Abraham “Thunderclap” Jones was a
man who was used to doing – and getting – what he wanted, when he wanted. He was
a rake and philanderer, a seducer of women, and he regarded the entire world as
his hunting ground. So, when in the winter of 1922, he received an excited
telegram from his American drinking buddy Scott, advising him to return to
London without delay, he didn’t think twice. He had the wallahs pack his chests,
beat and fucked the maid, drove into the village to buy some powdered fukkummuppa
root from Mr Midnight the witchdoctor, and then sped his British racing green Bentley
Speed Six into Zanzibar, in the hope of finding a ship bound for England.
The telegram had read:
HEY BUDDY STOP
SERIOUSLY MAN YOU NEED TO COME BACK TO ENGLAND STOP
I KNOW YOU LIKE THOSE AFRICAN WOMEN BUT SHIT STOP
YOU NEED TO MEET THIS GIRL STOP
FRIEND OF ZELDA’S STOP
SHE’S A BURLESQUE DANCER IN LONDON STOP
I THINK SHE WOULD MAKE YOU A FABULOUS WIFE STOP
SHE’S GOT IT MAN STOP
SHE’S CALLED BUNNY STOP
CALL ME WHEN YOU GET HERE STOP
SCOTTY
The phrase “friend of Zelda’s” gave
him a brief moment’s pause – in his opinion Zelda was a mad and aggravating
bitch who should be in a lunatic asylum, and he couldn’t for the life of him
work out what his friend saw in her – but he trusted Scott’s judgement
otherwise, and if Scotty said he’d found a girl who looked like feasible
marriage material, he owed it to himself, to Scott, and to the world at large,
to check her out.
Abe was 23 years old, and – as he
had told Scotty one drunk evening, at a Benny Goodman gig in Paris the previous
summer - his mind had recently turned to such unsettling subjects as his
mortality, his future, his lineage and his legacy, and he thought it was high
time he got hitched, if only to father a handful of good healthy red-blooded
males to ensure the continuance of the family line. He had children, to be
sure; he was probably responsible for half of the little savages in the
village. They could hardly be considered legitimate heirs though, and if his
father knew he’d been rogering the natives – and he’d moved halfway across the
world precisely to prevent his father finding out about such things - he’d probably threaten to cut him out
of the inheritance, again.
Which would be a drag.
Not only that, but, much as he adored
the African girls with their musky aroma, their nosebones and spears and their
breasts like ripe coconuts, bare and brown and glistening in the Tanzanian sunshine,
he missed the “raa raa” totty that could be found around Knightsbridge and
Mayfair, and the panty-soaked, knee-trembling awe that was the inevitable
result of the appearance amongst such dim-witted upper-class debutantes of the dashing
and legendary philanderer and playboy, libertine and lady-killer that he
considered himself to be.
Such being the scenario, he sent
Scott the following return telegram:
KEEP HER HOT FOR ME BABY STOP
AM ON MY WAY STOP
GOT THIS MAD ROOT OFF THE WITCHDOCTOR STOP
YOU’LL LOVE IT STOP
DESTROYS ALL THOUGHT PROCESSES AND REVEALS THE UNDERLYING REALITY STOP
WE’RE ALL ONE THING MAN STOP
STOCK UP ON GIN, HOOKERS AND PERUVIAN MARCHING POWDER STOP
SEE YOU SOON STOP
THUNDERCLAP
Upon arriving at the harbour and
making his enquiries, however, he was informed by the harbour master that there
were no ships going that way, no sir, but that he was welcome to book his passage on
the next boat that did, if that was his pleasure. The next ship to England
would be leaving in three weeks.
“Three
weeks?” he thundered at the harbour master, indignant with disbelief; “What do you
mean three weeks? I haven’t got three weeks. I need to be going today. Now.
Right this instant.”
“I’m
sorry sir,” said the harbour master, with as much dignity as he could muster, “it
is impossible. Perhaps try sailing from one of the northern ports. There are
many more ships sailing from there. You will be bound to find one that suits
you. Perhaps you can find a Captain who will take you. There are many Captains
for hire in the bars around here.”
“Yes,
yes,” said Abe absent-mindedly to no-one in particular, having dismissed the
harbour master from his mind some time ago, “thank you so much.” And with that
he was gone.
In one of the seedier dockside
bars, he knocked back a half bottle of rum while considering his options. One
thing was certain, there was no way he was going to be waiting around in
Zanzibar for three weeks. When you got that urge to move, baby, you just had to
move. He had his travelling shoes on now, and his wandering head. And no way
was he getting on a train, with all the bodies and the heat and the flies and
the stench. He considered the pouch of powdered fukkummuppa in his pocket;
perhaps if he poured some into the rum it would help him think straight. On the
other hand, there was always the chance that it would stop him thinking at all,
that the world would melt away and when it reassembled itself he’d find that three
weeks had passed and he’d missed the boat anyway. I suppose I’d better try and
find a Captain for hire then, he thought to himself as he poured several grams
of mind altering root into his rum without noticing.
Abe’s father was the infamous
Jeremiah “Sledgehammer” Jones, who had originally gone to India in 1881, where
he was employed by Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff, the Governor of
Madras at that time, as Head of Native Intelligence. Sledgehammer’s reputation spread
like wildfire; he was a man that you would not want standing behind you in a
dark alley at night, nor, for that matter, in front of you in a street full of
policemen in broad daylight. In fact, Sledgehammer Jones was a man that you
would not want within a thousand miles of yourself or your loved ones, or to
know that you even existed; not if you had any sense. The eyes of his lackeys
peered from every shadowy corner, and he was feared for his ruthlessness, his
lack of mercy and the extreme violence he visited upon the hapless subjects of
his investigations. This reputation suited Sledgehammer down to the ground. For
him, India was a hunting ground in open season. He could do whatever he wanted
without fear of retribution, and did. He had a harem of beautiful Indian women,
all of whom had been abducted, taken as payment for “protection”, or “donated”
by their fathers and husbands in the hope of ending an unremitting campaign of
intimidation by his Native Intelligence goons. 
In spite of his profligate
extra-marital activities, his wife Isobel remained faithful and dedicated to
him, and bore him three children; Abe, his only son, who was born in 1899, and
his twin sisters Eunice and Erica, who came along a couple of years later. Izzy
became pregnant for a fourth time in the year 1904, but the baby was stillborn,
and Izzy died too, of complications.
Money was no object to Sledgehammer
who, as the Governor’s most trusted aide, advisor, enforcer and “problem solver”,
received a commensurately high salary, to which he added the profits gained from
his illicit entrepreneurial enterprises of kidnapping, blackmail, and
extortion. He was as rich as any man needed to be. Any more would have been
gratuitous and unbecoming. Nevertheless, he was called “Sledgehammer” for a
reason, and the reason was this: Jeremiah Jones, known to the natives of Madras
as “the Bad Man”, or “the White Devil”, believed that to accept the cards life
dealt you was to be a flaccid he-bitch of about as much use as a street
hooker’s slack and torn arsehole, and that it was incumbent upon any Englishman
created by God in His Holy and Perfect Image to be the shaper of his own destiny.
Therefore, in 1902, he consolidated upon and expanded his financial concerns by
setting up a private import and export company, dealing in “exotic luxuries”.
Importing vast quantities of high
grade opium from China, he flooded the entire Indian sub-continent with it,
creating millions of hopeless drug addicts at the drop of a hat, and giving
birth to a goose that laid more golden eggs with every passing year. To double
the productivity of his transports, he had his thugs round up Indian women and
children by the hundreds, shipping them to the darkest corners of civilisation,
to be sold into slavery or the sex trade, or as game to reserves that
specialised in “man-hunting”.
As the only legitimate son of the
most feared man in the Empire, the young Thunderclap Jones enjoyed the kind of privileges
and debaucheries normally the exclusive reserve of criminally deranged billionaires
and wayward heirs to the throne. He spent his formative years in India, where
he lived in a village about eight miles from town, in the family house his
father had built. It was of a type known locally as a semi-pukka, being a
combination of kachcha (mud and dung) and pukka (stone and clay) architecture,
and was a massive engorgement of white stone which gleamed in the tropical sun like
the omnipotent erection of Jehovah. A shining edifice that could be seen from
miles away in every direction; it was bigger than all of the other dwellings in
the village put together. It had a grass roof and bamboo verandahs on each floor
and every side, and an army of servants and wallahs that saw to young Abe’s needs
and satisfied his every whim.
He spent his days causing trouble and
fighting with the local street boys, exploring the boundaries of his mind with
the aid of countless psychotropic roots and herbs, and enlarging his education
with books that he found in the numerous small and dimly lit emporiums of
Madras. He was particularly fond of books on philosophy and spirituality,
subjects that, in India, known by many as the “Land of Light”, had been handed
down from teacher to student, generation after generation, for several thousand
years. His nights were filled with more earthly pursuits; the exploration of
his sexuality with any girl he could get hold of, which, to his delight, turned
out to be quite a few. He groped, molested, fucked, and sodomised his way
through untouchable girls from the slums, lower caste girls from the towns and
villages, and high caste prostitutes made wet between the legs by his youthful
savagery, fear of his father, and the shock of his monstrously oversized ego.
His weakness for brutal sexual
congress with any reasonably attractive and willing female – those qualities
being his preferences, not his requirements – grew. He wasn’t particularly
discriminating, and whether his partner was awake, conscious, or even alive
mattered little to him. His only requirement was a snug fit and – from those
lovers who still had a pulse – an enthusiasm for exploration and, better yet,
exploitation; preferably in public, and for large sums of cash. Wherever they
were and whatever they looked like, however young or old they might be; whatever
their colour, nationality, religious beliefs or various moral standards; these
things meant nothing to him. He was consumed, obsessed, possessed. He was powerless over women.
As each new sexual proclivity became
public knowledge, his reputation for iniquity grew into the urban legend of a
notorious debaucher and insatiate degrader of women, detestable and despicable,
it went without saying, but also quite charming and rather good looking. A fan
club of sorts grew up around him, a vast and secret female army of admirers,
groupies, fanatics and stalkers that monitored his every move and were known to
the newspapers as “Thunderclappers”. Rumours and nicknames abounded, and he was
known diversely and in no particular order as “Abe the Omnipotent”, “the Beast
of Britain”, “the Punisher”, “the Full English” (as in “I hope my husband gives
me the Full English tonight”) and, slightly more disturbingly, “Satan’s Sodomiser”
(meaning variously: “the sodomiser who was sent by Satan”, “the one who
sodomised Satan”, “the one who sodomised me in the alley last night in a
Satanic fashion” or “the one who sodomised me as if he were Satan, the Beast, the
Sodomiser of Sodomisers himself; so cruelly, thoroughly and unspeakably, that in
my delirium I became a worshipper of the diabolical and a dealer in depravity
and degradation; a convert to the church of the Evil One, and an enthusiastic Satanist,
with an unholy desire to sodomise others, and their mothers, whoever they are and
wherever they may be; brutally and eternally, with no mercy.”)
But it wasn’t until recently that
the perennial nom de guerre with
which he would forever be associated had come into existence, when it was used
as the title for a section on “the Life and Legend of Thunderclap Jones” in a
series of popular encyclopaedias published annually from 1919 onwards. The
series was called “Kings of the World” and listed inventors and their
inventions; men and the movements they had led; religious leaders, brilliant
criminals, paragons of virtue, agents of evil and the irretrievable souls that
had been lost to hideous plague or insanity, and telling the urban legends and
popular myths surrounding them. It was, in short, a celebration of the highest peaks
and lowest troughs of humanity, and of its gods and demons; influential people
of all kinds that had left an indelible mark upon humanity in some way, good or
bad, in any area whatsoever. Abe appeared in the book without being asked for
his permission, although he would have granted it gladly, as happy as he was
with his hard won reputation as “the most sexually sadistic Satanist in
recorded history”, and as “King of the World” of depraved and diabolically
inspired debauchment.
The article about him that appeared
in the 1919 first edition of “Kings of the World” was a fairly comprehensive
account of his history, peppered liberally with gratuitously violent, sexually
depraved and utterly fictitious myth, rumour, and lies. Some of the acts that
the authors of the encyclopaedia claimed he had committed were obviously
impossible outside of the most deviant and twisted imagination, even for a
dedicated “lady-boner” such as he. Just reading about some of the vile abuses
the book claimed he had visited upon himself and others was enough to turn the
stomach so violently that even the least sensitive reader was forced to race to
the outhouse when suddenly and without warning, projectile streams of shit and vomit
exploded from both ends simultaneously, as if the very guts of man could not
tolerate the thought - let alone the reality - of such acts of desecration upon
a body, alive or dead or human or otherwise. Such desecration was abhorrent to
the fundamental nature of humankind. 
When, years later, Abe finally got
around to reading the odious mash of lies contained in the book; lies that the
public at large had eagerly lapped up as the truth of who he was, earning him
an even more notorious reputation; he was impressed – not to mention repulsed
and sickened to his very core - by the
twisted imaginations, warped desires and masturbatory pipe dreams of the
authors, which shone through the words of their fantasies, where cowards’ confessions
of frustrated desire are often to be found, shining like wistful diamonds in
the tedious, everyday dirt of reality. He briefly considered suing them for
defamation of character, but discarded the idea for several reasons. Firstly,
he already had more money than he could ever know what to do with, so any
financial remuneration was going to make absolutely no difference to the
quality of his life. His quality of life was sure to suffer, however, if he bogged
himself down in a tedious and time consuming court case, when he had far more entertaining
things to be doing.
Secondly, he couldn’t help but feel
some kind of solidarity with them. They were sick men, that much was clear.
Anyone who had a mind like that had to be, and because of his own driving
compulsions, he had always identified and sympathised with those who found
themselves enslaved to a mental obsession that perverted the character.
In Abe’s experience, such an
obsession had the power to drive out any sane or reasonable thought that appeared
in the mind, with a preposterous idea totally at odds with common sense,
decency, and the sufferer’s own experience; which was almost without fail a tragic
catalogue of humiliations and sufferings, various in degrees of intensity or
the wreckage they had caused to a man’s life, but every one of them the
inevitable result of the same, single cause: that of believing an insane idea,
and acting upon it again and again, in spite of the fact that it was obvious to
everybody, even to the sufferer himself, that it was killing him, or at the
very least, turning him rapidly into a dribbling, delusional, semi-vegetable;
mostly harmless, but often exhibiting socially unacceptable behaviour; behaviour
of the sort that would qualify you instantly for a lifetime residency in your
local insane asylum or maximum security hospital for the criminally disturbed.
The only difference Abe could see between himself and those poor souls who were
institutionalised for life - due to the actions they performed while driven to insanity
by the constant demand for the things, people, substances or experiences which
were the desired objects of their respective obsessions; actions that were
often dangerous and harmful to others, frequently immoral, and even more
frequently illegal – was one of position, wealth and influence. Abe could get
away with anything, simply because of who he was; the incredibly wealthy son
and heir of the most universally feared and notoriously violent crime boss in recent
history. If his conduct was deemed too shocking, repulsive or in violation of
taboo, he had only to remove himself from the ensuing furore by going somewhere
else - anywhere else - in a world that – to Abe, at least - was nothing more or
less than open day in the Garden of Eden. He could buy away trouble as he went,
bribing officials to overlook his indiscretions, or blackmailing them so they kept
their mouths shut. If the worst came to the worst – which it sometimes did
- he could ensure their silent
complicity and powerless acquiescence by invoking the powerful reputation of
his father, and sending round a couple of his bullet-headed bullyboys to
threaten the very lives of those who dared to challenge him.
There was third, final and far more
compelling reason that he didn’t sue the authors and publishers of “Kings of
the World” for defamation, and it was this: in spite of the tawdry fabrications
about his life and deeds, presented as they were like badly written schlock
horror, without subtlety or grace, he was absolutely in love with the nom de guerre that the authors of the
book had given him. It would eventually be the name by which he was known
around the world; whispered in awestruck voices around the globe, from the
residences of Sloane Square to the Sydney Opera house; from the wattle huts of
darkest Africa to the slums of Brazil; from the leafy green boughs of the
English countryside to the Bowery in New York; from the brothels of Paris and
Amsterdam to the travelling freak shows of the southern United States; it was
his Title, his Holy Name, the nom de
guerre that not only defined him as a person, but that finally revealed to
him his God-given purpose in life. From that day onward he would proudly wear
the Title of his Holy Office that the authors of “Kings of the World” had instinctually
known was his alone; the Title that could only belong to a fallen angel; an
angel of divine retribution who held the release of death and the liberation of
rebirth in his hands, as they called out to the wretched and the poor in spirit
to seek the shelter of his all-encompassing black wings. From that day onward
he would be the Destroyer of Assholes.
Down on the waterfront, nothing had
changed but everything was different. Abe was sat outside on a barrel, taking
the occasional swallow from his rum bottle, which was empty, and enjoying
himself. He hadn’t found a Captain to hire, in fact he hadn’t done much of
anything at all, but gaze around in wonder at how beautiful the world was.
It was all so clear to him now, so
simple and obvious. There was nothing that needed to be done. Life was like an
ocean, an ocean of spontaneity, and all he had to do was allow the waves to
crash over him, and to accept whatever they brought with them. After all, what
was, was, and what would be, would be. He began to giggle to himself, and the
more he giggled the funnier everything became, until he was in a roaring fit of
hilarity, the tears running down his face.
It was the fukkummuppa root that
had done this.
The fukkummuppa root was a semi-mythical
and highly potent hallucinogenic that was said to exist in the jungle. Known to
the shamen and witchdoctors since time out of mind, it was a sacred and magical
root that could be used to traverse the worlds of the spirits or the dead, the
realms of the ancestors or the gods. There were fukkummuppa ceremonies of
cleansing, in which entire tribes or villages ingested the root which would
then wash away the scum and detritus that settled like dust on a man’s soul,
just from contact with the physical world. It was important to do this
regularly, because the thicker the dust on the soul, the more earthbound a man
became, and the harder it would be for him to move on after death. Such regular
rituals kept the soul shining bright, and closer to the gods. The medicine men
also used the root to bring about visions, and to drive out demons and evil
spirits.
In order to find the fukkummuppa
root, you had to know exactly where to look, how to look, and the propitious
time in which to do it, which happened to be in the darkest heart of the
jungle, out of the corner of your eye, three hours after midnight on your
birthday. And even then you’d probably come away empty handed, because it was
invisible. The only ones who could find the root were those who had already
ingested it; it was only to be seen inside a fukkummuppa trip.
And therein lay the mystical
quality of the sacred root. Fukkummuppa revealed things about the world of
which you’d always been ignorant. You saw things that you’d never seen. You understood
everything. It wasn’t a hallucination in the sense that you were seeing things
that weren’t real, it was the opposite. It revealed what was always there, but
had forever gone unnoticed.
Abe was seeing something that he
hadn’t seen before, at that very moment. As he sat looking out across the
endless Indian Ocean, he noticed something out upon the water, or maybe it was
just above the water, it was difficult to say. It was a shimmering, shining
sort of something, in the way of a mirage in the desert, or the water that
seems to appear on a hot road. At first he thought he saw it take the shape of
a big fish, or maybe it was an octopus. Then it seemed to appear in the shape
of a small ship, or a large Cuban cigar. The more he tried to focus on what he
was seeing, the less comprehensible it became. It was like trying to make sense
of a piano recital performed by a tone deaf imbecile with no arms in the middle
of a thunderstorm, or trying to catch the wind in your hands. It was
impossible. It made his brain hurt.
“Ain’t
she beautiful?” came a gruff voice from beside him.
“I’m
sorry, what?” he turned to see a beaming, ruddy face atop a long white beard, garnished
with a seaman’s cap.
“I
said ain’t she beautiful,” said the old boy with no small pride, his eyes a twinkle,
“the ship. My ship. That ship.”
“What
ship?”
“For
the love of God boy, are you daft? The ship you’ve been mooning over for the
last half hour. The one out on the water, hanging there like a mist.”
And
suddenly Abe understood.
“That’s
a ship.”
“Tha’s
right,” said old Sea Legs, “but not just any ship. What you see before you my
friend, is the greatest ocean going vessel ever built, the Psychonautilus.” He beamed again, as proud as punch.
“The
Psycho-what now?”
“The
Psycho-nautilus,” intoned the old boy
carefully, to be sure that the half-wit had understood. “You’ve heard of
Captain Nemo, right?”
“Um…”
“Well
Captain Nemo’s ship was called the Nautilus, and it was the greatest ship that
ever sailed the seven seas, y’see?”
“You
what?”
“Y’see?
Because Nemo was an explorer of the seas, see? Well now, I’m an explorer too,
but I explore a much wider ocean. I explore the ocean of existence and the limits
of the mind, and for that, you need a very different kind of ship. And that is
what you are looking at. I named her the Psychonautilus
because I thought it was an amusing play on words.” He spat on the ground, then
muttered: “I don’t know why I bothered. No-one’s ever understood the joke.”
By now it had dawned on Abe that by
some quirk of grace or synchronicity, the ship and Captain which he had gone
out looking to find, had found him. All that remained was to broach the subject
with old Captain Ahab here, and come to some sort of an agreement. And that
would be done far more easily with alcohol.
“Let
me buy you a drink, Captain,” he said, “and you can tell me more about your
magnificent ship. And allow me to introduce myself. Abraham “Thunderclap”
Jones, Destroyer of Assholes at your service.”
“Trout”,
beamed the seaman through his facial hair, giving him a hearty handshake, “Captain
Bill Trout.”
As
if it could have been anything else, thought Abe, as they headed back towards
the bar.
As Abe prepared to embark upon the
journey that would eventually take him to England, Bunny was in London working
the cabaret clubs, where she was earning a lot of money, and building a very
fine reputation for herself.
She was a burlesque dancer, a great burlesque dancer, with the
instinctual charms and talents that she had inherited from her mother. She had
a magnetism that was all but irresistible, and such a charismatic presence that
she was literally impossible to ignore. When Bunny stood in the same room as
you, you could feel it. She also had a vivid imagination and was endlessly
inventive, creating new personas for the stage, which she could become in the
blink of an eye, depending upon her mood or whim. With names to match her characters,
she became a theatrical chameleon; surprising and delighting audiences with her
spontaneity, wit, and mischievous sense of humour. One night she was Bunny
Fantastic, superstar of the stage; another night she was Bunny Black, an
insolent sulky faced bag of bolshiness, who danced in the most insolent and
“couldn’t care less” manner that anyone had ever seen. Another night would
bring out Bunny Burlesque, the rosy-cheeked, raunchy good-time girl of British
Vaudeville; and yet another would see the provocative strut of the one who
would become her most popular and infamous creation; Bunny Rotten, the filthy
little alley cat with the bad attitude; the street punk with the “give it a go
if you’re man enough” pout, who was rougher than a drug-addicted east-end
whore, and sexier than Louise Brooks and Clara Bow rolled into one. She was the
perfect alter-ego, because nobody could tell – herself included - where Bunny
Simpson finished and Bunny Rotten began.
It was the advent of Bunny Rotten
that catapulted her from the rank and file clubs that she’d been working night
in, night out, into the big time, at least as far as cabaret went. She became a
regular fixture at some of the most famous clubs of the day, the kind of clubs
that attracted wealthy, upper class socialites, such as the 'Coconut Grove',
the “Kit Cat Club”, and Bunny Rotten’s obvious spiritual home, the 'Bag of
Nails'.
It was in the Bag of Nails, while
performing as Bunny Rotten that she came to the attention of Scott and Zelda
Fitzgerald, the king and queen of the Jazz Age, who were instantly smitten by
her looks, her attitude, her performance, and the effect that she seemed to
have on everyone; an effect that felt like electric static in the air, or an
imminent lightning strike. Zelda was particularly enraptured; in Bunny Rotten
she saw what she believed to be the epitome of female liberation; the
quintessential spirit of the Lost Generation, wrapped up in a smouldering
little package of sex and sinfulness. She made it her business to grab Bunny as
soon as she left the stage, so they could ply her with drinks and introduce her
to the fast moving circles of the social elite that would be her very next
conquest.
No comments:
Post a Comment