My Last Friday Night John Race MP3
Read by Silas Hawkins
I would see Roland when I’d tart-card the phone boxes down in Westminster and Victoria. It was dominatrix tart-cards promising pain and torture to attract the politicians. Running the country required your arse whipped raw while being called a dirty little bitch every now and then. Roland would arrive outside Victoria Station and take exactly sixteen steps. If a skirt passed on the sixteenth step, he would say—‘Excuse me, would you like to go for a drink with me?’
He did that every evening, back and forth the sixteen steps from 6pm to 7pm, giving himself dog's abuse all the way, calling himself stupid then reassuring himself that Renelle will show, that tomorrow he will meet her. No cunt had ever thought of using him as their John in the Friday Night John Race but me. Nobody even knew his real name. We just called him Roland because it fit for a fruitcake. Roland had been looking for Renelle, whoever she was, for years. I figured that amount of pent-up frustration needed to be given an opportunity. He was a long shot, but my Johns over the last few months could not have got any worse. I had picked a bunch of crying, whimpering, conscience-ridden, non-starting, limp-dicked cheapskates and I was losing a fortune. I needed to start thinking outside the box.
Stink’s John on the other hand was Mayor of the Goddamned box. Stink was sitting on the owner's couch admiring his John, who was discussing prices at the bar, when we arrived. Stink smirked when he saw Roland.
‘You won’t find her here, Roland,’ Stink said.
‘My name’s not Roland,’ Roland said.
‘Quiet, Roland,’ I said. ‘Go get yourself a drink over there at the bar. Loosen up.’
Stink was the most fully functional junkie I had ever known. That guy you did not see stealing all of your shit—that was Stink. That guy who stood at the entrance to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square, charging Chinese tour groups admission—that was Stink. His bread and butter were the walk-up brothels in Soho. He waited at their doors and asked the Johns just where the hell they thought they were going.
‘Upstairs?’ the Johns would say.
‘You pay me first,’ Stink would say, all loud and authoritative. The Johns would hand over cash and Stink hightailed it. A minute later the Johns would come running back downstairs shouting, Where is he? The bastard! Where is he?
‘You’re scraping the barrel, Dog,’ Stink said. ‘Roland here won’t even get out of the starting gate.’
‘You forgetting the rules, Stink?’
Johns were not to be made aware of the race. This rule was made because Stink had recruited several of his Friday night Johns from the live sex shows. These were purebreds, a whole class above a John. They did four shows a day, had no performance anxiety and were financially backed by Stink himself. His winnings were less because he invested their money for them, and had to cut them in, but they were winnings nonetheless. It had nearly ruined the Friday Night John Race when we uncovered the scam but Stink was Stink. He'd conceded it was underhand and returned money to avoid a suspension.
Stink’s John was typical—down in London for a “business meeting” weekend, the ball and strife back home knowing the score full well, couple of kids in university draining him dry. Stink had probably scouted him from the streets of Soho—told him where he could find quality girls—that he could show him if he liked—that he was going there anyway. His John drank a gin and tonic that Stink had more than likely laced with Viagra. Doping your John was frowned upon but tolerated because it was both a positive and a negative. Sure, it got the John off to a flying start but after a second or third spin, numbness could set in and they might pull up. A winning John could sometimes go up to eight times in one night without Viagra, whereas sometimes the winning John was a doped-up four-timer. Viagra was a dice throw.
I took a seat on the John-owners' couch beside Stink.
‘What’s your John’s name?’ I asked.
‘Dirk Diggler,’ Stink said.
‘You can’t call them all Dirk Diggler.’
‘Dirk Diggler the Second, then.’
‘This is about your fifth Dirk Diggler.’
‘Dirk Diggler the Sixth then.’
‘I want ten!’ came a shout from the front door. There was a bit of calming down and stern instruction given by the Russian—the proprietor of the After Party—an old-school brute from the first wave of exiled militant Cossacks, an army rank away from owning Chelsea. Guy had war crimes coming out of his ears, wore tight, shiny tracksuits that everyone could see his shlong through, then tried to tie it all together with a buzz cut and a right hand adorned with fifty grand in lumping gold rings. Many an unruly John went home to the missus with the imprint of the Russian’s right hand on their forehead. Before the last house was closed down, he was rumoured to have strangled an Albanian for stinking up the bog one night, then chopped the fucker up and flushed him down after it.
Frenchy came in accompanied by his John—a young lad of about twenty-five with big red eyes full of weirdness. The John started to dance around the room, pointing his fingers like guns.
‘What is this? Gay place? That’s the ugliest man I’ve ever seen,’ Frenchy’s John said, pointing at Roland.
‘I need to go,’ Roland said.
‘She’s on the way, Roland,’ I said. ‘Five minutes, buddy.’
‘You’re sure she’s here?’
‘Positive, Roland. Told me herself she’d be here, mate.’
‘Ten. I want ten!’ shouted Frenchy’s John.
Frenchy sat down on the couch beside us. ‘All of the way here he’s talking women, women, I want women,’ Frenchy said. ‘He says before he dies he wants to fuck ten thousand women. And I say, sure you are strong, good-looking guy—you could. And when the door open he shouts—ten, give me ten. I could not believe it. Swedish.’
Frenchy was a rickshaw rider but I had never seen him actually pedalling. He was the lummox of the rickshaw world, unemployable, beer-bellied and chain-smoking. He sat in his own backseat all day down on Windmill Street studying form, making scribbles in the margins of The Racing Post, all part of his quest to try and reconfigure the force times distance moved equation. He had been married but she had left him because he had bet away holiday funds, got a second chance, then a third chance and then bet away the mortgage repayments.
‘That country is too dark for too much of the year,’ Stink said, swirling a finger around by the side of his head, wanting to mock Frenchy’s John in any way he could. ‘You give him Viagra?’
‘Had to—sold the guy enough blow to kill a water buffalo,’ Frenchy said. ‘Gave him a packet of Viagra for free and he downed them all.’
‘Fuck,’ I said.
‘Oh, and he has a platinum credit card,’ Frenchy added.
‘It’s over,’ I said, looking at Roland picking fluff out of his belly button and tasting it.
‘You could make a million pounds with this guy, Frenchy. You bastard,’ Stink said and we all sat there on the couch admiring Frenchy’s John who had the potential to be a record-breaker.
‘I’ll make sure to keep my million pounds away from you, Stink, you junkie scoundrel,’ Frenchy said. There was bad blood between Stink and Frenchy. Apart from the scam with the sex show performers, Stink had recently stolen Frenchy’s rickshaw and was caught down in Waterloo trying to sell it for a score.
‘What’s your John’s name?’ I asked.
‘His name, The Swedish Stallion,’ Frenchy said and waved his hand across the sky like the name was written in lights across it.
‘OK, gentlemens,’ said the Russian. ‘This way please.’
Roland, Dirk Diggler and The Swedish Stallion followed him out of the sitting room and upstairs to the first floor starting gate.
Stink, Frenchy and I threw our hundred quid entrance fee into the pot, and waited.
The Russian came back downstairs with the first update.
‘Frenchy. Your guy took three,’ the Russian said, and handed Frenchy four hundred and fifty pounds, half of the £900 the Swedish Stallion had paid for his three girls. ‘Your guy took two,’ he said to Stink and handed him three hundred. ‘Your guy, only one,’ he said to me, and handed me a hundred and fifty. We threw our cash into the pot.
Upstairs, springs in a bed started to squeak. A man groaned like a bear and a headboard slammed over and over against a wall. The Swedish Stallion yee-haw’ed from somewhere up there too, and another headboard started to slam.
I turned on the television and left Frenchy and Stink to fight it out. I was out of the starting gate with Roland but there was just no way he was of higher pedigree than the Swedish Stallion.
I flicked through the channels. At that time of night there were just channels and channels of lonely girls in lingerie, lying on their beds, looking to chat on the telephone right now. There were late night poker tournaments and text-betting roulette shows where the drop-dead gorgeous hostess with the big fake tits said winning was just that easy. There were God shows too—televangelists saying that one donation guarantees a place at the right hand of the Father in the Kingdom of Heaven.
The Russian went upstairs after the Johns' half hour was up to see if they wanted another spin. He came back down, handed Frenchy three hundred, Stink one-fifty and me, a sour face. Roland was out and I expected as much. My losing streak was to continue.
One girl on the television said that all your desires and fantasies were just one phone call away.
Then came the scream. A woman’s high-pitched, terrified, life and death type scream.
The Russian raced upstairs with his game-face on. Someone was about to get their head knocked off. We heard muffled threats.
‘Hundred quid says it’s your Swede, Frenchy,’ Stink said, then we heard heavy footsteps and a scuffle through the ceiling and then something big like a wardrobe smashed to the floor. There was breaking glass and louder and more terrified screaming then a window shattered and the Russian came crashing down through the conservatory We hopped up off the couch and stood there looking at the dead Russian.
And then there was silence upstairs. And we wondered whether we should just get the fuck out of there. And just as we were about to maybe go up and take a look, footsteps came slowly walking down the stairs. The sitting room door opened and Roland walked in, black from head to toe in blood, holding a crying prostitute by her hair in one hand, the Russian's Stanley knife in the other. He looked at the three of us and said, ‘I found her. I actually found her. Gentlemen, this is Renelle. Say hello, Renelle.’
‘I’m not Renelle you crazy fuck!’
‘Say hello, Renelle,’ Roland roared pulling her hair tighter and the knife closer to her eye.
‘Hello!’ she cried. ‘Hello! Hello!’
‘Easy, Roland,’ I said. ‘Just take it easy, mate.’ And I looked to the Frenchy and Stink for help with him, for help with the situation.
Stink just shrugged as he pillaged the dead Russian’s right hand while Frenchy cleared his throat, looked me in the eyes and said in all seriousness, ‘Your John is fucking disqualified.’
(c) David McGrath, 2014
David McGrath has been published in Litro, Open Pen, Weird Lies and An Earthless Melting Pot. He's won StorySlam, came 3rd in Words with Jam Story Competition and was highly commended in the Manchester Fiction Prize 2013.
Silas Hawkins is continuing the family voiceover tradition (he is the son of Peter 'Dalek' Hawkins and Rosemary 'Emergency Ward 10' Miller). Favourite voice credits: Summerton Mill, Latin Music USA and podcasts for The Register. For countless voice clips see links on website www.silashawkins.com. Agents: [email protected], [email protected]
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