I walked west for a block, then turned south. On Ninety-Sixth Street I hijacked a cab at the lights – I just yanked open the door and swung my case on to the seat. The cabbie turned: and our eyes met horribly. ‘The Ashbery,’ I told him, for the second time. ‘On Forty-Fifth.’ He took me there. I gave the guy the two bucks I owed him, plus a couple more. The money changed hands very eloquently.

[...] Perhaps you fancy your girl’s best friends because your girl and her best friends have a lot in common. They’re very alike, except in one particular. You don’t go to bed with the best friends all the time. In the sack she can give you one thing your girl can’t give you: a change from your girl. Not even Selina can give you that. Is Alec fucking her? Well, what do you think? Is she doing him all those nice favours? Could be, no? Here’s my theory. I don’t think she is. I don’t think Selina Street is fucking Alec Llewellyn. Why? Because he hasn’t got any money. I have. Come on, why do you reckon Selina had soldiered it out with me? For my pot-belly, my bad rug, my personality? She’s not in this for her health, now is she? . . . I tell you, these reflections really cheered me up. You know where you are with economic necessity. When I make all this money I’m going to make, my position will be even stronger. Then I can kick Selina out and get someone even better.

[...] My pad has tousled cream carpets, a rhino-and-pylon sofa and an oval bed with black satin counterpane. None of this is mine. The voile walls are not mine. I hire everything. I hire water, heat, light. I hire tea by the teabag. I’ve lived here for ten years now and nothing is mine. My flat is small and also costs me a lot of money.

[...] I’ve solved one minor mystery. I now know how I managed to make my flight from New York. Fielding rang JFK and informed Trans-American that there was a bomb on board my flight. ‘It’s no big thing, Slick,’ Fielding told me on the phone. ‘I always do it when I’m running late. They grill the latecomers but not if you’re first class. It’s not economical’ . . . [...]

[...] There used to be a third-generation Italian restaurant across the road: it had linen tablecloths and rumpy, strict, black-clad waitresses. It’s now a Burger Den. There is already a Burger Hutch on the street. There is a Burger Shack, too, and a Burger Bower. [...]

[...] I am a headliner, a highroller. Peter Sennet did it. Freddie Giles and Ronnie Templeton did it. Jack Conn – he did it. They all live in California now. They have all bled out of the ordinary world. They all have new houses, new wives, new tans, new rugs. In V8 Hyenas and haunchy drophead Acapulcos they cruise the road-margined seas, gunning to the medical zone for their daily DNA boosters and plasma rethinks. Twice or three times a month they wing out for a long weekend on Thousand Island, a world that time forgot, down in the sea of joy. Everyone thinks that this will soon happen to me. Me, I don’t see it somehow. I have a sharp sense of my life being in the balance. I may never look back, or I may never recover. I tell you, I am terrified, I am fucking terrified. [...]

Terminal Three was in terminal chaos, the air and light suffused with last things, planet panic, money Judgement. We are fleeing Earth for a newer world while there is still hope, while there are still chances. I queued, checked in, climbed the stairs, hit the bar, I got frisked, X-rayed, cleared, I hit the bar, plundered duty-free, walked the chutes, paced the waiting room until we entered the ship, two by two, all types represented, to make our getaway . . . Aboard the travel tube (a new kind of waiting room) we sat in lines, like an audience, to check out the art therapy on offer: toothache muzak, and, adorning the canvas curtain of the home-movie screen, a harbour view from a bracingly talentless brush. Next, the death-defying act from the stewardesses, those bashful girls and their oxygen mime. But the stalls gave the bird to this dance of doom. Unhooked from London, we boiled and shuddered and raced. Away! I thought, as we climbed through the air with the greatest of ease.

Her English husband Ossie, now he’s rich-for-life but he works in money, in pure money. His job has nothing to do with anything except money, the stuff itself. No fucking around with stocks, shares, commodities, futures. Just money. Sitting in his spectral towers on Sixth Avenue and Cheapside, blond Ossie uses money to buy and sell money. Equipped with only a telephone, he buys money with money, sells money for money. He works in the cracks and vents of currencies, buying and selling on the margin, riding the daily tides of exchange. For these services he is rewarded with money. Lots of it. It is beautiful, and so is he.

Look at my life. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: But it’s terrific! It’s great! You’re thinking: Some guys have all the luck! Well, I suppose it must look quite cool, what with the aeroplane tickets and the restaurants, the cabs, the filmstars, Selina, the Fiasco, the money. But my life is also my private culture – that’s what I’m showing you, after all, that’s what I’m letting you into, my private culture. And I mean look at my private culture. Look at the state of it. It really isn’t very nice in here. And that is why I long to burst out of the world of money and into – into what? Into the world of thought and fascination. How do I get there? Tell me, please. I’ll never make it by myself. I just don’t know the way.

I had my reasons. Do you want to hear the good news first, or the bad news? The good news is that Martina called this morning and we’re having lunch tomorrow. The bad news is that the good news made me feel so relieved and excited that I ran out to a bar and drank a bunch of big ones. Yeah? you’ll say. 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 B & 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.