Mr. Henry cringed and whimpered. Then he reached out to accept the Card, the thing that would set him free ... The Judge was still grasping around in the lining of his raincoat. “What the fuck?” he muttered. “This thing has too many pockets! I can feel it, but I can’t find the slit!”
Mr. Henry seemed to believe him, and so did I, for a minute ... Why not? He was a Judge with a platinum credit card—a very high roller. You don’t find many Judges, these days, who can handle a full case-load in the morning and run wild like a goat in the afternoon. That is a very hard dollar, and very few can handle it ... but the Judge was a Special Case.
Suddenly he screamed and fell sideways, ripping and clawing at the lining of his raincoat. “Oh, Jesus!” he wailed. “I’ve lost my wallet! It’s gone. I left it out there in the Limo, when we hit the fucking sheep.”
“So what?” I said. “We don’t need it for this. I have many plastic cards.”
He smiled and seemed to relax. “How many?” he said. “We might need more than one.”
I woke up in the bathtub—who knows how much later—to the sound of the hookers shrieking next door. The New York Times had fallen in and blackened the water. For many hours I tossed and turned like a crack baby in a cold hallway. I heard thumping rhythm & blues—serious rock & roll, and I knew that something wild was going on in the Judge’s suites. The smell of amyl nitrite came from under the door. It was no use. It was impossible to sleep through this orgy of ugliness. I was getting worried. I was already a marginally legal person, and now I was stuck with some crazy Judge who had my credit card and owed me $23,000.
I had some whiskey in the car, so I went out into the rain to get some ice. I had to get out. As I walked past the other rooms, I looked in people’s windows and feverishly tried to figure out how to get my credit card back. Then from behind me I heard the sound of a tow-truck winch. The Judge’s white Cadillac was being dragged to the ground. The Judge was whooping it up with the tow-truck driver, slapping him on the back.
“What the hell? It was only property damage,” he laughed.
“Hey, Judge,” I called out. “I never got my card back.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s in my room—come on.”
I was right behind him when he opened the door to his room, and I caught a glimpse of a naked woman dancing. As soon as the door opened, the woman lunged for the Judge’s throat. She pushed him back outside and slammed the door in his face.
“Forget that credit card—we’ll get some cash,” the Judge said. “Let’s go down to the Commercial Hotel. My friends are there, and they have plenty of money.”
We stopped for a six-pack on the way. The Judge went into a sleazy liquor store that turned out to be a front for kinky marital aids. I offered him money for the beer, but he grabbed my whole wallet.
Ten minutes later, the Judge came out with $400 worth of booze and a bagful of triple-X-rated movies. “My buddies will like this stuff,” he said. “And don’t worry about the money, I told you I’m good for it. These guys carry serious cash.”
The marquee above the front door of the Commercial Hotel said:
Welcome: Adult Film Presidents
Studebaker Society
Full Action Casino/Keno in Lounge
“Park right here in front,” said the Judge. “Don’t worry. I’m well known in this place.”
Me too, but I said nothing. I have been well known at the Commercial for many years, from the time when I was doing a lot of driving back and forth between Denver and San Francisco—usually for Business reasons, or for Art, and on this particular weekend I was there to meet quietly with a few old friends and business associates from the Board of Directors of the Adult Film Association of America. I had been, after all, the Night Manager of the famous O’Farrell Theatre, in San Francisco—the “Carnegie Hall of Sex in America.”
I was the Guest of Honor, in fact—but I saw no point in confiding these things to the Judge, a total stranger with no Personal Identification, no money, and a very aggressive lifestyle. We were on our way to the Commercial Hotel to borrow money from some of his friends in the Adult Film business.
What the hell? I thought. It’s only rock & roll. And he was, after all, a Judge of some kind ... Or maybe not. For all I knew he was a criminal pimp with no fingerprints, or a wealthy black shepherd from Spain. But it hardly mattered. He was good company (if you had a taste for the edge work—and I did, in those days. And so, I felt, did the Judge). He had a bent sense of fun, a quick mind, and no Fear of anything.