God of Speed Page 14

  Whatever the question, the answer is always More. This is called chasing the tail that feeds you.

  Sleep is something else, of course. And I do not know where I have gone each night. Only that it feels, in the light of those translucent flakes of memory silently falling through the now-still air, that it was a sweaty place. That the tendency of cotton sheets will always be toward yellow. That morning is awful. (Or I mean to say, waking is awful, since it’s often afternoon.) And only the medicine will get one back on track. There are only compositions of consciousness. Oh apples of my eye. Oh overblossomed tree.

  Actually, Jack, it was in the Unreal City that this habit of not sleeping, deeply, the whole night through, became entrenched. In Las Vegas there are no clocks; time never really passes.

  You get the thing you want, but hardly. Hardly have you breathed your way into the next thought than the last thought fills you with yearning and is gone.

  To say nothing of all this constriction.

  NAKED IN THE EPOCH OF

  THE CLOTHES

  I’VE NOT BEEN wearing clothes a lot these past fifteen years because they are such a hindrance, really, when you look at it, when you think about it, rationally, deeply. And on the spectrum of priorities, there’s a lot of organizing to get through in terms of getting clothes on and off; time and energy better freed up for more important matters such as writing memos or running empires! Clothes are a complexity barely worth thinking about.

  Germs are the issue here, too, of course. Clothes are so replete with folds and crevices. It’s like giving those things a home, a festering ground. You might as well be sticking your hand down toilet bowls. Licking sidewalks. Rolling in the back alleys of restaurants. It is a teeming world of dangers. It is best to paint the windows black, several layers thick. As a bare minimum, in emergencies or temporary circumstances, thick curtains and masking tape suffice. Because here in London the proprietors were not happy with the paint idea, and I’m in no mood for buying the whole hotel. But what rides in even on sunlight can destroy us.

  You see, sunlight activates the particles of dust. That’s why you can see motes dancing in sunbeams. So a darkened room would mean reduced mote activity, and that means reduced chance of infection. There it is, everything operates according to a sublime logic. There are patterns of interference everywhere, ready to menace us, and there is a divine path opening out so smooth and clean that even sunlight passes straight through it. There is destruction and disease; then there is the electricity of ease. By this I mean there is an actual electrical charge carried through the Empirin, there is a colluding of molecules down the needle of the syringe that transmute into the platelets and cells of the blood. They are clean. In there, deep in the blood, there’s not a germ for miles around. But one must always be careful. The logical extension of all my theories is that electric lamps, properly placed in a room, unmoved, the globes being of moderate strength, are less liable to agitate the dust and the microbes than sunlight. There are worlds of death and strands of virus whirling on flakes of matter tinier than pinpricks. That is why my Latter Day Saints must help me in the quest for cleanliness.

  In fact, I remember when clothes first started annoying me, in the thirties when I was seeing Ginger Rogers, whose advances and retreats were inordinately frustrating—it was not a goddamned fencing match. Ginger, I loved her perhaps the most. Ginger, or Kate, or Jane Greer, perhaps even Ava Gardner, oh, and Billie Dove much earlier. When I think about it there were a few, but Ginger, I certainly loved her a lot.

  At the same time I was discovering the world of the east coast debutante balls, easy pickings from the socially ambitious in Newport and New York during the Ginger off-periods. The debutramps were happy girls in a bright new world. A few times off Newport I had rented luxury yachts, since the offer of a speedboat ride out to a floating palace for a glass of champagne on a moonlit deck seemed somehow to these teenage socialites less frightening than the journey inland via limousine to my hotel suite.

  So I’d fallen happily, luckily, upon a method.

  Then, of course, I wanted to make the method bigger and better and safer. So I sailed to Scotland and bought the Rover, and refitted it and renamed it the Southern Cross. I may have mentioned that already. Much effort was expended in the master bedroom. And yet there were times, with the gap so narrowed between desire and achievement, between compulsion and compulsion-acted-on, that I should have felt happier. Instead, I felt merely unclean.

  I got what I wanted; it was never enough. There wasn’t enough scrubbing a shower could engender that could make me right again. Tiny unseen creatures, billions of them per cubic inch, which were even then—decades ago, Jack—beginning to invade my world.

  Because I had learned the hard way, you see. I’d seen the blisters on my hands before I’d noticed that my penis was leaking. I no longer even remember the name of the starlet. Dr. Mason gave me penicillin and said, No sex for six weeks. Also it’s contagious, so don’t shake hands until it clears up. I’ve not shaken hands in the thirty years since, Jack.

  A fever set in. My cock burned with ulcers. I lay in bed for a week, dosed up on penicillin and “combative chemicals”. I moved in and out of delirious dreams. The chemicals and the confinement made me seethe with a murderous rage.

  I was being eaten alive. I was about to be forced to curtail my activities. It was controllable by medication but not curable. If left unchecked it could eventually affect the mind. I would be wise to eat foods heavy in iron and to maintain a balanced diet. With luck the episodes would not be greatly recurrent. Would be intermittent. Would perhaps, if I were truly lucky, never return.

  In bed those long strange days, syphilis and fever coursing through me, I thought it would be good to turn over a new leaf. To rid myself of all this impure past. So you can see how the debutantes were appealing.

  On those lissome expanses of skin, so unblemished, so firm, one could imagine, if only at the level of microscopic topologies, could imagine for a moment, for an evening, a joyfully inviting sterility, arctic expanses of danger-free flesh, infinities of purity, a world erased of disease. And so my actual adventures, the ocean nights, the debutramps themselves, were swashbucklingly ejaculatory, oh milky way, oh milk-white skin.

  I promised so much. I meant every word I said: give or take. I was immersed in my enthusiasm. I was a devoted listener. I wanted to give them all my attention, all my will.

  And all my sap. It must have been a limited supply. Because I do feel rather weary these days!

  But I’ve gotten off track. I was talking about when clothes became a problem, not the debutantes. I’m trying to focus my memory but it keeps bursting out on its own. I’d better get it right for Jack. The closer morning comes, the more excited I get. Where was I? My emptiness expanded with all those easy girls. The wind was getting in. Back in Los Angeles, Ginger Rogers behind me, the debutante season over, I stared blankly around my room. Suddenly it occurred to me that we keep clothes for years—a lot of time for things to grow in the dark spaces of wardrobes, a lot of time for festering—and maybe we’ve got it all wrong. Even the cross-threading of a woolen suit is filled with the very chasms made by the cross-threads themselves, and every chasm a hidey-hole for an unseen horror. A tweed suit can double its weight in dust. A suit bag means nothing but more darkness, more humidity. Mere hay fever would be a benign outcome. There is so much in wait for you, Jack.

  I felt alive with insight. At this moment my attachment to clothes became less important than my desire to cleanse my body, my house and my soul. A turning point.

  I tore through the house like a man possessed, pulling the closets apart. I threw the clothes in piles in the courtyard, categorized according to type: sweaters, linen suits, woolen suits, cardigans, socks, underwear. Life was filled with purpose once more. I called Noah. He never asked questions. He followed my instructions, organizing the men with protective clothing, including industrial rubber gloves. They piled the clothes into canvas postal bags.
I padlocked the bags and kept the key. The bags were driven to industrial kilns. The men returned the charred padlocks for my inspection. Only then was I satisfied the threat was gone.

  I purchased underwear and socks. A dark suit and a light suit, off the rack. Two pairs of chinos, shirts, tennis shoes: this was all I needed from now on. Howard made lighter by adversity. Howard ready to flee at any moment.

  Everything was cleaner in the air. The higher you soared into the stratosphere, the less the thickness of the physical world, the less the cloying of germs and evil things. Up there, in a plane, mostly alone, my lungs expanded with a great pure joy.

  Around this time I took to taking off. And I don’t just mean taking off my clothes—I made a kind of pun, I hope Jack laughs at that!—I mean, first I’d disappear from home and then I’d leave the very earth. I worried everyone terribly—Noah would tear his hair out—but I needed to be invisible. When all the events down here became too complex, I would drive out to Inglewood Air Field and simply Go. I rode the air currents as others hopped freight trains. I spread my maps across my knees. I noted wind speeds, pitch and yaw. My notebooks filled with theories. Undulated altocumulus thinned at the horizon. How can I ever have given it up, Jack? Of course, the medicines, properly assembled, properly taken, can give one a sense of being borne aloft—and without the complexity of leaving one’s bed. (Though bed has its own risks, as I’ve learned.) What matters is that I plan to fly tomorrow. I’ll see that curve of the earth once more.

  I commanded from such heights, Jack. Back then, the sky was my friend. America was a giant, growing enormous beneath me. I had a share of that, a solid slice of haunch.

  Memo, 1959: On retrieving

  my hearing-aid cord from

  the cabinet

  First, use six or eight thicknesses of Kleenex pulled one at a time from the slot in touching the doorknob to open the door to the bathroom. The door is to be left open so there will be no need to touch anything when leaving the bathroom. The same sheaf of Kleenex may be employed to turn on the spigots so as to obtain a good force of warm water. This Kleenex is to then be disposed of. A sheaf of six to eight Kleenexes is then to be used to open the cabinet containing the soap, and a fresh bar of soap that has never been opened is to be used. All Kleenex used up to this point are to be disposed of. The hands are to be washed with extreme care, far more thoroughly than they have ever been washed before, taking great pains that the hands do not touch the sides of the bowl, the spigots, or anything in the process. Great care should also be exercised when setting the soap down on the soap dish or whatever it is set on to assure that the hands do not come in contact with anything. A sheaf of fifteen to twenty fresh Kleenexes are next to be used to turn off the spigots and the Kleenex is then to be thrown away. (It is understood that while each Kleenex tissue as it is normally pulled from a box consists of a double thickness actually, when one Kleenex is referred to, one of these double Kleenexes is meant.) The door to the cabinet is to be opened using a minimum of fifteen Kleenexes. (Great care is to be exercised in opening and closing the doors. They are not to be slammed or swung hastily so as to raise any dust, and yet exceeding care is to be exercised against letting insects in.) Nothing inside the cabinet is to be touched—the inside of the doors, the top of the cabinet, the sides—no other objects inside the cabinet are to be touched in any way with the exception of the envelope to be removed. The envelope or package containing the cord is to be removed using a minimum of fifteen Kleenexes. If it is necessary to use both hands, then fifteen Kleenexes are to be used for each hand. (It is to be understood that these fifteen Kleenexes are to be sterile on both sides of each tissue with the exception of the very outermost edge of the tissue, where the fingers first touched it. Only the center of the tissue should come in contact with the object being picked up.) If something is on top of the package to be removed, a sterile instrument, say, a set of tongs newly purchased and freshly boiled*, is to be used to lift it off.

  [* Refer to separate instructions for purchasing and boiling of tongs.]

  THE SHEET BLEW ALL AROUND

  HER LIKE A SAIL

  I HUNCH FORWARD, concentrating intently, my body completely mobilized, completely attentive, like a cat about to pounce on a snake, as I inject myself in the left arm. I pull out the syringe and put it down on the table. I know this instrument now almost as well as the instrument panel, with which I will become familiar again tomorrow, but one thing at a time. I dab a corner of the sheet onto the droplet of blood on the inside of my elbow. I close my eyes, holding the sheet to my arm, and moan once, long and soft. I pull myself up higher against the pillows.

  Nevada. Nevada. All that eroded desolation, all that demon-ridden expanse. I was talking about Nevada, if I recall.

  After an injection, after the first prickly rush of the codeine subsides, ten percent converts to morphine in the body.

  A naked woman flowed across the lawn. She took the bedsheets from the clothesline. The sheet blew all around her like a sail. Where was I? The things that visit me when I close my eyes.

  I was thinking about Nevada, if I recall.

  Las Vegas was pure money with no product, the grand and glorious skeleton of capitalism; nothing was manufactured there but hope. Or rather, hope becoming desire, desire becoming yearning, yearning becoming this desperate, this desperate … I remember the spangled patterns, the Stardust, the Sands, Caesar’s Palace, the beautiful lights. But in fact I could not see. The windows were black. I was somehow lost in all that light. When I bought KLAS in ’68, because of that midnight-to-dawn programming issue, I started running the old Randolph Scott films. What a lovely man was Randolph! Then, deep in the heart of night, I felt connected to the day, and the desert, to Randolph, so righteous, so certain, so steadfast, so pure, blazing away at the bad guys. The Vegas way dovetailed nicely with the Howard Hughes way. People are alert and active at two in the morning. My hotels and casinos made large amounts of money. And I didn’t have to pay state taxes as long as it was my principal place of residence.

  But when Sunrise Semester came on at 6.30 every morning, I would feel very flat, as if another night had passed, and all its safety had dissolved, and I hadn’t quite got hold of it, got the measure of it. And I couldn’t go on programming Randolph Scott films forever. Even I knew that.

  But it wasn’t nearly as bad as London, Jack—the TV shuts down at midnight here! There is nothing on now until nine in the morning! And what is on is rarely good. These Brits are an odd lot. When you come I will quote to you from the Times TV guide. There. Look at this. If I wait until 8.55 we can see Open University—Reading Development, or Open-Air Eucharist in Trafalgar Square. Or Funky Phantom at 11.05. What the Sam Hell is Funky Phantom? You can see why I travel everywhere with my projector.

  What’s worse, there are only three channels! Three!

  NIXONBURGER

  I HAVE NOTICED, in this other section of the paper, the non-TV-guide section, the front page in fact, The Times, June 9, 1973—which may be today’s date but is more than likely yesterday’s already, time marching as it does brutally on, it seeming now to be exceedingly likely that we are well, well past midnight, and possibly nearer dawn—here on the front page beside me on the bed I have noticed, and been greatly amused by, an article, “Haldeman admissions cause new embarrassment to President.”

  The damnedest thing. The damnedest thing.

  What to make of those hearings, Jack? I’ll say, tossing him the folded paper, perhaps. It all seems rather a mess old Nixon has gotten himself into.

  “Mr. H.R. (Bob) Haldeman,” he’ll read, “closest man to President Nixon until Watergate accusations forced his resignation from the White House on April 30, has for the first time admitted he might have heard about the plotting before the breakin at Democratic Party headquarters …”

  We will sit and talk, as men do, about power, about how to understand it. It is all, of course, just a dreadful cockfight. It is not nearly so dignified as you might think,
Jack. They’re calling him Tricky Dick. I had to laugh, the first time I saw that!

  Somehow I fear—though fear is rather too strong a word, I fear!—that all of Tricky Dick’s present woes lead back, though thankfully in a largely invisible path, to me.

  What happened was in fact very simple. Dick Nixon came to me in ’56 and asked if I might please lend a hand and bail out his brother. It didn’t make sense. I would have thought that Dick owed me; I’d been a regular contributor, after all. But when he became vice-president, the balance apparently changed.

  Donald Nixon, the idiot brother, owned Nixon’s, Inc.—too grand a title, in fact, for three restaurants and a supermarket which bled money hand over fist. Donny had been savaged by the press when he tried to get the Young Republicans to cough up cash in a public stock offer, the problem being that it was perceived he’d somehow misused big brother’s name in grifting the money. That particular kerfuffle all went nowhere.

  Now with Dicky as VP I received some polite enquiries, all seventh hand of course. It doesn’t matter how many removes it actually was. The fact is it was Dick Nixon coming to me and asking could I help his brother with a little problem: Nixon’s, Inc. was going under, fast, and it seemed that nothing but an immediate cash injection would ward off imminent bankruptcy. I was always willing to help out a politician in need, and I understood the desire to keep a strong family name as untarnished as possible. The upshot of all this being that Noah transferred $250,000 from one of our Canadian divisions, through an accountant in a Hughes Tool subsidiary who handled the paperwork, to Momma Hannah Nixon, who dropped the “loan” down to Don, though the central problem there is, you throw truckloads of money at a fool and they still remain a fool. Bad business, on paper.