HARRY RICHARDS: PUNK ROCK PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR (Part One)

HARRY RICHARDS: PUNK ROCK PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

Harry Richards is my name. I’m a private investigator. A shamus. A dick. Course, you can’t use that last one in the present day. It’s a cynical world. Been in the business a few years now, approximately ten, I’d be inclined to say. Maybe...no, twelve. Twelve years I’ve been running the errands not of society as dictated by our institutions (I was in the police force for some years. Not anymore, of course. It was an acrimonious split.) but of the common folks who want something done. Maybe it’s unseemly, but ain’t my job to say. I just pocket the cash and gather the information.

Was going thru a financial rough-patch in the fall of ’76. Drinking too much, too. Ask my friends, and both of ‘em would tell you that I’m a great one for blowing it all on the brown. By “the brown”, I’m talking whiskey, of course. Not heroin. I’m no beatnik. Never been one to “get” the pop culture phenomena, inasmuch as I’ll never understand the kids’ problem with spinning a Coltrane LP and smoking a few Camels...but, heh, I guess the last couple’a generations lost their desire to wind down. Everyday grind ain’t stressful enough for ‘em, so they gotta add to the frenzy with their music and their goddamn hairstyles. Y’know, I’m sure you can gage my reaction when this broad walked into my office one day. Legs like a ladder to heaven, but I couldn’t help but notice she’d covered her body in what looked like the remnants of a crashed jet.

“Siddown, lady” I said, and she spat on my floor. This was not an unusual reaction from my customers, so I sipped my Scotch and asked her “What’s the problem?”

This time she spat in my face, but she had a verbal response too, “This guy I know’s off the map all of a sudden. Hasn’t been showing up to gigs. I’ve been subbing for him but the band are getting pissed.”

“What kinda music d’you play? Lemme guess...cocktail jazz?” She strung me up from the lightbulb by my pelvis

“Punk rock, you dinosaur. Do you never hit the Sunset Strip?”

“I dunno, is there a liquor store there?”

“Don’t play dumb with me,” she yelled, drenching my face in mucous “You bet your ass you know where the sunset strip is. A barfly like you would know that shit anywhere. Fucking loser.”

I dropped from the ceiling, taking my lightbulb with me “What’s the guy’s name? You got a snap?” I asked, gradually getting to my feet and massaging my pelvis

“His name’s Edgar Cunt.”

“Have you asked Mr and Mrs Cunt where their son might be?”

“Shut it, pig. And, no, of course I don’t have no fucking photo. That would be pretty lame and superficial. We’re not fucking Pink Floyd. Go to your beloved liquor store and buy the latest issue of Punk Your Pants if you want to see what he looks like. Fag.” She swung at me with a tasty left-hook and everything went to black.

When I came to, I could’a been in worse spirits. Not only had she left me my hundred dollar fee (say what you will about these Punks, preferably outside their house with a fuckin’ megaphone, they’re not dishonest), but I’d caught an upskirt on my way down. No panties. Must’a been a radical feminist. With the masochistic babe on my mind, I headed down to Anbu’s Liquor Store and, as she’d ‘requested’, purchased a copy of Punk Your Pants, mistakenly filed out of plain sight, underneath some editions of Tits Express and Banging Anal Chicks Daily. Good job I checked that section of the magazine stand pretty religiously.

As I walked back to the office I lit myself a smoke and rifled through the mag, careful to stay on the sidewalk ‘case my inattentive eyes led to an altercation with an automobile. It pained me to read about this garbage, but in a matter of minutes; there he was. Edgar Cunt. Turns out he fronted a pop group called the Piss Merchants, and they’d been getting rave reviews all across the board. The kids were flocking to their shows like sheep to an abattoir, dying to get cut up by the brutal sounds. What could’a happened to him? Maybe he’d joined another group, but I doubt there were any prospective employers as hot as the Piss Merchants. Maybe he’d been kidnapped? Some of their fans seemed pretty rabid.  There was only one way to find out; I was gonna have to pay a visit to a Punk Rock club.

In the Bedlam Cellar, I sidled up to the bar and asked the barmaid for a double whiskey on the rocks. She poured me a whiskey, spat in it, and then filled it with actual rocks. Seeking minimal ear-damage, I positioned myself on a table at the back of the bar and looked around for anybody I thought might hold the answer to the mystery of Edgar Cunt’s disappearance. Kids, I thought – they all looking the fucking same. I’d almost finished my whiskey, and it was nearly showtime for the first band by the time somebody approached me. A fine looking guy with a thick-set stature and well-kept spikes of a hairdo (by the standards of his peers) marched towards my table, and perched himself on the previously unoccupied stool next to mine. Maybe I’ve cracked it, I ruminated.

“Alright, mate?” he asked me in a deep Estuary-English accent “You want some ket?”

“Some what?”

“Y’know, ket. Ketamine. Special K. Horse tranquillisers.”

“What, are the kids not smoking pot anymore?”

“Ah, naw, naw, mate. They want summin a little more extreme, d’youknowwhaddamean? Wanna get their ket buzz on. It’s the shit, mate, trussme. Fuckin’ bangin’. Absolute piff. Wise investment, mate, I’m tellin’ ya. K –E –T. All the way from fuckin’ Compton.”

“I can do without, thanks. I got my whiskey.”

“Ah, well, never mind, never mind, that’s what I say! Will Corston, mate.” He offered me a hand, which I shook “Main man for ket in the area.”

“Pleasure. I’m Harry Richards. Private investigator. You know this band who’re playing later? The Piss Merchants?”

“Not on a personal basis, G, but I know someone who does.”

We walked towards another table, populated entirely with grotesque figures of punk decadence. Will introduced us.

“This is Sonny Fuckface, plays guitar for Gentile Spirit, the best Nazi Punk group on the Strip.”

“Pivotal figures in the musical hate movement” sniffed a balding, bespectacled guy rather pompously. I later found out he was a music journalist  by the name of Garden.

“Sonny, this guy’s Harry Richards. He...”

“I run a label.” I quickly intercut. Mr Fuckface took this as an opportunity to square up to me with real venom

“Oh yeah?” he said “You wanna sign us? Oi oi.”

“Listen up, Fuckface, I’m askin’ the questions here. You know a guy called Edgar Cunt?”

“Edgar Cunt? Sure I know Edgar Cunt.”

“When d’you last see him?”

“Why, you wanna sign him? We piss on his shit band.”

“I wanna sign anybody with that Punk Rock spirit. Just answer my questions.”

“Yeah, I spat on him only yesterday.”

“Where? You got the info, and I might have something for you.”

“He was getting in a Taxicabcar. Said he was heading for the docks.”

“The docks? What’d he be doing there?”

“Fuck do I know? You gonna sign us up?”

“Well, are you playing tonight?”

“What kinda fuckin’ Label Boss doesn’t know the line-up?”

“Ah...well...I’m only second in command. Before I make any decisions, I’d have to consult my superior, Mr Goldstein...”

He kicked my scrotum to the Himalayas and left me alone.

I’d managed to hobble back to my seat just in time to see the Piss Merchants take the stage. There she was. Ripped jeans, ripped t-shirt, several areas of ripped flesh, she played bass with the least groove I’d ever heard, and sang in a manner that sounded less like the deliverance of a melodic pattern than the erotic cries of a predatory jungle beast. I was in love. Transfixed with her, I didn’t avert my eyes from the centre of the stage even when the guitarist fashioned his machine-head into a shank and brutally stabbed a member of the audience in the front row, actually creating music with more melodic structure than the rest of their set. Sounded kind’a like Miles. I may’ve been in hell, my balls killed me, the whiskey sucked, but damn. That broad.  I heard a voice in my ear. At first I thought I was just imagining her post-coital whispers, but in an instant I realised two things; firstly, it was not in her nature to whisper. Secondly, I could smell the stale body odour of a late-teen male.

“Hey...you.”

“Hello?” I turned ‘round, irritated. It was your common-variety punk rocker

“I hear you’re a Dick?”

“Don’t call me that!”

“No, I mean, a Private Investigator.”

“Oh yeah, I am.”

“And you’re looking for Edgar Cunt?”

“Sure am.”

“I’ve think I might be able to help you.”

TO BE CONTINUED...