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By Root 648 0

them out. Let's see here... The whole idea was obviously a very serious mistake. It wasn't any fun at all and gave me an unbelievable neck-ache. Besides, pornography is habit-forming, you know. Oh yes it is. I am a pornography addict, for instance, with a three-mag-a-week and at-least-one-movie habit to sustain. That's why I need all this money. I've got all these chicks to support... While I ruefully rubbed my neck in front of the bathroom mirror, and withstood the gaze of my blasted face, I also received another memory from the gibber of my nights of fever here in hot New York. Someone had come to the end of the long passage outside Room 101, once, twice, perhaps many more times, someone had come and mightily shaken the door, and not with the need for entry but in simple rage and warning. Did it happen, or was it just a new kind of dream? I'm getting new kinds all the time now, sadness dreams, drunk dreams, boredom dreams with me or someone else going on and on for ever — and dreams that I can liken only to the strains of search that poets must endure as they wait for their lines to form. I say this tentatively. I don't know what it's like to write a poem. I don't know what it's like to read one either ... About me and reading (I don't really know why I tell you this — I mean, do you read that much?): I can't read because it hurts my eyes. I can't wear glasses because it hurts my nose. I can't wear contacts because it hurts my nerves. So you see, it all came down to a choice between pain and not reading. I chose not reading. Not reading — that's where I put my money.

I rang Fielding at the Carraway.

'Lorne wants reassuring,' he told me.

'Yeah, well you reassure him for a while. I'm going home.'

'Slick, so soon!'

'I'll be back. I got to sort some things out.'

'What's the problem? Women or money?'

'Both.'

'It's the same problem. When's your flight?'

Ten.'

'So you leave for the airport at 8.45.'

'No. I arrive at the airport at 8.45. I'm flying Airtrack.'

'Airtrack? What do they give you on Airtrack, Slick? A spliff, a salad and a light-show?'

'Well, that's what I'm doing.'

'Listen ... I want you to meet Butch Beausoleil before you wing out. Can you get to my club around seven? The Berkeley,West Forty-Fourth. Leave your bags at the door and just walk on through.'

Yes and I rang Martina too. She accepted my apologies. They always do, at first. Actually she was very sympathetic. We're meeting for a quick one at the Gustave on Fifth Avenue, six o'clock. I levelled with the girl, and told her how ill and lonely and fucked up I'd really been.

——————

Now this was turning into a busy day. Noon saw me queueing at the stall on Sixth Avenue, queueing with the studes and lumberjacks for a cheap thin seat on the wide-bodied, crash-prone aircraft. This is the people's airline: we are this airline's people. They brought the prices down across the board and now only the abject fly Airtrack. A uniformed girl with tomato-red hair and an incredible gobbler's mouth disappeared for an ominous few minutes to check out my US Approach card, then bustled back, her moist teeth refreshed by my sound credit rating. I asked, 'What's the movie?'

She tapped out the query with her red nails. 'They got Pookie Hits the Trail,' she said.

'Really? Who's in it?'

The tolerant computer knew this too. 'Cash Jones and Lorne Guyland.'

'Come on. Who do you like best?'

'I don't know,' she said. 'They both suck.'

I looked in on a crepuscular but definitely non-gogo bar on Fiftieth Street. For a while I read my ticket. On the next stool a trembling executive sank three dark cocktails quickly and hurried off with a dreadful sigh... White wine, me: trying to stay in shape here. It's my first piece of alcohol for — what? — nearly two days. After all that tearful confusion, after feeling like a one-year-old out on the street last night, I couldn't get anything down me. I tried. It tasted of poison, of hemlock. So I just sacked out with a fistful of Serafim. I don't know what J would have done without the old guy in his boiler suit. I really think I