The Man Who Lived by Night (25 page)

I looked down at him. He may not have been the handsomest man I’d ever seen, but he was close. So handsome he was almost pretty. He had wavy blond hair, a high forehead, prominent cheekbones, and a delicate, rosy mouth. His complexion was fair and free of blemishes. The nose, aside from the blood caked on it, was perfect. So was the chin. His eyes were set wide apart. I wondered what color they were. I guessed blue. It was the face of a sensitive boy. It didn’t go with the rest of him. He was a big man with huge, sloping shoulders and powerful arms. His chest was deep, his waist was narrow, his stomach flat and ridged with muscle. The words
Born to Lose
were tattooed on his left bicep. The hands were monstrous and work roughened. The legs belonged on a modest-sized plow horse. It was the body of a laborer or an outside linebacker, or the young Brando. It was a body that didn’t fit with the face.

I looked down at him and wondered. Cameron Noyes had it all. He was young, handsome, brilliant, rich, and famous. And he was trashing it. Why? This I would have to find out.

I heard something rolling on the bare wooden floor. Lulu had made a small discovery under the bed and was nosing it toward me. It was a woman’s lipstick. Red. I picked it up and put it on the nightstand next to the tequila.

Then I went downstairs to the kitchen. The refrigerator was empty except for a half-eaten sausage-and-mushroom pizza from John’s, the coal-fired pizzeria on Bleeker. I went to work on a slice. I’d missed lunch, and there’s no greater delicacy than cold pizza, except for licorice ice cream, and there wasn’t any of that in the freezer. Just a bottle of Polish vodka and four trays of ice cubes. These I dumped in an empty joining-compound bucket from the cellar. I filled the bucket with cold water from the sink, swooshed it around, and carried it back upstairs. When I got to the bed, I hefted it, took careful aim, and dumped half of its contents on the naked, fully exposed groin of Cameron Noyes. He instantly let out a lion’s roar of shock and pain and sat right up, his eyes — they
were
blue — bulging from his head. I gave him the other half of the bucket in the face. Then I wiped my hands and sat down and asked myself what the hell I was doing there.

Y
OU COULD TAKE YOUR
pick with Cameron Sheffield Noyes.

You could call him the brightest, most gifted boy wonder to shine on American fiction since F. Scott Fitzgerald lit up the Jazz Age. Or you could call him an obnoxious, big-mouthed, young shithead. The only thing you couldn’t do was ignore him.

Not since his sophomore year at Columbia, when this strapping young part-time male model and full-time blue blood had submitted the manuscript for a slim first-person novel to Tanner Marsh, who teaches creative writing there. Marsh also edits the
New Age Fiction Quarterly
, and happens to be the single most influential literary critic in New York. Marsh read the little manuscript, which told the story of a shy, privileged, young Ivy Leaguer who suffers a nervous breakdown while studying for finals and runs off to an Atlantic City hotel-casino with the middle-aged cashier at the diner where he regularly breakfasts. There, besotted by drugs, alcohol, and sex, he blows both of their brains out. The novel was called
Bang
. Marsh was so knocked out by it he showed it to Skitsy Held, editor in chief of the small, prestigious Murray Hill Press. She shared his enthusiasm.
Bang
was published one month before Cameron Noyes’s twentieth birthday. A spectacular front-page review in the
New York Times Book Review
catapulted it, and its author, to instant celebrity. “It is as if young Scott Fitzgerald has come back to write
The Lost Weekend
while under the influence of cocaine and José Cuervo tequila,” raved the
Times
’ reviewer, who was none other than Tanner Marsh. “Indeed, Cameron Sheffield Noyes writes so wincingly well he must be considered the most brilliant new literary find since Stewart Hoag. One can only hope he will fare better.”

Critics. One thing they never seem to understand is that everyone, no matter how gifted, can roll out of bed one morning and have just a really rotten decade.

I read the damned thing, of course. How could I not? I read all 128 pages of it, and I thought it was absolutely brilliant. Oh, I wanted to hate it. Desperately. But I couldn’t.
Bang
captured the itchy ennui of the young as so few novels ever had. Cameron Noyes had a gift — for peering into the depths of his own soul and for coming back with pure gold. And he had the rarest gift of all. He had his own voice.

Lulu stayed out of my way for a whole week after I read it. I was not in a good mood.

Lonely, alienated teenagers who before might have turned to Plath or Salinger for comfort found Noyes much more to their liking.
Bang
understood them. It was dirty. It was
theirs
. It took off and stayed near the top of the bestseller lists for thirty-six weeks, the name of Noyes crowding out more familiar ones such as Michener and King. The paperback reprint went for close to a million. The movie version, which starred Charlie Sheen and Cher, made over $100 million, though fans of the book not to mention the movie’s first director — were put off by the studio-dictated happy ending, in which the hero has only
dreamt
the violent climax and awakens from it sobered and determined to get his degree.

Cameron Noyes wasn’t the only hot young novelist in town. It seemed as if a pack of baby authors had been let loose on the literary world with their hip, sassy tales of the young, the restless, the stoned. There was Jay McInerney, author of
Bright Lights
,
Big City
, Bret Easton Ellis with
Less Than Zero
, Tama Janowitz with
Slaves of New York
. They were a kind of universe unto themselves, an undertalented, overpaid, over-publicized universe at that. But Cameron Noyes was not like the others. He actually knew how to write, for one thing. And he knew how to grab like no one else. He appeared in ads for an airline, a credit card, a brand of jeans, a diet cola, and the Atlantic City casino where
Bang
was filmed.
Saturday Night Live
made him a guest host. MTV sent him to Fort Lauderdale to cover spring break as its guest correspondent.
Rolling Stone
put him on its cover. So did
People
, which called him the sexiest man alive. He was seldom lonely. Not a week went by without his appearing in the gossip columns and the supermarket tabloids, squiring one famous film or rock ’n’ roll beauty after another to Broadway premieres, charity bashes, celebrated murder trials. He had been with Charlie Chu, his current live-in love, for two months now. It was, they both told Barbara Waiters on network TV, a “once-in-a-lifetime thing.”

He made good copy. Indeed, Cameron Noyes seemed to revel in his own enfant-terrible outrageousness more than any young celebrity since John Lennon. “It’s true, I brought the remote-control generation to literature,” he told
Esquire
. “And they will keep on reading great books just as long as I keep writing them.” When he wasn’t blasting literary sacred cows of the past (“Hemingway and Fitzgerald are officially sanctioned culture — the boredom comes built in with the product”) and present (“Saul Bellows been dead since 1961. Isn’t it time someone told him?”), he was acting out his own style of commentary. He became so outraged, for instance, when real estate developer Donald Trump’s book hit number one on the bestseller list that he bought up every copy in every store on Fifth Avenue — several hundred in all — carted them into Central Park and made a bonfire out of them. For that he spent a night in jail. And while that little demonstration might have displayed a certain spirited cheekiness — not to mention good taste — a number of his lately had not. He ran over a pesky paparazzo with his car one night and nearly crippled him. He punched Norman Mailer at a black-tie benefit for the New York Public Library and broke two teeth. Currently, he held the unofficial record for turning over the most tables at Elaine’s while in the heat of a drunken argument: three.

He was a powder keg, a troubled young genius blessed with James Dean’s looks and John McEnroe’s personality. He was the perfect literary celebrity for his time, so perfect that if he hadn’t come along, someone would have invented him.

In a way, someone had. The mastermind behind the meteoric rise and phenomenal marketing of Cameron Noyes was twenty-four-year-old Boyd Samuels, who had been his college roommate and was now the most notorious literary agent in the business. Boyd Samuels had made a name for himself in publishing almost as fast as his star client had — for trying to steal big-name talent from other agents, for being unprincipled, for being a liar, and most important, for being such a damned success at it. Take Cameron Noyes’s much anticipated second novel. He wasn’t writing it for Skitsy Held. Samuels had simply blown his nose on his client’s signed contract with her, snatched Noyes away, and delivered him to a bigger, richer house willing to pay him a reported advance of a million dollars. Just exactly how Samuels had managed to pull this off — and why Skitsy Held, no cream puff, had let him — had been the subject of much speculation around town. Just as Noyes’s second novel was. Word was it was on the late side. Word was his new publisher was getting edgy. Hard to blame them. A million is a lot of money for a serious novel. Especially one by an author who had only just turned twenty-three.

It was Boyd Samuels who got me mixed up with Cameron Noyes. He called me one day and invited me up for a chat. I went. I had nothing better to do.

The Boyd Samuels Agency had a suite of offices on the top floor of the Flatiron Building, the gloriously ornate skyscraper built in 1902 at the elongated triangle where Broadway meets Fifth and Twenty-third. It was about 1957 in Boyd Samuels’s outer office, and it wasn’t so much an outer office as it was a diner — cute and kitschy as hell, too, right down to the shiny chrome counter and swivel stools, the pink and charcoal linoleum on the floor, the neon clock and the vintage jukebox, which was playing Eddie Cochran. It seemed as if everywhere I went that season I bumped into the fifties. I suppose young people are always nostalgic for a decade they didn’t have to live through.

Phones were ringing, people were bopping in and out of different office doors, snapping their fingers to the juke. None of them looked over twenty-five. Lulu and I waited at the front door until one of them, a tall, gangly, splay-footed kid with a Beaver Cleaver burrhead crew cut, hurried over to us from behind the counter. He wore a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt, jeans, and the look of someone who was used to getting whipped. His shoulders were hunched in the anticipation of blows, his eyes set in a permanent wince.

“Stewart Hoag, isn’t it?” he asked timidly, fastening his eyes to a spot on the wall about a foot over my head.

I said it was.

“I’m Todd Lesser, Boyd’s assistant. H-He’s on his way.”

“From … ?”

“Home,” he replied, explaining quickly, “he’s running a bit late this morning. He’ll be here in just a few minutes. Really. Care to wait in his office?”

“Nice decor,” I commented as we crossed to a corridor of offices. “If business is ever slow, you can sell burgers.”

“Business,” Todd said modestly, “is never slow.”

Boyd Samuels was into ugly. Ugly, kidney-shaped desk of salmon-colored plastic. Ugly art-moderne love seat of chrome and leopard skin. Ugly specimen cacti growing uninvitingly in pots in front of the window overlooking Madison Square Park. These Lulu ambled right for, sniffing delicately at them so as not to honk her large black nose on a prickle.

Todd eyed her warily. “Uh … she’s not going to … ”

“Just getting the lay of the land,” I assured him.

One wall of the office was floor-to-ceiling shelves displaying the many best-selling books by his many best-selling clients. Framed magazine covers and best-seller lists and rave reviews crowded the walls. Standing in one corner was a life-sized, full-color cardboard display cutout of Delilah Moscowitz, the statuesque, scrumptious, and sizzingly hot young sex therapist who was blowing Dr. Ruth out of the water, so to speak. Delilah’s looks, frisky wit, and bold irreverence toward such touchy subjects as fellatio, bondage, and her own rather uninhibited sex life had made her a sensation. She had a top syndicated newspaper column, a radio call-in show, a regular slot on
Good Morning America
, and now, thanks to Boyd Samuels, a surefire bestseller,
Tell Delilah
. “Good sex is all in the head,” read the promo copy on her cardboard cutout. “Take home the lady who gives the best head in the business.”

“Nice subtle approach,” I observed.

“Our newest star,” said Todd, beaming. “Her book has already hit the B. Dalton chain list. She’ll be appearing on
Donahue
and
Oprah
both, and Donna Karan and Norma Kamali are still fighting over her.”

“For … ?”

“They want her to wear their clothes on her national publicity tour. She looks fabulous in whatever she wears. The camera loves her.”

“Yes, she does give a whole new meaning to the word
bookish
,” I said, admiring her cutout. “I see Skitsy Held is her publisher. Interesting, considering what happened with Cameron Noyes.”

Todd frowned and shook his head. “No, not at all. B-Boyd always tries to make things work out even. Coffee?”

“Please. Black.”

He shambled out. I sat down on the love seat, which was as uncomfortable as it looked, and gazed over at the shelves crammed with all of the hot books by all of the hot authors. I listened to the phones ring — publishers calling with feelers, with firm offers, with promises of gold and village virgins. And I sighed inwardly. Once, the raves and magazine covers and phone calls were for me. Once, I’d swum in these swirling waters myself. And drowned in them.

Maybe you remember me. Then again, maybe you don’t. It has been a while since I burst onto the scene as the tall, dashing author of that fabulously successful first novel,
Our Family Enterprise
. Since the Times called me “the first major new literary voice of the eighties.” Since I married Merilee Nash, Joe Papp’s newest and loveliest leading lady, and became half of New York’s cutest couple. Since I had it all, and crashed. Dried up. No juices of any kind. No second novel. No Merilee. She got the eight rooms overlooking Central Park, the red 1958 Jaguar XK 150, the Tony for the Mamet play, the Oscar for the Woody Allen movie. Also a second husband, that brilliant young playwright, Zack something. She got it all. I ended up with Lulu, my drafty old fifth-floor walk-up on West Ninety-third Street, and a second, somewhat less dignified career — ghostwriter of celebrity memoirs.