‘Makes you feel part of history, don’t it?’ says Sunbed. ‘‘Ere, Billy, you gotta take our picture for the boys back home.’
Just after I’ve taken snapshots of the brothers grinning inanely while calling their mum on Meyer Lansky’s phone, Paulie comes strolling in and so I commence with the proceedings.
‘Paulie,’ I say. ‘These are my pals, Terry and Jack. Good people from England. Terry, Jack, this is Paulie. Paulie is one hundred per cent proper and you can talk to him as you talk to me.’ Nods and handshakes all round sees me wolfing down my now cold coffee, bid my farewells, and then slip out through a side door while thinking what a pleasure it is to just do such business without Danny wanting to turn people over, or cut them to pieces for some transgression, real or imagined. It’s finally getting through to my thick skull that without that lunatic on the firm I could be doing deals like this all day long. No violence, nobody getting hurt. Good charlie, good karma and plenty of easy cash with the chance of having my collar felt down to about zilch. And I mean I have to be honest with myself, the day I ever do a straight job will be the day pigs fly. And if pigs ever do fly, then Scotland Yard will be London’s biggest airport. Yeah, fuck that straight-goer nine-to-five shit. I like to do my business with the sun gone down. What about ethics I hear you say? As far as I’m concerned, ethics is a county in the south of England, where some of my pals live in great big houses. When I get home I resolve to sit down and give myself a serious talking to, but for now with my part of the deal done, I decide to vamoose out of town for a few days while they sort their business out, in the very slim chance that it goes boss-eyed. The last thing I need at the moment is to be banged up in a Yankee nick. A shiver runs down my spine. The thought of spending fifteen stretch in one of those reptile houses runs my blood cold. On the plus side, Paulie has slipped me a large nugget of crystal, bit of personal, if you get my drift. And so, with the sun setting against the left side of my face and the moon already rising bold over my right shoulder, I gun open the throttle of my Mustang and hit the freeway that leads up to Boca Raton, to lay low and catch me some serious rays.
FIVE DAYS LATER and with not a dicky bird from the two brothers means I’m taking as read that no news is good news, and so I’ve slipped back down the coast to spend my last night in Miami. After bidding fond farewells to Henri and Paulie, I make my way to South Beach to drop Lennie McLean’s film script off to Derry O’Dourke. I’m a little apprehensive about the meet because of O’Dourke’s reputation of being a flash cunt with a big mouth, but I press on regardless for Lennie’s sake. A message left at the Alfonse informs me he’s hanging at his brother Buck’s bar, Boner’s, located one block back from the beach. One reaching the bar my eyes lock onto a single custom Harley-Davidson parked directly outside on the sidewalk. On it sits a handwritten sign, warning; ‘This bike belongs to Derry O’Dourke, don’t touch it or I’ll kick your ass.’ Now this tells me two things. One, that the bike’s his; and two, he’s a total cunt. I bowl in but already I’ve got the fucking zig. Working my way through a party crowd of biker babes, beach bums and surf Nazis, I catch sight of O’Dourke propping up the bar in the far corner. He’s togged up in full outlaw leathers and with a stars and stripes bandana wrapped tight around the top of his head, while holding court spieling war stories to a small crowd of bought and paid for cronies, who are hanging on every ounce of his bullshit. One of the sycophants lapping up his largesse is a pretty-boy English boxer, who me and Danny smashed the granny out of in an East End boozer a while back, after him and his mates took a stinking liberty with an old-age pensioner. As I approach the party, Pretty Boy stares at me through narrowed eyes then pretends not to recognise me.
Ten seconds after I’ve introduced myself, O’Dourke’s all over me like a cheap suit, ordering up drinks and asking about Lennie McClean, as if he’s his long lost brother. Waving Lennie’s script in his hand for all to see, he then orders a lackey to chop up some fat hairy ones on the bar, which we demolish, chasing them down with shots of gold tequila. But the high don’t last, because after suffering approximately fifteen minutes or so of embarrassing rhubarbing, and watching grown men debase themselves by sucking up to this egotistical, phoney baloney piece of southern-fried white trailer trash, I’m already plotting my escape. Thankfully, Lady Luck deals me a fabulous hand, which I run with, when O’Dourke, who obviously can’t drink like he can talk, and judging by the couple of snide boxing bouts he’s taken part in, can’t even fight like he can drink, goes as green as a gooseberry and starts staggering through the bar to the entrance, brushing revellers aside as if they were ninepins. Without so much as a by-your-leave to any of his arsewipes I follow swiftly in his wake. On reaching the outside of the bar he misses a step, tumbles arse over elbow over bandana and ends up in a crumpled and dishevelled heap next to his motorcycle. As I reach the bottom of the steps I stand and take stock, not quite believing what I’m seeing, because there laying comatose like a tramp in front of me, and with a piss stain forming on the front of his jeans, is a movie legend and one-time idol of mine, who not only blew most of his peers off the screen in any number of classic films, but who also ended up in the feather with some of the most beautiful women in the world.
Stepping over him in obvious disgust in order to get on my way, I suddenly catch sight of his dentures, which have fallen out of his mouth and are laying open in a wide grin two feet away from his head. I do no more than give them a swift kick, sending them tumbling into the gutter, alongside my estimation of the man. Then without even checking to see if he’s OK, I stroll off into the night to look for some real action with some real people. But witnessing yet another hero plummeting to a zero sent me into a deep depression, the result of which saw me skulking the streets of South Beach acting like Mr Sad-fuck himself, charlie-sniffing alone and talking bollocks to the moon. I even got refused entry to Gianni Versace’s nightclub, because the no-neck mackerel of a head doorman spotted white powder around the edges of my nostrils and all down the front of my shirt. If this was London I would have shot the mug in the fucking leg, but I didn’t have no yogger, so instead I screamed abuse at all and sundry then tore off into the night with the raving hump, hitting more bars, sinking yet more booze and consequently searching for action in a steadily declining quality of watering holes, until reaching rock bottom in the form of the flickering neon of the Four Deuces, which in essence is nothing more than a cave gouged out of a hole in the wall, and that sucks desperadoes into its clammy hell like dog shit draws flies.
The Four Deuces. Twenty-four seven of scuzzball heaven. Excepting that they close up for one hour between five and six in the morning to throw out the trash alongside the drunks, sweep up the spit-soaked sawdust and swill the congealed sick out of the toilets with buckets of disinfected water. After which, they open up and let the drunks back in again. As soon as I walk in off the street, the door slams shut behind me, leaving me blinking blindly into the bar’s netherworld of half-light and lipstick-stained glasses. Tentatively I make my way along the bar, brushing past a row of seated barflies in stinking workwear, glued to their stools with dried sweat, and swigging back mouthfuls of snide well whiskey. At the end of the bar, what light there was abruptly disappears and I find myself having to feel my way into the men’s toilets like a blind man boarding a bus, just so as I can have a toot and a freshen up. Another indication of what a classy joint this is, hits me as soon as I make it into the wash area, because the lights installed are ultraviolet, put in specially to make it impossible for junkies to locate their veins for mainlining. After moving in close to the mirror and seeing my reflection, I give out an audible gasp of ‘fucking hell!’ Because staring back at me is one messy cunt. Not only is my reflection slobbering at the chops, but its nose is dripping like a jank pussy. Not that it matters, ‘cos the cunt ain’t got a cat in hell’s chance of banging any beaver tonight. So, after blanking out the mirror, I creep into a cubicle to sniff up some more sustenance and then negotiate my way back into
the main bar area to get fucked up some more.
They say that God works in mysterious ways and he sure does, because I’ve just found divine providence in the form of Candy Darling, sitting in a far corner under a swathe of light emanating from a nearby pool table, and sharing cocktails with Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland. Well, that’s who they look like to my fucked-up eyes. After straightening myself up as best I can in the circumstances, I stroll over to a trailer-bride cocktail waitress, busy chewing gum and painting her inch-long nails, order the two screen legends a drink, plus another each for me and Candy. She’s so pleased to see me I get a full on frenchie and a loving reef round my bollocks. Now if she was a bird I would’ve loved to have bent her straight over the pool table and fucked her right there on the spot, after which, I would’ve stuck a finger up each one of her holes like I was ready to pick up a tenpin bowling ball. But no matter how fucked up I am I ain’t fucked up enough to forget that Candy’s only got one hole to play with, and I don’t do business with the brown-eye.
Plus, there’s already a couple of heavy looking Hell’s Angels at the table playing eight ball for big bucks, so I give that passing pipe dream a miss, and instead drag Candy off to the gents, pile her into a cubicle and carve up another couple of lines. Candy ain’t no sooner powdered her hooter, when without any further ado, she drops down to her knees on the beer and piss soaked floor, pulls down my flies, whips out Mr Sloppy-head, throws a Jamaican lip right over him and starts sucking him like she’s sucking a golf ball through a hosepipe. And let me tell you, there ain’t nothing in the world to make a man feel more like the almighty than someone, anyone, down on their knees in front of him, sucking his corey.
So there I am lost in lust with my life being played out like a backstreet porn movie, and the volcano deep inside my spuds showing every sign of erupting and getting ready to blow Candy’s tonsils down the back of her throat, when it dawns on me that my fucking plane leaves at seven a.m. But I don’t have my watch on, and being a gentlemen, I deem it rude to interrupt anyone while they’re enjoying a good meal. But a quick look down at Candy tells me it must be at least five o’clock, judging by the shadow that’s starting to manifest itself on her jaw. Now sometimes while I’m getting blown I’m prone to sermonising and dispensing my own particular pearls of wisdom, but with a plane to catch, my mind is now on my flight, and so I pull out my cock sharpish and dispense a pearl necklace instead. A lovely clammy number made up of thick white globules which I proceed to lay in as uneven line around Candy’s neck and shoulders. But as quickly as I shoot my bolt, the guilt trip kicks in, and I quickly zip up in silence and do the Dustin out of the Four Deuces without so much as a thank you for services rendered. Although I’m as mangled as a drunken redneck’s pickup truck in a death crash I somehow manage to gather my possessions from my hotel room, check out and drive myself to the airport, arriving with only fifteen minutes until the gate closes and I miss my flight. After pulling close to the pavement directly outside international departures, I dump the Mustang in a loading bay that says no parking, leaving the keys in the ignition and the engine still running. Then, grabbing my luggage off of the bag seat, I hotfoot it to the check-in and slip through passport control, arriving in the departure lounge with just a few minutes to spare.
On reaching the required boarding gate it relieves me immensely to find that the package tour lemmings have already boarded, and now the only downer is that because of my paranoia about keeping a low profile back in Blighty, I’m booked into cattle class. After chucking a quick envious glance at the first class cabin, I turn right and skulk along the impossibly narrow aisle looking for an empty seat. As I squeeze my way past the legions of sweating fuglies, squashed together like cattle to the slaughter, their turnip heads red raw and sunburnt by unaccustomed sun, I can’t understand why they seem so happy and content. I mean they’re flying back from paradise to belting rain and the grindstone of twenty-five year mortgages. But then my heart lifts a little when I suss that there’s rows of empty seats at the back. Snagging the furthest window seat I can find away from the madding crowd, I plonk myself down under the auspices of a shit-eating grin, because the nearest sore-heads are five rows down, and there’s no screaming brats within earshot. A short while later as we taxi ready for take-off I remember that I’m still cottrelled up with some of the coke I got as a gift from my Cuban connection. A quick reef around my strides also reveals me to be in possession of half a bottle of amyl nitrate. As the plane eases onto the runway, the interior lights go down and the hostesses strap themselves in as we prepare for take-off. Seizing the opportunity I discreetly pull the blind down on my porthole window, pull down the table from the back of the seat in front of me, and chop up a couple of lines on it, which I sniff up straight away. As we move further along the runway, the jet’s engines wind up into a high-powered scream and the plane jolts forward reaching maximum tyre speed, tilts backwards then takes off, rocking slightly as the wheels leave the tarmac. And right at that very moment, I uncap my bottle of amyl nitrate and take a huge blast up each nostril before settling back to enjoy what is definitely a whole new meaning to ‘in-flight’ entertainment. Twenty cans of Budweiser, two wraps of charlie, fuck knows how many blasts of amyl, and ten racehorse pisses later, my plane finally touches down at Heathrow.
FAT RAY’S A real piece of work. Thirty rotten stinking stone of soap-dodging, ex-army smegball. But for all his personal hygiene problems he ain’t no mug. He’s got his nicotine-stained fingers in untold dodgy pies, only trouble being is that when his fingers ain’t in the pies, they’re either up his arse or up his nose. He never changes his clobber and bites his nails to the bone, but I love the man to death because he’s one hundred per cent and brightens up the darkest day. He runs the stall pitches in Berwick Street Market, Soho, copping kickbacks from every stallholder, although he does keep one himself, just as a front really. And if you ever find yourself trolling about down Berwick Street you can’t miss him. Gravy-stained wife-beater, mouldy old sweat pants from hell, potatoes growing out of his cauliflower ears and scuffed-up dealer boots, leering at every little piece of Top Shop totty that totters by. ‘Come and get yer gums around me plums,’ is what he shouts at them. Don’t think he gets too many takers though. I’ve slipped up to see Fat Ray today because I’ve got a proposition for the man, but having scouted his usual haunts I’ve drawn a blank. He ain’t even standing at his stall, which means there’s only one man to ask, Hoover-mouth. Hoover-mouth is Fat Ray’s eyes and ears on the street.
And any shit that needs straightening out, it’s down to Hoover-mouth. Like if a stallholder’s late with their rent he’ll get Hoover-mouth to hover around their stall, cunting and fucking in his indecipherable lingo and scaring off punters. You see Hoover-mouth blew half his own face away in a failed suicide attempt. Put a shooter under his chin, pulled the trigger and BANG! Only thing is he lived, sort of. His bad aim saw an ordinary mooey transfigured into a grotesque mask, of which one side is exposed down to raw flesh and jawbone, into which a few manky teeth have survived, alongside a stub of tongue. And what with a hook clay pipe stuck permanently on what’s left of his lower lip, he looks likes like a cross between the Elephant Man and a sawn-in-half pig’s head with a strange taste in smoking apparel.
Hoover-mouth grunts and points to the sky when I ask him for Fat Ray. That don’t mean Fat Ray’s dead or he’s on a plane. It means he’s in an upstairs room in a building of mine and Danny’s that we let him use rent free, and where he conducts all his moody business from. Like the fat man don’t stop telling me, ‘Gotta keep the crooked cash rolling in, Billy, there’s fuck all karats in carrots.’ And on that I have to make him right.
DREAMING LIPS, THIS gaff is a gold mine. Forget pawnbroking, and open your heart to pornbroking! The whole building belongs to me and Danny, but not on paper of course. In the basement there’s a hardcore porno cinema that takes a fortune. All men, all day. Middle-aged married inadequates mostly, trapped in pitiful cycles
of self-abuse. Spend all afternoons engaging each other in furtive bouts of mutual masturbation and spunk swallowing, before slinking home to their Doreens in Dorking. Ground floor. Sex shop. Soft stuff on show, hard stuff under the counter. At the back of the sex shop we’ve got some peepshow booths. Absolute money-spinners, consisting of nothing more than a bored, bumpy-legged old broad, grinding lethargically for endless droves of sad-fuck, five-knuckle shuffle merchants. And hardly any outlay needed, save for the bird, and the bloke who gives out the change and has to mop up the spunk the punters leave behind. At the moment there’s a clampdown, fucking Tory council! And we’re also getting serious grief from the vice squad. Two raids a month. They come in, smash the gaff up and take everything, even the DVD machines. But we’ve got a large van full of porn parked up in a car park around the corner, plus a cowboy building firm on call, and as soon as they bust any of our gaffs, we’re back ready to do business in a matter of hours. That’s the great thing about the porn game. Build it, and they will cum!
We use a front man system to avoid the nickings ourselves and it runs like a dream. You see the thing about Soho is that it attracts drifters. They come and they go, and we make cunning use of them. The front man for this building is The Monkey, a miniature Scouser already on his toes from a lagging. A pal of his brought him round to see me, and this is the deal. On paper, he now owns Dreaming Lips, and so first of all we got him a new ID and a little flat on the top floor, rent-free. A three’er a week in his hand, which is well enough to keep him in scag and sherbet, and all he has to do is make himself available when the pigs put on a raid. Of course, they look at him, a five foot druggy Scouser and know he’s only a patsy. But he’ll wave a snide lease in front of their snouts, stick to the script and all they can do is confiscate the porn, write him up and send him a summons in the post. Then, using one of our bent briefs we can normally stretch out proceedings for anything up to two years. And when it all eventually does come on top, The Monkey will go down to Bow Street magistrates court and stick his hands up to all the porn charges, plus any VAT or tax owed. He’ll get six months to a year and do most of it in an open nick, where he’ll use the time to dry out. We’ll send him down regular parcels to help his bird run smooth, and when he comes out he’ll get a ten grand cash pay-off, after which, he’ll probably slip away to Scouse heaven. Chasing the dragon till the cows come home in a pox-ridden little bedsit down on the Cornish Riviera. And there will be another hapless doughnut waiting to step straight into his smelly trainers. That’s how we run all our gaffs in Soho, and it’s why, no matter how early Old Bill gets up in the morning, he’s got no chance of feeling our collars.
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