Dirty work
Jeffrey Bernard
Tomorrow I have to sit down and write a few words about London's. afternoon drinking clubs as I know and knew them — for a 'girlie' magazine. Well, most people call them girlie magazines although I usually refer to them as 'dirty' magazines. I'm allowed to be quite explicit about certain bizarre events I've witnessed in such clubs and I'm writing the piece because the editor said he'd pay me promptly on delivery. Now why am I trying to justify the exercise? Because I feel a little guilty and embarrassed about it and I suppose that it's a hangover from the time I wrote a rather well-paid column for Men Only called, would you believe it, 'Bedtime with Bernard'. Now it happens that, if I was capable of writing 100 per cent fiction, that sort of column wouldn't worry me at all but, as it is, the entire business of writing porn is a dead giveaway. Even if you can make it up it's still a giveaway since all you're doing is jotting down your fantasies and such things are part of the private guilt machine. I just wish I could enjoy my own pornography as much as I do other people's.
I first got practically involved with porn some 20 years ago when the owner of some half-dozen dirty bookshops in Soho gave me a job in one of them from 6pm until 8pm every evening. I got £5 for each session — very good money then — and that didn't include the accepted fiddle. The fiddles perpetrated by the bookshop counterhands in those days were so blatant that the owners of the shops actually expected you to take as much as 50 per cent out of the till for yourself. So, apart from the excellent pickings, the job held the fascination of the surrounding goods plus contact with the most extraordinary customers.
First, the goods. It just isn't true that if you worked in a chocolate factory you'd get tired of sweets in no time, and in that bookshop I never ceased to be fascinated by the material I browsed through when it was empty. When it wasn't empty it was visited by a strange collection. Apart from the sad, lonely, raincoated brigade most of my customers seemed to comprise Members of Parliament and people so well known you'd have thought they wouldn't have dared to be seen sweating in a dirty bookshop. The one that always amused me to see walk in was the famous theatre critic, now turned impresario who, not content with lashing thespians in print, collected books on flagellation with a quiet and intense concentration reminiscent of a man secretly picking his nose in public.
Incidentally, one sidelight on those days I can't forget was the time when I got held up in the shop. One evening I was visited by a psychopath who I later learned had already stuck up three other shops in the preceding half hour. He pulled out a Colt .45 automatic which he pointed at me and asked for the contents of the till. I have to tell you it wasn't at all like it is in the movies. The gull looked enormous, he meant it and I really was extremely frightened. I gave him the day's takings and offered him my own personal rather sick-looking wad as a leaveme-alone bonus and off he went without harming me. Later, a CID man from the vice squad told the owner of the shop that there wasn't anything he could do without nicking the proprietor himself — it was all highly illegal in those days — but he did, surprisingly I thought, offer to get another villain to shoot the stick-up man, who was fairly well known to them, through the knee cap. The going rate was £50 a knee with the promise that the target wouldn't be able to walk for at least six months.
Hey ho. Jolly days. Now, I fear I might have to return to the scene of the crime if not in person then in print. I do need the money, but fear not ladies. All those of you who have been as needlessly frightened of my writing an autobiography as two publishers have been insanely optimistic with their golden carrots of my doing so can rest assured that names will be changed and disguised. I'll gloss over the sordid bits and turn it into a Rabelaisian romp. Though I must admit that I'd love to put it down as it was without a change of name and see you, you two po-faced leading lights of the feminist movement and national press and you out there in Ruislip, squirm just a little as I do writing the wretched stuff.
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