Mondo Desperado Read Online Free PDF Page B

scattered sweet papers, we
know in our hearts that he will never live to see the day when, before cheering crowds, he cruises homeward in that open-topped bus through streets bedecked with bunting.
    No, there shall be no evening walks in the seminary grounds, no private crises of conscience along the ‘gravelled circle of contemplation’ as small birds twitter in the evenings. For
these, like so many of my thoughts about him, now are but as wisps of cloud drifting across the skies of what might have been.
    Yes, he is far away now, that pale smiling boy whose soft hands once clasped his zippered missal of calf leather and whose precious words through smiling lips did promise ‘Someday I will
save the world!’, a sentiment which like the thinnest wisp of cloud slowly now makes its way silently above the rooftops, looking down upon me where I stand, moist-eyed, outside the New Pin
Cleaners, part of me lost for ever in a world that used to be, before Fish-hook Halloran, fate and the insouciance of an ‘all-seeing deity’ took the balloon of hope and, mockingly,
holding it aloft, repeatedly squeezed until we watched it, like a boy called Declan Coyningham one sad, seemingly innocent day one spring long ago, go ‘pop!’ before our very eyes.

My Friend Bruce Lee

Incredible as it may seem, the reputation of Bruce Lee as the supreme exponent of exhilarating, sweep-kicking kineticism is not yet secure, and it is indeed far from uncommon
to overhear comments so mind-numbingly ill-informed as to be almost stupefying. Comments such as: ‘This Bruce Lee fellow! What do you think of him? Is he all he’s cracked up to be, do
you think? To kung fu what Elvis was to rock and roll or a chopsocky fraud in a warm-up suit?’
    It is galling to have to acknowledge that this is the pitiful standard of commentary currently prevailing. And to have to further admit that these would-be – and arrogant, with it! –
commentators are not content to leave it at that, but will insist on you accompanying them to a coffee shop or hotel bar where they can proceed with their sententious pronouncements – with
your presumed approbation, of course! – not to mention heaping unnecessary derision on the shoulders of a man who, for almost the entire duration of the 1970s, was the undisputed king of
kick-boxing. And who, if he were alive today, would soon show these bumptious detractors – who persist in puff-chestedly proclaiming from the rooftops that he is not all he is ‘cracked
up’ to be – just what the word
cracked
really means! It would be straight over a banqueting table in a somersault and a fresh-fish-slapping-on-concrete kick in the jaw for them!
But I suppose we ought not be too severe, for, in the end, what can one do but feel pity for them?
    For the midgets, that is. For what else are they? If Bruce were alive today, it would take one glare – just one – from his intense, angular face, perhaps accompanied by a gym-towel
smack of his hand in the solar plexus, to dispose of a gratifying proportion of their intellectually diminutive number. And if that were to happen, I, for one, would have absolutely no compunction
about cheering on the air-slicing killing machine from Hong Kong. ‘Who’s the sick man of Asia now!’ I would cry, as he dispatched them like dominoes right across the floor of the
mah-jong parlour.
    A deafening silence is what we could expect to look forward to after that particular encounter.
    Ever since I completed my book
Bruce Lee and Me
, many people have come up to me and said: ‘Tell us, Helmet-Head’ – their nickname for me! – ‘which of all the
Big Boss’s films that you have seen would you consider to be your favourite?’ It is a question I hear time and again and yet, to this day, I have to confess that it is a teaser that
often comes very close to stumping me.
    What I found quite extraordinary about the man when I first encountered him was that he was quite unlike himself. By