"Bukowski made me writer letters to dead people. 'You do what you have to do', he said, 'and I will do her'; he pointed at the heavy woman in the corner of the bar and lit a cigarette. We got drunk with Ginsberg in Paris, and passed out under stars burned out like dripping candles. 'You do what you have to do,' Ginsberg said, 'and I will do a little of this acid.' Burroughs was already shooting at the tourists with his shotgun. He saved the rocket launcher for special occasions, and was understandably upset when the police confiscated it. 'Pigs', said Bukowski, smoothing down the betting slip on the table, like a bookmark for a chequered account of his life. Imaginary conversations, imaginary lives; only the deaths were real."

MY NAME IS SAL PARADISE, and I'm a private investigator.

The skies outside my shoe-sized apartment's windows were like a dull grey numbing pain that perforated through the urban landscape like a burrowing worm, eating away at the rows upon rows of identical brick houses. It was winter, and I was alone.

I wasn't always a private investigator. I used to be on the road. I'll tell you about it later.

I arrived in London, England, one rain-drenched evening in November, looking for nothing more than a refuge, a safe-house, a place where I could be alone and where my past could be safely filed away in the great sweaty tumbling reams of paper that were left behind me in New York when I fled my old life.

I took the train to town, in turns sweating and freezing as the aftershocks of Benzedrine hit me repeatedly. I was a washed-out boxer getting pummelled on the ring of life, and the punches were coming in like a pile-up of cars on the Golden Gate bridge, fast and painful and without an end in sight. The people on the train, gentle Englishmen and delicate girls with pale, beautiful faces, looked at me in alarm but left me to my thoughts. I came to learn England is a place where the mad are--not revered, no, but allowed a quiet respect, a space around them like a shield of protection and comfort.

I'm sorry, I'm not making much sense, am I. My therapist says I'm getting better. Making progress, he says, and laughs like a big ol' Texan cowboy, stroking his great big white beard all the while. He so reminds me of Carlo Marx sometimes I want to jump up and hug him and dance around the room with him and talk about poetry.

But I don't, anymore. I'm getting off Speed, and Carlo Marx is dead and besides, this is London, not New York.

So I was sitting in my tiny apartment counting the bricks and watching soaps on the box and thinking of a drink. It was cold. When I first arrived in London I stayed with a girl I knew, an American flower transplanted without much success in this ancient metropolis, held hands and shivered like a madman and dreamed of the road, and the trip to Italy with my one true love that I've never taken and now never will, and of the secret byways of the world.

"Sal," my friend said to me one night. We were sitting on her small brown sofa without our clothes and with the ancient heater working overtime by our side, eating curry from little silver packets. I dipped a large chunk of Naan bread into my chicken Madras and bit it and felt warmth flood me for the fraction of a second like a remote gun shot.

"Yes, darling?" I was affecting a British accent in those days, the kind bad actors use in Hollywood movies, all upper-class and superior, as if one's nose is full of snot through which the words ooze out with difficulty.

"It's time you got yourself your own place," she said, her sweet voice vaporizing in the heat of the room. "And a job, too." She put her hand on mine, tenderness in her eyes like the bite of a snake. I was suddenly angry. I wanted to shout at the moon, berate the unfairness of this life I found myself in, cry for the road and for friends left behind. I got ready to stand up and leave, as I was, to step blissfully into the cold calm arms of night, naked and unbowed and unafraid.

But she was right, and I didn't.

I told you I was getting better, didn't I.

Instead, I finished my curry in silence, and in the small hours of the night made love to that strange undemanding creature for the last time. The next day I packed my bag and left and in a moment of sheer exhaustion walking around Mungo Park, which never fails to evoke in me thoughts of Old Bull Lee in Tangiers, found this place and paid for it there and then and moved in.

And found employment the next day as a private investigator.

It wasn't a bad job, really. I worked for a guy called Little Mo Cohen, a big barrel of a man, a Jew of the old East End, a former gangster with a love of black and white movies, a mountain of muscle with the heart of a child.

I did divorces, mainly.