards camera the light catches his monocle and he ...'

I stared grimly across the room as Lorne babbled on. Who, for a start, was Garfield? The guy's name is Gary. Barry isn't short for Barfield, is it. It's just Barry, and that's that. Still, this would no doubt be among the least of our differences. Lorne now began mapping out Garfield's reading list. He talked for some time about a poet called Rimbo. I assumed that Rimbo was one of our friends from the developing world, like Fenton Akimbo. Then Lorne said something that made me half-identify Rimbo as French. You dumb shit, I thought, it's not Rimbo, it's Rambot, or Rambeau. Rambeau had a pal or contemporary, I seem to remember, with a name like a wine ... Bordeaux. Bardolino. No, that's Italian ... isn't it? Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It's so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You're given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour, you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how hard, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.

Yes, all in all, a dreadful little show was being staged for me, up here on the twenty-first floor. I knew that at least. In his gilt sandals Lorne walked with poised uncertainty from one window to the other, his rapt face upturned, the hands both summoning and offering the revelations which the gods now fraternally distributed. Like all filmstars Lorne was about two foot nine (something to do with the condensed, the concentrated presence), but the old prong was in good nick, you had to admit, with that tan-and-silver sheen of the all-American robot-kings. Yeah, that was it: this isn't a man, I kept thinking, it's a mad old robot, all zinc and chrome and circuitry coolant. He's like my car, he's like the fucking Fiasco — way past his best, giving everyone grief, and burning up money and rubber and oil.

Lorne had gone on to explore Garfield's sumptuous lifestyle, the art galleries he superintended in Paris and Rome, his opera-nut vacations in Palma and Beirut, his houses in Tuscany, the Dordogne and Berkeley Square, his Barbadian hideaway, his stud ranches, his Manhattan helicopter pad ... And as this fizzy old dog bayed and barked into the night, I spared a tender thought for my project, my poor little project, which I had nursed in my head for so long now. Good Money would have made a good short, with a budget of, say, £75,000. Now that it was going to cost fifteen million dollars, though, I wasn't so sure. But I must keep a grip on my priorities here. A good film didn't matter. Good Money didn't matter. Money mattered. Money mattered.

'Lorne,' I said. 'Lorne! Lorne? Oh Lorne?'

'Rubies, diamonds, emeralds, pearls, and an amethyst worth one-and-a-half million dollars.'

'Lorne.'

'Speak your mind, John.'

'Lorne. If Gary's so rich, who cares if he's got a couple of million dollars' worth of heroin in the kitchen?'

'Pardon me?'

'It cuts down on the drama, no? Think a minute. Think a second. If Gary is rich, then so is Doug. Of course they give the heroin back. No problem. No film.'

'Bullshit! Garfield wants to give the heroin back. But the other guy, Doug you call him, he wants to keep it. Why?'

'Yeah, why.'

'Jealousy, John, jealousy. He's jealous of Garfield.'

For twenty minutes Lorne talked about jealousy, how powerful and widespread it was, and how a man like Garfield (I think he even said Sir Garfield at some point) was especially likely to promote such a feeling in one as low, as weak, as vile as Doug—Garfield, with his connoisseurship, helicopter pad, erudition, Barbadian hideaway, and all the rest. This took another twenty minutes.

'Plus,' said Lorne, 'he's jealous of what I do for Butch.'

'Why? He can't be that jealous if he's fucking her too.'

'I'm glad you raised that. You know, John, I don't think — and I never have thought — that it's dramatically convincing that he should, that he should fuck her too, John.'

I stared heavily at him.

'It makes no sense. It just doesn't add up.' Lorne laughed. 'If Butch is fucking Garfield, how could she risk that happiness, that fulfilment, John, on a young punk like ...' He shook his head. 'Okay.

Over that we can argue. But my scenario still holds. The way I see it, Butch has never had an orgasm before she meets this wonderful guy, who shows her a world she's only dreamed of, a world of Othello jets and Caribbean mansions, a world of...'

I stared on. Time passed. Abruptly Lorne halted in mid-sentence, in mid-spangle, and said, 'I think it's time we talked about the death scene, John.'

'... What death scene?'

'Why, Lord Garfield's,' said Lorne Guyland. 'This is how it happens. The mob guys, they're torturing me, naked as I am. I fought like crazy but there were fifteen of the bastards. They want the heroin — they also want my cultural treasures from all over the world. But I tell them nothing. Now. As these cocksuckers torture me, Butch and Caduta are forced to watch. Maybe they're nude too. I'm not sure. John, you might think about, about that. And these two women, as they see me, suffering, silent, naked, this guy who's given them everything and who's the greatest fuck they ever had in their goddam lives — these women, these simple, nude women, they forget their rivalry and weep in each other's arms. Credits.'

'Lorne,' I said, 'I've got to run.'

In fact it was another hour before Thursday let me out. The script conference ended with Lorne shrugging his robe to the floor and asking me, with tears in his eyes, 'Is this the body of an old man?' I said nothing. The answer to Lorne's question, incidentally, was yes. I just flourished an arm and clattered down the stairs.