Red, White & Bruce

There are many things I’ve done that I’m not proud of. Having sex with that chick in the wheelchair, for instance, and getting my penis stuck in a mouse trap. One thing I am proud of, however, is writing a book. It’s called Red, White & Bruce and, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but there are no sparkly vampires or spectacle-wearing magician poofters in it. There’s a bit of bondage, though, so it should appeal to the Fifty Shades of Grey set.

Red, White & Bruce is about a really cool and sexy young journalist (remind you of anyone?) named Bruce Barton who heads to America to cover a funeral, and finds porn stars, drug smugglers, street fights and shootings. Basically, all the good stuff. There’s even a bit where a fat bloke shits into a bin while children throw firecrackers at him.

With his best mate Pieman along for the ride, Bruce’s adventure takes him from award shows in Los Angeles, to the slums of Tijuana, to the seedy clubs of Las Vegas and the sites of San Francisco. Think of it as a travelogue with more swearing.

There’s even some serious stuff in there, which is every bit as brilliant as the crap in War and Peace. If you enjoy my ramblings on here, don’t mind a laugh, or are a fan of Robert G. Barrett’s series of Les Norton books, you’ll love the Red, White & Bruce. Alright, that’s not a guarantee and you might think it’s shithouse, so don’t hold me to it.

You can purchase it for your Kindle bookmachine right bloody here, for the low price of $3.99. If you’re the sort of person who needs to carefully weigh up all your options before dropping a couple of bucks on a book, I’m just going to slide the first few pages in here. Crack a beer and enjoy. I’m off to get pissed.

I pulled my passport and landing papers out of my backpack and joined an endless line of tired visitors trying to get into the good ol’ US of A. It took me about 45 minutes, but finally some massive black dude stamped my passport and, with a dirty look, sent me on my way. Pieman was 10 or so people behind me, so I waited till he got through immigration so we could grab our bags and fuck off to the hotel.

I was scoping out some perky-arsed redhead when I glanced over to see my pastry-loving buddy take a piece of paper out of his pants, unfold it and hand it over to the same huge fella who’d been eyeballing me a few minutes earlier. The black dude looked at it, and he wasn’t amused.

“What the fuck is this, motherfucker?” he spat. “You think this is some sorta joke, bitch?”

Pieman just looked at him with a dopey-but-confused smile, and I started to feel a bit bad. I also started pissing myself laughing. He’d just handed over the picture I’d told him to draw of Obama injecting himself into a dog.

“Mate, that’s a picture of that Osama fella. Is he related to you? He’s one of them black fellas,” replied Pieman with an innocent look on his face.

“Motherfucker, he ain’t my relation, he’s my President. Now why the fuck did you think handing me this would be a good idea? I should send yo’ ass back to New Zealand.”

“I’m not from New Zealand, mate, I’m from Bathurst.”

“I don’t give a fuck where you’re from. Shit, if I hadn’t been caught smoking crack on the job yesterday I’d jump over there and kick your head in, you honky asshole.”

I stopped laughing long enough to walk over and explain to the huge negro that my friend was a ‘special person’ and didn’t mean any harm. He called me an asshole too, let Pieman through, and we gave him a big thumbs-up as we walked off. Shit, we almost didn’t make it into the country!

We walked past a bunch of guards wielding fuck-off huge guns, grabbed our suitcases from the baggage collection area, then walked out a set of automatic doors and into a brave new world. After the sterility of the plane and airport, my introduction to Los Angeles was a true sensory overload – the brilliant sun dug deep into my skin, while taxis honked and growled like angry animals and the stench of smog clawed its way into my nostrils.

I found the closest taxi rank, and we wandered up to the first one and the hairy, nervous-looking fella behind the wheel jumped out and helped us load our bags into the boot. Pieman went for the front seat – and got a confused look for doing it – and I hopped in the back. I pulled out a printed-out piece of paper that detailed where we were staying, handed it over to Akmal, and we were off, driving through the City of Angels.

The City of Arseholes would be a more appropriate name.

The first person I saw as we eased out of the airport was a skeletal junkie with a sign around his neck that said, “Will suck cock for drugs.” At the next servo were two whores – one black, one white, who had about three teeth between them. If I had to choose between sticking my dick in one of them, and sticking it in a woodchipper, I’d go for the woodchipper in a heartbeat. The further we went, the more hobos and hookers and junkies I saw, and it took me about two-and-a-half minutes to realise that LA wasn’t exactly as glamorous as it looked on TV. In fact, it was a bigger shithole than The Block in Redfern. Sure, there were nice cars all over the place, plenty of palm trees and the odd spunk, but overall it was filthier than a pig’s cock.

Akmal eased us out onto a freeway that was four lanes wide going each way, and Pieman and I both stared out the windows at the unbelievable amount of traffic buzzing around us. It was 11am on a Thursday, and the traffic was still backed up north and south, as bad as it was on the Western Distributor on a Friday afternoon. And every car was either black, white, silver or dark red – spotting a car of any other colour was as hard as spotting a white bloke in Cabramatta.

I was tired and hungover, so I can’t really remember where we turned off, but at some point we did and then we were driving past streets with names like Rodeo Drive and Sunset Boulevard. They weren’t anything special; in fact they just looked like the streets I was used to driving down in Sydney. Maybe a few more junkies, a few more plonkers with silly haircuts, but not exactly the exotic streets they promise in all those Yank movies.

The taxi – sorry, when in Septopolis, it’s a cab – pulled up out the front of a nondescript hotel in a nondescript street. It was a generic Crowne Plaza, exactly like every other one in every major city around the world. Exactly like the one down the road from my work. I paid Akmal from a wad of bills that all looked the same, tipped him a few bucks, and we took our stuff into the hotel. Shit, by this point I’d been awake for damn near a full day, and all I wanted to do was have a nap before meeting up with my porn star… and our room wasn’t ready. Wouldn’t be ready for an hour or two, in fact. Fuck, fuck, cunt, fuckity, shit, cunt!

“What do you wanna do while we wait?” I asked Pieman. He was already headed for the hotel bar. There was my answer.

We had two beers at the bar – a dark, wooden joint that was a few degrees too cold and as busy as Nathan Tinkler’s treadmill – then headed outside and walked through the sunshine. We had a beer at every pub we saw, which wasn’t a lot, while trying to spot celebrities. Pieman saw a fella who looked like Jack Nicholson, but who turned out to be a homeless bloke, and that was the closest we came to seeing anyone famous. Dunno, maybe they were all at a Scientology meeting or something that day. After hitting maybe five ‘pubs’, and I use that term loosely, we had to get back to the hotel to change and meet up with Loosey Lawless.

On the way back, Pieman headed into some pizza joint that served beer and, despite being on a tight schedule, I thought it sounded like a bloody good idea to grab another jar. From experience, porno stars, strippers and prossies are almost never on time, so I thought I might as well spend 20 minutes sipping on a watery beer rather than hanging out in a coffee shop down the road waiting for some well-fucked bint to rock up.

Pieman paid for the beers and a large pepperoni pizza (I almost fell off my stool when he offered!) and we took them out to the little fenced-off area by the street and started chucking them back while checking out the local talent. While there were enough hobos staggering around to make me think the zombie apocalypse had hit, the amount of good-looking babes on display was extraordinary! One chick with big, fake tits and a tight arse walked past, then two chicks with big, fake tits and tight arses walked past, then a whole group of chicks with big, fake tits and tight arses walked past. Then a Latino-looking homeless fella walked past pushing a trolley full of cans. Then three more chicks with big, fake tits and tight arses walked past. Fuck me sideways, I pretty much walked out of the little pizza shop on three legs.

Across the road was a shop called Alfredo’s Pies, and Pieman basically danced over to it despite having just polished off three-quarters of a pizza. I swaggered across the road and got in there just in time to hear the big fella order “Two meat pies and a chicken and veggie pie, thanks.” The place was singing with the sweet scent of blueberry and and strawberry, and the cross-eyed bloke behind the counter almost fainted.

“Is this some kind of the joke?” he said in a heavy accent that could’ve from anywhere this side of Transylvania. “We do not have the meat pie.”

“Bacon and egg pie?”

“No!”

“Veal pie?”

“No!”

“Steak and kidney?”

“No!”

“Emu?”

“No!”

“Kangaroo?”

“No!”

“Seafood pie?”

“No!”

“What about crocodile?”

“No!”

“Fuck me drunk, it says pies out the front, and I want a pie – I’m fucken starvin’! Now what type of pies have you got?”

“We have the apple pie, the blueberry pie, the strawberry pie, the plum pie and the cinnamon pie. You want pie? You order, or else you leave Mr Strange Pie Eater Man.” Pieman looked like someone had slapped him in the face.

“So, no meat pies then?” he asked, and slowly lurched out of the shop, mumbling something about apples and pooftahs and what a shitty, weird country America was.

“Don’t worry, my brother, they might not have meat pies, but there’s something better around here,” I said with a wink. “Poontang pie.” And then we gave each other a jumping high-five and continued on our way. If there’s one thing Pieman likes more than a dog’s eye, it’s a nice, juicy vagina to munch on. What can I say, the man has taste!

We headed back to the hotel and I was over the moon when they handed me the keys. We left our bags with some dude who didn’t speak English, then took the lift up to the fifth floor to find the bag-dude waiting for us at the door. We went in, bag-dude took our suitcases in, then stood there with a huge smile on his face and his hand out. I reached for my wallet, but before I could tip the bloke, Pieman walked over and slapped him a low-five. Bag-dude looked like he wanted to run out and bring his homies back to shoot Pieman in the face, so I chucked him $2 for his two minutes of service and stood by the door while he fucked off.

“Bloody hell, mate, what did you give that bloke money for?” asked Pieman.

“You’ve gotta tip in America. It’s customary.”

“And it’s customary for me to tell pricks to piss off if they want more of my hard-earned than they deserve.”

“Ah, Pieman, you’ll do Australia proud while you’re over here.”

The room wasn’t much – plain white decor with an 82cm LCD screen pushed against one wall and two single beds against the other. There was a small bathroom, a small desk, and a small window that looked out onto a very large brick wall across a laneway. Well, at least we wouldn’t be distracted by the view.

I took a dump and had a quick shower, then pulled out my phone and called Pieman over to check out the screen. “Mate, check this out,” I grinned, showing him a video of a petite brunette with massive jugs and a large dragon tattoo on her back. Two goofy-looking dudes with cocks like gums trees were having the time of their lives, with one taking care of her droopy smoo while the other jabbed away at her black-lipsticked mouth. “That’s the chick we’re going to see this arvo. Loosey Lawless.”

“Reckon that could be me and you?” he asked, pointing at the fellas with the massive wangs. I chucked up a little at the thought of splitting a sheila with the big oaf.

“I’d rather share a girl with a pit bull,” I replied, putting my phone away. “OK dude, let’s get some shut-eye, then we’ve gotta get up to the café to meet this charming sheila.”

“Cool, and then we’re going back to her place to take some photos, right?”

“Yeah, so bring your camera and a bottle of disinfectant.”

I jumped into the bed nearest the window for a quick nap… and ended up sleeping 20 minutes past my alarm. When I finally got up I swore my head off, then woke Pieman from his equally deep slumber, then slipped myself into a plain black T-shirt and a pair of jeans. My hair looked rubbish, so I grabbed a cap out of my suitcase and chucked it on, stuck some shoes on my feet and the two of us raced to the front of the building to grab a cab.

The bloke who pulled up was another ethnic fella, with an accent somewhere between Borat and the Count from Sesame Street and no teeth. I got in the front and copped another weird look, Pieman got in the back, I showed the cabbie a slip of paper with an address on it and we started winding our way up and down congested street after congested street.

The coffee shop – a place called Patrick’s – was only a few blocks up the road, but with LA’s traffic it took us a good 15 minutes to get there. It seemed longer than that though, with the driver’s choice in music sounding like a recording of a bloke who’d caught his nuts in a toaster. It was all wailing and squealing and bongo drums, and I didn’t understand a word the bloke was spitting out. For once, the big fella in the back was quiet, his brain too busy taking in the sights and sounds of this strange new land.

The taxi stopped, I paid the driver, he coughed, I tipped him more, he muttered ‘Cheapskate Englishman’ and sped off, then we walked into the coffee shop. It was about half-full, smelled of exotic beans, and every single person in there looked like an extra from Desperate Housewives – fake tits, too much make-up, the whole deal. They were also the gloomiest bunch of motherfuckers you’ve ever seen – deadset, they were that sour I wouldn’t be surprised if every single one of them had a lemon up their arse.

Despite the booming sunshine outside, the coffee shop was gloomy inside with tiny candles at every table and dark purple walls, so it was hard to find Loosey, but when I saw the biggest set of jugs ever and knew I’d found my girl. The fact that she was sucking on a pen like it was a rigid penis kinda gave it away, too.

“Loosey Lawless, I presume,” I said, and shook her hand when she stood up. Beneath her massive norks was a tiny waist and cute little arse, and the whole package was wrapped in a skin-tight boob tube/spandex pants combo that made my knob want to break free from my pants and run around the room like a headless chook. Tattoos walked up and down her arms and when Loosey sat down, her black hair cascaded down around her face. With her dark make-up she looked barely 18, which made her perfect for a Terry Todger movie.

“You must be Bruce Barton. From New Zealand, right? I think I fucked a New Zealander once.”

“Close. Australia.”

“Oh right, where Schwarzenegger comes from.”

I let it slide. I mean, did it really matter if this buxom babe knew where I came from? It wasn’t like I was going to take her home to meet my parents. For one thing, she’d probably try to screw my dad. Actually, perhaps that wouldn’t be such a bad present for the old pervert…

“You look like my brother,” she said to Pieman, then coughed a smoker’s cough and spat a green gob of phlegm onto the floor. “I wonder if your dick is as big as his? If we fuck, I’m calling you Paul, alright?”

Bloody hell, we had a live one here. Loosey finished the rest of what looked like a glass of straight bourbon in one shot as I took out my tape recorder and switched it on, then plonked it down on the table. Pieman pulled out his camera and snapped away a few photos, then we settled down to business.

“Alright Loosey,” I said, while trying and failing to grab the attention of a passing waitress, “we’ve got two things to talk about today. First, I wanna ask you a bunch of questions about your sex life and your career in the porno industry. Y’know, so we’ve got some words for the readers to ignore while they’re jacking off to photos of you with your wig-wams out.”

“Sure, I’ve fucked more guys than colon cancer, so I can tell you a story or two” snorted Loosey, bored. I assumed that she’d done this a million times before. I knew I had. I asked her a bunch of questions about how she got into the porno biz, who her favourite co-stars were and what was the most extreme thing she’d done on camera (“Drugs aren’t cheap”, “The UCLA college wrestling team” and “Getting fisted by a dwarf while two blokes dressed as robots jazzed on my face”, respectively), and when I had enough material to run alongside a simple glamour shoot I decided to ask her a few questions about Todger.

“He’s a cunt,” she spat, before I could even ask her anything. “I don’t think you’ll find a person in the country who’s sad he’s dead.”

“Fairy nuff,” I replied, a bit taken aback by her frankness. “So how’d you get involved with him?”

“It was about a year and a half ago and I would’ve been 19. Back then I was really new to the business, and I’d only done two scenes – one was girl-girl and the other was a nice, normal scene with some random dude who I barely remember. His dick bent to the left, like a banana, hit all the right spots. Then that old fuckwit got in touch with my agent and said he wanted me to do a scene with him. Some of the other girls in the industry warned me not to but I was naïve, and the money was good, so I went along.”

“Let me guess, Todger wasn’t exactly a gentleman?”

“He was barely human. He was, like, 100 years old and he stank like he’d peed himself. The first thing he made me do was lick his ass – gross! I’d never even done that to a cute guy, but he yelled at me and said my career would be over if I didn’t do it, and I got scared and went along with it.”

For a second – and only a second – Loosey looked into the distance with half a smile on her face, as if she hadn’t hated it nearly as much as she was making out. Then she screwed up her face again and kept going.

“Then he fucked me rougher than any guy had ever fucked me before – pulling my hair, slapping me, spitting on me. I usually like that sort of thing but he was just gross and weird. He even fucked me up the arse without asking, and laughed when I screamed. It was fucken horrible.”

I looked around again for a waitress, finally caught the attention of an outrageously skinny brunette, and ordered a plain coffee for myself, a beer for Pieman and a pint of wine for Loosey. Not a glass, a fucken pint. No wonder she stunk like a wino. “So was it just the girls who hated him?” I said.

“Fuck no! The cameramen hated him, the lighting guys hated him, the other male actors hated him. As well as being a complete asshole on set, he was a complete cunt away from the camera. Always putting people down, always bragging about how much money he had and just acting like a dickhead. He was about as popular as Chlamydia at a gang bang. Everybody was saying they wanted to kill him, and someone even punched him out a few months back.”

“Really?” I asked, and already I was getting the feeling there was more to this story than most people believed. I saw headlines, I saw awards… I saw myself getting laid for getting headlines and awards. “Who knocked him out?”

“Some Asian slag’s boyfriend. Yeah, Todger kept going up to this guy at a party and telling him he’d fucked his girlfriend up the ass and made her cry. That was typical Todger; he wasn’t just cruel during scenes. I genuinely think he hated women. Shit, after what he did to me, things changed…”

Our drinks arrived and I took a sip of my coffee, which felt like velvet as is rolled across my tongue, and then asked Loosey to elaborate. “After he broke me down and did all that to me, I got into drinking pretty hard to forget about it. Drugs, too. Todger said I was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, that he was going to make a star out of me. Before that I’d had a bit of interest from the major porn studios, too, but that dried up after they saw the depraved shit I did with Todger. There was nothing left for me but gang bangs and fucking midgets. It’s pretty demeaning to cop a bukkake from a bunch of blokes who have to shop in the kiddie aisle at Wal-Mart.”

I spat out my coffee and laughed, then felt like shit when I saw how hurt Loosey was. Pieman, who’d been playing Angry Birds on his phone, suddenly looked up and said, “Our boss is a midget. Perhaps you could fuck him? He needs to relieve some tension, he’s an angry bastard.” I apologised for the both of us.

“So there’s your story,” continued Loosey. “Todger was a tosser to everybody, so everybody hated Todger. Now everybody’s happy ’cos the old bastard’s worm food.”

“Do you…” I started, then paused, then started again. “Do you think there’s more to his death?”

“Do I think someone killed him? Yeah, I do, but I don’t have a clue who.” Loosey finished her drink a little too quickly, like she had something to hide.

“Did you ever see Todger after the scene you shot with him?” I asked.

“Sure, but just at parties and industry nights and that, with some stuck-up bitch. I never hung out with him or anything. Never.” She took another swig of her wine. Again, it was just a little too quickly. She was lying, I could tell that, but I couldn’t work out why. Porn stars, hey, I wouldn’t trust ’em as far as I could throw ’em, and with tits that size I probably couldn’t toss Loosey too far. I was about to push on when she licked her lips and reached under the table to grab first my dick, then Pieman’s.

“I’m shitfaced,” she slurred. “Let’s go back to my joint and get these photos out of the way. Afterwards, I just might let you boys fuck me up the ass. Reckon I might be a bit yeasty up front, y’know. I gotta take a dump first, but.”

“How charming,” I laughed.

“And remember, boys, I want my cash before I do a thing.”

———-

Thought it was great and just have to find out what happens next? Then pick up your copy right fucking now, my dude