Gone...

Money was the thing. I’d run out of it, and Mr Henry never would. Well, not unless people stopped drinking beer.
Living with Henry and Clarissa, I felt a bit like that bloke who went to live with those rich people in Brideshead Revisited. I was amazed and as amused as he was, (only I thought of myself as being a bit more outgoing than the boring young coot played by Jeremy Irons).
Of course it wasn’t long before I was driving the Lotus, usually because Clarissa wanted to go somewhere and didn’t want the chore of parking near the wine bar in Central London where she had regular meetings with her “wine adviser”. This bloke fancied her and she fancied him. But it never went anywhere further than a wine bar. They’d both get so pissed that only the fantasy was real.
Meanwhile Donkey Boy was angling to get his equipment tangled up with Sophia Loren’s while Jack tried to look like this wasn’t going to bother him, Henry being his boss and all that. Rude Jude dispensed liposuction and free sexual advice in equal proportion to anyone who came near, Julie was increasingly making the application of her lipstick into a sexual art form worthy of a one-woman show at some fringe theatre and Dawn showed everyone just what it meant to clean in a dirty manner.
Every weekend there was a party, and sometimes in the week too, and all of these people would be there, plus many of Julie’s girlfriends, all of whom were stunningly beautiful but who also had the distinction that if you added all their ages together I was still old enough to be at least their father. One of Henry’s business acquaintances visiting from Texas drawlingly said, “Henry, old man, you’re living in The House of Babes”.
Those weekends were bonkers. Imagine all the free drink you want, free cigarettes, as much food as you could eat and loads of women, some of them young enough to be my daughters and all of them experimenting with sexual lipstick and wearing as few clothes as possible. If the devil had a house on earth, this was it. Debauchery didn’t even begin to describe it. Everyone there had just a couple of things on their minds and they weren’t what the weather would be like tomorrow or whether United was going to win the cup.  
Of course I started drinking far more than I’d ever drunk before and I took up smoking again, though this time instead of Embassy Regal which I’d smoked when I was 17 because they weren’t as cheap and nasty as Player’s No 6, (Regal were just cheap but a fine smoke nevertheless, if you’re looking for some guidance on which species of the weed to imbibe these would be, as they say in Australia, the go), I was now on Lucky Strikes because they tasted good and Henry got them for free from the brewery and I had no idea how much they cost.
Like just about everything else, the Lucky Strikes came each week on a big brewery truck.
So, there I was, no money, no obvious future, no place I could call my own, but living it up in The House of Babes, smoking for the first time in 12 years, drinking like I was the owner of a brewery, a new liver and a new pair of kidneys, and having a damn fine time just looking out for the truck every evening and flirting with girls.
As we drank we talked and as we ate we talked and laughed and said the most stupid things of course, and the more alcohol we drank the more stupid it all became. It was really funny at those events, or at least that’s what I thought, and the drink flowed and the cigarettes were smoked and the food was eaten.
Only, as even Emperor Nero must eventually have realised, there is only so much of this type of living you can take. I mean, every day I was waking up with a hangover and not just a nagging one either. The type that tells you your liver is going to seriously object any day soon and that perhaps one day you’re not going to wake up at all.
One night I ended up in bed with Kristy, who by then I was sure I’d actually seen in Topless Tenerife Tearaways, and I was giving her back a massage in the dark and I drunkenly asked her to roll over on to her back so I could get my drunken hands on those breasts of hers and there was a long silence and then she said, “I am on my back,” and before I could think I said, “So what happened to your breasts then?”, and she said, “you’ve been kneading them so fucking hard for the last half an hour I thought you were making bread. And you didn’t even know! Jesus H Christ!”
I had to do something. One winter’s morning after they’d all gone to work, I sat there in a cane chair on the patio, smoking a Lucky Strike, wrapped in my overcoat, collar up around my neck and wearing one of Henry’s fedoras (he had a collection of 44), watching the horses frolicking in the field, the iced grass crackling like newspaper under their hooves. I knew I had to get out of this place and stop smoking and stop drinking and stop living this false life and try and get some sense and proportion back into it all. And in one of my increasingly rare moments of lucidity and sobriety I remembered The General. And I smiled because suddenly I began to have the germ of an idea.