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I farted and flung back the warm cocoon of bedding. My watch showed that it was as good as midday; I put the 'phone back on the hook, padded across the nylon shag-pile to the bathroom, "sanitised for my comfort and protection," and de-sanitised it. While I rinsed the lenses of my glasses under the warm tap, the face in the mirror returned a wince that might have begun as a smile.
Outside the sky was as dim and unreal as a Sun editorial. Fine rain blew against the pane and down in the streets, car lights were sucked into the black sheen.
The weather and lack of sleep combined to help me start the day feeling sour and critical and glum. I checked the tour itinerary: "NO SHOW TODAY: DEP 13.45PM: DRIVE TO DENVER: 850 MILES."
Downstairs at least half of our "party" was in the coffee-shop.
A few businessmen were dotted about: as neat as a cemetery lawn with creases as straight as a column of printed zeroes. From our tables floated a series of low moans and fragments of conversation, punctuated now and then by the clatter of cutlery dropped from lifeless fingers.
"... yeah, I think I caught it off that one in Minneapolis, you know..."
"Aw, not her! You'd screw a snake if I held its head down for you."
I still felt tired. After getting back to the hotel after last night's gig, I spent a couple of hours in the bar babbling into the mike of someone's cassette recorder, mainly with the intention of impressing his girlfriend. (No doubt the contents of this tape would be regurgitated for my embarrassment at some suitably piquant moment.) Most of the night I'd laid in bed reading, being kept awake by the yowls and yelps and whinnies from the room next door, until the noise had eventually died away along with the supplies of booze and nonsense powder. 1 didn't want to go and join them: the sound of people determined to Have a Good Time is both a melancholy and a savage sound.
As I left the hotel I walked into the dampness; the air was soft and humid, almost drugged. The warm rain splashed against my face. Skirting a building site was a long, neat hoarding that hadn't yet been up long enough to be aerosoled with tribal claims. Somehow, today, the buildings had lost their power to oppress; like the hoarding, they too might be gigantic sheets of board propped from behind like a Dodge City movie set. I walked further leaving the surge of the city faint behind me, past shops selling cheap furniture, cheap luggage and cheap jewellery; I thought about stuffing my cash down inside my sock. Here and there I passed empty lots between buildings where weeds grew up through chunks of old foundation concrete and scraps of rusting metal sheets and wire. A radio blared distorted dance music from a basement somewhere.
Having no idea where I was, or how to get back to the hotel, I hailed a cab. Without any kind of preamble the driver craned his head to the right and spoke out of the corner of his mouth.
"I once drove Frank Sinatra." He waited for me to be suitably impressed.
I managed an 'Mmm.'
"Yeah, really! But not in this cab of course," he continued. "See, I useta work for the limo company... Well, I only drove him round for one morning though." He awaited my response.
"Mmm."
"Yea. Would you believe it! He had me replaced for sneezing in the goddam car."
"Why's that," I said, "because he was a hypochondriac?"
"Nah... because he was a dick-head."
As we were pulling up in front of the hotel the driver intimated something further.
"I remember," he said, "when the Terminal Hotel useta have four attendants in white jacketsta to work the elevators. The place was so immaculate you coulda eaten your
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