TRICKY DICK'S COFFEE HOUSE: 21) CONCLUSION
A Throwback Thursday Memoir of Living in London in the 1970s
Mid-1978
Enter Le Qouc, a suave Asian, half Vietnamese, half-French: slender build, dark suit, silk shirt…
Le continually felt slighted by people and was forever saying, with much vehemence, "I will kill this man."
Le's father had played a prominent role in the Vietnam War, was close to Marshal Ky and many other former Vietnamese leaders. Apparently a wealthy man, Le's father lived in Paris, was said by Le to own a spaghetti factory, which seemed a rather odd occupation.
Mike and I had decided we wouldn't carry on beyond 1978; we couldn't afford a rent renewal and we wished to travel different roads: Michael, a law degree; me, a career in journalism. So I was looking for somebody to take over Tricky Dick's.
Le got excited immediately. (He was prone to bursts of excitement.)
Le was sort of stuck in Britain because he had left France to avoid twelve months' compulsory military service and couldn't return without facing a stint in prison. His old man was willing to back him in a business venture; anything to keep him occupied, out of trouble, out of the army—and Tricky Dick's looked awfully like the new life Le wanted for himself.
Le hung out with us, trading out his silky smooth dress style for blue jeans and flannel shirts, cultivating a sleazy mustache. He jumped into the whole bizarre mix that was Tricky Dick's, and practically became a brother to Mike and me, soaking up the spirit of the madhouse we had created.
I took Le around to pick up supplies: Marine Ices in Chalk Farm for Ice Cream, Biggs at King Cross for burgers, cash & carry in Stanmore for everything from salad dressing to paper napkins.
One morning, Le phoned and talked me into driving to Heathrow Airport to meet a friend of his father.
"Who the hell are we meeting?" I asked as we sped along the A40 in my Austin minivan.
Said Le: "His name is Songvhudi Chomanand and he's zee younger brother of zee guy who rules Thailand."
"Oh, c'mon."
"It's true. But I don't know what he looks like. We're supposed to watch for someone wearing a red beret."
No one on the flight from Paris was wearing a red beret.
Special Branch, Britain's political police, found Songvhudi first. They offered to escort him anywhere he wanted to go. Then Le and I suddenly appeared and said he was coming with us, and the pair of officers wearing suits and constipated expressions looked us up and down. We weren't much to look at: unshaven, blue jeans, shirts hanging out. Le had let his hair grow, and there was always a cigarette hanging out the corner of his mouth.
This is probably where my Special Branch file begins.
Songvhudi wanted to go straight to the Dutch Embassy to collect a visa so he could fly to Amsterdam next day. He told us he had come to London to do this because he did not want the French intelligence service to know he was going to Holland.
An old fart at the Dutch embassy pointed to a sign that said something like, Visas take a week, so I pulled the clerk aside and told him who Songvhudi was related to and that if a diplomatic incident took place he personally would take the blame. To my total amazement, they issued Songvhudi a visa on the spot.
We checked Songvhudi into the London International Hotel in Kensington then dumped him on Oxford Street where he wanted to shop. Later, he took us to dinner at an elegant Chinese restaurant in Soho.
Over dessert he asked us for a woman.
Le and I exchanged glances and shrugged. We didn't know any prostitutes.
So there’s the three of us cruising Shepherd's Market, the high-end red-light district in Mayfair, and we can’t find him a single sex-worker so, other than dessert, poor Songvhudi went tart-less that night.
His parting words to us, as he struggled with English: "Thank you very much. Come to Thailand. You will be very hospitalized."
I left it to Mike to sort out the business of transferring Tricky Dick's to Le. I had no idea about the value of our restaurant. I thought it was a matter of finding someone who was willing to take the place off our hands and give us a little something for our furnishings.
Looking back, our liquor license alone had intrinsic value.
But we went out the same way we came in: spontaneously; no plan, no strategy, only a desire to dump the present and move on to the future.
We sold Tricky Dick's to Le Qouc for eight thousand pounds, about $13,000, and I thought we did good, selling merely a right to renew.
Le's sister smuggled cash from Paris, two thousand pounds a trip.
After paying bills, my share was about three grand, and that didn't last long.
Thereafter: The real world.
Running Tricky Dick's was the kind of self-employment people aspire to later in life, after running a race with rats and saving up for an escape route. Maybe having my own coffee house at so tender an age came too early for me to appreciate.
But I knew what I had, what I was giving up.
A place like Tricky Dick's would have been wasted on a 60 year-old. By then, your body can't take the kind of abuse we took: booze and regular all-nighters. And at that age you no longer have patience for characters that sit three hours over a free cup of tea.
No, I couldn't have found a better way to grow up.
Le spent over a $100,000 of his dad's money transforming Tricky Dick's from an anarchistic hole in the wall into an up-market, yuppy-ish bistro called Carnegie, a name he borrowed from the iconic deli in Manhattan.
It was his cocaine habit that induced such delusions of grandeur. We only ever dabbled with drugs, never crossing the line between use and abuse. But Le got hooked. A gram a day disappeared up his nose.
Le installed a fancy revolving door more befitting a grand hotel than a small shop front. He built an elegant wrought-iron spiral staircase to connect the ground floor with the mezzanine.
He wanted the place to be something it could never be on our little strip of Finchley Road shopfronts. He fantasized rock stars hanging out, and not the down-and-out Tim Hardin variety; he dreamt of Fleet Street “diarists” (gossip columnists) peppering their copy with items about who’d been seen at Carnegie the other night. He talked about "Regine" this and "Regine" that, invoking a name synonymous back then with classy nightclubs.
It was the coke talking.
The comedown was a bitch: Le's father (not really a spaghetti-maker but an arms-dealer) pulled the plug, and Le soon went belly-up.
Coming soon, a second serial memoir: The Spymaster & Me.