Free Stealing Picasso by Anson Cameron Page A

before him. Tutankhamen in a white-goods store, Wonder Woman in a pub – it all adds colour to his day.The fact that he sometimes makes threats or whispers sweet nothings to thin air doesn’t bother his colleagues. If you’re having a council of war with the Gypsy Jokers in the Rosstown Arms and are at a fragile moment in territorial negotiations, when your president has just said to theirs, ‘If you want Bays-water, you give up Coburg,’ and into the dangerous silence that follows, one of your stone-hard presidential guard says in awe, ‘Throw that magic lasso, girl,’ to a super heroine nobody else can see, it gives your gang a valuable whiff of lunacy. Larry Skunk brings that to the Stinking Pariahs.
    He likes fighting and fights often. After the years of drugs he is as happily deluded as any holy warrior. Knows he is on the side of the angels, and doesn’t need any righteous justification for a fight, because he can hallucinate his own righteous justification in a trice. It might start as an argument over a parking infringement. But anybody who angers Larry Skunk quickly transforms, before his very eyes, into a slavering Hun, a Red Indian warrior, a paedophile, a terrorist, a triceratops … Any one of a cast of monsters is retrievable from his frontal lobe at a moment’s notice.
    These happy metamorphoses mean Larry Skunk never has to feel guilty about chopping down a lollipop man or trouncing a milk-bar owner. He has always defeated a fiend of the most contemptible kind. And when that fiend lies, beaten and groaning, on the ground, Larry Skunk walks away before the delusion clears and before him, once again, is a parking officer or a clumsy motorist. Larry Skunk is happy in his violence. He saves himself and his friends from the clutches of fiends several times each week, and walks proudly through his days.

    This man gives himself the assignment of chaperoning Marcel Leech into the suburbs at night to meet with clients. It’s a minefield of violent incident, babysitting a whore-poof. Right up Larry Skunk’s alley. He enjoys the work – Marcel’s self-deprecating humour, the fifty per cent cut. And it’s a blast coming to Marcel’s aid when things turn sour. A blast to beat up weasel-type faggot clients who become violent or won’t pay. You’ve got to be broadminded, because on the one hand it is, after all, a faggot you’re rescuing. But on the other it’s a faggot you’re beating up. So it’s a nil-all draw on the right/wrong scale. And as far as the drama of the event goes it’s not so different to rescuing a damsel in distress. Sometimes, on good nights, when Larry Skunk is clubbing a client who has misbehaved, Marcel transforms in Larry Skunk’s peripheral vision into a distressed damsel in an ankle-length velvet dress. This gives Larry Skunk a heroic blush. He takes big righteous breaths and stares down on the sprawled malefactor and delivers maxims at him like, ‘A lady tells you to stop, you better stop, Jack.’ Or, ‘You agree on a price, you don’t insult a lady by offering less after the fact.’ Marcel doesn’t mind being called a lady in these circumstances. Truth is, it gives him a thrill being Larry Skunk’s lady, his honour regained in that moment of crisis.
    For Larry Skunk it turns out to be cool to keep a pet as small and disgusting as Michael Jackson, whom everyone abominates. Anyone can ride with a rotty or a pitbull behind. But only a real hard-as-stone outlaw can keep a little homo sidekick crazy enough to be living out a King of Pop fantasy.
    Marcel, too, feels some comfort in the arrangement. He feels safer, at least, under the protection of the Stinking Pariahs. But he is still morbidly depressed about selling his hero as a whore. Seeing his flagging morale, Larry Skunk begins to feed him speedballs. Whenever he picks up Marcel for an assignationhe palms him a little