There was this bar like a rooftop bar in Hamburg. This was in the ’90s so no one thought it was weird that it was themed tastefully on The Perfumed Garden, which is a fifteenth-century book on fucking written by a guy named Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Nafzawi. These days it is tolerably unlikely that a bar in a European nation would theme itself on an Arabic sex manual because you know there’s just a whiff of something a little culturally insensitive there plus also the world’s relationship with the, you know, Mysteries of Exotic Islam have shifted since Mike and the Mechanics had a hit with “Seeing Is Believing.” But back then even a decade later it was absolutely supercool to have German university students dressed as genies and houris and cheeky mujahideen and what all the fuck else prancing around bringing hookah pipes and affogato to the finance community. Do not ask me how the fuck that was okay I am not a hospitality person I do not even like people.

It being Hamburg there had to be a twist and the twist was that there were flamingos wandering around and if a flamingo stood on your table the house bought you champagne and the houris made a huge fuss about the whole thing.

Well enough but your flamingos for some reason don’t like to stand on tables especially they do not stand on tables covered in ashtrays and bottles of Cristal. It turns out that flamingos despite being associated with excess because they are pink they are real homebody types they do not appreciate bad smells or strong liquor and in fact these flamingos were depressed. They were becoming agitated and I think we can safely say even if Ronnie Platt hadn’t’ve come along they’d still have shut the place pretty soon. There is nothing sadder than drinking champagne with four dozen silent flamingos standing around in the grip of an existential crisis.

But Ronnie man Ronnie. Ronnie was a generous asshole and he could feel the sorrow and he figured to fix it. Ronnie figured that the flamingos were sad because they were captive and the night after I told the head of Lindo-Michaelsen to kiss my ring if he thought I was buying his crappy fauxlombian—I could smell the deceit on the fucking paperwork and I left him holding that warehouse full of shit and Jeni Sutton called me the Cardinal—the night after we were in the Garden. Ronnie was not real rational on account of having actually washed himself in vodka on the advice of some Swedish naturopath. He looked at one particular flamingo and it looked at him and some kind of thing passed between them like brotherhood and Ronnie shouted:

“FREEDOM!”

And he picked it up and he ran.

Ran like the wind.