by
Martin Amis
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Money
Money
by
Martin Amis
by
Martin Amis
Money
by
Martin Amis
by
Martin Amis
So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown skyline carries a smear of God’s green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hour, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing BEEF-BOOZE – NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON’T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don’t walk. Stay inside. Don’t walk. Drive. Don’t walk. Run! I tried the cabs. No use. The cabbies are all Saturnians who aren’t even sure whether this is a right planet or a left planet. The first thing you have to do, every trip, is teach them how to drive.
i love him
‘I see this Garfield as a man of some considerable culture,’ said Lorne Guyland. ‘Lover, father, husband, athlete, millionaire – but also a man of wide reading, of wide . . . culture, John. A poet. A seeker. He has the world in his hands, women, money, success – but this man probes deeper. As an Englishman, John, you’ll understand what I’m saying. His Park Avenue home is a treasure-chest of art treasures. Sculpture. The old masters. Tapestries. Glassware. Rugs. Treasures from all over the world. He’s a professor of art someplace. He writes scholarly articles in the, in, in the scholarly magazines, John. He’s a brilliant part-time archaeologist. People call him up for art advice from all over the world. In the opening shot I see Garfield at a lectern reading aloud from a Shakespeare first edition, bound in unborn calf. Behind him on the wall there’s this whole bunch of oils. The old masters, John. He lifts his head, and as he looks towards camera the light catches his monocle and he . . .’'
I stared grimly across the room as Lorne babbled on. Who, for a start, was Garfield? The guy’s name is Gary. Barry isn’t short for Barfield, is it. It’s just Barry, and that’s that. Still, this would no doubt be among the least of our differences. Lorne now began mapping out Garfield’s reading list. He talked for some time about a poet called Rimbo. I assumed that Rimbo was one of our friends from the developing world, like Fenton Akimbo. Then Lorne said something that made me half-identify Rimbo as French. You dumb shit, I thought, it’s not Rimbo, it’s Rambot, or Rambeau. Rambeau had a pal or contemporary, I seem to remember, with a name like a wine . . . Bordeaux. Bardolino. No, that’s Italian . . . isn’t it? Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It’s so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You’re given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour, you get weaker. Sometimes, as I sit alone in my flat in London and stare at the window, I think how dismal it is, how hard, how heavy, to watch the rain and not know why it falls.
‘It makes no sense. It just doesn’t add up.’ Lorne laughed. ‘If Butch is fucking Garfield, how could she risk that happiness, that fulfilment, John, on a young punk like . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Okay. Over that we can argue. But my scenario still holds. The way I see it, Butch has never had an orgasm before she meets this wonderful guy, who shows her a world she’s only dreamed of, a world of Othello jets and Caribbean mansions, a world of . . .’
I stared on. Time passed. [...]
‘All the fish respond to the manoeuvres of the alpha fish,’ said Fielding, his valved face reflected in the glass. ‘That’s the alpha fish – there, with the black tail.’ He looked at his watch, and straightened. ‘Now today we cast the girl, the stripper.’
‘The dancer?’ I said. ‘What about Butch?’
‘You know Butch is in. I know Butch is in. You know she’s a dancer. I know she’s a dancer. These girls, they don’t know nothing. You read me, Slick? We’re going to have some fun.’
christ
[...] ‘Now I shall leave the men together to enjoy their coffee and port, free of a woman’s chatter,’ said Caduta, and disappeared. Kasimir and I sat drinking heavily in total silence for forty-five minutes, until Caduta returned bearing three fat albums devoted entirely to her godchildren. [...]
amazing
'Answer me something. Do you sort of set yourself a time to write every day? Or do you just write when you feel like it. Or what.’
He sighed and said, ‘You really want to know? . . . I get up at seven and write straight through till twelve. Twelve to one I read Russian poetry – in translation, alas. A quick lunch, then art history until three. After that it’s philosophy for an hour – nothing technical, nothing hard. Four to five: European history, 1848 and all that. Five to six: I improve my German. And from then until dinner, well, I just relax and read whatever the hell I like. Usually Shakespeare.’
honestly kinda goals
‘The distance between author and narrator corresponds to the degree to which the author finds the narrator wicked, deluded, pitiful or ridiculous. I’m sorry, am I boring you?’
‘– Uh?’
‘This distance is partly determined by convention. In the epic or heroic frame, the author gives the protagonist everything he has, and more. The hero is a god or has godlike powers or virtues. In the tragic . . . Are you all right?’
I am a thing made up of time lag, culture shock, zone shift. Human beings simply weren’t meant to fly around like this. Scorched throat, pimpled vision, memory wipes – nothing new to me, but it’s all much worse these days, not that I ride the planet shuttle. I have to get up in the middle of the night to check out the can. My daily tiredness peak arrives exactly when it wants to, often after morning coffee. Sitting down to eat, I am either ravenous and fat-cheeked with drool – or helplessly sated, for no reason. On impulse I floss my teeth in the middle of the afternoons. Even these would-be handjobs of mine turn out bassackwards, with climaxing coming first. All day I am my night self, spliced by night thoughts, night sweats. And all night, well, I am something else entirely, something else again, I am something overevolved, a salty slipstream thinning out and trailing down over the black Atlantic.
On the other hand, look what the human mouth has to put up with. I’m trying to see it from your point of view. Unimaginable, Third World food-mountains are churned and swirled through that delicate processor – pampas of cattle, fathoms of living sea, horizons of spud and greens, as well as conveyor belts of Wallys and Blastburgers, vats of flavouring and colouring, plus fags, straws, thermometers, dentist’s drills, doctor’s shears, drugs, tongues, fingers, feeding tubes. Is this any way to treat the mouth, the poor mouth, the human mouth? And so perhaps, after all this, the constant cartoon of pigments, textures and impacts, a man’s dick doesn’t look that bad.
Out on the street the black Autocrat was waiting inexorably. The chauffeur stood ready – a different chauffeur, but a fellow member of the zooty, moustachioed, chauffeuring caste. Fielding waved a hand at him and took my arm for a turn around the block. No bodyguard this time. The second guy was a frill, an extra, and even Fielding economized sometimes, as all moneymen do. Yet the driver was wearing his piece: I saw the thickness in his armpit, like a superfat wallet. ‘Who’s out to get you, pal?’ I asked Fielding as we walked along. ‘Poor people,’ he said with a shrug. So I asked the second question – why the limo? He just looked at me drily. I know why, I think. The hug and glaze they give you is worth the street hate. Maybe it’s even part of the deal, the bluntness, the thrilling brutality of money. We turned, and talked a little more, and then Fielding climbed inside, falling slowly into the seat.