Philip Nutman - Cities of Night

…and the world of concrete and glass, stone and slate, garbage and dog shit disappeared, broken by a surging synaptic fracture… and what lay before him was in one instant a glimpse of total destruction, unrelenting holocaust, a subliminal flash frame instantly replaced by the stronger all encompassing vision of a Void — black, unforgiving.

Meredith turned from the doorway to vomit his dinner of spaghetti carbonara and several glasses of mediocre frascati on the grime-encrusted steps. He stumbled with a second heave, grabbing the incongruously fake Doric columns of the façade for support, easing himself into a sitting position a few feet away from the puddle of bile. He looked up the street in an attempt to clear his rolling vision. In the distance were two faint figures, one tall and painfully thin, the other short and squat. With the final wave of surreal nausea he wouldn’t have been surprised if they turned out to be the Walrus and the Carpenter. A coughing fit disrupted his eye line, his mind rolling vertiginously, and a distant voice questioned how he had come to this, reached such a state of dissolution.

He knew the answer.

As the telephone rang for the seventh time, a sense of hopelessness descended on Meredith like a carrion bird swooping to a corpse in an arid landscape.

Come on! Answer the damn phone!

The tension in his stomach tightened another notch. Since arriving in Rome two days ago, he’d been feeling a sense of trepidation so strong he could almost smell it, an aroma that churned his gut and diminished his appetite. Worrying he’d developed a stomach ulcer, he clutched the call box receiver so tightly his arm trembled, jarring loose a length of ash from his cigarette. His mouth was dry, and he badly wanted to take a pull from the bottle of Johnny Walker in his bag.

The ringtone buzzed for the eleventh time and he hung up, running a hand through his thick black hair, pushing back the stray strands from his forehead, then threw the cigarette to the floor. On the opposite side of via Paisello, trees moved with the early evening breeze. It was 5:45 PM. He’d try Masullo one more time. After he took a quick pull from the bottle.

Where the hell was the producer, or his secretary for that matter? There wasn’t any reason she should be ignoring the phone; he’d called each day at the same time in a frustrating attempt to get Masullo to finalize a time for the proposed interview, already rescheduled four times in the past week. With the way things were going, it looked like Film Comment wasn’t going to get the definitive story of Italian exploitation movies. This was Masullo’s chance to gain some mainstream respectability, which, for a producer of over thirty cheap horror movies and softcore skin flicks, was hard to come by, and Meredith couldn’t understand why he was being given the run-around. Still, the producer of such bad-taste gems as Emanuel and the Satanists, The Sex Crimes of Dr. Crespi , and pseudo-documentaries like Savage Africa , complete with scenes of clitoral circumcision, probably didn’t care about anything other than money. Meredith could relate.

A sharp knock on the glass of the booth cracked him from his reverie. A large woman in a sickly green raincoat was rapid-firing unintelligible Italian through the glass that kept the chill of the Roman night at bay. Her face was a sour rictus, the corners downturned over cheeks the color of dough like a bloated, tragedy mask, and the coat fabric taut over her huge breasts.

Meredith vacated the booth as the woman pushed past him into the cubicle.

“Fuck you,” he said with a smile. On second thought, don’t.

The woman was truly gross. A dried shitty substance stained the back of her coat and legs, and her black hair hung in greasy rat’s tails.

As far as he could make out, all Italian women belonged to one of two groups: over twenty-five and overweight, like the whores at the hotel, or under that age and curvaceous. He’d seen one Dachau-thin woman in, he surmised, her late thirties, a walking skeleton who served in the café near the station. But she had to be the least attractive woman he had ever laid eyes on, a woman who seemed thinner each time he saw her. Still, the opposite sex wasn’t on his list of priorities.

He lit another cigarette while the woman dialled. The brown stain disgusted him. Rome was potentially the dirtiest city he had ever visited, the buildings heavily blackened from the cancer of carbon monoxide. And as soon as he stepped off the airport bus he’d trodden in a sizable turd — human, not animal. Great .

Dirty. Smelly. Winos in the gutters near the pensione . Rubbish spilling from the bins by the Villa Borghese. Shit in the Tiber. Meredith had had enough.

He had, however, much more to worry about than shit and magazine articles. More to the point were screenplays and movie deals. If Masullo would agree to read one or two of Meredith’s novels, he felt certain they could get a deal going. Film Comment would have to make do with what he sent them. At least he’d interviewed Dario Argento, Joe D’Amato, and Ruggero Deodato. But he had a lot riding on the idea of selling Masullo the rights to at least Blood Stunt , if not A Killing For Christmas. Throwaway thrillers deserved to be made into movies by hack producers, and Meredith was under no illusions about art; all he wanted was money. And soon. If he could get Masullo hooked, he could be out of debt for the first time in seven years.

A grunting noise made him look up. The green blob vacated the phone booth, bustling past with a flourish of body odour. Meredith belched in response as he fished in his pocket for a getone and reentered the cubicle.

The phone buzzed against his right ear.

One… two… three… four…

Jesus! Answer the bloody thing!

…six… seven…

A click.

“Pronto?” said a woman’s voice.

“Zebrafilm?”

“Yes.”

“This is Bruce Meredith. I’m calling again about the interview of Signore Masullo.”

“I have bad news, Signore Meredith. Signore Masullo asks me to apologize for not being able to see you this evening as was suggested. He has to go to Milan for a meeting. But he can see you at 10:30 AM on Monday.”

“What? I have to return to London this weekend. Is there any chan—”

“In that case, Signore Meredith,” the voice interjected, “I’m sorry, Signore Masullo has been very busy. Perhaps you will be in Rome again soon?”

Meredith threw down his cigarette. “No, that’s out of the question. The magazine deadline is in two weeks. Would it be possible to see him this weekend — say Saturday?”

Please say yes!

“No, Signore Meredith. That’s not possible. Thank you.” The line went dead.

Bitch!

Monday! Damn Masullo. Damn Rome. Damn the whole shitty country.

He stepped from the booth and stood a while, worrying his bottom lip before fumbling in his shoulder bag for the bottle. He took a large pull, the Scotch hitting instantly, burning his gut in a fiery rush. Without further thought, he began to walk.

A light breeze rustled the trees which whispered their secrets in return. What could he do? He couldn’t really afford to come here in the first place and had only managed to do so by conning his sister out of five hundred quid under the pretence of repairing his car, conveniently neglecting to tell her he’d sold it. He couldn’t cancel the return flight as he didn’t have enough to purchase another ticket. If he’d thought the situation through before coming, he could have anticipated delays, made provisions for an alternative course of action, but as usual he had done everything in a rush. It was too much to think about, the decision requiring a ruthlessly objective look at his position, so he did the usual — procrastinated for several minutes while he paced up and down, neither thinking nor acting, and lit another cigarette. He looked vacantly at the trees, the pavement, the walls. He would decide tomorrow. He needed to rest, relax. And that meant one thing — sex. A night of fucking would burn out the cloud of depression that was already filling his system like ink in water. If he could get laid, he’d awaken refreshed in the morning, be able to take his situation in hand. Sex always provided peace of mind.