He Died with a Felafel in His Hand by John Birmingham Read Free Book Online Page A

bowl of one because of the clean cup shortage. Meanwhile, I was sitting in the single lounge chair. I let my left hand drop onto the carpet looking for my beer but fumbled upon something I thought was a shoelace. When I picked it up to have a closer look at it I realised it was the major portion of a rat’s tail.
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    Milo and I sat in the living room later that night, surrounded by the debris, sunburned and hopelessly drunk, knowing in our hearts that we would not clean up for at least three months. McGann, however, was bouncing off the walls. A long day of drinking with pneumatic wonderbabes had touched off some elemental drive within him, jacked his soul into some giant black generator and cranked it up to critical mass. He was raving about his student grant, $6000 which had just gone into his account. We found him on the phone working his way through the Yellow Pages. E for Escort. We started ringing them back, cancelling orders. But we weren’t dealing with drunken bravado here, we had a case of rutting madness in the house. While Milo and I consulted in the kitchen, McGann tried to place an order for a dozen Asian girls and a gram of speed from some dodgey escort agency. We could see him getting bilked out of every cent he had. The house did not need the hassle. It would very definitely not be cool . We cancelled the girls and put the soothers on McGann by telling him he could take us to a strip club for a drink, and if there were any hookers about, we’d sit around and watch him get laid. But he’d be paying for everything. We stressed that, shouted it at him as he called us a taxi. Milo had five bucks to his name and I had $1.38 in phone jar change. We planned to drive McGann into town, get him so drunk he passed out, or in the final extreme, knock him unconscious. Total cost: about $150, all down to him.
    We cabbed it to the Valley, to this pre-Fitzgerald strip club which had a brothel attached to it. Risky, but we had to string him along. Two hours later, McGann was still conscious and a big whack of his student grant had been poured down our throats in the form of tequila laybacks administered by topless barmaids. Our table had become the centre of attention, the terminal point for an unceasing stream of bouncers, hookers and waitresses. There was shouting and singing and the sound of smashing glass. At other tables, businessmen hunkered down sullenly over their drinks. A well-known Marxist university lecturer, a politically correct hatchet man who’d been trapped at his table when we came in, tried to sneak out during a round of laybacks. Milo spotted him and started a commotion, scrambling towards the guy with a cigarette lighter, mumbling something about marking him ‘as of the Beast.’ McGann chose that exact moment to make his move on The Fabulous Tina. He launched himself from a paralytic stupor into full flight across the top of our table, sending beer bottles and shot glasses everywhere as he dived. He didn’t make it, drastically misjudging the distance and his ability to take it in a blur of fluid action. His chin hit the stage and he managed to get out a scream before the bouncers descended for the last time and threw us out.
    We were hoping that McGann might have folded by this stage, but he picked himself up from the footpath and said this was the best night he’d had in ages. That black wave of despair, unknown outside the desperate wee hours, swept down on me. We tried to get into an illegal casino, where the alcohol is free as long as you’re losing – the economics seem feasible when you’re drunk –but they wouldn’t have us because we weren’t wearing ties. The casino people referred us to an address up the street, a white stucco palace with a lot of friendly women hanging out of the windows. We thundered up the stairs, ran past the receptionist and settled in at the bar. Two hours later, the bar was dry and nobody had made any bookings. Men in tuxedos began to block the exits.