Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (21 page)

SNOOKER WITH JULIAN BARNES

Julian Barnes and I agreed to dispute the best of five frames of snooker and then write about it for
Esquire
magazine. This is my version.

By analogy with Whirlwind White and Hurricane Higgins, I am known, in the snooker world, as Earthquake Amis. A
flair
player, one who relies on
natural ability,
his only academy the pool halls and borstal rec-rooms of a
misspent youth:
inconsistent, foul-tempered, over-ambitious, graceless alike in victory and defeat, and capable of missing
anything.
On the other hand, I do hit the ball tremendously hard and with various violent spins. A while ago I considered changing my snookering nickname (which I am at complete liberty to do, because I'm the only one who ever uses it), to take account of the New Weather: global warming, and so on. I briefly became known as Ozone Amis. But the past summer saw a reversion to the Old Weather (cloud and warm rain: England in July, where the cricketer casts no shadow), and somehow Earthquake has stuck.

I have thought long and hard and often over the years about a suitable nickname for my opponent. Let's see. Snooker frames with Julian last about twice as long as they do with anybody else. His play is marked by exaggerated, even psychotic caution, as if, after the slightest lapse on his part, I will coolly rise from my chair and assemble a century clearance — rather than a single miscued jump-shot double-kiss
in-off.
Otherwise he is persistent, deliberate, gentlemanly, and unpitying. He is at his strongest (and I am at my weakest) when only six or seven balls remain, when wariness is all. Oh, how he loves to thwart and hamper... Blizzard Barnes, then, I quickly rejected: the temperature's right, but the agitation is way off target. The way he wears you down, the way he bleeds you white — if his name were Julian Games, he would have long been known as the Glacier. The appealing aptness of slow-moving natural processes led me to flirt with Geology Jules. Finally, though, because his style resembles not a force of nature so much as a medium of measurement or response (response to pressure, atmospheric pressure), I settled on something less personal: Barometer Barnes.

We used to play for money, he and I, twenty years ago. Pounds sterling changed hands, in note form - and they really mattered. A win or a loss could affect how well you lived for a day or two. I nearly always won, as I remember; and as we left the club or the hall I would make quite a show of hailing a taxi, offering to drop Julian off at the nearest tube. When, years later, he bought his own table (and a house big enough to put it in), and we started playing regularly, almost weekly, we wondered whether we should go on playing for money. Because the money didn't matter now, and our games were more evenly and bitterly fought, and we agreed that the rivalry shouldn't - and indeed couldn't - get any tenser. It's all a nightmare anyway.

Unlike the Barometer, who is largely faithful and wholly site-tenacious, the Earthquake puts out all over town. My casual opponents include a biographer, an entrepreneur, a political analyst, a tennis pro, a handyman, a philosopher and a hustler (who casually obliterates the fifty-point leads he gives me in a torrent of pinks and blacks). All these players can make me flinch and squirm: but it's nothing compared to the torment meted out bv the Barometer. With him. even when I'm an inch away from clear victory, I sometimes wonder if I have
ever
suffered so. Why is this? Because we have 'contrasting styles', and go back a long way, and are both novelists? No. It's because there's nothing in it. We're equal. Each frame is decided by the tiniest psychological edge, by sniggering fate — by the sneer of the snooker gods who determine the rub of the green.

I prepared for the match with an early night, a breakfast rich in carbohydrates, and, later that morning, a secret visit to a local club, where, with a pensive pint of low-ale lager, I practised alone: to get the spasms out of my cueing arm, to neutralise the excitement (i.e. panic) of one's induction into the verdant six-bagged oblong. With epic nonchalance I motored north. We've each had our hot streaks, I won't deny: the whammy has changed hands many times. For a while, as Julian once accurately and hauntingly said to me, 'You now come here with fear in your heart.' But in recent weeks the whammy has been mine: just. Barometer Barnes received me calmly. He was pretending to take an interest in the Edberg-McEnroe fourth-rounder at Wimbledon, further claiming to see an encouraging paradigm in Edberg, the expressionless icicle, versus McEnroe, the scowling has-been. Of course, we hardly needed to say, as we made our way upstairs, that we were both nervous wrecks.

Our cues bespeak us — both, coincidentally, presents from our wives (pious admirers, naturally, of their husbands' baizecraft). The Barometer's cue is a one-piece broadsword, the Earthquake's a two-piece rapier, which, moreover, comes in a yob-heaven black leatherette case with twin combination locks. His tip is ponderously large, half the size of the cue-ball; mine is as slender as a sting — excellent for spins and miscues. The blinds were lowered. The gentlemen ruminatively chalked. I felt confident and self-possessed, and recovered quickly from the catastrophe of losing the toss.

The pattern of our recent frames has been as follows. I go into the end-game (the colours) with a lead of about 30 — and then win on the black. The equivalent in tennis would be a 6-0 lead in the tie-break, and eventual victory at 19-17. This was, at least, an improvement on an earlier pattern, where I went into the end-game with a lead of about 30 - and then
lost
on the black. That's the Barometer for you: never more dangerous than when in the portals of the slaughterhouse. The man's an animal. My brain is encrusted with scar tissue from all the frames he has pinched and nicked. I can so easily fall apart ... In frame one I went into the colours, feeling completely hysterical, with a lead of about 30 — and won on the brown! 61-32. No sweat. Rack 'em.

Frame two, I say with tears of pride in my eyes, was a near duplicate, 51-14, my opponent disgustedly resigning with blue, pink and black still on the table. I was impressed. I was astounded. I hadn't relaxed or over-reached or crumbled or collapsed. I saved all that for frame three. All wobble and tremor, the Quake just wasn't making it on to the Richter Scale. His eyes now lit by a weak leer of hope, Barometer Barnes closed me out on the pink: 35-43.

Here's a little confession. Julian and I are not terribly good at snooker. But we
can
be terribly bad at it. The longest, if not the highest, break of the day was my five-bailer, which scored 8 (green, yellow, three reds). There was also a 15 (me), a 13 (him) and a 12 (me). My opponent secured his third-frame win, for example, by rifling in breaks of 4, 7, 6, 5 and 3. The fourth frame, though, was an all-howler affair, a series of abject calamities. The builders on the scaffolding outside must have thought that the house contained a pack of feral beasts, groaning at their captivity, their ill-treatment, their lousy food. At one point the score stood at 13—18, without a colour potted. The only ball that seemed to find the pocket was the white, in a bad dream of
in-offs
and
in-withs —
plus, from Julian, a world-class
in-instead,
the cue-ball struck with such a prodigious unintentional side-spin that after a deadened impact it ambled on grimly into the corner bag. Altogether appropriately and ingloriously, the frame ended with the Barometer's
in-off
the black, the ball lasering in on the middle pocket at a preposterous angle. 58—46. The taste of victory is sweet.

Actually I felt strangely subdued as I drove home. Gutted for the Barometer, no doubt. He took it like a man, which is better than I would have taken it. I would have taken it like a boy. Later, though, I felt tremendously happy and high-souled. I felt as if I had singlehandedly wrecked San Francisco. It occurred to me that all the pleasure of snooker comes either in anticipation or retrospect. On the table, everything is a falling-short, hamfisted, cross-purposed — a mortified groping. Come to think of it, the same goes for tennis, chess, poker, darts and pinball. Asked about his writing, the great Jimmy White once admitted that he wasn't much good at it, adding: 'Not much good at the reading neither. Either.' I
can
read and write, and to a high standard. As for the snooker, well, to approach the televisual ideal, by which we all measure ourselves, I'd have to do nothing else for the rest of my life. Then snooker might work out and measure up, with everything going where you want it to go, at the right weight and angle. Then snooker might feel like writing.

1991

ROBOCOP II

ROBOCOP: PRIME DIRECTIVES

1  Serve the Public Trust

2  Protect the Innocent

3  Uphold the Law

RoboCop II - and I mean the robot, not the movie - looks like a wasp-waisted three-ton Swiss Army penknife with all its blades outturned: cutters, skewers, pincers, gougers. Called 'The Monster' in the script and on the set, this sizzling cyborg is not RoboCop's successor but his adversary. 'The concept of two robots duking it out', says one of his creators, 'was a given.' Part Man, Part Machine, All Psychopath, RoboCop II is also, for good measure, a drug-addict, a vigorous abuser of a substance called
Nuke.
He is programmed to Break the Law, Protect the Guilty, and Trash the Public Trust. 'We're very pleased with him,' says his chief designer. 'The face is great. Those twin panels shoot back revealing a digitalised screen, with receding lines giving a weird to-infinity effect.' For now, the curved diagonal panels remain closed, impeccably hostile and severe, like the sharp prow — the leading edge — of the future.

Last fall, downtown Houston was also giving a good imitation of the henceforward. The main precincts are deserted after 6 pm - for this is a modern city, and no one is seriously expected to live in it. You
work
in it. Elegantly alienated youths rollerskate through the empty malls. They aren't sullen or simmering or smashed; they are just not interested. Later, the night sky will contain the faint reports of gunfire: the crack wars of the crack gangs. Driving through the more depressed areas the next day, you will find the streets littered with beercans, hookers ('Hey, white boy!'), undergarments, human wigs - and the nomadic poor, clustered in the steel and concrete crevices of the city; soon, the police will come and briskly pressure-hose them out of there, and they will be obliged to regroup somewhere else. But not downtown, where the future is contentedly going about its business. Look into the magenta glass of the looming skyscraper, and what do you see? The reflection of another skyscraper — and then another, and then another.

This month there is street theatre in Houston: the making of
RoboCop II.
Onlookers gather early behind the police lines. The crowd (mostly black) has come to see what the imported natives (mostly white) will get up to this evening, what explosions and firestorms they will stage, what miracles of wreckage they will achieve: what strafings, what stompings, what splatterings. The
ahs
and
ows
of this first preview audience are strictly calibrated to the size of the bang, the height of the flamespout. All week the night action takes place amid the fortress architecture of Houston's cultural centre: between the theatre and the opera house. The filmmakers are obliged by the city to get through their most thunderous scenes before 8 pm, when the curtain goes up on the other performance (tonight, a rock opera of
Measure for Measure).
But they never make it.

'HOLD THE SMOKE!' says the Assistant Director into his bullhorn. 'I'LL NEED SOME BEEF.' Beef means muscle, means sceneshifters - for the upended cars, the shattered stanchions. 'I SAID HOLD THE SMOKE,,,
MORE
BEEF!'

A mist of stardom shrouds the trailer of Peter Weller, who has yet to appear. Everyone waits. A rejuvenated, reglamorised Nancy Allen sits chatting on a director's chair (her handsome new boyfriend is near by, the silent custodian of her second blooming). Nancy plays Lewis, RoboCop's sidekick. It is a pivotal role, and she understands its centrality. She is the only 'real' presence in both movies: everyone else is either a hood, a corporation ogre, a scientist, or a robot. Nancy is happy to kill time; indeed, she is an expert time-killer, like all movie stars, for there is much time to kill. Everyone waits. Weapons expert Randy Moore trundles on to the set to deal with 'a blanks problem'. Randy's outrageous handguns and bazookas look at home in Houston: they wouldn't seem out of place, you feel, in the average Texan kitchen. At length, Randy resolves the blanks problem, and everyone goes back to what they were doing before: waiting.

Unbelievably, about five hours later, two whole shots are in the can. Nancy has scaled an armed-personnel carrier and successfully back-kicked a security guard in the face. And Peter has scaled a media truck and readied himself to pounce on The Monster. But the street audience is unconvinced, and gives a collective shrug before it disperses, as if to say, 'Is that
it
?' And you sympathise. You want to explain to the Houston crowd that what they are getting is, as yet, only half-formed, only half-made. As yet, the illusion is embarrassingly - but necessarily — incomplete. Peter hasn't got his RoboCop pants on, for instance (the shot is only waist-up). And Nancy's back-kick looks dainty and innocuous. And the battleground is littered with scene-coordinators with their walkie-talkies. And the corporation HQ seems punily small-scale. And The Monster is still in the prop shop . . .

This is the thing with
RoboCop:
it all comes later — the sheen, the
finish.
What you see here in Houston is just raw material, the chaos of the merely contemporary. Only in the lab will it take on the hard edge of the future.
RoboCop
is itself a sign of things to come; the new depth of illusion, the widening gulf between set and screen. On screen, the corporation HQ will have a matte painting on it and will loom eighty storeys high. The scene-coordinators will be blacked out of shot. The Monster will be on duty. Peter will appear to have his pants on. And Nancy's back-kick will be crunchy.