Martin Amis - Money: a suicide note

Martin Amis

MONEY

A SUICIDE NOTE

[numbers added by scanner]

To Antonia

This is a suicide note. By the time you lay it aside (and you should always read these things slowly, on the lookout for clues or giveaways), John Self will no longer exist. Or at any rate that's the idea. You never can tell, though, with suicide notes, can you? In the planetary aggregate of all life, there are many more suicide notes than there are suicides. They're like poems in that respect, suicide notes: nearly everyone tries their hand at them some time, with or without the talent. We all write them in our heads. Usually the note is the thing. You complete it, and then resume your time travel. It is the note and not the life that is cancelled out. Or the other way round. Or death. You never can tell, though, can you, with suicide notes. To whom is the note addressed? To Martina, to Fielding, to Vera, to Alec, to Selina, to Barry to John Self? No. It is meant for you out there, the dear, the gentle.

M. A. London, September 1981

AS MY CAB pulled off FDR Drive, somewhere in the early Hundreds, a low-slung Tomahawk full of black guys came sharking out of lane and sloped in fast right across our bows. We banked, and hit a deep welt or grapple-ridge in the road: to the sound of a rifle-shot the cab roof ducked down and smacked me on the core of my head. I really didn't need that, I tell you, with my head and face and back and heart hurting a lot all the time anyway, and still drunk and crazed and ghosted from the plane.

'Oh man,' I said.

'Yeah,' said the cabbie from behind the shattered plastic of his screen. 'Fuckin A.'

My cabbie was fortyish, lean, balding. Such hair as remained scurried long and damp down his neck and shoulders. To the passenger, that's all city cabbies are mad necks, mad rugs. This mad neck was explosively pocked and mottled, with a flicker of adolescent virulence in the crimson underhang of the ears. He lounged there in his corner, the long hands limp on the wheel.

'Only need about a hundred guys, a hundred guys like me,' he said, throwing his voice back, 'take out all the niggers and PRs in this fuckin town.'

I listened, on my seat there. Owing to this fresh disease I have called tinnitus, my ears have started hearing things recently, things that aren't strictly auditory. Jet take-offs, breaking glass, ice scratched from the tray. It happens mostly in the morning but at other times too. It happened to me in the plane, for instance, or at least I think it did.

'What?' I shouted. 'A hundred guys? That's not many guys.'

'We could do it. With the right gunge, we could do it.'

'Gunge?'

'Gunge, yeah. Fifty-sixes. Automatics.'

I sat back and rubbed my head. I'd spent two hours in

Immigration, God damn it. I have this anti-talent for queues. You know the deal. Ho ho ho, I think, as I successfully shoulder and trample my way to the end of the shortest line. But the shortest line is the shortest line for an interesting reason. The people ahead of me are all Venusians, pterodactyls, men and women from an alternative time-stream. They all have to be vivisected and bodybagged by the unsmiling 300-pounder in his lit glass box. 'Business or pleasure?" this guy eventually asked me. 'I hope business only,' I said, and meant it. With business I'm usually okay. It's pleasure that gets me into all this expensive trouble... Then a half hour in customs, and another half before I firmed up this cab yeah, and the usual maniac fizzing and crackling at its wheel. I've driven in New York. Five blocks, and you're reduced to tears of barbaric nausea. So what happens to these throwbacks they hire to do it all day for money? You try it. I said, 'Why would you want to go and do a thing like that?'

'Uh?'

'Kill all the niggers and PRs?'

'They think, you know, you drive a yellow cab,' he said, and raised one limp splayed hand from the wheel, 'you must be some kind of a scumbag.'

I sighed and leaned forward. 'You know something?' I asked him. 'You really are a scumbag. I thought it was just a swearword until you came along. You're the first real one I've met.'

We pulled over. Rising in his seat he turned towards me gradually. His face was much nastier, tastier, altogether more useful than I had banked on it being barnacled and girlish with bright eyes and prissy lips, as if there were another face, the real face, beneath his mask of skin.

'Okay. Get out the car. I said out the fuckin car!'

'Yeah yeah,' I said, and shoved my suitcase along the seat.

'Twenty-two dollars,' he said. 'There, the clock.'

'I'm not giving you anything, scumbag.'

With no shift in the angle of his gaze he reached beneath the dashboard and tugged the special catch. All four door locks clunked shut with an oily chockful sound.

'Listen to me, you fat fuck,' he began. 'This is Ninety-Ninth and Second. The money. Give me the money.' He said he would drive me uptown twenty blocks and kick me out on the street, right there. He said that by the time the niggers were done, there'd be nothing left of me but a hank of hair and teeth.

I had some notes in my back pocket, from my last trip. I passed a twenty through the smeared screen. He sprang the locks and out I climbed. There was nothing more to say.

So now I stand here with my case, in smiting light and island rain. Behind me massed water looms, and the industrial corsetry of FDR Drive ... It must be pushing eight o'clock by now but the weepy breath of the day still shields its glow, a guttering glow, very wretched rained on, leaked on. Across the dirty street three black kids sprawl in the doorway of a dead liquor store. I'm big, though, yes I'm a big mother, and they look too depressed to come and check me out. I take a defiant pull from my pint of duty-free. It's past midnight, my time. God I hate this movie. And it's only just beginning.

I looked for cabs, and no cabs came. I was on First, not Second, and First is uptown. All the cabs would be turned the other way, getting the hell out on Second and Lex. In New York for a half a minute and already I pace the line, the long walk down Ninety-Ninth Street.

You know, I wouldn't have done this a month ago. I wouldn't have done it then. Then I was avoiding. Now I'm just waiting. Things happen to me. They do. They just have to go ahead and happen. You watch you wait... Inflation, they say, is cleaning up this city. Dough is rolling up its sleeves and mucking the place out. But things still happen here. You step off the plane, look around, take a deep breath and come to in your underpants, somewhere south of SoHo, or on a midtown traction table with a silver tray and a tasselled tab on your chest and a guy in white saying Good morning, sir. How are you today. That'll be fifteen thousand dollars ... Things still happen here and something is waiting to happen to me. I can tell. Recently my life feels like a bloodcurdling joke. Recently my life has taken on form. Something is waiting. I am waiting. Soon, it will stop waiting any day now. Awful things can happen any time. This is the awful thing.

Fear walks tall on this planet. Fear walks big and fat and fine. Fear has really got the whammy on all of us down here. Oh it's true, man. Sister, don't kid yourself ... One of these days I'm going to walk right up to fear. I'm going to walk right up. Someone's got to do it. I'm going to walk right up and say, Okay, hard-on. No more of this.

You've pushed us around for long enough. Here is someone who would not take it. It's over. Outside. Bullies, I'm told, are all cowards deep down. Fear is a bully, but something tells me that fear is no funker. Fear, I suspect, is really incredibly brave. Fear will lead me straight through the door, will prop me up in the alley among the crates and the empties, and show me who's the boss... I might lose a tooth or two, I suppose, or he could even break my arm or fuck up my eye! Fear might get carried away, like I've seen them do, pure damage, with nothing mattering. Maybe I'd need a crew, or a tool, or an equalizer. Now I come to think about it, maybe I'd better let fear be. When it comes to fighting, I'm brave or reckless or indifferent or just unjust. But fear really scares me. He's too good at fighting and I'm too frightened anyway.