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.

Just then, Shadow bobbed out on to the terrace. He made straight for me and started sniffing greedily at my dock. Now this was all very well, but hardly the most welcome comment on my personal hygiene. I raised an arm – in warning, no more – and with a crawling wriggle Shadow had rolled on to his back, his head averted, his legs crooked in supplication and fear. I knew then that the dog had once feared somebody very like myself, somebody big, tense and white. I knelt and patted his hot belly. ‘Sniff all you want,’ I said. ‘I won’t have you fearing me. I just won’t stand for it.’ As I straightened up I saw that Martina was watching from the doorway with curious eyes.

[...] I had to pick him up each day and ride downtown with him, an eighty-block journey at nine in the morning, during which Lorne talked all the time. I soon discovered that you could not do this with a hangover. It wasn’t possible. I had several shots at it, and got more and more certain that it just couldn’t be done.

‘Are you all right now?’ she asked as we settled. ‘You look shattered.’

‘No I’m fine,’ I said. But I wasn’t.

I was shattered. I couldn’t get the fucking cummerbund off. Jesus, was that cummerbund ever a bad idea. Under the attendant’s mirthful sneer I had skipped and cursed and twisted. In the end I merely tautened the noose around the molten melon in my bowels. Martina called from beyond and pausing only to wipe away my tears I blundered back through the door.

You won’t believe this. It’s the damnedest thing. Suddenly, it seems, half the girls in New York want to get in my pants – yes, my pants, the winded Y-fronts with the slack elastic. Is this success? Is this money? Is this promotion, the light shed by Martina Twain? Loafing around at the Blithedale, I am accosted by little crackers in the commissary and the games room. They come right up to me, packed tight in heatwave wear, and suggest pressing get-togethers at their place or mine. I sit in a bar drinking lite beer and marshalling my confusions – and a big bim will climb up next to me, steadying herself with a hand on my thigh. ‘Buy me a drink,’ she’ll tell me. ‘I’m hot.’ The other evening, I swear, as I walked up Forty-Third Street in the dusk, a New York woman stood spread-legged in my path and dropped a handkerchief – like so – as I loomed by. There are salacious notes waiting for me in the lobby of the Ashbery. There are salacious women waiting for me in the lobby of the Ashbery. What do you want? I say. ‘Can’t we discuss this in your room? I’d really like to discuss this in your room.’ I fend them off, full of fear and failure. Drink, deep drink, has never looked so sweet. But I get by on wine and Serafim. I look for clues in all this sex bloat and beriberi. And I sometimes think: I’m it. I’m the clue.

We went to bed. We went to bed in that grownup way – you know, as if it were just the next thing. No mood-qualifiers or tone-deepenings, no goatish grunts or frisky yelps and giggles, no props, brandy, brothel gear, thongs, thumbscrews, third parties. She stripped swiftly. Her pants are pretty talented, too, but you hardly ever get a decent look at them. On her long brown legs, the form of the inner thighs endearingly curved like the join of a pincer (the hips broad-banked, the back deep but unsturdy, raisined, rich), Martina strode to the bathroom. Then her return, full and frontal, the flesh showing the first interesting looseness, the first prints of time, of death, making you sure that if you were ever lucky enough to – you would certainly have been with a woman. That was a woman, no mistaking her. I said,

A pretty adult situation, no, wouldn’t you think, with Selina now tightening the belt of her sheer negligée (and gazing down disclaimingly – even she won’t forgive me), and Martina fixed in the frame of the doorway, in a suit of light-grey worsted, black shoes together (and what did she see? Brute hard-on, gut, the frightened face) – and me, the decked joke, flummoxed, scuppered, and waving his arms? I’ve had some naked travel but never quite as naked as this, not even in the Boomerang off Sunset Boulevard, sprawling under the pimp’s bat.

A pretty adult situation, and yet Martina looked like a child. She looked like a child who has suffered more reverses in a single day than ever before in living memory, and is now poised between refusal and acceptance of the fact that life might be significantly worse than she thought, that life was unkinder in its essence, and no one had given her fair warning.

‘You’ll notice we’re going into a wide turn at this time. It looks like I’m out of a job too, so . . . Ladies and gentlemen, I have to tell you that this is Airtrak’s last flight. They’ve pulled the plug on the whole operation. We’ll be re-encountering that turbulence on the way back to JFK. Please fasten seatbelts and, uh, extinguish all smoking materials. Thank you.’

I got back to my seat as we came lancing in over the bay, just in time to see the stretched arcs of silver and slack loops of gold, the forms and patterns that streets don’t know they make.