American Desperado (20 page)

Since Phyllis liked to sleep late, many mornings I went to Serendipity alone. I’m sitting there one morning, eating my French toast, and seated at the next table was a girl I’d seen in the movies.
^†
In one movie she played James Bond’s girlfriend. She was a goddess. I was just a nobody twenty-two-year-old, but I decided to give it a shot.

I said, “I’m sorry to intrude, but I couldn’t stand not saying hello to you, because you are absolutely gorgeous.”

She smiled at that. Even though she’d been complimented a million times in her life, one more still made her happy. When she smiled, I told her I was surprised I’ve never seen her before at my club, Sanctuary.

“Oh, that’s your club?” she says.

“Please come and be my guest sometime. Dance your brains out. Anything you want. The bar is open.”

A week later she showed up at my club. I wasn’t there, but my bouncer called me and said, “Jon, James Bond’s girlfriend’s here asking for you.”

My doorman dealt with a lot of famous people, but to him, this girl was a big deal. I had him take her to a special table and bring her a bottle of wine. Not champagne. A bottle of wine and two glasses. I made her wait forty-five minutes before I came over.

“Do you like to dance?” I asked her.

“I love it.”

I said, “I don’t dance. So knock yourself out.”

“Let’s sit and talk,” she said.

I sat and talked to her. After a while I said, “I want to watch you dance.”

So she got up and danced. By four in the morning, she’d danced her brains out, and she’d told me all about herself—how it’s hard to be taken seriously when you’re a beautiful woman, blah, blah, blah. I sat there listening, and she was very happy. She said, “What are we going to do now?”

“Whatever the fuck you want to do, we’re going to do it now.”

“Let’s go to an after-hours club,” she said.

I took her to a place downtown. It was a club where rich people and degenerates from the artistic world liked to go. That painter, Andy Warhol, had turned me on to it. I knew this would be just right for an actress. Everybody inside was wacked on cocaine. I said, “Do you like to get high?”

“I really don’t know,” she said.

I said, “Stop with your ‘I don’t know.’ Do you like to get high or don’t you like to get high? Obviously, I’m not a fucking cop.”

She laughed, and we got high on cocaine into the morning. I drove her back to her place in my Jaguar. But I did not try to come in. When I let her off, she said, “I’m going to California to work on a movie, but you can call me here.” She wrote a number on a piece of paper.

I never called. A few weeks later she came back to my club. She was angry I hadn’t called. I told her to stop being like that. She brightened up. We stayed out all night again. At eight in the morning, she said, “I want to go eat.”

We go to Serendipity. We order the French toast with cream cheese, and by now I’m aching for her. She takes a bite of her French toast, and the fucking cream cheese squishes out on the side of her mouth. She starts to laugh.

“That’s it,” I tell her. “Come with me.”

“What?”

“You’re a mess.”

I pull her into the bathroom. As soon as I shut the door, I lift her ass up and drop her on the sink, with her legs open in front of me. “Nobody’s ever done this,” she says.

“I don’t give a fuck what anybody else has ever done in your whole fucking life.”

We start fucking, and right away the sink busts loose from the wall. My ass is banging the door behind me. The little bathroom in Serendipity was like an airplane toilet. But this doesn’t stop us. I’m not saying I was the greatest fuck in the world, but the urge of the moment was very strong in both of us. When we finish, she gets a frightened look and says, “Oh my God. The noise we made. I can’t go back out there.”

I leave her alone in the toilet and go back out in the restaurant. It’s a really tiny place. Everybody looks up at me. I say, “I’m sorry, everybody. The restaurant is closed. You have to get the fuck out of here. Now.”

The half-a-fag waiter who runs the place, he knows me. He comes up to me and says, “Jon, what are you doing?”

I explained to him there was a lady in the bathroom I’d just fucked, and because of her station in life, she did not want to step out and have a bunch of morons stare at her. I told him I’d pay whatever it cost for everybody to leave. That waiter emptied out the place.

He made up a new table for us in the middle of the restaurant, and we finished breakfast all by ourselves. I felt invincible. There I was, twenty-two, and I’d just fucked James Bond’s girlfriend in the toilet.

P
ETEY
:
The movie
Super Fly
came out in the early 1970s, and working at Jon’s clubs, I felt like I was living it. That movie changed everybody’s look. We started dressing in Borsalino hats and tailored sharkskin suits. I was shooting so much junk, there were times I thought I was Super Fly.

Jon’s club, the Boathouse, became a big hangout for the New
York Knicks. Wilt Chamberlain
^*
would show up, and the women would line up for him. Walt Frazier
^†
used to come in a Rolls-Royce he’d customized with whitewall tires and extra chrome like a pimpmobile. We had real pimps that used to come to the club. There was a famous one called the Flying Dutchman. He had gold teeth, gold chains, a big watch, and a cane with diamonds on it that all the Knicks started to imitate. That bling look didn’t start with rap; it started with the Flying Dutchman. Of course, when Jon and Andy saw how the black celebrities were getting into diamonds and gold, they schemed a way to rob them.

J
.
R
.:
I had admired the great basketball players since I was a kid. These guys knew what Andy and I were about, and they would ask us if we knew any deals on jewelry. Being who we were, they assumed we could get them deals on hot items. I didn’t intend to rip them off, but they were asking for it.

Because my uncle Sam owned dental labs, he bought a lot of gold. Through him I had a good friend in the diamond district named Howie. Howie was a good, good guy. He was into smuggling stones from around the world. Show me any diamond guy in New York, he’s got stones that don’t belong to him or he’s not paying taxes on. It’s how their business works.

I told Howie how I got all these high-paid athletes who wanted diamond watches and rings. He said, “Send them to me. I’ll take care of them.”

Howie had a trick that a lot of diamond guys use. They call it “blowing out the rock.” They take a piece-of-shit stone, even glass, and I don’t know if they use chemicals or what, but they make it shine and feel as hard as a diamond. So Andy and I started sending
all our wannabe-pimp basketball player friends to Howie. Even the white guys were into this. Howie robbed them blind with his junk rocks and gave us a cut. We did this for years. These athletes were happy with what they got. It wasn’t our fault they didn’t know they were wearing garbage.

T
HERE WERE
many nights Andy and I went out just to have a good time. No schemes. No women. We’d just try to soak up the scene. At Hippopotamus we tried to keep very quiet, out of respect for Bradley Pierce, whose name was on the club. But there were always jerks who could make a problem out of nothing.

One time it was my Granny Takes a Trip boots that got us into trouble. I was at the bar in Hippopotamus one night talking with Andy when a couple of guidos came past. These guys were real hicks from Jersey—their hair greased back, pizza-collar shirts. It’s anyone’s guess how they got past the doorman. But I don’t say nothing. I’m having a quiet night. As they walk by, one of these mouth-breathers makes a comment about my boots.

Andy gets very uptight. I say, “Andy, what do we care what this asshole thinks about shoes?”

Now one of the Jersey hicks says, “I told you they were nothing but a couple of faggots.”

Enough is enough. I grab him by the neck, and Andy breaks a bottle on his face.

Out of respect for the club, we immediately dragged this guy out a back door to a loading area. His friend came out after us. One of our bouncers knocked him down with a baseball bat. These guys wanted to get wise about my boots, so I decided to show them my boots.

As good as my Granny Takes a Trip boots looked, they were not just for show. They were made for stomping people. One thing you should know about kicking is, never kick with the front of your foot. I don’t care if you got steel-toe boots, you should never kick with your toes. Never, never, never. If you kick forcefully with your toes and hit a shin, or even ribs, you can break your toes. A rib bone
is stronger than a toe bone. Even if the person you are kicking is unconscious, he can still hurt you if you kick him the wrong way. Try running away on broken toes and see how far you get.

Andy and I stomped and stomped these idiots. One guy was bleeding so much, I nearly fell on my ass. His blood was like grease under my boots. I was so intent on crushing these guys, I didn’t see the cops coming at us from all directions. They grabbed me. They grabbed everybody. One of the wise-mouth hicks lying on the ground lifted his finger and pointed to me. He said, “The shoes. The shoes.”

The cops shined their lights on my boots.

“So what? Everybody wears shoes,” I said.

“But nobody got shoes on like you,” said one cop. He must’ve thought he was Sherlock Holmes. He grabbed my hand to cuff me, and I got uptight.

“You’re arresting me ’cause of my boots?”

“Are you wise?” the cop asked me.

“No, man. I’m not wise. I see you’re a cop who likes shoes. How about I take mine off and put them up your ass?”

Right away all the cops take out their sticks and start beating me. More of our guys from the door come out. They see me getting hit, and—not thinking—they jump the cops. More cops run in from the street. We have a riot of cops. They arrest everybody.

We were two days in jail before my uncles could take care of the cops. They dropped every charge. It’s America. They can’t keep you in jail for the shoes you wear.

W
HEN
I came home with my face smashed up, stinking of jail, Phyllis nagged me. “Can’t you go anywhere and just have a nice time?” she asked.

As soon as my face healed, Phyllis twisted my arm into taking her out. She wanted to go to Hippopotamus. My mind was sour when we went in there. We’re standing near the bar waiting for Phyllis’s cocktail, and I hear a guy talking so loud, his voice is louder than the music. I see this loud-talking clown a couple feet
away—thinks he’s a player in his safari jacket leisure suit, talking to a couple of stupid-looking broads. He’s one of those people that has to be extra noisy to show off what a big shot he is. When he laughs, he wants everybody to hear what a good time he’s having. He’s really scratching my nerves. I walk over to him and politely ask him to shut the fuck up.

He turns away and gets real quiet. End of story. I parade Phyllis through the club. She dances a little. We have a few laughs with friends. A couple hours later we’re ready to go. That night we had driven in my green Eldorado, which I parked a couple of blocks up from Hippopotamus on 52nd Street. I leave Phyllis in the club and walk out alone to get my car.

A half block from my car, I turn and see the jerk in the safari suit coming toward me with a pistol. He’s not saying a word. I see in his eyes he’s going to shoot me. There’s nothing else in his mind.

In any fight, you always need to analyze the situation. If someone comes at me swinging, I’m not going to run into him and make the force of his punch stronger. I’m going to back away and weaken his punch. You should always think of how to take away the other guy’s advantage.

This guy is maybe twenty feet from me. When someone comes that close to you with his gun out, your best move is to find cover. But there’s no cover where I’m standing. I don’t have a piece on me at that moment. Even if I did, the guy will shoot me in the time it takes to reach it.

I know I can’t stay in place. Staying in place will just help him aim better at me. But if I run away, he’ll shoot me in the back. Here’s the truth of the situation: If a guy is a few feet from you with a gun, my belief is your best chance is to run toward him. I know that might sound crazy, but think about it. You run at him, he’s only going to get one shot off before you’re close enough to fight him with your hands. If you run away, he’ll have time to fire every bullet in his gun. I’d rather get shot at one time than many times.

So I run at this asshole. I assume he’ll hit me once. I’m not Superman. I won’t be able to see the bullet spinning at me and step
aside from its path. I just hope he doesn’t shoot me in my heart, or my eye.

The moron hits my leg—in the meat of my thigh. He’s so stupid, I grab his gun. He doesn’t release it, but I’m able to jam my finger into the trigger guard. On a revolver like he has, if you jam the trigger, the hammer sticks and nobody can fire the gun. Once I have his gun, I get control of the whole situation. This guy doesn’t know how to fight. I knock him down and push his head into the pavement. I take the gun from him and see it’s a little popgun, a .22. I think,
I ought to just put it in his mouth and pull the trigger
.

But this asshole doesn’t even deserve to get shot. I take his little gun, and I beat his brains in with it.

The important thing when you beat somebody with a gun is, always lock your finger under the trigger or under the hammer to make sure you don’t accidentally shoot yourself by force of smacking the gun on the other person’s body. Once you secure the trigger, always beat down with the butt of the gun on the other person’s skull or teeth or whatever you’re trying to break. Never hit with the barrel. Some of these guns on the street are pieces of shit. You beat somebody with the barrel, and it might fly off and hit you in the face. The other point of hitting from the underside of the gun is, most trigger guards have sharp edges, and they’ll slice up the jerk’s face while the gun butt is breaking his bones.