Everybody's Right: A Novel

By Paolo Sorrentino and Antony Shugaar

An aging singer abandons Italy for South America as he struggles with the loss of his stardom, in a Strega Prize–nominated novel by the famed filmmaker.
 
Born on the streets and born singing, Tony Pagoda has had his day. But what a day it was! He had fame, money, women, and talent. He spent his golden years entertaining a flourishing and garishly happy Italy. His success stretched over borders and across the seas. But somewhere things began to go awry, the public’s tastes in music first and foremost. His band is now a shadow of its former self and his life is fraught with mundane but infuriating complications. It’s time to make a clean break with the past.
 
Following a brief tour in Brazil, Tony decides to decamp and make a life for himself in South America. Here, his vision of the world, shaped by those years in which he hobnobbed with Sinatra and enjoyed the adoration of audiences the world over, is under assault. Now that he has abandoned music, the world strikes him as a barren place completely at odds with his understanding of it. Tony’s story is the story of a worldly yet strangely naive man forced to reconcile with life or lose himself entirely.
 
“Tony’s episodic account of his life is a nonstop onslaught of sex, profanity, high-rolling and low-dealing across decades. . . . A furious, ironic, idiosyncratic, unexpurgated torrent, capturing Italian modernity through the lens of a monstrous character.” —Kirkus Reviews
 
“The vignettes that showcase Tony’s moral ineptitude are decidedly entertaining.”—Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 27, 2011
• ISBN: 9781609458966

Book preview

FOREWORD

by Maestro Mimmo Repetto

(written at dawn on the day he turned a hundred years old)

Everything I can’t stand has a name.

I can’t stand old people. Their drool. Their complaints. Their uselessness.

Even worse when they try to be useful. Their dependency.

Their noises. Numerous, repetitive. Their exasperating anecdotes.

The centrality of their stories. Their scorn for successive generations.

But I can’t stand the successive generations either.

I can’t stand old people when they start shouting and demand a seat on the bus.

I can’t stand young people. Their arrogance. The way they show off their strength and youth.

The saga of the heroic invincibility of young people is just pathetic.

I can’t stand the impertinent young people who refuse to give up their seat for an old person on the bus.

I can’t stand hoodlums and hooligans. Their sudden laughter, shameless and useless.

Their scorn for their fellow man, for anyone who’s different. Even more intolerable are respectful, responsible, generous young people. They’re all volunteerism and group prayer. Such good manners, such a smell of death. In their hearts and in their heads.

I can’t stand willful self-referential children and their obsessive parents, referential only toward their children. I can’t stand children who shout and who cry. Silent children make me nervous, so I can’t stand them either. I can’t stand workers and the unemployed and the mellifluous and reckless ostentatious display of their divine misfortune.

Which isn’t divine. Just a lack of determination.

How can you put up with all those who are dedicated to the struggle, the revindication of claims, the facile political speech, and the sweat under the armpits? No, it’s impossible to put up with them.

I can’t stand executives. There’s no reason even to explain why. I can’t stand the petite bourgeoisie, closed up in the shell of their shitty world. Their lives are guided by fear. The fear of everything that won’t fit into that tiny shell. And so they’re snobs, without even knowing the meaning of the word.

I can’t stand boyfriends, because they get in the way.

I can’t stand girlfriends, because they intervene.

I can’t stand people who are broad-minded, tolerant, and unbiased.

Always correct. Always perfect. Always impeccable.

Everything’s allowed, except murder.

You criticize them, and they thank you for your criticism. You scorn them and they cheerfully express their appreciation. In other words, they’re always tripping you up.

Because they boycott viciousness.

So, they’re intolerable.

They ask you: How are you? and they actually want to know. A shock. But deep down, under the disinterested interest, somewhere, there’s a stab in the back lurking.

But I also can’t stand those who never put you in a quandary. Always obedient and reassuring. Loyal and duplicitious.

I can’t stand pool players, nicknames, the indecisive, non-smokers, smog and fresh air, traveling salesmen, pizza by the slice, pat phrases, chocolate crunch cones, bonfires, stockbrokers, flowered wallpaper, fair-trade products, disorder, envi­ronmentalists, the sense of civility, cats, mice, soft drinks, unexpected doorbells, long phone calls, people who say that drinking a glass of wine every day is good for you, people who pretend to forget your name, people who say that they’re professionals to defend themselves, former classmates who meet you thirty years later and call you by your last name, old people who never miss an opportunity to remind you that they fought in the Resistance, grownup children at loose ends who have nothing to do so they decide to open an art gallery, former Communists who go crazy over Brazilian music, airheads who say how intriguing, fashion hounds who say that’s hot and related terms, the sugar-sweet ones who say things like cute, lovely, and stupendous, ecumenical types who call everyone sweetheart, certain beauties who tell you they adore you, the lucky ones who can play an instrument by ear, the supposedly distracted types who just don’t listen when you speak, the superior types who judge, feminists, commuters, artificial sweeteners, fashion designers, film directors, car radios, male dancers, politicians, ski boots, adolescents, undersecretaries for this or that, rhymes, aging rock singers with skin-tight jeans, stuck-up over-serious writers, relatives, flowers, blondes, bows, mantelpieces, intellectuals, sidewalk artists, jellyfish, magicians, VIPs, rapists, child molesters, anyone who works in a circus, cultural impresarios, social workers, amusements, animal lovers, ties, fake laughter, provincials, hydrofoils, all collectors of anything, especially watch collectors, all hobbies, doctors, patients, jazz, advertising, builders, mothers, people who watch basketball, all actors, all actresses, video art, amusement parks, experimentalists of any kind, soups, contemporary painting, elderly craftsmen in their workshops, amateur guitarists, statues in the main square, people who kiss hands, beauty farms, good-looking philosophers, over-chlorinated swimming pools, algae, thieves, anorexics, vacations, love letters, priests and altar boys, suppositories, ethnic music, fake revolutionaries, bivalves, pandas, acne, percussionists, showers with shower curtains, birthmarks, calluses, knickknacks, moles, vegetarians, view painters, cosmetics, opera singers, Parisians, high-neck pullovers, music in restaurants, parties, meetings, houses with views, Englishisms, neologisms, momma’s boys, chips off the old block, wealthy heirs, other people’s children in general, museums, town mayors, commissioners, protesters, poetry, people who run delicatessens, jewelers, car alarms, thin chains made of yellow gold, leaders, followers, prostitutes, people who are too short or too tall, funerals, body hair, cell phones, bureaucracy, art installations, automobiles of all engine sizes, keychains, singer-songwriters, the Japanese, high officials, racists and the tolerant, the blind, formica, copper, brass, bamboo, chefs on television, crowds, suntan creams, lobbyists, slang, stains, kept women, cornucopias, stammerers, stutterers, youthful old people and elderly young people, snobs, the radical chic, plastic surgery, ring highways and bypasses, plants and trees, loafers, sectarians, television personalities, aristocrats, cords that get tangled, showgirls, comedians, golfers, science fiction, veterinarians, fashion models, political refugees, the obtuse, blinding white beaches, made-up religions and their followers, factory reject floor tiles, the stubborn, professional critics, couples where he’s a lot younger than she is and vice-versa, people who are mature, everyone with a hat, everyone with sunglasses, tanning lamps, forest fires, bracelets, nepotists and protégés, people in the armed forces, dissolute tennis players, sectarians and fans and supporters, perfume that was purchased from a tobacconist, weddings, jokes, first communions, freemasons, Mass, people who whistle, people who burst into song, burps and belches, junkies, Lions Clubs, cokeheads, Rotary Clubs, sexual tourism, tourism, people who detest tourism and say that they’re travelers, people who speak from experience, people who have no experience but want to have their say all the same, people who know how the world works, elementary-school teachers, people who are obsessed with meetings, people who are obsessed in general, nurses who wear clogs, but why do they have to wear clogs?

I can’t stand the timid, the overtalkative, the fake mysterious, the awkward, the airheads, the whimsically inspired, the charmingly affected, the crazy ones, the geniuses, the heroes, the self-confident, the silent, the valorous, the pensive, the conceited, the rude, the conscientious, the unpredictable, the comprehensive, the attentive ones, the humble, the experts, the passionate, the bombastic, the eternally astonished, the equitable, the futile, the enigmatic, the wisecrackers, the cynical, the fearful, the arrogant, the quarrelsome, the proud, the phlegmatic, the con artists, the too precious by half, the vigorous, the tragic, the listless, the insecure, the dubious, the disenchanted, the awestruck, the winners, the miserly, the meek, the slovenly, the saccharine, the plaintive, the grumblers, the capricious, the spoiled, the noisy ones, the unctuous, the brusque, and everyone who interacts socially with relative facility.

I can’t stand nostalgia, normalcy, cruelty, hyperactivity, bulimia, courtesy, melancholy, poignancy, intelligence and stupidity, haughtiness, resignation, shame, arrogance, amiability, two-facedness, cavalier attitudes, the abuse of power, ineptitude, athleticism, goodheartedness, religious convictions, ostentatiousness, curiosity and indifference, reenactments, reality, guilt, minimalism, the sober and the excessive, the generic, falsehood, responsibility, carelessness, excitement, wisdom, determination, self-complacency, irresponsibility, correctness, aridity, seriousness and frivolity, pomposity, necessariness, human misery, compassion, gloom, predictability, recklessness, captiousness, rapidity, obscurity, negligence, slow­­ness, mediety, velocity, ineluctability, exhibitionism, enthusiasm, slovenliness, virtuosity, amateurishness, professionalism, decisiveness, self-sufficiency, autonomy, dependency, elegance, and happiness.

I can’t stand anything or anyone.

Not even myself. Especially not myself.

There’s only one thing I can stand.

Nuance.

1.

Gondolier, carry me back to Napoli.

—FRANCO CALIFANO

And without any of us even noticing, it all began because, unfortunately, one of us had talent. Me!

What else can I say? You spend so much of your life telling yourself: it’s okay. But it’s never okay to say it’s okay. Or almost never. And I’d be done before I even started if it wasn’t for this unhealthy vanity of mine galloping along inside me, faster than I could ever hope to go.

I’d like to be pellucid, but it wouldn’t do a bit of good.

Three dry retches and now tiny dots of clammy yellowish sweat speckle my lowering brow, my brow, the brow of Tony Pagoda, alias Tony P., with my overcharged and ferocious forty-four years of life—these years that I carry inside me, years I don’t choose to count, because if I do count them, I suffer so. Because all your life you wish you could just be a kid—it’s no fun getting old. No, fun isn’t what you’d call it. But, whatever you call it, you have to take care of this business of living. In a series of slow-motion four-wheel drifts.

But forget about it, I’m just one of those guys, the kind that people who think in terms of idiotic labels like to classify as a lounge singer. But I’m more than just some label. I am a man.

Now that I think about it, though, with 20/20 hindsight, wouldn’t it have been better to be a label?

I’m luxuriating in this first-class dressing room, as big as the living room in my apartment back in Naples, surrounded by all this red velvet that makes my head spin and my eyes blur, as I wait to go onstage for the single most momentous concert of my entire sumptuous career, a career that—as everybody knows—I have constructed, brick upon brick. I fall to my knees and do my best to hold in the mineral water that’s trying to get from my stomach into the washbasin, I make the sign of the cross, hands clasped, fat fingers studded with gold rings. My palms stick together like a pair of sweaty magnets. I’m drenched with myself, right now.

I pray, rummaging and stumbling through the distant memories of my first communion, but I come up with nothing, not even a miserable Our Father. Cocaine, if you sniff it and snort it for years at a time, every blessed day, will massacre your memory, you’d better believe it, and not just your memory. And I’ve been doing coke joyfully, without a break, for twenty years. Then you kid yourself that it’s not so bad; in the district of the mind, you consider your memory to be a die-hard, a last-ditch holdout, you savage the evidence, you ring down the curtain of enchantment, a curtain of powder. Enchantment, as well as astonishment, but the glitter and flash is fading. The stench of the new, unexpectedly.

Before you know it, you’re hurtling into a world of atrocious pain, gastric juices and saliva flowing frantically, and there, distractedly kneeling before you, in a flaccid genuflection, is your soul. This invisible monument.

That’s not the way to dig down and extract a prayer from the viscera of your soul, but while we’re on the subject I do recall something I said years ago to a reporter, this babe with a pair of tits that were nothing to complain about:

Okay, maybe the Lord in person sent Sinatra his voice, but mine, I’d say more modestly, was handed down to me by San Gennaro. That’s what I said.

Back then, I was all leopard-print conceit. And if this concert is a success, then I think I can be just a little bit conceited again today.

I get back on my feet and another surge of peristalsis rises within me like a goddamned rodeo. Here comes gin & tonic number three trying to regain the light of day. No, I don’t sniff coke when I sing. Maybe Mick Jagger can indulge in that shit, when he howls, runs, and shakes his ass, but what I do is sing, so I need to feel my uvula snap like a snare drum and my vocal cords vibrating—they’re like a guitar, to me. And this impulse to retch has a specific origin, because out there, in a front-row seat, in the majestic auditorium of Radio City Music Hall, suffocating in vast quantities of alcohol and experience, is none other than him, The Voice, waiting to listen to my performance—me, this Neapolitan who is a nobody in the States, but in Italy, Germany, Russia, Spain, Belgium, Holland, Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela, it would appear that I generate sparks with each volley of LPs that I sell. Like a machine gun popping them out of the record stores. That’s right.

They’re waiting for me. And if there’s one thing I know how to do in this life of ours, it’s how to make people wait for me. Reckon it all up, and I’m so good at making people wait that, in the end, I’ll never get there. Which is another story entirely.

It’s a wave of applause that reeks of nostalgia for songs like ’O sole mio and Munasterio ’e Santa Chiara, a wave of applause rising from the clapping audience of sixty-year-old Italian-Americans and washing over the still-empty stage, awaiting the usual triumphal entrance. My entrance!

I know this audience of Italian-Americans like I know the cheeks of my ass. It’s an audience that’s been fed a steady diet of television signals beamed in from Italy, raised on dagger thrusts of melancholy reflux. You can trust these people.

My longtime piano player, Rino Pappalardo, rings the bell of my dressing room, then he knocks at the door, his well-trained hand dense with a red coral horn to ward off the evil eye. It’s time.

Just a minute! I hiss, with a single vocal cord, as I survey and analyze my naked, misshapen belly, swollen and matted with hair. I glance at myself in the mirror, with the proud little wink that has demolished so many girls in its time, and I notice with just a hint of concern—not now, of all the fucking times!—that my dark brown eye, the eye of a man about town, has become wrinkled and inopportune. Yes, perhaps, but still sly and opportunistic, cynical and romantic all at once. I hold my breath, and strain to suck in my swollen gut. With dispiriting results. I tuck in the silk shirt of my tuxedo, and then take a good determined look at myself in the mirror, edged by too many white lightbulbs, priestly and hopeful as I am by nature, and it’s all just an orgy of emotions, fear, anguish, and excitement.

Rino keeps at it, and knocks again.

Okay, little sisters, I’m coming, I say.

I lustily and hastily throw back gin & tonic number four.

We advance down the neon-lit corridor that leads to the stage, like a mayor flanked by his city council, me at the head of the pack, Rino Pappalardo, Lello Cosa on drums, Gino Martire on bass, Titta Palumbo on guitar. All of us dressed in tuxedos, all of us defenestrated from our customary world, all of us drenched with excitement, with the filthy knowledge that this concert is bigger than any of us—bigger than all of us put together. Deep down, Titta is no doubt thinking that we don’t even know how to read a note. But deep down. Our success is built by ear.

I could use a drop or two of Ballantine’s, Cosa whispers to Martire.

Maybe he’s in the audience, Martire responds with a hint of terrorized irony.

Who? Lello Cosa drools back dully.

Mr. Ballantine, the man who owns the distillery that bears his name, ripostes Gino Martire.

Shut your fucking latrines, I command. And no one says a word.

Four, Lello Cosa hollers raucously, and the bass drum kicks into action a little slower than usual in 4/4 time. He catches up to the usual tempo on the second round. From offstage, I glare furiously at Cosa. During the interminable intro, twenty-four seconds long, I ruminate mercilessly that this hall is bigger than I remember it, but there’s something wrong with my saliva, too much drool, and in fifteen seconds I’ll be onstage, I’ll make my entrance, even sooner than that, now: Fuck you, drool; fuck you, drool. Begone, saliva.

My blood pressure has stabilized at values you’d expect from a gecko: something like eleven over forty. A medieval pallor spreads over my face. Whatever. My entrance is jaguaresque, feigned distraction I’d call it. But I’m a past master at entrances, an archangel on the subject, I could write treatises, manifestos . . . the applause makes my jaw twitch, the clapping sounds like the day after, it’s a grace of the Christ Child that my drool subsides momentarily, and as I rip into the microphone with all thirty-two teeth, I smile out at the overjoyed audience, howling in chorus as they recognize and accompany Un treno per il mare.

As the intro comes to an end, I start singing. And after two amorous utterances, a savage wave of applause bursts forth from the Italian-Americans. Still too much saliva, I ruminate, dazed by waves of emotion, but I fuck them anyway, that’s how it is every time, the love always stuns them, no one will ever know, they’ll never know that . . . too much saliva, too much saliva.

Now, the parietal walls of my brain are slamming back and forth like shutters left unlatched in a typhoon. My eyes frantically search for Sinatra in the front row, I can’t find him, where the fuck is he sitting? I’ll bet he didn’t come at all, the scrawny faggot!

I launch into the second verse half a second late, I recover quickly and complete a mediocre performance of Un treno per il mare. I end with a grazie followed by a thank you and as I say it, I spy a purple-faced Sinatra. Go for it, Tony, I whisper to myself, and Tony goes for it as Una cometa nel cuore sails out over the heads of the audience, one of those numbers that would slice, dice, and julienne even the heart of a Swedish serial killer. Two chords in, and I’ve demolished the walls of emotion.

And I wander off into a nondenominational reverie: when you demolish the walls of emotion, life becomes a Christmas ornament.

Now, strutting and arrogant like the parrot named Porto­bello from Italian television, I’m perched four notes higher up, on the insane high note of the refrain, and I challenge even Diamanda Galás to do anything of the sort, it’s so powerful that the walls of Radio City are quivering like a harp played by an asshole, and the Italian-American audience members shatter their callused, hardworking carpals and metacarpals as they applaud, while their garrulous wives keep their big salty tears within easy reach of their pupils. Their eyeshadow melting, dissolving like so much cheap margarine. Stuff that plays havoc with your heartbeat if you’ve ever fallen in love so much as once in your life. And who hasn’t fallen in love at least once in their life?

I can even see Frank Sinatra, in the front row, adjusting his gabardine trousers, laughing, amused at this display of vocal potency. His amusement is marked by a sense of moderation, accustomed as Frank is to an aloof self-restraint, but he’s another story, it takes a lot to surprise Frank, a man who knows this merry-go-round we call life inside and out, forward and back. And now I nail him in a close-up, none other than Frank, our gazes meet, in an orgiastic delirium of boundless admiration between colleagues.

I’m on Mt. Olympus, Christ on a crutch, or at the very least, I’m in Frank’s clan, I ponder.

I’m just a few steps away from paradise now, singing like a demigod, now, and feeling like a demigod, by God, I’m God Himself with my eyes closed and my head tipped back, heavenward. And if God could be seen, probably, He’d be holding my mike, for me, for Tony Pagoda. Alias Tony P.

And so, like a Charlie Chaplin of popular music, I take a stroll arm-in-arm with Our Lord, from ten to midnight. New York time. On the stage of Radio City. Sinatra, drunk as a skunk, sure isn’t sleeping. He’s not even catching a catnap, and that, where I come from, is what we call results. Clear, unmistakable results.

In any case, a whirlwind of musical notes, phrasing, and syncopated thoughts tumbles through my meditative cranium and I think to myself that if I don’t go for it now, when am I going to go for it? I give the audience a serving of Quel che resta di me and decide that my balls are cubic.

I scatter into the ethereal darkness Un giorno lei mi penserà and decide that my balls are hexagonal.

I drown my audience in its own tears with a heart-piercing Non c’ero, amavo and think to myself that this success, by God, will last for the rest of my life, all my life . . . and so—Tonight: Whores, American whores tonight, New York is full of them.

And then I ham it up—the way only I know how—with Lunghe notti da bar, and as I sing I slip a hand into my jacket pocket and with my fingers I fiddle with my little three-gram bag of cocaine. Two thousand people out there, and each of them notices when I bat an eyelash, but not one of them knows that with my naughty little fingers, I’m playing with my drugs, tonight I’ll have American puttane, all this is swirling around in my head, like a milkshake in a blender.

I’m having fun. To a certain extent, I’m mocking these sixty-something Italian-American lovers of mine: If you all think that right now I’m naked, naked in my emotions, my sincerity, at the mercy of the stubs of the tickets you bought, then you’re way off track, that’s not how it is, even with all your eyes on me you’ll never know my secret, the secret of my fingers, playing with the forbidden, with the illegal. For that matter, you never know anything, about people or things, for the simple reason that you can never see a thing or a person in its totality, if you can see a person’s face, you can’t see their back, you never have more than a rough, partial view of everything. Lives, after all, are nothing but attempts, and for the most part half-assed ones.

And I, in my turn, peek out at my spectators moving in their seats and I see glistening eyes, the hands of elderly couples intertwining to reiterate how right it was to spend thirty years in a marriage—No, spending our lives together was not a mistake, it was a life, a hell of a life, filled with unexpected ambushes in the night, assaulted and swamped by displeasures and disappointments, but it was worth it all, and I see the wide asses of mothers shifting with emotion in their seats—they’ve done it all, everything imaginable, but that’s not something you’re supposed to say, on the other hand, the priest absolved all us mothers. Now I’m on the verge of hallucinations. I see tradition, folklore, hopes, strong wills, these fucking Italian-Americans, it’s all a separate, unique world. Super-Tony flies high on the notes of Lunghe notti da bar. Surveys tell us that people violate the standards of morality more now than they used to, it’s not true, it’s just that nowadays people talk about it, in the old days people kept it secret. My head is jam-packed, cluttered with surveys.

And I hand out encores like so many advertising flyers at a subway stop.

In the dressing room, Titta feels lighter, he’s lost five pounds worth of tension, now, as he trades hugs and kisses with Lello, Rino, Gino, and Yours Truly. They shout and sing a stadium fight song as if they’d just won the Italian championship. Sweaty and happy. I look at them indulgently, but I don’t sing, I’m the bandleader and I have to play the role of the guy who knew the whole time that this New York thing was going to turn out fine. Jenny Afrodite, my manager, rushes into the dressing room, with his square-cut insignificant little face, with the stubborn lock of hair that dangles obsessively over his forehead, and the little diamond stud penetrating his left ear, making him look, tops, six months younger, and he stills the chorus with a phrase that rings out like a thunderclap right after you’ve fallen asleep.

Boys, Sinatra’s outside. He wants to say hello.

A fragile silence falls. An existential silence.

With the speed of the cheetah that hears a gunshot, I turn and focus like a laser beam on the luminous mirror. I fix my hair. My red hair. Dyed. Bleached. Mahogany-hued. Hair that looks sort of like that of the Italian psychic Silvan, the helmet hair of a maniac. I brush it back, with one long stroke, and I fasten my dressing gown around me. I gesture to Jenny with one arm, a gesture with a distinctly dictatorial flair. Unforget­table. And the door swings open. Titta trembles and apologizes to himself for having self-criticized on occasion, for having failed to love himself adequately, at times. The sound of rhythmic, catlike footsteps comes from the hallway. The footsteps of several people. The wall-to-wall carpeting raped. The bodyguards come in first, and then Frank appears, stumbling, wobbly, red-faced, like southern Italian peasants I have known. Frank walks over to me, extends his hand, upon which there sprawls a ring that lists at 122,000 dollars. An orgasm of diamonds. I reply with my thirteen million-lire ring, one-tenth the value, purchased from the goldsmiths on Via Marina. The two hands clasp. The rings touch with a clinking sound that nobody misses. Fifth Avenue versus Via Marina, an unfair match-up. Titta looks down at his wedding ring, humiliated, and, at the most important moment of his life, underwriting new and previously unexplored inferiority complexes. Theories and ideologies of new forms of generosity, in contrast, blaze paths within me. I feel an impulse to give a gift of cocaine to old Frank, but I contain myself. Barely.

Frank, shorter than even the most pessimistic prediction, indulges in a couple of poses worthy of an emperor, before taking a seat in my chair, the only perch in the dressing room. Me and my group, standing, wait for the oracular statement that can make or break an entire career. In a completely inopportune manner, Lello Cosa remembers that he is a brilliant comedian, as well as a talented drummer.

Doesn’t he look like Napoleon? says Lello Cosa, looking around in search of the unlikely complicity of his fellow band members. I look daggers at him, along with a tacit promise to fire him at the first opportunity. Thank God, Sinatra didn’t get it. Frank sits there, still wordless, the tension rises, there is a tension so indescribable that it truly rivals the humidity in the dressing room. Sinatra, as slowly as a heroin addict, pulls out a pack of cigarettes. Like a herd of giraffes, we crane our necks to glimpse the brand name on the pack. But we’ve never heard of this brand. They’re called Sinatra.

Frank places the cigarette between his lips, as if in a slow-motion musical, then he pulls out a 1958 Dupont platinum lighter and puts together a sentence in halting Italian.

"Questo me lo ha regalato Marilyn Monroe."

It was a gift from Marilyn Monroe.

Now, anxiety. So. Much. Anxiety.

"Il concerto is good, ma ricordati una cosa Tony, il successo . . . il successo sta sul cesso," Frank Sinatra says haltingly, with a burst of alcoholic laughter at his little play on words. He says it was a good concert, but don’t forget, Tony, success is on the toilet.

Il successo sta sul cesso. Success is on the can.

Your Own Tony thinks back on these words as, spread across the seat of the black limousine paid for by who knows who—certainly not by me, that much is certain—he sits there all alone, as the skyscrapers of Midtown file past his eyes, eyes that have been pierced by six gin & tonics. The chauffeur wouldn’t pay attention to me if I begged him to, and so I explain to myself that it’s time to sniff some coke. I hunker over the white powder and snort a line that ought by rights to bring down the Empire State Building, but not even the black chauffeur heard me, soundproofed behind a plate of glass that, where I come from, you’d only find in a bank. Here I am, all alone. I was hoping to have dinner with Sinatra, but he slipped away with the air of having done me an enormous favor just by coming to the concert. I’d been overly optimistic: stars, celebrities, it is well known, are always somewhere else. And in any case, not where I am. I imagined agreeable after-dinners with Frank in houses decorated by Billy Wilder’s set designer, but instead I’m heading straight for Times Square and its monopolistic concentration of whores. My personal domain. Here I never feel out of place. I proceed by ethnic groups. And I beckon into the limousine a black woman, a Puerto Rican, and a blonde with a mean glare who strikes me as German, Hungarian, or I don’t know what, I’ve always muddled east and north. I’m a man suited either to American luxury or the hot tropics, down there I feel like a pharaoh on holiday. I left my three bandmates to stew in a bar in the Village; the most that those three can expect from life is a bottled beer in a dark bar. They can’t even talk to the bartender; the dictatorship of the English language has cut them off from of the better circles of life. I have no idea where Jenny Afrodite is, no one does, he travels in his own circles and never says a word to anyone about it, he just tells us he has work to do, which might be true, or he might just as easily be off shooting up heroin, what would I know?

But as I offer cocaine to the three prostitutes, I quack out little words in American English that would sound natural on the lips of a turn-of-the-century immigrant. They don’t even bother to answer, plunged head-first into the white drug as they are. But I like to communicate. I’ve always liked it. And I’ve never been too squeamish about the method of communication. Whether that method involves words, fists, tears and laughter, love letters, sex, alcohol, or cocaine, it’s all fine with me: it’s all just communication.

We enter the hotel room and snort coke again, lines so long that you can see the beginning but not the end. I flop down onto the bed as if to say: well, here I am, look at me now, do what you will with me.

The black prostitute has magniloquent breasts that ooze out at the sides with torrential crevices, the result of too many children or too many hands palpating her. That last thought couldn’t have been more apt: it excites me! The Puerto Rican is a neat little person, she undresses in a corner, as if she were about to go to sleep all by herself. She chooses an empty chair and places all her bits and bobs there, like a shop clerk trying out for a job. She is diligent. To judge from appearances, she was a good student but had no interest in interacting with siblings and family. That’s the idea I’m getting of her. But the one who’s starting to worry me is the blonde ice princess. She’s just standing there, immobile and fully dressed, leaning against the monumental English secretary desk by the door with the air of a vicious accountant. As if to say: here I am, but if I were at a dentists’ convention I wouldn’t behave any differently. She’s starting to get on my nerves, and she’s undermining the excitement instilled in me by the overhandled tits of the black whore. It’s the black prostitute who falls onto the bed with me first, rubbing up against me. I kiss her. She avoids the kiss.

Who knows why, it triggers an awkward statement:

I’m a singer, I say, for no reason.

No one else said a word, I was the one who spoke.

None of the three could give a flying fuck.

The Puerto Rican presses in, putting on a hot-and-heavy act. First I knew, she’d crept up behind me, like a professional killer, but now she is caressing me from here and from there, while the black whore has settled into her routine, legs wide open. I slip into her and, who can say why, I think that I’m not solving my problem here. I’m still excited, but I’m not as hard now as you might expect. The coke tends to undermine those macho hopes. And the blonde is annoying me, standing there, watching indifferently, without moving away from the secretary desk, still fully dressed, and I’m thinking what the fuck did I pay for? If this goes on much longer, I’m going to raise hell. I move back and forth on the black one, but I lack pathos. Loneliness grabs me by the balls and turns me head over heels.

We have to be strong, Tony.

I go for it, all the effort of work, the anxieties, the apprehensions of my life are justified, and must be justified by moments like this. Screwing three different women, with different lives and different mothers and fathers. Anyway—whatever—I speed up, start panting, enter into anatomical confusion, pull it out just as I’m about to come, and only then do I understand, the blonde, furtive and rapid as a silent jackal, has crouched down beneath me, still fully dressed, and takes it in her mouth and—before I know it—I’m home. Now I’m dying. The same one that annoyed me so much has given me this Christmas present, this spectacle! A silent spectacle. What massacres your senses in sex is the silence when you expect noise, and vice versa. That is one of the few things that still astonish me. I’m still short on oxygen, experiencing the last few spasms, when the bedside phone rings. It’s Maria, my wife.

Ciao, amore, I say, as I extract myself from between the legs of the black babe, but taking my time about it. Not even Jesus Christ can instill guilt complexes in me, or tell me what to do. I paid all three of them in advance, so I watch as they silently dress, while I describe with a hearty laugh how well the concert went. I can hear my wife leaping with joy back home. Like a kangaroo. She shares my joys, she shares my sorrows. I don’t even see the blonde, she must have already left the room, she never undressed anyway. What the fuck would she still be doing here? My wife tells me that the little girl wants to talk to me. I hear that innocent voice say:

Papa.

While the black whore and the other one slip out the door without even waving bye-bye, my daughter tells me that she misses me. It occurs to me that she’s been missing me all her life.

Darling, I’m going to bring you a present when I get back, now let’s hang up, it’s late, didn’t Mamma tell you? I have jet lag, a different time zone, Papa is very tired, he worked tonight.

I’m in a hurry to get off the phone, but why?

I hang up the receiver, but I don’t feel very good. My stomach hurts. But it’s not the ulcer, it’s the jet lag that’s lacerating my tummy. I have sperm on my hands, and then I realize with a start that something else isn’t on my hand anymore: the ring that cost me thirteen million lire. I had it a minute ago. I emit a scream you’d expect from a hungry seagull. That blonde whore stole my ring. Why doesn’t this sort of thing ever happen to Sinatra? Maybe because he doesn’t go around picking up whores in Times Square. I have confirmation when I hustle over to my wallet by the