Hound Dog Read online

  ‘Yeah, it was all right,’ I say. ‘You need to work on a few things, though. Firstly, you’re closing your eyes too much. If you stand up singing with your eyes closed in some of the places we play, they’ll think you’re taking the piss and bottle you off. So always look at the audience, but only make eye contact with birds and kids. If you make eye contact with a bloke you may as well ask him to shove a snooker cue up your arse and be done with it. Also, couldn’t you do that stupid dance he used to do?’

  ‘Uh, not sure what you mean. Buddy didn’t do a stupid dance.’

  ‘No, he did, I’m sure. I saw it on TV once. He used to kick his legs up behind him and hop from foot to foot. Made him look like a spaz.’ I stand up and show him the dance I mean.

  ‘Ah, Elvis, I think that was Freddie and the Dreamers,’ says Buddy.

  ‘Are you sure? Not Buddy Holly?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m pretty positive on that one, Elvis.’

  ‘You could still do the dance, though,’ I say.

  ‘I’m not sure about that. It wouldn’t really be accurate.’

  ‘OK, but here’s something to think about, how about a joint tribute to Buddy Holly and Freddie and the Dreamers? You look like both of them, so you just have to change your jacket. Then you could do the dance.’

  ‘I don’t know if it would really work…’

  ‘Look, it’s something to think about, that’s all. We’ll leave it for now and come back to it later, OK?’

  ‘Uh, yeah, OK…’

  Now, as you know, I’m not a total fucking moron. Of course I realise it was Freddie and the Dreamers who did the dance and not Buddy Holly, but right now I’m faced with some kid who has every chance of upstaging me, and the only way I can stop that from happening is undermining his confidence to the point that not only does he think he’s nothing special, but that he’s not even normal. To do this, I’m already formulating a three-step plan in my head, which at the moment goes something like this: step one, trick him into portraying his hero, Buddy Holly, in a disrespectful and unflattering manner; step two, find his weak spot and tease him about it, ideally working up to giving him a derogatory nickname; step three, and this is more of a long-term goal, shag his girlfriend. All of this plotting leaves me feeling a bit more my old bastard self again, and that feels good. As well as feeling good, however, I also feel sick, and before I know it. I’m spewing my guts out on my living-room carpet.

  ‘Are you OK?’ says Buddy, edging quickly backwards.

  ‘Fine, fine, just a bit of sick that’s all. Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Uh, I’ll get a cloth, shall I?’ Buddy scampers off to the kitchen, leaping across the vomit pool on the way.

  ‘Oh shit, oh fucking shit, oh fucking bumholes,’ I hear him rasping to himself.

  ‘What’s the problem, Buddy?’

  I hear running water and more muttering. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck. Fucking, fucking hell.’

  ‘Are you OK in there?’

  ‘Uh, yeah, hang on a minute.’

  Eventually he comes in damping himself down with a cloth. ‘Um, Elvis, I think you may have caught me with some of that, look.’

  He takes the cloth away. There’s a brown patch of vomit stain on the right sleeve and across the pocket of his blue rock ’n’ roll jacket.

  ‘Um, right,’ I say, ‘not sure what to suggest really. You could leave it in the sink to soak.’

  ‘Nah mate, best get this down the dry-cleaner’s straight away. Could be ruined otherwise.’

  Dry-cleaner’s, now there’s an idea. I still haven’t been able to get rid of that spunk stain on my Elvistrousers, no matter how long I leave them in the sink. Hadn’t occurred to me I could take them to a dry-cleaner. In fact, I’d forgotten such places existed. Now, if I had a bird, she would know when to take things to the dry-cleaner’s, or at least remember what they are. Buddy’s of a younger generation where men can remember that dry-cleaners exist all by themselves. It’s progress of a sort, I guess.

  ‘Buddy,’ I say, ‘can you do me a favour? Could you drop my Elvistrousers off at the dry-cleaner’s as well? We’ll split the cost between us, yeah?’

  ‘Ah, actually Elvis,’ he says, looking down at the ground, ‘you couldn’t pay for all of it, could you? It was your sick after all.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right,’ I say. I don’t want to push him too far, too soon. There’ll be all the time in the world for that once I’ve broken him. Having said that, I’m beginning to think he’ll be a tough nut to crack. Even though he’s dying to be part of the act, he actually seems keen to hold on to some self-respect and dignity. Also, it has to be said, I vomited on him far too early in our working relationship. It’ll take a lot to recover my position of superiority after that.

  The rehearsal has clearly reached a natural conclusion, so I pack Buddy off to the dry-cleaner’s with my Elvistrousers in a plastic bag. We arrange to try again on Monday, by which point my stomach will have calmed down and I’ll hopefully have cleaned up some of this mess. I wouldn’t put money on it though, because I have three rooms full of sick, and no real idea about what cleaning products to use to get rid of it. So unless I find that out, I may well have to live with it. It’s probably seeped right into the mattress of the bed by now, so that’ll smell forever more for a start. I could just turn it over I guess. No, that won‘t do. I must concentrate hard on solving this problem, or I may as well just move out and live under a bush with the village tramp. Now, I think there’s such a thing as carpet cleaner, because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it advertised on telly. I could buy some of that. And isn’t there some spray you use for getting rid of stains in carpets? Fucking hell, I’m making some sort of breakthrough here, thinking maybe I can do this after all. I’ll just go down the local shop, load up on all this stuff, and read the instructions.

  But as soon as I even think about leaving, I feel so tired and drained that I don’t want to leave the house, even though the smell is almost unbearable. God, I’m feeling rough. I haven’t even wanked today, in fact I’ve barely had the horn. I think about having a quick fiddle before I leave the house, and get as far as letting my cock out, but it refuses to respond to my touch, and just sits in my lap, semi-erect and shrinking. Looking at it deflate somehow makes me recall the details of last night. With sudden horror I remember talking to the girl with the long hair and the angelic smile. I remember grabbing at her hair. And getting thrown out of the pub. I remember the aborted blow job in the alley from the old drunken hag. I even remember the ride home on the last bus, shouting, ‘I am Elvis! I am the fucking king of fucking rock ’n’ roll!’ and singing Elvis songs to embarrassed teenagers and shift workers. And now I’m in a house full of sick.

  The doorbell rings. ‘Fuck off!’ I shout, instinctively.

  It rings again. Through the window I can see a swarm of baseball caps and rat-faced youths. They’ve probably been told to fuck off so many times they’ve forgotten what it means. I say it again, but when it has no effect, I give in and open the door.

  ‘What do you lot want?’ I say. ‘I told you lot a million fucking times to phone ahead.’

  ‘You got any puff?’ asks the head baseball hat.

  Oh well, I need the money for the dry-cleaning. ‘Yeah. Get inside.’

  I leave them in the hallway and make my way to the stash drawer and scales upstairs.

  ‘Fucking hell, it stinks in here, mate,’ says one of them as I climb.

  ‘Do you want it or not?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Then shut your fucking mouth then.’

  I complete the transaction and tell them to sling their hooks. Then, I find some clothes that don’t have sick on them and, feeling like a man with a mission, finally walk to the village shop.

  Chapter 9

  After several hours of following the instructions on the back of cleaning products, I lie triumphantly on my bed, which admittedly still smells quite a lot of sick, high on charlie, and celebrate a job well done with a h
ard-earned wank. I got my horn back sometime in the mid-afternoon, and now it’s throbbing like a good ’un. I come, and I relax as the spunk forms a puddle in my belly button. Coupled with the post-orgasm bliss, I feel a real sense of achievement at cleaning up my sick without the help of any woman. I’ve been thinking recently about how maybe it would be easier if I got hitched up again and had someone to look after me and the house, but now I realise, if I learn a few new skills, like I’ve just done with sick removal, it might not be necessary. Granted, I wouldn’t say the sick clearance was entirely successful, there’s still an outline on the carpet of where it was, like a chalk drawing at a murder scene, and I have no fucking clue how to stop this mattress from smelling, but it’s a first effort, and chances are next time I’ll crack it.

  Still, a wife or live-in partner would be handy. Not that getting one would be so easy these days, seeing as I’m so much older now, as well as a bit of a porker, which isn’t surprising seeing as I pretty much live on takeaways and ready-meals. Nothing new there, but I used to be able to eat anything and my body could deal with it. Now I’m just getting fatter all the time. If I had someone looking after me, I’d get to eat proper food and I might lose some weight, but I’m getting to be such a lard-arse that no bird is going to want to. Also, even though I try to keep the house clean, some of the time anyway, it’s never as good as when a woman does it. It always whiffs a bit, even if I spray the place. Birds know how to do this stuff properly, birds and gaylords. But I’ve been on my own so long, I’ve got so I feel nervous about having someone else around the place. I actually enjoy being left alone, and if I had a woman around I’d never get any peace. It’s not like I’m lonely. I’ve never really got lonely, but now I’m on my own so much, sometimes I get bored.

  So there are pluses and minuses to getting a bird. Also, I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve a good track record of holding down a serious relationship. Like I said, I’ve been married three times, and all of them ended in tears. The first time was way back when I was living where I was born in Colchester. I was just a kid, so it’s not surprising it all went tits up. I mean, I really was, I had to get my parents’ permission. You see, by the time I was fifteen, it was pretty apparent I was a sex addict. I was wanking constantly, even more than usual for a teenage boy. I was skiving off school just so I could wank. I was already shagging by the time I was fourteen, but back then it wasn’t like it is now. It was really hard work getting into a girl’s pants, they were all waiting for someone they loved, or even saving themselves for fucking marriage. You don’t need that crap when your dick’s opening your flies all by itself. Obviously, there were some dirty slappers about, just like there always are, but really, if you wanted it from a bird you really fancied, you usually had to convince them that you loved them, and might even marry them one day. I remember I used to say things like, ‘I thought I’d died and gone to heaven, but now I can see that I’m still alive, and heaven has been brought to me.’ They’d laugh when I said that, but they still slipped their knickers off. So I said these things to a fox of a girl called Karen, and of course right away she’s up the duff. She went and told her parents when she found out, and next thing I know, her dad’s beating seven shades of shit out of me in his garden shed, telling me I had to marry her or he’d make sure I spent the rest of my life in a wheelchair.

  So I got married at sixteen years old. I was still in school, but I had a wife and a kid on the way. I was made to move in with Karen’s parents, even though her dad hated me and was always threatening to thrash me if I put a foot wrong. I had to play the role of the dutiful husband and then, when the baby was born, the dutiful father. So, in order to appear responsible, I got a job as an apprentice in the butcher’s, but that hardly paid anything at all, and I wasn’t exactly good at it, in fact, I nearly caused an outbreak of food poisoning. And after the baby was born, of course the sex dried up, although it was already hard enough getting any with the in-laws skulking about all the time. Under the circumstances, I don’t think there was any way that I could have stayed faithful. Three months into the marriage I had two other women on the go regularly, with the occasional odd bits of stuff as well. Both of the women were quite a lot older, in their late thirties. One was married, and the other was a divorcee with a kid nearly my age. After five months of a wife I couldn’t shag, a little brat who wouldn’t stop screaming, and a father-in-law who was always looking for an excuse to give me a beating, I did a runner and went to live with the divorced lady.

  She was pretty well off, so I didn’t have to work. I chucked my job and spent my days being looked after by her. She also had a maid that cleaned up after the both of us. I didn’t leave the house much because if Karen’s dad tracked me down I’d be mincemeat. So we pretty much just shagged all the time and lived off her ex-husband’s money. I remember she had a poodle that would always try to bite me, until I booted it across the room one day and it learned its lesson. It was an all right way to live, but pretty soon I was getting bored and claustrophobic. Then her daughter came home from boarding school. She was gorgeous, a real classy young thing, and before long I was banging her too. Course, her mum didn’t know, and when she came home one day and caught us, I was out on my ear. Years after I found out I’d got the girl pregnant, but her mum told her to get rid of it. So anyway, I moved on to Luton and fell in with a bad crowd. A couple of years later I’m in the nick and you know what happened there. Once I got out, I found myself struggling to make ends meet until Eddie intervened and I spent that time in London working as a fence, moving electrical goods and kids’ toys and the like that had fallen off the back of a lorry.

  Me being connected with Eddie meant that I ended up with some good contacts. That doesn’t mean that I was taken that seriously, I was treated like a bit of a joke to be honest with you, but I got to hang out in the right clubs and was allowed to say hello to the right people. Anyway, that’s when I met Nanette. Now Nanette was what I’d call a top-looking bird. She always dressed like a model, I mean you never saw her wearing jeans or stuff like that, and she had one hell of a bod. Long legs, big tits and she wasn’t afraid to show them off. It was impossible for a man to look at her and not think about what she’d be like in bed, and it’s not just me that’s said so. Her family were all part of the scene, and she was meant to be the girlfriend of Brian O’Sullivan, who was a real psycho, but he was in the nick and wasn’t coming out for a very long time. Now like I said, I was a small-time fence who got the piss taken out of him, so it was a bit of a surprise when it became obvious that Nanette was interested. I swear I never made a move on her, because I didn’t want to get my neck broken by O’Sullivan’s goons, but Nanette told me to relax, that O’Sullivan would never dare do anything to upset her dad. Now her dad was Harry Roscoe. If you want to know who he is, go down your local library, because they’re writing fucking history books about him now. He’s an underworld legend. Young posh lads now who’ve never done a bad thing in their entire lives fucking worship him. Mind you, these days he’s going straight and does adverts for breakfast cereals on telly. Anyway, Nanette started to make the moves on me. First I just catch her looking at me a few times in the club, and then when she sees she’s got my attention, she looks away. Then another time, I’m standing at the bar when she walks up and tells me I should stop drinking. I ask her why. ‘Because you’re driving me home,’ she says. And of course, next thing I know, I’m banging the hottest property in gangland. Not unreasonably, this won me new-found respect.

  Why Nanette chose me I’ve never been sure. I guess I was pretty damn good-looking. I still had my blond, curly hair, and I was in good shape. A lot of the other guys on the scene had been in so many punch-ups their faces looked like train wrecks. Still, she must have known the way people thought about me. Anyway, thanks to Nanette, I was doing pretty fucking well for myself. I got promoted and ran laundered money through a car lot. Of course a lot of people were jealous, but if O’Sullivan wasn’t going to mess with me, they sure as he
ll weren’t going to. I was living a charmed life, it seemed, and even Nanette’s dad ended up liking me and put a few little earners my way. After a while, however, old Harry took me to one side, and suggested that if I wanted to carry on enjoying intimate relations with his daughter, it would be only right for me to do so within the bounds of holy matrimony. It was up to me of course, but if I enjoyed breathing, proposing to her was probably my most sensible option. So for the second time in my life, I married a girl in order to avoid the possibility of her dad doing me some serious damage. We had it all right for a while, me and Nanette. Lots of cash, a nice house in the suburbs, cars, foreign holidays. Even staying faithful was easy for me, I think partly because Nanette chose me instead of the other way round, and partly because there’s no telling what her dad would have done to me if I was caught putting my pencil in the wrong case. Now, I can’t say that I loved her, because I honestly don’t know what that means, but at least I respected her, and I don’t have too much of that to go round. So things were good, I’d say. Until Johnny Brooks got out of the nick, then it all went tits up. At first it was just a few dropped hints in conversation by friends, words to the wise that Johnny and Nanette had a history, and that I should keep an eye out, that was all. Then acquaintances would tell me they just happened to see them together down the club on a night I was working, and they looked quite friendly. Nanette wouldn’t always be around when I expected her to be, but that wasn’t anything new, and besides, I’d never kept tabs on her before, and I didn’t think I’d get away with starting to now. Finally Harry Roscoe cornered me and said outright that Johnny was having an affair with Nanette and what was I going to do about it. Even Harry was scared of Johnny. He wasn’t going to eat his own eyeballs just for the sake of his slutty daughter’s marriage, so if anyone was going to teach him a lesson it was going to have to be me.