from Money
MARTIN AMIS
There’s a game I used to play with some friends at Cambridge. Assuming that there was nothing worse than being an obvious second best, the point of the game was to say to one another, “Hey ______, you’re no ______.” Hey Pepsi, you’re no Coke. Hey Burger King, you’re no McDonald’s, and so on. As the latter component—the truly best—is meant to be obvious, it shouldn’t be necessary to say it. Hey Engels. Hey Roebuck. Hey Roger Moore. You get the drift. So when I first picked up a book by Martin Amis, having read a number of books by his extremely talented father, Kingsley, I had only one thing in my mind: hey Julian Lennon. I assumed poor Martin’s flower was trying to bloom with shallow roots in borrowed sunlight. But you know what? I was wrong. Seems more like he resolved the predictable Oedipal dilemma in the most direct way possible: kill Pop with his own pen.
Amis the younger is good, real good. The scene that follows is from his breakthrough novel, Money, in which a bloated, bumbling, and fabulously vulgar English commercial director gets bankrolled to make a feature film in Hollywood. Like most of Amis’ characters, John Self is a believable and recognizable caricature, a stock player in the twilight of the millennium, and we love him through his flaws. Here we find Self at his best, in a hotel room with the bombshell lead of his film, having done a “hangman’s rope” of a line of cocaine with his fifty-two-inch waist trousers around his ankles doing what most of us assume we’ll never do: boffing a superstar.
At this moment in time I am doing something that millions of people all over the planet are longing, are aching, are dying to do. Eskimos dream about it. Pygmies beat off about it. You’ve thought about it, pal, take my word for it. You too, angel, if you’re at all that way inclined. The whole world wants to do it. And I’m doing it . . . I am giving Butch Beausoleil one. You don’t believe me? But I am! Round from the back, what’s more. You get the picture: she’s on all fours and clutching the headpiece of her neighing brass bed. If I glance downwards, like so, and retract my gut, I can see her valentine card and the mysterious trail of her cleft, like the inside of a halved apple. Now do you believe me? Wait: here comes her hand, idling slantways down her rump, ten bucks of manicure on each fingertip. Why she seems to be . . . Wow. Selina herself doesn’t do that too often. And I bet not even Selina does it on the first date. Well, true sack artists, they adore themselves, every inch . . . I’m in a position to tell you that the camera doesn’t lie. I’ve seen Butch naked before, partially on screen and fully in one of the whack magazines that feature celebrity indiscretions, but that hardly prepared me for all this costly flesh texture and high-tab body tone, not to mention the bunk knowhow on such vivid display . . .
At last: she’s making those noises . . . Butch would seem to be girding herself for some kind of apocalyptic jackpot and, yes, I’m along for the ride too, panting and jabbering and holding on for dear life. Now or never. What shall I think about, to help me jump off the train? I’ll think about Butch Beausoleil. It’s working . . .