Headline, June17, 2013

'''THE ARCHIMEDES PRINCIPLE'​''

HE'S A STRANGE looking chap, this Jamie Short, flat, black hair that clings to his bulldog face like spaghetti on the rim of a pan. We know each other from the club where most nights I work the door.

I am 18, I care only about girls, the cut of my dinner suit and the tips.

After a brief and disastrous stint in the City at a brokerage house, I am gainfully employed as the ''greeter'' at Tokyo Joe's, a hot nightclub in London's Mayfair. Jamie is a punter. He has little stubby child teeth with gaps between them, and although he grins a lot, inside he's all coiled up. You know the type. As a kid he's the quiet, tough, sad type, a loner even the bullies avoid.

He has family money, lots of it, from banking, which he spends carelessly. I have none, and when i have it I spend it frivolously. Jamie and I have an arrangement of sorts. His money; my charm, and the free use of his car. At the club, he slips me £ 20 and I let him in wearing his nasty navy round-neck sweater.

After work at the club, Jamie turns up at the Greek in Point. He sits quietly as the Club Manager and I eat steak Diane at 4am with gangsters, crooks and ladies of the night. I can't go on this way. 

Night after Night with the rest of the day in a blur of 4pm lunches. I try to get to grips with my life. I want to be an Actor! To hit the boards. i want to be famous. I want Caine, Burton and Connery. Most of all, I want to be more famous than my Dad.

All this revelation stuff happens fast. One minute I am heading up a sterling ladder to the club-greeter hall of fame, and the next I am asking Sheil and her pals to tidy me over until I set myself up in New York City. After all I tell her, she owes me. Go to New York, she says. Become a Star like you should be........and come back for me when you have made your fortune.

My fortune, she knows, is an Air India one-way Ticket and $300......$100 of which she lends me. Jamie too is touched and forthcoming:

''Listen old boy,'' says Jamie. ''if you need to stay somewhere in New York, you can have our apartment at 525 Park Avenue. Full Staff you know, everything you could want.''

''Jamie,'' I say, ''I couldn't accept such kindness.

''Nonsense,'' insists my benefactor, ''you just turn up. The staff, they know  you are coming.''

It's the clipped British upper-class way he says it that is reassuring. It's the voice of careless confidence, coupled with touch of a lisp, and the mumble of aristocracy.

''Thank God for Jamie,'' I am thinking as the black cab heads for the Heathrow.

It is raining at New York when I land at the Kennedy. Digging deep into my $300 wedge, I hail a Taxi. the traffic is lousy. I am tired and anxious. I have visited the city a few times, but now at night, and with all my worldly possessions in the trunk, I am jumpy.

But 525 Park Avenue is everything it should be. A testament to the great power and wealth of the New World. But it is not an apartment building. It is a Bank called Paine Webber........

In my hand is the scrawled up piece of paper with the address and telephone number. I head to a telephone booth and call. The number rings and rings and rings and rings. A thought hits me, ''Maybe its 252 Park Avenue and somehow I have written the number down incorrectly.''

I hop back into the taxi and up and down Park Avenue we go. I try every combination, but I know in my heart I have been BURNED. 

So, so, In Life not all associates will prove to be as trustworthy as man's best friend.

Hahaha!  So all this from the Grand Master of True Tales : Charles Finch.

With respectful dedication to all the Students of the world.

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless