print story

If Wishes Were Porsches - Part One

By Jay McInerney

...Your penis gets bigger, of course. Or your breasts. And generally you change your name. You start with a name like Norma Jean or Archie Leach. It's not required, of course. But here in America, it's good to remember that we like people to start from scratch. We like inventors. So get with the program. Catch the buzz. Life and liberty you got, now get happy. Don't be a wimp, don't be a geek. Get hip. Get laid. Get rich. Think big.

Look at Jonathan Calloway, a space cadet of galactic proportions, a dreamer -- he starts with zip. Seems like only yesterday. A Sunday morning late in the century, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Check it out--

Calloway sitting innocently in his barber chair, reading the Sunday Times magazine, television set waxing evangelical in the background. The barber chair, like most of Jonathan's furniture, salvaged from the street, equipped on one side with a chromed lever so that, like nothing else in the world, it rises and falls at his express command.

With a black felt tip pen he had drawn in the margins of the Sunday Times magazine a female form of surreal proportions. Looking up from the page, he gazed into the ether, which is to say that an observer would have been hard-pressed to determine the focal length of his stare, then lowered his eyes and his pen to the magazine and wrote:

Indecenies of the pen noir, coffee
And OJ in a funny chair.

He looked up again. The decorative flourishes, few in number, were largely relics of college dorm rooms: Gallerie Maeght lithographs of Picassos and Giacomettis; a poster from the Rolling Stones 1978 tour; a reproduction of Augustus John's portrait of Dylan Thomas; a stolen Mercedes Benz hood ornament mounted on the television set. One memento of childhood, a brittle, flaking scale model of a birch bark canoe, circa 1967, provenance Camp Wannamuckie, Maine.

The television preacher rolling and tumbling, howling about how to get rich and get God, neither of which seemed imminent to Jonathan. His modest hopes were focused on the prospect of hot water. In his building, a hot shower constituted a miracle. Meanwhile he was studying the ads for luxury homes -- his favorite section of the Sunday Times, along with the wedding announcements. A touch of awe, a tincture of masochism informed by his interest in luxury real estate and matrimony, those grown-up sports. He always deferred those tart pleasures, though, by starting with the Week in Review, then going on to the Book Review and Arts and Leisure, as if some stern arbiter of culture camped out on his shoulder, or perhaps on the principle of saving the best 'til last. (Wimp tendencies.) No one he knew had been married or engaged that week so far as the Times was concerned. He was enjoying the description of a forty-room cottage in Newport, Rhode Island, which he presumed to have numerous tubs and showers and faucets, all of which would liberally dispense hot water, when there was a knock on the bedroom window.

The face of Juan Baptiste was framed in one of the upper panes, his complexion lunar. Juan's fifth-floor apartment in the adjoining tenement was linked to Jonathan's by a fire escape which had become in practice an exterior hallway between their apartments, being much more convenient than the alternative, which was to descend five flights of stairs, walk outside, climb over one or two infragrant unoffical doormen on loan from the Rescue Mission down the street who were crashed out in the entry hall, ring the buzzer -- if it worked -- and climb up five flights. The landlord, who was tring to co-op both buildings, referred to the fire escapes as terraces in his correspondence with his bankers and architects.

--Jesus wants you to be materially comfortable and prosperous, the better to serve him.

Jonathan opened the window for his visitor. Between brick chimneys and water tanks, above the clothes line, a faceted sliver of the Empire State Building glittered in the sunlight, forty blocks uptown. The landlord's minions appraised this vista at $5,000 on top of the price they could expect once they pried Jonathan out of what was to be called a penthouse. Juan climbed through the window, a pale blond Creole prince, dressed in basic black from shades to shoes, redolent with the smoke and sweat of a long night among the vampires and the zombies.

"Any hot water?"

Jonathan shook his head.

"No matter. I bring you tidings of great joy," he said, proffering a tablet of newsprint. "Unto us this day in the town of Manhattan a cipher is born."

The printed matter was an advance copy of South of the Border, a sporadic periodical which chronicled major non-events and Blitzkrieg trends of the fashionable downtown scene and which marginally employed Juan as a gossip columnist, a historian of quips that pass in the night. (Juan had a day job, too, but like everyone else, he aspired to one of the agented professions.)

Sitting in his barber chair and pumping the handle for elevation, Jonathan skimmed the unjustified columns of Inside Out, by Juan Baptiste, Voice in the Wilderness, pausing briefly at each of the NAMES in boldface. The names belonged to luminaries of the demimonde, individuals who were renowned for the way they styled their hair or for their acquaintance with a rock star.

It had been more than a year since Jonathan had wittingly entered a fashionable nightspot. He was familiar with these names through Juan's conversation and his column. To him they were characters in a serial fiction, a soap opera. The present installment looled like a case of the usual suspects in the usual places. Or not in the usual places. The whole world was apparently wondering why Donny Deal hadn't shown up for Susan Roebuck's birthday party at Kilimanjaro. Tongues were wagging. Eyebrows arching. Fingers pointng all over the place. Fingers with nails outlandishly painted and polished. False fingernails. Green fingernails, shiny black fingernails, fingernails sculpted in the shape of crucifixes or filed to dagger points. All in all, though, from Jonathan's unsophisticated point of view, not nearly as racy as last week's installment of "Dynasty."

Drumming his garden-variety fingernails impatiently on the top of the bureau, Juan couldn't stand the suspense.

"There!" He pointed.

Jonathan read:

Susan's 21st bash was brightened by the ubiquitous JOHNNY MONIKER, who allegedly flew in for the event from London, where he was reported to be staying at the Belgravia townhouse of a recording star whose name we need hardly repeat here for the cognoscenti. Johnny, of course, confirms nothing, denies nothing, since he doesn't believe in the past. Makes us historians crazy, but we love him still because he's always good for a quote. "I don't remember" is his favorite. "I'm here now," he confided to us at Susan's fete. So just for the record, he was there, then.

"Who's Johnny Moniker?"

"This was your idea." Juan was exultant. "You said I should create a fictional celebrity."

"I thought that was your general practice."

"This is the first I made up from scratch. In the beginning was the word. Johnny Moniker -- a pure signifier. Liz Smith thinks she's a starmaker? I'm going to make a star out of thin air." As he spoke he moved around the room, handling Jonathan's personal effects, examining his hairbrush, his unremarkable Japanese watch, a bottle of aspirin and a wedding picture of his parents, as if they were artifacts of a vanished culture. Juan opened the bottle of aspirin and swallowed three of them dry. "First we conquer downtown. Next thing you know, Johnny Moniker will be popping up in New York magazine. Guest spots on Letterman, a recording contract. Hollywood or bust. And we're all exquisitely aware that it's a short step from Hollywood to the White House."

--How much more shall your father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him? Matthew Seven, Eleven, Brothers and Sisters.

"Something's missing here," Jonathan said.

"It can't miss."

"You don't have a body."

(Oh, Jonathan, you killjoy. Ye of little faith. Check your mailbox for Christ's sake, you may already be a winner.)

"If this wasn't your idea I'd say you lack imagination," Juan said. "It's terribly retro to suppose that the product pre-exists the package."