The first time I got shot (27)
So of course everybody eventually had their own pet junkie. (258)
I just trod on the neck of one of them while Tony did the other one in. (265)
Fat Jacques was our cook, who now doubled as the heroin dealer. . . . Jacques emerged because I said, “Who knows how to get some good shit around here?” (297)
We’d pull into Monte Carlo for lunch. Have a chat with either Onassis’s lot or Niarchos’s (300)
We use to go to Saint-Tropez to score all the bitches. (301)
And they threw us a bag of weed. And in exhange we told them which were the best whorehouses in town. [Socializing with a US Navy ship in the Mediterranean] (301)
Switzerland was my base for the next four years or so. I couldn’t live in France for legal reasons or in Britain for tax reasons. (337)
The way it was explained to me, the winner is the one who can make a quick horizontal cut across the other’s forehead. The blood will fall like a curtain. (345)
I don’t mind a polite arrest. It was their manners. (365)
One of my [Freddie Sessler] biggest pleasures has always been the ritual of opening a sealed bottle of cocaine. (373)
He [Marlon, his 7-year-old son] acted beyond his age. Necessary when we were being busted. “Er, Dad?” “Yeah?” (He’s waking me up, shaking me.) “The men in the blue suits are downstairs.”
And I didn’t know that I’d fractured three ribs on one side and perforated the other lung until a month later. (532)
My Recipe for Bangers and Mash (525)
Finally, one dawn when the time was running out, I said, for fuck’s sake, of course you can marry her [his daughter], and threw him a skull bracelet to remember the moment. (527)
There was Syphilis, a big wolfhound I had. (529)
I accidentally disposed of Ronnie’s pet parakeet. I thought it was a toy alarm clock that had gone wrong. (531)
Crocodile breath. You don’t want to feel it. (534)
It wasn’t too long after Mick’s ribbon cutting that he called me to say, I’ve got to tell you this now: Tony Blair is insisting that I accept a knighthood. (534)
[Paul McCartney] just turned up, said he’d found out where I lived from my neighbor Bruce Willis. (537)
And I had messages from Jerry Lee Lewis, from Willie Nelson too. Bill Clinton sent me a note, get well soon, my dear friend. The opening line of my letter from Tony Blair was “Dear Keith, you’ve always been one of my heroes . . .” England’s in the hands of somebody who I’m a hero of? It’s frightening. (542)
Indeed.
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Richards, Keith and James Fox. Life. 1st ed. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010.
