JS Gives Captain Jack the Finger!
Here’s a little story for all you Johnny Depp fans.
I was walking around the 26th street flea market, just killing time,
waiting for the call from my brother, Johnny Depp to come through on
my little Nokia cell phone .
I loved that little cell phone. It was another late summer
Sunday afternoon in the mid-90’s and I was a big shot New York City
underground tattoo artist with a pocket full of cash and a fancy new
cell phone, waiting for a call from my big deal fucking movie star
brother.
A few years earlier I was a loser. Broke and unknown, living in a
little shack in a squalid favela in Brazil with no electricity or
running water, no phone, no money, no friends, circling the drain…
Now I was an infamous underground art dude living in New York
City with my own fucking cell phone, waiting for a call from another
infamous dude.
Wheeee!
Just like that.
Reincarnated again. What a life!
I loved that fucking phone cuz it represented something.
Friends. Family. Dreams. Success. Hope.
Juice.
Johnny had called me on it an hour earlier and told me that he
and Hunter Thompson were sitting up in Hunter’s room in some fancy
fucking hotel where they were both staying up in the 50’s or somewhere
way the fuck up there…doing press or doing lines or doing some
fucking legendary thing.
Hunter S. Fucking Thompson! He’d always been one of my big
time literary heroes, ever since I’d first gobbled up Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas with a handfull of good 1970’s LSD as a crazed
homeless teenager running the streets of Hollywood with other
wild-eyed Manson Family refugees.
1971. Me and My friend way back in the day…
Nice beret, Jono!, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.
Brother Johnny said he’d call me again as soon as they were
coming up for air. For me to come up there on my motorcycle and get
him or something… then we’d go somewhere downtown and do something,
like we always did whenever he came to town.
We were like a little gang back then in the 90’s… Me and
Johnny Depp and Jim Jarmusch and Iggy Pop.
We even called ourselves the “Death is Certain Club.”
Death is Certain Club, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.
We all wore the same skull ring and we all had the same fucking tattoo. A
skull and crossbones with the words, “death is certain” that I did on
us one night down in my little basement tattoo studio off the Bowery.
Back in the day when William Burroughs still lived on the Bowery. When
the Bowery was still the fucking Bowery. Before the thundering hordes
of Euro-trash culture-vultures and all the money boys swooped down to
lay claim to our turf…
Everybody but Iggy got the skull and crossbones carved in
their hide. The tattoo was actually his idea. Then he was the only one
who didn’t fucking get it the night I did them all.
deathiscertain, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.
He did write a song called “Death is Certain” though, and he
even put a big picture of his hand wearing our skull ring on an album
cover…
Maybe it was a guilty conscience. Maybe he did all that shit
to compensate for being a big fucking pussy and not just getting the
fucking tattoo like the rest of us. Whatever…
Iggy Pop is Iggy Pop, and he can do whatever the fuck he wants
to do and even die a tattoo-less old fart and he’ll still be the
coolest man who ever sucked breath…
We all lived in the same neighborhood. Downtown… Whenever we
were at home. We were all gypsies. And we all lived in hotel rooms a
lot, all over the world.
Everybody but Johnny. Johnny never lived downtown. Johnny
only lived in hotel rooms… ALL the time.
Johnny Depp was the king of the fucking gypsies in the Death
is Certain Club.
Me and Jim and Iggy always hung out together downtown, since
we all lived in the same hood. Johnny hung out with us a lot too.
Whenever he came to town.
JD hadn’t been round to visit New York City for a few months
now, so we were sure as shit way overdue for a reunion.
I think the last time he’d come around, we’d both been in a
big old barroom brawl involving hecklers and hells angels and cops and
high-risk adventures and drama.
The usual legendary high-risk hi-jinx we always seemed to fall
into together down in my neighborhood. Every fucking time he came to
visit.
Article from Cityrag involving Johnny Depp barfight
Now he was playing it safe or something.
Staying way the fuck uptown, way up there in the sanctified
stratosphere of the 50’s.
Maybe it was the 60’s… 70’s.
Whatever.
“Up there” somewhere…
Uptown.
It all gets to be a big blur up there in the high numbers for
guys like me and JJ and Iggy who rarely strayed from our sheltered
little septic bunkers way downtown on the Lower East Side - Or the
“East Village” as the blood-sucking Gentrification Mongers of the real
estate game who would soon divide, conquer and destroy our
long-cherished, dangerous old neighborhood were already heartlessly
dubbing it back then in the early 90’s.
Jarmusch, another card-carrying, notorious ‘downtown hipster’
once told me, “I get a nosebleed whenever I gotta go up above 14th
street.”
JJ tattoo, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.
That memorable phrase always came jumping into my head like an
acid-dancing little prankster’s monkey at times like that.
So there I was, nursing a psychic nosebleed, wandering around
the flea market up there in the 20’s, like a dark helmeted deep sea
diver taking time to decompress in safe, familiar waters to keep from
moving up too fast and getting a deadly case of the fucking bends or
something.
The good old 26th street flea market. A funky retrograde nostalgic
netherworld where, back in the day, guys like us used to rub elbows
with guys like Andy Warhol and other big dogs of the day… back in
the fucking day when we were all shiny-eyed junkie art pups and New
York was still the dirty, dangerous outlaw center of the universe. The
coolest cool place on earth to exist.
JJ JS and JD, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.
That flea market was the one regular Sunday afternoon
exception to the “above 14th street” rule for generations of guys like
me and Jarmusch and Joe Coleman and Iggy Pop and Dee Dee Ramone and
Debbie Harry and Chris Stein and Howie Pyro and Steve Bonge, the crazy
Hells Angel artist… And we were all part of one big fucking
extended dysfunctional family of artists and rockers and bikers and
junkies and beautiful thieves and thugs and hipsters… a dying race
of hungry, jaded, oversexed drunken bleary-eyed downtown pirates and
phantoms and cockeyed junkyard angels…
So of course that was the natural stopover on that particular
Sunday afternoon. Just the right place to tread around in familiar
waters to get my bearings before the inevitable culture shock of
walking into some 800-dollar-a-minute glittering marble Uptown hotel
to meet up with my super successful younger movie star brother who
didn’t much give a fuck where he was staying anyway, as long as “they”
were paying, just cause he’s a cool old gypsy soul like that…
I was walking around the flea market in my usual Sunday
afternoon stupor, not quite in buying mode though, since I actually
had a half-ass plan for the rest of that day and even a destination. A
rendezvous that would soon take me still further from my downtown home
on the old Triumph Bonneville 650… just as soon as JD called.
So I’m wandering down aisles of crooked crazy piles of odd,
mystical stuff, just killing time there looking, feeling, stopping to
fondle, weigh, touch, smell, before moving on. Cruising along like a
lazy grey tiger shark on the prowl for nothing, anything, whatever….
Passing lazy Sunday New York summertime in that holy vortex of
shadows, vague recollections, remnants of the past…
Rubbing elbows with ghosts, memories, whatever…
A box of old black and white police mug shots catches my eye,
and I stop to look… and suddenly I’m staring into the haunting dark
psychopathic eyes of long-dead murderers and pickpockets and Bowery
flim-flam specialists and drunks and snake-eyed coolie opium smokers,
standing there like an art-deco-faced dummy, surrounded by that whole
enormous crazy vibrating wonderland of everything old and haunted and
magical and useless and special and precious and unknown and abstract
and absurd that ever existed in all those long-forgotten other times
and other places…
Times and places I would often dream of at night, crying out
in my sleep without any particular reason…
A familiar voice snaps me out of my spell and I look up.
“JS! What’s up, buddy?”
It’s just my friend, Billy.
“Biker billy.” 6′4″ and 275 pounds of heavily tattooed
muscle-bound hustle.
Biker Billy. A sometimes Hells Angel hangaround who haunts the
flea market like some diamond Rolex-wearing shaggy grinning lunatic
pirate scourge, buying low, selling high, prowling for victims, on the
make, on the take…
Biker Billy.
I’ve known Billy since before he was an FXR-riding sidewalk
commando. Since when he was still just a wet-nosed puppy, a schoolboy,
a button-down uptown preppy who went nuts on liquor and drugs on the
downtown scene and suddenly remerged one day looking like some
hung-over shabby tattooed Kossak, mercilessly reinventing himself as a
cheap second-generation knockoff of guys like me.
He used to even like to blame ME for his questionable
transformation, referring to me as his fucking role model, mentor,
hero… shit like that.
Until I told him to knock it off.
He knocked it off.
For some reason, Billy always sorta… feared me, I guess.
Despite the fact that he was a lot bigger and stronger and younger,
and probably coulda broke me in half without breaking a sweat.
Maybe it was the guilty ghosts of his secret preppy past
haunting his borrowed outlaw conscience.
Whatever…
There seems to be a very fine line between fear and love and
respect and imitation sometimes.
I’m slowly trying to piece that one together. Someday ill get
it, maybe… Wisdom comes with living, they say. And God knows, I’m
living….
I didn’t know it at the time, but, looking back now, I think I
used to have that kind of effect on many people back in the dirty old
day… including my super famous brother, Johnny Depp. Even despite
his being a true badass in his very own right….
And while he has never admitted it to me, or anybody else that
I know of, including himself, just like Biker Billy, and a lot of
others over the years, I think JD always sorta liked to… study me
for some reason. People say David Bowie did that with Iggy.
I dunno…
We’d been living together in Paris one summer, staying in this
spooky old rented house full of rusty antique nautical knick-knacks up
on a hill in Montmartre with our respective bitches while he was
making some shitty, disappointing flick with Roman Polanski.
He’d come home after a day on the set with the fly-fucking
little pedophile Polanski and we’d sit around the kitchen table
getting shit-faced on French wine and tattooing each other.
Paris
JD tattooing JS, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.
Then one day, months later I’m sitting in a dark movie theater
back in New York, and I’m watching that movie, watching JD playing
this sleazy sort of lowlife character… and suddenly it hits me.
That’s ME!
I looked over at my girlfriend, Amy, just as she poked me in
the ribs and gave me that look that told me that she knew it too.
Spooky.
It’s an eerie, indescribable feeling, suddenly seeing yourself
up there on a movie screen, being… incorporated.
Incorporated. That is the only word that comes to mind here.
Incorporated. Soul-snatched. Or body-snatched. Whatever. By somebody
you know so well, but who isn’t YOU… and sorta IS you at the same
fucking time… at least for that odd little abstract impressionist
celluloid moment.
Weird.
And while I’m on the subject I may as well mention that I saw
a nice little chunk of my soul for the role of Captain Jack, the
fucking pirate. I don’t think he even knew how much of that role he
got from me at the time he was ‘in it’, since he always told the press
that captain Jack character was some sort of a hybrid of Keith
Richards and Pepé Le Pew…
Isn’t that what actors do? And writers too, for that matter.
We’re all just a gang of very good, highly entertaining
soul-snatchers.
I could be lying. For what it’s worth….
So sue me. Now you know my name. Look up the number…
The fact is that, for whatever reasons, Johnny Depp’s personal
nickname for me for over a decade before that captain Jack character
even existed as a drop of sweat under some writer’s nutsack was…
“Capitan Jack the pirate!”.
I don’t know where the fuck that nickname came from…
But I guess it means I WAS the original Captain Jack the
pirate. Before Disneyland and their thundering reptilian hordes got
into the picture…
So I’m just setting the record straight here now for all the
boys and girls.
Just for shits and giggles.
After all, if you don’t toot yer own horn, who will?
And let’s face it. When it comes to the curses of fame and
notoriety, there are also other factors involved.
Like cash and prizes.
And… Dramatic drum roll…
Power.
Juice.
What a concept…
JD JS private jet, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.
A lot of other people, mostly mutual friends of ours, have
pointed out uncanny similarities between other characters portrayed by
JD and my person…
I didn’t usually notice.
Not that I mind.
I’m cool with that.
It’s all just a little… Wierd.
I think it’s gotta be have been completely unconscious on his part.
Or not. Who knows?
Maybe my famous brother Johnny was just trying to protect me
from all the terrible curses of such high levels of notoriety and
fame.
God knows that shit is a double edged sword that cuts most
well-known folks in half eventually.
My own famous, infamous father, Artie Shaw himself had warned
me all about that deadly trap, way back when I first started gaining
notoriety as a ‘celebrity tattooist’, the first ever scab-vendor to
appear twice on the David Letterman show, way back in the day before
my sweet little homegirl, Kat Von D was even born.
Maybe Johnny Depp was just watching my back.
Or not…
Or… Hey, check this shit out…
Maybe… Dramatic drum roll… Maybe it’s all part of some
weird reptilian plot…
This is the part where most people reading this kinda shit go,
“this dude’s fucking nuts…”
Don’t worry, kiddies, I already know that.
Its cool..
For a writer, it’s what’s known as “poetic license” or some shit…
Whatever…
I don’t dispute the fact that I’m completely nuts.
I do believe that’s what makes guys like me just a little more
interesting and a little less nuts than most other people though.
Because, whether they like to dwell on it or not, here’s the truth:
EVERYBODY is insane.
It’s what’s euphemistically known around town as “the human condition”.
And, like it or not, its just an indisputable scientific fact
these days that there are many different levels and dimensions of
‘reality’ that neatly transcend what most of us little monkeys call
“reality.”
Trust me.
Anyway, past life, this life, whatever… Seeing yourself up
on a movie screen in some other dude’s body is a spooky and
indescribable experience, believe me.
Spooky.
Like I said, indescribable.
But being a writer, I have given it my best shot to try and
describe anyway.
And that’s why, just like Biker Billy and Johnny Depp and
anybody else worth a shit in this world - copycats one and all, myself
included - I too decided to reinvent myself once again.
As a writer.
And here I am. Writing this shit. Let the chips fall wherever they may.
And I’d much much rather be an anonymous starving writer living under
a tree full of monkeys shitting down my neck here in Brazil any old
day than ever go back to being some fucking world famous tattoo artist
or even a famous movie star…
For whatever reasons, I’ve had a long and surreal, interesting
existence, spanning many continents and movie star friends and
beautiful girls and dangerous criminals and visionary artists and wild
adventures.
And I’ve been fortunate enough to have lived all these many
extraordinary lives and reincarnations in just this one body in one
fucking lifetime, forget about all the others…
As my famously neurotic father once counseled me, “one life at a time”.
Wise advice.
And as I slowly found myself approaching the big half a
c-note, I began feeling more and more of a burning need to try and
write about it all.
Since I put down the liquor and drugs at the age of 48 and
moved back here to a quieter life in Brazil where I belong, that’s
just what I’ve been doing…
Mostly.
When I’m not too busy living it…
I was actually in the middle of writing a long, drawn-out
memoir called “Scabvendor - Confessions of a Tattoo Artist,” a
detailed accounting of as many of my lives as I could remember, when
an amazing, beautiful and paranormal muse, who shall remain anonymous
for the moment, came along and turned my life into a raging fucking
three-ring circus, leaving me no choice for survival but to
temporarily abandon my memoir. And, under the blazing guns of love and
obsession, I was compelled to write what would end up becoming my
first published novel, “Narcisa - Our Lady Of Ashes.”
Any way you slice it though, I have somehow redefined myself
through the act of writing.
I am no longer Jonathan Shaw, the notorious tattoo artist.
That guy is dead, and good fucking riddance.
I’m quite sure there are many of those who would rejoice his demise.
That guy was a real asshole - albeit a colorful one.
Don’t bother looking for him if ya got beef.
Today he’s gone.
Today Jonathan Shaw has died and reincarnated as a full-time writer.
I may not be a great writer… But I am a writer today.
It’s what I do.
And I love it better than anything else I’ve ever done. And
that’s saying something, since I’ve done a whole lot of shit.
Today I think being a writer is just the cat’s fucking asshole!
Even better than being a famous tattoo artist who tattoos
movie stars… even better than being a famous movie star who plays a
tattooist. At least for me…
Because as a writer I can comfortably kick back like a sort
of immortal lord of creation, a fucking badass shit-kicking little
god, as I glide effortlessly around through time and space.
Just like the Silver Surfer… like fucking Spiderman, baby!
And, all that having been said, now I can move on with my little story.
Just like that. See what I mean?
Back to the flea market, waiting for Johnny Depp to call.
Back to Biker Billy.
Wheeee!
Just like that.
So Biker Billy looms and lurks and hovers over me like a
vulture floating around my sun-baked flea market head till he’s
finally got my full attention.
I sneer at him, just to keep him in line, as he tells me he’s
got something I’ve just fucking gotta see.
Still, I continue blowing him off, since, like I said before,
I know Biker Billy for a long fucking time. And Biker Billy’s ALWAYS
got something you just gotta see.
That’s his hustle. He’s pretty good at it too. But I blow him
off anyway. If nothing else, it’ll help me get his price down - just
on the off chance that Biker Billy is really holding the goods.
Sometimes he is.
Biker Billy and I have actually done much business over the years…
One memorable transaction involved a perfectly preserved human head.
A man’s head, sitting in a jar of formaldehyde, dead eyes
staring off into nowhere like waterlogged white grapes… eyebrows,
mustache and all. A strange and haunting sort of Dr.
Frankenstein-style antique medical specimen or something. A totally
gruesome thing.
Only god knows where Biker Billy gets stuff like that.
Don’t even ask…
There’s probably another little story there in its own right.
But I’ll just save that one for another time.
Or not…
Suffice it to say that the decapitated human head in a jar
ended up in Joe Coleman’s notorious odditorium collection of weirdo
morbid vintage exotica from around the world.
Joe Coleman in his Odditorium
Joe Coleman’s Odditorium, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.
And I ended up with a very nice and quite valuable little Joe
Coleman painting in trade. The painting hung for years on my wall at
the old Bowery basement underground tattoo shop where I did most of
Johnny Depp’s famous movie star tattoos over the years.
That’s another cool thing about being a writer, by the way.
You can jump around all over the fucking place like a flea on a frying
pan and drop names like they were going dry.
Like Mark Twain said, “it’s all grist for the mill” for a writer.
Wheeee…
So all that by way of saying that Biker Billy sometimes really
did come through, not that I’d ever give him the satisfaction of
letting him know it and raising his hustle on me. I hope he doesn’t
ever fucking read this…
Finally, after much sneering and pestering back and forth, the
two of us shifting around on the flea market asphalt like a couple of
angry crabs in the desert sand, finally I gave Biker Billy a shot at
the big time.
“Alright, hot shot, let’s see watcha got,” I sneered.
He reached in the inside pocket of his leather jacket, looking
around like a criminal, probably for dramatic effect.
“Cut the shit, kid,” I sneered to counter his confidence and
disguise my own growing curiosity. All part of the ritual, the hustle,
the game.
Then, without further ado, Biker Billy produced a dusty
looking zip-loc bag and handed it to me proudly.
“What the fuck is this?” I sneered.
It looked like an old bag of dried up dogshit.
“Check it out, dude,” he smirked. I knew that smirk.
The same smirk that was plastered on my memory banks like
puerto Rican graffiti on a jailhouse wall.
The same fucking smirk he was wearing that day when he sat
down at my desk at the tattoo shop a year earlier, just before he
unveiled that gruesome pickled puss in the jar for me.
I cautiously opened the bag of dried up dogshit and rolled a
turd-like item out onto the palm of my hand.
I looked at it.
Fuck.
I was holding a petrified human finger.
Yep.
Definitely.
A thumb.
With a perfectly manicured fingernail.
Shit.
There were four more fingers in the plastic bag.
Biker Billy had robbed a fucking grave or something… Fucking
tattooed freak…
“Where did this come from, man?” I asked casually, as though
it was just a bag of dried prunes he was offering me, trying not to
sound too impressed.
“They’re souvenirs some guy brought back from ‘Nam, I think,” he said.
“You THINK!?”
“Well, the guy I got em from told me…”
“Some guy told you…” I sneered, already depreciating the
goods, hopefully driving the eventual price down.
Biker Billy shrugged, looking around, losing ground.
“How do ya know they ain’t from fucking Brooklyn, man? This
shit could be nothing but trouble,” I said, shaking the bag like a
short count of dope. “Talk about a fuckin’ trick bag…”
“Ill give em to ya cheap, man,” he whispered desperately.
I rolled my eyes.
“I bet you could get another painting from Coleman for em…”
I just flashed him a hard look for taking a cheap shot like
that. He should know better.
He backed down.
“Well, maybe a sketch…” he stammered.
“Whatever, dude,” I sneered, holding the bag away from me as
if it stunk.
“How much you want for this shit anyway?”
“For you, man… Fifty bucks.”
“Fifty bucks?!? For THIS!? You gotta be fuckin’ kidding!” I
sneered, handing him the bag.
I knew Billy didn’t pay more than twenty, so I figured I’d
just try and jew him down to thirty and let him make a ten spot for
his trouble.
Who else was he gonna sell a bag of somebody’s severed,
dried-up fingers to around there? .
“This shit ain’t for me man,” I said, handing him his bag
back, lowering the boom on his ass..
“Gimme fourty,” he said suddenly, refusing to take the bag.
“Uhh uhhn” I said, still handing him the disgusting bag of dog turds.
Body language is everything at times like that.
He looked at me like a puppy in the rain.
This was the moment of truth.
“I’ll give ya thirty… and ya better take it fast, Billy,
before I change my fuckin’ mind.”
“Thirty five,” he tried.
I had him.
“No way! I don’t WANT this shit, Billy!”
“Ok ok. Gimme the thirty,” he said, biting the dust as I
quickly stuffed the bag of dubious digits in my pocket, closing the
deal just as my beloved old Nokia started ringing.
I handed him a twenty and a ten and walked away fast, leaving
him standing him there talking to himself.
I was halfway across the lot when I answered the cell on the third ring.
“Js” I said.
“What’s up, fucker,” that ultra famous voice crackled through
the airwaves.
“Nothin’ to it, man. What’s up witchoo, big time?”
“Just finishing up here. You comin’ up? Hunter wants to meet you.”
“That makes two of us, brother. How soon?”
“Whenever you get here. We’ll dangle with Hunter for a
minute, then go down your way. You motorized?”
“Got a spare helmet if ya don’t mind sittin’ bitch for a
minute. See ya in fifteen.” I said and hung up, putting the Nokia in
my pocket with my bag full of fingers as I got on the old Triumph and
gave it a kick…
I’d forgotten all about my bizarre little purchase by the time
I pulled the bike up on the sidewalk in front of the plush hotel.
A dour-faced white haired porter in a red monkey-grinder’s
suit approached purposefully with a look of utter disdain as I got off
the dirty black wasp of oil-leaking motorized antiquity, obviously
about to shoo me off like an oversized shit-fly.
“I’m here to see my brother, Johnny Depp,” I said casually, as
I planted a greasy black motorcycle boot onto their fancy-pants red
carpet.
That took the wind out of monkey suit fast, sending him into
ass-kiss mode so quick I thought he’d pop a gold button onto the red
fucking carpet.
“Johhny Depp…” He mumbled. “Oh, yes, of course! Yes sir,
just go to right up to the desk and they’ll announce you… Ill keep
an eye on your… Motorcycle for you, sir…”
Instant attitude change, right before my eyes.
Like magic. Presto-chango…
From filthy undesirable outlaw biker scum of the earth to Sir
this and Sir fucking that. Red fucking carpet. Watch your bike. Piss
on fucking ice…
Yeh, baby, that’s juice!
Juice.
I glided like Fred Astaire up that red fucking carpet and
swaggered right up to the front desk.
“May I help you, sir?” A pleasant young front desk jockey in a
spotless black suit said in an ear-pleasing British accent. I
especially dug the ’sir’ thing. Again.
Juice, baby.
“Uhh, Johnny Depp’s room?” I said.
“Oh, of course,” he said, looking relieved, as if I’d suddenly
solved a puzzling riddle for him.
“I’ll ring you up just now,” he said pleasantly. “And your name, sir?”
“Uhh… JS”
“JS. Yes sir,” he said as he lifted the phone and called the room.
Juice. Gimme the juice, baby.
After a minute, the handsome young man in the spotless black
suit frowned, ever so pleasantly.
“I’m so sorry, sir,” he shrugged ever so pleasantly, ever so helplessly.
I looked around uncomfortably.
“They don’t appear to be answering in that room. Would you
care to have a seat for a moment?”
Have a fucking seat?
“Can’t I just go up?” I said. “He’s expecting me. I just spoke
to him a few minutes ago…”
“I’m sorry, sir. All visitors must be announced. I’m sure it
won’t be a minute…” He assured me.
Then I remembered.
They were in Hunter’s room. That’s what my boy had said.
I told the desk guy to try Hunter Thompson’s room and he did.
After a minute, the same frown, same story. Same shrug. Shit…
Same pleasant invitation to have a seat and wait.
Wait. Shit…
I staggered over to a plush white sofa and plopped my greasy
biker ass down in defeat.
Hurry up and fucking wait.
So I sat there and waited.
And I waited. And waited.
And waited…
Every once in a while I wandered over to the front desk and
looked at the pleasant handsome young man in the spotless black suit.
And he looked up from whatever he was doing.
He tried the room again.
Same frown. Same helpless shrug. Same fucking story.
I went back to my post on the sofa, watching the elevator, waiting…
Half an hour later I was sick of fucking waiting.
I got up and started pacing around the lobby.
I watched the elevator, looking at my fancy stainless and gold
Rolex, watching, waiting, pacing.
What if I just made a run for the elevator and went up
Fuck. I didn’t even know the room number…
I looked over at the pleasant young man behind the desk. He
managed to smile reassuringly and shrug helplessly at the same fucking
time.
He was good.
British. A born diplomat. Probably gay. Aren’t all Brits gay?
But for all the pleasant smiles and helpless diplomatic
shrugging, he wasn’t gonna give me that fucking room number. No
fucking way. Hotel policy…
I shrugged back and tried to smile, squeezing out something
that probably looked more like an agonized gold-toothed rigor mortis
grimace
I paced around some more and waited.
I looked at my watch.
Forty five minutes.
Fuck this.
I was done waiting.
I walked back up to the front desk and asked the pleasant
young man for an envelope and a piece of stationary. He gladly
obliged.
I had my own pen. Silver-plated Mont Blanc.
Paid cash for it at the Duty Free in the Amsterdam Airport
after a pretty successful European work tour as a world famous, movie
star-marking, nigger rich tattoo artist.
Another hot shot success symbol. To go with my fancy fucking
stainless and gold Rolex.
Big fucking deal.
Just another big fucking loser, a greasy old nobody waiting in
a fucking fancy ass hotel lobby for some big shot movie star who
didn’t give a shit.
Self-pity is a terrible, soul corroding malady.
I was drowning in it, going down fast…
And I was pissed.
Back in the day it didn’t really take too much to piss me off.
I was already pissed, waiting for any little trigger… I just
came that way.
I’ve gotten a little better over the years, I’m glad to say… A day at
a time, I’ve even learned a bit of patience.
It comes in handy these days, believe me.
Back in the day though, I was mostly restless, irritable and
discontent. Most of the time… And at that particular moment I was
straight up pissed.
Pissed off and vindictive…
I sat back down on the sofa and laid out the crisp, off-white
sheet of fancy hotel stationary on the table in front of me.
I looked at my watch. Fifty-three minutes. Fair enough…
I got out my fancy silver plated Mont Blanc and I wrote.
HERE’S A LITTLE SOUVENIR FROM THE LAST ASSHOLE WHO LEFT ME
WAITING FOR AN HOUR IN A FUCKING HOTEL LOBBY.
HAVE A NICE DAY.
JS
I looked around the lobby…
Nothing.
Nobody.
I reached in my pocket and took out the dusty ziplock bag.
I lowered it discreetly between my knees and opened it. I
looked around guiltily, feeling a bit like a drug dealer doing some
dirty deal.
Nobody around.
Nothing.
Fuck it.
I reached in the plastic bag and extracted a good looking
finger with a good looking fingernail on it.
Index, I think.
That would do the trick.
Then I remembered there was Hunter up there too.
A writer of his status was certainly worthy of a finger of his very own.
I popped out another one.
I quickly rolled the two dried up digits of questionable
origin up in my hastily scrawled note like a burrito.
I dropped it into the envelope… Done.
I licked the envelope somewhat distastefully, wondering
vaguely about possible diseases, sealing it finally and irrevocably
shut.
Done.
I stood up and looked at my watch.
Over an hour now.
I looked around the lobby… Nothing.
Nobody.
I looked at the elevator.
Nothing.
Fuck it.
I sauntered over to the pleasantly smiling, helplessly
shrugging young British diplomat at the front desk.
He smiled back pleasantly.
No turning back now.
“Something’s come up. I gotta go,” I said.
He nodded and smiled sympathetically.
“Would you please make sure this envelope gets delivered to
Johnny Depp personally? Its very important.”
“Of course I will,” the pleasant young hotel man smiled
pleasantly, reassuringly, taking the grim little package from my
sweaty hand.
The deed was done.
No turning back.
I thanked him and walked out of the hotel.
I got back on my greasy old rattletrap motorcycle and rode the
fuck out of there.
I turned onto 5th avenue and didn’t stop until I was back
downtown, south of 14th street, down on the dirty old Lower East Side.
Back where I belonged.
I woulda gladly given a thousand bucks to be a fly on the wall
of that fucking hotel room when they opened that envelope!
Today, in my new incarnation as a writer I don’t even need to
kick down all that change. Or have to worry about shape-shifting
techniques either.
Fuck all that shit.
Today I got it all right here at my busy little fingertips.
Sitting with my trusty Blackberry up on my cozy loft bed here in Rio
de Janeiro, looking down at my beautiful, paranormal crackhead muse
sleeping on the sofa down below, peaceful as a fallen angel while a
gentle sea breeze glides in my open window.
Ahhh! The good life.
Here’s Johnny Depp’s full account of the fateful moment,
faithfully reconstructed from my own memories of the many many times
I’ve heard him tell the story over the last ten years.
Wheeee…
JD’s tat, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.
It goes something like this:
“Me and Hunter were sitting around this big table up in his
suite, telling stories and drinking absinthe and… Ingesting things.
We’d been sitting at that table for quite a while. Days maybe…
Hunter always had a lot of stories and you just sorta lost track of
time around him. Especially when you’d been ingesting things with
him…
The table was just littered with all sorts of stuff. Weird
stuff. Hunter’s stuff. We’d been sitting there for a long long time,
ingesting some of Hunter’s stuff… It was all pretty surreal.
There was a knock at the door. Hunter looked around and said,
‘Did you order from room service, coronel?”
He always called me coronel.
Anyway, I told him it was probably just my friend, JS.
He said, ‘Well you better go and find out. I’ll just stay here
and keep an eye on things, coronel. Don’t worry.’
So then I went to the door and the bellboy handed me this sort
of bulky envelope.
He didn’t know where it came from.
I don’t know if I even asked…
So I went back over to the big table and looked at the
envelope and Hunter said, ‘what’s that you’ve got there?’ And I told
him I didn’t know.
He looked at it and told me,
‘You better open it then,’ and I did.
There was something in it, wrapped up in a note. From JS.
These two brown clumps of… Stuff fell out onto the table.
I didn’t know what it was.
Hunter picked one up and said, ‘looks like hash. Let’s try it
out. I’ve got a pipe here somewhere…’
Then suddenly he goes, ‘uuuhhgghhh!!!’ And drops the thing on
the table…
He was pretty startled… It’d been another very weird day for us.”
Here’s what Hunter had to say:
Hunter’s Note, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.
By the way, not that I give a flying fuck, or think for a minute that any shit-for-brains, humor-challenged “pc” types would ever have the prerequisite class to read my demented musings….
But, just in case…
Let me go on record here as saying I’m not a racist, and the term ‘nigger rich’ and the statement ‘aren’t all brits gay?’ Were included in this piece as nothing more than a totally deliberate fart in the face of the “politically correct,” a scum-sucking scourge of bottom-feeding albino lizards on the English language.
Just on the off chance that any such humor-impaired, skanky little weenies might be among us here today.
If so, breathe deep!
And… Enjoy!
Have a nice day.
Love, JS
