Squeeky. Squeaky clean? Squeaky Fromm? What does that even mean? Squeeky, in foot high letters on the ridged steel shutter of a doorway. The building’s blue, and long, with a clockface missing handles in between two tidy windows. It reminds me of the buildings in the Yellow Submarine.

A couple wander down the street, quiet in white tracksuits, plus on him, dark leather jacket. He craddles their child, murmering something, maybe in Russian, as she pushes an empty stroller.

A group of Chinese head in to the town, eight guys for every girl, dressed like money; but so tacky, two decades behind. I wonder if in twenty years, my kids will grin and saunter down a street in Shanghai or Hong Kong, migrant workers, rubes.

The street is soaked in dirt, but smells of nothing. Tatty buildings yawing, sagging, sitting, falling oh so slowly. In the quiet of the city, in the coffee coloured night. Where am I waiting?

It’s well known fact that I, Quim La Douche, am drawn, like a fish to a lovely bait, to strong women; and my current interviewee is no exception. Her firm grip on international relations has a hard tug on my loins, and we’re only ten minutes into the interview.

Born Conchita Maria Elvira Gonzalez, Albright’s path to international power brokeress was a strange one. In fact, much of the first forty years of her life were spent in menial servitude, as live in maid to Columbian impresario Pablo Baresco.
“You must have seen a lot of dirty laundry”, I yell above the surf, as our boards crest a thirty footer off Waimea.

Stunning in a neoprene Gucci wet suit, she hits an aerial barrel roll, the feet which burnt cheeky hoof prints into the corridors of power, rooted to her Bilabong, like willows.

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“Pat.”

“Frank.”

“Well.”

“Well.”

“Hows she cuttin?”

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Since starting as a hobby project in 2002, the Suicide Girls have become an internationally recognised brand, the ‘Gilmore Girls’ of Alt porn. With its host of interviews with intellectual iconoclasts, and an active, literate user community, the companies site - Suicidegirls.com - has become what the playboy mansion aspired to be in the mid 60’s - a mecca for the libertine intelligentsia.

Yet while financial success and critical acclaim have embraced the Suicide Girls, rubbing the sweet balm of profit into their tanned and pierced skinnybodies; controversy too has stalked them, like an ugly Greek outside a hip party in Notting Hill, with a zoom lens and a bowie-knife. Allegations that the Suicide Girls corporation has used convincing mannequins in some of their shoots, worse, poorly paid mannequins, have dogged the company. If there was any truth to such rumors, I, Quim La Douche, resolved to find it.

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Tommy thought that if he could only get his parents to divorce, then maybe everything would be ok. Pete Hoffman’s parents had split, his dad roaring off in their beat up old station wagon. Now in place of one gruff business dad, with a dirt collard shirt and a loud voice, Pete had a string of cool new dads. One had a motorbike and smoked marijuana cigarettes on the Hoffman’s back porch. Another drove a firetruck red convertible, with a two foot CB antenna.

Pete said you could tell a lot about a dad from his means of transportation. If he had a car or a truck, with enough seats to carry a family, it meant he’d be sweaty and quiet, and wouldn’t kid around while he waited for your mom to get ready for their date. If he drove something fast, with only a couple of seats, he’d probably bring candy and chat with you about TV shows and comic books. The best example of this last kind of dad was the motorcycle guy, who’d once given Pete sixteen dollars just to buy cigarettes from the drug store a couple of blocks over.

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‘It’s been a controversial move, but ultimately I think the right one. We looked at the success of shows like Girls gone Wild, Family Business, and Girls of Playboy Mansion, and thought, you know, why not?’

Adult film sets are often bleak places, populated by coked out former state beauty queens, with stretch marks and loan repayments. Not so here. The cast of ‘Special Stephanie’ are all smiles, goofing off between takes. ‘Suzie Suze’, another emerging star, runs by me giggling, her mouth caked with peanut butter and crusty jam. She’s chased by a boom operator wielding a Super Soaker. There’s a real family atmosphere on set. I ask Pim Champagne, CEO of ShortBus Video, and the genius behind the award winning series ‘Young, Dumb, and Full of Plum’, about this difference.

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Harry spit. He had an ulcer. I looked away, disgusted. Above us the ladder stretched out of sight, hooked at intervals into the crooked granite face. The ladder was really just two steel cables, and between them, every yard or so, a knotted plank, nailed into the rock. Getting Jessie up there would be murder.

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Ms Kettle stood listening at the foot of the stairs. The building was a converted Georgian mansion. Its top floor housed an office and its first and second floors had been bisected into sought after apartments. As Ms Kettle waited, it gradually assumed a kind of silence.

Old buildings are never completely quiet. Wood floors shift and settle as the night grows cold. Pipes and pluming gurgle wise lead bellied secrets. Tiles flinch and rattle at the slightest clutch of breeze. But it was mostly quiet now the Cutlers were asleep.

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BigMac moaned, his stick was too short. He couldn’t reach the wet mat of infected flesh that burned in the small of his back. He released the mop and it stayed where it was, wedged between his smooth hide and the flattened mattress.

He moaned again, a deep sonorous low, like a ships foghorn emerging from the salty dark. There is an idea. An idea of a voice, so mellifluous that it’s sound can bind the mind, can infiltrate like the song of a succubean siren. Helen had a voice like that, and jet black hair, straight and glossy like a light freshwater stream. She spoke now, gently stroking BigMac’s bulk with her curled fingers.

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‘I miss him.
Maybe it’s not that I miss him. I guess I just miss sleeping next to someone.
You know, it’s not even that.. I just sort of miss having somebody thinking about me. Somebody to cuddle. Someone I could give a damn about.
Maybe I just miss saying I love you.
He wasn’t perfect. Pretty nuts, objectively. And we had so little in common.
He was so immature, so messed up. I’m not even sure if I loved him, how can you tell?’

I shuffled foot to foot uncomfortably. Christ, but Peter’s eulogy was overly honest.

Before us, Henry’s tiny casket sat on canvas sheeting next to the grave. It’s size a tragic reminder of his youth.

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