Zip Gun Boogie

by Mark Timlin

  ‘Trouble with CDs is there ain’t room to roll a joint on the cover,’ he said. ‘Give me a regular album anyday.’

  ‘It’s the march of technology, man,’ said Chick.

  I was beginning to realise that Chick was something of a philosopher in his own, individual way.

  Seltza made the joints American-style. All grass. One skin. No cardboard filter. Just a flat fold at the end. He rolled one, lit it, took a hit, passed it to Chick and started rolling another. ‘Help yourself to a drink, Nick,’ he said. ‘The ice-box is full.’

  I went over to the mini-bar and got a Grolsch. Chick asked for one too. Seltza went for a Bourbon on the rocks. I got the drinks and swapped them for the joint. I took a hit, and kept the smoke down for a long time before releasing it. The taste reminded me of other times. So did the music. I took the bottle and the spliff and sat on an easy chair by the window. The evening was warm, and the sky was growing dark and merging with the tops of the trees in the square across from the hotel. Between tracks on the album I could hear traffic and the sound of children going home. I drifted away as the dope took hold. My thoughts were like a kaleidoscope, jumping from one memory to another. So many people. So many gone. And not enough time or energy left to start again.

  ‘Don’t bogart that joint, my man,’ said Seltza.

  I came back to reality with a start. ‘Sorry,’ I said, took another hit and passed the joint to him. I looked at my watch. It was almost nine o’clock. Seltza went back to the bureau and brought out a bag of white powder big enough to choke a horse, and started cutting out long fat lines on the glass top. He took out a twenty and rolled it up into a tight tube. ‘Guys,’ he said, ‘be my guests. Shorty laid this shit on me today. Best pink Peruvian.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I said. My voice sounded stoned and I had some trouble enunciating the words.

  ‘Yeah, man,’ said Seltza. ‘I gave it the test. It’s good pure shit. Take my word.’ As if to show his faith in the product he scarfed up the first line. ‘Fuck!’ he said after a moment. ‘Awesome. Do your nose some good.’

  He passed the rolled-up bank note to me and I took up a line myself. It made me go cross-eyed, and I felt that old familiar shiver go down my spine. ‘Good gear,’ I said, and Chick passed me a joint and dived into the Charlie. I drank more beer, sucked a mouthful of smoke and sat down again.

  ‘What the fuck are we going to do?’ asked Chick as he rubbed his nose.

  ‘Want to boogie?’ said Seltza.

  ‘Who’s on?’ Chick again.

  ‘Cheap and Nasty’s at the Astoria. Fields of Nephelim at the Town & Country. There’s a party for The Nasties after.’

  ‘The Astoria it is then,’ said Chick. ‘That way we can get out of it for nixes after. You know the tour manager, don’t you, Seltz?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Seltza. ‘The cheap bastard owes me. You coming, Nick?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve got things to do tomorrow. It sounds like you’re going to make a night of it.’

  ‘Every fuckin’ night,’ said Seltza. ‘Another time then?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘There’s a reception on tomorrow for The Miracle. They’ve got a new album out. Want to come?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Inn On The Park, I think. I’ve got an invitation somewhere. Everyone’s going, including your friend Ninotchka.’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ I said.

  ‘I bet you will,’ said Chick. ‘Be there or be square.’ And he laughed a stoned laugh.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I’ll see you guys later. I’m going to wander about. See what’s cooking.’

  ‘Have fun,’ said Seltza.

  ‘That’s what life’s about,’ said Chick. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’

  ‘Or anyone,’ said Seltza.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘G’night. And thanks for the dope.’

  ‘Pleasure,’ said Seltza. ‘The pharmacist is always in attendance.’ And he laughed too,

  I left the room and went up to my suite. I went in, put on the TV, made a weak vodka with tonic and stretched out in front of the box.

  I sat there for an hour or more, watching anything. Seeing nothing. Just coasting on a high, topping it up from the vodka bottle and drifting like a dead leaf on a current of warm air. Then the phone rang.

  I picked up the receiver and it was Ninotchka. ‘Where the hell are you?’ she asked angrily.

  ‘Right here. Where else?’ I replied.

  ‘I thought we had a date?’

  ‘I got involved.’

  ‘Fuck involved. Get up here now.’

  ‘Hey, slow down,’ I said. ‘Not so fast. I’ve been working.’ And I wondered why the hell I was justifying myself.

  ‘Here. Now,’ she said, and put the phone down in my ear.

  His Master’s Voice. Son, this is the record biz, I thought. I got up, put on my jacket and took myself and a mild cocaine hangover to face the music.

  Don let me in to her suite. Ninotchka was sitting on the sofa. She was wearing a short black skirt and a dark green Levis shirt. Her legs were bare. ‘Don, get lost,’ she said.

  ‘You know what Mr Lomax said,’ he protested.

  ‘Fuck Mr Lomax! Get the fuck out of here and stay out,’ she hissed through clenched teeth. She looked and sounded strung out as hell.

  ‘What about…’

  ‘Just do it!’ she shouted.

  Don shook his head and left. ‘I’ll be right here,’ he said as he closed the door behind him.

  I lit a cigarette. Coke does that to me, makes me into a three packs a day man. Ninotchka sat and gave me the old snake eye.

  ‘So where were you?’ she said.

  ‘With the road crew, getting fucked up,’ I said, honesty being the best policy.

  ‘Fine. You’d rather be with those creeps than me?’

  ‘No. I was just getting acquainted. I have a job to do. Time flew. You know how it goes when you’re having fun.’ I was beginning to feel a bit strung out myself.

  ‘Shit!’ she said. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’

  I leant against the wall and smoked my cigarette.

  ‘Get me a drink,’ she said. No ‘please’, you’ll notice.

  ‘What?’ I said. Meaning what drink, not that I hadn’t heard her.

  ‘Vodka and grapefruit. Have you eaten?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘With the crew.’

  ‘Christ, are you in love with those guys? You been jerking each other off, or what? I haven’t eaten a fucking thing all day.’

  ‘Call room service. Get them to kill the fatted calf,’ I said.

  ‘Why are you so horrible?’ she said, and burst into tears.

  Ah, tears. Don’t you just love ’em?

  I ignored her sobs and went to the bar. I made her a drink and took it over to her. ‘Sorry, I haven’t got a hankie,’ I said.

  ‘Get lost.’

  ‘Just now you wanted me here. Now you want me to get lost. I wish you’d make up your mind.’

  She looked up at me. Her eyes were dry and her make-up wasn’t even smudged. ‘I’m sorry, Nick,’ she said. ‘You’re right. You’ve got a job to do. I’m just so uptight with all this waiting around.’

  ‘Shapiro is coming out of hospital tomorrow. He’ll be back at work soon.’

  ‘Thank God for that. I’ll go crazy if I have to stay here much longer with nothing to do.’

  ‘Do you want me to order you some food?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Stay with me. Keep me company.’

  ‘Sure.’

  So I stayed. But she was jittery and irritable. Not at all the same woman she’d been that afternoon, or the previous evening. Something was up, and I didn’t know what. I still had a hangover from the jo
ints and coke and booze I’d had earlier. She got up and started pacing the room. She switched on the stereo and sorted through the little silver discs looking for something. ‘Fuck!’ she said. ‘Where is that fucking thing?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That fucking rem album. I had it. I had it! I’m sure I had it.’

  ‘Relax,’ I said. ‘It’ll be there.’

  ‘Some help you are,’ she said. ‘Find it for me.’

  I went over. ‘Document?’ I said.

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘It’s right here.’

  ‘Put it on then.’

  There was a knock at the door and Don stuck his head round.

  ‘Can I see you?’ he said.

  She went to the door and stood blocking my view of what went on. When she turned round she looked happier. ‘Put it on, Nick,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go to the bathroom.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, and slipped the disc into the machine and pressed the play button. Michael Stipe started singing Finest Worksong, and I went and got a drink and lit another cigarette. The album played on and she didn’t come back.

  After about twenty minutes I went looking for her. I knocked on the bedroom door. No answer. It was locked. ‘Ninotchka,’ I called. Nothing. I rattled the door knob loudly. Nothing again. Shit, I thought.

  I stepped back and hit the door with my shoulder. It was thick and heavy and bounced me back, and I knew that in the morning I was going to have a sore shoulder. I hit it again, harder, and heard something crack. Once more and the lock gave and the door crashed back against the wall.

  I went into the room. There was one bedside lamp lit. The bed was made. Ninotchka was lying on it. Her skirt had been pulled up to her waist showing she was wearing lacy black bikini panties underneath. She was holding a loaded syringe in her right hand. The point of the needle caught the light from the lamp. ‘You needn’t have broken down the door,’ she said. ‘I was just going to come and let you in.’

  ‘So that’s why you were so fucked off?’ I said. ‘Waiting for the man.’

  ‘And he came through,’ she said lazily. ‘Which is more than you have. D’you want a hit? Get you relaxed. In the mood.’

  ‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘It’s not my style.’

  12

  I watched as Ninotchka pumped up a vein in her thigh, and slid the needle on to the blue line under the skin, and I remembered the first time I ever saw anyone mainline. I only have to see a needle to remember. I was sixteen and still at school. It was the fag end of the sixties, and the hippies were getting dog-eared and ratty around the edges. I was hanging out with a weird bunch of ex-mods and soon-to-be glam rockers, with the odd skinhead and bike boy thrown in for flavour. They were mostly older than me, and I found them as glamorous then as I found them dull and stupid a couple of years later.

  There was a girl. No, a woman, twenty-two or -three, who we used to run into down Streatham High Road. We’d meet her at the bowling alley or The Golden Egg. She wasn’t with us, but we all knew her. I thought she was real sexy. She came from somewhere in the country and still had traces of the accent. But I never took the piss. To me then, not taking the piss was love. Still is, as it goes.

  She was tall and built solid. Big shoulders, big hard breasts, and wide hips. But her legs were long and shapely. Not solid at all. She was blonde, but I guessed it was from the bottle and dreamed about finding out the one sure way. Her hair was chopped all ragged, like she did it herself, and she wore pink lipstick and thick, dark make-up to cover the acne scars on her face.

  She worked in a garage in Brixton, on the pumps, and rode a motor bike.

  She doesn’t sound like much, but when I was sixteen she had the power to drive me crazy, and her deep, dirty laugh got me hard in a second.

  One day that summer I was standing all alone in Norwood Road when she pulled up on her bike and asked me if I had any cash. I had, a couple quid change from posting some parcels for my father. I lent it to her. I would have cut my throat if she’d asked me to.

  She told me to come down to the garage on Friday at four when she got paid, and she’d give me the money back.

  I told my dad I’d spent the money, and got a bollocking, and promised to pay him back out of the wages from my Saturday job. I hopped the wag from school that Friday afternoon and went home and changed into some killer flared jeans and a tank top. Suave or what? I hooked a pair of John Lennon sunglasses over my ears and headed for the garage.

  When I got there she was just finishing work and smelled of petrol and sweat and patchouli oil. She was wearing a pink Angora sweater, skintight jeans and bike boots. I hooked my thumbs over the waistband of my jeans and let my hands cover my erection.

  ‘Hello, Nick,’ she said. ‘Come for your money?’

  ‘Please,’ I said.

  She opened her pay packet and took out two pound notes and handed them over. ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you. You saved my life the other day.’ She didn’t elaborate, and it never would have occurred to me in those days to think how cheap her life must have been.

  ‘Anytime,’ I said, and blushed.

  ‘What are you doing now?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Come back to my place for a cuppa?’

  That was bliss. That was it. I had to sit down or I’d bust my jeans. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll get some beer later.’

  She could bathe in beer if she wanted. Well, at least as much as two quid could buy.

  She got her bike and I rode pillion. Rode pillion with my arms around her waist, and my hands maybe two inches from her tits. I prayed she wouldn’t move back and touch me between my legs as I knew I’d come into my Skants.

  We drove from Brixton to Clapham. She lived in a room in a house in a back street. In those days, whole streets of houses were bedsits. They had been converted from single tenancy to multi in the forties and fifties, and that’s how they still were in the late sixties. In those days no one in their right mind wanted to live in Clapham. Now of course lots of people do and they’ve been converted back again. Everything changes. Nothing stays the same. That is the only rule.

  Her room was in a three-storey mid-terrace. As we turned the corner into her street I saw two big travel-stained touring bikes, chopped into hogs, parked up, and my erection subsided. There were two dirty road gypsies sitting on her front wall waiting for her. They were back from grape picking in France and needed a doss for the night. We went upstairs and they brought out the wine and dope, and I had tea and felt about twelve years old, and a load of other people from the house joined us.

  The two bikers sat next to each other on the floor leaning back against the wall. They had long black dirty hair, loads of stubble and earrings. One wore a black vest and stiff black leather trousers and boots, and the other wore a greasy blue denim shirt and jeans with a leather waistcoat. It was a warm evening and as the sun went down it struck through the window, and the room heated up, and the smoke from the joints that hung in the air made me dizzy. It was obvious that now the bikers had turned up, I wasn’t wanted, but I hung around anyway.

  About eight o’clock, the biker with the waistcoat went into his rucksack and pulled out a small box. The pair of them laughed about getting it through customs. The one in the vest took out a bent spoon, burnt black on the bottom, and put some water and pale powder into it. He stirred it and lit his lighter and heated the bottom of the spoon. The liquid bubbled and he added more water. The other biker took out a syringe and sucked up the liquid. Meanwhile the first guy took off his belt and wrapped it around his upper arm. His biceps bulged and the veins were dotted with needle marks. His buddy did the business for him. He tapped the needle to get rid of any bubbles, then inserted it into a vein and pushed down the plunger, then quickly pulled a mixture of blood and smack into the glass barrel of the syri
nge and zapped it back into the vein. The first guy’s eyes bulged and almost immediately his nose started to run. He left the needle in his arm and the syringe hung down like an obscene exclamation mark.

  I left before I threw up. I got lost in the back streets of Clapham, but I didn’t care. Eventually I found my way to the common and sat and watched the sun disappear behind the trees, and shivered as the evening turned to night and the common turned from green to black. I hated her that night. I felt she’d taken the piss. I don’t think I ever saw her again, or if I did I ignored her. That’s the way I was then. Stupid. She wouldn’t even have noticed, I know that now.

  Funny thing is, for the life of me I can’t remember her name. But I’ve hated needles ever since that day.

  By this time Ninotchka was floating herself. I sat on the edge of the bed and she held my hand. She rambled on about Christ knows what as time passed.

  I smoked cigarette after cigarette and our skin stuck together with sweat.

  There were one or two people I wanted to see, and one or two questions I wanted answering, but I wasn’t going to leave her. So I just sat and smoked, and watched the smoke from my cigarettes vanish like dreams into the shadows at the corner of the room.

  13

  Ninotchka finally fell asleep about two in the morning. I rolled back her eyelids. The pupils of her eyes looked OK and she was breathing steadily. Her colour was good and she had a strong, regular pulse. I covered her with the eiderdown and went looking for Don. He was still in the hallway outside, sitting on a straight-backed chair looking bored. He stood up when I came out of the suite. ‘I want a word with you,’ I said.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘You heard. A serious word.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  I walked towards him, and he flexed his muscles. I was so angry I could easily have ended up getting seriously hurt. Then we both heard running footsteps coming from the front of the hotel, muffled by the thick carpet on the floor, and turned and looked in that direction. Roger Lomax came round the corner, skidded slightly, righted himself, then saw us. ‘Christ, Sharman!’ he said. ‘Thank God I’ve found you.’ He was breathing heavily, and his skin was greenish-white with an unhealthy sheen to it.