The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. Stanley Booth

in a sharp and most often displeased nose, seemingly displeased just to be there. On this tour we would have many idiosyncratic drivers, including me, but none quite so bored, so butch, or so belligerent as Mimi. If she showed up when she was not needed she made it no secret that she could be having a better time elsewhere, and if she was needed her attitude was about the same. While most drivers would, if your luck held out, get you to your destination and wait or come back to pick you up, Mimi would if she cared to, and she cared to, accompany you wherever you went, so that she sat down to eat at the Aware Inn with Charlie and me, both of us struck numb by the violent chicness of the place. We were, it was clear, barely worthy of being accepted as customers – in fact the Japanese waiter poured wine on me to put me in my place – while Mimi, perfectly not to say blissfully unimpressed, somehow managed to chew gum and rattle her car keys throughout dinner. Charlie and I gulped a few bites and escaped, but the management was superciliously slow to take our not-with-it money, and we both registered disappointment when, once outside, we saw our car, left by Mimi at the curb, being towed away by an L.A. county sheriff’s department tow truck.

      ‘Isn’t that our car?’ Charlie asked.

      ‘Yeah,’ said Mimi, engaged as assiduously in smacking her gum and rattling her car keys as a Hindu mystic in the tintinnabulation of his little prayer bell.

      ‘Well, tell them to stop,’ Charlie said.

      ‘Hey, stop,’ said Mimi, as the car was pulled into the swiftly moving traffic to disappear in the night. A white Jaguar stopped at the curb before us, and we moved aside to let some aware people enter the Inn. It was late Sunday evening on the Strip, the sidewalk busy with kids who looked so strange that the police, walking by in pairs, gazed blankly into space trying not to see. ‘Maybe you’d better do something,’ Charlie told Mimi.