by Money(Lit)
'Wow.'
'Yeah. But I'm incredibly relieved. With my accent I thought I'd be smashed to pieces or fucked in half after five minutes in here. But it's not like that. It must be the only place in England where the class system still works.'
I lit a cigarette, and waited.
'I think it's to do with the clarity of the voice. Everyone else, including the screws and the pigs, they all talk as if they've just learned how. They can't understand why I'm in here. They're all paranoid of me. The screws are paranoid of me. The assistant governor is paranoid of me. Even the governor comes down to hobnob with me in the cells.'
'What's the food like?'
'Awful. It's all that soya stuff. It fills you up okay but runs you down at the same time. You know, I always thought they put anti-bonk pills in the coffee. But they don't need to. They don't put anything in the coffee. They don't put coffee in the coffee. Butch Beausoleil could live here in the nude and no one would give her a second glance. I suppose they might try and sellotape her to the walls of their cells. All day you feel as if you've just had about ten hand-jobs. It's the food and the air, and the confinement.'
We sat in a gothic cafeteria. If you lifted your head, it felt like school. Up there among the coach-house windows it was all swimming light, free-style, and tolerance of the noise and warmth of the human commerce below. Below, the prisoners sat at the far side of a rank of yellow-decked tables, with their little visitors — women, kids, the old — ranged opposite on kitchen chairs. No booths or metal grilles. You could hold hands if you wanted to. You could kiss. The older jailbirds were a snouty, ferrety contingent. Some of them looked only half-made. They sat back easily on their benches, their gestures resigned, explanatory. Their women were tensed forward on their seats, almost in a crouch of inquiry or solicitude. The children simply stared and fidgeted, in a high state of nerves — they were on their best behaviour, no question.
'I got you a sleeve of fags,' I said, 'plus twelve half-bottles of wine.'
'Thanks. Did —'
'I was amazed when they told me what I could bring. Half a bottle of wine a day—it's not enough but it's something. I left it all with the guy.'
'Did you bring any books?'
'Uh?'
'Ah you fucking lout! Bring me some tomorrow, okay? Promise. What do you think I do all day, for Christ's sake? All they've got in here is a little heap of Westerns and thrillers with half the pages torn out or covered in tea and snot. I've been reading the fucking Bible for the last few days. Even that would be okay but everyone's beginning to think I'm bananas. Bring me some books.'
'I don't even know what kind of books you like.'
'Jesus, anything. I'll make a list. Novels, history, travel books, I don't mind. Poetry, anything.'
'Poetry? In here?'
'I'll take my chances.'
Alec wore a navy-blue romper suit — the outfit of a French workman, or indeed that of some little new-wave narcissist at a C.L. & S. screening... It was the sight of him in his issued clothing that made me sense just how far he had fallen. Not too far, don't take him too far down, I thought. He'll disappear the other way. Everyone in here, they had all transgressed, they had all sinned against money. And now money was making them pay.
'That reminds me,' I said. 'You haven't got six thousand quid on you, have you?'
Alec scratched his scalp. His sharp nose twitched. 'Yes well I'm sorry about that.'
'What happened?"
'I gave some of it to Eileen and tried to double the rest at roulette. Brill, I agree. It wasn't enough anyway. You should have seen me in the dock, man. I was just melting. When that old moron in the wig, when he read out the sentence — oh, I thought, he must be talking about someone else. Who, me? And this is just remand. If things go against me on the ninth, then I go somewhere serious.'
'Can I do anything?' I said in a quick voice.
'No. I'd need — with the guarantee I'd need, I couldn't even ask you. What did Ella say?'
'Nothing much. Do you hate her?'
'Oh, you know. When you're fighting and hating each other anyway, it must be nice for the chick when she turns out to have the law batting for her. A judge, five hundred filth and Brixton on her side. Instead of throwing an ashtray at you, she throws prison.'
'Christ, I'd —'
'It wasn't her fault. It's all legal stuff to do with the kids. The irony is,' said Alec Llewellyn, describing a figure-eight with his neck, 'the irony is that Andrew — he's not even mine.'
'How do you know?'
'Look at him. Look at his hair. Look at Mandolina. A completely different order of human being.'
'Are you sure?'
'The month she conceived we were getting on so badly — I didn't sleep with her, not that month. She said I fucked her when I was drunk. But if I was too drunk to remember I'd have been too drunk to perform. Anyway. Ella came here the day after I got in and cried her eyes out. She tried to stop it, you know.'
'Oh yeah?'
'How's Selina?'
'Fine. And as true to me as the day is long.'
'You dupe. You gull.'
I named his prep school. I named his public school. I named his Cambridge college. 'And now Brixton,' I said. 'Wherever next?'
'Pentonville.' He took another cigarette from my fanned pack. 'Well, it's the university of life. You learn new things every day. For instance, there's a contract out on you, pal.'
'Oh that,' I said coolly. 'Yeah, so I've heard.'
'One of the minor villains here told me about it. It's a pretty minor contract, too. Fifty quid or something.'
'Who's taken it out?'
'That he didn't know or couldn't remember. But he remembers the damage.'
'Fifty quids' worth,' I said, feeling oddly hurt or slighted. 'What is it — a clip round the ear? A Chinese burn?'
'One blow in the face with a blunt instrument. Now. I'll make the list. And you fucking get me those books.'
The piece of paper changed hands softly. So did a ten-pound note. It wasn't prudent for him to have more. There wouldn't be a great deal to buy, but money has its powers, even here ... Soon he was taken away: a uniformed guard simply beckoned to him through the half-open door. Alec Llewellyn nodded seriously at me as he walked off in his blue overalls, Alec, that snappy dresser. I left the way I'd come in. The criminals now embraced and encouraged their women, many of whom were patiently weeping their daily tearfall. The children had been stilled and quietened by fresh apprehensions. I walked through the clearing-house, the bench-lined locker-room, past full trashcans and the rods of old radiators. The next wave of families were gathered in huddles: the next wave of berks, burglars and bunglers was being dredged up from the cells. Shirtsleeved guards moved about with forms—cheerful, overworked. One of the guys at the gate helped me give the Fiasco a push. At many revolutions per second I came down the green slide into ßrixton and beyond. But only when I reached the washed sky of the Thames did I dare to pull over and negotiate my fear.
I climbed out. I walked half the slope of Battersea Bridge. Behind my back the four smokestacks of the power station pointed upwards, the threshold of an unfinished building of inconceivably vast and dreadful size. Beneath me the Thames lassooed and pulsed like a human brain, sending signals, slipping veil after veil as if a heavier liquid had been sent to slide across its face of water, leaving no doubt that rivers are living things. They die, too. I held the bars until the nausea left me, pouring out through the restraining iron and into the open air.
You see, I come from the criminal classes. Yes I do. It's in me, all that, in my blood. Oh, it gets you! Someone like me, I cannot put real distance between myself and prison. I can only put money there. It's in the blood, the blood. When I fly to California for my final rethink, maybe I'll go the whole hog and get my blood fixed too.
——————
California, land of my dreams and my longing.
You've seen me in New York and you know what I'm like there but in LA,
man, I tell you, I'm even more of a high-achiever—all fizz and push, a fixer, a bustler, a real new-dealer. Last December for a whole week my thirty-minute short Dean .Street was being shown daily at the Pantheon of Celestial Arts. In squeaky-clean restaurants, round smoggy poolsides, in jungly Jacuzzis I made my deals. Business went well and it all looked possible. It was in the pleasure area, as usual, that I found I had a problem.
In LA, you can't do anything unless you drive. Now I can't do anything unless I drink. And the drink-drive combination, it really isn't possible out there. If you so much as loosen your seatbelt or drop your ash or pick your nose, then it's an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there's a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug.
So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown skyline carries a smear of God's green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This restaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hour, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flashing beef-booze—no strings, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say don't walk, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don't walk. Stay inside. Don't walk. Drive. Don't walk. Run! I tried the cabs. No use. The cabbies are all Saturnians who aren't even sure whether this is a right planet or a left planet. The first thing you have to do, every trip, is teach them how to drive.
I got drunk and dialled Hire-A-Heap and rented a scarred Boomerang on a budget four-day buy. I bombed around with a pint between my thighs. Bel-Air, Malibu, Venice. Then on the last night I made my big mistake, and hit that bad business I told you about. I don't like to sound judgmental, but it really was a big mistake. I was surging down Sunset Boulevard: purely on impulse I hung a left near Scheldt's, where I've seen these sweet little black chicks parading in tiny pastel running-shorts . .. Anyhow the upshot is, one way or another I'm lying in the front seat of the Boomerang with my trousers round my knees and copping a twenty-dollar blowjob from a speed-fuelled Zulu called Agnes. I mean it's incredibly reasonable, don't you think? What a fine country. What value. With sterling in the shape it's in, that's barely nine quid! But Agnes and I have a problem. 'This is why they're called hard-ons,' I remember explaining to her. 'They're not at all easy. They're very difficult.' Agnes is losing patience and revenue, I've practically got my legs sticking out of the Boomerang window, when there's this heavy handslap on the roof of the car.
I thought: law. The sex police! I straightened my neck. A glamorous, dressing-gowned housewife was staring in through the open side window, her face framed by my shoes. 'Hurry it up, pal,' she said. 'You're in my drive!' Instantly, as if it were a bad oyster, Agnes spat my dick out of her mouth and started shrieking back at this loathed adversary of hers — Agnes's language, it was unimaginable: even I was grossed out by it. She swore detailed vengeance on the woman, her dogs, her kids, with intimate reference to various feminine rudiments and effluvia that I for one had never come across. 'Okay it's the cops,' said the lady finally, and strode back towards the house ... I was thrashing and clawing but with Agnes still slumped on my middle and the whisky bottle and everything I couldn't seem to writhe my way upright. Then the door behind my head jerked open, the car light came on like a flashbulb, and there was a seven-foot black pimp snarling down at me with a mahogany baseball bat in his fist.
Well, you don't ever feel more naked than that. No — you never do. Something about the bat itself, the resined or saddlesoaped grain of its surface, offered unwelcome clarity, reminding me why I had stayed away from Scheldt's and the sweet black chicks and their bargain blowjobs. This is all very serious and violent and criminal and mean. You cannot go slumming, not here, because slums bite back. As Agnes wriggled out of the far door the big pimp raised his hammer. I clenched my eyes. No quarter. I heard a grunt, a hum of air, a bloodstunning crack, then with oddly exact and flowing movements I sat up saying 'Money, took my wallet from its holster, fanned five twenties at the sweating black face, wedged shut the door, made the triple-ring sign, and drove sedately out of Rosalind Court. Next, the machine squeal of sirens on my tail. Leaving a continuous, scalding double-tyretrack in my wake, I rocketed on to Sunset Boulevard, jumped three lights and made a spectacular crash-landing in the lot beneath the Vraimont. I slid out the door and made a dash for the lift. I got to my feet, pulled up the trousers which shackled my ankles, and tried again. Lucky lucky lucky, oh lucky, I kept saying, as I washed the blood off my nose in Room 666. They didn't even notice the smashed front lights and the vicious new welt on the Boomerang doorframe when I slinked back to Hire-A-Heap the following day. I leaned over in my boxy suit and re-signed the credit slip, my bitten fingers shimmering over the scorched trunk. Behind my back, under showboat lights, Sunset Boulevard sailed on down its slope.
An hour later I was fastening my safety-belt at LAX. First class: the Pantheon of Celestial Arts — their treat. Toasting John Self with premixed martinis, 1 too was a cocktail shaker of hilarity and awe. I had just been reading in the Daily Minute about the string of beatings and manslaughters in Rosalind Court: the night before last a Jap computer expert and a German dentist had been found in a parking lot with their faces stomped off. I think I was in shock, or undergoing reaction. 'You're so lucky, you're so lucky,' I murmured, staring down at the rocky Rockies or the Smokies or the Ropies through cloud-cover made of snow and contour tracing.. .In the next throne along lounged an elegant young man — summer business suit, Cal tan, thick, unlayered rug: I took him for an actor. He glanced up from his hardback and sipped his champagne. He raised the glass. 'Here's to luck,' he said. 'And to money.' Well, I didn't need much prompting, and soon babbled out all my dreams and dreads. It transpired that he had been scouting at the Festival. He'd seen Dean Street, and liked what he saw. And to follow? I told him about Bad Money — another short, no big deal. We talked, we made plans, we exchanged numbers, as you do on aeroplanes: it's the booze, it's the canned air and the rich-quick stories, it's the pornography of travel.
'I'll call you,' he said, when our tunnels parted at Kennedy. Oh sure, I thought, as I queued for my ticket to London. Three days later he rang me at my sock. He said, 'We have Lorne Guyland. We have Butch Beausoleil. We have eight million dollars, and climbing. Get your butt on a bird, Slick, and let's make Bad Money.'
I can see me now. I'm in the design department over at Silicone Valley. The sun shines but no dust stirs. I move confidently among the technicians, the ideas-men and creative consultants, the engineers and fine-tuners. Someone shows me the rough of my new ears and nostrils. I lean over a drawing-board to approve a sample merkin. The heart boys doublecheck on my detailed specifications. I have a preparatory meeting with the rug people. We move on to the gene pool, the DNA programmers, the plasma bank. Occasionally I say things like 'Looks good, Phil,' or 'What's the guarantee on this, Steve?', or 'Yes, Dan, but will it take the strain?' Eventually I produce my wallet, and silence falls.
'Okay, boys, now I want to make this absolutely clear. I'm paying top dollar and I expect the best. I don't care what it costs. I want it blue, I want it royal, I want the best blood money can buy. Go on, God damn it, and give me the right stuff this time around.'
——————
Now with Selina Street here the texture of my life has already changed or shaded. With a moan of effort the unloved flat slowly responds to the female presence. Heavily, and with unpractised movements, it straightens up and tries to look courtly, attentive and willing. Only rarely does the leer of insincerity glow through the mask. It smartens its act. It stows its towels. It keeps the batch at bay. Yes, the smell of the place, even to my clotted nostrils, has definitely improved. For this I thank Selina's duty-free perfumes and bath essen
ces, the laundry-fresh tang of her clothes, the costly oiliness of her flesh and its smooth secretions. She's back in the tub again even now, the amphibious Selina. Soon I'll hear her primping herself in the bedroom, cosseting her curves in silk and lace. We're going out to an expensive restaurant, a very expensive restaurant, the sort of place Selina can dress up for ... The flat feels better, better-run. It's not that she's much of a hausfrau or hoover-wielder. The cleaning-lady comes once a day now, instead of once a week. But Selina is efficient, is practical. She is cost-effective.
And with a chick on the premises you just cannot live the old life. You just cannot live it. I know: I checked. The hungover handjob athwart the unmade bed—you can't do it. Blowing your nose into a coffee filter—there isn't the opportunity. Peeing in the basin — they just won't stand for it. No woman worth the name would let it happen. Women have pretty ways. Without women, life is a pub, a reptile bar at a quarter to three... Have you noticed, you guys, the way black or blue or red underpants stay clean for days on end, whereas white underpants—what is it with white underpants ? They barely last an hour. What is it with these exploding, these joke-shop, these trick underpants? Anyway, with Selina here, my life is being lived in white underpants. They're better, really, I suppose, even though you have to change them all the time.
I went next door with Selina's toy drink. 'Mm,' she said. She stood before the mirror in full brothel gear. What talent. What artistry. She turned. Her sexual features aren't particularly full or plump. They're just incredibly prominent. Bum, box, belly, breasts — just incredibly prominent. She looked so pornographic in her gimmicks that I wanted her to take them off again, or better, much better, push bits of them aside.
'Come here,' I said.
'No.'
'Why not?'
'You know why not.'
'... I saw Terry Linex today. He sent his love. Good news about my golden handshake. He says it should be half way to six figures.'
