The Fall of Princes (16 page)

It was the year the match struck, and the flame burned brighter and hotter than it ever had before or ever would again. The Firm was inventing, every day, new instruments, as they called them, for duping and doping the rich, betting against their own bets, knowing that the house never loses. To be a client of The Firm, to allow them to move your money from square to square on the invisible chess board with lightning speed, with the speed of a con artist hiding a pea under a thimble, you had to have $20 million in your account at all times. That’s a lot of toys to play with. And nobody played harder than me. I could guarantee investors 10 or 12 percent on their capital, knowing that The Firm could make at least twice that, just from keeping the money moving at lightning speed, and that a frightening chunk of that change would find its way into my pocket by the end of the year, on the day the bonuses were handed out. A yard, two yards. A fucking touchdown.

This is the way we live now. It is how our lives tick. Once there was freedom of desire, a sweetness in the skin. These are gone. Gone also is the invitation to the dance; the music has stopped. Gone also is the blue sky, the crystal water. Gone is Harbour Island, and Pink Sands, where the serving woman asked, in your cottage in the palm grove, what you would like for breakfast as she left for the night with a wave. Gone is Max’s Kansas City, and sitting in the back room with Anna and Sharon, gin and tonics and cocaine and tarot. Things diffuse, some nights we just can’t hold on anymore, grip any harder, fight any more savagely.

Every minor cut is watched to see if it will heal. Every cough is a death rattle.

Gone is the beauty and insatiability of fucking a stranger. Nights with women. Nights with men. The heartbeat of a decade dead in your chest. Now every touch, each kiss, is fused with a disaster that whispers in your ear and pulls you out of the sea of flesh. It is the death of pleasure, and there is not one person who is not infected.

Suddenly, everybody is carrying condoms, something you haven’t done since high school, and sex is only the prelude to the dread you know you are going to feel.

You should call your doctor, schedule a test. You do nothing. In these early days, the test takes a week for the results to come back, a week during which there is no other thought in your brain except the virus floating in your blood on a slide under a microscope.

First your hair cutter dies, Benjamin Moss, a scrappy little English guy, and that’s a bummer, because he cut your hair just right, and also because, in New York, changing your hairdresser is harder than changing your religion. And then everybody else dies. They die and then they stay dead.

Gone is your heart, the hopes of your youth. You tell yourself you are not a homosexual. This is not happening to you. And then Shirts, your favorite bartender, husband to three, father to seven, dies after having pneumonia eight times in six months, and you go to your first memorial in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, with bagpipers playing “Amazing Grace,” all of it paid for by his friends, ten thousand dollars is the rumor, as seven tough Irish American children sob uncontrollably at the loss of their father, and you think well, maybe. Maybe that one time. Maybe that other time. Who can remember all the times?

Outside, on the steps of the church, Steven says, “Who knew Shirts was a queer?” and you wonder whether any of the seven children he fathered carries the disease.

The papers say the virus can live in a teardrop. A sneeze, and you know you should be tested but you don’t go. You have wept, and sneezed, and exchanged bodily fluids with perfect strangers, men and women, and there is a cold spike in your heart that you do not pull out.

Suddenly, love is fatal. How are we to live? You work out harder at the gym. You avoid crowds. Something is broken in you and it will never be made whole again. You have the rest of your life to live, years and years, and they stretch out in front of you, barren.

Then my friend Adrienne gets it, one night with the wrong man she swears, and she dies over and over, only to be dragged back to the living every time. She is spared the blisters and blossoms of Kaposi’s sarcoma, but here she is, twenty-five and she is both dying and a hypochondriac, and our blithe friendship is strained.

It’s two in the morning. The phone by the bed in the Hovel rings.

“My veins are too blue.”

“Adrienne, it’s two o’clock in the morning. I’m sure you’re fine.”

“I’ve been watching them for two hours and they just keep getting bigger and bluer. Can you come over? I’m scared.” This from a spoiled, aggressive girl who isn’t afraid to make the same hairdresser “fix” her hair color four and five times in a week.

“You’ve been looking at your veins for how long?”

“Two hours.”

“Where are you, exactly, in your apartment?”

“The bathroom.”

“What kind of light is in the bathroom?”

“I don’t know. Fluorescent. I guess.”

“Do me a favor. Walk into your sitting room and look at them under a normal light.”

A pause while Adrienne scoops up the tiny dog that never leaves her side and moves to her other phone in the sitting room. The click of a lamp and then, “Oh. Oh. They look fine.”

“It was the light, Adrienne. The fluorescent light. Now go to sleep.”

“Thank you for being there.”

“Good night. Angels on your pillow.”

And then Adrienne is in the intensive care unit at St. Vincent’s, tiny, no bigger than a pencil, and I am alone and Carmela is irrevocably gone, and I don’t know what to do. Not about anything.

I look at my own veins. They’re blue. They carry the blood to my heart. I have no heart. Not anymore. I have no job and no future. I am thirty-six years old and I have a $300,000 car and a wardrobe that would fill a museum and I haven’t the faintest idea of what to do, become, be, love.

The days are racing by, and with every day, more money gone. In New York, if you’re not working, you’re spending. I imagine the moment there is nothing. Terror. I get drunk in the morning and stay drunk, driving my car through the jammed streets of a hostile city, miraculously unscathed. There is a certain excitement at the thought of the vast nothingness the future holds.

I have dinner with friends, paying for everybody over their weak protests. I want disaster. I want death, a finiteness to this agony.

And, every day, more die, die hideous deaths, more often than not alone. It started with a look, a tightness of the skin across the cheekbones, and suddenly the virus was visible, and then we all had the look, and there was no touch that was not suspect, no gesture that did not cause suspicion.

Kurt Cobain sang, “Everybody’s gay,”
In Utero,
1993, but by that time it was too late, and we could only hear, “Everybody’s dying.”

Nobody remembers it now. An entire generation of men walking in a wasteland. The young men now, they are so smug, so self-satisfied. Their skin will never be covered with running sores. They have unsafe sex, playing the odds, knowing that the result, even if they get the virus, is no more than a chronic condition, like diabetes.

Adrienne lay in her bed at St. Vincent’s, hooked up to an array of tubes, and I sent her a flat of tulips to cheer her up. She didn’t like the color. She ripped out her IV tube, screaming. She sent them back. Demanded new ones, and of course she got them.

These are not my people, I told myself again and again, memory selecting what to keep and what to discard.

But, in the dark, in the dead of night in my narrow bed in the apartment I said I would never live in again, I hear their voices. I hear them talk to me. They say: they die, and then they stay dead.

Wish me luck, the same to you.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Table Hopping

I
t started very badly and it went on for a very long time. The end was kind of fun, in a career-wrecker kind of way, but traveling the distance from two hostile men sitting at a conference table over espresso to the throwing up in the street part just took fucking forever.

First of all, my Hermès scarf tie was just all wrong. Dick
Morris, my client, had made his fortune by owning the most Laundromats of anybody in the world, he lived in Beanstalk, Idaho, or somewhere, and was a wildly alcoholic man of simple tastes. The scarf tie was a show of ostentation that was bound to raise his hackles, even if he didn’t exactly know its provenance. It just looked too expensive, and, in Dick’s eyes, had been bought with his money, a useless, foppish waste by a city slicker, the man who was supposed to be making his money grow to even more gargantuan size. Then there was the Brioni suit I wore, the shoes polished to a lacquered gloss, wrong, all of it, all wrong. Dick Morris,
with his shapeless hopsack suit and his Florsheim shoes, found my attire inappropriate for a heart-to-heart chat, even if he had flown to New York on his own jet, landing at Teterboro in a fog, both meteorological and alcoholic.

We sat in a conference room high up into that fog, and went through his handsomely extended portfolio line by line. At about line 200, Dick Morris put down his retractable pencil and said, “Scotch.” A glass of eighteen-year-old on a silver tray was put in front of him by a white-coated waiter. “Fuck the ice and leave the bottle” was all he said. It was ten thirty in the morning.

I was dying for a drink, even though I was still a tad tipsy from the night before, which had ended about five. I could feel the sweat pool at my sacroiliac, my carefully fitted shirt wilting, even in the chill of the conference room. Dick Morris was a strong, rich man, affable enough, fun, even, at times. His theory was: How can you stay drunk all day unless you start drinking in the morning?

The conference lasted seven hours, during which he consumed the entire bottle of Scotch. We got to the end and began a discussion of the tax implications of the buying and selling and rearranging we had been doing for the past lifetime, me sober as a Wheatie, Dick drunker and more irascible by the hour. I tried to explain them, but he cut me short.

He spoke with the overly accurate diction of a man who has been drinking for seven hours. “Taxation is robbery. How much are they going to rob me of this year?”

“It’s the price we pay for living in a free society,” I said.

“I will go to my grave without ever giving a penny to those goddamned people in Washington. I don’t believe in government. Blood-sucking bastards, every one of them. I haven’t voted in twenty years. Are you a child? Make it go away, or I’m taking my marbles across the street. I give you a gift, a fucking bull’s-eye, and you expect me to pay taxes?
Taxes?
Taxes are for fools.”

He drained his glass for maybe the three-dozenth time.

“So where are we eating? I hate the food in New York. I hate New York.”

I suggested several places. Places it was impossible to get into, unless you knew the number that was the real number, not the one in the phone book, the line that never got answered.

“We’re going, son, to the Russian Tea Room. Now
that’s
a restaurant.”

It was five o’clock. My stomach churned at the thought of food, but brightened at the sound of a single word—
cocktails. Dick Morris was one of those clients you didn’t have to worry about getting drunk around; he would do nothing more than welcome the company. He drank with a thirst that was gargantuan.

The car dropped us at five forty-five. And we entered the restaurant’s giant room, all red, hung year-round with Christmas decorations. Tinsel swagged from every beam, crimson-faced waiters in scarlet hussar uniforms circled the
room. When it came to venomous service and inflated prices, nothing beat the RTR, and I began to settle into that feeling of being in exactly the right place at the right time.

An icy bottle of vodka was brought to the table, and caviar was heaped on plates with ice cream scoops. Dick ate and drank ravenously, the prices meaning nothing. He figured with $350 mil stashed at The Firm, it was only our duty to show him a good time, and, if the Russian Tea Room had offered lap dancers, he would have had several along with his caviar. That not being in the offing, Dick tucked in and settled down to a long evening of gastronomic pleasure with the awful food on the awful menu. The food was so bad it was kind of endearing. I was just glad to feel the first hit of vodka flooding my veins, making my heart sing.

Dick was a funny guy, meaning he could, given enough liquor and sensual pleasure, actually be funny and likable in a polyester kind of way. Stories about his fat wife, Mamie, about his car collection, thirty-seven, and his moronic children were truly amusing, and I was suddenly glad to be in his company. A joie de vivre imbued the air, settled my stomach, and erased the day’s every number from my mind. He had the air of a man who was going to finish the evening asking for a really expensive hooker, with the certain knowledge that she would be provided for him. Anything he liked would be provided for him, the Laundromat king who maybe hadn’t had sex for six or eight weeks, certainly not with a smooth-skinned twenty-something girl in six-inch heels.

Borscht was served, the one thing the RTR did well, and if they had had a board announcing, like McDonald’s, the number of portions served, the total would be impressive. Over a trillion sold, toyed with, and sent back to the kitchen largely untouched.

Dick asked me to order a bottle of wine, and I did, at $400. It was brought to the table with great ceremony, and uncorked, and Dick was given a taste. He swirled it in his balloon glass. He sniffed, drank, then spat it on the floor. Let me say that again. He spat it on the floor, splattering the sommelier’s dusty shoes, and said, “This swill? I wouldn’t drink this swill on a bet. Give this bottle to my friend here, and bring me a
real
Bordeaux. Bring me your most expensive bottle of red wine right
now
.”

Tiny Armenian teenagers frantically began to scrub the ancient carpeting as the egregiously expensive bottle of wine, decades old, dusty from waiting, was brought to the table, tasted, and met with glum approval by the laundry king. “I serve better wine
at lunch,
” he bellowed.
“To people I don’t like.”

Suddenly: “What’s your name? I’m calling you Louis.”

“It’s Dimitri, sir.”

Dick peeled a $100 bill off of a big roll in his pocket and gave it to Dmitri. “Well, Louis, life is just too short to drink bad wine. If I wanted bad wine, I’d get poor like you.”

“Yes, sir.”

He tasted the wine that was poured. “Drinkable. Not great, but drinkable. Now get these damned kids away from me and bring some food.”

He sent everything back at least once. The vodka had kicked in, and I began to like Dick and his $350 mil a lot. Underneath his baggy suit, he was a good guy. Fun-loving. Vulgar. Dumb as a dryer. And, with him drinking like a fish, he wouldn’t notice how much I was knocking back or how many times I went to the bathroom to freshen up.

There was something uber-bizarre about being in the old Russian Tea Room. All those Christmas decorations. All those octogenarian waiters, all called Dimitri or Boris. Lost in time. Lost in an alcoholic haze that made forty bucks for a bowl of soup seem reasonable. Those were the days when expense accounts were endless, nobody really paid for anything, except some poor guy in Denver who was watching Monday-night football, unaware that $400 bottles of wine were being spit on the floor, staining the thousand-year-old raggedy carpeting. We had blini with the golfball caviar, several times, and we had borscht and we had shashlik and strogonoff, and a lot of other stuff I didn’t even know the name of. Waiters swirled around the table like bees at honey time, placing and replacing the enormous, heavy restaurant silver.

Dick told me how his wife Mamie was in bed—not so hot—and how he was in bed when he was with women other than Mamie—fantastic—and how big his dick was—
enormous, much bigger than mine and this I know for a fact because we went to the bathroom and compared. He was a stubby little man with a lot of washers and dryers and a big dick, and all of this was making Dick happier and happier as the night wore on, although my mood darkened when I realized, in the size department, both of portfolio and of member, I would never be where Dick was, that is, on top of the fucking world.

Even the Dimitris and Boris’s started to like Dick, the more times he reached into his pocket and peeled off more bills. He would do it at odd moments, did it as though in passing, “Here, Louie,” he would say, to some sadsack waiter who just happened to be passing by. “Go wild. Bring me another bottle of that wine.” When all that was gone, he asked for some even more obscure, ridiculous vintage and of course they had it.

The Christmas lights began to sparkle and whirl, and I could tell the moment was approaching when Dick stopped sending his food back and began to make subtle and then not so subtle hints about Russian girls and all that he had heard about their beauty and licentiousness.

“You have to taste this fish,” he said.

I declined, twice, but he insisted, and then he picked up a big gob of some sort of fish in a heavy cream sauce in his fork and deposited it on the tablecloth. “Eat that,” he said. “It’s heaven.” And, once scraped off the tablecloth, it kind of was.

Dick and I were having fun. At least it seemed so at the time. The other patrons of the restaurant found it not so much fun, and began to call for their checks.

A girl was mentioned by one of the Louies, and then a girl was found, she’d be here in half an hour, nineteen, and capable of tricks and pleasures unseen in any non-Asiatic country, anywhere. She would be in this very room in forty-five minutes. And, stomach churning from all the caviar and the steaming dishes that weren’t hot enough or too salty, and the expensive wine I had personally packed away, along with two grams of Peru’s finest Marching Powder, I decided that what the evening needed, to pass the time from brandy to Natasha, was some entertainment provided by me personally. So I jumped on the red banquette and hopped on the table and sang, at the top of my voice, “Hava Nagila,” which, thanks to thousands of duty bar and bat mitzvahs I had attended, I actually knew the words to, at least the “Hava Nagila” part. The room, almost empty, really cleared out fast, so we were the only customers left.

The disaster that wrecks you can be a big thing, or a small thing. Sometimes, it’s hardly even remarked upon. The thread snaps, and the button falls to the ground. You don’t even notice. The blister that’s been bothering you for weeks suddenly pops. Sometimes you say the unsayable, the thing that, once said, cannot be unsaid. You say it not because it’s clever or apt or kind. You say it simply because it’s there, hanging in the air, waiting to be said. You drop the bomb. You fuck up at work and can’t find anybody else to blame it on. Me, I danced.

In what even I, through the fog, knew to be a misguided adventure, I danced. I got up on the banquette, tearing the hundred-year-old leather, where every famous behind in New York had sat, at some time, along with thousands of wide-eyed tourists, and then I clambered onto the small round table, and I danced the Kazatsky, booming “Hava Nagila” in the full-throated cry of my youth and enthusiasm. How else could I express my joy at having spent the evening with Dick Morris, laundry king, and soon-to-be-laid Midwestern schlub extraordinaire. At that moment, I loved Dick Morris.

Stemware and crockery flew everywhere, smashing into a thousand bits and sending the Algerian boys into fits of overtime. There was general alarm in the restaurant, alarm that in no way weakened my enthusiasm for my melodious exertions. I was, at 185 pounds of solid-packed muscle, a challenge for the small round table, which suddenly gave way, landing me on my backside amidst the carnage, cutting a wide gash in my suit, not to mention my ass. My butt would need stitches; the boxers were beyond repair, a heartbreak, my favorite pair.

Just as the table collapsed, Natasha arrived, a stunning girl with a wildly unnatural mane of blonde hair, wearing a micro-leather skirt, pink, with a purple chubby fur jacket
and more eye makeup than is normally in stock at Bloomingdale’s. Dick Morris laughed uproariously, sobering up slightly at the sight of Natasha and her bodyguard, who was introduced as her uncle. The kind of burly man who could squash a Volkswagen with one hand, a man with hair growing out of both his ears and his nostrils, sprouting as well out of the sagging neckline of his heavy sweater. There may have been a gun in there. I’m pretty sure there was.

It took two hussars and two Armenians to get me off the floor, still attempting the Kazatsky even in the ruination of blood and glassware. I had no wish to stop dancing, even as it became obvious that all Dick wanted was to get to the Marriott Times Square where he, ever thrifty, stayed, and be alone with the luscious Natasha. I waved my American Express card at them, and they brightened considerably and returned instantaneously. Everything was hilarious, but the figure at the bottom of the bill was especially hilarious, four thousand in wine alone, over five total for a quiet, barely edible and largely untouched dinner for two. I tipped in cash, as Ford Madox Ford advised.