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By Root 626 0

And? Nothing new in that. Agreed, but the bad thing about the bad news is that the alcohol had a really bad effect on me. It didn't make me drunk, which was what I was confidently expecting it to do. It made me hungover instead. It did. I kept incredulously ordering more drinks, in a doomed bid to stave off this conclusion. That's why I had so many. All the more ironic, too, because I woke up this morning feeling bloody marvellous after a really late and heavy night with the TV and the ß & F. Was the phenomenon a new jet-lag deal, or the terminal mutiny of my whole bodybag? Oh man, I'd better get to California soon, while the transplant people still have something to work on. Maybe I'd better wing out there right away and have them fix me up with a temporary. And the mind was suffering too. Yes, the mind had its sufferings also. It was crammed with sin and crime, the thoughts nowhere, all in freefall and turnaround. I've got to get this stuff out of my system. No, more than that, much more. I've got to get my system out of my system. That's what I've got to do.

'Concentrate, Slick,' said Fielding. 'This is semi-crucial. The entire package pivots on this. Money wise, Meadowbrook's the safe choice. I think Nub Forkner would play well with Butch. But Davis is the gamble, the longshot, and that attracts me. Put your instincts to work on it, Slick. I say we go with Spunk.'

'You better give me a scotch.'

This would entail some self-inspection, alas, since the character was loosely based on me, on myself — Doug, the Sonj the greedy berk, the addict, the betrayer. It now looked like a straight playoff between Christopher Meadowbrook and Spunk Davis, with maybe Nub Forkner as an outside possibility. Meadowbrook I knew all about, a steady ensemble man but no headliner. You've seen him. He's the guy with the freckly yankee-doodle face and the hint of comic spindliness in his floppy-limbed frame. He usually plays older brothers, blushing patsies, jumpy sidekicks, all-smiles Ivy Leaguers. As Doug, Meadowbrook would be cast violently against type, but that was exactly the sort of doubletake effect I was interested in. The other guy, this Davis character, I had heard of but never seen in action, a Broadway boy with one film in the can. Prehistoric was still at the editing stage. We were going to see the roughcut. The word was very good. According to Fielding, Davis was hot.

We alighted at an address on doublebarrelled Park Avenue. Our greeter, who looked like a presidential bodyguard, led us through the lobby and into the executive screening parlour—a six-seater with an air of luxury interrogations, one-way mirrors, corporation propaganda. Davis's agent was there, Herrick Shnexnayder, a desperate human being who wore a French smock, a prosciutto cravat and the most complicated double pate-job I have ever come across in ten years of show business. One yellowy hank was swiped forward from the nape of his neck, while the other originated from his luxuriant left sideburn. His head looked like a fudge sundae—I swear to God, he could have put a spoon in his ear and a maraschino cherry on his crown and looked no worse. I drank the limitless champagne on offer (most of it soaked without fuss into the parched coral of my tongue) and listened to Herrick's obsequious banter. Agents, these days, they look like corporation men—but Herrick was more showbiz than Coco the Clown. At one point Fielding mentioned money. The agent smiled like a death-dealing doctor and said, 'Oh I think, after Prehistoric, we're looking at five.' In other words, Spunk's fee was now half a million dollars. Fielding just nodded and said, 'And what does his availability look like?' His availability looked good, partly because, after Prehistoric, no one could afford to hire him. Prehistoric started with a long pan over a series of cave murals: a man, a woman, a fight, a fuck, a tiger—a spaceship. We backed off. A gang or tribe of pre-fire apepeople were huddled about the place: there was Spunk, sharpening his spear. Square-headed, square-lipped, the dark face dense and sinewy.