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By Root 603 0

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