TRICKY DICK'S COFFEE HOUSE: 20) WINDING DOWN (& "MERCENARY" MIKE'D)
A Throwback Thursday Memoir of Living in London in the 1970s
December 1977
Bruce S came back to London for Christmas and turned his parents' townhouse into Party Central one last time. After New Year's he returned to the States and I haven't seen him since.
I give him a lot of credit for holding out longer than most ASL grads who went straight to college Stateside, got married, had kids and put off a return to London until they were middle-aged.
Is it that our small group didn't want to grow up?
Or maybe we wanted to make the most of our youth in a foreign capital before returning to reality in Sioux City, Iowa or some such place.
Dickie W went home, too, and eventually traded his hash pipe for a golf club.
I ran with a new crowd: U.S. Navy petty officers who worked in the security group at Navy European Headquarters on North Audley Street.
My link was Tom C, another ASL alumuni.
We'd eat at the U.S. Embassy commissary around the corner on Grosvenor Square and my navy friends would each put away four vodka tonics over lunch. At 4:30, after work, we'd meet again at the Mainbrace, a basement bar in the navy building, Budweiser and Schlitz at giveaway PX prices.
I began a romance with a Navy WAC, and when it ended, it left me in a funk.
I phoned Tim Hardin, who'd flown the coop and was living with his grandmother in Seattle; told him I needed to get away, maybe I'd come see him.
Tim listened to my pitch and said, "It's over a girl, isn't it?"
He'd been around.
He said, "Great, come on over, I'm on a lake and it's a wonderful spot, it'll clear your head."
I almost did. I looked into flights to Seattle, but got no further.
Months later, Tim moved south to Hollywood, grew back into old habits and, at the end of December 1980, OD'd on heroin. He was only 39.
I was tired of Tricky Dick's.
A mongrelized mix of genetic compulsions were driving me somewhere. I wanted to move on, become a journalist.
The long lease that allowed us to pay only 12 bucks a week rent would expire at the end of 1978. The rent would then increase 20-fold.
By this time we had applied for and been issued a liquor license, but we never took advantage of it because it would have upset our sober balance of insanity. Do they allow booze in mental hospitals? Of course not.
Booze would have given Tricky Dick's a hard edge we didn't need. Yeah, I guess we needed it money-wise, but we didn't want it. And we didn't know the value of serving booze; the incredibly high profit margin compared to food. We didn't care.
We had a responsibility to look after our characters. If money had played a part in our thinking, we wouldn't have been a coffee house anyway; we'd have become a pool hall with three big bouncers.
With hindsight, we should have called ourselves a bar: Tricky Dick's Saloon or Tricky Dick's Wine Bar (wine bars had suddenly become the new trend in London).
But we didn't. We didn't set up a bar at all, just stocked one brand of beer (Heineken) and wouldn't serve it to boozers who came in looking for another drink when the pubs closed at 11 p.m.
Meantime, I'd begun writing for a bi-weekly newspaper called The American that catered to Americans living in London. It provided a series of small ink fixes.
Tricky Dick's still bustled with characters, people like "Mercenary" Mike, who lived inside a Freddie Forsyth novel and carried a Walther P-38 strapped to his body.
He claimed to be an ex-Green Beret and was planning "Operation Tiger Claw," an ambitious plan to zip into Columbia, raid a drug factory and make off with 40 pounds of cocaine. He said he was in London to buy equipment for "Tiger Claw," including grenade launchers, high-powered rifles and six rolls of toilet paper.
But Mike put "Operation Tiger Claw" on hold to take a dishwashing job at Tricky Dick's.
It was foolhardy to hire him, but I liked quirky characters; I liked mixing them together like chemicals, see what might combust. Plus I paid such poor wages I always needed people, and characters like “Mercenary” Mike would work at Tricky Dick's just to be part of the scenery.
Mike was a terrible dishwasher, more interested in demonstrating his prowess as a gladiator than scrubbing plates, and it wasn't long before I caught him "borrowing" money from the cashbox to buy panty hose at the local bodega.
“Mercenary” Mike's true calling was bouncer, not dishwasher, but we didn't need bouncers, preferring a diplomatic approach when the need arose. Besides, if a wig-out was called for, I got tanked up and handled it myself.
Once, someone did a runner while Mike was there. I ordered Mike to "Sic 'em!" and without a moment’s hesitation he chased after two guys, reappearing five minutes later with one of the culprits, whom he frog-marched through the door commando style. It was Mike's moment of glory. He wanted to beat the guy up. But it was just a scared kid who didn't even have bus fare, and it ended with me giving him money to get home.
Through our network of Polish waitresses, Mike plugged into a young virgin out of Poland and made her his live-in mate in a seedy bed-sit over the Wimpy Bar on Finchley Road.
The girl's cousin came to see me, concerned about her cousin's odd behavior, asked me about Mike, and I said, "Oh, the mercenary?"
She became visibly anxious as I joked about Mike's fantasy life. I made her swear not to mention my name to her parents.
Next thing I knew, the girl's aunt and uncle nabbed their niece, took her home and locked her up. The way I heard it, she and Mike had been walking down a street and a shiny new Jag pulled up, the uncle jumped out, pulled her into the car and sped off. The mercenary stood frozen. It was the kind of live-action drama Mike lived for. But when it arrived, he froze-up, incapable of a James Bond response.
Then Mike came looking for me. The girl had managed to call him and reveal me as the fink. Mike was pissed. He came into Tricky Dick's with a fight in his eye, trembling with rage. He started yelling at me from across the restaurant; he had a rolled up a magazine in his hand, and he approached me like he was going to jab me with it. We went back in the kitchen to talk.
"It it true?" he demanded. "Did you blab to her relatives?"
"No," I lied. "You look like you could use a drink. Let's go down to The Red House and talk about it."
We drove to The Red House. Mike pounded his hand with his rolled-up magazine, saying, "When I find out who blabbed, I'm gonna kill the sonofabitch," and he pounded his hand again for emphasis.
I bought us each a shot of tequila, then another. It would either calm Mike down or make him go berserk. I didn't care. I fed him a line about the cousin coming round, asking questions, me saying, "Mike's a mysterious guy, nobody knows much about him."
Mike liked hearing this, of course, because he imagined himself as the kind of guy people talked about as being mysterious.
"The cousin," I said, "talked to a lot of people..."
"Who?" Mike demanded.
"I don't know, I was back in the kitchen. I didn't want to know."
The tequila calmed Mike down. And then he remembered what the girl had told him. "But she said you were the one who talked to her cousin! She managed to get that out before the phone got cut off. They won't even let her talk to me, when I phoned back they hung up!"
"Look," I said, "I don't know why she's saying what she's saying. She's upset, confused."
Mike wanted a hit of Bronchipax, an over-the-counter asthma tablet that he'd grind into powder and snort. He swore it worked like speed. And he'd snorted so much Bronchipax over so many months that the cartilage inside his nose had melted, and he could literally push his nose to one side.
We returned to Tricky Dick's and, now Bronchipaxed, Mike engaged in his favorite pastime: slinking up behind the Vietnamese chef and demonstrating a combat hold.
A week later, Mercenary Mike mounted a rescue attempt. He'd recruited Nick, one of our customers, a marginally retarded courier, and the two of them sped out to the countryside on Nick's motorbike, to the house where his Polish girlfriend was grounded.
The police were called.
They questioned Mike and cautioned him never to return.
And they confiscated his Walther P-38, which turned out to be a realistic-looking replica firearm that could not fire.