Glamorama (36 page)

The camera slowly pans around my apartment, Smashing Pumpkins’ “Stumbleine” pours out over the sound track: a vintage industrial fan, an empty fish tank, dried flowers, a candelabra, a bicycle, a kitchen custom-made from several kinds of stone, a glass-door refrigerator, a food processor unwashed and stained with the grain and pulp from a health shake, a set of martini glasses. In the bathroom there’s a poster of Diana Rigg in “The Avengers” and candles from Agnès b. and in the bedroom there’s a down comforter lying on a futon that was hand-carved in a Japanese forest and the original poster for
La Dolce Vita
that Chloe gave me for a birthday hangs over it and in the closet in that bedroom is a black Paul Smith suit, a black turtleneck, jeans and white shirts, vests, an open-weave pullover sweater, a pair of brightly colored Hush Puppies, black desert boots. On my desk: free drink tickets, a Cohiba cigar still in its container, a Clash CD—
Sandinista!—
unopened, a check to Save the Rainforest returned because of insufficient funds, last year’s Social Register, a Baggie of psilocybin mushrooms, a half-empty Snapple, a roll of Mentos, an ad ripped from a magazine of Tyson promoting a new lip balm and the dragon tattoo etched on his bicep has a Chinese inscription on it that translated means “don’t trust anyone” and an old fax machine and falling out of the fax machine at this moment is a slip of fax paper that I pick up and read.

On it:

I’m about to reread it for a fourth time, wiping tears off my face, when I hear someone outside the front door and a key slipped into the lock, unlocking the door, and the door opens and someone playing the building’s superintendent—“a young gorgeous guy”—peers in and spots me, wasted on the beanbag chair beneath a giant framed poster of the Replacements’
Pleased to Meet Me
LP, and the actor seems bewildered and finally he apologizes for missing his cue.

“I thought I heard voices, man,” he says. “I thought I heard voices.”

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Everything surrounding the ship is gray or dark blue and nothing is particularly hip, and once or maybe twice a day this thin strip of white appears at the horizon line but it’s so far in the distance you can’t be sure whether it’s land or more sky. It’s impossible to believe that any kind of life sustains itself beneath this flat, slate-gray sky or in an ocean so calm and vast, that anything breathing could exist in such limbo, and any movement that occurs below the surface is so faint it’s like some kind of small accident, a tiny indifferent moment, a minor incident that shouldn’t have happened, and in the sky there’s never any trace of sun—the air seems vaguely transparent and disposable, with the texture of Kleenex—yet it’s always bright in a dull way, the wind usually constant as we drift through it, weightless, and below us the trail the ship leaves behind is a Jacuzzi blue that fades within minutes
into the same boring gray sheet that blankets everything else surrounding the ship. One day a normal-looking rainbow appears and you vaguely notice it, thinking about the enormous sums of money the Kiss reunion tour made over the summer, or maybe a whale swims along the starboard side, waving its fin, showing off. It’s easy to feel safe, for people to look at you and think someone’s going somewhere. Surrounded by so much boring space, five days is a long time to stay unimpressed.

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I boarded the
QE2
still wearing the Comme des Garçons tux and I was so stoned by the time the driver Palakon had sent dropped me off at the passenger terminal on West 50th Street that how I actually got on the ship is a blur of images so imprecise you couldn’t really even classify them as a montage: red, white and blue balloons floating in midair, crowds of photographers that I assumed were paparazzi but weren’t, a porter assuring me that my luggage—faded Gucci bags hurriedly and badly packed—would be in my cabin when (“and if,” he added) I got there, a live band playing “The Lambeth Walk.” In my haze I vaguely realized that “things” had already been taken care of, since I moved through the whole embarkation process—security, passport, receiving a
QE2
VIP Gold Card—swiftly and with no hassles. But I was still so wasted that I barely made it up the gangway, and then only with the help of a couple of production assistants dressed as extras, one on either side of me, and a triple espresso from Starbucks, force-fed, as the band began playing a jaunty version of “Anything Goes.”

In my cabin I opened a complimentary split of Perrier-Jouët and downed two crumbled Xanax with it and then slumped into an overstuffed armchair. My eyes were sore and glazed and only by squinting could I take in my surroundings: a telephone, a minifridge, an okay bed, an unopenable porthole blurred opaque by the salt air, baskets of fresh fruit and flowers that I glumly stared at. Impassively, I noticed a television and turned it on with a remote control it took me fifteen
minutes to find, the prop sitting (inconspicuously, I thought) on top of the TV. I tried to focus and read a “Welcome Aboard” letter but started hyperventilating when I saw an invitation requesting my presence for cocktails with the ship’s “cruise director.” My maid, a cute little English thing, a tiny Courteney Cox maybe, introduced herself, and eyeing the bright new oversized orange felt Versace overcoat I’d unpacked and thrown across the bed, she smiled proudly and said, “I see you’ve already gotten acquainted with your life jacket,” and I just mumbled whatever I was supposed to mumble at that point, which was, I think, “Just respect yourself, baby,” then glared at her until she left and I relaxed back into my stupor.

As we started moving down the Hudson River I wrapped my head in a fluffy towel, started to sob inauthentically and then used one of the gift-box lotions I found when I hobbled into the bathroom to jerk off with but I was too wasted even to get half hard or to conjure up a fantasy about Lauren Hynde or Chloe Byrnes or, for that matter, Gwen Stefani. On the TV screen was a live feed of the horizon from the prow of the ship and now skyscrapers were passing by and then we were under the Verrazano Bridge and then the sky was darkening and another world was taking over as it always does in times like these and then I was dreaming of things that I couldn’t really remember later: I was making various Bart Simpson noises, Heather Locklear was a stewardess, I kissed and made up with Chris O’Donnell, the sound track was remixed Toad the Wet Sprocket and the special effects were cool and the filmmakers had hired a topnotch editor so the sequence really zipped and then there was a final shot—the camera moving closer and closer into the black hat Lauren Hynde gave me until the image was distorted by the hat’s tiny red rose.

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