Limitless

I finished up the first one and started in on the new one. I lit another cigarette.

The problem I suppose was this: if I was going to be drinking in the afternoon, I would have preferred it to be in any of a dozen other bars, and sitting at the bar, shooting the breeze with some guy perched on a stool just like myself. Vernon and I had chosen this place because it was convenient, but as far as I could see it didn’t have any other redeeming features. In addition, people had started trickling in now, probably from surrounding offices, and were already getting noisy and boisterous. A party of five took the next booth up from mine and I heard someone ordering Long Island Iced Teas. Don’t get me wrong, I had no doubt that Long Island Iced Teas were good obliterators of work-related stress, but they were also fucking lethal and I had no desire to be around when that gin-vodka-rum-tequila thing started kicking in. Maxie’s wasn’t my kind of bar, plain and simple, and I decided to finish my drink as quickly as possible and get the hell out of there.

Besides, I had work to do. I had thousands of images to pore over and select – to order and re-order and analyse and deconstruct. So what business did I have being in a Sixth Avenue cocktail lounge in any case? None. I should have been at home, at my desk, inching my way through the Summer of Love and the intricacies of microcircuitry. I should have been scanning all those magazine spreads I had from the Saturday Evening Post and Rolling Stone and Wired, as well as all the photocopied material that was stacked on the floor and on every other available surface in my apartment. I should have been huddled in front of my computer screen, awash in a blue light, making silent, steady progress on my book.

But I wasn’t, and despite these good intentions I didn’t seem to be showing any signs of making a move to leave either. Instead, giving in to the numinous glow of the whiskey and letting it override my impulse to get out of there, I went back to thinking about my ex-wife, Melissa. She was living upstate now with her two kids, and doing … what? Something. Vernon didn’t know. What was that all about? How could he not know? I mean, it made sense that I wasn’t a regular contributor to the New Yorker or Vanity Fair, or that I wasn’t an Internet guru or a venture capitalist, but it didn’t make any sense at all that Melissa wasn’t.

The more I thought about it, in fact, the stranger it seemed. For my part, I could easily retrace my steps back through the years, through all the twists and turns and taste atrocities, and still make a direct, plausible link between the relatively stable Eddie Spinola sitting here in this bar, with his Kerr & Dexter book contract and his monthly health plan, and, say, some earlier, spindlier Eddie, hungover and vomiting on his boss’s desk during a presentation, or raiding his girlfriend’s underwear drawer looking for her stash. But with this domesticated, upstate Melissa that Vernon had sketched, there didn’t seem to be any connection – or the connection had been broken, or … something, I don’t know.

Back then, Melissa had been akin to a force of nature. She’d had fully worked-out opinions about everything, from the origins of the Second World War to the architectural merits, or demerits, of the new Lipstick Building on Fifty-third Street. She would defend these opinions vigorously and always talked – intimidatingly, as if she were wielding a blackjack – about going back to first principles. You didn’t mess with Melissa, and she rarely, if ever, took prisoners.

On the night of the Black Monday stock market crash, for instance – 19 October, 1987 – I was with her in a bar down on Second Avenue, Nostromo’s, when we got talking to a party of four depressed bondsalesmen doing shots of vodka at the next table. (I actually think Deke Tauber might have been one of them, I seem to have a clear picture of him in my mind, at the table, glass of Stoli clenched tightly in his fist.) But in any case, the four of them were all shell-shocked and scared and pale. They kept asking each other how it had happened, and what it meant, and went on shaking their heads in disbelief, until finally Melissa said, ‘Shit, fellahs, don’t let me hold you back from the window-ledge there or anything, but couldn’t you see this thing coming?’ Sipping a frozen margarita and pulling on a Marlboro Light, she then launched – ahead of all the newspaper editorials – into a rapid-fire Jeremiad which deftly attributed Wall Street’s collective woes, as well as the country’s multi-trillion-dollar debt, to the chronic infantilism of Dr Spock’s Baby Boomer generation. She bludgeoned the four guys into an even deeper depression than they’d probably bargained for when they agreed, back in the office, to go for a quick drink – for a quick, innocent little post-crash post-mortem.