The Fall of Princes Read Free Page B

the money I made meant nothing to me. There was no time, no future. There were only piles of cash. I felt no particular compunction about manipulating the hopes of people less fortunate than myself, people who would never hold the reins of a Derby winner in their hands, as I did every day, all day long.
    It’s three a.m. and sleep will not come. There are too many ghosts in the room. I don’t dwell in the past, as I said, but tonight I’m there again, right there, with the roll and the flow and the vulgar indiscretions and the unbridled narcissism of it all. I’m buried in guilt and remorse. I am overcome with rage that the past is over, irrevocably, that I have my laundry done at the wash and fold, that I know exactly how much it costs to buy a pint of half-and-half for my coffee, that the men and women I spent so many years with are lost to me forever. The darlings of my youth. They speak a different language. I have forgotten the way, the argot, the inflection. I am sad that the places I used to drink and dance and eat and whore are now just numbers in somebody else’s Filofax.
    I see the past, I feel its addictions, but the faces are indistinct and the voices are mute. The past is only the place you came home to one day to find the locks changed, the rooms stripped of furniture, of every object from which you had derived such ridiculous amounts of self-esteem.
    Do they ever think of me? I doubt they do. There are, after all, more interesting topics. Success has a million musical nuances. Failure is only the monotonous banging of a brass gong.
    Forgive me, French girl I met while she was bathing topless on the beach at the Delano Hotel. Frank bet me I couldn’t fuck her by ten o’clock, bet me a hundred dollars I couldn’t have sex with her by the time we met for dinner, and I showed up at ten with the girl on my arm and said, “You lose,” and Frank gave me a hundred right in front
of her.
    She was staying at a cheesy motel, and she’d only come to the Delano to meet nice rich men. Men like me. When I put her on the plane, she looked at me with fear.
    Forgive me for thinking I was good-hearted. I wasn’t. For thinking even now that nevertheless God has a special place in his heart for me, that there is a reason for all this suffering.
    Forgive me for thinking that black limousines were public transportation.
    This night will last forever. I am locked in the darkness until the end of time. I have reached the age of regret, and forgive me my hour of lamentation and self-pity.
    We used to go to this sports bar all the time where we would eat bad food and drink endless cocktails and dip the tips of our cigars in snifters of Remy and watch sports on TV. We played a game, night after night for a while.
    The game was called To Have and To Have Not. The idea was you had to think of something you had done that nobody else at the table had done, or something you had never done that everybody else had done. You had to tell the truth. It was understood.
    If you could think of something that made you unique, everybody toasted you and took a drink, although, since we were drinking pretty much continuously, the toasts were pretty much pro forma.
    The early nights, the entries were mostly sexual.
    “I’ve had sex on the pitcher’s mound at the University of Denver.” Unremarkably enough, her fiancé blushingly had to admit that he had, too.
    “I’ve been in a threeway.” Practically everybody.
    “I’ve masturbated at a movie.”
    “In the theater or at home watching a porno?”
    “In the theater.”
    It turns out, a lot of people have masturbated at the movies, mostly when they were teenagers. This is something that happens, the huge, glowing image, the sensual mouths, the whispered dialogue. Somehow, it’s all sexual, sitting in the dark.
    But once the usual sexual shenanigans were out of the way, the entries got both more commonplace and more fascinating. It took weeks until people’s real distinguishing