Money_ A Suicide Note - Martin Amis [23]
'More,'he said. 'I like your style. Big man.. .We'll meet one day.'
'Oh I hope so. And when I get through with you, sunshine, there'll be nothing left but a hank of hair and teeth.'
'We'll meet —'
'We'll meet one day. And when that day comes I'll fucking kill you.'
I cracked the receiver down and sat there panting on the bed. I needed to spit. Uch, I hate making these threatening telephone calls. I looked at my watch ... Jesus. I must have gone to sleep for an hour or more — though sleep might be pitching it a bit high. Sleep is rather an exalted term for what I get up to nowadays. These are blackouts, bub. I upended the rum bottle over my mouth, finished my packing in the sourly twanging light, marshalled my travel documents and buzzed down for the boy.
——————
In the end I had ample time for my farewell to New York. First off, I gave Felix a fifty. He seemed strangely agitated or concerned and for some reason kept trying to make me lie down on the bed. But he was pleased, I hope, by the dough. I love giving money away. If you were here now, I'd probably slip you some cash, twenty, thirty, maybe more. How much do you want? What are you having? What would you give me, sister, brother? Would you put an arm round my shoulder and tell me I was your kind of guy? I'd pay. I'd give you good money for it.
Leaving my bag in the lobby I marched straight off to the House of the Big One, where I ate seven Fastfurters. They were so delicious that tears filled my eyes as I bolted them down. Next I bought a joint, a popper, a phial of cocaine and a plug of opium from a fat spade in Times Square and snuffled it all up in a gogo bar toilet. This is a dumb move, they say, because the spades mix in strong stuff like devil dust with the dope. But where's the economics in that? What they really do is mix in weak stuff with the dope, so that in effect you're only buying a roll-up, a dime-store thermometer, some ground aspirin and a dog turd. Anyway, I snuffled it all up, as I say— and felt a distinct rush, I think, as I came bullocking out of the can.
Urged on by the cars and their brass, I crossed the road and hit the porno emporium on Forty-Third and Broadway. How to describe it? It is a men's room. These 25-cent loop cubicles are toilets, really: you enter your trap, putting money in the slot, you sit down and do what you need to do. The graffiti is written in black magic-marker on yellow cards, to which curious pin-ups are attached. This bitch has a gash so big. Watch the fuckpigs frolic in torrents of scum. Juanita del Pablo gets it in the ass. Who writes these things? Clearly someone on exceptionally cool terms with the opposite sex. Meanwhile, the black janitorial stroll with jinking moneybags . . . First I sampled an S/M item in booth 4A. They got the chick on her back, bent her triple, and wedged a baseball bat in the tuck behind her knees. Then they gave her electric shocks. It was realistic. Was it real? You saw a writhing line of white static, and the girl certainly screamed and bounced. I split before they gave her an enema, which they were billed to do in the scabrous hate-sheet tacked to the door. If the girl had been a bit better-looking, a bit more my type, I might have stuck around. In the next booth along I caught a quarter's worth of film with a sylvan setting: the romantic interest of the piece focused on the love that flowers between a girl and a donkey. There she was, smiling, as she prepared to go down on this beast of burden. Ay! The donkey didn't look too thrilled about it either. 'I hope you're getting good money, sis,' I mumbled on my way out. She wasn't bad, too... Finally I devoted twenty-eight tokens' worth of my time to a relatively straight item, in which a slack-jawed cowboy got the lot, everything from soup to nuts, at the expense of the talented Juanita del Pablo. Just before the male's