Read The Fall of Princes Online
Authors: Robert Goolrick
Uncle Hairy accepted the huge wad of bills Dick put in his hand, without counting it; even he had some politesse. Natasha spoke no English, but made it clear that she was ready to shed her chubby and get down to business with Dick, over whom she towered.
It took an army to get us out the door, even after they saw the fabulous pile of cash I had left as expiation. I somehow had a strand of tinsel around my neck, and blood gushing from my rear end.
On the street outside, the car still waited. The dinner had gone on for six hours, and the driver was asleep, but, once wakened, he could see he had a situation on his hands. “Great night,” said Dick, just as I threw up on his shoes.
“Fuck, man,” he said. “That was truly uncalled for.” He took off his shoes and socks and, in a Herculean display of athleticism, threw them into the middle of Fifty-Seventh Street. “Not acceptable,” he said, as he got into the stretch barefoot with Natasha and crept off into the night, leaving me bleeding and broken on the curb. I waved a feeble good-bye, and something told me it really was good-bye.
The emergency room removed the shards of glass from my behind, asking no explanation with none given, and sent me home with seven stitches at three in the morning. A long haul for a night of revelry that had started early that morning. It seemed, now, so far in the distant past.
The sheets were silken and cool, Carmela slept peacefully, her hair, her skin, radiant in the glow of the streetlights, more beautiful than a thousand Natashas. Moonlight. Milk. The petals of white peonies. A woman of qualities. I imagined her in a short purple fur, and I wanted desperately to bathe my wounds in the sweetness of her waters, and tried to wake her, but she shrugged me off.
“You’re drunk,” she said. “I was drunk but now I’m asleep. Leave a girl alone for once.” I tried to sleep, but there was no way, so at six thirty I got up and gingerly showered and appeared at work at seven thirty, except there was no way I could sit in an office chair, and one guy stopped by, took one look, and said, observing the various cuts, abrasions, and bruises on my face, “I want to see the other guy,” so I hadn’t quite gotten away with the night of revelry.
At nine, there was a brief meeting at which I was told I had been asked off of Dick Morris’s account but, not to worry, there was lots of other room to grow and ply my satanic wares. I could make a rock make money, they said. I sent Dick Morris a gift certificate for a pair of John Lobb shoes and went on, standing, with my day, wielding complex financial instruments like Obi-Wan Kenobi’s sword of light.
But it was over and I knew it. If you think you’re going to get fired, you are, in fact, going to get fired, and, as the days passed and I behaved myself with an absolute rigor, word began to get around and the myth grew, and within four months, slowly stripped of account after account, I was called into the office for the last time.
So quick bright things come to confusion. So quick.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
What They Sing About, When They Sing in Heaven
I
t is axiomatic that, just because you lose all your money, just because you are suddenly stripped of your place in the world, it doesn’t mean your friends lose everything, too. No siree, Bob. They do not.
The morning after you get fired, you wake up back in Hovel Hall, where the rats and roaches, in your absence, have apparently done nothing but multiply and grow less timid. You know that, by 7:45 a.m., you are already past tense at The Firm. You have simply ceased to be, your office bare, your friends averting their eyes when they pass your door.
Yesterday, when you were still in the present tense, in the land of the living, there was much collegial backslapping and high-fiving and dewy-eyed hugging with your colleagues. You were still a person, a friend.
The looks began to grow more distant, the high-fiving nonexistent as they watched you return to your office, where the phone had already been shut off, the Rolodex confiscated, and an armed guard stood at the portal of what was once the seat of your power. The head of HR was there, trying to look sympathetic, but let’s face it, she, with her $42,000-a-year life—lived principally with cats and crosswords and Beaujolais—must get such glee out of watching the mighty with their tails between their legs.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, firm and confident, “You have to clear out your office. They want you out by noon.”
Looking around at all that stuff made you want to throw up. “Belinda, love of my life. I’m not packing up anything. You know what belongs to The Firm. The rest is mine. Get some grunt to box it up and send it to me as soon as possible.” Not knowing that she would be sending the stuff to a loft where Carmela was already having the locks changed, having received a call from a friend and set her course of action—possess the loft, strip the bank accounts of cash, cut my face out of the wedding pictures, things that women know to do. She was on the phone every five minutes with Gloria, her mother, who’d been through it all twice, plotting it all out, where to transfer the money so I couldn’t get at it, stuff like that.
I was to get nothing, except, of course, the bills for maintaining it all. She got the lap pool at eighty degrees in January.
“Here’s what we do,” said Fanelli, who was one of the genuinely dewy-eyed ones. “You get four rolls of quarters and then we go to the nearest Irish bar and get shitfaced and you call every headhunter and trader you know. You got to move fast, bro’. Don’t let the Wookie win.”
Seven martinis and a hundred quarters later, not one headhunter or trader—people I had known for years, the same people who were calling me a week ago to entice me to switch jobs—not one of these fine people had even deigned to take my call. To them as well, I had vanished. They knew there was no higher rung on the trading ladder to be thrown off of than The Firm, and that it was impossible to climb back up. Ever. Not even if I went to the Trappist monastery in Gethsemani, Kentucky, where the Dalai Lama holes up when he’s in town and where they make the fruitcakes one gets relentlessly at Christmas, not even if I took a vow of chastity and silence, not even then would I ever get another job, not on The Street.
The sun just beginning to slant, we went to Tenth Avenue and I bought the fancy car, which I couldn’t afford and which lost half its value the second the tires hit the asphalt, and we rolled through the streets and bars and clubs like kings until four.
I woke up the next morning in the suit I had worn the day before, sprawled half on and half off the sofa in the Hovel. We, Fanelli and I, had traveled the length and breadth of the city in the new car, which was probably parked somewhere near to where I lay; no matter how drunk you are, you don’t lose a car, at least you don’t lose it forever. There were many empty bottles of fancy liquor rolling around on the floor, indicating the presence of recent company, but who they were, or when they had arrived and done whatever they did, I couldn’t have told you. The apartment was in every way worse than it had ever been.
There are some apartments that, once you’ve moved out of them, become so radioactive you could never live there again. Hovel Hall, by dawn’s light, had the greenish glow of nuclear fission.
Things you learn when you’re unemployed: a watched pot
will
boil. It just takes a very, very long time, time being what you have a lot of. Second thing: a million dollars isn’t really very much money. Third thing: work may be heinous, but it gives you someplace to go in the morning, a reason to get up and shave and leave the apartment, not to mention that they pay you.
These thoughts brought on the plan for revenge. I would show them, or so I thought. Get a better job. Have harder abs. Rent a house on the beach in East Hampton and allow them to come and sponge off me. I was so young, hardly begun. I was very, very good at the thing I did. It was unthinkable that life as I knew it was over. This was only a minor interruption on the road. A speed bump.
After four days of self-pity and rats, I did the only sensible thing: I moved into the Pierre Hotel, a Four Seasons property at the time. Staggering flower arrangements. Staggering room rates. Staggeringly obsequious service. God bless the Platinum Card from American Express.
I rented a suite, a big one, overlooking the zoo in Central Park. From the bathroom, you could see all the way to Harlem, and at night, the glow of the city lights lulled me to sleep as though in a mother’s arms, imagining all the festive parties the gang was going to have in my little slice of heaven on the 37th floor. A foyer, a big sitting room furnished with that kind of furniture so popular in English country houses, the same art on every wall in every room.
It was going to be great. Elegant. People would come over and cavort until the small hours. Champagne Brut in the minifridge, long lines of cocaine on the glass-topped cocktail table. Super Bowl parties. Like a clubhouse with room service. The staid pictures on the cream-colored walls would look down nightly on scenes of such debauchery they would blush with shame and turn their faces to the wall.
I kept $2,000 in cash in my pocket at all times. There’s no money like cash money, Shirts used to say. The other thing he used to advise was that one should never tip a bartender with coins. Coins were trash, to be swept onto the floor for the busboys to clean up.
The $100 bills in my pocket were like condoms for my self-esteem. The smaller bills were there for the endless tipping involved in living in the Pierre Hotel. It cost me, on average, about sixty bucks to get from my room to the street, more if it was raining and I wanted a cab. This made the staff unbelievably deferential to me, greeting me respectfully by name every time they saw me.
The hotel even moved a baby grand piano into the vast sitting room of the suite, so that Fanelli could sing when he wanted to, which was any time anybody asked him. He adored Anthea, but she wouldn’t let him smoke in their apartment, so he bought a dog, and every night he’d walk the dog down to the Pierre and join in the fun, smoking a fat cigar while the doorman watched the dog. Every night was a fiesta, music by Fanelli. He couldn’t really have thought he was fooling his wife, but I guess, even early on, there are secret arrangements that are made between married people.
Just stepping out of the revolving door of the hotel was a thrill, after a dozen sharply worded good-mornings. Outside was Madison Avenue, the street of dreams. I would wander Madison Avenue every day, drooling at the collection of shops and the merchandise therein. I would pretend I had ten thousand dollars, and see how many blocks it would take before the imaginary ten thousand was spent. Some days, I could get all the way to Ninety-Sixth street. Some days I couldn’t even go a block. I bought myself a present every day.
I sent out a hundred résumés, accompanied by a fine letter with the Pierre’s logo embossed on the eager cover letter. Then I waited. And still I waited. Nothing came back, not a word. I gave out the Pierre’s number, thinking it added a touch of gloss. Nothing. Sometimes I would take a nap in the afternoon, and ask the telephone operator to hold any calls until I let her know. It was a useless thing to do. There was never a call.
Still, it was going to be great. They even let me smoke in the room, which was a thing that was increasingly hard to come by. Smoking was being stamped out everywhere, one of life’s great pleasures, but in really expensive hotels they still let you smoke. I delighted in every puff. I was riding a river of cash that was without end, or so I told myself, except in the dead of night when the cold sweats came and I calculated exactly how far I was from zero.
Security at the hotel was almost invisible, making you think you roamed free and safe in a blessed and fragrant meadow, filled with those enormous flower arrangements, although there must have been a thousand eyes following your every move. So you had to be careful who you brought home with you, you didn’t want to sully the splendor and grace of the hallways with the wrong kind of riffraff. I brought somebody home every night, women, men, sometimes both. Fantastic men and women you paid money to have sex with, paid in cash and cocaine. The staff and the elevator operators never said a word. At Christmas, I gave everybody who could walk fifty dollars, and I gave Mr. Papandreou, the manager of the hotel, five hundred. I put a tree in the room, and we all decorated it, and the hotel sent champagne and a cake. It was like being Eloise with six-
pack abs.
It was the perfect way to live. I might as well have taken all my money and put it in the middle of Fifth Avenue and poured gasoline on it and set it on fire. I woke up every morning terrified that this time I had caught AIDS from a hooker, but I still brought them home with me almost every night. I didn’t want to sleep alone. I was lonely. And there was such marvelous beauty to be had.
Then, one night in January—it was snowing, I remember—I met Casey on Lexington Avenue, strolling and trolling with the other hookers. The other women were warm and enticing, dark and lissome and eager. They emanated warmth and comfort.
Casey was chilly. Not little-matchstick-girl cold in any pathetic way, she just looked chilly as the snowflakes swirled around her boyishly short blonde hair, and settled, leaving diamonds of water all over her head, a sparkling tiara under the streetlight.
I stopped and said hello, in that way you do, letting her know that she was, for the night at least, the chosen one. She pulled her coat more tightly around her and said hello so softly a passing taxi whisked it away.
Something happened. I took her hand. That is never done, not ever, but she put her small, cold hand in mine as naturally as anything, and we began to walk back up Lexington and toward the hotel. We looked like any affectionate couple anywhere in the world.
I told her my name. My real name.
“Casey” was all she said.
“Well, Casey, here we are.”
“And here we go.”
“Again you mean.”
“No. No. I didn’t mean anything. Just trying to be friendly.” She paused. “You say hello a lot in this business.”
“Hello.”
“Hello. But nobody takes your hand. Not ever.”
“It’s a pretty hand. Warm?”
“Warmer now. Thanks for asking. Where are we going?”
I told her and she tried not to be impressed, but you could tell she was. And you felt a loosening, a relaxing of her guard. Nothing bad would happen to her at the Pierre. Nothing bad ever happened to anybody at the Pierre.
We walked along in the snow. “It’s nice, though,” she said.
“What?”
“Holding hands. Nobody wants to touch you except when, you know, when they’re fucking you.”
“You looked cold.”
“Most people wouldn’t notice. To them you’re only one thing. A catalog of body parts.”
We got to the hotel, and went to my room. Casey admired the view, and looking down at all the rooftop gardens, winter now, she said that one day she was going to have a garden like that. Casey looked at the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, hazy in the snow and the mist, and mentioned Georgia O’Keeffe.
Then we took our clothes off. She liked a dim room, and I did, too, that moment when the shadows disappear into dark and you’re living solely in the land of touch and desire.
She was terrible in bed. Not for lack of trying, or even pliability and kindness, but this was a girl who wasn’t going to win any awards at the Hooker Ball.
She tried. Her body drew warmth from mine and her skin became like a dawn rose. But she knew none of the tricks of the trade, the oh baby’s and special posturing and entreaties that made most good hookers worth the five hundred dollars. She didn’t know, as they did, how to make you feel, in that moment, in that slanting light and swirl of snow, to make you feel like the only man on earth.
Casey was an amateur, and that kind of turned me on, but the more I approached, the more my body sang, the deafer she became.
I drew away. “I know,” she said. “I’m not very good, am I? Most men don’t care. They just don’t tip me. I don’t do this because I want to. It’s OK. You don’t have to pay me. It’s not your fault. You are . . .” she thought for a minute, “. . .
éblouissant
.”