Chico initiated me into the Crads. I don’t recall too much about the actual ceremony, only that it involved Chico and me going into a shed on the allotment and drinking a great deal of colourless liquid from an unlabelled bottle.
I know I couldn’t ride my bike for about a week afterwards. But you can make of that what you will.
The Crads were not the largest teenage gang in Brentford. But, as Chico assured me, they were the most exclusive. There was Chico, the leader, there was me, and there would no doubt be others in time.
Once we had ‘gained a reputation.
Gaining a reputation was everything. It mattered far more than algebra and history and learning how to spell. Gaining a reputation made you somebody.
Exactly how you gained a reputation seemed uncertain. When questioned on the subject, Chico was vague in his replies. It apparently involved gunfire and cocaine.
I arrived in school as Brother Michael, our teacher, was calling the register. He had been scoring lines through the names of those boys slain in last night’s drive-bys and seemed quite pleased to see me.
I received the standard thrashing for lateness, nothing flashy, just five of the Cat, put my shirt back on and took my seat.
‘Chico,’ I whispered from behind my hand, ‘have you heard the news?’
‘That your mother caught you whacking off in the bathroom?’
‘No, not that. President Kennedy’s been shot.’
‘President who?’ whispered Chico.
‘That’s what I said. He was the President of the United States.’
‘Just another dead gringo,’ said Chico and he thumbed his teeth.
And that was the end of that.
We got stuck into our first lesson. It was, as ever, the history of the True Church and I think we’d got up to the Borgia Pope. We had not been at it for more than ten minutes, however, before the classroom door opened and Father Durante the headmaster entered.
We rose quickly to our feet. ‘Bless you, Holy Father,’ we all said.
‘Bless you, boys,’ said he, ‘and please sit down.’
Father Durante approached Brother Michael and whispered several words into his ear.
‘President who?’ said Brother Michael.
Father Durante whispered some more.
‘Oh,’ said Brother Michael, ‘and was he a Catholic?’
Further whispered words went on and then the Father left.
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ said Brother Michael, addressing the class. ‘Apparently President Kennedy, who is, before you ask, the President of the United States, has been assassinated. Normally this kind of thing would not concern us. But it appears that President Kennedy was a Roman Catholic and so we should all express our sorrow at his passing.’
Chico stuck his hand up. ‘Holy sir,’ said he.
‘Yes, what is it, Chico?’
‘Holy sir, this gringo who got snuffed. Was he the leader of a gang?’
‘He was the leader of a mighty nation.’
‘Whoa!’ went Chico. ‘Kiss my ass.
‘Not here,’ said Brother Michael. ‘Was there anything specific you wished to know about the president?’
‘El presidente, huh? How did the motherf—’
But he didn’t get to finish his no doubt most pertinent question.
‘You can all take the rest of the day off,’ said Brother Michael.
‘Spend it in quiet contemplation. Pray for the soul of our departed brother and write me a five-hundred-word essay on the subject:
What I would do I became the President of the United States.’
‘I’d get a better bodyguard,’ said Chico. ‘Go with God,’ said Brother Michael. So we did.
I caught up with Chico at the school gates, next to the barbed-wire perimeter fence. He had learned to swagger whilst still young, but I was yet a shuffler.
‘Where are you off to now?’ I asked.
Chico flipped a coin into the air and then he stooped to pick it up. ‘I think I’ll go and hang out at the Laundromat,’ he said. ‘I love to watch the socks go round and round together with the soap-suds. Don’t you get a kick outa that?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. Not really, I thought.
‘So, what you gonna do?’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘As I’ve just reached puberty this morning, I was hoping to have sex with a long-legged woman.
Chico looked me up and down. ‘You want I introduce you to my mother?’
‘That’s very kind, but she is a bit old.’
‘You feelthy peeg, I cut your throat.’ Chico sought his flick knife, but he’d left it in his other shorts.
‘Don’t get upset,’ I said. ‘I’m sure your mother’s a very nice woman.
Chico laughed. ‘You never met my mother then. But you get the wrong idea. It’s OK. I don’t mean you have my mother. I mean my mother get you a girl.’
‘Why would she do that for me?’
‘Because that’s what she do. She run the whorehouse.’
‘Chico,’ I said, ‘your mother is a wholesaler. She runs a warehouse.’
‘Curse this dyslexia,’ said Chico.
The sun went behind a cloud and a dog howled in the distance. ‘I tell you what,’ said Chico, perking up. ‘I take you to my aunty’s place. She runs the House of Correction and don’t tell me that ain’t no whorehouse.
The House of Correction was a proper whorehouse. Well kept and properly run. You had to take your shoes off when you went in and you weren’t allowed to jump on the furniture or tease the cat.
The House of Correction was semi-detached in a leafy Brentford side street. Those who remember the final shaming of America’s last president would recognize it from the pictures posted on the internet at the time.
Chico’s aunty, who ran it throughout the 1960s, was one of those big-bosomed Margaret Dumont kind of bodies, the like of which sadly we won’t see again.
The front door was open and Chico took me in. His aunty was seated in what was appropriately named the sitting room. She was on the telephone.
I thought I caught the words ‘President who?’ but given the law of diminishing returns this was probably not the case.
I was greatly impressed by the scale of Chico’s aunty and by just how so much flesh could be contained within so little clothes. She glanced down at our stockinged feet and then up at our stockinged faces.
‘Why are you wearing those?’ she asked.
Chico shrugged. ‘It was the gringo’s idea,’ he said.
‘You lying bastard.’ I pulled off my stocking. ‘You said we had to come in disguise.’
‘Only if you’re famous,’ said Chico’s aunty. ‘Are you famous?’ I shook my head.
‘Don’t get nits on my carpet.’ ‘Sorry.’
‘And you’ve got lard in your hair.’
‘The gringo wants a long-legged woman,’ said Chico.
‘I’ve just reached puberty this morning,’ I explained. ‘I don’t want to waste any time.’
Chico’s aunty smiled the kind of smile that you normally see only on the face of a road-kill. ‘Can’t wait to try out your pecker,’ said she. ‘Think that the entire female species is nothing more than walking pussy, gagging for you to ram it right in.’
‘I wouldn’t put it quite that way,’ I said.
‘But, in essence, I’m correct?’
‘Oh yeah. In essence.’
‘You’d better open an account then. How much money have you got?’
I dug about in my shorts. ‘About half a crown,’ I said.
Chico’s aunty tut-tut-tutted. ‘You won’t get much for half a crown,’ she said between the tuts. ‘Let me have a look at the tariff.’ She took up a clipboard and examined it with care. I noticed how her finger ran from top down to the bottom. ‘Chicken,’ she said, finally. ‘For half a crown, a chicken.’
‘A chicken?’ I said in horror.