The party was I think for either PJ O Rourke or Tama Janowitz, and I think it was PJ O'Rourke -- every Pan publishing party of that vintage took place in the same room upstairs in the Groucho Club, anyway -- and when the party ended I wandered downstairs with the publicists and Roz Kaveney and a lady named Maria who was then the books editor of Time Out. We carried on talking and drinking, and when the Groucho closed we moved, shedding a few people as we did so, to another club, and then to another, and finally it was just me and Maria wandering the streets of Soho, still talking, and Maria (who in five years would lose her job, and twenty years later, her life, both mostly from booze) desperate for that last final drink. We were in the unpromising area at the top of Wardour Street, and I blinked, and realised that I was standing next to a door I recognised. My friend Dave Dickson had taken me there, years before. A downstairs bar, semi-secret. Lemmy from Motorhead had been down there, playing the fruit machines. I knocked on the door. A suspicious face looked out. "Can we have a drink?" I asked. "I don't know what you're talking about," said the man, impassively. "Er..." I thought about mentioning Dave Dickson, but didn't think it would work. "We're friends of Lemmy's," I said. "You should of said," he told me. "He's downstairs waiting for you." And we went downstairs. Lemmy was still on the fruit machines, as he had been two years before. I sidled over to him. "Er, just used your name to get in," I said. "Good on yer," said Lemmy. And Maria got her drink. I never found it again -- never looked for it -- although I am certain that if I was ever drunk enough and in Soho late at night, it would be there waiting. And Lemmy, wherever he really was in the world or out of it, would be down there playing the fruit machines. And late night talk does burn brightly in the mind. Neverwhere came out of a late night talk with the late Richard Evans, in Glasgow at Eastercon in 1986, where I started rambling on about "Magic City" books, like Winter's Tale or Free, Live Free, in which the city was as much a character as any person in the book, and saying that someone should do it for London. (Richard said "Why don't you" and I fumfed and told him he should find a real writer and commission one, or something.)
areudirty
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