Limitless

After a while, a few friends of Dean’s arrived and we all had dinner together. There was a middle-aged couple I’d met once before, called Paul and Ruby Baxter, who were both architects, and a young Canadian actress called Susan. Over dinner, we discussed lots of subjects, and it quickly became apparent to everyone present, myself included, that elaborate, scarily articulate views on just about everything were going to be emanating from my end of the table. I got into a protracted argument with Paul about the relative merits of Bruckner and Mahler. I gave them my’60s spiel, including a brief aside on Raymond Loewy and streamlining. I followed this with further ruminations on Italian history and the nature of time, which in turn developed into a lengthy expostulation on the inadequacies of Western political theory in the face of rapid global change. Once or twice – and it was as though from outside my body, as though from above – I became acutely aware of myself sitting at the table, talking, and for those fleeting moments, as I went on hacking a path through the knotty thickets of syntax and Latinate vocabulary, I had no real sense of what I was saying, no real idea if I was being coherent. Nevertheless, it all seemed to go down quite well – whatever it was – and despite being a bit worried that I was coming on too strong, I detected in Paul the same thing I’d detected earlier in Artie Meltzer, a kind of agitated need to keep talking to me, as though I were buoying him up somehow, empowering him, supplying him with regenerative energy waves. Neither was it my imagination, a bit later, when Susan started flirting with me, casually brushing her arm against mine, holding my gaze. I was able to side-track her by returning to the Bruckner-Mahler debate with Paul – though don’t ask me why, because I was certainly getting bored with that subject, and she was strikingly beautiful.

After dinner, in any case, we went to a string of nightclubs – first to the Duma, then to Virgil’s, then to the Moon and later to Hexagon. I don’t remember exactly when, but I took another dose of MDT in a bathroom somewhere. What I do remember is that harsh, neonbright toilety atmosphere, people reflected in mirrors all around me, some locked into teeth-grinding, out-of-focus conversations, others slumped up against white tiles, staring at themselves – drunk, wired, bewildered – as though they’d accidentally fallen out of their own lives.

I remember feeling electric.

An increasingly bewildered Dean went home some time after two, as did Susan. Other friends of Paul and Ruby’s arrived, followed awhile later by friends of theirs. Then Paul and Ruby dropped out. Another hour or two passed and I found myself in a huge apartment on the Upper West Side with a bunch of people I’d never met before. They were all sitting around a glass table doing lines of coke – but still, I was the one out-talking them. Standing up and walking around at a certain point, I caught sight of myself in a large ornate mirror that was hanging above a fake marble fireplace, and realized that I was the centre of attention, and that whatever I was talking about – and God knows it could have been anything – everyone in the room, without exception, was listening to me. At around five o’clock in the morning, or five-thirty, or six – I don’t remember – I went with a couple of guys to a diner on Amsterdam for breakfast. One of them, Kevin Doyle, was an investment banker with Van Loon & Associates and seemed to be saying that he could throw some information my way, good information, and that he could help me set up a portfolio. He kept insisting that we meet during the week, in his office, for lunch, even for coffee, any day that suited.

The other guy just sat there the whole time staring at me.

Eventually – because sooner or later everyone had to go to bed – I found myself alone again. I spent the day criss-crossing the city, mostly on foot, looking at stuff I’d never really paid that much attention to before, like those mammoth apartment buildings on Central Park West, with their roof-towers and Gothic cornices. I wandered down to Times Square, over to Gramercy Park and Murray Hill. I went back in the direction of Chelsea and then down to the Financial District and Battery Park. I did the Staten Island Ferry, standing out on the deck to let the fresh, invigorating wind cut right through me. I caught a subway back uptown, and went to museums and galleries, places I hadn’t been to in years. I went to a recital of chamber music at Lincoln Center, ate brunch at Julian’s, read the New York Times in Central Park and caught two Preston Sturges movies in a revival theatre in the West Village.

Later on, I hooked up with a few people back in Zola’s and got home to bed, finally, some time in the early hours of Monday morning.

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