by Martin Amis
Yesterday afternoon. I was doing then what I'm doing now. It's one of my favourite activities — you might even call it a hobby. I was lying on the bed and drinking cocktails and watching television, all at the same time... Television is cretinizing me — I can feel it. Soon I'll be like the TV artists. You know the people I mean. Girls who subliminally model themselves on kid-show presenters, full of faulty melody and joy, Melody and Joy. Men whose manners show newscaster interference, soap stains, film smears. Or the cretinized, those who talk on buses and streets as if TV were real, who call up networks with strange questions, stranger demands ... If you lose your rug, you can get a false one. If you lose your laugh, you can get a false one. If you lose your mind, you can get a false one.
The telephone rang. 'Yeah?'
There was silence — no, not silence but a faint parched whistle, dreary and remote, like the sound that lives inside my head. Perhaps this was the sound the Atlantic made with all its mass and space.
'Hello? Selina? Say something, for Christ's sake. Who's paying for this call?'
'Money,' said a man's voice. 'Always money, the money.'
'Alec. Who is this?'
'It isn't Selina, man. I'm not Selina.'
I waited.
'Oh, I'm not anybody very special at all. I'm just the guy whose life you fucked up. That's all I am.'
'Who are you? I don't know you.'
'The man says he doesn't know me. How many guys' lives you fucked up recently? Maybe you ought to keep score.'
Where was this coming from? Would the hotel telephonist know? Had I fucked up anyone's life recently? Not that I could recall...
'Come on,' I said, 'who needs this? I'm hanging up.'
'WAIT!' he said — and I thought, at once, with relief: Oh, he's mad. So there's no real problem. It's not my fault. Everything's fine, fine.
'Okay. Say your bit.'
'Welcome to New York,' he began. 'Flight 666, room 101. Thank you for flying Trans-American. Don't mess with cabbies, don't fight with drunks. Don't walk Ninety-Ninth Street. Don't go to topless bars. You want to buy Dawn a drink? Stay out of those porno stores you've been eyeing. They'll wreck your head. Stay drunk for when we meet. And give me back my fucking money.'
'... Wait. Hey. What's your name?'
The line died. I put down the receiver and picked it up again.
'It was a local call, sir,' the girl told me. 'Everything all right, sir?'
'Yes,' I said. 'Thank you. Everything's fine, fine.'
Wow, I thought — this is a new wrinkle. It was a local call, no question. It was very local indeed.
——————
Two-forty, and I was out on Broadway, heading north. Now, how bad do you assume I'm feeling?... Well, you're wrong. I'm touched by your sympathy (and want much, much more of it: I want sympathy, even though I find it so very hard to behave sympathetically). But you're wrong, brother. Sister, you slipped. I didn't feel too great this morning, true. A ninety-minute visit to Pepper's Burger World, on the other hand, soon sorted that lot out. I had four Wallies, three Blastfurters, and an American Way, plus a nine-pack of beer. I'm a bit full and sleepy, perhaps, but apart from that I'm ready for anything.
I wondered, as I burped up Broadway, I wondered how this town ever got put together. Some guy was dreaming big all right. Starting down in Wall Street and nosing ever upward into the ruins of the old West Side, Broadway snakes through the island, the only curve in this world of grids. Somehow Broadway always contrives to be just that little bit shittier than the zones through which it bends. Look at the East Village: Broadway's shittier than that. Look uptown, look at Columbus: Broadway's shittier. Broadway is the moulting python of strict New York. I sometimes feel a bit like that myself. Here the fools sway to Manhattan time.
Now what's all this about me playing tennis with Fielding Goodney? Do you remember me making this ridiculous arrangement? Remind me. This morning, as I sat sobbing over my first cigarette, Fielding rang and said, 'Okay, Slick. I fixed the court. Let's do it.'
Well of course I kept quiet, and nonchalantly transcribed the address he gave. I happen to have an old pair of sneakers with me, and a T-shirt of sorts. Fielding will supply the trunks. As for tennis, I thought to myself — yeah, I can play that stuff. A mere four or five 'summers back you could have seen me out there, gambolling around the court. I haven't played since, but I've watched an awful lot of tennis on television.
Carrying my stuff in a plastic duty-free bag, I followed leaning Broadway up past the loops and circuses at the corner of the Park and into the West Side with its vacant lots and gaping car chutes. The numbered streets plodded slowly by. I kept expecting to see a sports complex or a gymnasium, or one of those shady squares of green that surprise you in the streets of London. 'You've screwed up again,' I thought, when I came to the building that Fielding had specified. It was a skyscraper, whose glassy lines climbed like a strip of film into the open blue. I went in anyway and asked the oldtimer.
'A fifteenth,' he said.
What was Fielding playing at? I rode the lift, which barrelled me up through the dead floors marked with an X. In the corridor I passed a familiar face — that of Chip Fournaki, a swarthy pro who usually flopped foul-temperedly in the semis of the major competitions. A few seconds later I passed Nick Karebenkian, Chip's doubles partner.
The door buzzed and I stepped into the loud green of an equatorial anteroom. On the astroturf carpet stood Fielding Goodney, drinking real orange juice from a tall beaker. His skin had the perennial tan, highlighting the milky down on his limbs and the sharp creases of his pristine shorts and shirt, the chunky bleach of his high-tec footwear.
'Hey, Slick,' he said, and turned towards the glass wall. I joined him. As if from the bridge of a ship we looked down on to the court. It was television: two top grand-slammers thwacking it out, all grunt and sprint. At the far end of the deck was another window. Behind the dark screen sat twenty or thirty people. The court itself must have been three floors deep. A hundred dollars an hour? Two hundred? Three?
'Who are they over there?' I asked.
'They just come in and watch. See that kid down there? Jo'burg out of Texas. Eleventh on the computer. He's under investigation by the TPA. He takes guarantee money to appear in the minor majors. Bribes. It's illegal, but practically the whole top thirty are triple earners. There's going to be a real shitstorm in a couple of years. They should legalize it, fast. I'm a capitalist, Slick. I'm a good capitalist. It's supply and demand. Why fight it? Here are your trunks.'
He pointed to the door.
'Oh, Mr Goodney,' I heard the white-smocked lady sing. 'You'll finish prompt, won't you. Sissy Skolimowsky is on at four, and you know what she's like.'
I knew what Sissy Skolimowsky was like too. She was the world champion.
So I slipped into my gear next door. Hippie-red, tanktop drummer's T-shirt, Fielding's hideous trunks (they weren't tennis shorts at all, damn it: they were skintight Bermudas, with golfing check), black socks, my cracked and parched sneakers ... Usually, as I think I've said, New York is a holiday from the nine-to-five of my social shame. But I felt a bad premonition now — intense, adolescent. I tiptoed to the can. The shoes pinched like crazy: my feet must still have jet-lag, jet-swell. I unzipped the trunks and did my thing. The pee looked awful pale against the Vitamin B-steeped mothballs of the curved jug. I turned. There was a mirror. Oh forget it. They won't let you play anyway.
But they did. The lady gave me a startled glance — at the tureen of my gut, no doubt, and at the crushed bullybag in the wide-checked Bermudas — but she gave me my racket and opened the door. I came down the steps and on to the deck. Fielding had already loped hungrily to the far end, holding his barndoor-sized steel bat in one hand and a dozen yellow tennis balls in the other.
'Want to hit for a while?' he shouted, and the first of the balls was burning through the air towards me.
——————
I should have realized that when Engl
ish people say they can play tennis they don't mean what Americans mean when they say they can play tennis. Americans mean that they can play tennis. Even in my prime I was never more than an all-weather park-player. A certain wrong-footing slyness has sometimes enabled me to dink and poke my way to victory over more talented players. But basically I'm a dog on the court. Fielding was good. Oh, he was good. And there were differences of health, muscle-tone and coordination to be accounted for too. Fielding, tanned, tuned, a king's ransom of orthodonture having passed through his mouth, reared on steaks and on milk sweetened with iron and zinc, twenty-five, leaning into his strokes and imparting topspin with a roll of the wrist. Me, I lolloped and leapt for my life at the other end, 200 pounds of yob genes, booze, snout and fast food, ten years older, charred and choked on heavy fuel, with no more to offer than my block drive and backhand chip. I looked up at the glass window above Fielding's head. The middle-management of Manhattan stared on, their faces as thin as credit cards.
'Okay,' said Fielding. 'You want to serve?'
'You do it.'
I watched Fielding bend forward, pat the ball, then straighten up to aim his gun. My serve is no more than a convulsion which occasionally produces a baseline overhead. But Fielding was precise in his stance, measured in his action, with a touch of the severity that all natural ballplayers have. What is it with ballplayers? What is it about roundness that they understand better than we do? The world is round. They understand that too.
His opening serve I didn't see at all. It fizzed past me, losing its definition for a moment on the centre line, before thwacking first bounce into the green canvas behind my back. The passage of the ball seemed to leave a comet's trail of yellow against the artificial green of the court.
'Nice one,' 1 called, and trudged across in my black socks and checked Bermudas. This time I managed to get a line on Fielding's first serve: it smacked into the tape with a volume that made me whimper — the sound of a strong hand slapping a strong belly. I edged up a few feet as Fielding daintily removed the second ball from the pocket of his tailored shorts. I twirled my racket and swayed around a bit... But his second serve was a real dilly too. Hit late and low with what I guessed was a backhand grip, the ball came looping over the net, landed deep, and kicked like a bastard. It jumped so high that I could return it only with a startled half-smash. Fielding had come sauntering up to the net, of course, and angled the ball away with acute dispatch. He aced me again at thirty-love, but on the last point of the game I got another crack at that second serve of his. I stood my ground and lobbed the brute, quite accurately, and Fielding had to stroll back from the service line to retrieve it. That lob was my last shot, really. I was never a contender after that. We had a rally of sorts: Fielding stood at the centre of his base line while I hurled myself around the court. Put it away, I kept telling him, but there were a good few strokes exchanged before he chose to place the ball beyond my reach.
We switched ends. I didn't meet his eye. I hoped he couldn't hear my hoarse gasps for air. I hoped he couldn't smell — I hoped he couldn't see—the junk-fumes swathing my face like heat-ripple. As I took position I glanced up at our audience in their high aquarium. They were smiling down.
My opening serve flopped into the net, six inches from the ground. My second serve is a dolly and Fielding murdered it in his own sweet time, leaning back before putting all his weight into the stroke. I didn't even chase his return. The same thing happened on the next point. At love-thirty I served so blind and wild that Fielding simply reached out and caught the ball on the volley. He pocketed it and strolled forward a few paces - several paces. I moved wide and, in petulant despair, hit my second serve as if it were my first. And it went in! Fielding was less surprised than I was but he only just got his racket to the ball — and he was so insultingly far advanced that his return was nothing more than a skied half-volley. The yellow ball plopped down invitingly in the centre of my court. I hit it pretty low, hard and deep to Fielding's backhand and lumbered cautiously up to the net. A big mistake. Fielding chose this moment to untether a two-fisted topspin drive. The ball came screaming over the tape, skipped a beat, regathered its tilt and momentum—and punched me in the face. I toppled over backwards and my racket fell with a clatter. For several shocked seconds I lay there like an old dog, an old dog that wants its old belly stroked. Now how's this going to look? I got to my feet. I rubbed my nose.
'You okay, Slick?'
'Yeah. I'm cool,' I murmured. I bent down for my racket, and straightened up. Behind the glass wall the sea-creatures watched from their pool. Sharp faces. That's right, get your staring done with.
And so it went on. I won about half-a-dozen points — from Fielding's double-faults, from net-cords and shots off the wood, and from telling lies about a couple of the calls. I kept wanting to say: 'Look, Fielding, I know this is costing you a lot of money and everything.
But do you mind if I stop? Because I think I might DIE if I don't.' I didn't have the breath. After five minutes I was playing with a more or less permanent mouthful of vomit. It was the slowest hour of my life, and I've had some slow hours.
The first set went six-love. So did the second. We were about nine-love in the third when Fielding said, 'You want to play or you just want to hit?'
'... Let's hit.'
Finally a bell rang, and Sissy Skolimowsky appeared with her coach. Fielding appeared to know this chunky, white-skinned girl.
'Hi,' she said.
'Hey, Siss,' said Fielding. 'Okay if we watch?'
She was already on the line, starting work. 'You can watch,' she said, 'but you can't listen. Shit!'
But I was staggering off by this time. Ten minutes later, I was still slumped wheezing and gagging on a director's chair in the ante-room when Fielding trotted up the steps. He squeezed my shoulder.
'I'm sorry, I...'
'Relax, Slick,' he said. 'You just need to sink a couple of thou into your backhand, maybe a grand on your serve. You should quit smoking, drink less, eat right. You should go to high-priced health clubs and fancy massage studios. You should undergo a series of long, painful and expensive operations. You ought to — '
'Look, shut the fuck up, will you. I'm not in the mood.'
'Your funeral, Slick. I just want you to stick around for a while. You'll be a rich man by the time I'm done. I just want you to enjoy.'
Pretty soon, Fielding jogged off back to the Carraway. I went and sat next door in the changing-room. I stared at the pimpled tiles. I thought if I could just stay completely still for the next half an hour, then maybe nothing too bad would happen. One twitch, I reckoned, one blink, and the changing-room was in for some restricted special effects ... Then six huge guys came in — I guess from the squash courts, down the passage somewhere. These gleaming, stinging jocks were all shouting and swearing and farting as they stripped for the shower. I never saw their faces. I couldn't raise my head without copping an open-beaver shot of some armpit or scribble-haired backside. Once I opened my eyes to see a great raw dick dangling two inches from my nose, like a pornographic reprisal. Then they had a ten-minute towel-fight. The chick in the smock even poked her head round the door and hollered at them through the steam... I couldn't take it any longer. I weepily gathered my street clothes and crammed them into the duty-free bag. I hit Sixty-Sixth Street in sweat-looped tanktop, knee-length Bermudas, black socks and squelchy gyms. Come to think of it, I must have looked exactly like everyone else. My body craved darkness and silence but the sun's controls were all turned up full blast as I screamed for cabs in the yellow riot of Broadway.
——————
There is only one way to get good at fighting: you have to do it a lot.
The reason why most people are no good at fighting is that they do it so seldom, and, in these days of high specialization, no one really expects to be good at anything unless they work out at it and put in some time. With violence, you have to keep your hand in, you have to have a repertoire. When I was a kid, gro
wing up in Trenton, New Jersey, and later on the streets of Pimlico, I learned these routines one by one. For instance, can you butt people (i.e. hit them in the face with your face — a very intimate form of fighting, with tremendous power to appal and astonish)? I took up butting when I was ten. After a while, after butting a few people (you try to hit them with your rugline, hit them in the nose, mouth, cheekbone — it doesn't much matter), I thought, 'Yeah: I can butt people now.' From then on, butting people was suddenly an option. Ditto with ball-kneeing, shin-kicking and eye-forking; they were all new ways of expressing frustration, fury and fear, and of settling arguments in my favour. You have to work at it, though. You learn over the years, by trial and error. You can't get the knack by watching TV. You have to use live ammunition. So, for example, if you ever tangled with me, and a rumble developed, and you tried to butt me, to hit my head with your head, you probably wouldn't be very good at it. It wouldn't hurt. It wouldn't do any damage. All it would do is make me angry. Then I'd hit your head with my head extra hard, and there would be plenty of pain and maybe some damage too.
Besides, I'd probably butt you long before it ever occurred to you to butt me. There's only one rule in street and bar fights: maximum violence, instantly. Don't pussyfoot, don't wait for the war to escalate. Nuke them, right off. Hit them with everything, milk bottle, car tool, clenched keys or coins. The first blow has to give everything. If he takes it, and you go down, then you get all he has to mete out anyway. The worst, the most extreme violence — at once. Extremity is the only element of surprise. Hit them with everything. No quarter.
——————
Well I really beat myself up out on the court there, I'll tell you that. For seventy-two hours I just lay in my pit at the hotel. The tinnitus was operational pretty well full time, and that toothache of mine got much more complicated: it would kick me awake with sirens of pain, loud, inordinate, braiding, twisting, like currents in a river. I'd fucked my back, too, out on the deck—and there was this incredible welt up the rear of my thigh where I'd fallen and tobogganed across the mat on my can for a few yards, wrong-footed by Fielding. Last but not least, I seemed to have developed an acute gastric condition, maybe from all those frazzled junkfurters. Or maybe it's just a compound hangover, I don't know. For the first day I was pure turbo power, a human hovercraft over the bowl. Oh, I had lift-off... The maid lurked but never got a look in, and soon the room was really showing its age.
