In London I was always good at it; I could catch a fly in mid flight. One day I was in someone's house and did it; a big blue bottle of a fly buzzed in to their kitchen, I caught it lightly in my hand, threw it at the wall and when it landed I put my foot on it; simple.
The person, whose kitchen it was, said she had never seen anything like it before.
In Los Angeles there was no chance. I wonder if it had anything to do with humidity getting on to the fly's wings in London and in Los Angeles, where there is little or no humidity most of the time, they fly freely.
I would often see them coming in to the living room from our balcony; coming in to wipe their feet on our food. The feet that they had been getting dirty by walking in the soft and smelly – yes the shit.
They must be the cleanest creatures on earth as they do not like having anything sticking to their feet so they wipe them wherever they can.
I found a way I could get rid of some of them by shooting them with rubber bands. It was amazing, really, as I could fire at them and miss by a fraction of an inch and they wouldn't notice. So I would always get a second shot.
Most of the time the way I would catch flies would be this way:
I can't remember who took that shot but someone called it Dead Elvis – cruel.
One Sunday morning, in Los Angeles, the phone rang and it was a friend of mine from London saying he was in MacDonald's on Hollywood Boulevard and could I come down and pick 'us' up – I asked who 'us' were and he told me he had brought along his psychic; a kind of 'magic woman.'
I went down to pick them up and she was a Columbian woman in her late fifties and I took them back to our apartment where they stayed for a few days. They were on some kind of spiritual journey and he wanted her to meet me as he reckoned we had met before in another life.
Over the period of the next few days she said I had been an Indian Chief in a former life and my friend was an Indian Brave. I laughed at this and he said 'look at you; you have feathers on the wall and you shoot flies with elastic bands.'
I said 'I pick my nose but that doesn't make me a monkey!'
By the way the Indians I met in America preferred to be called just that – Indian not native American; that's what the white professors call them.
One night the magic woman asked if she could use the phone and after she was talking for a few minutes she got up and went to the balcony in some kind of rush; I said 'where are you going?' and she said 'Israel; it's an emergency!'
I said 'Well, you're going the wrong way.'
We lived five floors up.
What was my wife doing whilst this was going on, I hear you ask – she was in London with the kids for a few weeks.
I looked out on to the balcony, after a while, and there she was sitting with her head buried in her hands and her eyes closed.
I asked my pal what was going on and he shrugged and carried on reading.
She had been reaching someone in Israel with her magic powers of psyche and later she called him again and the poor sap said he had felt her all that way!!
Eventually I dropped them at Grand Central railway station in Los Angeles and they made their way to Big Bear National Park; she said her sister lived near there and she wanted to tell her sister that she (her sister) was ill but didn't know it yet; she knew this through her psychic powers.
She said she could cure cancer, Parkinsons, MS and a superabundance of other diseases.
They only stayed with me for a few days and she could see that I was a skeptic and one day she told me to lie on the floor. I asked why and she told me she would prove to me that she was for real.
I wondered what she meant so I lay down and when I was down there she kind of sprawled across me – not in any kind of missionary position for sex – but across me, I think, as I had my eyes closed.
I opened them and looked at my pal and he took his book out on to the balcony to read. After a few minutes she got off me and asked me if I experienced anything – I said 'no – not really!!'
One day she said she should vacuum the apartment as my wife was away and another time when I cooked something for them she added a lot of balsamic vinegar and ruined the meal – I told her it was still acetic acid and didn't go with pasta.
Of course when she vacuumed she threw a lot of my notes away.
When they left that day I said goodbye and she said she would be in touch spiritually but I didn't hear another word and carried on shooting flies – oh I did hear from her once: about three-o-clock in the morning a month later she called to ask where my pal was and that he'd used the phone at her sister's house and didn't pay for the call. I told her it was three-o-clock in the morning and that she didn't pay me for her calls to Israel either!!
Oh by the way – before I go; I won something; my play, The 2 Sides of Eddie Ramone, won 'Best Play' in the solo festival I did at the Lord Stanley recently – how about that?
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