35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

186
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
We returned to The Diplomat, where Ray Sahib was grandly
received, proceeding by means of a shuddering, claustrophobic lift
up to the fourth floor. The corridor smelled like the bar, but was
warmer. Ray knocked on a door, from behind which blared a track
from Exile on Main Street. Then an accented and muffled voice
hollered at us to piss off.
‘Franco!’ Ray shouted, knocking louder.
The door opened a crack, and a pale face with an appalling
complexion peered out.
‘Eet’s Raymondo!’ Franco shouted to someone in the room,
flinging open the door and grabbing Ray in an eager embrace. Ray
roughly extricated himself and brushed at the sleeves of his
immaculate suit.
Franco stood before us, wasted, gaunt, an unruly nimbus of black
curls surrounding a ravaged face, clad only in creased black cotton
pyjama trousers. The drawstrings hung loosely below a spidery tuft
of pubic hair. Running like stations on a railway map along the
veins of his arms were red welts and sores and ugly scabs. I guessed
he was in his early twenties.
The room was a sordid junkies’ lair more vile than anything in
William Burroughs’ imagination: numerous blackened teaspoons
with bent stems rested on ledges and tables, containing rolled up
pea-sized cotton balls or the insides of cigarette filters stuck in the
bowls by brown scum; spent matches burned down a fraction from
the end were also scattered over every surface; so were clothes that
needed a thorough burning. Several tumblers full of murky pale
pink liquid held hypodermic syringes that belonged in medical
museums. The Rolling Stones thrashed and barked from a cheap
cassette recorder held together by Scotch tape.
Stretched out like an exhausted swimmer in a turbulent ocean of
sheets stained with everything from blood to curried grease lay
Sophie. Barely twenty, if that, unaware of her lank and matted long
blond hair, she turned a once-pretty face toward us, its skin drawn,
haunted, her weary eyes experienced. Wearing only a ragged cotton
dressing gown minus belt, she made no attempt to conceal the purple
bruises that floated like clouds over a sky of almost translucent skin,
from her thighs up to a wedge-shaped one above her left breast, and