TURN BACK THE TIME, BABE. BOOK 5. GIVING IT ALL MY SOUL

BABY, YOU'VE BEEN HAD

The huge Fairmont hotel ballroom looked indeed like a gloomy forest with those fifty dry trees serving as decoration. I took barely a break, the 80 reporters were my thing and as press secretary must help them in anyway they wanted. Therefore, the legendary party where it built up the urban legend of arranging huge orgies with sex and drugs was only work for me. Caroline was right, you needed a lot of different gifts to carry out that task. You must be always available, smiling, helpful and a thousand other things for the demanding media machinery.

It's true I was a natural born journalist but with barely experience. I've been working as one more than a year and with no respite I was in the middle of this adventure.

At the end the party went so wild that the Jazz record that it was supposed to be played there, never did. It was deliberately excessive, in part for the band's own enjoyment, in part for their friends could enjoy too and in part, what the hell, because they could.

The party was beyond any wild night. Just now the contracts were renegociating and so, that crazy fun would fulfill one double added mission: promoting the new record and meeting a good amount of executives to doing business. Leslie Hill, EMI chairman, their company outside the States ordered 52 staff members of the record company would travel there.

With snakes hanging from the ceiling, smoke machines turning the local constantly into a foggy place and all the display of luxury and decadence, the atmosphere wasn't precisely right to doing business at first sight. The japanese record executives were provided with dollar bills to being able to sneak them into the dancer's thongs. Strippers, exotic dancers, jugglers, contortionists, drag queens, wrestlers in bath tubs full of raw liver. Getting wild was a premise that night and if someone wanted to have any kind of sex, was able to do it wherever he felt like it. Under the tables were more than one intercourse. It was crazy.

Freddie looked radiant, happy and in his element. He watched everything curious with his beautiful eyes and felt completely identified with the party philosophy of "taking things to the extreme". It was HIS party and I didn't want any other way.

When he started to bit his lower lip restless I knew Queen would move to another promiscuous and lively place from New Orleans. My friend Sylvie Simmons, journalist from Sounds, went out with him and a little group of people to the heart of Bourbon Street to get on with the fun.

Deaky, looking so pure, so cute with his wool vest Oxford student style, was eager to change the place. I had still work at the Fairmont, had used Brian unmercifully like easy meat to the japanese press and they got him cornered, asking questions. It was time to go out of there and even Queen security staff couldn't wait to end their work. But the band had given a strict order that the ballroom wouldn't close before the dawn so they must keep there working till the end.

We stepped into one of the clubs in the heart of the french quarter and Brian seemed specially restless. His ice had just landed into his glass when he wanted to go some different place.