A
t three o’clock, on Thursday, September 5, I was supposed to be at Soho House on Greek Street to meet with Jon Powell, the film director. Jon was interested in a script I’d written called
Rough House
about nasty goings-on in Soho in the late ’70s. He’d had a top-ten box office success with his last film,
Anxiety
—a horror flick with reality TV overtones—so sitting on the tube train from Kilburn down to Piccadilly Circus, I don’t mind admitting that I was well gassed up and a bit nervous because I really wanted it all to go well. The thing is, I had to eat something fast, both to silence the juices gurgling away in my stomach and to deal with the lack of blood sugar making me more nervous and edgy by the second. I was lucky. I still had an hour and a half to kill before the meeting, and the Ristorante Il Pollo, which serves the best lasagne in Soho, was close to the corner of Greek Street where the meeting would take place. The Pollo was definitely going to be my first stop.
I jostled up the packed escalator of the tube station, pushed my way up the stairs, and I was out onto the Dilly—Eros, lights, action. I dodged a couple of taxis and ducked up Great Windmill Street. It could have been a scene from the film script: beautiful girls on the doors of the strip joints, all with flashes of cleavage, coy smiles, or lewd words to tempt me inside. But I wasn’t biting, was I? I had work to do. I turned right onto Brewer Street and then jagged right and left onto Old Compton Street, where I got the eye from the pretty boys sitting at the tables of the cafés and leaning in the doorways of the hip gay boutiques. Everybody wants something in Soho. I wanted lasagne.
I pushed through the glass door into Ristorante Il Pollo and breathed in the rich meat and tomato smells oozing out of the kitchen and the whiff of coffee from the Gaggia machine that roared behind the counter. The Pollo had been selling the same lasagne in steel dishes for at least thirty years and probably longer, and I was really counting on that béchamel and meat sauce and a nice glass of wine to sort me out before the meeting with Jon. The waitress seated me at a little table in the front.
That’s why I didn’t see Magsy at first. Not until after I’d dug my way through the crusty cheese and into the soft green pasta and scraped the brown and crispy bits off the edge of the steel dish. It was a shock to see the old bastard come walking down between the booths from the back of the café. Twenty-six years ago. How did he happen to be in here right at this moment when I hadn’t seen him in twenty-six years? We had a bit of a history, me and Magsy, I got to admit. I pushed the steel dish back and smiled at him, but my shoulder muscles got tight and my knee started bouncing as if somewhere inside me I was all ready to run for it. Like a lot of people who’d gone bald these days, Magsy had shaved his head
But then there was that old Mickey-taking smirk on Magsy’s face when he saw me. He wasn’t a tall bloke, about 5'8
, still five inches taller than me though. He looked well enough off in his cord jacket, checked shirt, and jeans. I’d heard he’d gone to live in Spain after he’d come out of prison. Twenty-two years back that must have been. But he didn’t look at all tanned. He’d been through some real damage, I reckoned: the tiredness around the eyes, the deep wrinkles, the grayness of the skin of a longtime smoker.
“What are
you
doing here?” he said.
I got up from the table and I even gave him a hug. It was a bit stiff to tell the truth, but he still had that pleased-to-see-me grin on his face when we stepped back.
“I got a meeting,” I said. “Business thing in about …” I jerked my sleeve so the watch showed on my wrist, “ten minutes.”
“What business you in then?”
“I’ll tell you about it later, if you like, if you gonna be around.”
“Half past 4 in Steiner’s,” he said.
“Right,” I said.
Steiner’s, yeah. One of our old haunts.
We came out of the Pollo and into the sunshine on Old Compton Street, walked the few yards to Greek Street in the glare, and then crossed the road to the shady opposite corner.
“You working down here again?” I said.
I hoped he wasn’t.
“Nah, I live in Bridgwater now.”
“Bridgwater?” I said. “What you doing in Soho then?”
“Meeting Richie when he gets off his shift.”
Richie was one of Magsy’s oldest mates, though I didn’t know him that well myself.
“He still work here?” I said.
“Yeah. Manager of about four Harmony shops.”
“Corporate porno.”
“Fully licensed and legit,” Magsy said. “New Labour, son. As long as it makes money, it’s all right. Liberal attitude, innit?”
“Fair play,” I said.
“So I
will
catch you in Steiner’s?” Magsy asked.
“Yeah, right,” I said.
He just walked off then. I watched him as he headed west. Weird that I ran into him in the Pollo after all those years. It gave me the wobblies a bit. But I checked my watch. I was bang on time for the meeting. I had to get Magsy out of my head for now. I rang the bell on the door of the club and then went up the stairs to meet Jon Powell.
On the roof of Soho House, in the bright sunshine, over a couple of bottles of sparkling mineral water, the meeting went okay. Not great, but okay. It would appear that trying to get a film made is a process that requires a lot of patience. I told Jon that I wasn’t sure how the producers who’d got the soft money for me to write the script planned on coming up with the hard cash to get this thing into production but they did have some serious coproduction interest. That’s filmspeak for a lot of hot air that might one day float a balloon. Jon said that he really liked the script and promised he would pass it on to someone he knew with Pierce Brosnan’s company who might well be interested in the project, and that Jon would do that as soon as he came back from the Toronto Film Festival and a trip to L.A. This was all very positive. But no one had, as yet, signed on the line, or was eating a bacon sandwich on the set of the first shoot. This was either a great way to make a living, or I was chasing a total mirage. Still, I’d been paid for the script and I’d get more money if the film got made, and the sun was shining. It was not a bad way to make a living. I swallowed the last of the mineral water and we went down about five flights of stairs to the street. Mineral water? Christ, I’m losing my identity. I can’t even drink much coffee these days.
I shook hands with Jon and he set off north toward Soho Square while I went west along Old Compton Street toward Steiner’s. I
was
going to meet Magsy—if he was there. Me and Magsy had been mates together in the mid-’70s and I’d spent long hours back then in his flat, just lying around and listening to music. He’d lived there with his girlfriend, Penelope. I was in their flat in Camden so often that I practically lived there. I
did
live there when the lease ran out on my own little gaff in Chalk Farm. Then, after I’d crashed there for six months, him and his girlfriend found a place for me in Dalston, “through a mate of Penelope’s,” they said.
So they didn’t have to officially throw me out. We had some times, me and Magsy. Incredible times. Like … just before I was due to move into the new gaff on a hot July afternoon in 1975 … me and Magsy decided we’d celebrate my last night in the flat. We bought a 100-gram bag of salt and half a dozen lemons from a corner shop, and three bottles of tequila from the offy on Camden High Street. Then we picked up Penelope from her job at the Royal Free Hospital. She was standing outside the gate with this petite longhaired girl, Angela. We hadn’t expected this at all—we
had
just planned on going back to the flat and getting blasted on the tequila—but Angela invited us all to dinner at her place on Cornwall Gardens, just off the Gloucester Road. Cornwall Gardens—now that is a class-A address, mate. And it was a bright and lovely summer’s day, and we had the salt and lemons and tequila to donate to the proceedings, so I felt okay. We drove down Haverstock Hill and through the West End and into Kensington in Angela’s car, and Angela said that her boyfriend, Ted, owned the flat that I was just about to move into in Dalston.
Ah, I thought, the flat connection.
So we turned onto Cornwall Gardens. Angela had a permit to park on the street and she opened this big Georgian door for us and took us up in a lift to a lovely three-bedroom flat with all these Persian carpets in the lounge. It was gorgeous. And the balcony overlooked the fenced-in private gardens.
Angela started cooking a vegetarian dinner in the open-plan kitchen. She said she always ate macrobiotic food, but she kept having a break from the kitchen every now and then so she could smoke a cigarette, which didn’t seem somehow kosher to me, her being macrobiotic and that. Ted arrived home about half an hour after she’d begun preparing the dinner. He wasn’t that big, a bit skinny with wire-rimmed glasses and a ponytail. A bit of an old-time hippy. He’d been out doing business, according to Angela. What with the sunshine and the shooters and the fresh taste of the lemons, by this time we’d already finished the first bottle of tequila: at least, me and Magsy had; the girls had been chatting most of the time in the kitchen.
So then we all sat down around a tablecloth that Angela spread over the Persian carpet in the lounge and we polished off the brown rice, pickles, and veggies. I was feeling really healthy after that meal. We slumped back against the giant cushions and started on more shooters of tequila, and Ted brought out this lovely pearl-inlaid backgammon board. We all tried to concentrate on the game. That was when Ted produced a large mirror and laid out five enormous lines of white powder that he said was Colombian cocaine. Ted vacuumed up a line of powder and took the tails off the other lines and handed the rolled-up note to Magsy. Magsy dug into it and then Penelope had a line. I had a sense of relief when Angela said she didn’t want any. It made me feel a little less like a dork when I said, “Thanks, but I’ll stick with the tequila.” I’m not a prude—but I get these terrible asthma attacks if I breath hostile flower pollen, let alone cocaine, and I didn’t want to risk anything at all, given the state I was already in. The black and red and white triangles on the backgammon board already had a glow all their own after we’d finished the second bottle.
So we threw the dice and moved a few counters and then Ted laid out another set of lines of the Colombian coke and I downed another three shots of tequila and I felt a lot less nervous about the heavy drugs the boys on my right kept snorting and we threw the dice some more and we finished the third bottle of tequila and I was feeling all sunny even though it was dark and time to go home and I stood up and my knees didn’t seem to work so good and I thought, well, it’s all right because I’m going to go home now, and I really hadn’t realized just how good I was at backgammon. I thought, I really wouldn’t mind meeting Ted again, even if he
is
a bit of cokehead. I really wanted to play another game with him.
But you know what? I never did get to go back to that flat … not ever again, did I? I’d been there by chance, really, I suppose. I mean, it was Magsy and his girlfriend who Angela had meant to invite and I’d just happened to be along with Magsy after we bought the tequila. So I had no real business being there, did I?
Just as we were about to leave, Ted grabbed Magsy by the arm, all friendly.
“Hey, Magsy,” he said. “Think you can shift some coke for me?”
Magsy’s face lit right up. A business opportunity … Magsy liked that … and no doubt he really had enjoyed all that marching powder, and Ted liked him so much that, right there and then, he laid a couple of ounces on Magsy and told him to pay it back in a week. Even with all that liquor in me, I knew that this was probably a bad idea, but Magsy was dead thrilled. Fair play, I know for a fact he paid Ted back on the fronted coke two days before the week was up.
Ted, of course, was now my landlord. That made me feel a bit uncomfortable, but after a month or so a lovely woman of thirty-one by the name of Sheri moved in with me and I was glad I had my own gaff. Sheri was a real cockney. I met her when I got a job as a shipping clerk in Mile End. I had to pay the rent somehow. I took her round to see Magsy. He was still my mate, wasn’t he? By now he was doing a brisk trade. What I felt though … when we were around there … was that Magsy seemed a lot happier to see his clients than he did to see us. I thought, well, he’s my mate. I’ll confront him, like.
“What’s going on?” I said. “You know, really going on?”
He knew what I was talking about, when you’re mates, you do; but he just said, “I’m doing fine, son. Doing well. Just the sniffles, like. It’s just like having a cold, really. No bother at all.”
The sniffles? What the …? I wanted to push him on it, but right then Ted walked in. He had this bloke with him called Danny. Danny had a very good haircut, a very expensive suit, a black crewneck cotton pullover, and a camel’shair coat. He was not an old-time hippy at all. He was very definitely an old-time villain—even if he was only about twenty-eight or so. Danny oozed charm.
“Magsy,” he said, “how would you like to make a very sound investment, my son?”
“What’s that?” Magsy replied.
“How would you like to take out a lease on a small pornography outlet on Dean Street? Reckon it might be the perfect front for your proper business.”
Magsy’s proper business was now, very definitely, hardcore narcotics.
“Yeah,” Magsy said, big smile on his face. “I could get into that—a finger in every pie, innit? Sex and drugs and rock and roll.”
I laughed along with him. He was charmed. I was charmed. But I still didn’t know if this investment was a good idea at all. I didn’t know the financial details, of course. But who was I to know, anyway? At that time I had a shit job in a shipping office on the Mile End Road while Magsy was about to move up to the West End with all the villains. And he did. After he opened up the porn shop, I used to go up to Soho every Friday night to have a drink with him after work.