Vanished Years (6 page)

‘I have to ask you a very awkward question,’ said Barry.

‘If you must.’

‘Yes. I must. Did you have sex in – where was it, Tracy – the Loading Zone?’

Barry enunciated these last two words with courtroom deliberation, clearly horrified by their implication, and I shuddered with embarrassment for us both, but him mostly. (I can’t think why, though. He was also Richard Gere’s lawyer, after all, so our conversation couldn’t have been any more awkward than the one he must have had one morning with the great Botty-sattva himself, enquiring whether that gentleman had ever had intimate relations with a gerbil.)

‘Well? They say they have film,’ he continued. ‘Did you have sex in the Loading Zone?’

‘Not on camera,’ I replied carefully.

‘What does that mean?’

One must always come clean with one’s lawyer. I remembered that from an old
Ironside
episode. So I told him everything I knew.

The Loading Zone was a dive in Miami Beach. It no longer exists. It was a big, black, barely lit hangar with a bar in the middle and a ghoulish fishtank in one corner. It was one of those hit-or-miss places where extraordinary encounters sometimes happened but usually didn’t. And that’s what I loved about it. The only time it was ever full was for the monthly sex party, which was usually raided by the police. The City of Miami Beach was hell-bent on shunting the gay world out of South Beach towards the ghettoes of Fort Lauderdale. (First
the Jews. Now us. But that’s another story.) Any minute now the Loading Zone would be closed down but for the time being there it was, a black hole at the end of that wonky universe of go-go bars and cocktail lounges, and at some point during a night out one’s little spaceship felt its magnetic pull and was dragged blinking towards it, little by little, planet by planet, until suddenly one was sucked inside. In the low visibility of its atmosphere the bar itself was an island in a patch of light, the barmen stripped to the waist, while a handful of freaks usually flitted through the shadows beyond. The grumpy fish observed the proceedings with big open mouths from the tank where a treasure chest blew bubbles from the seabed. It all felt rather exotic.

I usually went there with my friend David and we could sit for hours and the world stood still. We were both blind as bats and everyone looked good enough to eat, until we went in for the kill and soon came flying back like boomerangs.

‘That backpack turned out to be a hunchback.’

There were two barmen. One, Luis, from Panama, an illegal, was really handsome, with a glass eye that twinkled in the gloom, and the other was a big old slut from Argentina with work papers and gigantic overtugged nipples. Well, to make a short story long, one night during a cold front I was the only person there and – yes – I started making out with the Panama Canal. Just to keep warm really. After a little while things got a bit more serious and so he sweetly suggested that we adjoin to the nearby store cupboard, which we did, leaving the bar in the hands of the Argentinean slut.

‘Was there a surveillance camera in that storeroom?’ quizzed Barry.

‘I don’t know, Barry. I wasn’t really looking.’ I was getting tetchy.

‘You do realise that if this comes out, your deal with NBC will fall apart?’ said Barry.

My heart was ready to explode. The NBC deal. Oh, no. That was my last stand. My Chappaquiddick. (Was that where Custer was cornered or where Teddy Kennedy’s secretary was drowned? Check facts.)

After I got off the phone with Barry – my world caving in – I called David in Miami. There seemed to be a party going on and David was playing to the gallery. I explained the situation and he relayed it to the group of layabouts around his pool.

‘If there’s any film of me having sex we need to get it.’

‘Then we can put it out ourselves and you can be the new Paris Hilton.’

‘I don’t have her legs. With me it would backfire.’

‘Ryan is here and says maybe you got caught on their penis cam.’ I could hear muffled shrieks from around the pool.

‘David. This is serious.’

‘So is Ryan. They installed cameras in the urinals and your dick comes up on screen in the bar while you’re pissing.’

‘Or whatever!’ screamed a familiar voice. More laughter.

‘What’s Gingi doing there? I thought she was in prison.’

‘She’s out. Good behaviour-can-you-believe-it?’

There was an impenetrable mood of sloshed frivolity in Miami and there was no use trying to lance it with shafts of gloom from the outside world. That’s why people were there. It was going to be tough masterminding a sting or whatever one called it – a pincer movement – to bring these video-dealing queens to justice. I was Charlie, going round and round on a leather wing armchair in some glamorous undisclosed location while David was my Farrah-Force-It-Major-Blind-Nelly.

A couple of days later he called with an update. ‘You’ll never guess what I wore to go there.’ He giggled.

‘What?’

‘A deerstalker! Someone left it in our house. Genius,
non
?’

David was on a new mystery medication and could never be serious. It was getting quite irritating. Having been in a terrible mood for the last twelve years, he had suddenly become a jolly Buddha and would crack a joke as soon as you said ‘hello’.

‘Wouldn’t a pair of glasses be more appropriate?’

‘Boys don’t make passes at girls wearing glasses and I needed all the leads I could get.’

‘Well?’

‘Yes. A reporter has been sniffing around the bar. Several times. He said he knew you went there and that apparently you had committed lewd acts in public. That’s not really fair, I said. After all, some of your films aren’t that bad.’

‘Were there any cameras?’

‘He offered money to the barmen. The Panama Canal said no way, but the Argentinean slut said yes. He thought he could get famous. By the way, you didn’t tell me you had him too.’

‘Not on camera.’

‘You’re screaming.’

‘You would be screaming too if your whole career was about to go down the drain.’

‘OK. Keep your hair on! Anyway PC persuaded AS not to talk, and the penis cam has been broken for two years – typical Miami – so it looks like you’re safe. Incidentally, the reporter is the same one that busted Britney Spears for doing coke in the loo of the Delano. So in one sense you’ve really made it.’

‘Who is this journalist?’

‘A dwarf living in Kendall. I got his address – 433 West 110th Street.’

‘We should go there and break his legs.’

I reported all this to Barry who immediately dispatched a thousand-page letter to the
Enquirer
, saying that if they published the story they would have to pay me the money I would lose from NBC, which could run into millions of dollars, and anyway there was no film. So the story was never printed, but I was completely drained. On the other hand at least the NBC deal was still in place.

A year or so later David and I stalked the Kendall dwarf to his clapped-out bungalow in the Everglades. It was a hot sticky afternoon in a tumbledown street carved into the edge of the swamp. Weeds grew out of the cracked sidewalk and biblical swarms of mosquitoes hovered in clouds ready to attack.

We found the dwarf’s residence and rang the bell. A little dog barked in the house next door, which had a for sale sign on a pole that had snapped in half. And then the door opened and there was the dwarf, only he wasn’t a dwarf, just a small roundish man with thinning ginger hair and thick glasses. His eyes jumped out on stalks when he saw us and he visibly recoiled as if I was going to hit him, but I breezed in like Matron, pretending not to notice, asking about the house next door: did it get the sun – sure; how was the neighbourhood – OK; was there a gay bar near by – yeah, maybe for alligators. That was quite funny and I was rather warming to him but David, who was hell-bent on retribution, produced the big round cake we had purchased on the way and threw it at his face. It missed, needless to say, and landed at the dwarf’s feet. There was a pause. I think we were all shocked.

‘That’s for Britney,’ David finally screamed and ran off to get the car, leaving the dwarf and me in a face-off during which I was meant to squirt him with the washing-up liquid I was hiding behind my back. It all seemed rather pointless now. This innocuous blob blinked and sighed, bracing himself for whatever was coming next, and it was rather touching. I was lost for words.

‘Would you mind awfully not writing stories about me for the National
Enquirer
?’ I asked finally.

‘OK,’ he replied, looking at me with owlish eyes.

‘You have no idea just how much these things can fuck one up.’

‘Oh yeah.’

‘Thanks.’

Another pause. The sun was sinking over the vast green swamp and it suddenly tinged the dwarf’s head with radiance as if he were a saint. He was instantly surrounded by a cloud of leggy mosquitoes and the effect was rather mesmerising. The for sale sign, the long blades of grass on the ratty lawn, the windows of the bungalow, were all momentarily lined in gold and the whole thing looked heavenly.

‘Oh look …’ I said. ‘It’s going to be a lovely evening.’

The dwarf looked up and agreed as David screeched around the corner in the car.

‘Quick. Get in!’ he screamed.

I looked at the dwarf and aimed my Mr Dazzle at his face, pulling the trigger a couple of times before jumping in the car. As we shot off I looked back and he was still standing there, no longer bathed in radiance. Just a sad little snitch in the long shadows, living comfortably on the edge of a swamp.

We turned a corner and David said, ‘That was West 110th Street, right?’

I craned to look at the street sign.

‘No, 109th.’

‘Oh dear,’ said David and kept on driving.

T
he NBC deal took a long time to come off. It all began one night at the end of the last century.

It was a beautiful July evening in 1999, the perfect night for the last great American party, and the day I hit my peak. Harvey Weinstein and Tina Brown were launching a new magazine called Talk. It was going to be the most successful magazine the world had ever seen. People still talked – thought – like that in those heady last days of the American Raj.

Harvey was cinema’s most enigmatic producer, a New York hoodlum, the essence of that town, as tall and wide as its streets, as dangerous too on occasion. In appearance he was like a vast manatee recently emerged from the sea. Dripping and scarred, addicted to cigarettes, with flapping shirt-tails. In short, he was a brilliant slob, larger than life, Hollywood style. He had a round face with shrewd eyes and a flat boxer’s nose. People said he was ugly – he always came up in those Hollywood games that were played during commercial breaks at Oscar parties: who would you rather fuck, Wienstein or Fierstein? – but actually I think he was attractive. He had an enormous energy, a
great voice, and the secret of his charm was that somewhere under that blunt exterior you could still glimpse the face of the ten-year-old Harvey, an erased innocence submerged under the bumpy surface of his moon-shaped head. When he wanted you, as he did me once and never again, his onslaught was irresistible, unbelievable. He made great films and great turkeys. He interfered with every aspect of a film and his terrible tantrums were legendary. In other words, he was exactly the type of character that made it all worthwhile, a throwback to the Hollywood autocracy.

Tina Brown was his unlikely sidekick in those drunken days, as small and thin as he was tall and wide. She dressed carefully, a Princess of Wales in clumpy shoes, often in white to set off her short blonde hair and her ice-block eyes, and next to her, Harvey looked like a giant old couch that had been left on the street. Tina was perched perfectly on the edge, knees crossed, a journalistic falcon, looking, watching, ready to dive-bomb from a great height at any sign of a scoop.

Together they were a strange combination, a Vaudeville double act. He pushed the barrel organ, while she held the hoops and we all jumped through. They had the makings of the great business marriage
à la mode
. Tina’s pedigree was faultless. First she had breathed new life into Tatler magazine in England. Then she moved to America and created
Vanity Fair
, and just as that magazine hit its peak she abandoned ship for
The New Yorker
, the jewel in the Condé Nast crown, and made a great success of that. She was vastly intelligent, extremely well read and, along with Anna Wintour, the legendary editor of American
Vogue
, was one of the unlikely British bookends that more or less held the boys’ club of Condé Nast together.

Those two fascinating figurines, so physically smashable, you would think, were as tough as nails under their china veneers and didn’t seem to care for each other much, giving one another a wide berth. Where one was, the other rarely appeared. Possibly they were the same person. Both women were petite, attractive and frosty with sharp tight voices of extraordinary dialect, peculiar to them and to
others like them (Joan and Jackie Collins, Grace Coddington, and all the other various British dominatrices who threw their lots in with Liberty during the seventies and eighties). They are regular treasure troves, vocal collages, replete with all the submerged twangs of north London, the British rag trade, red-brick universities and the Rank charm school, all frosted over with the hilarious compromise an English speaker arrives at with the American dialect.

Now I am standing with Madonna at the end of a jetty at Battery Park, on the eastern tip of Manhattan. Harvey is with us. A thousand paparazzi are crammed on another jetty, a giant porcupine bristling lenses and booms. A thin channel of water divides us from them, the colour of weak tea, slapping against the concrete bollards and jumping up at all those other half-submerged skeletons of ancient wooden piers, which for some reason have never been removed and stick up out of the water like black rotting teeth up and down the Hudson. (These teeth, incidentally, once supported the vast collapsing hangars appropriated by the queen world for crucifixions and cluster fucks. But that faraway Sodom was sucked beneath the waves of Reaganite America. It seems strangely innocent compared with tonight.)