The Buddha of Suburbia

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

After the opening night in New York we got out of the theatre and were taken in taxis to an apartment building on Central Park South, near the Plaza Hotel. We were on the nine-hundredth floor or something, and one wall was solid glass, and there was a view over the park and to the north of Manhattan. There were servants with silver trays, and a black man played ‘As Time Goes By’ on the piano. I recognized various actors, and was told that agents and journalists and publishers were there too. Carol went from person to person introducing herself. Pyke stood on one spot, just off-centre of the room, where, gladly and graciously, he received unsolicited praise, and no doubt hoped to meet hairdressers from Wisconsin. Being English provincials, and resentfully afraid of capitalist contamination, Tracey, Richard and I skulked in a corner and were nervous. Eleanor enjoyed herself talking to a young film producer with his hair in a pigtail. Looking at her now, after saying only a few words to her for three months, I realized how little I knew her, understood her, liked her. I’d wanted her, but not wanted her. What had I been thinking about all the time I’d been with her? I resolved to talk to her after a few drinks.

The man who ran the theatre, Dr Bob, was a former academic and critic, an enthusiast for the ‘ethnic arts’. His room in the theatre was full of Peruvian baskets, carved paddles, African drums and paintings. I knew he’d sensed I was looking into the abyss because as we rehearsed for the opening he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll fix you up with some decent music,’ as if he knew this was what I required to feel at home.

Now he sat Tracey and I in two somewhat exposed seats at the front of the room and hushed everyone behind us. They thought there was going to be a speech or announcement. Suddenly three dark-skinned men ran into the room, banging some sort of wooden hook on hand-held drums. Then a black man, wearing bright-pink trousers and naked from the waist up, started to fling himself, his arms outstretched, around the room. Two black women joined him, and fluttered away with their hands. Another man in sparkly trousers flew into the room, and the four of them did a kind of mating dance barely a foot from Tracey and me. And Dr Bob squatted in a corner yelling, ‘Yeah’ and ‘Right on’ as the Haitians danced. It made me feel like a colonial watching the natives perform. At the end there was rapturous applause and Dr Bob made us shake hands with all of them.

I didn’t see Eleanor again that evening until most of the guests had gone and Eleanor, Richard, Carol and I were sitting around Pyke in a bedroom. Pyke was frisky and laughing. He was in New York with a successful show and was surrounded by admirers. What more could he want? And he was playing one of his favourite games. I could smell the danger. But if I left the room I’d be among strangers. So I stayed and took it, though I didn’t feel up to it.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘all of you – if you could fuck any one person in this apartment, who would it be?’ And everyone was laughing, and looking around at each other, and justifying their choices, and trying to be daring and point at one another and say, ‘You, you!’ One glance told Pyke how volatile I was that night, so he excluded me. I nodded and smiled at him and said to Eleanor, ‘Can we go outside to talk for a while?’ but Pyke said, ‘Just a minute, wait a while, I’ve got to read something.’

‘Come on,’ I said to Eleanor, but she held my arm. I knew what was going to happen. Pyke was getting out his notebook now. And he started to read out the predictions he’d written down when we first started to rehearse, in that room by the river where we were honest for the sake of the group. God, I was drunk, and I couldn’t see why everyone was being so attentive to Pyke: it was as if Pyke were reading out reviews, not of the play, but of our personalities, clothes, beliefs – of us. Anyway, he read out stuff about Tracey and Carol, but I lay on my back on the floor and didn’t listen; it wasn’t interesting, anyway. ‘Now, Karim,’ he said. ‘You’ll be riveted by this.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I know.’

He started to read the stuff about me. The faces around him were looking at me and laughing. Why did they hate me so much? What had I done to them? Why wasn’t I harder? Why did I feel so much?

‘Karim is obviously looking for someone to fuck. Either a boy or a girl: he doesn’t mind, and that’s all right. But he’d prefer a girl, because she will mother him. Therefore he’s appraising all the crumpet in the group. Tracey is too spiky for him, too needy; Carol too ambitious; and Louise not his physical type. It’ll be Eleanor. He thinks she’s sweet, but she’s not blown away by him. Anyway, she’s still fucked-up over Gene, and feels responsible for his death. I’ll have a word with her, tell her to take care of Karim, maybe get her to feed him, give him a bit of confidence. My prediction is that Eleanor will fuck him, it’ll basically be a mercy fuck, but he’ll fall hard for her and she’ll be too kind to tell him the truth about anything. It will end in tears.’

I went into the other room. I wished I was in London; I just wanted to be away from all these people. I rang Charlie, who was living in New York, but he wasn’t there. I’d spoken to him several times on the phone but not seen him as yet. Then Eleanor had her arm round me and she was holding me. I kept saying, ‘Let’s go, let’s go somewhere, and we can be together.’ She was looking at me pityingly and saying, no, no, she had to tell the truth, she’d be spending the night with Pyke, she wanted to know him as deeply as she could. ‘That won’t take a whole night,’ I said. I saw Pyke coming out of the bedroom surrounded by the others, and I went to destroy him. But I didn’t get a clean punch in. There was a tangle; I threw myself about; arms and legs were everywhere. But whose were they? I was in a frenzy, kicking and scratching and screaming. I wanted to chuck a chair through the glass window, because I wanted to be on the street watching it come through the window in slow motion. Then I seemed to be in a kind of box. I was staring up at polished wood and I couldn’t move. I was pinned down. Almost certainly I was dead, thank God. I heard an American voice say, ‘These English are animals. Their whole culture has fallen through the floor.’

Well, the cabs in New York City had these bullet-proof partitions to stop you killing the driver, and they had slidy seats, and I was practically on the floor. Thank God Charlie was with me. He had his arms around my chest and kept me from the floor. He refused to let me stop at a topless bar. What I did see were the Haitians walking down the street. I wound down the window, ordered the driver to slow down and shouted at them; ‘Hey, guys, where are you going?’

‘Stop it, Karim,’ Charlie said gently.

‘Come on, guys!’ I yelled. ‘Let’s go somewhere! Let’s enjoy America!’

Charlie told the driver to get going. But at least he was good-humoured and pleased to see me, even if, when we got out of the cab, I did want to lie down on the pavement and go to sleep.

Charlie had been at the show that night, but after the play he went out to dinner with a record producer and came on late to the party. On finding me passed out under the piano and surrounded by angry actors, he took me home. Tracey later told me she’d been loosening my shirt when she looked up and saw Charlie moving towards her. He was so beautiful, she said, that she burst into tears.

I woke up with a blanket around me in a lovely, bright room, not large, but with sofas, numerous old armchairs, an open fireplace, and a kitchen through the open partition doors. On the walls were framed posters for art exhibitions. There were books: it was a classy place, not the usual rock-star’s hang-out. But then, I couldn’t consider Charlie a rock-star. It didn’t seem of his essence, but a temporary, borrowed persona.

I vomited three or four times before going upstairs to Charlie with coffee, and jam on toast. He was alone in bed. When I woke him there wasn’t his usual snarl. He sat up smiling and kissed me. He said a lot of things I didn’t believe were coming from his mouth.

‘Welcome to New York. I know you feel like shit, but we’re going to have fun like you’ve never known it. What a great city this is! Just think, we’ve been in the wrong place all these years. Now just go over there and put on that Lightnin’ Hopkins record. Let’s start off as we intend to go on!’

Charlie and I spent the day together walking around the Village, and had a milkshake thick with Italian ice-cream. A girl recognized him and came over to leave a note on the table. ‘Thank you for giving your genius to the world,’ she wrote. Her phone-number was on the bottom. Charlie nodded at her across the café. I’d forgotten how intimidating it was walking around with him. People recognized him everywhere, yet his hair was covered by a black woolly hat and he wore blue cotton overalls and workmen’s boots.

I’d had no idea he was so famous in America. You’d turn a corner, and there was his face tacked to some demolition-site wall or on an illuminated hoarding. Charlie had done a tour of arenas and Stadiums with his new band. He showed me the videos, but refused to sit in the room while I watched them. I could see why. On stage he wore black leather, silver buckles, chains and chokers, and by the end of the performance he was bare-chested, thin and white like Jagger, flinging his spidery figure like a malevolent basketball player across stages as wide as aircraft hangars. He appealed to the people who had the most disposable income, gays and young people, especially girls, and his album, Kill For DaDa, was still in the charts, months after it had been released.

But the menace was gone. The ferocity was already a travesty, and the music, of little distinction in itself, had lost its drama and attack when transported from England with its unemployment, strikes and class antagonism. What impressed me was that Charlie knew this. The music’s feeble, OK? I’m no Bowie, don’t think I don’t know that. But ‘I’ve got ideas between my ears. I can do good work in the future, Karim. This country gives me such optimism. People here believe you can do stuff. They don’t bring you down all the time, like in England.’

So now he was renting this three-floor apartment in a brownstone on East 10th Street while he wrote the songs for his next album and learned the saxophone. In the morning, while snooping around, I’d noticed an empty and separate apartment at the top of the house. As I stood there with my coat on, ready to walk to the theatre and sad to leave him – he seemed so generous and charmed to be with me – I said; ‘Charlie, me and the whole cast, we’re all living in this big apartment. And I can’t bear to see Eleanor every day. It breaks my heart.’

Charlie didn’t hesitate. ‘I’d be ’appy to ’ave you ’ere. Move in tonight.’

‘Great. Thanks, man.’

I walked down the street, laughing, amused that here in America Charlie had acquired this cockney accent when my first memory of him at school was that he’d cried after being mocked by the stinking gypsy kids for talking so posh. Certainly, I’d never heard anyone talk like that before. Now he was going in for cockney rhyming slang, too. ‘I’m just off for a pony,’ he’d say. Pony and trap – crap. Or he was going to wear his winter whistle. Whistle and flute – suit. He was selling Englishness, and getting a lot of money for it.

A few days later I moved in with him. During most of the day Charlie was around the house, giving interviews to journalists from all over the world, being photographed, trying on clothes, and reading. Sometimes there’d be young Californian girls lying around the place listening to Nick Lowe, Ian Dury and especially Elvis Costello. I spoke to these girls only when spoken to, since I found their combination of beauty, experience, vacuity and cruelty harrowing.

But there were three or four smart serious New York women, publishers, film critics, professors at Columbia, Sufis who did whirling dances and so on, whom he listened to for hours before he slept with them, later getting up to make urgent notes on their conversation, which he would then repeat to other people in the next few days. ‘They’re educating me, man,’ he said about these besotted women, with whom he discussed international politics, South American literature, dance, and the ability of alcohol to induce mystical states. In New York he wasn’t ashamed of his ignorance: he wanted to learn; he wanted to stop lying and bluffing.

As I wandered about the flat and heard him learning about Le Corbusier, I could see that fame, success and wealth really agreed with him. He was less anxious, bitter and moody than I’d ever known him. Now that he was elevated, he no longer looked up and envied. He could set aside ambition and become human. He was going to act in a film and then a stage play. He met prominent people; he travelled to learn. Life was glorious.

‘Let me tell you something, Karim,’ he said at breakfast, which was when we talked, his present girlfriend being in bed. ‘There was a day when I fell in love for the first time. I knew this was the big one. I was staying in a house in Santa Monica after doing some gigs in LA and San Francisco.’ (What magical names these were to me.) ‘The house had five terraces on the side of a steep, lush hill. I’d been for a swim in this pool, from which a flunkey had recently fished all leaves with a net. I was drying myself and talking on the phone to Eva in West Kensington. The wife of a famous actor whose house it was came out to me and handed me the keys to her motorcycle. A Harley. It was then I knew I loved money. Money and everything it could buy. I never wanted to be without money again because it could buy me a life like this every day.’

‘Time and money are the best, Charlie. But if you’re not careful they’ll fertilize weirdness, indulgence, greed. Money can cut the cord between you and ordinary living. There you are, looking down on the world, thinking you understand it, that you’re just like them, when you’ve got no idea, none at all. Because at the centre of people’s lives are worries about money and how to deal with work.’

‘I enjoy these conversations,’ he said. ‘They make me think. Thank God, I’m not indulgent myself.’

Charlie was fit. Every day at eleven a taxi took him to Central Park, where he ran for an hour; then he went to the gym for another hour. For days at a time he ate only peculiar things like pulses, bean-shoots and tofu, and I had to scoff hamburgers on the stoop in the snow because, as he said, ‘I won’t have the animal within these walls.’ Every Thursday night his drug-dealer would call by. This was more of the civilization he’d espied in Santa Monica, Charlie figured. Especially the way this ex-NYU film student came by with his Pandora’s Box and threw it open on top of Charlie’s MOMA catalogue. Charlie would lick a finger and point to this amount of grass, that amount of coke, a few uppers, some downers and some smack for us to snort.

The play didn’t last long in New York, a month only, because Eleanor had to start shooting a small part in the big film she’d landed. The play wasn’t doing sufficient business for us to cast another actress in Eleanor’s role; and anyway, Pyke had gone off to San Francisco to teach.

When the others went back to London I ripped up my ticket and stayed in New York. There was nothing for me to do in London, and my aimlessness would be eyeballed by my father, who would use it as evidence that I should have become a doctor; or, at least, that I should visit a doctor. In New York I could be a walking stagnancy without restraint.

I liked walking around the city, going to restaurants with Charlie, doing his shopping (I bought him cars and property), answering the phone and sitting around with British musicians who were passing through. We were two English boys in America, the land where the music came from, with Mick Jagger, John Lennon and Johnny Rotten living round the corner. This was the dream come true.

All the same, my depression and self-hatred, my desire to mutilate myself with broken bottles, and numbness and crying fits, my inability to get out of bed for days and days, the feeling of the world moving in to crush me, went on and on. But I knew I wouldn’t go mad, even if that release, that letting-go, was a freedom I desired. I was waiting for myself to heal.

I began to wonder why I was so strong – what it was that held me together. I thought it was that I’d inherited from Dad a strong survival instinct. Dad had always felt superior to the British: this was the legacy of his Indian childhood – political anger turning into scorn and contempt. For him in India the British were ridiculous, stiff, unconfident, rule-bound. And he’d made me feel that we couldn’t allow ourselves the shame of failure in front of these people. You couldn’t let the ex-colonialists see you on your knees, for that was where they expected you to be. They were exhausted now; their Empire was gone; their day was done and it was our turn. I didn’t want Dad to see me like this, because he wouldn’t be able to understand why I’d made such a mess of things when the conditions had been good, the time so opportune, for advancement.

Charlie gave me money when I needed it, and he encouraged me to stay in New York. But after six months I told him it was time to go. I was afraid he found me a burden, a nuisance, a parasite, though he’d never complained. But now he was insistent and paternal. ‘Karim, you stay here with me where you belong. There’s a lotta bastards out there. You got everything you need, haven’t you?’

‘Sure I have.’

‘What’s your problem, then?’

‘None,’ I said. ‘It’s just that I –’

‘That’s fine. Let ‘s go shopping for clothes, OK?’

He didn’t want me to leave. It was eerie, our growing dependency on each other. He liked having me there as a witness, I suspected. With other people he was restrained, enigmatic, laconic; he had the magazine virtues and wore jeans well. But he liked to tell me everything in the old schoolboy way. With me, he could be dazzled by the people he met, the places he was invited, the gifts that were thrown at him. It was I, Karim, who saw him stepping into the stretch-limo; it was I who saw him sitting in the Russian Tea Room with movie-stars, famous writers and film producers. It was I who saw him going upstairs with women, in debate with intellectuals, and being photographed for Italian Vogue. And only I could appreciate how far he’d come from his original state in Beckenham. It was as if, without me there to celebrate it all, Charlie’s progress had little meaning. In other words, I was a full-length mirror, but a mirror that could remember.

My original impression that Charlie had been released by success was wrong, too: there was much about Charlie I wasn’t able to see, because I didn’t want to. Charlie liked to quote Milton’s ‘O dark, dark, dark’; and Charlie was dark, miserable, angry. I soon learned that fame and success in Britain and America meant different things. In Britain it was considered vulgar to parade yourself, whereas in America fame was an absolute value, higher than money. The relatives of the famous were famous – yes, it was hereditary: the children of stars were little stars too. And fame gained you goods that mere money couldn’t obtain. Fame was something that Charlie had desired from the moment he stuck the revered face of Brian Jones to his bedroom wall. But having obtained it, he soon found he couldn’t shut it off when he grew tired of it. He’d sit with me in a restaurant saying nothing for an hour, and then shout, ‘Why are people staring at me when I’m trying to eat my food! That woman with the powder puff on her head, she can fuck off!’ The demands on him were constant. The Fish ensured that Charlie remained in the public eye by appearing on chat shows and at openings and galleries where he had to be funny and iconoclastic. One night I turned up late to a party and there he was, leaning at the bar looking gloomy and fed up, since the hostess demanded that he be photographed with her. Charlie wasn’t beginning to come to terms with it at all: he hadn’t the grace.

Two things happened that finally made me want to get back to England and out of Charlie’s life. One day when we were coming back from the recording studio, a man came up to us in the street. ‘I’m a journalist,’ he said, with an English accent. He was about forty, with no breath, hair or cheeks to speak of. He stank of booze and looked desperate. ‘You know me, Tony Bell. I worked for the Mirror in London. I have to have an interview. Let’s make a time. I’m good, you know. I can even tell the truth.’

Charlie strode away. The journalist was wretched and shameless. He ran alongside us, in the road.

‘I won’t leave you alone,’ he panted. ‘It’s people like me who put your name about in the first place. I even interviewed your bloody mother.’

He grasped Charlie’s arm. That was the fatal move. Charlie chopped down on him, but the man held on. Charlie hit him with a playground punch on the side of the head, and the man went down, stunned, on to his knees, waving his arms like someone begging forgiveness. Charlie hadn’t exhausted his anger. He kicked the man in the chest, and when he fell to one side and grabbed at Charlie’s legs Charlie stamped on his hand. The man lived nearby. I had to see him at least once a week on the street, carrying his groceries with his good hand.

The other reason for my wanting to leave New York was sexual. Charlie liked to experiment. From the time we’d been at school, where we’d discuss which of the menstruating dinner ladies we wanted to perform cunnilingus on (and none of them was under sixty), we wanted to fuck women, as many as possible. And like people who’d been reared in a time of scarcity and rationing, neither of us could forget the longing we’d had for sex, or the difficulty we once had in obtaining it. So we grabbed arbitrarily at the women who offered themselves.

One morning, as we had bagels and granola and OJs on the rocks in a nearby café, and talked about our crummy school as if it were Eton, Charlie said there were sexual things he’d been thinking about, sexual bents he wanted to try. ‘I’m going for the ultimate experience,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’d be interested in looking in too, eh?’

‘If you like.’

‘If you like? I’m offering you something, man, and you say if you like. You used to be up for anything.’ He looked at me contemptuously. ‘Your little brown buttocks would happily pump away for hours at any rancid hole, pushing aside toadstools and fungus and –’

‘I’m still up for anything.’

‘Yeah, but you’re miserable.’

‘I don’t know what I’m doing,’ I said.

‘Listen.’ He leaned towards me and tapped the table. ‘It’s only by pushing ourselves to the limits that we learn about ourselves. That’s where I’m going, to the edge. Look at Kerouac and all those guys.’

‘Yeah, look at them. So what, Charlie?’

‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘I’m talking. Let me finish. We’re going the whole way. Tonight.’

So that night at twelve a woman named Frankie came over. I went down to let her in while Charlie hastily put on the Velvet Underground’s first record – it had taken us half an hour to decide on the evening’s music. Frankie had short, cropped hair, a bony white face, and a bad tooth, and she was young, in her early twenties, with a soft rich voice and a sudden laugh. She wore a black shirt and black pants. When I asked her, ‘What do you do?’, I sounded like a drip-dry at one of Eva’s Beckenham evenings so long ago. I discovered that Frankie was a dancer, a performer, a player of the electric cello. At one point she said, ‘Bondage interests me. Pain as play. A deep human love of pain. There is desire for pain, yes?’

Apparently we would find out if there was desire for pain. I glanced at Charlie, trying to kindle some shared amusement at this, but he sat forward and nodded keenly at her. When he got up I got up too. Frankie took my arm. She was holding Charlie’s hand, too. ‘Maybe you two would like to get into each other, eh?’

I looked at Charlie, recalling the night in Beckenham I tried to kiss him and he turned his face away. How he wanted me – he let me touch him – but refused to acknowledge it, as if he could remove himself from the act while remaining there. Dad had seen some of this. It was the night, too, that I saw Dad screwing Eva on the lawn, an act which was my introduction to serious betrayal, lying, deceit and heart-following. Tonight Charlie’s face was open, warm; there was no rejection in it, only enthusiasm. He waited for me to speak. I never thought he would look at me like this.

We went upstairs, where Charlie had prepared the room. It was dark, illuminated only by candles, one on each side of the bed, and three on the bookshelves. For some reason the music was Gregorian chanting. We’d discussed this for hours. He didn’t want anything he could listen to when he was being tortured. Charlie removed his clothes. He was thinner than I’d ever seen him, muscly, taut. Frankie put her head back and he kissed her. I stood there, and then I cleared my throat. ‘Are you both sure you want me here and everything?’

‘Why not?’ said Frankie, looking at me over her shoulder. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘Are you sure you want spectators at this thing?’

‘It’s only sex,’ she said. ‘He’s not having an operation.’

‘Oh yes, OK, but – ’

‘Sit down, Karim, for God’s sake,’ said Charlie. ‘Stop farting about. You’re not in Beckenham now.’

‘I know that.’

‘Well then, can’t you stop standing there and looking so English?’

‘What d’you mean, English?’

‘So shocked, so self-righteous and moral, so loveless and incapable of dancing. They are narrow, the English. It is a Kingdom of Prejudice over there. Don’t be like it!’

‘Charlie’s so intense,’ Frankie said.

‘I’ll make myself at home, then,’ I said. ‘Don’t mind me.’

‘We won’t,’ said Charlie irritably.

I settled myself into an armchair under the curtained window, the darkest place in the room, where I hoped I’d be forgotten. Frankie stripped to her tattoos and they caressed each other in the orthodox way. She was skinny, Frankie, and it looked rather like going to bed with an umbrella. But I sipped my pina colada, and even as I sweated under the indignity of my situation I considered how rare it was to see another couple’s copulation. How educational it could be! What knowledge of caresses, positions, attitudes, could be gleaned from practical example! I would recommend it to anyone.

Frankie’s hold-all was beside the bed, and from it she produced four leather bands, which she secured to Charlie’s wrists and ankles. Then she roped him to the broad, heavy bed, before pressing a dark handkerchief into his mouth. After more fumbling in the bag, out came what looked like a dead bat. It was a leather hood with a zipper in the front of it. Frankie pulled this over Charlie’s head and, on her knees, tied it at the back, pursing her lips in concentration, as if she were sewing on a button. And now it wasn’t Charlie: it was a body with a sack over its head, half of its humanity gone, ready for execution.

Frankie kissed and licked and sucked him like a lover as she sat on him. I could see him relaxing. I could also see her reaching for a candle and holding it over him, tilting it over his chest until the wax fell and hit him. He jumped and grunted at this, so suddenly that I laughed out loud. That would teach him not to stamp on people’s hands. Then she tipped wax all over him – stomach, thighs, feet, prick. This was where, had it been me with hot wax sizzling on my scrotum, I would have gone through the roof. Charlie obviously had the same impulse: he struggled and rocked the bed, none of which stopped her passing the flame of the candle over his genitals. Charlie had said to me in the afternoon, ‘We must make sure I’m properly secured. I don’t want to escape. What is it Rimbaud said? “I am degrading myself as much as possible. It is a question of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses.” Those French poets have a lot to be responsible for. I’m going the whole way.’

And all the time, as he voyaged to the unknown, she moved over him with her lips whispering encouragement, ‘Ummmm … that feels good. Hey, you like that, eh? Be positive, be positive. What about this? This is delicious! And what about this, this is really intense, Charlie, I know you’re getting into it, eh?’ she said as she virtually turned his prick into a hotdog. Christ, I thought, what would Eva say if she could see her son and myself right now?

These ponderings were interrupted by what I could see and Charlie couldn’t. She extracted two wooden pegs from her bag, and as she bit one nipple she trapped the other with the peg, which I noticed had a large and pretty efficient-looking spring on it. She followed this with a peg on the other nipple. ‘Relax, relax,’ she was saying, but a little urgently I thought, as if afraid she’d gone too far. Charlie’s back was arched, and he seemed to be squealing through his ears. But as she spoke he did relax slowly and submit to the pain, which was, after all, exactly what he had wanted. Frankie left him then, as he was, and went away for a few minutes to let him come to terms with desire and self-inflicted suffering. When she returned I was examining my own thoughts. And it was at this moment, as she blew out a candle, lubricated it and forced it up his arse, that I realized I didn’t love Charlie any more. I didn’t care either for or about him. He didn’t interest me at all. I’d moved beyond him, discovering myself through what I rejected. He seemed merely foolish to me.

I got up. It surprised me to see that Charlie was not only still alive but still hard. I ascertained this by moving around to the side of the bed for a seat in the front stalls, where I squatted to watch her sit on him and fuck him, indicating as she did so that I should remove the pegs from his dugs as he came. I was glad to be of assistance.

What an excellent evening it was, marred only by Frankie losing one of her contact lenses. ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ she said, ‘it’s my only pair.’ So Charlie, Frankie and I had to hunt around on the floor on our hands and knees for half an hour. ‘We’ve got to rip up the floorboards,’ said Frankie at last. ‘Is there a wrench in the place?’

‘You could use my prick,’ said Charlie.

He gave her money and got rid of her.

After this I decided to fly back to London. My agent had rung and said I was up for an important audition. She’d said it was the most important audition of my life, which was obviously a reason for not attending. But it was also the only audition my agent had sent me up for, so I thought I should reward her with an appearance.

I knew Charlie wouldn’t want me to leave New York, and it took me a couple of days to gather the courage to broach the subject. When I told him, he laughed, as if I had an ulterior motive and really wanted money or something. Immediately he asked me to work full-time for him. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you for a while,’ he said. ‘We’ll mix business with pleasure. I’ll talk to the Fish about your salary. It’ll be fat. You’ll be a little brown fat-cat. OK, little one?’

‘I don’t think so, big one. I’m going to London.’

‘What are you talking about? You’re going to London, you say. But I’m going on a world tour. LA, Sydney, Toronto. I want you to be there with me.’

‘I want to look for work in London.’

He became angry. ‘It’s stupid to leave just when things are starting to happen here. You’re a good friend to me. A good assistant. You get things done.’

‘Please give me the money to go. I’m asking you to help me out. It’s what I want.’

‘What you want, eh?’

He walked up and down the room, and talked like a professor conducting a seminar with students he’d never met before.

‘England’s decrepit. No one believes in anything. Here, it’s money and success. But people are motivated. They do things. England’s a nice place if you’re rich, but otherwise it’s a fucking swamp of prejudice, class confusion, the whole thing. Nothing works over there. And no one works – ’

‘Charlie –’

‘That’s why I’m definitely not letting you go. If you can make it here, why go anywhere else? What’s the point? You can get anything you want in America. And what do you want? Say what you want!’

‘Charlie, I’m asking you – ’

‘I can hear you asking me, man! I can hear you pleading! But I must save you.’

That was that. He sat down and said no more. The next day, when in retaliation I said nothing, Charlie suddenly blurted out, ‘OΚ, OK, if it means so much to you, I’ll buy you a return ticket to London, but you’ve got to promise to come back.’

I promised. He shook his head at me. ‘You won’t like it, I’m telling you now.’