| Mrs. Cooper (Jimmy's mother): Where you been? Jimmy: Fell asleep on the train. I wound up in bloody Neasden. Mrs. Cooper (Jimmy's mother): Ridin' about on them motorbikes all night, I'm not surprised. It's not normal. Jimmy: Oh, yeah? What's normal, then? James Micheal Cooper lived in Shepherd's Bush, West London, barely a mile from the Goldhawk Social Club. He had left school and worked as a binman in the West End. Like most of his contemporaries he earned decent money for his age - seventeen - and spent this, according to a strict hierarchy of necessity and choice, on a variety of things. His mother took board from him at two pounds a week. Then the rest of his £15 wages went on clothes, dancing, records, magazines and pills. Not aspirins or Victory Vs but pep pills: leapers, french blues, purple hearts and black bombers. Amphetamine, or Benzedrine, the stuff that dreams are made of. He also paid religiously the regular weekly installments on a hire purchase account. It was for a motor scooter, a Vespa, Gran Sportique. A GS The scooter had five spotlights, four mirrors, front and back racks, trimmed with fur, and chrome side panels. It had cost him half-a-crown a square inch to have them done but, looking at the burnished metal and the beauty of it, the expense seemed worthwhile. So did the money he'd lavished on appropriate clothing, like an authentic US Army Parka with fur-trimmed hood. The two went together and made him visible to the street. It was impossible not to ... |
