New York is a boudoir where they serve you salmon mousse with everything, or salmon en croûte, or just plain salmon. What is it with Americans and salmon? That’s all they eat. In Paris it’s “salad of young green seasonal shoots,” here it’s salmon steak, salmon tartare. Paradoxically, the hip neighborhood is the Meatpacking District.
The clubs in the Meatpacking District are faithful to the name of the neighborhood: they really are meat markets. Models sway like hunks of meat hanging from hooks. I ask some New Yorker coked up to the eyeballs where he goes to chill out away from the city of lunatics. Ibiza, he says. Some New Yorkers are absolutely incorrigible. No one can save them from their apocalypse. The beauty of fury.
The bouncer at Cielo doesn’t seem too open-minded.
“Are you on the list?”
“Um…yeah, sure…”
“Your name, sir?”
“My name is Osama, Osama bin fucking Laden, okay?”
You have to be able to run fast after making a terrible joke to a bouncer.
It a rare thing, a writer afraid of the book he’s writing.
At the Taj, I admire a tall, sad, long-haired blonde dressed in black, surrounded by brothers. I don’t remember how I get talking to her. Maybe I spill my drink over her, jostled by some stoned French kid. I apologize and wipe my apple martini over her pale breasts. That’s when she says her bodyguards are going to break my face. I ask her to reason with them. She laughs, introduces me to her two giant brothers. I comment that her nail polish is the same color as her bubblegum. I ask her where she’s going later. When you’re anonymous in a distant city, you might as well exploit the situation and be direct. She says they’re going to the Lotus. Then she disappears into the crowd. I take a taxi to go wait for her at the Lotus. An hour later, I’m wasted by the time she arrives accompanied by her henchmen. She smiles when she recognizes me. To keep an American woman happy, you have to give her tokens of persistence. Her every gesture is beautiful. She looks touched by my presence, embarrassed by her overpro-tective brothers. She comes over to talk to me, touches my arm. I tell her I’ve always dreamed of having kids with a model. She asks if I’m French. I put on my Spanish accent. Her laugh is like crystal. I pour her a drink which she downs in one. New York women are crystalline but tough. It is she who leans toward my mouth. She kisses me, her tongue is cold and wet from the ice. Her neck smells of soap. I was wondering whether my pecker was up to functioning tonight, but it’s fine—I get a hard-on straight off. I ask her name. Candace, she says. I ask her what she does for a living. Victoria’s Secret catalogs, she tells me. She asks what I do for a living. New York women often ask this question, then mentally calculate your salary. I tell her I’m writing a novel about Windows on the World. Her face becomes blank. It’s as though I’d hit her with a baseball bat. She tells me she has to get back to her little group, that she’ll be right back. She never returns.