'The Most Seductive Thing About America? We Were Not Criminalised By Our Accent. Scousers Were Pariahs In England. In LA, We Were Fascinating'

The action in part 18 of Good Guys Lost moves across the Atlantic in the second half of the 1980s. A chance meeting in a Santa Monica pub opens up new opportunities

Read part 17 of Good Guys Lost here

No More Heroes

Demons come in different shapes. I had been determined not to become like the generation that preceded me. It was happening organically. In the security warehouse, I started each day assessing what I could sell. The fiddle was becoming the focus of life. It was lucrative. All the lads got their share. We did not consider it crime.

My working methods were significantly more relaxed than the late warehouse manager’s regime. When tasks needed to be done, they had to be completed quickly. If it was quiet, the boys could go the pub. We rotated manning the office in 15-minute spells so no one missed out on the drinking.

We were drunk most days. The Dolphin had a rarely-used downstairs function room that opened on to the loading bay and the pub’s boss let us drink there. If management suddenly appeared, it would look as if we were in the back warehouse.

Money rolled in. The company was charged with accepting returned goods from catalogues and magazine promotions. Some were faulty and broken. Others had been delivered to the wrong address and were in perfect condition. Even the pristine returns were eventually sent to the dump. It was such a waste.

I was in the recycling business. Any goods with resale value – inexpensive multigyms, Capodimonte porcelain figurines, Guinness beer promotions where a single broken bottle had compromised the package – were money in the bank for me. My take-home wages from the company were £130 per week. On good weeks – after paying off all the staff – I was leaving on Fridays with £600 in my pocket.

It could not last for ever. In January 1987, I had an epiphany. The boys were in the pub and I was taking my turn watching the office. It was important never to pull rank.

It was quiet. No wagons were on the bay. In five minutes, we would switch and there would be a pint on the table when I went back to the boozer. It was about 3.30pm and getting dark. I looked up the bay and there was a policeman coming towards me. For a moment, I was frozen. Running would be a mistake. I glanced around and then looked back at the officer. It was not a Busie.

It was one of the engineers that worked in the building. He wore blue one-piece overalls and no one rational could mistake him for a constable. My subconscious had projected my worst fears down the loading bay and it shook me. It was the moment that I realised the fiddle had crossed the line into larceny. When I was caught – which was surely inevitable – there would be a court case and probably a custodial sentence. I knew I had to leave.

Norman Tebbit, one of the worst vulgarian politicians, sneered at us as lazy. He told a story about his unemployed father in the 1930s. The old man didn’t riot, Tebbit said, he got on his bike and looked for work. Of course, this was in Hertfordshire, on the fringe of London, where a multitude of jobs were within cycling distance. There was nowhere to ride to in Liverpool. My bike would have to be a train or plane. I’d been postponing the moment I had to leave the city since I left school. That terrifying vision told me it was time to get out of the place.

Luckily, there had been a magazine sales push on BMX bikes. They were difficult to ship and plenty were sent back. So I got on them. Over the next month, I sold every workable cycle in the warehouse, plus numerous other returns and – literally – tons of waste paper. Over four weeks, the spree generated nearly £5,000.

Once you left a job of your own volition you could not claim social security for six months. I’d built up enough cash to go to America and ride out half a year. Jimmy, Billy’s brother, offered to set me up with a job in Manhattan. I turned him down. I would stay with him for a couple of weeks but I had schoolfriends who had relocated to the West Coast. The plan was to go to Los Angeles.

From the moment I knew I had to work, it was clear I had to leave Liverpool. I’d put it off for too long.

*

The most seductive thing about America? When you spoke you were not criminalised by your accent. Not only that, people were interested in you. Women, especially, would ask you to repeat what you had said. Being Scouse made you a pariah in England. In LA it made you fascinating.

Work was not a problem. There was an underground network of Scouse, Irish and British illegal immigrants that operated out of Santa Monica. Any newcomer could pick up a job quickly and, if they put in any effort, other opportunities would arrive. At least that’s what everyone told you.

The obvious place to start was on the building. Construction was rampant all over Southern California and British trained craftsmen made a very good living, They always needed labourers. A mate introduced me to a finish carpenter from Yorkshire on my first Saturday night in the King’s Head and on Monday morning I was doing the heavy lifting for him. It was easy work at $50 per day. Sometimes it was largely watching him install exquisite wood interiors for ranch houses in Agoura Hills. On other occasions it was simply fitting factory-made kitchen cabinets in cheap apartment complexes in Reseda. On the bigger building sites almost everyone else was Hispanic. They laughed when the lunchtime roach coach – it was perfectly clean but its horn played La Cucaracha to herald its arrival – served up tamales and we tried to eat them before removing the corn husk. Otherwise they largely ignored us gringos. There was no nastiness. We were all illegals together.

It was fun for a while. Henry, the chippy, had a fondness for exotic dancers and would use any excuse to finish early and head to a strip bar. It was in these seedy but completely unappealing surroundings that I began to understand American culture. It was pornographic rather than erotic. It was about mass consumption and Henry consumed greedily, without discrimination. Quantity was all.

It applied to a number of aspects of life on the West Coast. A recommendation for a restaurant would invariably be based upon huge portions. Was the food any good? Who cared? There was a lot of it.

The favoured beers were ‘light’ – tasteless but with fewer calories than the more established brands. By British standards they were high in alcohol. The main selling point seemed to be they got you pissed without getting you fat. They were bland, lacked bitterness and never challenged the tastebuds. It was the flipside of puritanism. A society that lauded sobriety, heath and virtue had a behind-curtains, under-the-surface appetite for gluttony of all sorts.

This was Ronald Reagan’s promised land, the template for Britain to follow. Vulgarism was at the heart of American vigour. It would do for a while. Once six months passed and I could go on the dole, it would be time to return home and find a direction. Hammering fence posts into the rock-hard earth one day – goodness knows why Henry had taken a job that involved stuff like this – I reflected that this was fine for now and wasn’t the worst place to be for a tanned, lean, muscular Scouser in his late 20s. It was impossible to envisage being here when I was 50.

Generally, newcomers graduated from building jobs after a few months. To open a bank account you needed a social security card but it was issued to foreigners with a warning across it saying it was not valid for working purposes. Luckily, within the expat community were a couple of forgers who were adept at taking the restrictive words off the document. If you knew the card had been tampered with, you could see it had been done. But most employers did not care to look too hard. With that and a CA driving licence you could start applying for real jobs. Small businesses tended not to ask for Green cards. That was the route off the building site for most British and Irish illegals.

Then, on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in the King’s Head while waiting for a mate, I saw a face I recognised. The Gasman. He caught my eye, did a double take, tapped the man he was with on the shoulder, whispered in his ear, and then came across to where I was standing.

“Joey’s lad?” he asked tentatively.

“Yeah,” I grinned. The last person I expected to bump into was the Ga… Neither of us knew each other’s names.

“Gazza,” he said quickly. “They call me that over here. They think it’s on offshoot of Gary.”

There was a warning in there but I laughed. “Still in the import-export business?”

He chuckled. “Sort of. But not quite in the way Billy took it to mean all those years ago. You seen him lately?”

I told him about the Bierkeller, the covers band and the waste of talent. “He’s making a few quid, right?” the Gasman said by way of rebuke. “Better than struggling.”

He looked back across the room to his mate. “This is not a good time. Fancy a beer tomorrow?” There was no work and no turkey dinner for me so I said yes. “Meet you at the Daily Pint on Pico. I’ve a place quite near there. Shall we say one? We can get something to eat after?”

“Yeah.”

“We can reminisce about the old days.” He smiled. “Not much good about them but I loved your uncle Duke.”

*

I hadn’t been to this part of Pico. Too often drinking sessions were a tour of expatriate bars – the King’s Head and King George in Santa Monica, Bangers in Reseda, Ireland’s 32 in Van Nuys. Occasionally we’d go down to the Oarhouse in Venice to pick up gloriously dopey students. The Daily Pint was not on the Billy Brit pub crawl route.

It was empty when I got there – apart from the Gasman. It had a horseshoe-shaped bar that split two rooms. One had a long shuffleboard table. Gazza was playing alone. I was still unsure what to call him.

He signalled the barmaid for another drink. “Guinness,” I said. The floorboards were wooden. Bowls of unshucked peanuts sat on the bar. Signs around the place encouraged patrons to eat them, throw the shells on the floor and grind them underfoot to feed oils into the wood.

We played. And talked. “You here on business?” I asked warily.

“Yeah,” he said. “You like the Beatles?”

Everyone did as far as I knew. It was a strange question.

“I’m here for a Beatles festival. It’s at a hotel by the airport.”

I was surprised. He had come all this way because he was a fan? He chuckled.

“You thought import-export meant drugs,” he said. “Billy did. He wasn’t quite right. There was a little bit of that when I first went to Holland but it wasn’t my game. It was dangerous.”

This was candid. So was my response. “I thought you were an armed robber?”

Again he smiled. “I was a daft kid, skint, stupid and desperate. Amsterdam was the best thing that happened to me. I learnt so much living in a foreign country. Most of all, I learnt to stay away from guns, crime and the possibility of being locked up. Duke tried to warn me. But you only learn on your own.”

It was time for another drink. I moved towards the bar but he stopped me. “I get the ale, alright?” It reminded me of my uncle. This was not a subject for discussion. He was buying.

We sat down as people began to come in. He asked: “What are you doing?”

“I’m on the building,” I said. “It’s alright. I was bred for manual labour…” I left it a moment, “… and battle.”

He spat his beer all over the table. “Very good,” he said, composing himself. “How much they pay you? Work weekends?”

“Fifty per day. Generally no.”

“I’ve got a couple of days for you this weekend. Two hundred a day?”

He looked at me and saw my thought process. “No crime involved.”

He explained. The Gasman had a stall at the Beatles fest and sold rare records. They were bootlegs, he admitted, but they were produced by a company – in which he had an interest – just across the Dutch border in Germany where the copyright laws made reproduction of live albums and the like legal. At least that was his story. It was convincing.

“I’d like you to come and man my stall,” he said. “Mainly to talk to people. The accent sells a lot of vinyl. I had a lad who did it for me here and he’s gone home. He was skimming from the takings, so I gave him a little shove. Let’s see how he enjoys being back in Garston when he’s signing on. Do it this weekend. It could turn into something.”

It seemed reasonable. I’d been to enough record fairs to know that they were relatively civilised. Back in Liverpool I had a pile of Jam bootlegs. No one was getting hurt. It was barely a crime.

“I also sell collectibles,” he said. “Memorabilia. Autographs, rare releases. People pay huge money.”

“Forgeries? Blag shit.”

He was amused. “No, no need for that. There’s lots of real stuff around. It’s the opposite. You keep your reputation by making sure you don’t sell fakes. I’m here this weekend to try to get one of the real rarities. The fella who’s selling it doesn’t like me, though.”

“Money talks?”

“Not in the world of obsessives.”

What he wanted was a Beatles album I’d never even heard about. It was a compilation released in 1966 in the US but the tracks were the least interesting part of it. Called Yesterday And Today, there was very little exciting about the content. The cover made it special.

The lovable Fab Four were frustrated by fame and Beatlemania. They hated their cuddly image. At a conceptual photoshoot in 1966 with a snapper called Robert Whitaker, the group donned butcher’s white coats and clutched a number of decapitated baby dolls and joints of meat. McCartney loved the pictures. One became the cover of the album but the retail reaction caused the record company to recall the release and pulp many of the sleeves. They were replaced by a softer, Moptop cover.

Some versions had the new photo pasted over the original sleeve as Capitol, the record company, tried to cut costs. It was known as a ‘slick’. Fans peeled off the new cover and the ‘Butcher’ sleeve became one of the most desirable rarities for collectors. Very few slicks were on the market. The original, shrinkwrapped, unopened covers were almost impossible to buy.

My attention drifted. He was explaining now about the differences between stereo and mono versions of the record. It was too much geekery. Then the Gasman got to the point. He had heard through the collector grapevine that the son of a former record company executive was preparing to sell a boxload of 24 authentic, unopened Butcher originals at the festival.

“I’d give him five grand for one,” he said. “I’ve got a buyer in Japan who’ll give me 15. But we had an incident a couple of years ago. Over a girl. He won’t sell to me.

“Anyway, that’s got nothing to do with you. Come and schmooze Yank obsessives, sell a few records and I’ll give you a few quid and we’ll have a laugh.”

“On one condition,” I said, feeling bold. “Tell me why you’re The Gasman.”

He guffawed. “Seriously,” I said. “It’s a frightening name. People were terrified of you.”

Auschwitz, and its associations, hung around the nickname. It gave this man the whiff of a killer. He shook his head.

“My first earner? Emptying gas meters of shillings with a screwdriver. You remember when you’d put a bob in the meter in rented houses? I was expert in breaking open gas and leccy meters. So that was my nickname when I was about 12. ‘Gas-meter Peter.’ It turned into The Gasman later.”

I gawped in surprise. “Here, with civilians, I’m Gazza. At home, I like to have an aura. Don’t be telling anyone I told you this. Or you’ll feel the wrath of The Gasman.” He was smiling and there was no hint of threat.

“I’m not the only one,” he continued. “You know John the Dog? Another of Duke’s mob? How he got that name? He was drunk one night, was desperate to have a crap but there was nowhere open so he ended up shitting in the street like a mongrel. He turned it around by telling everyone it was because he bit some fella’s nose off when he was in the army.”

With that, Gazza launched into a series of tales about clubland Liverpool. It was not a bad way to pass Thanksgiving afternoon.

I liked the Gasman. They said there was opportunity in America. They were right. It just arrived in an unexpected manner.

• On Sunday: The music bootlegging business brings the Gasman into contact with Missy