John Self arrived to New York in a bad mood. Fearing flying, the film director obliterated himself before heading to Heathrow to catch a standby flight across the Atlantic. The airplane’s cramped seat made his body, devastated by heavy drinking and smoking and downing of junk food, sore.
In a cab to his hotel on 2nd and 45th, splintering headache from hangover heightened his normal rudeness and made him tell the cabdriver that in his company he finally realized why cabdrivers are called scumbags. Finally in his hotel room, Self habitually downed a bottle of duty-free whisky and drifted to sleep to be fresh for days of absolute Manhattan misery.
He lost — terribly — in tennis, was spied upon, paid for a prostitute who happened to be pregnant. All that in pursuit of his first feature movie. But the film was not occupying his mind: rather he contemplated where his girlfriend Selena was and who were the people she had been fucking. Conversation with his friend did not bring him closer to her whereabouts: “I don’t know where she is,’ said Alec. ‘Lying in a pile of cocks somewhere. Wiggling her bum in some penthouse. Take your pick.”
——
Since early July, when I read for the second time the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, all my readings have been been non-fiction. Nothing wrong with that — they all have been highly engaging and informative, but they did not tell a story.
Last week I finished Christopher Hitchens’s memoirs, Hitch-22. Mid-way through the book, just after he finishes recollecting his Oxford years, I fell into mild depression — his life has been far more interesting than mine.
Known for dropping names, Hitchens devotes a few chapters to his closest friends. Salman Rushdie and James Fenton get their dedicated pages and so does Martin Amis, a son of Kingley Amis who authored the next book on my reading list Everyday Drinking. Amis is regarded as one of the best British writers of the 20th century and Hitchens’s accolades persuaded me to venture back into novels and pick up his Money: A Suicide Note.
After two chapters I must admit Amis’s fame is deserved. Thus far everything about the book has been superb. It has been a welcomed distraction from grad school applications and, however infrequent, thesis work.
