Clarence is now standing next to Joe waiting for instructions. He’s still got a half-smile on his face and looks like he isn’t quite with us yet.
‘Over there then, Sambo.’
Joe accidentally drops the camera and curses. He picks it up and shakes it to make sure it is still working. A Rolleicord! I suppose I would not have been more surprised if he had turned up with a Speed Graphic. With Joe, the f-stops here, you could say.
Clarence sits on the edge of the bed next to the girls. He’s a big guy all right and the girls have noticed.
Vera turns to Clarence and tells him that there is not to be any kissing. They don’t do that. Plenty of sucking, yes, but no kissing. Clarence continues smiling. He’ll do as he’s told.
Joe then produces an old Avo light meter! An Avo! Not even a Weston! An Avo. I haven’t seen one of these in years. They stopped making them in the late 1930s. It belongs in a museum. Little cream-coloured thing in Bakelite with a flat light receptor – not even a dome. Joe holds it in the direction of the girls, taps it, takes a reading and then twists the calculator disc for the exposure. I’m not even sure the thing is working and neither is Joe. Then he guesses the exposure just to be sure and throws (yes, throws) the Avo back in the bag. He sets the Rolleicord and shakily holds it at waist level telling the three of them not to move. I don’t think it would have made much difference if they had, Joe’s hands are so trembly the camera is vibrating anyway. That and the grease on the lens diffusing the image is going to make for a thin blurry neg. But will the punters notice? I wouldn’t have thought so.
‘Yeah, this seems all right.’
He looks up from the camera and gives the lens another polish.
‘Right. Vera, Olive – it doesn’t matter what you do to our West Indian friend here. You can do whatever you like as much as you like, he’ll never lose his horn.’
‘He won’t?’
‘He won’t. He’s got a medical condition. Ain’t that right, Sambo?’
Clarence shakes his head gleefully. But the shaking continues for a moment too long. I wonder if he isn’t doped up on something. Vera wants to know if this medical condition is infectious.
‘No, it’s a nervous medical condition. A condition every bloke wishes he had. It gives him a permanent hard-on!’
Vera and Olive are a bit sceptical.
‘Right. Now let’s get on with it. First shot. You lie on your back there in the middle, Sambo. Vera, give him a suck … and pull your hair back so we can see what’s going on. And you, Olive, give him a tit to suck. Yeah, that’s about right … lean back a bit. Hold it. Watch the birdie! Now change positions and hold it. Yeah. That’s right. Take it right in. Watch the birdie! OK. Now you stay where you are and you lie by the side, Vera, with your legs open and your lips pulled back. Yeah, that’s good. But a bit more. Watch the birdie! Stay where you are and I’ll get it from over here. Don’t move. Yup. Hold it. Watch the birdie!’
And so it will go on for four rolls of HP3. Clarence sticks it wherever Joe tells him to and the girls roll their eyes and lick their lips and sigh and groan and give out little cries of pleasure that would do St Teresa proud and which would be great if only Joe’s camera had a sound stripe. But it doesn’t. This is the iconography and sound-ography of purchased sex and this is what the girls’ punters expect and get, in spades. The girls are so used to putting on the sighing and aaaahing they even do it for the camera. While Joe reloads the camera the girls return to their normal mien, bored, impatient, stand-offish.
Clarence eventually comes over Vera’s tits and later over Olive’s face and he is very careful that it doesn’t go elsewhere. The girls don’t mind having semen over their lips but woe betide Clarence if he gets it on the bloody candlewick. He pumps away and they groan and push and Joe snaps away.
By the second roll I’m really bored. What I see going on over there on the bed has nothing to do with what I associate with sex. Dirty photos are sometimes exciting but this is too real. Photos allow you room for your imagination. This doesn’t. I say that, yet would I feel any different if the two girls over there were a couple of real crackers, like some of Charlie’s girlfriends, and not the two old scrubbers I now see? I wonder.
Joe gets paid £10 for a session like this from Mr Messalino who runs a few dirty bookshops here and there but mainly in Soho. Now I know who takes those dirty pix you see floating around Soho. French Joe, the plain man’s photographic genius, the happy snapper. French Joe – a Weegee without talent or technique – producing those washed-out photographs of lifeless fornication with overripe scrubbers. Washed out but uniformly hard lit, no sense of lighting. Next to stuff like this Harrison Marks starts to take on the mantle of Man Ray or Bill Brandt.
Before the session is finished I wander down to the car. I didn’t want to be a spectator any longer (and I certainly don’t want to be a participant). I stand in the street and smoke a cigarette and watch the people and traffic coming and going from King’s Cross and looking up at the too brightly lit window and think this evening would make a fine chapter in a book of Henry Miller-style memoirs should I ever write one.
I wondered why Joe had asked me along. To take part in the activities? He never said anything or indicated that he wanted me to join the girls. He was anything but subtle. If he had wanted me to take part he would have come out with it. He didn’t. I wasn’t asked along for any second photographic opinions. Joe is quite confident in his own expertise and doesn’t need some kid to tell him how to do it. Did he think he was doing me a favour letting me come along and watch? Joe has no idea of what friendship is and has never been known to do anyone a favour in his life.
This puzzled me.
I also learnt later that Clarence wasn’t doped up. He was mentally defective and Joe had collected him from some halfway house hostel in Blenheim Crescent. So an evening that began as being merely grotesque ended up as being totally gruesome … and all on the Sabbath too.
The net result of this night out was a week of diminished libido. I just didn’t fancy doing it at all. I wasn’t impotent or anything, just uninterested. Veronica said the evening sounded awful but didn’t want me to spare her any of the details and I duly obliged. Sonny said he would be happy to take over whenever they wanted a black guy to give it to the white mamas and I told him he should get in touch with Joe as I certainly wasn’t going to be involved in that scene. Charlie thought it was funny and wanted to know why I hadn’t taken part. I told him. He didn’t understand.
French Joe came by the bar a couple of times during the week sporting a smirky smile and acting like I owed him a big favour. He didn’t mention the Sunday at all but I could tell it was on his mind. He asked if I would lend him 10 shillings and somehow thought I should and when I didn’t he stormed out in a huff. A couple of days later he came back in, sullen and wounded. It still puzzled me why he had asked me along and I tackled him on it. He seemed to get nervous. He shuffled about and avoided looking me in the eye.
‘I just thought you might like to come along.’
‘What, as a favour?’
‘Yeah. That’s right.’
‘You’ve never done a favour for anyone in your life.’
‘I’m always doing favours … for friends.’
‘You are not … because you don’t have any.’
‘That’s not a very fucking nice thing to say, is it? You saying that … you’re talking like a real cunt, you are.’
‘Perhaps I am a cunt.’
‘Perhaps you are, Timmy. Perhaps you are. I didn’t think you was but perhaps you are … a real prize cunt.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Yeah. You got ten bob I could borrow to the weekend?’
‘No.’
‘What do you mean, no?’
‘I mean I haven’t got ten bob to lend you.’
‘I’ll remember that if you ever want to borrow a few bob off me. Don’t ever come to me on the earhole when you’re skint.’
Joe’s polic
y of asking everyone all the time for money probably results in a few shillings here and there but as he never pays any of it back he could never put the arm on someone a second time, except, of course, if they were real mugs.
Joe’s explanation for inviting me along was untrue. I could not figure it out. The probable reason came out in a conversation with Desmond the journalist: Joe was very nervous about black guys and thought at any moment they could ‘go jungle’, revert to type, that is, and start acting like cannibals. He always wanted another white guy about to act as his minder. Joe is certainly a coward and a blinkered, ignorant one at that so I suppose I could buy this explanation, but how come he was alone when he picked up Clarence in Notting Hill Gate?
Joe came in the following day and the business of the ten bob was not mentioned. It was early evening and quiet so I took my coffee over to Joe’s table and he told me the following:
‘First job I had when I left school was with Cox & Harris over on Long Acre. Commercial and industrial photographers. Worked there for a few years up until about 1926. Got a grounding in photography there. Worked for some other photographers too later on. Never came to much. In the 1930s I used to do the odd bit of glamour photography as they now call it. Only then it was hot stuff and sold only in certain places. You never saw anything more than bare tits and arses.
‘There was this French geezer up in Camden Town, on Delancey Street, who used to publish little pocket-size magazines with titles like Spicy Ladies, Parisian Nights. I used to make a few bob doing photos for him.
‘The only dirty photos you saw in those days was brought in from abroad. You know, sailors and people who went abroad brought them back. They came from France … or Egypt, I think. I mean there might have been somebody doing this stuff over here but I never saw it.
‘Then it all started to change during the war. Troops were coming and going through London like nobody’s business and they were bringing these dirty photos over from the countries they had been stationed in. So there was a big demand for the stuff. They didn’t just want to see foreign women and niggers and that, they wanted girls who looked like Vera Lynn. You know, English girls.
‘There was this fella over on Greek Street called Wally Gulliver who was originally a Highbury lad but he bought this shop there near the Pillars and was a photographic sundries man, a bit of this and a bit of that. He asked me to do some photographs and he sold them under the counter in his shop. We did a roaring trade! First off, all we sold was photos of single girls with their legs open but then the punters wanted to know why we didn’t have any lezzy stuff and fucking stuff. So we obliged.
‘The girls never asked for masks or anything. Sometimes one or two might have worn a wig but you could still see who they were.
‘So that’s how I got going during the war. After the war, in the late 1940s, things started getting back to normal but I stopped doing pictures. Then about 1948 … yeah, it was 1948 because it was the year Freddie Mills became the world light-heavyweight champion, this Maltese geezer, Franco Messalino, comes up to me and says would I like to do some business for him? He’s opened this shop selling Yank mags and pin-up mags and he wants some pictures for “out back”. Stronger stuff for the punters. So I say what’s in it for me and we work it out. I been taking pictures for him ever since.
‘There are a couple of other geezers doing the photos too but most of the stuff you’ll see about was done by me. And I’ve shot it all on my old Rolleicord. The box has never let me down.
‘When I began the stuff I shot was always the same. Just a boy and a girl. Just simple fuck and suck stuff. You never saw the bloke coming or anything like that. That came much later. Then it moved on to group stuff with two men and a woman, or two women and a bloke, and even two couples. Later on you got the jigaboos, the niggers in the pictures. There was a black girl I used a lot in the 1950s from Shepherd’s Bush called Nancy. She did a lot of photographs with white blokes, usually two at a time. She used to love it.
‘About six or seven years ago the stuff started getting pervy. The punters wanted pictures of girls getting it up the arse and stuff like that. Also, the flage stuff. I used to draw whip-marks on their arses with lipstick. Leather and rubber gear. That came along too.
‘I don’t do as many pictures as I used to now. Just two or three sessions a year. All my old stuff gets reprinted but I don’t get paid for it. Sometimes Mr Messalino might bung me a drink for old times’ sake but there’s no money there, not for me.’
There’s never much trade on Saturday mornings so I left Charlie in charge of the bar and wandered over to the Fox for a quick drink. The place was almost empty. I got a pint of light ale and sat down and started reading the Telegraph. About ten minutes later Veronica appeared. She gave me a light kiss on the cheek and told me she’d like a gin and tonic which I instantly and dutifully got for her. She knocked half of it back in one gulp.
‘Shopping always makes me thirsty.’
‘You’re always thirsty.’
‘I’m always shopping.’
‘I thought you were coming by this evening?’
‘I was. But we can go to the pictures another evening. My friend Babs is having a party tonight so we can go there instead. I’ll be around at your place about eight.’
And with that she finished the drink and was up and away. I returned to the paper and the light ale.
Half of the Telegraph later as the pub was getting crowded I heard my name being called and looked up to see French Joe striding across the floor towards me.
‘What you going to buy an old soldier, son?’
‘Hello, Joe.’
‘What you going to get me then? A gold watch? Huh?’
‘You can have what I’m having.’
‘What, the light stuff? That’s for nancy boys and women!’
‘And you can even sit here, but let me get on with the paper, eh?’
‘Sure. You keep your nose in the paper. I’ll sit here quiet.’
I got Joe a pint instead of a Scotch and returned to the paper.
‘Amazes me what you find to read in that paper.’
Joe could not sit still and quiet for five minutes to save his life. He’s looking around the room, drumming his fingers on the table, sighing and murmuring to himself, rubbing his nose, blowing his nose, picking his nose, inspecting the wax he has extracted from his ear with his little finger and then wiping it on the lapels of his jacket, belching, farting, clearing his throat and slurping his drink. I persevered with an article on Monday’s Budget which, amongst other things, had put twopence on a packet of cigarettes. I didn’t smoke that many, perhaps a dozen a day, but the twopences would add up. The cost of living was rising. Inflation had averaged out at about 5 per cent over the last three years if I understood the diagram correctly. People hadn’t noticed this because weekly earnings had gone up about 14 per cent in the same period while salaries over the same stretch were now up around 17 per cent. The pound had held strong against the dollar throughout the 1950s at $2.80. But this is the sixties now and I wonder how we’ll be at the end of it. As the article says, more and more foreign competition is challenging our traditional overseas markets …. Still, I can’t ever imagine our heavy and light industries going under. Who else could build a ship, a motorbike, or a television set so well?
‘Joe. How are you?’
A quiet well-spoken voice with the trace of a foreign accent. Who was it? I looked up and saw this man standing by our table. He was only about 5ft. 4in. and was sharply dressed in an expensive grey suit and a silk shirt that must have cost him a good few guineas. He had a silk tie too. Short grey hair greased and plastered back and a thin taz. He wore glasses and was carrying a walking stick thing more like a cane. His skin was olivey in colour and he didn’t look English. His smile showed a couple of gold teeth. He looked like Adolphe Menjou.
Joe immediately stands up out of deference and respect.
‘I’m all right, Mr Messalino. And how are you and the fam
ily?’
‘We’re good, Joe. Everything is good.’
‘Oh, I’m very pleased to hear that. Very pleased indeed, Mr Messalino.’
‘I see you already have a drink, Joe.’
Joe has social graces like the Sahara has lakes. He must always angle for something and he does:
‘Yeah, that’s true. But it’ll be gone in a minute.’
Joe says this in a joky fashion and when there is no response from his sometime patron his face contorts in embarrassment and he fidgets and shuffles. So even poor old Joe has some vestigial sense of the niceties of behaviour. Mr Messalino turns to me and smiles. Joe jumps into the breach.
‘Yeah, Mr Messalino. This is my friend Timmy. He runs Modern Snax across the road.’
‘Ah, you work for Emilio?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘I have known Emilio well for many years. He is a good man … as were his brothers.’
‘Yes, he is.’
‘You will please give him my best wishes.’
‘I will.’
‘Joe … Mr Timmy.’
And with that Mr Messalino bowed towards us and went off to join some cronies on the other side of the pub.
‘Important man, Mr Messalino. Very important.’
‘Seems pleasant enough.’
‘I know all the important people. Know ’em all.’
That night Veronica didn’t show up until nine o’clock. It was too late to go to the party so we stayed at Porchester Road. She was wearing a pair of knee-length leather fashion boots she had bought in Oxford Street that day. I’d never known a girl with boots like that before. I told her I thought it was only Russian princesses who wore them. Later we made love and I told her she had to keep them on. She says I am ‘kinky’. Afterwards I walked her down to the bus stop. On Saturdays she can stay out till 11.30 p.m. She said she’d had enough of her parents’ domination and wanted to get out. In fact she was going to move out this week and in with me.
London Blues Page 9