The Creep (13 page)

Bishman slowly walked past a school and about fifty schoolchildren came out running, shouting and screaming like savages. They all had horns on their heads and they were breathing fire. Great balls of fire, thought Bishman as he ran like hell.

Slowly but surely he was making his way to Brooklyn, but he could see it was going to take longer than planned. A squirrel from the park ran in front of him and turned into a six-foot-tall dinosaur with huge, sharp claws and started to
chase him.
Booo
,
screamed Bishman and the squirrel ran up a tree.

He caught a bus and as it went across the river, the bridge actually disappeared and the bus flew like a plane, landing safely on the other side, much to Bishman's amazement and utter horror. All the people on the bus had molten faces - when they opened their mouths their heads disappeared.
Crazy bastards!

Four bus transfers and a lot of fuck-ups later, Bishman found the house he wanted. It was a derelict building on Rockaway Avenue and Livonia Avenue. The first floor was empty and damp. The junkies lived on the second floor, about thirty of them, and the floor above was kept by a guy who owned hundreds of racing pigeons.

Bishman left a package on the first floor, walked up the stairs and entered, unannounced. There was pandemonium going on. The junkies hadn't even noticed him come in, they were busy slapping the face of one of their buddies who'd O.D'd. To Bishman this was a living hell. Normally these junkies were bad enough, but with the LSD inside him, they were monsters. He could see all their bones and muscles, as though he had X-ray eyes. Their hypodermic syringes started doing the boogie-woogie with each other on the table. One scantily-clad woman had long bright red finger nails and every time she moved her hands, thousands of tiny red missiles would emanate from her finger-tips. She moved her hands a little too quickly one time and the whole room filled with red polka-dots.
Fuck! Shit!

The junkie who'd O.D'd had come round and the first thing he asked for was more smack. Bishman had the heroin, the junkies only had a little money - as he'd thought,
it
didn't even cover what they owed before. He took what they had, gave them the phials and walked downstairs.

Bishman put his plan into operation. He picked up the package that he'd left on the first floor. In Brighton he'd bought a gallon container and filled it with gasoline. Brighton is not on the way to Brownsville but Bishman had ended up there - the fifty-minute trip had taken him five hours. He'd been on a trip of his own, fighting off butterflies the size of 747s, squirrels like dinosaurs and schoolchildren who were going to eat him
alive
.

He liberally sprinkled the gasoline all over the stair-well and floor. No-one came
out,
the junkies were all too busy shooting up. He threw a match and it went off with a
wh
ooo
mpfff
that startled him. Bishman gently closed the front door behind him.

The return journey took about seven hours, but of course you realize these things are difficult to gauge. It could have taken ten hours, he wasn't sure.

In Manhattan he played a game of pool.
Or tried to.
The wood grain of the cues and the side of the pool table was breathing - puffing and panting. He hit the first ball and by the time it was halfway down the green baize it was the size of a cannonball; by the time it reached the end of the pool table it had filled up the whole room, and Bishman passed out.

The next day the newspapers had the story about the fire that had killed the thirty-two junkies, but that was overshadowed by the fact that the fire had spread next door and killed a pregnant mother and her five young children.

Bishman went from a state of hypnosis to a state of deep sleep and stayed like that for several hours, while Harvey made himself busy editing, tidying
notes and putting his own thoughts on the subject in order - which proved to be quite difficult a task.

"Tell me some more about your tearaway days when you were a teenager in London. I find it fascinating - especially as the world thinks you're the great Dr. Bill, who's helped so many people through cancer, alcoholism and drug problems. They don't know the other side of you. I love it. It makes me feel
...
alive." Anita kicked some sand with her toes as the seagulls wheeled around in the air and the Californian sun baked down.

Harvey pushed his optical sunglasses further up the bridge of his nose and said, "
Be
-
Bop-a-Lula
was the record we used to put on the juke box at the Ace Café on the North Circular Road in London. In those days of course there were no speed restrictions and at the Ace Café the road was only two lanes wide. The idea was to put the record on, race outside, start your motorcycle, race up to the roundabout and get back before the
record finished playing. To do it, you had to average over a hundred miles an hour, and to average a hundred miles an hour it meant you had to do speeds of about a hundred and thirty. Only the fastest Triumphs, Nortons and BSAs could do it."

Harvey sipped his beer. "All the lads did it. You couldn't be a member of the legendary 69 CLUB if you didn't. A few of the lads got hurt or died on that one. Then we decided to spice it up, somewhat. The new game was called Chicken Run. Two motorcycles would leave the Ace Caf
é
and a third machine had to drive between the first two, who would be coming back at about a hundred and twenty miles an hour - that's a closing speed of two hundred and forty miles an hour. It was scary. The crazy thing was
,
we used
to do it late at night, so all you could see was two headlights coming at you at remarkable speed.

"Quite a few of us managed it until one night something went wrong and a Volvo with its two headlights on was mistaken for the two motorcycles. My best mate, Ian Stonehart, on a supercharged Vincent Black Knight, tore into the car at such an unbelievable speed it literally split the car in two. Ian and the four occupants died instantly and that ended the game of chicken. After that we all took up serious road-racing at organized race circuits."

They continued to walk along Venice Beach, kissing, cuddling and eating Heavenly Hash ice cream in sugar cones, and talking about their pasts. They got along great. There was
a
chemistry
and an electricity between them that was growing all the time.

Sessions snatched wherever.
Sessions that unburdened the one, and held the other in a thrall of fascination.
Who needed paying?

"Where did ya say you were from?" The beautiful young hooker, sitting on the bench in Lynn railway station turned her head towards Bishman, but kept on chewing her gum.

"I come from out West originally but I travel a lot." Bishman stood up as if to stretch, but he yawned instead.

"Have ya been to Lynn before? Fuckin' dump, this place, I can't wait to get outta here." She pushed her golden hair back and tossed her head. Good looking
girl,
knew how to use make
-
up too.

"You live here, then. Brought up here, were ya?" Bishman sat down and lit up two cigarettes, he passed her one.

"Yeah all my life."
She drew down on the cigarette and blew the smoke out, neat, through round lips, like women do.

"I've never been to Lynn before. I've been to Boston lots of times though. I'll probably never come here again. I got a ride with a guy and I've been travelling in the wrong direction. It happens all the
time,
I was on the wrong side of
the freeway.
Story of my fucking life."
He looked around. At three in the morning the place was desolate.

"You know what?
Lynn' s
a fuckin' dump. It's the only place in America where McDonald's went bust. They had to close the place down. It got robbed every week for about a year. Yeah - Lynn, Lynn,
City
of Sin they call it." She laughed and smiled at Bishman.

"I've never heard that one before. My sister used to work in McDonald's. She O.D'd way back on smack or some other shit." Bishman rolled a joint.

"I still keep in touch with a friend of hers whenever I can," he went on, "She works for the CIA in Virginia. You should hear some of the things she comes out with. Incredible!" He lit the joint, took a long toke and handed it to the eager recipient.

"Yeah, like what sort of things? I've never known anyone in the CIA."

Bishman coughed on the joint. Then cupped his hands around the smoke and inhaled it like that, rather than puffing the joint directly. "She doesn't work out in the field. She works in the headquarters, in the computer room." He'd had enough of the joint and lit a cigarette. The girl put her hand out for one and smiled nicely. He handed her a cigarette and she lit it with
a slim
silver lighter.

"Brenda, my friend at the CIA told me all about the moon rock samples. They've landed on the moon dozens of times you know. But most times it was on secret missions. They've brought
back all sorts of rocks and samples. They've already proved the moon was part of the
ea
rth and the craters are from a nuclear war, three thousand years ago.
Blew the fucking place sky high and the moon split off from the earth.
The Chinese and Arabs.
Not the Americans and Russians. They've proved it and hushed it all up. The CIA controls NASA. They blew the shuttle up because NASA wasn't handing over all the samples. They do now. They've learnt their lesson." He tossed the half-finished cigarette onto the track.

"Like the fucking AIDS scam, another big CIA hush-up. They know the Russians developed and released the virus here in the States. The CIA and KGB are in cahoots. They've already got the vaccine for AIDS but it's a big hush-up job." He put his hand on her lap and she held it, gazing into his eyes, taking it all in.
Awesome.

"They keep letting it rip because it's wiping out all the blacks. People don't realize it but it's already wiped out over sixty million blacks in Africa. They reckon by the time AIDS has gone full circle there won't be any blacks left."

She squeezed his hand and moved closer, as if to cudd
le up. She put her face closer,
he felt her
Juicy Fruits
breath and smelt her cheap, sickly perfume. "What do you mean, full circle?" she asked.

"Well, they're all fucking each other, and the babies come out with the AIDS. The prostitutes never use any birth
control,
they don't believe there is such a thing as AIDS. Soon there won't be anyone who isn't infected in the whole of Africa. The other thing is the CIA wants all the
gays wiped out in America, it always has done, so they let it carry on in this country too. Brenda reckons it'll be another six or seven years before they release the cure to the public."

"You know what? You're the most interesting guy I ever met. You're kinda neat. I like that in a guy. You wanna fuck me, for free I mean."

"Yeah, you bet, where?"

"Round the back here, that's where I always go." She took him by the hand.