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.