I remember the night I met Johnny Lizard, although I didn’t know it was he at the time. You can never be sure with Johnny. He was in London for once. He was working as always. He was in a bar as was often the case.
   And right in front of me, in the middle of the bar, he had just shot Chet Baker; it was in the middle of the closing bar of My Funny Valentine. Whoomph, a blinding flash left negative silhouettes dancing across the eyeballs, the Hasselblad captured the moment of trumpeting passion. I would soon come to learn that Johnny would forgive a lot of things, but he would never forgive a lack of passion.
   Rita Hayworth walked in, all tits and ass, she’d been working the streets. Rita the parking meter, there was always space for someone to park up for the night between those thighs. You just needed to feed the meter. She lurched up to Monty at the bar shaking the raindrops from her see-through plastic rain hood as Chet lurched into She Was Too Good to Me. It wasn’t his best evening, it wasn’t his worst, no matter, we knew we were in the presence of brooding talent.
   Whoomph. The smoke curled around in the bright afterglow, floating and curling around Johnny’s head in reptilian shapes as abstract and soft as the sounds from the aching Conn Constellation. The set over for now.
   Johnny walked up, his Calvados waited, Monty slid a green viper to Rita as I accompanied them on Bells.


   Johnny’s piercing blue eyes pierced Rita’s red dress, although there was little left to pierce. The room turned to conversation. We were just a mingle at the bar, early morning drinkers looking for an excuse not to go home. Johnny didn’t have far to go, he lived above. He lived above a Jazz club, why is it other people always lead exotic lives I thought as I wondered if I would be able to find a cab driver willing to take me back up to the exotica that was Muswell Hill.
   Monty asked if Johnny had got the shot? Johnny’s Plaistow origins pronounced themselves from the first syllable. He replied that he had got the real thing that afternoon in a more intimate setting. “I had been about to shoot Chet’s portrait and had told him that the first time that I had ever heard him play was when I was 13, Winter Wonderland on an EP entitled Chet Baker Quartet. “Yea,” Said Chet “with Russ Freeman, Bobbie Whitlock and Bobbie White on bass and drums.” Johnny took out the little, slightly crumpled Polaroid and placed it on the bar for Monty to see. “It was at that moment that I took the picture.” “Magic Johnny,” said Monty. Johnny replied that in every picture he took he tried to find that bit of magic, it doesn’t happen that often, he said, but today, for Johnny this was one of those times.
   Black and white deep hollow cheeks from the blowing all those years of jazz drugs, the Polaroid detailed the topography of a face with a story in every crease. The shot was so simple and so powerful, one of those images that in a one hundred and twenty fifth of a second captures the intensity of a lifetime. Monty passed the image to me with the due reverence it deserved. I could see that there was more to photography than just taking pictures.
   “Can I have it Johnny?” asked Rita with no intention of waiting for the reply. It wasn’t because she loved Chet or even photography, she was not known for her appreciation of the Arts. In fact once in a conversation with Johnny after he had been to a screening of Fellini’s 81/2 she had asked if it was an Italian porn film?
          I asked for another glass of ice with a shot of Bells in it Johnny took another Calvados.