The Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll

Glorianna O'Toole had seen better times and worse.

At the occasional peaks of her long career, she had opened for the likes of Pearl and the Airplane and Springsteen, and had even gotten out two solo albums of her own, though neither had come within a light year of ever shipping gold.

At various karmic nadirs, she had been reduced to dealing acid in the Haight, suffered through a two-year amphetamine jones, and been forced to sing voice-overs in cheap tv commercials.

In between the heights and depths, which is to say most of her forty years as a rock and roll singer, she had done more back-up work on other people's albums than she cared to remember now, had taken an endless succession of tank-town tours of the universe, and while it had taken her a very long time to stop hoping for better, who could say that it had not been one long blast?

Certainly not the self-styled Crazy Old Lady of Hock and Roll as she tooled along the freeway in her monstrous old Rolls-Royce convertible.

She had lacked into a deal on the car as the buyout of his debt on a fucked-up coke deal by a rock star who need be nameless, her sometime lover and never again partner, who had laid it on her as a basket case. Over the years, with this and that score, she had used her charms to have it lovingly restored at cut-rate prices by the best in the business. It hadn't even started out as a convertible. That had been done as a surprise birthday present by Sam Perry to get her over her case of the over-thirty-five blues. Replacing all the metalwork with solid brass she had done slowly over the years at her own expense. The free paint job must have cost her thousands in retouching over the past ten years, but who could slap a new coat of lacquer over such a work of art?

One mad afternoon, she had turned on a trio of New York graffiti artists to mescaline for the first time at her Laurel Canyon tree house. Within two hours, they had turned the Rolls into their piece de resistance with their spray cans, not so surprising, since in those days one of those dudes was capable of putting up a throw on a whole subway car in thirty minutes.

But Glorianna's Rolls had been a unique throw even then, a fitting memorial to the lost art, for there, under the shade of the eucalyptus, looking out over Los Angeles to the Pacific on a clear mescaline-blue day, these three refugees from Manhattan had been moved to create what may have been the world's only example of graffiti pastorale, a phantasmagorical stylized arabesque rendering of mountains, and sea, and sunset, of the jeweled cityscape of night and the night city of the stars, all done up in brilliant blues, and forest greens, and neon swirls, and of course with the Hollywood sign rendered in psychedelic gold across both front door panels.

The stereo system, on the other hand, was a much more recent manifestation of her current ectoplasmic means of support. This she had suggested Tod Benjamin lay on her back when he was still president of Muzik, Inc., in return for procuring certain necessary substances for obstreperously sensitive talent.

Glorianna had her scruples about actually dealing dope. Long experience had taught her that the paranoia of dealing was terminally bad for the psyche, and morality insisted that participating in the obscene profiteering that had been going on for the last twenty-five years was karmic poison to the soul. But if she could assist the needy without becoming one of the greedy, well that was her good deed for the day, and it certainly was worth a present from the Factory's A&R budget.

Glorianna had been luscious jailbait when she hit the Haight in sixty-six, a sexy rock and roll queen in her long youth, a red hot mama in the flower of her maturity, and now, with her pipes long since honorably retired, and her looks gone to gray hair and wrinkles, the Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll got by on her chutzpah and her connections.

And north of forty years in rock and roll had cushioned her shaky retirement as a singer with plenty of both. Though part of the karmic contract seemed to be that none of them had held her full interest for more than a year or two, a red hot mama of a sometime lead singer who really knew how to boogie had had her pick of lovers well through her fourth decade, and while none of them had stuck as her one and only, more of them than not were still her friends.

And inevitably, since she had met so many of them through the music business, and since all of them had long since reached their mature years, a good many of them were placed where they could assist her in her survival enterprises.

So if Glorianna's golden years were not exactly financially sound, at least she was well set up to boogie through them. The mortgage on the house had long since been paid off, the Rolls she owned outright, she made sure she had more dinner invitations than she could ever accept, she hadn't had to pay for getting loaded in twenty years, she had instant imperious access to the freebie list of every club and concert in the known universe, and so all she really needed money for was gas, clothes, utilities, and metabolic enhancers.

It was by way of obtaining a fresh supply of same that she had deigned to take a meeting with Billy Beldock at the Muzik Factory. For while she loathed just about everything that Muzik, Inc., had done to rock and roll, even the Crazy Old Lady thereof could hardly afford to turn down an offer to talk business from the latest president to pass through the revolving door of the conglomerate monstrosity that had come to so utterly dominate the music business.

Glorianna took the Wilshire exit off the 405, and sailed through the traffic east on Wilshire amid the usual bug-eyed stares a couple of blocks beyond Westwood Boulevard to the Muzik Factory.

This was a twenty-story tower of mirror glass the color of a motorcycle cop's shades. Rainbow glass pillars ran up the four corners to form a false deco pagoda roof at the top supporting the Factory logo—"Muzik" lettered in gold like notes beneath a tie-line. At night, they ran laser beams through the whole thing, so that it reminded Glorianna of some ancient Mafia jukebox in a sleazy Valley bar.

An appropriate corporate image for Muzik, Inc., as far as Glorianna was concerned.

For while no one could accuse Muzik, Inc., of being owned by some petty mob of gangsters from Sicily or yaks from Yokohama, the yaks and the maf could certainly learn something about big league sleaze from the Muzik Factory.

Muzik, Inc., pressed forty-five percent of the videodiscs sold in the United States, and moved the lion's share of them through their own nationally franchised chain of Muzik Stores. They had Muzik clubs in New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, and San Francisco. They had a string of twenty-four-hour music tv stations all across the country hoping their own product. They were to the music business what I.B.M was to the computer industry or McDonald's still was to greaseburgers, and somehow there was nothing that what was left of the antitrust division of the Justice Department cared to do about it. They were employing people, weren't they?

Glorianna showed her permanent pass, parked in the underground garage, and took the express elevator to the twentieth floor. Even here there was a screen and quad speakers subjecting her to the national satellite feed from MUZIK, some dead-ass plastic max metal thing with a ton of swagger and rubber underwear and a spec sheet for a soul.

Oh yes, Muzik, Inc., had by far the biggest payroll in the music business, for sure they employed more people than they would like. They employed techs to program the production robots in their disc factories, and they employed bartenders, bouncers, waitresses, and assorted flunkies in their clubs, and they employed five vjs and a small team of workers to beam the MUZIK feed to their satellite and maybe a hundred or so others to handle it at the tv stations at the other end.

But mostly they employed the people who turned out this shit.

They didn't employ drummers or keyboard players or guitarists or any other kind of sessions musicians. They employed instead VoxBox wizards who could replace bands, orchestras, and even back-up vocalists, with a keyboard, a vocoder, and a black box full of wizardware.

They employed platoons of shrinks and unemployed former Pentagon psy-war spooks to think up best-selling scenarios for their songhacks and VoxBox mercenaries to turn into lyrics and music, and they employed producers and sound crews to record the audio, and once in a while they even still hired cameramen to shoot some footage their image organ hacks couldn't quite conjure up from raw bits and bytes or stock footage.

And of course Muzik, Inc., was an endless gravy train for pr people, market experts, demographic analysts, disc pluggers, and the “consultants” who were the beneficiaries of their freebies, among them, admittedly, Glorianna herself.

The ubiquitous Muzik motto assaulted her eyes as the elevator doors opened onto the twentieth floor. Even here at the top, the golden letters were emblazoned on the wall directly across from the elevator bank, as if nobody in the Muzik Factory, and especially the head honcho of the moment, had better forget it:

“muzik is Music!”

Maybe, Glorianna thought sourly, but it sure ain't Rock and Roll!

The head honcho of the current moment, Billy Beldock, sat in the familiar black leather throne in the big corner office with the frazzled look of a man who expected to have it yanked out from under him at any moment.

Glorianna, over the years, had seen many asses perched in the black leather chair behind the big polished gunmetal desk, and over the years they had changed the president's office little.

There were two picture-window walls—one gazing up at the eternal dream of Hollywood, at the houses and condos and villas glitzing and glittering up the hills, the other looking out from on high over the vast smog-shrouded barrio of lowland Los Angeles, where most of the city's people struggled for survival, an endless genteel faevela in full sight of the city on the hill. As if to say to all who entered here, there but for show biz, go you, kiddo, no matter how far you've managed to climb, your plug can always be pulled.

There was a wall-sized video screen with the current state-of-the-art decks, and there was a whole wall of miniature yellow videodiscs to remind the current occupant of the gold shipped by his predecessors, just in case he missed the point.

The only possible personal touches were changes of incidental furniture and bric-a-brac, since the sadist who had designed the president's office had cleverly seen to it that there was no blank wall upon which to hang personal artwork.

Billy had filled the place with the sort of horrendous mismatched collection of antique French couches and chairs that decorators used to embellish the waiting rooms of superstar transplant surgeons.

Poor Billy certainly looked uncomfortable in this ultimate motel room of music industry power as he sat there in a two-thousand-dollar powder-blue suit smiling peculiarly at her with his shoulders hunched slightly, as if to say with some embarrassment, “What a long strange trip it's been.”

He had been a drummer back in the early seventies when they were lovers, not a great one, but a real rock and roller, and good enough to keep himself riding around in a Porsche. When sophisticated Drumulators and percussion synthesizers enlisted drummers in the great army of the unemployed, Billy had read the writing on the video screen wall well enough to go with the wizard ware rather than go out rockin' with his drum kit. He got hold of one of the early primitive VoxBoxes, went with the enemy, became the producer of some early VoxBox hits, and gained entry to the business end, and now, here he was, at the top of the corporate pyramid, about to have his heart ripped out and sacrificed to the Great God of the Sacred Bottom Line, by the look of him.

“You look like an old man, Billy,” Glorianna replied, resting her bones as best she could on the uncomfortable chair in front of the desk.

Actually, as a physical specimen of mature manhood, Billy still really wasn't so bad. He kept his body trim with the best metabolic enhancers, he gardened his luxuriant crop of long silver-gray hair with expensive German scalp fertilizer, and he had the perfect leathery tan of endless weekends in Hawaii and Mexico.

But as John Lennon once observed, one thing you can't hide is when you're crippled inside.

Billy shrugged, and grimaced owlishly at her. From the Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll, the president of Muzik, Inc., would take this shit; indeed, he craved it, as Glorianna knew full well. Her attitude was her major stock-in-trade in these dim days with all these poor old rockers who had become the people they had long ago warned themselves about. Oh, yes, they could feel like winners feeling sorry for this poor old broken-down anachronism from their musical prehistory, but some sad part of them needed to know that Glorianna O'Toole still felt sorry for them.

“Yeah, well, I'm not going to get very much older in this chair unless I start shipping some A.P gold,” Billy said frankly. “The stuff just isn't making it big enough, and our stock is down seven points from its fifty-two-week high.”

“Maybe there is a God, after all, and maybe he knows how to boogie.”

“Aw, come on, Glorianna, you know that A.P's have to be the future of the industry,” Billy whined. “It's too cost-effective not to be inevitable.”

“But it does work!” Billy insisted. “I got here proving it, didn't I? We're shipping respectable numbers on Lady Leather and Gay Bruce and the Velvet Cat and even Mucho Muchacho, and nobody outside the industry even believes the rumors that they're A.P's. I just haven't been able to come up with a big hit, is all. You just don't want to believe we can synthesize a major league rock star.” Having long since replaced sessions musicians and back-up singers with VoxBox cyberwizards, Muzik, Inc., had turned their cost-cutting attention to automating out rock stars themselves. They collected big royalties, didn't they? They were egotistical pains in the ass who frequently showed up at recording sessions stoned or not at all. They didn't want to listen to the demographic experts or the marketing department; they wanted the songhacks to turn out material to their own specs.

Fuck 'em! Who needed 'em? Let's replace them with Artificial Personalities who we don't have to pay royalties to and who won't give us any prima-donna shit!

The wizardware was certainly there. Journeyman VoxBox players had been synthesizing back-up vocals out of voice programs for years, syncing them to the bass or counterpoint line, so in theory all you had to do was play the synthetic voice track with the instrumental lead, and you had yourself a lead singer. As for the visual persona, A.P's starred in half the tv commercials made, and you couldn't tell the footage from something shot with a live actor. You gave your image organ player a still photo and he danced it through the bits and bytes, or even created an A.P visual out of pure specs if the little nerd insisted on being a cyberpurist.

What was more, Muzik, Inc., had turned hit-making into a science, hadn't it? The psychological profiles of the total mass audience had been broken down into fine demographic slices, and the boys in the research department had a trillion kilobytes of words, images, rhythms, chord progressions, and inaudibles keyed into their inner mythic structure. And the marketing department, making full use of the Muzik clubs, and the Muzik Stores, and MUZIK was for sure the Big Green Machine.

So why had Lady Leather and Mucho Muchacho and the Velvet Cat and the rest of Muzik, Inc.'s, stable of well-crafted A.P software never shipped gold or cracked the charts with a megahit?

If this was an arcane mystery to poor Billy and everyone else who had forgotten the obvious, it was crystal-clear to Glorianna O'Toole, and anyone who had to ask was never going to find out.

“That soulless crap is to the real thing as white bread is to pumpernickel,” she declared from the bottom of her heart. “It's—” “I know, I know,” Billy sighed, joining her on the chorus.

“It's just not Rock and Roll.”

Billy laughed; he reached into a drawer and came out with a dust kit, a silver mirror, a golden straw, a tiny golden switchblade that he snicked open with a flourish, and a crystal vial of the blue powder. And for a moment he was forty years younger, laying out lines for her in one of the hundreds of motel rooms they had once shared together.

“I haven't become quite that much of an asshole, Glorianna,” he said as he cut a pile of the synthetic into hits. “I know what's missing. That's why you're here today.”

“It is?” Glorianna said with a sinking feeling, grabbing for the mirror. “Give me some of that designer dust, will you? I've got the feeling somehow that I'm really gonna need it.”

She tooted up a line of the tailored blow, so much better than the crude Peruvian extract of her youth and middle years that an old doper like her needn't worry about overtaxing her cheaply enhanced metabolism or developing a jones again in her dotage. Soft on the nose, sweet to the taste, nonaddictive, and a blast of energy to the brain. Just what the geriatrician ordered.

“Look, Glorianna, we've got one of the best young VoxBox players in the business, Sally Genaro. And we got Bobby Rubin, who's the absolute state of the art on the image organ. They've both worked on A.P discs before, so we know the wizard ware is there, and we know that these kids can make it do anything. …”

“Except boogie.”

Billy shrugged. He did a line of dust. “So she's a little fat girl from the Valley and he's a second-generation computer nerd,” he admitted. He beamed at her falsely. “That's why we want you.”

“To do what?” Glorianna demanded dubiously, declining another hit with an imperiously upraised palm.

"To make them boogie."

“Huh?”

Billy leaned back in his chair and played presidential. “For old times' sake, I'm about to give you the chance of a lifetime,” he declared expansively.

“I'll bet you are, Billy,” Glorianna said with dripping sarcasm.

“I kid you not, Glorianna, I'm offering you a chance to be a producer. Ten grand a month. Four-month trial period. All you have to do is get these kids to come up with one A.P rock star that ships gold two discs in a row and I'll give you a three-year contract.” “Fuck you, Billy,” Glorianna said genially.

“Aw, come on, don't bullshit a bullshitter, I know you need the money, but okay, okay, twelve grand a month, that's really as far as I'm going to go.”

“You want me to produce an A.P rock star?” Glorianna said with angry passion. “You want me to take the bullshit cranked out by your songhacks and your marketing department's specs and somehow get two dead-ass cyberwizards to spin it into gold? You want me to collaborate in the creation of a best-selling rock star who exists only as software?”

"You got it," Billy said approvingly. "You'll be in charge. We'll give you sets of specs, and you choose which ones to go with. You can order up whatever you like from whichever songhacks you choose.

Do it your way. Give me a viable A.P rock star, I don't care how."

“Why me?” Glorianna said, and she found herself up and pacing before she could think about it. “You know how I feel about A.P's, you know how much I hate the whole idea, you know as well as I do that a disc with no soul will never be real rock and roll!”

“Two out of three ain't bad,” Billy said.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Billy Beldock leaned across his desk, pushing the dust kit toward her, and practically purred at her, the way he had the very first night that the sexy young drummer had coaxed her into bed. He even gave her what was left of his bedroom eyes.

“Why you, Glorianna?” he said slyly. “Because you're the Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll. Because inside that, ah, mature body, there still beats the heart of a rock and roll queen. Your voice is gone, and you hardly ever wrote your own material, and you can't play the VoxBox or the image organ, but what you've got left is all that we need to complete the equation, the soul without which, as you say, no disc can ever really be rock and roll.”

“What a line of bullshit,” Glorianna scoffed. But she sat down and tooted another line of free dust as Billy Beldock spun out his temptation.

“Look at it this way, Glorianna, you'd be falling all over me in gratitude if I was offering to let you take a band and some songwriters and a raw lead singer with technical virtuosity and try to turn them into the Beatles or the Rolling Stones at our expense even if I wasn't paying you twelve thou a month for the privilege; can you deny that with a straight face?”

Before she could answer, he had snorted another line, and was off and running again. “So what's the difference? Like the man says, it's not the singer, it's the song, right, so if a disc needs soul to ship gold, then if it ships gold, it's real rock and roll, and what's the difference between a live lead singer and a wizard piece of software when you pop it in your disc deck? Either way, all you really see or hear is a digital playback.”

“Even if it were possible, even if I could really do it, it would be wrong, Billy,” Glorianna said quite earnestly.

"Would you mind explaining why?" Billy said smugly.

“Because... because ...” She threw up her hands. “Because you fucking can't make real music without a single real musician! Jesus H. Christ, Billy!”

“For sure!” Billy Beldock agreed. “But don't you see—that's you!” “Me? I don't write lyrics, I don't write music, I can't play anything, and my voice is shot! I don't have any way to make music anymore, goddammit!”

"Wouldn't I like to whatf?"

"If we conjure up Mucho Muchacho or the Velvet Cat out of nothing but chips, programming, and data base, we can sure as shit do you, Glorianna," Billy cooed. "Think of it, your cyborged comeback at the age of sixty-three! We could take your cracked old voice and run it through vocoders that will make it better than young again, better than you or anyone else ever was back when you were never quite good enough to have a real career as a recording artist. We could lay down visual tracks in which you'll be what you were in the sixties, young and beautiful, and solarized forever. You just do the best you can and our wizards will cyborg you into a superstar. Wouldn't that be real rock and roll?"

“Fuck a duck. . . Glorianna whispered softly. “You really could do that, couldn't you?”

The president of Muzik, Inc., just smiled a shit-eating smile. “You squeeze an A.P rock star that ships gold two discs in a row out of my little cyberwizards, and we do you next,” he said.

Glorianna snorted a line up her left nostril. “Do I have to sign a contract in blood?” she asked, and took another up the right.

“I gather I've made you an offer you can't refuse?” Billy Beldock said.

Glorianna's brain was working in overdrive now. Sure, giving Muzik, Inc., what they thought they wanted would seem to be treason to the spirit of everything she had ever been or believed in.

Nevertheless, she felt that long-remembered spirit moving through her now like the music of a braver and grander age waiting to be reborn through her frail and age-drained body and wizardware circuitry.

Because if by some miracle she succeeded, if she could somehow fulfill her end of the bargain with the corporate powers, why then the assholes would get far more than they had ever bargained for. They would get themselves the Glorianna O'Toole that had never existed except in her heart of hearts.

For forty years and more, her one great dream had been to become, if only for one shining hour, the great voice of that spirit which had now all but vanished from the world. And if it was given to her to become at this late date, through the machineries of the enemy, the reigning queen of rock and roll she had never in her youth quite been, why then real rock and roll might yet be reborn, and with a vengeance that the powers that be would not like at all.

Because real rock and roll was music that kicked their kind of ass.

And for the chance to do that great deed this close to the end of her road, she would indeed have signed on the dotted line with Satan.

“Billy, my love,” she told the president of Muzik, Inc., almost gaily, “you've made me an offer that you can't understand.”

Paco Monaco, Mucho Muchacho

Nada, man, zip!

Paco Monaco had scored nothing in the past eight days—no dinero, no chocha, no wire, and now the wan October sun was oozing down the flinty gray sky over East Fourteenth Street, and it was La Hora Frontera of another wasted day.

You're getting too old for this shit, muchacho, Paco told himself once more. La Hora Frontera did this to him lately, he hated this twilight time between day and night in his bones, even as the gordos feared it in their tight white culos, if not for quite the same reason.

One by one the lights behind the windows of the Stuyvesant Town co-op towers on the north side of the street were coming on as the hordes of the gainfully employed sidled nervously past him into the safety of their nighttime holes. The zonies guarding the open gate in the high electrified barbed-wire fence paced in paranoid little circles stroking their Uzis, and then the mercury vapor spots snapped on, searing the cracked gray pavement with cruel television-blue light.

Without conscious thought, Paco found himself dashing reflexively across the gutter to the sombre side of the street like a roach scuttling into the shadowland beneath the sink after the kitchen light came on.

He stood there with an empty street-bag in the shadows by the stoop of a burnt-out building staring across the Line at the ancient redbrick apartment houses and cursed himself for the pettiness of his longings.

For he was still haunted by the faded early childhood memories of a life inside the walls of a project not that much unlike this one, over on Avenue D, when he, and his mother, and his two sisters, and two teenaged uncles had lived in the two-bedroom apartment of his abuelos. Memories of hot stuffy steam-heated winters and sweaty stinking summers, of rancid cooking odors, and farts, and toilet sounds, and the cries and grunts of fucking.

There had been real food daily in those long-lost days; chicken hearts with spicy rice, cuchifritos, eggs, Coca-Cola, bread, and cheese, and even the occasional ice cream.

Hijito, those were the days, his mother had never stopped telling him, after Abuelo Gutierrez had lost his job in the garment center, after the Devaluation, after the welfare checks dwindled away to a daily ration of kibble, when she staggered back, stinking of wine and cum, to whatever shithole they happened to be squatting in after a long night of hooking.

And then one morning when he was maybe fourteen, she just never came back, oh-deed, knifed in an alley, busted, quien sabe, and chingada, here he was seven years later, wishing he were what, some pale white gordo with a shit-ass job pushing a rack in the garment district or sweeping the floor of Macy's, with a quarter share in one of these two-bedroom co-ops, and a fat momacita he was too tired to fuck?

"Chingada, man, you just need some wire," he muttered aloud to himself as he turned on his heel, kicking a paper Coke cup to vent his ire, and headed west along the sombre side of Fourteenth.

But the thing of it was that wire required dinero, and he had been Ciudad Nada for eight days now, and there were only two ways he knew to score.

He could head over to West Street or someplace even worse and sell his dick or his culo to some disgusting old maricon, which he had not had the stomach to do since he turned sixteen, or he could cruise Round the Corner and hope to catch some stupid gordo too stoned to know when he crossed over the Line.

Of course that was just what he had been doing for these past eight days, but mostly up in midtown, where the Line between sombre and sol was clearly drawn by the city cops, and the gordos scurried around in hordes for safety like cucarachas, and Round every Corner lurked little gangs of streeties with a muy malo attitude about solos poaching their turf.

Verdad, during the nine-to-five, the gordos ruled Ciudad Trabajo, the world of gleaming glass canyons in mirror shades, of crumbling loft-factory buildings watched over by hard-eyed zonies, and natch at night, the vecino was deserted by prey and predators alike. When the sun went down, the plushie-tushies retreated in cabs and limos to the Zones—Upper West, Sutton, Lincoln Center, Park Plaza, Soho, 'Beca—where it was all town houses, glitz palaces, fancy restaurants, floodlights, and whole armies of zonies with a license to blow you away just for showing your brownskinned face.

And the gordos, by their sweaty little millions, stuffed themselves into the subway for the ride home to their half-a-room share in a co-op; even now Paco felt the rumble of an IRT in the soles of his feet, and oh, yes, it was tempting to think of all those assholes with money in their pockets passing right beneath him in the subterraneo!

But no one with the street smarts to survive in N'York for ten minutes was dumb enough to try a crash and grab in El Sub. If the transit cops didn't frag your ass—or write you a long ticket to Rikers if they were feeling mellow—fifty-seven vigilantes would fill you full of holes. Even ancient abuelas packed 0.357s in El Sub. Or streeties themselves would carve you into cuchifritos, for the same reason you wouldn't win any popularity contest by shifting where they slept, either.

Between Halloween and Easter, a million streeties would probably freeze to death if the city chose to clear El Sub at night by pumping through tear gas, which they did now and again when it threatened to become too much of a combat zone for the gordos to ride to Ciudad Trabajo. Every streetie knew that the plushie-tushies were more than willing to watch a million of them turn to corpsicles in the gray winter slush before they would let it come to that.

The sun was just about down by the time Paco reached the corner of Fourteenth and Avenue A, and, as it usually did, his black funk began to dissolve as La Hora Frontera faded into Noche Nuestra. For as surely as the day belonged to the gordos and the plushie-tushies, with their nine-to-fives, and their dinero, and their zonies, so did the night belong to el pueblo sombre, to the people of the streets, to fist and knife, to shadow and cojones, at least here, just Round the Corner from both Boho and Tompkins Square Park.

The park itself was an oasis of grass and benches well-lit by the golden globes of phony antique streetlamps and patrolled by plainclothes zonies. There were town houses along its Tenth Street side and fancy co-ops along Avenue A and Sixth. Farther west, up and down First and Second Avenues, were the main-drag midways of Boho, also known as the East Village, chockablock with bars, restaurants, galleries, boutiques, and gourmet bodegas. The glitz promenaded eastward to Tompkins Square across St. Marks and Sixth Street, but half the turf bordered by Second Avenue and Avenue C, by Fourteenth and Houston, had been left Round the Corner on the sombre side of the street.

Because the gordos and the plushie-tushies who favored this turf were assholes who actually wanted it that way; pervos and dopers, artsy-farts and wire-chippers, who got off on skirting the sombre, on slumming it in luxury, on the adrenaline rush of knowing what lurked in the shadows for the unstreet wise, on being able to score wire and meat just Round the Corner from their well-armored front doors.

They didn't want any city cops here, oh no, muchacho, and they had the dinero to grease them away, and the zonies they hired were wireheads and junkies, sometimes even streeties with ambition, and they dealt wire and dope and meat on the side. They let you wander up and down the midways as long as you didn't look like you were ready to crash and grab or deal on their turf, and Tompkins Square Park was a primo mercado, where the gordos and plushie-tushies could bump bellies with tu putamadre, and score cheap snorts and overpriced wire likely as not to fry their brains.

Paco despised these cabrones with a brainburning hard-on of contempt and envy, and yet he was drawn to this vecino as he was to the wire, and indeed, the charge that he got on these streets and the flash of plugging in to the Prong were from a certain angle one and the same.

Plugged in to the Prong, with his dick hard and hot as an electrified switchblade, and every muscle of his body as taut and twanging as oiled spring steel, and a primo Mucho Muchacho disc blasting max metal into his ears, and Mucho himself leering and dancing and singing to the hunger of his soul, ah, he was no longer Hernan Gutierrez, the cockroach son of his putamadre, but Paco Monaco, muy macho muchacho, ready, able, and more than willing to fuck the world of the gordos up its tight white culo!

So too, out here just Round the Corner from the cockteasing world of look but don't touch, from these chocharicas in their slick silver leather jeans wiggling past him with their little noses in the air, from these pasty white maricones with their pockets full of dinero and their pants full of shriveled cojones, did he feel his street-hard muscles taut against his skin, his cock bulging against the zipper of his dirty pants, his brain burning with the streetwise knowledge that one wrong move, one false step Round the wrong Corner, and any one of these soft creatures would find themselves on the sombre side for real, would meet the bruising for which they were cruising, Paco Monaco, the true macho man.

Bouncing on the balls of feet now, flashing challenging sneers at the men and lip-sucking kisses at their women, both of which were studiously ignored, Paco turned west off crowded Avenue A onto Ninth Street, a narrow shadowy block of renovated five-story tenements with few shops and many garbage can storage areas below street level under the stoops. Seeing that the block was for the moment deserted, he ducked into the nearest of these alcoves and hunkered there in the dark, with his back against a garbage can and his eyes level with the pavement, and waited.

The buildings on this block had for the most part been converted into the sort of co-op apartments inhabited by young wage-slave migrants from Cleveland or Long Island who were willing to fork over two-thirds of their salaries to cram themselves three or four to a two-bedroom for the privilege of living where the action was. Meaning, first, that the gordos on this block couldn't afford their own zonies, and second, that they sometimes staggered home alone and loaded from some meatrack or singles bar over on First or Second after striking out with the muchachas.

Paco squatted there in the darkness below the sidewalk for what began to seem like several hours as gordos drifted by in groups of three or four or five, jabbering to each other, entering buildings across the street, passing joints, sniffing dust from aluminum bullets, out of reach, and indifferently unaware of who crouched impatiently waiting to pounce just Round the Corner beneath their feet.

His ankles were getting numb, his patience was getting mighty thin, and he was thinking of packing it in and trying elsewhere, when the sound of a single set of footfalls coming up the sidewalk toward him on his side of the street gave hope that his long streak of mala suerte might be about to change.

He rose to a standing crouch, wriggling the numbness out of his feet, as he saw his prey approaching, lookin' good! A young dude in fancy blue leather pants, trendy gunmetal boots, and a white linen jacket, long curly black hair, slimly built, and at about five eight, giving away about three inches to Paco. Though the gordo's face was hidden from this angle, he was walking a little loose around the knees, seemed a little loaded.

Buena suerte! Paco thought as the dull metallic boots of his victim came even with his eyes. This maricon for sure I can handle!

Still crouched in shadow, Paco tiptoed to the front of the garbage can pit and grabbed hold of both ankles. Before the asshole even had time to scream, he yanked with all of his strength, pulled him down into the darkness, let go, socked him in the kidneys, flipped him around by the left arm as he fell to the concrete, came down on the dude's chest with one knee, got him in the cojones with the other, clamped his left hand around his Adam's apple, choking off his wind, and cocked his right fist back about two feet from his face.

“One sound, motherfucker, and I break your motherfucking face!” he snarled, pressuring his knee into the gordo's cojones for emphasis.

"Q-q-que pasa Paco looked down at the bug-eyed, choking face of his terrified victim. And instead of some pasty-faced gordo, he saw a brownskinned, dark-eyed muchacho not that much older than himself, with a pencil-line moustache and a thin little puberda goatee.

He froze for a moment as he locked eyes with this unsettling mirror-image of himself as he might have been, wearing a thousand dollars' worth of clothes, and playing macho man with the rica gorda chochas in the fancy make-out bars on Second Avenue. He hated this slick little Blankriqueno would-be gordo with a sudden blood-burning passion. But he also envied this motherfucker with a sickening longing, and what was worse, he couldn't keep himself from knowing it. Nor could he keep down the shameful feeling that he was betraying something he could not quite fathom.

“Tu dinero, puberda shithead, what the fuck you think I want, chingar tu culo?” he hissed.

“Hey, amigo—”

“No amigo me, maricon motherfucker!” Paco said, squeezing the throat harder in stomach-twisting fury. “Ponga tu dinero, or I rip your prick off, hijo de gorda puta!”

A look passed between them then, a wounded yet superior contempt behind the very real fear in the eyes of his victim, a guilty acknowledgment of that truth in the eyes of Paco. Then, without looking away, without breaking that accusatory stare, the arrogant little son of a bitch reached into his pocket and pulled out his wallet.

Paco snatched it up with his free hand and fumbled free a thin sheaf of bills.

“That's all you got, man?” he complained.

“No soy gordo rico, hermano. Por favor, let me keep mi plastico, you can't use it, and it'll be a motherfucker convincing the man I'm not running no number. Tu sabes que pasa, amigo?”

Paco's grip loosened. “I don't want your fuckin' credit cards!” he said, flinging the wallet as far as he could across the street, where it would take this... this Blankriqueno scumbag a good long time to find it.

“You fucking well stay right here until I turn the corner... amigo” he said. “Tu sabes what's good for you?”

Then he leapt up and let go the dude's throat in one motion, dashed up onto the sidewalk, broke into a run, and didn't look back or pause to count the money until he had rounded the corner of Avenue A. crossed over, and faded into the street traffic, Round the Corner in plain sight, just one more faceless streetie who none of the gordos among whom he now ambled would care to even lock eyes with.

Only then did he read the score and get the malticia.

A twenty, a ten, and two fives! Chingada!

That cheapo little motherfucker with his three-hundred-dollar boots and his wallet of plastico had only forty bucks of real money in his pocket! No wonder all the sincojones son of a bitch was worried about was his credit cards! No wonder he had been such a pussy when it came to coughing up his cash!

“You're getting too old for this shit, muchacho!” Paco muttered loudly as a gordo couple who had been walking up the street past him took a sudden jog into the gutter and looked away.

In his own ears, his complaint had levels of meaning whose complexities were far beyond his ability to fathom, but whose streetwise gut feelings did a switchblade stompada in the pit of his stomach. Somehow, his anger at the slim proceeds was only a two-step around the incomprehensible pain of a far deeper and more elusive fury.

Somehow he had been made to feel like a cockroach on a shipile, yet somehow he also felt a contemptuous superiority to the Blankriquenos of the world in his heart of hearts. But what was worse, he also somehow felt deeply ashamed, for he knew not what, and that incomprehensible feeling of self-loathing was what filled him with such a passionate hatred for an enemy who seemed nonexistent.

Paco stared with curled lip at the slim sheaf of bills between his fingers and rubbed them disdainfully, as if they were smeared with old snot. For a wild moment he almost tossed them into the gutter.

But the sheer shock of such an asshole thought moving through his mind brought him to his senses. Eight days of nada, and you have to hit on some stupid spick like yourself with ninguno dinero! You got a right to be pissed off at yourself, muchacho, he told himself, but that don't mean you gotta throw away enough money to buy half an hour of the Prong!

Chingada, man, you felt like this before, and this time you've got what it takes to buy the cure. Look on the sol side, hombre, you got enough money off the maricon to plug into some wire and feel like Mucho Muchacho!

Dojo was on the door at Slimy Mary's when Paco arrived, and appeared less than overjoyed to see him. “I thought I told you I didn't want to see your face unless you had the yen to imitate a paying customer, my man,” Dojo said by way of greeting, folding his big arms across his chest and barring the door with his war-machine body. “You plannin' to do anything inside except cruise for free pussy?”

Paco liked Dojo, despite the fact that the big black bastard generally treated him like cockroach shit. He knew it was nothing personal. Dojo treated everyone like cockroach shit, as befitted his exalted position and the necessity of his role as jefe of a meatrack where crash and grabbers, street meat, and burned-out wireheads came to score perv and wire. It took mucho macho, muchacho, to work the door at Slimy Mary's!

“Gonna plug into the Prong, Dojo,” Paco said proudly, pulling the sheaf of bills out of his pocket and waving it under the doorman's nose. “Got enough for half an hour on the wire.”

“What you do, suck some cheap faggot's cock?” Dojo said with a narrow-eyed sneer and easy attitude which was as close as he ever came to granting approval.

“Naw, all I had to do was let this cheap black nigger suck mine,” Paco told him, grabbing his crotch and leering.

Dojo laughed. “Got to admit you got balls, boy,” he said. “Too bad they're located where your brains are supposed to be.”

He stepped aside, shaking his head. “Go on in and fry what little you got left with that wirehead shit,” he said.

Although he made mucho dinero off all the wire action inside, Dojo loftily disdained wire himself. Nothing but classic coke or designer dust for him; it was part of his mystique.

As Paco marched by him, Dojo caught him by the elbow, leaned close, and spoke to him in confidential tones. “How much balls you really got, my man, I mean seeing as how you mean to plug in anyway, how'd you like a special deal on something real wizard...?”

“Real wizard... ? What's the flash?”

“Well, that's the thing of it, son, no one here's ever seen the Zap before, it's the latest thing from Silicon City, they say it's made by the same dudes that make the red boxes the video pirates use to take over broadcast satellites. Makes the Prong and that shit seem like sticking your dick in a light socket."

Paco eyed Dojo dubiously. “What you're talking about is some piece of shit from out of town that no one you know has plugged into before, motherfucker,” he said. “Something could fry me to cuchifritos.”

Dojo beamed at him. “You're not as stupid as you look, bo. That's the only reason I'm willing to let you have half an hour on the Zap for the same thirty bucks as half an hour on the Prong. Two weeks from now, the price triples.”

“Unless it turns out to be another brainburner and you can't give it away.”

Dojo shrugged. "If you don't have the balls to try it..."

“Who's dealing this Zap for you?” Paco shot back.

"Monkey Girl. Just tell her Dojo sent you."

Slimy Mary's occupied the basement of what appeared to be an abandoned formerly renovated tenement on Third just off Avenue D. The word on the floor was that Dojo and his yak compadres had captive wire wizards up there in the dark behind the boarded-up windows, permanently plugged in to their own products, and turning out merchandise just for the juice. Up There was where old wireheads went to Florida, muchacho, and anyone who got too curious was likely to end up the same.

The meatrack itself was typical of such streetie oases, burrowed into basements beneath ruined buildings without obvious full-time squats visible from the street, and running on juice from jumpers that the Con Ed cops were greased to ignore.

Down a dark flight of metal stairs, and Paco was suddenly in another world, the closest thing he knew to home turf.

Only the dance floor was lit, and that by dim red, white, and blue bulbs set in the aluminum-foil-covered ceiling, and flashing on and off in a cheaply randomized sequence. On three sides the dance floor was surrounded by a twilight zone of dirty old cushions, orange crates, and spavined stuffing-burst couches, where the clientele sprawled—plugged in, burnt-out, hustling each other's meat, or taking care of light business. The walls of the big basement were out there somewhere in the musty darkness beyond the clearing, where the fucking and the heavy dealing took place, where those who could not bear the light shared the shadows with the roaches and ratones.

There were about a dozen people on the floor at this hour, all dancing to the tune of their own fading flash, but all of them moving to the max metal beat of the Lady Leather disc playing on the big screen behind them.

Eat my big black whip You dirty little dip Shove it up your hole Suck my leather soul

The whip! The whip!

“You look as sexy as ever, Glorianna,” he said by way of greeting.

“What do you want from me, Billy?” Glorianna asked. “You know how I feel about AP rock stars. It’ll never work.”

"Wouldn't you like to?"

Trip to the whip!

Up on the videowall, Lady Leather, wearing gunmetal jackboots and skin-tight black leather from neck to knees, cracked her two long whips to the beat, snarling and spitting and strutting like a crazed stormtrooper on a carpet of writhing pink bodies, while behind her was a big close-up of her own face, lip-syncing the lyric in the innocent bliss of an endless orgasm.

Paco couldn't see why anyone would pay to play this shit, and, in fact, he saw, no one was; el Lizardo's disc deck was idle, this was just the usual caga being broadcast by MUZIK, which el Lizardo tortured the meatrack with when he had no paying customers.

Paco wanted some Mucho Muchacho, but it cost ten dollars a pop to have el Lizardo play your disc, so he knew he had better save it for later, since by the time he bought himself half an hour of wire, he would have only enough dinero left for one five-minute number.

So he hung back in the sombre zone until his eyes adjusted to the murk and he spotted Monkey Girl hunkered on a cushion deep in the shadowy darkness.

Monkey Girl wore an I.B.M T-shirt and a formless skirt of crud-smeared burlap. Her hair was a greasy black mess. Her face, skeletal, lined, and leather-dry, might have been that of some souvenir shrunken head were it not for the perpetual grin of happiness on her cracked lips, and the monkey-bright eyes, which stared right through you out of those deep and blackened sockets.

She wore a crown of wire, a crude helmet of sheet-steel strips studded with chips and bits of breadboard. A long umbilical of power cord trailed away to some hidden wall socket from the stepdown transformer on the top of her head.

Monkey Girl's flash was the Blue Max. Contact electrodes pumped amplified alpha waves into her cerebrum, and by now only bits and pieces were at home. You didn't last too long permanently plugged in to the Blue Max, but no one could say you didn't go out with a smile.

“Dojo sent me,” Paco said, squatting down on the floor in front of her. “Made me a deal on the Zap. Thirty for media hora.”

“Wanna tap the Zap …” Monkey Girl babbled in a skittery-skattery voice, fixing her big dark eyes right at him, but giving Paco the feeling she was seeing something else. She reached down and came up with a piece of wire unlike anything Paco had ever seen.

There was hardly anything to it, just a crumpled spiderweb of very thin flexible metal threads attached to a flat and concavely curved round breadbox about the diameter of a beer can bottom.

“Que pasa?” he demanded dubiously as Monkey Girl held the thing under his nose with one hand and held out her palm for the dinero with the other. “Where the fuck's the power cord? This some nojuice piece of shit?”

Any piece of wire worth anything, let alone thirty dollars a half hour, had to plug into a wall socket. Every low current battery-powered piece he had ever tried had been a bullshit ripoff that failed to flash, shit gordo kiddos conned each other with outside fancy schoolyards. Every real wirehead knew that nojuice pieces were for asshole wirechippers who didn't know the difference because they didn't even know what a real flash was.

“The Zap don't flash, you get back the cash,” Monkey Girl burbled.

“Science flashes pretty out of Silicon City!”

Well chingada, muchacho, if that was the deal, there was nothing to lose, he had never heard of anyone offering money back for a no flash before, and if the likes of Dojo were willing to back this new piece with his own dinero, he must really believe that this was real wizard from some Silicon City spook shop, not cabezacaga wired together by the brainburned zombies upstairs.

He handed over the thirty dollars and took the strange piece of wire. Shaking it out, he saw that it was a wirework helmet shaped to the head, a form-fitting hairnet, really. The breadbox had a single green touchpoint, and a sliding battery compartment lid, aside from which it was a featureless sealed can. When he put the thing on, he couldn't even feel the wire mesh; all he could feel was how the bottom curve of the breadbox fitted comfortably to the curve of the upper back of his head. Something about all this was beginning to convince him that he really was about to score a real wizard flash.

Pero primero, let's have some Mucho Muchacho instead of this gordo pervo shit MUZIK keeps playing. He snake-danced through the dancers on the floor to the table at the side of the screen, behind which el Lizardo sat, ensconced behind his disc decks, and surrounded by untidy mounds of videodiscs piled waist-high around him on the floor.

El Lizardo was a sallow-skinned stony figure in black denim jeans and a McDonald's T-shirt he wore backward with a crude green tyrannosaur head painted onto it. The teeth were bits of old razor blades epoxied to the cloth. His hair was lacquered into a green ridge of dinosaur scales up over his shaved head. No one had ever seen the eyes behind those gleaming black mirror shades.

“Hey Lizardo, why you playing this shit?” Paco demanded. It was everyone's standard greeting to el Lizardo.

IvIUZIK went to a commercial now. Foxy Lady, a black momacita wearing a well-torn tie-dyed T-shirt and clean white jockey shorts, was shaking her thing in front of a huge concert audience which moaned like it was coming, and blasting out “Down and Dirty Tonight,” while the title of the disc flashed a pink neon strobe over her, and a sexy voice just at the edge of audibility sighed “Buy, buy, buy.”

“Because pinheads like you are too cheap to put their money where their mouth is,” el Lizardo said in his flat voice. It was his standard comeback.

“Let's have 'Tu Madre Tambien.'”

El Lizardo began rummaging through his discs. “I can stand it if you can,” he said, favoring Paco with his horrid grin as he snatched his money, peeling open his thick rubbery lips to reveal a mouthful of teeth that had been filed to points and painted black.

Paco faded away across the dance floor into the twilight zone as el Lizardo popped “Tu Madre Tambien” into the videodisc deck. “Saludo amigo,” he whispered into the dark as Mucho Muchacho exploded onto the screen to a rhythmic blare of air horns and a heavy beat of drums and stomping feet, screaming out the beat line with the multiplexed voice of an angry army.

Tu ma-dre tambien Tu ma-c/re tambien Tu ma-dre tambien

Mucho Muchacho, naked to the waist, had the leanly muscular body of a martial arts fanatic, and his bronzed hairless upper torso was filmed with oil and smudged here and there with black ash. He wore clean white and skin-tight cut-off jeans that outlined the bulge of a superhuman cock and were belted by a gunmetal chain. His feet were bare, and the only adornment of his true nobility was his great crown of hair, a central red mohawk serpent arising out of a jet black helmet of close-cropped fuzz.

Beneath this culebra de machismo, Mucho Muchacho's big brown bedroom eyes were almost angelic, but his nose and the chiseled angles of his dark brown face were mercilessly Aztec, and his mouth writhed its defiance around his perfect white teeth as he proclaimed the lyric over the insistent beat line.

Solnos cholos in the night (Tu ma-dre three...”)

Con color and you are white (Tu ma-dre three...”)

So besa me pica (Tu ma-dre three...”)

And ponga me your sister (Tu ma-dre three...”)

Better call me Mister

Paco's feet danced in place in the darkness to the razor-sharp rhythm, the bones of his body thrummed to unheard subsonics as he leaned slightly forward like a warrior on a stalk. His dick began to throb, and all the shit of the world outside seemed to slough off his skin as Mucho Muchacho sung him the secret marching music of his soul.

Mucho danced, pelvis outthrust, through a vast suburban shopping mall, up Fifth Avenue, in front of the White House, through a crowded restaurant filled with old men in black tuxedos and beautiful blond women in evening gowns, jewels, and furs, and through an endless suite of offices where tight-bodied bitches in skin-tight gray business suits sat chained to computer consoles. Behind him paraded a vast tide of rag-clad muchachos just like Paco, roaring the mighty chorus with Mucho Muchacho's multiplexed voice as the chochas went wild in their wake, tearing off their clothes, shaking their tits, and breaking into a sweaty mating dance.

Nosotros somos gigantes (Tu ma-dre three...” Cojones de elefantes (Tu mad-dre three...”))

So pull down all your panties

Y tu Madre También!

As Mucho Muchacho's face snapped into full close-up, eyes peering straight into his soul as two subsonic vocodor vocals doubled on the lyric and beat line and the guitar tracks screamed toward redline, Paco's hand went to the breadbox on the back of his head and hit the touchpoint.

At first, there seemed to be no flash at all, not even the generalized greasy tingling of juice going through his head. Mucho Muchacho danced a stompada at the head of his army of streeties now, pumping his fisted right arm up and down to the beat like a throbbing hard-on, and sung more insinuatingly, his voice furred into an enormous lubricious lion purr.

Your sisters and your aunties (Tu ma-dre three...”)

Chocharicas Elegantes (Tu ma-dre three...”)

Don't Want No Gay Romantics (Tu ma-dre three...”)

And then, somehow, Paco suddenly seemed to have melted, dreamlike, out of his body and into the screen, or somehow Mucho Muchacho had emerged from the screen to don his body like a skinsuit, for it was Paco Monaco, Mucho Muchacho, who found the song pouring forth from his lips, who found his taut, muscular, well-fed body prancing and preening in an endless adoring mob of beautiful women of all ages, dripping with fur, and jewels, and silk, and throwing money at him as they danced around him, legs a-spraddle.

They all want macho mucho (Tu ma-dre three...”)

Mucho Muchacho (Tu ma-dre three...”)

So Get Out There and Hustle (Tu ma-dre three...”)

He knew himself to be Paco Monaco, hijo de puta, existing on the meager ration of people kibble doled out at the dispensaries, crashing in subways or burnt-out buildings, sneered at by the fucking chocharicas on the streets and their rich gordo maricones, who hadn't gotten laid in two weeks. And yet just as surely, he knew himself to be Mucho Muchacho, the max in streetwise macho, who had the chocharicas of the world which despised him on their knees before him in the puberda truth between their sleek sweaty legs.

Use your mojo muscle (Tu ma-dre three...”)

Get it while you can (Tu ma-dre three...”)

From a red hot macho man (Tu ma-dre three...”)

We all remember when Y TU MADRE three...”!

He had come home to the Mucho Muchacho he had always known himself to be, as if every Mucho Muchacho cut he had ever heard had just been his own secret macho man talking to him in his sleep. And now he had awakened to his full unfettered glory.

He might have spent his life scrabbling around for survival on a shipile, he might be nothing but a streetscum little spick in the blind eyes of the patrones cabrones of Ciudad Trabajo, but he was the cocko de la calle between the legs of their virgin sisters and esposas putaricas, y tu madre tambien!

And when the disc ended, he was still Mucho Muchacho, moving out into the blinking multicolored lights of the dance floor with animal grace and the sure steel certainty that he had the world by the chocha, and all he had to do was fuck it.

Verdad, the garden of flesh had melted into the dance floor of Slimy Mary's, but a Slimy Mary's transformed and a Paco transformed, for the flickering waves of multicolored light were flashing from his skin, and there before him moving to the throbbing beat of the blood in his loins was the woman of his wettest dreams.

Somewhere in his dreamtime, he had known her all his life. She was elegantly slim through the legs and waist, with the ass of a jogger, and tits like soft ripe guavas, the nipples hard and brown as walnuts through the sheer fabric of her tight white evening gown. Her long blond hair fell over the silvery fur stole flung around her pale bare shoulders.

Her hands were encrusted with diamond rings, and her long neck was draped with a dozen thin gold chains. Her eyes were icy blue with the arrogance of a thousand years of steel-snatched transactions with the limp-dick patrones of Ciudad Trabajo, but the serpentine tongue licking her moist red lips told him that she would turn into a mindless sex-crazed animal just for him.

He strutted across the dance floor toward her to the jungle rhythm of some afrometal shit MUZIK was playing, but somehow that didn't matter, somehow it segued into “Tu Madre Tambien” in his ears after a few bars, and somehow he wasn't in Slimy Mary's anymore.

Instead, he was dancing in some fantastic plushie-tushie disco high atop the towers of Ciudad Trabajo, with invisible glass walls open to a brilliant starry night and to the jeweled city spread before him far beneath his feet. Men in black tuxedos and tall elegantly dressed blond women were gliding in languorous boredom around the floor to a dead-ass black dance band in evening clothes.

But Mucho Muchacho moved to his own music, and as he danced his chingada stompada, the patrones quivered and cowered and seemed to age ten years into white-haired balding old men as their cool blond women began to shake their things to Paco's beat, began to writhe, and grimace, and blow kisses at him holding their crotches, in their mad lust for the superhuman machismo of his perfect body.

He ignored these begging bitches with lordly disdain, and danced up to the perfect creature of his dreams, pelvis outthrust, his gigantic hard cock literally bursting from his tight white pants, engorged with outrageous certainty.

“You,” he said, clutching his cojones and beaming at her. “I want to fuck your brains out.”

Her ice-blue eyes snapped wide open in disbelief of her fantastic good fortune. “Me?” she exclaimed. “You want to fuck me?”

“You want my big hard dick up your chocharica,” he told her evenly, hypnotizing her with his pitiless Mucho Muchacho stare. “You want to know what it's like to have a real macho man giving you what you know you need.”

“You really want to fuck me?” she said, dancing closer to him, wriggling her chocha inches from his pelvis.

"Best you'll ever get, momacita," he told her with a proud lion grin.

“Well then let's cut the bullshit and get on down to it before you change your mind!” she declared, grabbing him by the hand and dragging him off the dance floor, into a mirrored elevator, through the streets in a block-long white limo, and into an immense luxury apartment, whose endless gilded and carpeted rooms and parlors stuffed with antique furniture, overflowing chests of jewels, silver bowls heaped with dust, and tables brimming with money seemed to go on forever.

Into a huge bedroom with a smoke-glass mirrored ceiling lit by a fireplace glow and papered in lip-red velvet, where she tore off her white gown, rending it to gauzy rags, grabbed him by the cock, and pulled him down onto a big round bed whose golden satin sheets were warmed to blood heat.

He pinned her wrists to the pillow with his hands and entered her with a triumphant long thrust that seemed to never end, as if years of nada had become a mighty battle ram, capable of opening up the innermost depths of the tight white cunt of look-but-don't-touch and at last gaining him entry.

He went on and on and on, for weeks, for centuries, for a thousand years, and somehow he was also on the ceiling watching himself, watching a bronzed Mucho Muchacho moving to the beat of “Tu Madre Tambien” astride the perfect blond bitch at the center of the world.

As she moaned and cried in grudging ecstasy, she clung naked to his side as he promenaded up Fifth Avenue in his black tuxedo; as he watched his dark and perfect body master her pale white flesh, he snorted teaspoons of dust from a silver mirror, and it seemed that he had become the Cocko del Mundo when his brain and his dick went off in a simultaneous explosion of shattering glass towers.

And he went sailing out like his own private helicopter through the aerial canyons high above the shipile streets of Manhattan, soaring free as a bird and rich as a plushie-tushie up out of the sombre and into the sol, cruising lazily around the deco pinnacle of the Chrysler Building in the golden afternoon sunshine—

“Some people just got no class.”

Paco blinked into a dark cave of odorous gloom, where max metal music smashed and tangled, where shadowy figures sprawled on heaps of rubbish, where something scuttled across the unseen floor, and where he lay with his pants around his ankles across a soft, sweaty, sour-smelling body.

“—what the fuck—” “Quit your bitchin', Paco, I waited for you to come, didn't I, even though it meant giving you three free minutes.”

Paco squinted up at Dojo, who stood above him, curling his lip, shaking his head in disapproval, and holding the limp wire mesh of the Zap in his meaty hand.

“Must have really been quite a flash to have you humpin' away at Miss Piggy there,” Dojo said. “My eyes seen it, but my stomach still don't believe it.”

Paco rolled off the fat smelly body, pulling up his pants in the same motion, and popped up onto his feet, looking down on the perfect blond dream creature he had been fucking.

What he saw made his gut drop and his manhood shrivel into a sticky pimple of shame. The girl in the grungy nest of cushions had her raggy blue dress hiked halfway up her torso to reveal a gross heaving belly, huge thighs wadded with folds of grimy flesh, and the bottoms of squishy pendulous breasts. Her hair was a greasy black halo around her fat, acne-reddened face.

She looked up adoringly at him through heavily lidded puppy dog eyes and beamed him a smile of perfect contented bliss. “Thank you,” she sighed. “That was wonderful.”

Paco stumbled off toward the exit through the twilight zone around the dance floor, the flickering pattern of colored lights mercifully fragmenting the stream of his thoughts into rainbow confetti. Dojo caught up with him at the foot of the exit stairs, catching him by the elbow.

“Come on, my man, what was the flash?” he demanded. “You think I let a worry mother like you try a piece of wizard wire like this just because I think you're pretty?” He held up the Zap in front of him as if he were flourishing a wad of bills. “I wanna know whether you wirehead assholes are going to plug in to these things. My supplier wants three hundred apiece, and I don't wanna tie up any heavy capital in some nojuice bullshit.”

Caught in the big doorman's firm but gentle grip, Paco found his scattered wits drifting back down to street level like crystal snowflakes melting into dirty gray slush in the gutter.

“The fucking thing is real wizard all right, Dojo,” he said. “It makes you feel... it lets you ... I was... ”He threw up his hands in frustration.

“Well, shit, man, would you do it again?”

“Would I do it again?” Paco repeated dreamily.

He remembered what lay blissfully back there in the shadows with his cum inside her, and he remembered the perfect woman of his wet dreams on gold satin sheets, and he remembered being Mucho Muchacho fucking the queen of Ciudad Trabajo forever in her penthouse bedroom, and he remembered what it had felt like to fly like a plushie-tushie helicopter as the king of the city.

“Quien sabe?” he said distractedly. Then, snapping back into some semblance of focus: “Why don't you try it yourself, Dojo, and see if you've got the cojones to handle it?”

Dojo smiled at him knowingly. “You know I don't truck with no wirehead shit,” he said, rubbing the piece of wizard wire thoughtfully between his fingers. “But lookin' at you, I got the feeling I've got my hands on something primo.”

Out on Third Street again, Paco found himself walking south through the dark ruined buildings toward Houston, and then turning west toward the border of Soho. What the fuck happened to me? he wondered.

If he hadn't come out of the flash atop that fucking fat puerca, he would have thought that the whole flash had just been some wirehead dream inside his head. For now that he thought about it, he realized that he had dreamt bits and pieces of it for years, curled up in some subway station or shitty hole in the ruins. Oh yeah, he had known that stuck-up chocharica bitch all his life, and for sure he had dreamed of fucking her brains out!

Reaching West Broadway, and peering longingly south along the brightly lit avenue lined with galleries, and fancy restaurants, and fabulous plushie-tushie meatracks, it seemed as if he were staring straight up the dress of the queen of the city. In the ^{t} distance, between the forbidden thighs of Chocharica City, he watched rich bitches promenading along West Broadway, guarded from the likes of Mucho Muchacho by pale white patrones and Uzi-toting zonies. Up there at the vanishing point beckoned the secret key to everything.

“Tu eres muy loco, muchacho!” Paco told himself. “It's just some fucking piece of wire!”

But out here in the sombre, just Round the Corner in sight of the city of his dreamtime, Paco knew that he would do just about anything to go there again.

Electric Dreams

Bobby Rubin pulled his Cadillac Samurai into the parking garage of the Muzik Factory on Monday morning in a bubbling good humor. Not only had he wormed his way into a wild Bel Air party Saturday night, he had actually scored there after a fashion, and today he was finally going to be given the chance to show the pinheads upstairs what he could really do if only they would let him.

He had gotten to the party at Davy Stone's by the happy fluke of running into Stone's manager, Marty Beckman, as he had emerged from Billy

Beldock's office after getting the big news from the president of Muzik, Inc., himself. Bobby had worked on one of Stone's discs a couple years ago, the last one that shipped gold, in point of fact, and Beckman, upon seeing him emerge from a private seance with Beldock himself, had deigned to remember him. “Bobby... ah...”

“Rubin.”

“Right, you played the image organ on...”

“'Streets of Strangers.'”

“Yeah, hey, that was good stuff. …”

“Last disc of Davy Stone's to ship gold.”

Beckman's ebullience narrowed a bit, and he eyed Bobby speculatively. "Yeah, well just between you and me, the songs they've been giving Davy lately suck, and the visuals have been amateur * night. So what have you been up to... ?" He nodded significantly in the direction of Beldock's office.

“Billy has sworn me to secrecy,” Bobby said airily. “We're working together on a whole new concept.”

Technically speaking, it was all true. Project Superstar certainly was a whole new concept, and Beldock had certainly made it crystal-clear that he would never work in this town again if he went around shooting his mouth off about it.

Still, he had to resist the strong temptation to tell Beckman that it would not be long before smart-ass pretty boys like his meal ticket Stone were out on the streets eating kibble, and cyberwizards like himself were the new lords of the industry jungle.

For while a glamorous prince of rock and roll like Davy Stone was precisely what he had wet-dreamed of becoming as a horny kid from Long Island fresh to the High Life of Hollywood, he had soon learned that here, as in high school, he was just another faceless nerd to the tantalizing prime pussy who hung all over the preening hunks and charismatic rockers.

But he kept his mouth shut and contented himself with projecting silent mysterioso as he entered the elevator with Beckman, and his virtue was rewarded before it reached the garage by an invitation to the party at Stone's house that weekend.

The party was filled with starlets, would-be starlets, once-were starlets, high-class hookers, and hordes of groupies chosen for their beauty and star-fucking ambitions. It would have been pussy paradise for Bobby, had not the party also been filled with handsome out-of-work actors and musicians, middle-aged cunthustlers who called themselves producers, and dust dealers dispensing their wares gratis to promising partygoers of the feminine gender.

These, of course, were getting all of the action that Bobby didn't even know how to begin to come on to, and so he counted himself lucky to be able to latch onto a secretary from C.B.S who had gotten there by the grace of a girlfriend who did bit parts in porno discs.

She hadn't been so bad, really, a head full of show-bizzy babble, and a bit big-assed and flat-faced, but once he had fed her the dust with the promise of which he had lured her to his Franklin Avenue apartment, she had looked a lot better, especially after he snorted about a half-dozen lines himself and allowed her to fuck his brains out.

So all in all, he had to count it a successful weekend, and it felt like anything but Blue Monday as he took the elevator to the eighth floor, to Studio Four, one of the Factory's best, where his gear had been moved from the monkey block down below on five.

The studio was empty when Bobby arrived, and he had time to savor the luxury of his new playpen alone for a while, and contemplate how wrong his father had been to call him a bum when he turned down the long-sought M.I.T scholarship to open his own basement operation.

Daddy had done okay as a computer programmer until the advent of language interface chips reduced him to a precarious living repairing hardware, so in order to preserve his son from such an economic fate, he had pointed Bobby toward a career as a software designer and a life as a computer nerd virtually from birth.

He had bought him a Commodore when he was just five, taught him programming by the time he was seven, and so Bobby had spent his childhood happily zoned into his V.D.T's and controllers, creating and playing computer games, doodling for hours with his light-pen and mouse, and babbling contentedly to himself about algorithms and pixels.

Daddy had certainly been right about the dire state of the job market he would confront in his young manhood, but he had been dead wrong about the path to a sure meal ticket, for the simple reason that millions of other daddies had also foreseen the obvious.

Now there were millions of desperate little computer nerds with degrees in software design fighting each other to the death for some boring job writing programs for assembly line robots.

And indeed he would no doubt now be one of them had it not been for rock and roll and his horny longing to be something sexier than a stoop-shouldered hacker. For while it was all very well to get off playing with bits and bytes in the nursery, in high school he became all too painfully aware of his nerdishness in the form of his inability to get laid.

The early home vidconsoles were coming onto the market, little more than two read-wri te disc decks, a monitor, a sound camera, and a modem, interfaced with a personal computer and packaged in wood-grained plastic for about $6000. But the disc decks did handle bits and bytes for the computer as well as video and sound, so with the right software, it would serve as controller and mixer for the stereo video equipment.

It had certainly been a far cry from the toys they had now given him to play with in Studio Four, or even what he had had to work with in the monkey block, but since it would download broadcasts, videodiscs, and library footage onto disc, and allow you to mix it with the camera feed, it was enough to let you produce some pretty fancy visual tracks for garage discs by the dubious standards of the local high school bands.

That is, if, like Bobby, you were enough of a computer nerd to master the bits and bytes of this novel new medium. For while anyone in theory could now become his own videodisc producer for about $6000, making this early cheap stuff fulfill your visions, genius or otherwise, required far more software smarts than was generally contained within the craniufn of your average teenaged rocker.

Videodiscs having long since replaced audio records and cassettes, and MUZIK having long since steamrollered most music radio, any kid band dreaming of a recording contract or even local airplay had to at the very least have a demo disc with a visual track that would hold the attention.

And while established acts might have the budget of a major tv commercial to work with, the stuff that the poor boys and girls trying to boogie out of their basements disced on their home vidconsoles was of necessity cut together to the music out of what they could shoot themselves and bits and pieces of old stock footage, and unless there was some mad cyberwizard to blow an inspired riff through the bits and bytes with these secondhand images, it looked it.

Thus was it given to Bobby to boogie after his own nerdish fashion into the life fantastic of Long Island rock and roll.

For he was just the sort of computer nerd who knew how to make a vidconsole sing. Shamelessly scamming his father for the equipment, and writing his own software like a fiend, he put together the local state of the art. Couple extra monitors. Three recording decks instead of two. rom upgrades. Animation chips. Ten-track video dubber.

He could work cut-rate magic. He wrote his own visual emulator program which would synthesize simple images out of pure algorithm and which let him do rude kinestatic pseudo-animation with images off the air and old tapes and discs. He could even make dead rock stars caper and dance jerkily with the local talent.

So to his father's horror, when he graduated from high school, instead of going off to M.I.T, he stayed home, built a shed in the backyard, and turned it into a studio. Despite his softhearted mom, Daddy would have kicked him out as the bum he kept calling him had not he himself gone through a prolonged period of severe underemployment while Bobby was at least bringing in a few bucks doing visuals for shoestring local tv commercials and playing high school dances.

Bobby endured over two years of this tense life en famille as the grudgingly tolerated black sheep thereof before two local groups got Muzik, Inc., contracts largely on the strength of his visual tracks for their dem-ohs.

Then he was offered a five-year work-for-hire contract muy pronto and was swept up into his present life in Hollywood before he really understood what he was signing. “Come to work for us, kid,” they told him over a fancy lunch in Le Pavilion. “We're making you an offer you can't refuse. Mucho dinero. Porsches. Designer dust. Groupies. State-of-the-art equipment. The chance to work with big stars instead of the kiddie corps. When it comes to rock and roll, compadre, Muzik is where it's at!

“Just sign right here,” they told him back at the New York office, shoving a contract under his nose as they shoved dust up it.

Only a good deal later, when he found himself churning out crap to order in the monkey block alongside whole platoons of young cyberwizards who had been conned into the same contract by the same line of bullshit, did he learn the reason for Muzik, Inc.'s, beneficence to backyard cyberwizards in terms of their own Bottom Line.

These goddamn kids are too good; they're putting together out of junk image organs almost as good as the ones Moog and Mitsubishi are soaking us an arm and a leg for! Such talent we always need if we can sign it to work-for-hire contracts, and what we sure as shit don't need is a plague of pimply little genius nerds turning out bargain-basement videodiscs as good as ours for a hundredth of the cost. We better get control of this technology before it becomes too unprofitably democratic!

And by the time Bobby's five-year contract was up, he had the fancy apartment on Franklin, and four years left on the seven-year note on the Cadillac Samurai, and a taste for the Hollywood high life that far exceeded his grasp, and besides, they were willing to give him a good raise to sign him up for another five-year hitch.

So what if he was handed specs dreamed up by the cynics in market research and told to turn them into visuals for discs that amounted to commercials for themselves? So what if he never got a cut of the royalties?

So what if he was a musical mercenary?

Who wasn't? By that time, you worked for Muzik, Inc., or one of its lesser clones, or you developed a taste for people kibble.

And if somewhere buried deep within the heart of hearts that he pretended to himself he didn't have, Bobby harbored a gnawing yearning to flow with his own creative impulses instead of reaming out crap to the specifications of the pinheads on the top floor, well, here he was in Studio Four, wasn't he, with a mandate direct from Billy Beldock himself, and a real rock and roller as the producer.

Bobby, of course, knew all about Glorianna O'Toole, the Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll; who in the industry didn't? She had known everyone who was anyone back in the fabulous Golden Age of Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll, and these days she was famous for taking shit from no one, including the pinheads upstairs, for whom she expressed open contempt and somehow made them love it. She went to all the best parties, and just working with her was bound to upgrade his social life if he could make her like him. And since Beldock had told him flat out that she was completely in charge, as a producer, she would be no mere messenger girl carrying specs down from the assholes up in research and marketing.

Bobby checked and rechecked the equipment, impatient for Glorianna O'Toole to show up so they could get started. He had not felt like this on a Monday morning since his early months in the Factory. Then, as now, he had felt he was about to embark on a grand boogie into rock and roll adventure. Then, as now, he had practically gotten a hard-on from the upgrade in equipment.

Jeez, with this wizardware, he could do just about anything! Four decks and a mixer with infinite tracking capability. A macrobyte of ram memory that would enable him to random-access a whole cut in virtual disc for editing and processing.

An infinite color palette that could vary hues angstrom by angstrom and intensity photon by photon. Direct modem access to every image library in the United States and state of the art animation programs already in rom. Microsensitive joy glove image controllers. Ten independent image sequencers per track with infinite overdubbing. Automatic lip-syncing.

If I can't synthesize a solid gold A.P rock star with this wizard gear, Bobby told himself, then it fucking well just can't be done by anyone short of the Pentagon!

Then he heard a woman's footsteps outside the door and his excitement rose to a peak.

“Hi, Bobby!”

A pudgy girl in a loose yellow and silver Muzik, Inc., T-shirt and electric-blue velour pants that made her ass seem enormous stepped into the room and beamed at him happily. Her bleached blond hair was frizzed into some weird afro frosted with ratty black swirls, and a smattering of zits was not quite concealed by her heavy suntan makeup.

It was Sally Genaro, the VoxBox player assigned to the project, and upon sight of her, Bobby suddenly remembered why the name had sounded vaguely familiar.

He had worked with her once before, on “Long Gone Skyway,” a Long Jim disc for the shitkicker market that had shipped gold. She had been real wizard, one of the best VoxBox artists he had ever worked with, and his intellect had to admit that Beldock had made a shrewd choice. Musically speaking, he knew he should be pleased.

Nevertheless, his stomach sank.

For little Sally from the Valley had made it all too clear that she found him "cute," "wizard," and even "snaky," and she had never stopped coming on to him the whole time, sidling up to him in the studio, sticking her face in his ostensibly to discuss the material, inviting him to her apartment for extracurricular consultation, and constantly rubbing her flabby tits against him "by accident."

And the whole time she had this enormous inflamed acne pimple just off center on the tip of her nose. Yech! The memory of it still made his flesh crawl.

He had gotten through it only by staying obtusely professional, by adamantly refusing to acknowledge that he ever knew what was really on her mind no matter how blatant her come-ons got, by being cool, and icily civil, and all business, and telling himself that if he told her to fuck off, it would only screw up the sessions and prolong the agony. He had done his work, and she had done hers, and they had zipped through “Long Gone Skyway” in a week, after which he had been able to heave a great sigh of relief, knowing it was over, and he would never have to sit in the studio with the Pimple again.

And now here she was, and he was going to have to go through the whole damn thing over again, and on the most important assignment of his career.

Well, if I got through it once, I can get through it again, Bobby told himself. There's just too much at stake here. I just can't let her get to me. Maybe she's found herself a boyfriend. Maybe she's forgotten all about me.

“Hi, Sally,” he said neutrally, “I guess we'll be working together on this thing.”

“For sure!” Sally said all too eagerly in a rough, slightly nasal purr that she probably thought was sexy. “We had a bitchin' time working together on 'Long Gone Skyway,' remember?”

Bobby forced a bland smile. “How could I ever forget it?” he said dryly, choking back any ironic inflection.

“I see you two know each other.”

Glorianna O'Toole had entered through the open door, a robust-looking old lady in a bizarre loose-fitting pajama suit of soft thin white flannel, tie-dyed in neon red, green, and yellow, and belted with a black silk obi. Her long thick gray hair fell in carefully groomed waves over her shoulders. Her tanned face, softly lined like fine old parchment, was devoid of concealing makeup, but she wore subtle silvery-red lipstick, and her black eyebrows, over deep emerald eyes, made even more dramatic by heavy black mascara, were frosted with metallic speckles.

On a much younger woman Bobby would have found the whole effect quite sexy, and he had to admit that for an old lady, Glorianna O'Toole still cut a dashing figure. Wrinkles and gray hair or no, it was hard to think of her as grandma.

“We worked on 'Long Gone Skyway,' ” Sally said brightly. “We did some real wizard tracks together.” She inclined her body subtly in the direction of Bobby. “It was like... chemistry.”

Glorianna O'Toole looked the Pimple up and down appraisingly. She regarded Bobby in like manner, then cocked an eyebrow at him subtly.

Certainly not! Bobby telepathed at her indignantly. “You got some specs for us?” he said, determined to get this onto a neutral professional level immediately.

Glorianna sat down on the nearest of the director's chairs scattered about the studio and pulled a thick sheaf of readouts from the snakeskin briefcase she was carrying. Bobby waited till Sally had pulled up a chair and sat down to her left before placing his own chair at Glorianna's right, as far away from Sally as he could discreetly place himself.

“You mean these?” Glorianna O'Toole said, waving the papers under their noses. “These demographic breakdowns from the marketing department? These character sketches from dead-ass shrinks?”

She smiled sweetly. “Fuck 'em,” she said just as sweetly, tossing the specs over her shoulder and into a heap on the floor with an imperious flourish.

Bobby stared at her in open amazement. “You don't even want me to read the psych profiles or the demographic targets?” he exclaimed. He had dreamed of such a moment for seven years, but now that it had come, he suddenly found himself feeling strangely lost. “How am I supposed to start without them?”

Glorianna O'Toole rolled her eyes toward the ceiling in theatrical anguish. "Fuck a duck!" she groaned. "Look," she said, regarding him with contained exasperation, "if the pinheads upstairs knew jack shit about what makes a real rock star, would they be paying a crazy old lady like me to play Svengali to you two cyberkiddies?"

"What about, like, the songs?" said Sally from the Valley. "You're the VoxBox player, aren't you?" Glorianna O'Toole said, nodding her head toward the VoxBox rig across the room from the image organ equipment. "You're supposed to be able to make that junk play like the rock and roll symphony orchestra and sing like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on wire, aren't you?"

“Well, yeah …” the Pimple whined uncomfortably. “But I need at least a voice spec and some lyrics, I mean, I just do the music…. Someone has to give me, you know, like words and parameters. …”

Glorianna O'Toole sprang to her feet and paced before them in small circles, wagging a finger at them as she spoke like some hardnosed high school teacher giving two unprepared pupils what for. But no high school teacher had ever read Bobby the riot act like this.

“Demographic breakdowns! Psych profiles! Voice specs! Parameters! You two sound like refugees from Silicon City, not rockers! Let's get one thing straight, kiddies, you're not here to ream out Muzik to specs, you're not working for the pinheads upstairs now, you're working for me, and I'm here to tell you that you're here to prove to the world that out of all this fucking wizardware you two little geniuses can make some real rock and roll!”

Glorianna's ire swiftly subsided. "Look what you've done," she said with a rueful grin. "You've got me ranting and raving like a corporate fascist."

"Come on, come on," she said, shooing them toward their equipment like errant chickens. "Boot up and boogie, let me just see some random jamming."

She winked at Bobby as he sat down before his console and began throwing switches. “Loosen up, man,” she said. “All I'm asking you to do is have some fun. It's only rock and roll.”

Sally Genaro booted up her VoxBox with a queasy void in her belly that the jelly doughnut she was munching did little to fill. Glorianna O'Toole sat on a high stool behind her, the better to look over Sally's shoulder and make her even more uptight than she already was.

A week into Project Superstar, and she already had the hollow feeling that she was blowing it.

In a way, these sessions were like the old days with the Razor Dogs in Cliff Jones's garage, jamming together to come up with a new song or two for the weekend's gig.

But the Razor Dogs, however lame, had at least been a band. Cliff mostly wrote the words and did all the lead vocals, so there was none of this stuff about making up voices without analog input or specs and trying to fit them to some silly A.P on an image organ screen.

The Razor Dogs hadn't even had an image organist. Cliff's image fronted the band, and he had made it up all by himself. A skintight silver body suit with these tacky hairy-clawed animal feet out of some costume shop, and a long bushy tail. His shaved skull was grease-painted black, and the mohawk crest of hair that he had left down the middle was dyed steel-blue and gunked into a hard knife edge with waveset before each performance. He actually performed with a set of phony plastic fangs in his mouth which tended to fall out when he was really wailing.

The only processing he ever let Sally put the vocals through were a limited range of occasional special effects, mainly the bloodcurdling wolf wailing and harsh metal-grinding robot grunting that were the Razor Dogs' signature.

The Razor Dogs might have been the pits and Cliff and Karl might have treated her like a human being only when they wanted her to give them blow-jobs, and she certainly hadn't thought twice when Muzik, Inc., offered her a contract without them, but at least they were a band and Sally knew her place in it.

And in a way, working in the Factory had not been all that different from playing with the Razor Dogs until now, except that mercifully she did not have to face a live audience.

Sally loved playing the VoxBox, but she had always hated live performance, hiding behind her VoxBox in the background shadows while Cliff and Karl danced in the spotlight, assuming the bar they were playing in had one that worked. They wouldn't even throw a spot on her for a few bars when she was doing a vocoder chorus, and it was one of the thousand indignities which the guys inflicted upon her about which she never dared complain.

So Sally actually liked her job as a studio VoxBox wizard at the Muzik Factory. The producers gave her lyrics from the songhacks, and voice specs, beat-patterns, style-parameters, and sometimes even melody lines from the research department, and all she had to do was make it into songs, one track at a time. Most of the time she had a live recording of a real singer to play with, and when they let her do vocals from scratch, they had these real wizard scientists to tell her what they wanted in the way of voiceprint parameters.

For sure, sometimes when she was making some foxy lady with a voice like a telephone operator and like a total inability to even keep in key or follow the beat sing like a superstar, Sally wished she had the bod to stand up there and belt it out herself.

After all, any voice was just analog input for the vocoder circuitry, so why not her own? So what if her raw voice was harsh and squeaky? She could sing a lead line into the mike as well as any of the beautiful dips they used as fronts for their discs, and once she had an analog input, she could turn it into anything she liked. She could filter it, enhance it, raise or lower it, multiplex it, fuzz it, sharpen it, add overtones, sync it to the lead instrumental, and it would come out the other end of the VoxBox singing like an electric angel or demon precisely on the beat and in perfect pitch.

And in fact, they had let her do it on two A.P discs. The voices they used on Lady Leather and the Velvet Cat might have used detailed voiceprint parameters from research, but the raw analog voice input had been Sally's own.

But of course no one was about to use her bod even as rotoscope input for a vid track! Los Angeles was full of luscious airheads who could shake their

Ts and As far better than she could, and needless to say, they had a lot better stuff to shake!

That was why she had liked doing Lady Leather and the Velvet Cat better than processing live input. If it wasn't Sally Genaro up there on the vid track as a wet dream for all the world, and if their voices owed as much to the parameters and specs of the research department as they did to her raw lead-line input, well, it wasn't any other real girl they saw dancing either, and if Sally wasn't really doing the singing, then who else was, smart guy.

Sally was all in favor of having Artificial Personalities replace stuck-up hot- stuff rock stars. If she couldn't be a real live rock star, why should anyone else?

So she had really been pleased when they assigned her to Project Superstar, first because she wanted the idea to succeed, second because it sure beat processing live singers as far as she was concerned, and third because Bobby Rubin had been assigned to the project too.

Bobby certainly had no bitchin' surfer bod, being somewhat slouchshouldered and skinny, and his nose was too big, and his hair was a black mop, but he dressed real well, and he had these big dark brown eyes, and a snaky little smile, and he was a level to which she might reasonably aspire.

It had really been a turn-on working with him on “Long Gone Skyway,” it had like inspired her, given her tracks soul, but somehow they had never quite gotten it on.

Every time she had invited him back to her place, he had begged off, and whenever she tried to give him messages with body language, he had been too shy to respond.

That turned her on too; she could tell that this somewhat wimpy little guy wasn't exactly a successful make-out artist, you could tell how horny he was by how he pretended to ignore sex vibes, he was probably afraid he wasn't a good lay, and so once she finally got to give him the terrific blow-job she had perfected in the shopping malls and car seats of the Valley, his cute little cock would be hers to command.

Alas, they had finished the “Long Gone Skyway” gig before she could figure out how to break through his shyness, but Project Superstar had sounded like something that would last a lot longer than one week, and surely she could get her hands in his pants during the process.

Or so she had thought when they began the gig last Monday. But just as these sessions in the studio had failed to ignite any musical chemistry thus far, so, too, was any personal chemistry missing between her and Bobby Rubin. Every time she even tried to be friendly, he retreated into his equipment, or made some smart-ass remark to cover up his nerdy embarrassment.

Sally ran her hands randomly up and down her main keyboard. An electric guitar line came out of the speakers. “Bomp-ba-pa-dupa ba-doom pam-bom,” she sang into her mike, inputting it into ram memory. She ran it up and down a few times between the sub and supersonics. She turned it into a black male bass with a standard soul rom chip. She multiplexed it into a chorus, then added a female voice singing lead above it in a mighty operatic contralto. She stored a lead guitar line, drum, tambourine, bass, rhythm guitar, and organ, laid the whole thing out across the keyboard, and then played a few bars of the result.

“Wonderful,” Bobby said dryly. “The Bo Diddley Tabernacle Choir meets the Phantom Lady of the Opera.”

"BobbyT Sally groaned. "I was just testing the equipment!" From his image organ rig to her right, Bobby looked at her blandly. "Really?" he said, suddenly giving her that smirky-sexy smile of his. "Gee, I thought maybe we were finally coming up with something. I even did a quick track to it. Wanna see?" Without waiting for an answer, he swiveled one of his monitors so she could see it and hit a volatile memory playback command.

A chorus line of Bo Diddleys danced across the stage of some opera house, while Lady Leather, with the addition of a white tutu, swung overhead on a vine, and then sailed out over an audience in formal evening clothes.

“Oh, Bobby!” Sally cried somewhere between a giggle and a moan of exasperation.

“Wait a minute, kiddies,” Glorianna O'Toole said from her stool behind them. “Maybe we've got something here.”

Bobby's eyes met Sally's and rolled upward in a rare moment of personal contact.

“Sally, wipe the female lead, give it to that black male voice, kill the multiplexing, bring it up half an octave, and let me hear it slow and easy, with just a sax and a piano....”

“Are you serious?”

“Humor me,” Glorianna said. “I think it might remind me of someone I used to know.... We haven't been getting anywhere with songs or images, so maybe we should concentrate on a voice ...”

Sally shrugged and changed the parameters. Maybe the Crazy Old Lady had a point.

So far, the three of them had just been chasing each other in circles. Without lyrics or a lead singer voice to work off, all Sally had been able to do was complicated arrangements of dumb random tunes running through her head, and without any songs or even voiceprint specs, all the voices she tried seemed to be just mimicking familiar performers. Without music, character specs, or even a voice to work off, Bobby's visuals were just a lot of smart-ass video doodling.

And though Sally knew that the songhacks and the research department were passing down reams of lyrics and specs to her, Glorianna O'Toole kept them all inside her snakeskin briefcase, refusing to even look at them herself until they had “laid down some tracks with soul.”

Sally punched up a playback. “Bomp-ba-pa-dupa ba-doom pam-bom,” a clear vibrant baritone crooned to languid piano and syrupy sax.

“Way too clean ...”

“Yeah …” Sally agreed, and she furred up the voiceprint a bit, graveling it with subsonics, and lagging an overdub program just behind the high notes, doubling them with exaggerated ghost-peaks just short of breaking.

“Bomp-ba-pa-dupa ba-doom pam-bom. …” The voice was more gutsy now, but also slightly shriller, a bit more manic. Almost sexy.

Glorianna bounced off her stool and came up closer behind them. “Bit more up in the nose, maybe... ?” she suggested to Sally. “Bobby, give me a quick visual. ...”

“Like what?”

“Just any old still from the data banks, first thing that comes into your head...”

Bobby shrugged and punched up a stock photo of Albert Einstein's head on his four screens.

“Real wizard …” Sally said with a little laugh.

“Let's just lip-sync Albert to the vocal and see if we can teach the old fart to boogie,” Glorianna insisted.

Bobby loaded a lip-sync program and Sally got a silly little charge as he plugged his image organ into an output jack of her VoxBox, so that the lip-sync program would follow her vocal track as its sequencer. Somehow, it made her think of what she'd really like him to plug into her 'Box.

“Bomp-ba-pa-dupa ba-doom pam-bom,” sang Albert Einstein.

Sally giggled. “Give him a bitchin' bod, Bobby!” she said.

Bobby called up a bodybuilder shot and laid it in under Einstein's white-haired old head.

"Get serious, kiddies, we just finally might be onto something here," Glorianna O'Toole said earnestly, peering intently at the screen. "Blacken his hair.

Lean him down to something human. Put him in a white lab coat, tight-fitting."

Einstein's grayish-white fright wig turned black, somehow becoming a sixties rock star aura in the process, Jim Morrison in a lab coat, with the big sad soulful eyes and wise old face of the saintly sage of the atom.

“Hey …” Bobby purred to himself, staring at his main screen and punching away madly at his keyboard as if no one else were in the room.

Einstein's wrinkles vanished, his chin tightened up, and his bushy eyebrows turned a bitchin' lustrous black. His great mane of black hair developed frosted red highlights. Only his nose and his warm soulful eyes lookin' right at ya remained the same, as Bobby Rubin reshaped his Ups into a visual echo of his own snaky smirk.

Bobby gave Sally the same exact smile as he looked up from his controllers and right into her eyes. “What says the demographic median?” he said. “Does this turn Sally from the Valley on?”

“Don't call me that, Bobby!” Sally snapped.

She hated it when Bobby called her Sally from the Valley, for even though she knew it was just like his New York attitude, that he couldn't know what it meant to her, it still never failed to flash her back to her horrible puberty in the San Fernando Valley as a fat pimply daughter of the nouveau poor.

Her father had bought a cheap tract house in Pacoima at a relatively low mortgage rate back in the seventies, when there was still money to be made as an aerospace technician, so at least the family wasn't thrown out onto the sidewalkless streets when he was reduced to working as a cable installer and lucky to have that.

But while her schoolmates in high school arrived in their own cars or at least on scooters, Sally was constrained to ride the bus, and while the golden girls were riding to the beach with their boyfriends, she hung around shopping malls with her ugly duckling sidekicks, surrounded by a lost world of goodies she could never touch. Sally from the Valley was everything a California Girl shouldn't be—poor, afoot, overweight, and fighting a constant battle against acne.

“Please don't call me that, Bobby,” she said plaintively, feeling that she had blown it, that maybe he had finally asked her the question she had been waiting to hear, and all she had been able to do was snap at him for disguising his true feelings behind his usual smart-ass sneer.

For what he had turned Einstein into did turn her on, and all the more so because he had given it his own smile, as if to say, behind this sneery grin there's a gentle sensitive guy lookin' right at ya the only way he knows how.

“Let me see if I can give him something to dance to,” she said, retreating from her embarrassment into the realm of the VoxBox, her one and only plastic fantastic lover, which, from those first magical moments at Timmy Knight's stupid party, had shown the ugly little duckling her dream self as a secret rock and roll queen.

Timmy was a shitty VoxBox player in a dead-ass high school band, and his 'Box was only a sleazy mass market model, but somehow, ignored by the boys as usual, she had found herself diddling with it. Sometime later she became aware that she was diddling with it for a rapt audience. Later, when the band inflicted themselves on the party, they let her sit in on a number.

By the time the party was over, she knew she had to have one.

What she had to do to g {dot}{s} t the money was both degrading and exhilarating to a frustrated fat girl who had not remained a virgin by choice. She took to hooking at shopping malls far from home, and since she could hardly do much of a trade on looks, she made herself an expert at giving head.

And while sucking all those faceless cocks for a few dollars made her feel like cheap and dirty, she enjoyed the way it made her feel raunchy and pure all at once—reduced to a cheap sex object on the one hand, and yet doing it all out of passionate commitment to a higher cause on the other.

Strange to say, she felt a vibe much like that right now as she stared dreamily at the image on Bobby's screens, at the charismatic creature with the soft sad eyes of a saint, and Bobby's own smile, and just let her fingers do the talking for what she felt between her legs. Before she really knew what she was doing, she was laying down multiplex instrumental tracks.

A wailing, distorted, feedback-shrieking guitar line, like some horny guy just begging for it, and a slow, heavy jungle beat on the drums and bass, and then a clear ringing instrumental lead generated by laying a single huge tenor church bell out on the keyboard, bumping it up an octave, and equipping it with vibrato and sustain so she could play it like a horn.

She sang a few slow bars of a moldy oldie that seemed somehow appropriate into her mike for tune and lyric input, then sequenced it to the instrumental lead, ran it through the current voice program, and then played the whole thing out on the keyboard.

“We are star-crossed lovers, we are sisters and brothers, we are star-crossed lovers, we will meet here again ...” sang a cunt-teasing male baritone while the instrumental lead ringingly proclaimed his pure horny littleboyish desire.

“All right …” proclaimed Glorianna O'Toole. “Okay now, let's see Albert do a song and dance to it.”

“Wait a minute, I've got a few ideas, just let me lay in some background and a little of this and that, give him some wire …” Bobby cackled to himself, swiveling Sally's monitor so she couldn't see what he was doing, and clicking away madly for a minute or two at his keyboard.

“Okay,” he finally said, sticking his right hand in a joyglove, and letting Sally see a monitor again, “and a one, and a two, and a three. …”

Sally played back the previous mix, sequencing the lip-sync program to her love song while Bobby danced the figure on the screen to it with his joyglove.

The snaky young man in the white lab coat with Einstein's eyes and Bobby's smirking mouth now had a rather ridiculous caricature of a wirehead device fitted crazily over his red-frosted crown of shiny black hair, like a headpiece from an antique electric chair, festooned with a random assortment of spark-coils and vacuum tubes. Bobby had laid in a colorized frame from Bride of Frankenstein as background, and a long power cord ran from the thing on the head of the figure to the Victorian mad scientist rig, upon the table of which a female body lay, restrained by metal bands, and hooked up to sparking machinery.

“We are star-crossed lovers...”

The young mad scientist did an Elvis number, waggling his pelvis at the girl on the table as sparks ripped up the gap of her machinery and sizzled around the wirehead piece in his hair.

“We are sisters and brothers.”

The girl on the table twitched in sync with the beat, and the sparky aura around Young Einstein's head flashed and flared with the moaning pitchbreaks of the guitar line.

“We are star-crossed lovers...”

Young Einstein danced over to his electrified beloved, and embraced her in an explosion of sparks and static as she bolted upright and empty-eyed into his arms on the final beat.

“We will meet here again...”

Bobby Rubin laughed uproariously.

“Fuck a duck!” Glorianna O'Toole exclaimed.

Sally's ears tingled, her lower lip trembled, and she felt a flush of heat go through her. "What's that supposed to be?" she said in a petulant whine.

Bobby shrugged at her innocently. “Just something off the top of my head,” he said. “What's the matter, Sally, don't Valley girls have a sense of humor?”

“Don't nerds from New York think about anything but playing with themselves?” she shot back without thinking, and instantly regretted it when she saw him shrivel and cringe.

“Play it again, and back off, you two,” said Glorianna, stepping forward to stand between them and study the screen. “It's only rock and roll.” She cocked her head speculatively as the sequence ran again. “Or anyway the Disney version …”

“What would you call him?” she demanded of Bobby.

He threw up his hands. "Is not my job," he said.

“Willy the Wirehead?” Sally suggested earnestly, trying to make it up to him for putting him down.

“Bad demographics, Sally,” Bobby said in what seemed like a somewhat placating tone. “Burnt-out wireheads don't have the money to buy discs.”

Both of them looked up at Glorianna O'Toole, who stood between them, peering at the final freeze frame on the screen with a peculiar expression on her face, as if she had eaten something really weird and couldn't tell whether she liked it or not.

“Don't look at me,” she finally said. “It may be my job to get you two to turn out this shit, but as far as I'm concerned, one A.P is as bad as another. But if I was one of the pinheads upstairs, I do believe I'd think old Albert here has as much potential as, say, Mucho Muchacho or the Velvet Cat. You two have worked on this crap before, what do you say, should we show him to marketing and research?”

“I really do like the voice,” Sally admitted somewhat grudgingly. “I think I could lay down good tracks with it with the right lyrics. And he is kinda cute. ..."

“A rockin' mad scientist...” Bobby mused. “It's dumb, but then, so are the songhacks and the assholes who buy this crap, aren't they? At least it's something to show to the pinheads upstairs to justify our salaries. ...”

Glorianna O'Toole shook her head ruefully. "Man, just listen to the three of us!" she said disdainfully. "What spirit, what enthusiasm, what a wonderful attitude toward the audience we have!" "Yeah," Bobby told her snidely, "then what's a Good 01' Girl like you doing in a place like this, Glorianna?"

Glorianna O'Toole flared at him for a moment like some mean old gray cat.

“Maybe I just like slumming,” she snapped.

“And maybe you just need the money like the rest of us?” Bobby suggested.

Glorianna's finely lined face softened. “Maybe,” she said. “But just maybe there's a pot of something at the end of this rainbow of dumbness for me that you're too young to understand.”

"Try me."

Glorianna O'Toole gave Bobby a long stare from deep down in those big green eyes and shot him a challenging grin that, if she wasn't this decrepit old lady, would have said in words of one syllable, Maybe I will.

Bobby's eyes widened for a beat, and then he immediately looked away from her with a weirdly discomforted look on his face that told Sally that he had picked up the vibe too.

Gross! thought Sally. Disgusting! How could this dirty old lady think that Bobby would ever want to make it with her?

Surely they must have both imagined it, for Glorianna O'Toole herself acted as if nothing had passed between them in the next beat, and she was all business, picking up a house phone and sitting back down on her stool.

“Hard-copy it to disc,” she told them, “and I'll tell Billy Beldock we finally have something for the songhacks and research to play with.”

As she dumped her audio track through Bobby's vid recorder so he could disc the whole thing, she listened to her own electronically transmogrified love song to Bobby sung one more time through the snaky smiling lips he had given to the A.P on the monitor screen. Einstein's warm wise old eyes seemed to peer longingly into her own, belying the smart-ass sneer on his young face as he capered like a rejuvenated Mick Jagger around his wirehead zombie bride.

She glanced back over her shoulder at Glorianna OToole, frail, and gray, and wrinkled in a loose red silk shift that hid her decrepit old bod, but with the easy elegant vibe of a woman who had known what it was to be sexy and beautiful for a long time peering unmistakably through those bright green eyes.

Good thing you're an old bag now, Sally thought. For she knew in her heart of hearts that never could she have competed for Bobby's attention for one minute with what this old lady must once have been.

Yet strange to say, in that moment she would have traded places with Glorianna O'Toole without hesitation just to know the memory of having been the beautiful rock and roll queen that poor fat and pimply Sally from the Valley could never get to be.

She snuck a glance at Bobby, who watched his monitor screen with a weird boyish longing on his face that somehow seemed in sync with something inside herself, that for a moment seemed to link them with an emotion that went beyond her lust.

“We are star-crossed lovers.”

For just as she was never going to get to be a sexy rock and roll queen, so nerdy little Bobby, despite his smart-ass put-downs, was never going to get to be the superfox he had conjured up on the screen. The girl Glorianna

OToole had once been wouldn't have looked at him twice.

“We are sisters and brothers.”

Oh yes we are, Bobby Rubin! she thought. You're another lonely little duckling just like me.

“We are star-crossed lovers.”

But if only you'll let me, I'll show you what it feels like to be someone's beautiful swan.

“We will meet here again.”

Return to the Big Apple

Kayren Gold had done everything her parents had told her to do to regain the urban middle class existence they had known and lost, but it was all coming out wrong.

“You don't want to be stuck here in Poughkeepsie for the rest of your life, do you?” her mother had told her when she entered high school.

Indeed she did not!

As far as Kayren was concerned, this grungy little city about seventy miles north of Manhattan was Siberia, for she had golden memories of spending the first nine years of her life on Manhattan's Upper West Side, in a five-room apartment looking out across Riverside Park onto the Hudson and the Jersey shore beyond. Two blocks east was Broadway, with its movie houses, and restaurants, and the crazed bustle and wonderful smells of Zabar's, where she would go shopping two or three times a week with her mother.

On weekends, Mommy and Daddy would take her to Central Park, or the Museum of Natural History, with its endless halls of stuffed animals and weird artifacts, or the Hayden Planetarium, or even to an occasional play, and they would eat with chopsticks in a fine Chinese restaurant.

She had friends like herself in the private school she went to. When the weather was good, they would play in the park, frolicking on the grass in the spring and summer, staging snowball fights, riding their sleds, and building snowmen in the winter.

Admittedly the pubescent Kayren enduring her exile in the Poughkeepsie gulag knew that her memories of Manhattan were gilded somewhat by the fact that she had never actually set foot outside a Zone. There had been nice zonies with their impressive-looking machinepistols all over the Upper West Side. They had patrolled the park, convoyed her to and from school with her classmates, and kept the dazzling excitement of Broadway off limits to any of the bad streeties her father was always warning her about. The excursions around town had been conducted in cabs, and always to venues where reassuring zonies abounded. Her parents had never gone anywhere by subway, and she had never been in one in her life.

But her parents had always promised her that when she entered high school she would be permitted to go anywhere within the Upper West Side Zone all by herself, and even travel with girlfriends and nice boys with sufficient funds to all the wonderful movies and restaurants and parks in the other safe Zones of Manhattan, provided, of course, that she always traveled by cab and never let herself wander out of the sight of the nice zonies.

Instead, Mom had lost her job with the Welfare Department when the vast bureaucracy was dismantled during the post-Devaluation depression, and Dad was laid off a few months later when Simon & Schuster eliminated two-thirds of its legal department as part of its attempt to stay afloat, and they were two months behind in their rent, on the verge of eviction, and actually reduced to eating kibble, when Theodore Gold miraculously landed a job as an insurance claims adjuster for Allstate in Poughkeepsie.

So instead of tripping the life fantastic in the cosmopolitan fantasy Manhattan she had been promised for her thirteenth birthday, Kayren found herself entering her teenage years as an exile from that golden New York of the mind among these hicks in the boonies.

“No, Mother, I do not want to spend the rest of my life stuck in Poughkeepsie!”

Mom understood. She had grown up in Brooklyn Heights and gone to college at N.Y.U in the Village and taken her graduate degree at Berkeley, and had even been some kind of hippie, taking drugs, and probably going to orgies, before she married Dad and moved to the glamorous Upper West Side. And now, here she was, with a graduate degree, and all those wonderful memories, fated to spend the rest of her life as a housefrau in wonderful suburban Poughkeepsie.

Anything but this for her only child! Study hard, Kayren, she told her daughter. Your only way out of here is a college scholarship.

Kayren dutifully beavered her way through high school. There were few distractions in Poughkeepsie anyway. The girls were all airheads, and the boys were dips; besides, the last thing in the world she wanted was a boyfriend who might even make her consider remaining in this burg one minute longer than she had to.

Her grades and S.A.T's were not quite good enough to get her dream scholarship to N.Y.U in the Village, but she did manage to get a scholarship to Rutgers. And while Rutgers was in Jersey, there were boys there with cars, or at least the money for train fare, and Kayren, with her thick honey-blond hair and her trim lean body, was a looker when she let herself be, and she made it perfectly clear to one and all that a proper excursion to the Apple was a sure means of getting laid, whereas any date that did not cross the Hudson guaranteed nothing but the certainty of a case of the blue balls.

So Kayren at least got to be a frequent day-tripper in Manhattan during her college years. Her dates took her to the theater and expensive restaurants and fancy clubs if they could afford it, and to movies, tours of the Soho art galleries, Chinatown, and Second Avenue meatracks and bars if they couldn't. She smoked dope, snorted designer dust, chipped a little wire, and put out freely with an open heart for just about any presentable boy who would squire her around the night life of the Big City at his own expense. From each according to his ability, to each according to her need.

She loved Manhattan with a far deeper and purer passion than she felt for any of the Rutgers students she day-tripped with. And while she saw things in New York that far exceeded the esthetic bounds of her innocent childhood memories—the blocks of ruined buildings, the savage raggy streeties lying in wait for the unwary, the kibble dispensaries, the garbage, and the filth, and the rats— these were mostly viewed from the safety of cab interiors or at worst under the eyes of watchful zonies or city cops, so none of it reduced the siren call of the city to her spirit.

As for her academic career at Rutgers, this was obsessively focused on the singular goal of securing upon graduation some kind of job, any kind of job, that would pay her well enough to let her live in Manhattan.

What this would take would be about 20,0 dollars in cash to buy into a share in a co-op and about 2,0 dollars a month to keep up the payments.

The down payment she began accumulating in her sophomore year by dealing wire. It was neither as dangerous nor as lucrative as it sounded. There were plenty of wirechippers at Rutgers with enough money and sufficient lack of street smarts to pay her a premium of twenty percent or so to score a piece of the latest wizard for them on her excursions to New York, and plenty of fancy meatracks in Manhattan where streetie dealers were admitted on good behavior to conduct just such business. Thus, $100 and $200 at a time, did she slowly accumulate the necessary capital, hoarding it in Swiss gold certificates, and living like a pauper.

Choosing a career that would net her the $2500 a month she estimated she would need just to barely survive as a Manhattanite was, however, a more difficult matter.

Her natural academic inclinations were toward those subjects largely based on verbal skills. She loved to read fiction, and history, and psychology, to expound in class, to write. She acted history, speech, English literature, composition. Science, math, or any subject involving computation, lab work, or problem-solving, were bummers she ground her way through.

In her intellectual heart, she daydreamed about becoming an English teacher, a lawyer, a journalist, even a novelist or poet.

But Daddy had a law degree and look where it had gotten him, teachers were paid peon wages when they were employed at all, journalists, print or media, had to put in years and years slaving away in Peoria or Akron before they could even dream about trying to land a job in the Apple, and garrets in which to be a starving writer or poet in Manhattan were called ateliers and went for half a million.

So she gritted her teeth, held her nose, listened to the sage advice of parents and guidance counselors, and sweated her way through four years of a major in computer science, specializing in word-processing, printing, data storage and retrieval, and librarianship, where the math was at least minimized, and verbal skills maximized, hoping to land an entry-level job in something like publishing, from which she might hope to screw her way to executive country.

What she managed to land upon graduation, three months of commuting from Jersey to pound the pavements, and a weekend in bed with the flunky doing the hiring, was a $4500-a-month job translating clothing specs into instructions for production robots in a sleazy Thirty-first Street shirt factory.

It was shit work indeed, and after deductions the take-home was only about $3300 a month, but things could have been worse, as they certainly were for so many of her classmates who found themselves subsisting on kibble in Passaic or gunfoddering in Venezuela.

She had an actual job in Manhattan, and she had been able to luck into a third-share in a one bedroom on East Twenty-seventh Street, where her share of the payments was $2200 a month and where she even had the living room as a solo sleeper, seeing as how Bill and Marta, her co-op mates, were sleeping together. She had attained the long-sought status of New Yorker, and the city spread itself like a free smorgasbord before her.

For the first six months she haunted the singles bars and declasse meatracks on First and Second Avenues, where admission was free to the ladies, looking to score a Mr. Wonderful, or at any rate, a Mr. Rich, who would sweep her away to the real high life, which she could see, but not quite touch. But it slowly dawned on her that the guys she met in places like these were more or less in her shoes, hanging on to some crummy job, living three and four to a co-op, and dreaming their frustrated dreams of somehow becoming a Prince of the City.

So she took to saving up her money and buying admission to fancy meatracks in Soho or the Village like the Temple of Doom or the American Dream, where such New York princes were said to abound. And indeed there were plenty of well-heeled plushie-tushie princes in such venues looking for instant romance. But there were even more guys pissing four to a pot and spending most of their money on fancy clothes and cover charges, with lines of bullshit they were sure would score them a slumming princess or at least a good piece of ass for the night. And of course there were whole platoons and squads of girls every bit as attractive as Kayren and then some competing fiercely for the available natural resources.

So while she got some meals at fancy restaurants and free snorts of designer dust every once in a while out of this foraging, after eighteen months in the Big Apple, Kayren was still working in the shirt factory, living with Bill and Marta on Twenty-seventh Street, and wondering somewhat forlornly when her life was really going to begin, and indeed beginning to wonder what it was really all about.

Still, she told herself bravely, things could be worse.

She was right.

Bill lost his job writing ad copy and ended up waiting tables in some plushie-tushie joint uptown. He grew more and more depressed and then started chipping cheap wire. He lost interest in Marta, who took to complaining to Kayren about his impotence in endless gory detail. They began to fight on a daily basis, and then Marta moved out of the bedroom and onto a trundle bed in the living room, where she kept Kayren awake half the night snoring like a horse. Bill's brain was beginning to burn, he spoke little, and bathed less, holding himself together just well enough to keep his job and his share in the co-op.

Still, things could be worse.

Right again.

Marta found herself a new boyfriend named Greg. Greg was a zoniel A big swarthy animal who took to staying over almost every night and fucking

Marta on the trundle bed right beside where Kayren tried to sleep.

Kayren wanted out of this horrible scene, but under the terms of the standard co-op share contract, she could get her $20,000 back only by selling out to Bill or Marta or to a third party with the consent of both of them. Neither Bill nor Marta had the money, and no outside party would be about to buy into this mess.

Moreover, the nature of Greg's sleazy game was becoming all too apparent. He wanted a share in the co-op, but he didn't have the buyout money. Bill was going downhill fast; it was only a matter of time before he'd be too burned out from all the bad wire to hold any kind of job anymore. According to the terms of the share contract, if one of the three shareholders failed to meet two monthly payments in a row, he had to either find a buyer acceptable to the other two, or his share would revert in another thirty days to his two partners, who would then be legally prevented from reselling it.

In the ordinary course of events, this prevented ripoffs, since unless the other shareholders permitted the defaultee to get his money back by selling his share, they would forevermore be forced to assume his share of the monthlies.

But in this case, the contract clause became a license to steal, since Marta had a veto over any sale of Bill's share, and Greg had the income to assume Bill's share of the monthlies.

It looked as if Kayren was going to be stuck with Marta and Greg as roommates forever when Bill finally got fired. It looked good on paper, since she would then own a half share instead of a third, but in reality she could hardly imagine a worse situation.

This time she was wrong.

Bill wasn't the one who lost his job.

She was.

Some son of a bitch had chipped a program that translated simple designer drawings into code for clothing production robots. They told her all about it at the shirt factory the day they canned her. You fed sketches into an optical reader, popped a shirt-specific chip into your computer, specified the sizes and production runs, and out the other end came discs that any moron could feed to the production robots. The software cost less than 30 dollars, the computer mod 200 dollars, and the optical reader 80 dollars, meaning that eliminating Kayren's salary would pay for the changeover in less than three months, and after that the factory's profit margin would be 4500 dollars a month greater forevermore.

“Nothing personal, kid, we just need every edge we can get to keep half a step ahead of the chinks.”

Kayren kept the bad news from everyone for over three weeks while she haunted employment offices and tried not to panic. Surely someone would hire her. She had a degree in computer science, didn't she?

But she had forgotten that it had taken her three months and some sleazy sex to land the shirt factory job in the first place, and since then the job market had deteriorated even further. Jobs for computer operators had been all but automated out of existence, and those that remained were filled by overqualified software designers quite willing to take anything they could get at peon wages under the dire circumstances.

As for shit jobs, New York was occupied by a vast army of the unemployed, so even if by some miracle she landed a job as a waitress or a cleaning lady or orderly in a nursing home, the wage scale was so depressed that it would take three months to earn one month's payment on her co-op share.

In desperation, the weekend before she was going to have to tell her co-op mates that she wasn't going to be able to make the monthly, she went home to Poughkeepsie and tried to borrow the money from her parents.

The numbers were hopeless. Dad would have to sell the car to come up with $2200 in cash, he needed it to get to work, and anyway, thirty days later she'd be right back where she started.

When Kayren got back to the apartment Sunday evening, there seemed nothing for it but to finally confront the inevitable.

“I lost my job,” she admitted as the four of them sat around on the beds in the living room. “I'm not going to be able to make Tuesday's monthly.”

Neither Greg nor Marta, holding hands on the trundle bed with thin little smiles, seemed particularly surprised by this revelation. Bill, gaunt and hollow-eyed, had long since passed the point where he was capable of much of a reaction to anything.

“I can cover,” Greg told Marta, already regarding Kayren in the past tense.

“It's not fair for you to cover, Greg, unless you have a share,” Marta said primly. “Bill and I will have to make up the difference. Eleven hundred extra apiece.”

This finally roused Bill from his wirehead stupor. "Hey, I don't have that kind of money," he told them.

“Tell ya what,” Greg said quickly. “I'll do everyone a favor and buy out Kayren's share.” He gave Bill a cold hard stare. “Any objections?” Bill glared at him silently, clearly afraid to open his mouth.

"Okay by me," Marta said.

“You two have it all figured out, don't you?” Kayren snapped. Greg grinned at her fatuously. If she had had a gun at that moment, she surely would have blown the bastard away.

“Don't you even want to hear Greg's offer?” Marta said sweetly.

Kayren just glared at her.

“I'll give you six thousand for your share right now,” Greg said.

“You son of a bitch! It's worth—"

“Twenty-two hundred more than it will be in thirty days,” Greg said diffidently. “If you wait a month to take me up on it, I'll have to deduct the monthly payment I'll be fronting for you, now, won't

I?"

“Forty-four hundred more than it will be worth to Greg in sixty days,” Marta chimed in.

“And of course in ninety days, it won't be worth anything to me, since your share will revert to Bill and Marta unless you sell it to someone acceptable to both of them before then,” Greg said.

"And you'll veto anyone but Greg, won't you, Marta?" Kayren sighed.

“Technically speaking, you'll actually owe Greg six hundred dollars if you wait for your share to revert,” Marta said.

“But I'm a good guy. I won't even bother to take you to small claims court for it.”

Forlornly, Kayren looked imploringly at Bill. He shrugged at her. Better you than me.

“Asshole!” Kayren shouted at him. “If you let them do this to me, how long before they pull the same number on you?”

“They can't do that, can they . . Bill whined. “They wouldn't be able to come up with sixty-six hundred a month just between the two of them.”

“Yeah, and as soon as you're too burned out to keep your job, they'll find a buyer who'll pay you shit and kick back what the share is really worth to them, and you won't be able to do a damn thing about it!” Kayren pointed out angrily.

Greg and Marta glanced at each other in sudden dim comprehension.

Marta beamed at Kayren. "Hey, thanks, Kayren," she said brightly. "That's a good one!"

“What do you say, Kayren?” Greg asked. “Six thou now, thirty-eight hundred on Wednesday, sixteen hundred thirty days after that, or zip in two months? Doesn't matter to me, I can wait it out if you can.”

“Go fuck yourself!” Kayren screamed. “I'll get a job! I'll find the money! I'll... I'll... oh, shit!”

She bolted from the bed, and, turning her back on the three of them to hide her tears of rage and frustration, she fled into the night.

The streets looked a lot different to Kayren now that she was forced to contemplate the likelihood that she would soon be thrown out onto them. Indeed, this past week it had almost seemed as if she were a streetie already, since she had returned to the apartment only to sleep, and that for only five or six hours a night, unable to bear the presence of Greg or Marta, or for that matter the cowardly Bill, unless she was quite comatose.

She made the daily rounds of the employment centers without any real hope, just to kill time. She hung out in the singles bars and meatracks along First and Second Avenues until closing time, far too spaced to be viable pick-up material or to care.

And she wandered aimlessly through Manhattan, exploring the city through a new set of eyes, as if she were scouting out the future terrain in which she would soon be constrained to forage for survival.

Now she really noticed all the rag-clad and predatory-looking streeties lurking in alleyways, disappearing down shadowy side streets, ducking into doorways at the sight of city cops and zonies. Like every other New Yorker, she had known that there were something approaching a million indigents subsisting on people kibble and their predatory instincts in Manhattan, but somehow they had always remained emotionally invisible.

But now the street-level reality of the city was intruding upon the forefront of her attention. It was Indian summer now, but where did all these streeties go in the winter? How many of them froze to death? How many succumbed to diseases? Did they prey on each other?

She knew that no one had to starve to death, the kibble dispensaries were everywhere on the peripheries of the Zones, holes in the wall guarded by city cops, where you could get a paper bag of the chewy, tasteless gray nuggets anytime you wanted to with no questions asked. There was no need to ration kibble; it supplied all the necessary nutrients, but it had been deliberately designed to taste like wet paper, so that no one would eat any more of it than they had to.

Nevertheless, Kayren took to eating a bag of the vile stuff every day or two even though she still had food money, as if training herself for a future that was slowly taking on the solidity of the inevitable.

In point of logical fact, of course, there was nothing inevitable about it; she could go home to Poughkeepsie, she could take Greg's pittance and go to some small city in the West or South, where rents were cheap, and unemployment lower, and where she could survive in a more or less civilized manner on the wages from some shit job until...

Until whalf?

Until she met Mr. Wonderful in Poughkeepsie or some other hick town?

Until she gave up and married some dumb dip just because he had a job?

Until they started hiring computer operators in Manhattan again?

Never!

She would never marry some asshole content to live the rest of his life in the sticks! And they would never start hiring computer operators at her level again in New York.

Since before she had entered high school in Poughkeepsie, she had had only one dream, to make a life for herself in the lost wonderland of Manhattan, and she had fashioned her whole life into an instrument for achieving it. She had worked so hard in high school, she had sweated through four years of courses she had hated in Rutgers, she had dealt wire, she had even screwed a fat creep to get the job in the shirt factory. She had been diligent, dedicated, motivated, and hard-working in pursuit of the only dream she knew.

She had done everything she was supposed to do right, and now it had all come out wrong.

She had only one thing left to cling to. Come what may, she would stay in Manhattan. Against all reason, against the evidence of her own eyes and nostrils, she knew that her life had no other source of hope.

Greg's first deadline came and went almost beneath her conscious awareness, and by the time she realized that she had procrastinated $2200 down the tubes, it seemed that an inevitable transformation had already taken place.

When she had been a little girl on the Upper West Side, the nice zonies had been her friends and protectors, and when she had been a day-tripping student from Rutgers and a gainfully employed computer operator with a secure share in a co-op, the zonies had been her anonymous mercenaries, hired to patrol the borders of an invisible but quite real bubble of security, whose function it was to keep her safe and the dangers of the streeties out.

But now she saw that bastard Greg in every zonie's face. Black, white, Puerto Rican, male, female, fat, thin, tall, short, they all seemed to have the same hard, implacable eyes and brutal, selfsatisfied mouth. Somehow, her protectors had all become the enemy. Somehow that callous uncaring son of a bitch had turned her world upside down.

She found herself unwilling to meet the cold, appraising stares of the zonies, which she had never even really noticed before, and she found herself occasionally locking gazes with the eyes of streeties, something she had always carefully avoided.

And while these miserable, streetwise, savage creatures regarded Kayren with implacable hostility when her eyes chanced to look directly into theirs, knowing her for what she was by her carriage and her clothes, she caught herself wondering what sad stories like her own had formed those bitter masks, what thwarted dreams had died or still might live behind those angry eyes.

Had they, too, done everything right, only to have it all come out wrong?

Someday soon, would another girl like Kayren Gold look into a streetie's hostile and defeated eyes and see her staring back?

One Man's Ceiling Another Man's Floor

Come on, man, I gotta have one, just tell me what I've gotta do," Paco Monaco whined.

“I told you a thousand times what you gotta do, my man,” Dojo told him with a patronizing air of weary patience. “Slip me four hundred.”

“Ching-ada!” Paco snapped, nuancing the word with just enough singsong irony to take the edge off his frustrated rage, for no matter how red his fury, he wasn't loco enough to really piss off the big black doorman. “Where the fuck am I going to get four hundred dollars?”

Dojo laughed. “Do I look like your moma?” he said. “How should I know? Rob a bank. Mug a plushie-tushie. Suck two hundred faggot cocks. Show a little good old American enterprise, my man.”

"Por favor, Dojo, put me onto something."

Dojo took a half step out of the dobrway to Slimy Mary's and peered down at Paco more narrowly now. "Put you onto something?"

“Yeah, man, anything, I mean, like I gotta have my own Zap, I feel like ... I mean I...”

Ever since that night on the Zap in Slimy Mary's, Paco had felt himself to be a changed man, and in ways he couldn't quite understand.

For one thing, he had lost his taste for cheap chocha. Not that he wasn't horny, not that he was turning into some kind of fuckin' maricon, he just didn't seem to have the energy to bullshit the crummy pussies in Slimy Mary's anymore, let alone do any crash and grab for a few bucks to buy the wire to pry open their pants.

Instead, he found himself wandering up and down Second Avenue eyeing all the chocharicas with a raging hard-on, and then jerking off in the ruins somewhere, imagining an elegant blond woman wearing only a silver fur stole, on her knees and stroking his hot cojones with her long jewelry-encrusted fingers as she sucked him off, staring up at him with reluctant surrender in her icy blue eyes.

And for another thing, he had also lost his edge for crash and grab itself. He had done a few in the past couple of weeks, and what had the poco dinero bought him, muchacho? He sure as shit had no taste for the Prong anymore! He didn't want any wire that would do nothing but make him hot for the puercas in Slimy Mary's.

And, strangely, after trying it three more times, he didn't want to flash on the Zap again in Slimy Mary's either.

It had been more or less the same each time. He'd pay Monkey Girl her thirty dollars, put on the Zap, grease el Lizardo his ten, then hit the touchpoint on the breadlx greater than x as the Mucho Muchacho disc came on.

And the music would start, and his heart would pound, and Mucho would dance across the screen, and he would melt into the reality of wherever it was as Mucho Muchacho donned his flesh, his oiled-steel muscles rippling fluidly beneath his taut bronze skin, his mighty superhuman cock all but bursting from his tight white jeans, “Tu Madre Tambien,” or “Hombre de la Sombre,” or “Besa mi Macho” pouring like hot lava from his throat as he capered and strutted through elegant nightclubs under the stars, promenaded up Fifth Avenue, paraded through shopping malls, restaurants, aisles of beachside cabanas, around Las Vegas swimming pools, across Hollywood sound stages, with all the look-but-don't-touch chocharicas of the world tearing off their clothes and flinging themselves at his feet.

But the length of the flash, like the length of a dream, was unpredictable. The first time he bought half an hour's worth again, he had stayed inside it until Monkey Girl had hit his touchpoint and told him his time was up, but the second time, and the third, too, he had popped out after fifteen or twenty minutes, and had to hit the touchpoint again to get his full time on the Zap.

And in the moment of cold harsh reality between, there he was, just a spick streetie dancing to a disc on the tacky dance floor of a crummy meatrack in the basement of a boarded-up tenement on Third Street off Avenue D, unable to forget coming out of the flash and back into just that reality lying atop a fat smelly puerca under Dojo's disdainful gaze.

And when he shuddered and hit the touchpoint again, a part of him still knew, even within the dreamtime of the flash, that the woman out of his dreams dancing her cocktease tango before him would turn back into slime from Mary's as soon as his thirty minutes were up.

So he did no more humping on the Zap in Slimy Mary's, and he had no more motivation for el cheapo crash and grab, for the fulfillment of the desire that filled him now, that obsessed his every waking hour, demanded a major score.

Paco had done mucho wire in his day, but never anything like the Zap.

This flash was in many ways like dreaming. On the Zap he became the mucho macho muchacho of his heart of hearts, the object of the adoring lust of all the chocha he surveyed. Scenes and times melted and flowed into each other exactly as they did in a dream. And on the Zap, a woman that he recognized as a creature out of his dreams appeared to him; cool, blond, with icy blue eyes, swathed in fur and dripping with jewels.

But unlike the sweet dreams that came to you curled up at night in the hallway of an abandoned building, on the Zap, what happened was in a certain sense real.

You might not be dancing in some fancy nightclub, but you were dancing on the floor of Slimy Mary's. You might not be fucking a beautiful blond bitch in a fabulous penthouse apartment, but you sure as shit did come out of it on top of some disgusting fat girl on a nest of grimy pillows in the musty darkness.

And the Zap was a nojuice piece. If you owned your own, you could put it on, and hit the touchpoint, and really march down West Broadway, up Fifth Avenue, down Second and First, past the galleries, and the fancy bodegas, and the bars and saloons, among the gordos and chocharicas, while you were flashing, and you would really be there!

And not as some nada little streetie, but with all the powers of Mucho Muchachol If you could go off into the real-life dreamworld of the gordos and the plushie-tushies and the chocharicas on the Zap, might you not awake to find yourself on real golden satin sheets with a rich momacita out of your dreams in thrall to the machismo of Mucho Muchacho?

There was much that Paco did not understand about the Zap.

But one thing he did know—he had to have one of his own!

“Por favor, Dojo, put me onto something, I mean, I'll do anything.”

Dojo looked down at him from the unfathomable heights of his exalted position as doorkeeper to the realm of a desire Paco had never before known he could feel.

"Anything?" he said with an ironic little grin.

"Anything, Dojo."

Dojo shrugged. He seemed to measure Paco's manhood with his eyes. His expression hardened, and when he spoke again, he was all serious business. "Bring me an Uzi."

“Que?”

Dojo's big brown eyes peered into his, and in them Paco seemed to see his whole life, his soul, his last chance at something he could not even name, hanging in the balance.

"An Uzi?"

“Shit man, you know what a fuckin' Uzi is, don't you?”

He looked back at Dojo, his stomach sunk down to his knees, or so in that moment it seemed. “An Uzi?” he said.

Dojo smiled at him with lofty indifference. “An Uzi machinepistol,” he said. “The piece they issue to zonies. It's only worth three fifty on the open market, my man, but I'm your friend, Paco; for you, I'm willing to break even. You bring me an Uzi and I'll trade it even up for a Zap. For which I can get four hundred.”

"How the fuck am I supposed to get an Uzi?"

Dojo shrugged, holding up his hands. "Do I have to tell you everything?"

"Off a zonieT

“Well, if you don't have the balls...”

"Who says I don't have the balls, nigger?"

Dojo laughed. "Quien sabe?" he said, mimicking Paco's voice with cruel precision.

“Y tu madre tambien!” Paco snapped back.

Dojo clapped a huge meaty hand on his shoulder, pursued his thick lips, nodded almost imperceptibly. “That's the old American spirit, son,” he said in a fatherly tone with hardly any discernible mockery in it. “You show me the color of your cojones, my man, and who knows, I might just start putting you onto things on a regular basis.”

Paco locked eyes with the big man. The task Dojo had set for him was, to say the least, the most difficult and dangerous piece of business he had ever even thought of attempting. But the payoff, if he succeeded, would be a transformation of his existence beyond his current capacity to even perceive.

“Thanks, Dojo,” he said quite earnestly, and he really meant it. A motherfucker of a job had certainly been laid on him, a task that only un hombre muy macho could hope to perform, and the thought of what he had to do scared the shit out of him. Yet beneath that fear was a strange and complex emotion, a kind of exhilarated calm mixed with cold determination. If he had ever experienced the concept before in his life, he might have told himself that the deal that Dojo had offered him was just.

As it was, he did know that the doorman of Slimy Mary's had never before treated him this seriously. Never before had Dojo held out the possibility that he might one day acknowledge him as an equal, as a real man.

He set off into the night feeling a bit more like Mucho Muchacho already.

“What do they want, blood?” Bobby Rubin said, snorting up a line of designer dust, then collapsing back onto the paisley velvet couch with a petulant shake of his head, in a foul mood already.

He had finally persuaded Glorianna to take him to one of her A parties. Come on up to my place, and we'll go in my Rolls, she had even told him.

So he had duded himself all up, and driven way up a succession of ever narrower and ever more winding streets to the top of Lookout Mountain with high hopes. What could be better than being driven to a fancy industry party by the Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll? Being escorted by Glorianna O'Toole would certainly be an entree into the inner circles, and on the other hand, she was far too old for anyone to take him for her date, so he would be free to forage among the prize pussy as a man of importance instead of just some faceless nerd who had managed to bullshit his way inside.

And Glorianna's legendary tree house had been everything he expected it to be.

Perched in a thicket of eucalyptus high on a ridge road overlooking the jeweled nightscape of the city and constructed of unpainted redwood timber, the house didn't look like much of anything out of the funky ordinary from the street side, except for the geodesic dome that crowned it, and the extravagantly decorated Rolls in the doorless carport.

But the entranceway led directly into the big living room that looked out over the city from on high through the glass doors that opened out onto the deck, and dominating the room, its branches overarching the couches and the redwood stump tables and the big stone fireplace, and forming a leafy subceiling just under the glass dome, was the legendary giant bonsai, the fully mature dwarf eucalyptus that turned the whole room into a forest glen.

But Bobby had scarcely had time to utter a breathless wow before he heard another car pull up outside, and a moment later, in waltzed Sally Genaro, flashing him a wink and a warm smile. What a bummer! Glorianna had never bothered to tell him that she intended to drag the Pimple along!

“Somehow I get the feeling they'll settle for money,” Glorianna said dryly, passing the dust kit across her lap to Sally from the Valley, who had stuffed herself into a sheeny low-cut gunmetal fabric gown that Bobby had to admit would have looked sexy on someone twenty pounds lighter.

She had also frosted her bleached blond hair with black tiger stripes, conked it up into a bluejay crest, and applied a thick layer of fairly subtle two-tone makeup that sharpened the pudge out of her cheekbones and would almost have made it if it had done a little better job of covering the outbreak of acne on her chin.

“But we're like making them money, aren't we?” Sally said earnestly, snorting up a line off the obsidian slab.

“They want gold, Sally, that's it, isn't it, Glorianna?” Bobby said with as much gentleness as he could muster. Poor Sally from the Valley! She did try so hard, and she was real wizard on the VoxBox, and she took all the put-downs he threw at her with a puppy-dog good-naturedness that was almost infuriating, and he did feel sorry for her. If only she'd give up coming on to him and just let it be, he might even be able to like her.

“Go to the head of the class, Bobby,” Glorianna said. “The thing of it is, Billy's job is riding on it, and shit, as they say in show biz, flows downhill.”

Bobby nodded in what he hoped was a knowing inside manner. Unlike Sally, he knew how to read the numbers. They had produced three releasable discs so far, starring three different A.P rock stars, and while all of them were selling well enough to eventually show a thin line of black ink on the balance sheets, none of them was going to be more than marginally profitable.

“Well, it's not like our fault, is it?” Sally said petulantly. “I mean it's the specs and the lyrics they send down that don't make it. I mean, we're not screwing up our end of it, are we? How can they expect us to be any better than the stuff they give us to work with?”

“Yeah!” Bobby agreed. For once the Pimple was right. “The pinheads upstairs have no one to blame but themselves.”

Glorianna looked at Sally. She looked at Bobby. She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling and groaned.

“What's the matter?” Bobby demanded.

“If you have to ask,” said Glorianna O'Toole, “you're never gonna know.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind, kiddies,” Glorianna said, taking the dust kit from Sally and laying it down on the big redwood table. “It's time to boogie. You do at least know how to party, don't you?”

It had been a fabulous ride along Mulholland in the front passenger seat of the open Rolls, marred only by the fact that Bobby had gallantly insisted that she take it while he sat by himself in the back, for of course Sally could have imagined nothing more totally perfect than cuddling with Bobby in the backseat while old Glorianna sat up front and drove alone as if this were their Rolls and she was like their chauffeur.

The party house belonged to some producer of something or other whose name she could not quite remember, and it was situated on just acres and acres in a secluded private valley just down from the Mulholland ridge road, with a giant swimming pool, tennis courts, and even an actual duck pond.

Inside, the place was just room after room after room—big ones with bright lights, bars, and buffets, smaller ones with muted lighting and all kinds of designer dust just laid out in bowls, a dance floor with flashy lighting and a live band, and if that wasn't enough, the whole thing spilled out through a succession of big glass doors onto a lawn and a huge patio surrounding the swimming pool, with its Jacuzzi, and sauna, and hot tub, where yet another bar and buffet had been set up.

And the people—awesome!

It was more like walking right into the middle of some movie than any real party Sally had ever seen. She recognized hundreds of famous faces, or so it seemed; actors, actresses, rock stars, some senator or something, two talk show hosts, and those she didn't recognize had these clothes and like this attitude that seemed to disdainfully proclaim that they knew they were more important than the ones she did. The only partygoers who didn't seem to be anyone famous or important were women so staggeringly beautiful she wanted to kill them.

It was like some kind of wonderful dream.

But not for very long.

Glorianna O'Toole whisked them inside, took them on a quickie grand tour, stuck some more designer dust up their noses, got them glasses of champagne and piled food on plates for them, introduced them to a dozen actors, actresses, and rock stars, who gave them the big smile and the glad hand and looked right through the two of them, and then, apparently having done her duty to her charges by her own lights, the horrid old lady had somehow contrived to just disappear, leaving her and Bobby standing there in a huge room full of people who obviously couldn't care less that they existed, balancing plates of food on one hand and holding champagne glasses in the other.

“Fabulous, isn't it, Bobby?” Sally said, trying to fork a piece of smoked duck crepe into her mouth with the same hand that held her glass, and dribbling champagne onto her overloaded plate in the process.

But Bobby didn't notice. "Uh-huh..." he muttered, checking out all the actresses and starlets and high-class hookers with his tongue practically hanging down to his knees.

'Terrific food. ...'

“What?” Bobby said distractedly.

“I said the food's great, Bobby, try some of this duck thing.”

He finally deigned to look her way, shrugged foolishly as he stood there balancing his plate on one hand and holding his glass in the other like a harried waiter in some diner.

Sally couldn't help giggling. "Come on," she said, "we'd better sit down before someone asks us for a refill on their coffee."

Bobby scowled; he obviously didn't think it was very funny, but he did follow her over to an empty couch in a corner, where he sat beside her silently, picking absently at his food, sucking up champagne, and staring hungrily at all the perfect sexy bitches like a sad little poor boy outside a bakeshop window.

Sally filled the awkward silence with smoked duck crepes, caviar canapes, salmon mousse, cold crab claws, and Black Forest cake, pissed off at him to be sure, but knowing all too well just how he felt, sitting there just like her, forever an outsider looking in.

“I think this caviar is the real Russian stuff,” she finally ventured. “I never had any before, have you...?”

“Don't really remember...”

“You tried the crab claws yet?”

“Don't really like crab much...”

“Great cake, huh... ?”

“S'okay.”

After a few minutes of this, Sally gave up, and concentrated on her food. It really was terrific stuff, she could see that she wasn't going to get anywhere with him right now, so she might as well enjoy what she could.

She had finished the salmon mousse and the caviar canapes and was halfway through her cake by the time Bobby drained the last of his champagne, put his still-laden plate down on the arm of the couch, stood up, and spoke to her again.

“Be right back, gonna get another drink,” he said. “Want me to get you one?”

“Yeah, sure, thanks, Bobby,” Sally said, smiling at him brightly. Wasn't that sweet?

Apparently not, as it turned out, just a lame excuse for leaving her flat, for that was the last she had seen of him, and now she had been wandering around alone like a fish out of water for what seemed like hours, trying to find Bobby, or Glorianna, or at least make eye contact with a friendly face.

But Glorianna must have been getting loaded with her fancy friends, and by now Bobby was probably off somewhere balling some good-looking airheaded slut, and none of these Beautiful People was about to pay her any heed.

In the worst possible way, this was just like all the parties she had endured as a teenager in the Valley. All the snaky guys just looked right through her. None of them tried to hit on her, and she entirely lacked the courage to try to even start a conversation with them.

Indeed, this was worse. At least at those Valley parties there were usually a few of her wallflower girlfriends to pass the time with, and now and again she would be hit on by some horny guy who had heard that there would be a blow-job in it for him if he was nice to her. But she didn't know anyone here, and these guys were all movie stars, and rock singers, and producers, and directors, and the party was full of beautiful women who had probably come here just to put out.

So all she could do to pass the time was snort up the free designer dust, scarf up the food, get sloshed on champagne, and listen to the band that was playing for the dancers.

They were pretty lame and old-fashioned by her standards. They didn't even have a real VoxBox player, just an electric guitarist, a keyboard player, and of all things an actual drummer playing an old acoustic drum kit. These were all old guys who looked at least forty in their black leather and moldy eighties spiked mohawks, and they sounded it. They didn't seem to have any original material of their own; all they seemed capable of playing were covers of stuff from the eighties, the seventies, and even the sixties.

Obviously these lames were only getting even lowly party gigs on the basis of their lead singer, a tall, alabaster-skinned redhead poured into a tight black dress slashed down to her navel. She had the face of a fallen angel and the bod of a weight lifter, and she was so sexy that if there had been any dyke at all in Sally, she would have wanted to go down on her.

But her voice was thin and nasal, and her phrasing of the moldy oldies was flat as last year's tortillas, and they weren't even processing her through a vocoder.

And Sally hated her with a purple passion. With her VoxBox rig, she could sing this no-talent airhead into the groundl

Why her? Sally thought angrily as she stood there fading into the woodwork for what seemed like centuries. Why not me? Put a bag over her and she couldn't sing her way out of a pay toilet! Some day... somehow... Aw shit!

Woozy from all the champagne, slightly stoned from the residue of her last hit of dust, more than a little bloated from all the food she had crammed into her face, and completely pissed off at the cosmic injustice of it all, Sally finally wandered away from the dance floor, through two or three other rooms, and out onto the poolside patio.

About a dozen beautiful people of both sexes were swimming in the pool without benefit of suits, people actually seemed to be balling in the Jacuzzi, and she didn't even want to think about what was going on in the sauna. She staggered off across the lawn toward the duck pond, where, she saw, a single solitary figure sat at the edge of the water, curled over, staring at the ground between his feet, and rocking back and forth rhythmically like a Jew in a synagogue.

She looked again, and saw that it was Bobby.

“Hi, Bobby,” she said in a flat, depressed voice, hunkering down beside him.

Bobby slowly lifted his head to peer at her blearily, his eyes moist and bloodshot.

"Hello, Sally," he said glumly, then hung his head back between his knees.

Sally sat down beside him. He didn't look at her, but at least he didn't get up and walk away. "Some party, huh?" she ventured. "Having a good time...?"

Bobby made a strange urking gurgly sound. “Just terrific,” he muttered sarcastically. “Tha's why I'm sitting out here all by myself....”he said forlornly, and heaved a great sad sigh.

Sally longed for the courage to reach out and throw a comforting arm around his shoulders. She went so far as to lay a hand lightly on his knee. He didn't seem to notice, but then he didn't shy away either.

Emboldened, she leaned a little deeper into his body space. "Yeah," she said softly, "I know just how you feel. ..."

“For sure!” Sally told him, daring to pat him lightly on the shoulder for emphasis. “I mean, here we finally are at this fabulous party, like we've walked right into this movie we've always dreamed of being in, and all the stars and even the extras just look right through us like we didn't exist.”

A long shudder racked Bobby's body. "Shit. . ." he moaned softly. "Jus' what I need to hear . .

“Well, like who needs 'em, Bobby,” Sally cooed woozily into his ear, letting her arm drape sympathetically over his shoulders. “Buncha no-talent sluts and airhead hunks think they're better than we are just because they got their pretty faces and perfect bods, we'll show 'em, won't we, we're gonna be the stars, and they're gonna be the ones on the outside looking in!”

“We?” Bobby snapped, writhing out of her embrace, and finally turning to look right at her with an angry scowl. “What the hell do you mean, we?”

“I mean ... I mean like, you know, Project Superstar,” Sally stammered, taken aback. “That's you and me, right, Bobby, that's our chance to show them all, I mean, have you heard the band they've got playing here?”

“How could I help it?” Bobby said sourly.

“Well what do you think of them?”

“Are you kidding?” Bobby snapped. “They suck!”

“For sure!” Sally agreed brightly. “And if that's like the competition, we're gonna rock 'em into the ground!”

Bobby bleared at her narrowly. “Yeah!” he shouted. “Y'know, you may not look like much, ol' Sally from the Valley, but you can really boogie with that VoxBox, I ever tell ya that, and I am the greatest image organ player what ever lived!"

“For sure you are, Bobby!” Sally cried, her spirit soaring.

Bobby rose shakily to his feet. “Ya hear that, you no-talent pricks!” he yelled vehemently, waving his arms as if to encompass the whole party. He rocked back and forth on his heels as if he were having difficulty maintaining his balance. “Ya know what, Sally?” he said rather wildly, his eyes rolling loosely in their sockets.

“What?” she said, suddenly aware that she was looking up straight into his crotch.

“We are gonna do it, that's what!” he shouted. “Put all the bastards on the kibble lines where they belong! Look! all these airheaded sons of bitches think they own the world got all these pussies hangin' all over them think they're such hot shit! You can kiss my ass, you motherfuckers, if you ask real nice, when we're the kings of rock and roll!”

Through her own woozy haze of booze and dust, it finally dawned on Sally that Bobby Rubin was roaring shit-faced blitzed. Somehow this perception reminded her that she, too, was a little loaded, and that gave her spirit energy and loosened her tongue, and filled her with joy as she synced into his righteous raving wrath.

“Yeah!” she shouted back. “We'll show 'em, won't we, Bobby, you and me! No-talent bitch! Dead-ass old farts!” Without quite remembering how she got there, she found herself on her feet beside him, holding his hand. And he didn't pull it away.

“Who the fuck do they think they are treating us like shit?” “Airheads!”

“Pinheads!”

“MOTH-ER-FUCKERS!”

“We are in somewhat deep shit, babes,” Billy Beldock said nervously. “I mean, our stock has dropped another two points this week, and the pressure is really coming down, and if we don't start shipping some A.P gold real soon …”

“What do you mean we, white man?” Glorianna O'Toole cracked with a wry little smile. But Billy was apparently in no mood to be amused. He had come up to her on the dance floor, boogied with her a while for old times' sake, with no heart in it, and then dragged her away from the action and into this murky little room full of little cabals of dealmakers doing their thing over dust, and had spent the last ten minutes snorting up line after line compulsively and bitching and moaning at her. It was hardly Glorianna's idea of how to party. Time was, Billy wouldn't have wasted party time this way either.

“I'm serious, Glorianna,” Billy told her. “I got where I am by proving to the board that the A.P technology can work, and the Factory has put significant capital into it on my say-so. And I have been told in words of one syllable that if it doesn't start paying off in gold read soon now, my ass is grass.”

“You won't be the first president of Muzik, Inc., to get himself canned, and you won't be the last,” Glorianna said philosophically. “Look on the bright side. You've already collected that fancy salary longer than most. Haven't you socked any of it away?”

“I want an A.P rock star that ships gold before they ship me off to Miami, goddammit!”

“I'm doing the best I can,” Glorianna said softly. “The kids are giving it all they've got.”

Billy shoved another line of designer dust up his nose. “Well so far that's been mediocre shit, and you know it!” he snapped.

“What do you want, miracles?”

“Yeah! If miracles is what it takes, then miracles is what you gotta come up with!”

“This whole mess wasn't my idea, if you'll remember, Billy!” Glorianna shot back, her temper finally flaring. “You knew bloody damn well what I thought about this whole stupid A.P rock star bullshit when you sweet-talked me into this crap! It just ain't rock and—”

“Don't say it!” Billy Beldock snarled angrily. “Please don't say it, Glorianna,” he said much more softly, placing a tender hand on her knee and begging her with those long-remembered bedroom eyes of his. “Take a good look at me. . .

Glorianna shrugged. She touched his hand. "Okay, so here's looking at you, kid ..." she said softly, staring warmly into his eyes and giving him a little smile.

What she saw was a tanned, well-preserved man in his sixties, with a luxuriant mane of silver hair falling to the shoulders of a beautifully tailored black velvet suit that must have set him back $3000. What she saw were uptight bloodshot eyes that seemed a good deal sadder than those of the hot young drummer who had been her lover many long years ago. What she saw was a true rocker she had once loved and admired, somehow grown older into a man of power just trying to hold on, whom she now found it in her heart to pity.

“Lookin' good!” she lied.

“Yeah, sure,” Billy said. “What you see is a sixty-five-year-old man who nobody will hire again. What you see is a guy who's a little long in the tooth to go back to his drum kit at this late date, kiddo, even if there were still work for drummers, which, as we both know, there ain't.”

“I left my gypsy violin at home,” Glorianna said, not all that unkindly.

Billy Beldock smiled wanly. He took yet another hit of dust, and his expression hardened, but it also seemed to go backward in time, to another Billy, to a comrade in the night, to the young spirit that somehow might still live behind those about-to-go-down old eyes.

“I'll tell you what else you see,” he said with more of the old passion. “You see the last president the Muzik Factory will ever have who ever even played in a rock and roll band! Maybe I have sold out a little, maybe what I'm asking you to do isn't exactly your idea of real rock and roll. And, okay, okay, so I'll admit that maybe it isn't quite what I'd like to turn out either.

But you know as well as I do what's behind me waiting to take over. Cost accountants. Marketers. Motivational researchers. They'll never go with another broken-down old rocker again.”

“What do you want me to say, Billy?” Glorianna said tenderly. “That all things pass? Let it be? Keep on truckin'?”

Billy's lower lip trembled. “Don't give me that old hippy-dippy line,” he said wanly. “That's not what I'm paying you for, babes....”

“Isn't it, Billy?”

Despite himself, Billy Beldock laughed, a shrugged, ironic laugh, that somehow in that moment touched Glorianna's heart. "You're a crazy old lady, you know that," he said softly.

"You're not so bad yourself."

They looked at each other for a long silent moment. They shared a little shrug that went back thirty years and more.

“So?”

“So I'll give it my best for you, Billy, I'll stand over your little cyberwizards with a whip, I'll shove acid down their throats, at least we'll go out rockin', I'll—”

“Hey, Glorianna, I think those kids you brought are up past their bedtime!”

Eddie Friedkin, their genial host, had stuck his head into the room with a somewhat distasteful curl on his lip. “They're out by the duck pond stoned out of their minds and raving.”

“Oh shit,” Billy groaned. “Now what?”

Glorianna laughed as she gathered herself to her feet. “Who knows?” she said. “From where they're coming from, that may be progress.”

Bobby Rubin's stomach seemed to be filled with sloshy green foam, his knees refused to lock into a stable position, and the back of his throat tasted like a desert of powdered aspirin. The house, the pool, the trees, and the duck pond all seemed to be revolving in slow circles around his head, and the lights of the party seemed to be shining through a diffracting sheet of glycerin.

He had no idea how much booze he had drunk or in what loathsome combinations, nor did he know how much of what designer dust he had snorted, but both had certainly been a lot more than enough.

“Pathetic!” he shouted. “It's all so fuckin' goddamn pathetic!”

Oh yes, he had succeeded in escaping from Sally from the Valley into pussy paradise. Everywhere he looked there were beautiful women who made his dick ache with longing. They danced in hordes to the music of the live band, they leaned over tables snorting up dust, they purred into the ears of actors and singers and producers; they even swam naked with rock-hard nipples in the swimming pool.

Bobby had never gained access to a scene like this before. It was like his fifteen-year-old wet dream of nirvana.

But it was pure pathetic nightmare too.

For he didn't even know how to begin to approach any of these unreal creatures, he couldn't even hold eye contact when any of them chanced by accident to gaze in his direction. They were all film and tv actresses or rock stars, or at the very least women who had come here with the intention of glomming onto someone who would turn them into same. And the men were all sleek, tanned, well-muscled Hollywood studs with perfect features from Central Casting, or self-confident make-out artists moving in a musk of money and power, and frequently both.

Here, or so at least it seemed, everyone but him was a show-biz glamour boy, and none of the glamour girls would look even once at a below-the-line tech like him. Unless... unless...

He didn't quite know unless what, but somehow it seemed to involve getting so drunk and so stoned that his mind would turn off, and courage would come from someplace magical, and his chemically augmented consciousness would instinctively evolve words of such total savoir-faire that he would be able to catch one of these tantalizing creatures in a brilliant web of conversation....

Instead, of course, the more loaded he became, the more impossible it seemed to venture so much as a word to one of these women. And the more angry and depressed he became, the more dust he snorted and the more foul cocktails he drank, and the more the reality of the party took on the agonizing aspect of something wonderful going on behind a pane of glass with his poor nose pressed against it like a starving little match boy slavering outside a pastry shop.

Finally, all he could do was stagger out into the night to sit by himself at the duck pond, brooding incoherently, and trying to convince himself that he was not going-to vomit.

And now, here he found himself, howling in the night like a tortured animal and defiantly not caring jack shit that everyone within earshot probably thought he was some kind of asshole.

“We'll see who turns out to be the assholes, MOTH-ER-FUCKERS!” he shouted in the general direction of the swimming pool. “You're all dinosaurs and I'm gonna kick your asses into the tar pits where they belong!”

“Stuck-up no-talent bitches! Like you couldn't sing your way out of a pay toilet!”

Huh? What... ? Did I... ? Oh, shit!

A bubble of sour gorge erupted from his churning guts to sear the back of his throat, and the effort of choking it back before he barfed all over himself snapped Bobby's barbled brain back into some semblance of mortified self-awareness.

No, he hadn't shouted the last; it had been Sally Genaro.

He now remembered, as if it had happened to someone else, that Sally from the Valley had come out here to sympathize with him, that she had put her arm around him and whispered into his ear that it was all right, that she understood how he felt, that she felt just like him, and Jesus, he had let her, he hadn't even denyed it, and now, here he was, so pissed he could hardly stand, on the queasy edge of throwing up, raving like a maniac, and holding hands with the Pimplel

“We'll show you bubbleheads, won't we, Bobby! Bomp-bomp-ba-doo-pa _ _”

“Sally! Sally!”

She was gibbering drunk out of her mind! Her makeup was smeared all over her face, revealing the zits on her chin; her eyes were bleary and bloodshot, and she was holding on to his hand and swaying vertiginously toward him.

“—pa-doop-bam-pah!”

Grinning crookedly, she flung her arms around his neck, pursuing her lips juicily around the climactic pah! and planted a hot, sour-tasting wet kiss on his lips, insinuating a thick avid tongue into his mouth, and grinding her pelvis against him.

This was more than Bobby's bilious stomach, besotted equilibrium, and horrified brain could finally endure upright.

He pulled himself away from her, teetering off balance backward in the process, and went down smack on his ass, breaking his fall by planting his hands on the ground behind him. The jolt, the visceral revulsion, the shame of it all, finally combined to trigger the inevitable, and he barely managed to roll over onto his hands and knees to avoid puking all over himself as a huge bolus of bitter vomit exploded from his mouth.

He knelt there on his hands and knees for a good long while, emptying his guts of all the booze and assorted mixers, letting it all pour out without any attempt to hold back, and, though the taste was vile indeed, and his head rang like a hollow gong, there was something almost pleasant about the relief of shutting out the world and just poking it all out with his eyes closed and his mind greened out into the narrow focus of spewing out the night's constricted accumulation of chemical and psychic bile.

When his drained stomach finally subsided in a dampening series of dry heaves, and he collapsed back onto his haunches on the grass, however, his inebriation had cleared to the point where the full mortification of the moment, of the whole evening, slapped him across the face like a cold wet towel.

There he sat on the lawn of a Hollywood mansion in front of a puddle of his own puke. Sally Genaro, the Pimple, hunkered down on the grass beside him with her arm around his shoulder, cooing sympathetically while Glorianna O'Toole peered down at them with her hands on her hips, shaking her head and grinning.

"Jesus ..." Bobby moaned.

He could have killed her.

“You kids!” Glorianna said dryly. “When I was your age, it took me a good twelve hours of partying to reach the barfing point.”

Bobby just groaned and looked away, unable to meet her eyes, unable to even find the strength in that horrid moment to pull himself free of the Pimple's loathsome and shameful embrace.

Glorianna laughed good-naturedly. “Don't take it too hard, Bobby,” she said. “Take it from one who was there, Jim Morrison didn't look any better after hugging the toilet bowl than you do now. Maybe we'll make a rocker out of you yet!”

Reality Liberation Front

With the chilling gray days of November descending upon the city and Greg's next deadline only five days away, Kayren Gold finally admitted to herself that she wouldn't let this one go by without taking what she could salvage. For while 2600 dollars might be an insulting pittance to accept from the bastard for a co-op share that had cost her 20,000 dollars, from her current street-level perspective it was quite a tidy fortune, and Kayren, of necessity, had begun to teach herself to think like a streetie at least when it came to survival economics. As she wandered about the city, she ran the calculations in her head over and over again.

Kibble was free, and she had plenty of clothing back in the apartment, including the luxury of cold weather gear, so that $2600 could be carefully husbanded to keep her above a brute survival level for years if need be.

She could do a wash in a Laundromat for about ten dollars twice a month, so it should cost her only 240 dollars a year to dress like a human being instead of a filthy streetie. She had found bath houses where you could get a shower and towel for as little as fifteen dollars, meaning she could keep herself from really stinking by bathing twice a week, at an annual cost of about 360 dollars. Meaning, at least in theory, she could avoid looking or smelling like some foul street creature for nearly five years if she remained strong and refrained from pissing much of it away on frivolities like real food or new underwear.

There were plenty of singles bars and meatracks where admission would remain free to a girl who kept up her appearance, so she could still cadge free drinks and even occasional meals in exchange for sex, and more importantly maintain her access to respectable social levels, where sooner or later she must surely make a connection, romantic or otherwise, which would rescue her from indigency.

She had managed to convince herself that she could certainly keep things together in this manner until the days began to turn colder and she realized that she had not yet really given much thought to the matter of shelter.

When she finally did, she soon relearned what every New Yorker including herself knew all along, namely that $2600 would not buy you very much of that in the Big Apple.

The sleaziest hotels extant ran at least $400 a week for a thin cot in a foul little closet, meaning that her money would be gone in less than two months. Streeties either slept in the subways or squatted in abandoned buildings, a prospect Kayren found terminally unacceptable.

A woman squatting alone in the ruins would face at the very least the prospect of rape on a nightly basis. The subways would provide safe haven from the approaching winter cold during the day, when the trains ran and the transit cops patrolled them, but she could well imagine what jungle law must prevail at night, when the transit cops abandoned the stations and tunnels to the streeties.

So it seemed that the best she could hope for after all was a couple of months in some slimy fleabag hotel in which to somehow find some source of further income, after which she must either risk the death of her body in the ruins or the subway, or, possibly worse, face the death of the only dream she had ever known, and slink back in the terminal defeat of her spirit to Poughkeepsie.

Which she would choose when and if the time came was something she entirely lacked the courage to contemplate.

Brooding upon it in the back reaches of her brain nevertheless, she was walking aimlessly down First Avenue near Third Street on a blustery early evening, when, as if conspiring to add to her misery, the sky opened up on her with a sudden fit of cold driving rain that had her half soaked and shivering before she could even find a doorway to duck into.

The first doorway she did find was that of a sleazy-looking little bar with a green neon sign proclaiming it “The Clearing” hanging in the unadorned plate-glass front window. The doorway was shallow, the wind was whipping the rain into it, and so, without any consideration of economic reality, Kayren slipped sloshily inside.

It wasn't much; just an ancient Formica bar with green plastic and rusty chrome stools in front of it and a fat old black bartender with a thoroughly grayed afro behind it, a half-dozen tacky tables and chairs presided over by a gaunt waitress with the hollow eyes and indifferent demeanor of a heavy wirehead, two toilets, and a pay phone. The jukebox was an antique audio-only model that might have been worth a small fortune to a collector if it was cleaned up. Some sort of muttery jazz that Kayren didn't recognize was playing at low volume.

Aside from the bartender and the waitress, the only people in the bar were a couple who were obviously wireheads coming down sitting at a table over steins of beer staring into space, a guy in an old peacoat at the table nearest the door nursing a big glass of vodka and drumming his fingers nervously on the table as if waiting for someone who was very late to show up, and a man and a woman seated together at the bar.

The man was a middle-aged uptown type wearing a fancy tan trench coat. The woman was about Kayren's age, with short, randomly combed blond hair, nervous blue eyes, and an ironic twist to her mouth. She was wearing old jeans, work boots, a loose-fitting red T-shirt, and a yellow plastic poncho. On the T-shirt, the initials “R.L.F” had been rather crudely stenciled in jagged electrified yellow script.

There was something weird about this dive. It shouldn't be this empty on this street at this hour, and in fact it appeared as if whoever owned it wasn't really doing much to encourage business at all. The bartender gave her a dirty look as she hesitated in the doorway. What clientele there was—

Then the woman in the red T-shirt handed something in a manila envelope to the man in the tan trench coat, who pocketed it and slipped her a thin wad of bills, and the whole thing clicked.

The spaced-out wireheads at the table. The guy in the peacoat waiting impatiently for someone to show. The moldy old jukebox without even a simple screen. The look the bartender gave her.

This was a dealer's bar.

Kayren had made connections in joints like this now and again when she was a college student scoring wire for her classmates in Jersey. The house got a piece of the action and did not encourage social drinkers to linger. In fact, if you had no business in a place like this...

Kayren turned, looked out into the rain, then hesitated, caught in a moment of indecision, and by more than the foul weather outside. Twenty-six hundred viewed as capital was certainly a sufficient stake to get her back into this game at the modest level she had played it at in college. She was rusty, she knew no ready customers, she had no connections anymore, and she had never ventured to front her own money in a wire deal, but...

While she stood there staring out into the rain, the man in the trench coat, having concluded his business, brushed by her and out the door, sending a wet, cold blast of bad weather into her face. Kayren turned away from it, back to the warmth of the bar interior, and found herself virtually nose to nose with the woman in the red T-shirt, who had apparently been on her way out behind him.

Their eyes locked for a moment. The dealer eyed her narrowly. The language began to come back to Kayren. She nodded almost imperceptibly. Yeah, I saw. A hardness in the other woman's eyes.

A little curl of Kayren's upper lip. Shit, no. I'm not a cop. A little smile.

“Buy you an Irish coffee?” the woman in the red T-shirt said with guarded diffidence. “You look like you need it.”

Is she a dyke? Kayren wondered. Does she want to make sure I'm not going to make trouble? Just being friendly? Or a chance to get in on something? Who cares!

“For sure,” Kayren said truthfully.

The dealer led her to a back table, ordering two Irish coffees from the waitress en passant. “Leslie Savanah,” she said laconically when they had seated themselves.

“Kayren Gold.”

“Out of a job? Broke? On the street?”

“More or less,” Kayren answered cautiously.

“More what? Less which?”

“Out of a job, still have a few days before I'm out on the street,” Kayren said, avoiding committing herself on the subject of her potential capital stake one way or the other.

Leslie Savanah nodded; she smiled a bit. “Didn't make you for a streetie,” she said more warmly.

Kayren shrugged. "Not yet anyway," she said with a friendly little edge.

“But you've got streetwise eyes,” Leslie observed carefully. “I mean...”

Kayren hesitated. The hell with it, she decided, we're gonna get down to it sooner or later unless she is just a dyke coming on. “I... I dealt a little wire in college.”

Leslie laughed. "Didn't we all?" she said rather gaily. "Where'd you go?"

“Rutgers.”

"Michigan State."

Now it was Kayren's turn to laugh. This was taking an unexpected turn; it was getting almost silly. "Get your degree?" she asked.

Leslie nodded. “Computers.”

“Really?” Kayren exclaimed. “Me too!”

“And now look at us!”

They both laughed together ruefully. The waitress arrived with the drinks and slapped them down on the table in a somewhat surly manner. Kayren took a long sip of the hot Irish coffee and luxuriated in the warmth spreading down her gullet and into her stomach. "Say," she ventured, "are you, I mean ..

Leslie laughed. “Give me a break, Kayren,” she said good-naturedly. “I'm not after your bod, if that's what you mean. And you?”

Kayren took another long drink of Irish coffee. She felt herself relax. “That's not the kind of action I'm looking for either,” she said, and before she knew it, she was telling Leslie an edited version of her sad story, leaving out any mention of the $2600, buying another round with her dwindling supply of pocket money, and listening to Leslie Savanah's not-too-dissimilar tale.

Leslie had taken her Michigan State degree to New York, gotten a job in a data bank, and moved in with her boyfriend, Rex, a law student at N.Y.U, liberally subsidized by his father, a well-heeled commodities trader. Round the bend of the last turn in the downward economic spiral, Rex's daddy went bust, Leslie got canned, they lost their co-op, the relationship quickly soured, Rex dragged his cowardly ass back to Des Moines, where he was now probably flipping greaseburgers in a McDonald's, and Leslie, well...

“And now you're making it dealing wire,” Kayren blurted out somewhat woozily.

“Wire? Hell no!”

“But I saw—”

"You didn't see what you thought you saw."

“Come on, Leslie, I'm righteous, you don't have to—”

Leslie pointed proudly to the initials on her T-shirt. “Don't you know what this means?” she said in a tone of some small amazement. Kayren shook her head.

“Jeez, Kayren, I thought that's what all this was getting to,” Leslie said. “I'm in the Reality Liberation Frontl The R.L.F would never deal wire! We deal bedbugs. I was slipping that guy a bedbug disc, not some shitty piece of wire!”

Kayren certainly knew what bedbugs were; she, like most of her crowd, had fooled around with them often enough in college. She had used a bedbug program to charge all her long distance calls to Poughkeepsie to null credit card numbers. It was common enough to run one through the college computers, if you could access a terminal, to change your grades to something closer to the heart's desire. She had heard stories of people who had managed to bedbug the I.R.S computers into making their returns invisible.

The real hackers bragged about bedbugging their bank account balances and utility company records. There were supposed to be bedbug wizards who played the stock market with phantom margin accounts through their computers. She had even known a guy who claimed to be able to write bedbug programs that generated pin numbers that would make cash machines cough out bills and charge the debits to nonexistent accounts.

But she had never heard of any Reality Liberation Front. “What's that?” she asked Leslie.

“What's whatf?”

“The Reality Liberation Front.”

Leslie eyed her peculiarly. “You don't know what the R.L.F is?” she said. “I thought you were angling to get in, I mean, having a computer degree, and being broke, and all. …”

“I might be if I knew what you were talking about.”

Leslie shrugged, ordered another round, and began to declaim in a slightly singsong voice, as if reciting someone else's words more or less from memory.

“The whole damn country is broke, twenty million people are out of work with no prospects, even people with jobs are living worse than people did twenty years ago, and in general it can fairly be said that America is in the toilet.”

Kayren squinted at her in incomprehension. “So?” she said impatiently.

Leslie smiled at her crookedly. “So how is it possible for a country like this to be worse off now than it was twenty years ago?”

“Huh?”

“People haven't actually gotten any stupider, have they? We've got more knowledge and better technology than we had in the 1970's and yet the economists tell us that our standard of living peaked in about 1972 and it's been downhill ever since. How the hell can that be possible?”

“Ya got me there …” Kayren admitted, and she meant it in more ways than one. Leslie hadn't told her anything everyone didn't know; she had just turned it around into a question she hadn't even heard anyone ask before. Kayren hadn't been sucked into a conversation like this since college, and, weirdly enough, considering her own dire personal circumstances, she found herself feeling an emotion she had all but forgotten she had ever had —intellectual curiosity.

Leslie Savanah smiled somewhat smugly at her, as if reading her mind, or at least the interest in her eyes. “Some people have figured out the answer,” she said. “And we're trying to do something about it.”

“The Reality Liberation Front?”

Leslie Savanah nodded. “Want to meet some people?” she said speculatively. “We've got a loft a few blocks from here if you can handle getting wet again ..."

“A loft?” Kayren's ears pricked up at the mere mention of anything that even sounded like it might lead to the remotest possibility of crash space.

Leslie smiled all too knowingly. "Don't think I don't know exactly where you're coming from, Kayren," she said. "I mean, six months ago I was standing right in your soggy shoes. To answer the question you're afraid to ask—maybe"

Kayren eyed her silently and narrowly.

Leslie nodded. "No one in the R.L.F ever has to sleep in the subways," she said.

Kayren laughed. “Say no more,” she said quite seriously. “What do I have to do to sign up? I'll do anything. And I do mean anything.”

Leslie Savanah did not laugh. “Not so fast,” she said. “You've got to convince us of your worth to the movement and, just as important, of your sincerity.” Her expression brightened, and now she did laugh a friendly little laugh. “And since right now you know even less about us than we know about you, it's a little early for you to be swearing your eternal dedication. Shall we take a little walk?”

“Let's go,” Kayren declared, fortifying herself with the remains of her third Irish coffee. “It's the best offer I've had all month.” She laughed. “And about that, believe me, I'm sincere!” she said. “It's been the only offer.”

The rain had let up to a dense foggy drizzle, and Leslie kept in the lee of buildings as much as possible as she led Kayren down to Houston, across the wide main crosstown artery, and three blocks west to laa-fai-yet, where she turned south for half a block, then pressed the doorway intercom button of a crumbly industrial loft building that seemed about half occupied.

“Reality Liberation Front …” said a scratchy voice through the rusty little speaker grid.

“Leslie …”

The front door buzzed open, and Leslie led Kayren, damp and panting, up five long flights of musty, grimy stairs to an unmarked gray-painted steel door on the fifth-floor landing. She pressed a button in the doorframe, Kayren saw someone flip aside the inside cover of the peephole, heard the clickings and clackings of several locks and bolts, and then the door opened, and a tall, stoop-shouldered, reedy black man thirty some-odd years old stood in the doorway, regarding her owlishly through thick wire-rimmed glasses.

“This is Kayren Gold,” Leslie told him. “Possible recruit. Kayren, this is Malcolm McGee, our number one wizard, or so he keeps telling us.”

Malcolm continued to regard Kayren dubiously. He wore black jeans and a dirty white T-shirt with the “R.L.F” logo stenciled on it in black.

“Kayren's got a degree in computer science from Rutgers.”

Malcolm's expression brightened. “Well, that's more like it… maybe…” he said, standing aside. “We're the only anarchist cabal that requires a minimum of three years of college.”

Leslie led Kayren into a large oblong high-ceilinged loft space as Malcolm went about resecuring two door locks, a chain, a bolt, and a police-lock bar. A big curtain sewn together out of a raggy assortment of tarps, old bedsheets, and blankets hung across about a quarter of the room on a clothesline. One long wall was given over to a series of big windows which looked as if they hadn't been cleaned since the administration of Ronald Reagan. There was an old stove, a big refrigerator, a steel restaurant double sink piled with dirty dishes and pots, and a jury-rigged shower clustered together against one short wall behind a big rude kitchen table.

The rest of the loft looked like some kind of Canal Street used electronic equipment warehouse.

There were at least a half-dozen computer set-ups of various moldy vintages wired together on desks and folding tables; weirdly mismatched keyboards, free-standing disc drives, monitors in naked frames that looked like they had been pulled out of old tv sets, hanging wallscreens, clunky old modems, bits of breadboard circuitry that Kayren could not begin to comprehend. There were tottery stacks of videodiscs, ancient floppies, and books piled everywhere—on tables, on dirty old couches, on chairs, in crates, on the unpainted splintery gray wood of the floor. There must have been two dozen telephones scattered about the loft, freestanding or wired into modems. Wires and cables ran from everything to everywhere like an explosion in a spaghetti factory.

The overhead lighting, long fluorescent fixtures, was all but overwhelmed by the green, amber, and black and white glow of assorted monitors and the pools of light cast by the Tensor lamps and artist's lights illuminating the workspaces. Drives whirred, keyboards clacked, and Kayren imagined she could even hear circuits sparking and smell the ozone.

“Je-sus …” She had no idea what she had expected, but no one could have expected anything like this!

“Welcome to the electronic village,” Malcolm said dryly, coming up behind her. “The hardware may be the pathetic crap you see, but the software's got its heart in the right place."

"What are they all doing?" Kayren asked him.

There were a half-dozen people huddled intently over their keyboards and computers, beavering away, and paying the visitor no mind. Two women and four men, none over thirty by the look of them, five whites and an oriental, intense, rather untidy, half of them sucking on cigarettes. One of the women, a thin mousy-haired girl who couldn't have been twenty-five, and two of the men, the well-built oriental, and a somewhat soft-looking white guy with a black mohawk, wore R.L.F T-shirts. It looked like a convention of computer nerds to Kayren.

“They're doing our thing,” Malcolm told her. “Writing bedbugs.” “Hey Markowitz, get your ass over here!” Leslie called out.

A big burly older man who had been peering over one of the female hacker's shoulders looked up, crossed the room, and scowled at Leslie with a resigned expression. He looked like a forty-five-year-old biker, with long wavy black hair, a bushy black beard, and intense blue eyes that seemed to look intently into Kayren's without any malice.

"My name's not Markowitz," he said by way of greeting as if he had said it a thousand times before. He held out a meaty hand. "That's just Leslie's idea of humor."

Kayren shook his hand uncertainly. “Kayren Gold. I'm afraid I—” “Gregor Markowitz.”

“Who?”

The bearded man winked at her peculiarly. He shot a wide-eyed glance at Leslie. “What have you brought us, Leslie, a tender young virgin?”

“In an ideological manner of speaking. But she does have a degree in computer science.”

“In that case, conditionally pleased to meet you,” the bearded man said, shaking her hand again. “I'm Larry Cooper Smith, the local commissar, as it were.”

Coopersmith led Kayren and Leslie over to a dusty couch while Malcolm returned to whatever arcane electronic doings he had been involved with at his work station. He offered Kayren a cigarette, shrugged when she declined, lit one up himself to the nose-wrinkled grimace of Leslie.

“Okay, Kayren, so you've got a degree in computer science and you're thinking about joining the R.L.F,” he said, leaning back expansively and throwing his arms up wide on the back of the couch. “Why?”

“Why?” Kayren repeated cautiously as if she didn't understand the question. Because I desperately need a place to crash, the simple honest truth, was obviously not what was called for.

“I mean just how much do you know about the Reality Liberation Front?” Coopersmith said.

Kayren looked from Larry Coopersmith to Leslie Savanah in befuddlement, seeking some kind of rescue. What was she supposed to say, nothing? But what else could she say?

Leslie indeed came to her rescue, but not in any way Kayren could have anticipated, and not in any way she could presently fathom. “What we have here, Markowitz,” she said, “is a pure example of naive class self-interest.”

Kayren looked at Leslie. What the hell was that supposed to mean? She looked at Coopersmith. Now he was hunched forward studying her intently with those intelligent blue eyes and positively beaming at her as if Leslie's gibberish had made all the difference in the world to him.

And when he saw her confusion, he laughed warmly, slapped her on the knee, and said: "Let me tell you your story."

“Do you, Sally?” Bobby said bitterly.

“I thought you were my friendl” Billy whined at her petulantly.

“I am, Billy,” Glorianna told him. “What do you want from my life?”

“It’s all right, Bobby, it’s all right...” Sally said, tenderly stroking his hair.

“The Theory of Social Entropy . . . ?”

“Huh?”

“Middle-class parents, right, but for sure not as middle class after the Devaluation as before. Be smart, little Kayren, don't get screwed like us, get yourself a degree that'll assure you a real job that will last your lifetime, something nice and high-tech and post-industrial, like... computer science. So good little Kayren keeps her nose to the grindstone like she's told, and she gets her computer science degree, and probably even finds herself some kind of half-assed computer operator job, buys into a co-op, and thinks she's got it made. Then one day not just her job but the whole class of jobs of which she is capable gets put on a chip, and she gets canned, and she's got no prospects, soon no place to live, already no hope, and today she runs into Leslie, who tells her about this bunch of loonies who just might let her crash in their loft, and poor little Kayren will do just about anything for a place to flop that will keep her out of the subway.”

Coopersmith leaned back, took a deep drag on his cigarette, coughed out smoke in Kayren's direction, eyed her narrowly, and grinned. “As the asshole mayor of this burg used to say when I was a kid,” he said, “how am I doing?”

Kayren gaped at him in dismay and amazement. This guy had not only seen right through her, he had summed up her entire life in about two minutes.

But Larry Coopersmith laughed heartily, reached out, and lifted her slack jaw back into place with his forefinger. “Don't goggle at me like I'm some kind of psychic,” he said. “All I've got is a dialectic.” He indicated everyone in the loft with a grandiose sweep of his arm. “You think anyone here is any different?” he said. “It's been done to all of us! It's the reality that's been imposed on the whole fucking country! It's official reality! It's why America is in the shit!”

He subsided into a more human and less declamatory mode. “But at least in the Reality Liberation Front,” he said, “we know that we're not alone, we know that we're all in the same shit together.” “End of speech, Markowitz, yes?” Leslie said owlishly.

“You mean... you mean you're not pissed off that I'm trying to get into this Reality Liberation Front just to save my own skin?” Kayren said slowly. “You... you don't think I'm a hypocritical self-serving little shit?”

“Maybe you brought us a live one,” Coopersmith told Leslie Savanah. He winked at Kayren. “Congratulations,” he said. “You've just defined class self-interest.”

“I have...?” Kayren muttered. Class self-interest? She laughed somewhat nervously. “You're not gonna tell me I've fallen in with a bunch of Communists...?”

“Communists/” Larry Coopersmith fairly shouted, rolling his eyes toward the ceiling. He groaned. “Those bug-brained motherfuckers are even worse control-addicts than the schmucks who think they're running things here!”

“Well then, what is all this a bout?” Kayren asked plaintively. “What are you doing here?”

“I thought you'd never ask,” Coopersmith said sweetly. “What we're trying to do in the Reality Liberation Front is, of course, liberate reality.”

“Liberate reality? That doesn't make any sense.”

Coopersmith beamed at her. He got to his feet and began pacing in small circles. “Speech number two,” Leslie groaned good-naturedly.

“Hell no,” Coopersmith declared, waving his arms, “this is speech number one! This is the whole raison d'être! Look, Kayren, for all practical purposes, this is the most advanced technological civilization the world has ever known, right?”

“Sure.”

He pointed a finger at her like a high school teacher. “Then why are people's lives more fucked up than they were twenty years ago?” he demanded.

Kayren shrugged. It was the same question Leslie Savanah had asked her in the bar; it seemed even more central now than then, but she still could not even venture a guess.

“Hey there kid, is it something you did?” Coopersmith went on. “Didn't you do what you were told you were supposed to do? Didn't you play by the rules? Didn't we all? And what have we all gotten by fulfilling our end of the social contract?”

“Fucked …” Kayren said softly. There was no denying it. In fact, there was a certain exhilarating relief in admitting it.

“Yeah, but by who?” Coopersmith said slyly. “By whalf?”

“The... the power structure... ? The fat cats... ?”

“But they're in the shirts too!” Coopersmith exclaimed. “The stock market is in the toilet, corporations keep folding, the country only avoided national bankruptcy by devaluating the currency and stiffing its creditors, and that didn't do much either because its creditors were us!”

“So...?”

“So if we're all losers, there's only one conclusion, isn't there? The system is fucked! Reality obviously doesn't work the way the rules say it's supposed to work! The official map does not describe the territory!”

“And you, I suppose, have your own idea of what kind of rules will really work?” Kayren said dubiously.

But Coopersmith beamed at her. “Shit no!” he said. “How the fuck should I know? Anyone who tries to lay any official reality on you is talking out his asshole! It's the whole stupid idea that there's any such thing as one true vision of reality that's fucked!” “Huh?”

“Huh?” Coopersmith mimicked. He collapsed onto the couch beside her. He shook his head sadly. “You poor kids...”He sighed. “Once upon a time a whole generation said fuck you to official reality. This is a new age, the age of multiple realities created by tv and drugs and telephones and the global village and rock and roll!

Let a thousand flowers bloom! Let a thousand new tribes multiply! Let a million versions of reality joyfully contend!”

Coopersmith paused to study Kayren. He shook his head again. “You never heard of that, did you?” he said. “It's not in the history books, is it?”

“I'm not as stupid as you seem to think,” Kayren told him indignantly. “You're talking about the sixties, the dope, and the hippies, and all—”

“And a little minor incident called the Vietnam War,” Coopersmith said. “Sex, dope, and rock and roll was one thing, the powers that be could tolerate that, seeing as how times were flush, and they were making big bucks off of it.”

Coopersmith paused to light a cigarette, and when he went on, it was in a more coldly ironic tone. “But when they found a whole generation saying fuck you to getting their asses blown off as gunfodder in some crummy jungle and beavering their lives away in nine-to-fivers, well, shit, that was over the edge, wasn't it? It was bad for business. You couldn't run a modern industrial economy if nobody wanted to grow up to be a wage slave. You couldn't play the good old nation state game with a generation that believed it was stupid to go out and die for abstractions. So what do you think they did?”

“They came down hard on all that stuff, didn't they?” Kayren said.

Coopersmith nodded. “They came down hard on the mind-altering drugs. They reestablished control of the media. They killed off hundreds of underground newspapers one way or another. They took back control of the colleges and the high schools and the textbooks. They did what they had to do to reestablish an official reality.”

Coopersmith leaned back, puffed on his cigarette, and grinned sardonically. "But they ended up imposing a new official reality on themselves. They made the fatal mistake of believing their own bullshit. They engineered a monster recession to break unions and create a big permanent pool of unemployment to keep wages down and to keep kids like you toeing the line and doing what you were told for fear of joining it. They listened to asshole economists who told them exactly what they wanted to hear and wrote the biggest rubber check in history and passed it off on themselves.

They blathered on about a post-industrial economy and how everyone was going to work in service industries for peon wages without realizing that everyone couldn't make a living taking in each other's laundry. They automated out as many workers as they could to increase productivity, but it never dawned on them that they couldn't sell all the shit if people didn't have the money to buy it.”

He cocked his head at Kayren. “Begins to sound familiar, doesn't it?” he said. “I mean, here we all are today, with enough production robots for thirty million workers to turn out three times as much goods as we can sell anywhere, and twenty-five or thirty million people like you without a pot to piss in and wondering why.”

Not since college had Kayren subjected herself to anything remotely like an extended historical argument, and never, certainly not in any history course at Rutgers, had she heard this version of recent history. And never had she even imagined that such a historical lecture could be delivered with such angry personal passion, or that some recitation of events that had occurred before she was even born could roil her own emotions so.

But Larry Coopersmith had managed to convince her of one thing at least, namely that historical forces did not play themselves out without shafting real people, for she could hardly deny that she was personally and precariously perched on the shitty end of this one.

“You're saying we're all the victims of some gigantic con job...?” she said slowly.

“And the Reality Liberation Front is out to ... to do what?” she asked dubiously. For what could a bunch of hackers in a grungy laa-fai-yet Street loft hope to do to roll back the gigantic steamroller of history?

“To liberate reality as best we can,” Coopersmith said. “To throw our little electronic monkey wrenches into the works. To destroy the viability of official reality.”

“No bomb-throwing? No riots in the streets? You're talking about bringing down the system with nothing but a bunch of bedbug programs?”

“Precisely,” said Larry Coopersmith. “These days, the system is really just one great big interconnected web of software, now isn't it? Data banks, the telephone system, I.R.S computers, bank computers, A.T.M's, satellite networks, credit card records, utility company records, the stock market, the commodities exchange, electronic bulletin boards! It's all in the bits and bytes. And where there are bits and bytes, there are openings for—”

“Bedbugs!” Kayren exclaimed.

Coopersmith laughed. “Hundreds of bedbugs, thousands, millions of them, bedbugs to the people! All nibbling away at official reality and turning it into a great big electronic Swiss cheese riddled with little liberated holes. And when there are more holes than cheese ...”

“Reality is liberated!”

“Chaos is reborn!”

“And then what?” Kayren said.

Coopersmith looked at Leslie. Leslie looked at Coopersmith. They both put on crazed wild-eyed faces. They laughed maniacally. They chanted in unison. “then the fun really begins!"

“You people are really crazy!” Kayren said.

But she was grinning as she said it, and she said it approvingly. She looked around the great untidy loft, at the endless mounds of electronic jury-rigging, at the people much like her beavering away over their keyboards and monitors, not to program some dumb production robots to put more people out of work and collect a paycheck till they did it to themselves, but in the service of some loony political notion she could barely understand.

Loony or not, however, she could see the energy behind it, she could hear it in the clicking and clacking of the keyboards and drives, she could smell it in the ozone in the air. Idealism had never been more than a word in the dictionary to her before, and she would have scoffed had anyone told her it was the possibility she was tasting now, but what the hell, what did she have to lose; at the very least this was a place to crash.

“You people may be crazy,” she said, “but I guess I'm not playing with a full deck myself. Count me in.”

But Larry Coopersmith eyed her much more coldly now. “Not so fast,” he said. “You have to be voted in. How good are you? What can you do for us?”

“How good am I?” Kayren said in some dismay.

“How good a programmer are you? What kind of bedbugs have you written? Tell me some wizard ideas.”

“What is this, a job interview?” Kayren muttered with a sinking sensation in her stomach. For the truth of it was, as she well knew, that she was no computer wizard at all, she had never written anything but dumb routines, and in fact she didn't even really have any enthusiasm for playing with computers as these people so manifestly did. To her, ironically enough in the present circumstances, computer science had never been more than a means of securing a safe job.

“Come on, Larry,” Leslie Savannah said in a somewhat wheedling tone, “don't be—”

Coopersmith cut her off with a raised hand. “Might as well tell us the truth now, Kayren,” he said not entirely unkindly. “We'll find out quickly enough...”

Kayren could only hang her head.

Coopersmith held up his hands and shrugged apologetically. “Larry! Don't be such a shit!”

Coopersmith looked at Leslie Savanah with a somewhat relenting expression. “If it was up to me...”he said. He looked across the room at the electronic beehive of activity. “They won't vote her in as a charity case, and you know it, Leslie,” he said.

Leslie regarded Kayren forlornly. She mimicked Coopersmith's apologetic shrug. Then suddenly her eyes brightened. “Wait a minute!” she said.

“Kayren used to be a big-time wire dealer, isn't that right, Kayren, isn't that what you told me?”

Coopersmith studied Kayren with a certain bemused speculation. Leslie winked at her, telling her to play along.

“Wire dealer...?” Coopersmith said slowly. “What good is that? We don't deal fucking wire!”

“But we don't deal many bedbugs in the meatracks where heavy wire dealing goes on either, now do we, Markowitz?” Leslie pointed out. “The R.L.F may be long on computer wizardry, but when it comes to street smarts…”

“Hmmm…” Coopersmith muttered. “You just may have something there. …”

“And Kayren here is a real wizard wire dealer; she knows her way around—The American Dream, The Temple of Doom, Hog Heaven—you know your way around that circuit real well, don't you, Kayren?” “For sure,” Kayren said. “No problem.” It really wasn't that much of an exaggeration, was it? She had never hung out much in places like that when she was scoring cheap wire for her classmates in Jersey, but she had paid her way in trying to meet interesting men in these fancy joints when she had been able to afford it, hadn't she?

Besides, when it came to any wire dealing scene, these people didn't know jack shit by their own admission, did they?

“You'd be willing to deal bedbugs for the R.L.F in the meatracks?” Coopersmith asked. “You think you can do it?”

“Sure,” Kayren said. “Why not? From each according to her ability, to each according to her need, right? I need a place to crash, and you need someone with the ability to deal.”

“Well, maybe,” Coopersmith owned. “Maybe that's enough to convince me. But if I'm going to stand up and vouch for you, I'm going to need something more.... Something to convince everyone else that you're not just some sleazy wire dealer angling for a place to crash.... something to prove that you're really sincere. . . .” His intelligent blue eyes seemed to stkre right through her. They seemed to be looking for something hidden.

Something deep inside. Something she did not at all want them to see. But something she knew was there nonetheless.

And all at once she knew what it was.

Twenty-six hundred dollars.

She stared right back at Larry Coopersmith and knew for a certainty that she could buy her way into the Reality Liberation Front. Not because they were cheap-shit mercenaries, but because it would be just. Because it would hurt. And because it would hurt, it would be a genuine proof of her sincerity. And because she genuinely believed in his sincerity, she believed he would understand.

She thought of that bastard Greg. She thought of the wire she had dealt to get the money he was stealing from her. What would the money buy her anyway? A couple of months in a sleazy fleabag hotel. A few score trips to bath houses and Laundromats. Or a grand gesture.

She had never made a grand gesture in her life.

She had never before even conceived of the concept.

But she understood it now.

And it felt good. It felt right.

“I've got twenty... I've got two thousand dollars,” she said. “You guys let me in, and I'll donate it to the cause. Is that sincere enough for you... Markowitz?”

Coopersmith stared at her. He did not smile. “You'd do that?” he said softly. “You'd really do that?”

Larry Coopersmith beamed at her. He threw his huge arms around her in a great bear hug. He planted a big wet sexless kiss on her Ups. “All right!” he exclaimed. “You're in, or I walk right out the fucking door!”

Kayren Gold looked out across the loft of the Reality Liberation Front. She looked at the sprawl of electronic junk. She looked at the people hunkered over it. She peered out the grimy windows at the implacable and uncaring streets of the city beyond. She looked at Leslie Savanah, giving her the high sign. She looked at Larry Coopersmith looking at her with a respect and affection she had never known before.

And for the first time in her life, she knew what it felt like to be on the inside looking out.

“You got it,” Coopersmith said, nodding his head. “Including the schmucks that did it to us.”

"Try me," Karen said.

Scoring

Manhattan was crawling with fuckin' zonies, and the Uzi was their weapon of choice, but figuring out how to crash and grab one of the putamadres and get away with his piece instead of a skin full of holes seemed about as easy as walking across the Hudson to Hoboken to Paco Monaco as he slunk around the fringes of various Zones for days on end searching for a target of opportunity.

All his street-smart instincts had schooled him to avoid the motherfuckers and do his best to make himself invisible as far as they were concerned. His experience in stalking zonies was exactly nada; indeed, he had never heard of anyone even trying to do such an asshole thing.

But while he could feel his bowels loosening in terror every time he so much as looked at one of these mean-eyed malhombres with the fantasy of crash and grab in his head, the fear itself, and the knowledge that he was out to do a deed that no one who wasn't bugfuck bananas had ever even thought about doing before, were like a flash of the Prong.

As he had so often wandered among the look-but-don't-touch chocharicas promenading down Second or First or A with an aching hard-on of unfulfillable desire, so did he now stalk many of the same streets with a frustrated hard-on of another kind for all these putamadre zonies. For just as the dream of fucking some cool blond chocharica bitch into adoring submission had more behind it than just cooling his cojones, so did the thought of scoring an Uzi by beating the shit out of a zonie mean more to him than just scoring himself a Zap.

The way these maricones tracked him with their eyes as he slunk past them, forcing him to look away like some fucking perro pobre for fear that they just might decide to blow him away for forcing them to notice his lowly existence, the sincojones stance he had automatically fallen into in their presence all of his life, now had a keener edge to it as he contemplated vengeance, and he used that edge to hone his fear into a gut-wrenching rage that he hoped would give him the necessary courage when the moment came.

Pero courage, si, assholery, no. He had learned more about zonies in these few days of intense and purposeful scrutiny than he had in an entire life lived under their cold and suspicious gazes.

While not all of them were hulking heavyweights, all of them had the look of muchachos who spent hours and hours building up their bodies and practicing some hard martial art. And almost all of them had the streetwise look of malhombres who had fought their way up out of the gutter, no soft down-on-their-luck gordos need apply. And of course, while not all of them packed Uzis, all of them were always conspicuously heeled.

And you never saw one of the putamadres with his back to an alley or doorway or street corner. Even when they were on the move, they seemed somehow to be able to keep a wall to their back. Chingada, they were good, they were as streetwise as any crash and grab artist like Paco, not so surprising, really, since half of them had probably started out just that way.

How then to catch one of these wary putamadres off his guard? This was the question that had taunted Paco since the stalk began, and while the answer was something that he had not yet let percolate up into his conscious awareness on the late evening of the eighth day, his feet had finally begun to figure it out, as they took him, without his self-aware decision, west along Houston Street, across Seventh Avenue into the West Village, and onto Bedford, a short side street that ran three blocks northwest to dead-end into Christopher.

Bedford Street was narrow, shadowy, and pretty much devoid of storefronts, but this was not the sombre side, son, this was a street of well-kept apartment houses and even some carefully restored old town houses, definitely a Zone, muchacho, sure to have at least one zonie patrolling it who would not take kindly to the intrusion of such as Paco onto his turf.

Que pasa, muchacho? he asked himself as he found himself staring up the dark canyon of Bedford Street toward the light and flash of Christopher at the far end. Muy loco, what you think you're doing, walking right into a Zone? He paused, started to turn back east. Better get your ass out of here before—

Just then, two reedy well-dressed gordos turned the corner of Bedford onto Seventh, walking hand-in-hand, and Paco's palms and scrotum broke into a queasy cold sweat as he abruptly realized what foul but streetwise instinct had brought him here.

Verdad, this was a Zone.

Pero una Zona Maricona.

Oh no, muchacho, chingada man, you're not gonna...

Paco had not ventured near this vecino for years and years, not since he was a tight-assed sixteen-year-old willing to do anything for a score, willing to let faggots suck his cock for a few dollars, willing to let them have it up the ass in the ruins on West Street for a few dollars more, willing even once or twice...

He hadn't even allowed these old memories to surface, he wasn't about to...

Pot que no, muchacho? a dirty bird whispered in his ear.

This was a Zone where rico maricones lived; Christopher Street was still the main drag of what was left of the faggot meatrack scene. These fuckin' faggots had plenty of dinero for zonies, and they needed them for sure. But not too many real machos were about to work this Zone, and besides, las frutas liked to hire their own.

And while Paco knew full well that the kind of faggot who worked as a zonie would be no easy sister, how good could anyone be with his pants unzipped and his dick in his hand?

Chingada, it wasn't as if he were about to let any maricon motherfucker do anything to him, was it? All he had to do was get the fucker worked up, get him to drop his pants and whip it out, and then...

Serve the son of a bitch right!

Paco hesitated for a long moment at the mouth of the dark little street, sweating in his jeans, a hollow bubble of nausea churning in his gut. Chingada, man, don't be such a fuckin' chicken! he told himself. What would Mucho Muchacho do? Shit man, probably nothin' gonna happen anyway. You come all the way over here for nothing?

At least just walk up the street to Christopher and back. Up and down. Just once. Up one side and down the other.

Paco nibbled his lower lip for a moment. Then he took a deep breath, unzipped his fly halfway to flash the top of his pubic hair, and began walking up the right side of Bedford, nervously, rapidly, but with a rolling, ass-waggling, exaggerated maricon mince.

One block. A block and a half. No one on the street, just the dimly lit aisle between the low buildings and the obscene garish lights of Christopher up ahead. You got yourself all worked up for nothing, Paco told himself. Nothing's gonna—

“What the fuck you doing on this street, asshole?”

Madre de Dios!

A great big ugly motherfucker had somehow managed to appear out of nowhere and had the muzzle of an Uzi pointed right at his belly button. Chingada, what a monster! Oh shit!

The zonie must have been six foot four, though from Paco's perspective he might as well have been eight foot six. He wore a tight white T-shirt outlining perversely chiseled wrestler's muscles, and tight black leather pants with a huge chromed zipper that gleamed in the light of a streetlamp. He had closely cropped black hair, little steel earrings up and down both earlobes, a hideously acne-scarred skin, beady black eyes, and a mouthful of rotten teeth behind a vicious scowl that told Paco in no uncertain terms that he was not amused.

“I said, what the fuck are you doing on this street, asshole,” the zonie repeated.

Paco came as close to shifting in his pants as he ever had in his life; he had to tighten his sphincter by an act of will. Oh man, oh fuck, what am I going to do? But he was committed now, there was no backing out, this fucking faggot son of a bitch had his Uzi pointed right at his gut, and he could see the bastard's finger eagerly stroking the trigger. What would Mucho Muchacho do?

Mucho Muchacho wouldn't be here, asshole! he realized. This isn't some videodisc, this is real And with that realization, he felt a strange energy course through him. He felt a tingling at the base of his spine, a heat behind his breastbone; he felt the blood pounding in his arteries and behind his temples, and, horror of horrors and wonder of wonders, he felt his cock hardening, a hard-on not of lust, oh no, but of rage, and fear, and cornered determination.

“What are you doing on this street?” he made himself answer in an insinuating tone.

The zonie looked at him speculatively now. His ratlike eyes ran up and down Paco's body. He smiled thinly. Paco stared openly at the crotch of his tight black leather pants and watched the monster's cock engorge, bulging the shiny chrome zipper outward.

Paco was beyond thinking now. It was far too late for that. He was running on pure instinct. He fixed his gaze on the zonie's crotch, ran his tongue slowly around his lips, and hooked his right thumb into the open top of his own fly, watching the big zonie's gaze follow.

“Hey man, that's sure a big gun you have,” he said softly. “You really know how to use it?”

The zonie's eyes seemed to acquire a glistening sheen now. He thrust his pelvis forward and ran his free hand along the short barrel of the Uzi. “Want me to show you?” he said.

Paco wriggled his ass in place. He took a deep breath, reached out, and ran a forefinger very slowly along the barrel of the machinepistol, twirling it around the tip. “Oooh ...” he purred. “It's so cold and so hard.”

“For sure, man,” Paco said, reaching down with his other hand and unzipping his fly the rest of the way loudly. He glanced around him. There was a dark alley between a town house and an adjacent apartment building close by, a line of garbage cans along one wall, plenty of empty space by the bricks of the other.

“In here,” he whispered, clasping the barrel of the Uzi in one hand and pumping rhythmically as he pulled the zonie forward, as he undid the top button of his jeans with the other.

Slowly, as if in a trance, the big man followed him into the alley. Paco reached out, caught the tab of the chrome zipper, and yanked it downward. The zonie's huge hard cock popped out. Paco moaned in delight, turned, offered up his ass, placed both hands up against the wall, and writhed seductively.

He peered back over his shoulder as the zonie slung his Uzi onto his back, grabbed his dick with one hand, reached for him with the other.

“Fuck you, maricon!” Paco screamed, pivoting on his right heel, kicking out with his left foot, and catching the zonie square in the cojones.

The big man screamed in agony and amazement. Paco slammed into the back of his neck with the side of his right hand as the zonie folded, clutching his nuts, grabbed the Uzi off his shoulder with his left hand, caught him in the chin with another full-force kick, stuffed the gun into his street bag, and ran.

It was no surprise to Glorianna O'Toole when they finally gave Billy Beldock the ax. Billy had told her at Eddie Friedkin's party that his days as president of Muzik, Inc., were numbered unless Project Superstar paid off in gold soon, and the kids had accomplished nothing of significance since.

Indeed, whatever had gone on between them before Bobby barfed his guts out all over Eddie's beautifully groomed lawn, far from finally syncing their creative vibes as Glorianna had hoped, only seemed to have poisoned an already testy professional relationship.

Sally was mooning quite openly after Bobby under the apparent delusion that whatever had happened had brought them closer, and Bobby alternated between putting her down and trying to pretend she didn't exist. Under these circumstances, Glorianna hadn't been able to squeeze even marginally marketable dead-ass crap out of them, and for poor Billy's sake, she had certainly tried every trick she knew.

She had brought dust into the studio and let them blow their brains out with it for days at the Factory's considerable expense. She had brought in good old-fashioned grass. She had dragged them to every club in town. She had even spent a small fortune of the Factory's money setting up alternate VoxBox and image organ equipment in her own house in the foredoomed hope that the vibes there would prove more creative.

None of it worked. All she had to show for it was a king-sized pain in the ass, a huge stash of free dust and pot, and a living room now cluttered with electronic junk. These kids were technically brilliant, any idiot could see that. But these kids were out of sync with each other and with the mysterious inner heart of rock and roll, and any real rocker could see that too. The whole damned project was misconceived from the beginning, and she had told Billy that up front.

To hell with the promise that they would do her next if she came up with two A.P discs that shipped gold! It was never going to happen anyway, and if it hadn't been for her feelings for poor Billy, she would have already told the Factory to take it and stick it.

Now that he was out, and this Carlo Manning was in, she went into the meeting he had summoned her to with every intention of telling him just that.

Manning was so new to the black leather chair behind the permanent gunmetal desk that, while Billy's French antique furniture was already out of the president's office, his hadn't even been moved in yet, and aside from the desk, the hot-seat, the disc decks, and the screen, the only furnishings in the place were a hideously mismatched collection of temporary director's chairs and folding tables.

Somehow it seemed appropriate. Carlo Manning was maybe a shade under forty. He had short well-barbered black hair, wore a conservative black suit with a white shirt and plain blue and silver striped tie, and he had a bland anonymous face that would fade into the woodwork at any party Glorianna had ever attended. He had gotten to the president's chair through the research department, and as far as she knew, had never sung or played any instrument.

At last a generic Muzik, Inc., president, Glorianna thought dryly as she plopped her bones into an uncomfortable chair and watched Manning pretend to study a sheaf of printouts intently for long moments before he spoke.

"Thirty days," he finally said in a flat even voice by way of greeting.

“What?”

“You have thirty days to bring me a demo disc that marketing estimates will ship one million plus or minus ten percent to a seventy-percent certainty,” Manning told her, regarding her with his cool brown eyes as if she were no more than a printout herself. “That's the bottom line.”

It was loathing at first sight. Who did this little punk think he was, talking to her like that?

“You don't waste much time on small talk, do you?” Glorianna snapped.

"My salary is a mil a year, sixteen thou a week, about three a day, two hundred sixty an horn," Manning told her. "It is therefore my responsibility to the company to manage it in a cost-effective manner."

Glorianna O'Toole had never heard such horseshit in her whole long life, and she had heard plenty. "Yeah, well I'll lay you even money you don't keep your ass in that chair long enough to collect six months' worth of it, sonny."

If she had managed to piss Manning off, he didn't show it. “It is my intention to be here a good long time,” he said evenly. “It's about time the company had stable professional management at the top instead of a succession of broken-down old hippies like Billy Beldock.”

“Yeah, well, watch your mouth, kiddo. Billy is a friend of mine, and as a matter of fact, I'm proud to say I'm a broken-down old hippie myself!”

Manning favored her with a sardonic corporate smile. “So I've noticed,” he said.

Glorianna glared at him. If I were a man and twenty years younger, I'd punch out this little prick, she thought. Shit, twenty years ago I would've punched him out anyway!

“Go fuck yourself,” she told Manning, rising to her feet, “you'll probably meet a better class of people. And if that doesn't get you off, stick your thirty days up your tight little asshole! This broken-down old hippie quits as of now.”

“Sit down,” Manning said in a voice of cold confident authority. “This meeting is over when I say it's over.”

“We have nothing to talk about,” Glorianna told him.

“Ah, but we do, Ms. O'Toole,” Manning said smoothly. “Unless of course you prefer to discuss matters with the district attorney.” “The district attorney?”

“Do sit down, Ms. O'Toole,” Manning said. Once more he made a fetishistic pretense of studying his readouts. “We have thus far expended approximately four million dollars on Project Superstar, counting salaries, studio time, production, promotion, and advertising on the discs we've already released, and... certain other items. I do not intend to simply write all that off, even if I can blame it on Beldock. That would not be fiscally responsible.” “That's not my problem ...”

“Oh but it is,” Manning said, leering at her openly now. “A small but significant portion of your budget contains the rather ambiguous category of 'research materials.' We both know what that really means, now, don't we?”

“You wouldn't... You couldn't...” Glorianna stammered. She found herself collapsing back into her chair without conscious volition.

“Designer dust, marijuana, and perhaps other illegal substances, procured by you with funds embezzled by you from Muzik, Inc., and resold at a profit to Rubin and Genaro,” Manning said. “Several criminal charges would be involved… possession with intent to sell… embezzlement of company funds… even possible income tax violations. …”

“You'd never make any of that bullshit stick, and you know it!” Manning shrugged diffidently. “Maybe yes, maybe no,” he said. “I'd be willing to leave it up to the courts. We have plenty of lawyers we're already paying handsome salaries to to present our side of the case. You, of course, would have to pay counsel to defend yourself against criminal charges of some complexity in several jurisdictions. Can you afford it?”

"You're a cold son of a bitch, aren't you?"

“I'm an expert in human motivation,” Manning said. He pointed at the wall of miniature gold discs. “I was responsible for the motivational specs on thirteen of those,” he said proudly. “That's why I have this job.” He smiled fatuously at Glorianna. “And I do believe I've succeeded in motivating you, now haven't I?”

Glorianna O'Toole studied this corporate monster with utter dismay and loathing. Was this what the industry had finally come to? Am I going to give this creep what he wants just to save my own ass?

Stupid question, Glorianna. A better question would be how do you feature spending your dotage in the joint? Where would you get the money to hire a lawyer?

More horribly to the point, how in hell am I going to do the impossible in the next thirty days?

"And if I try and fail...?" she asked plaintively.

Manning cocked his head at her and drummed his fingers thoughtfully on the desktop. "I'm not an unfeeling man," he finally said. "You do your best and convince me of your sincerity, and I'm willing to leave that question open."

“What does that mean?”

Manning picked up his sheaf of readouts and buried his nose in them. “It means,” he said, without looking up at her again, “that this meeting is now over.”

Glorianna did not go to the studio after her meeting with Carlo Manning. Instead, she drove directly home, went out onto her deck with a gram of dust and a full bottle of Pouilly-Fuisse, lay back on a beach chair staring down from her mountaintop at the thick brown layer of smog over the city, and did her best to get righteously loaded.

Her best, alas, was not quite good enough. The dust merely kept her mind crystal-clear and going round and round the circuit of her dilemma, and the wine merely kept her blood sugar up and supplied her with energy so that she couldn't even blitz herself into oblivion.

What I really need, she thought as the sun began to set in gorgeous smog- born flaming orange into the invisible Pacific, is some acid. Some mescaline. Some peyote.

The thought made her sit bolt upright.

Do I dare feed these nerdy little kids some real psychedelic?

Is there anything else left to do that I haven't tried?

Alas, the younger generation was, generally speaking, scared shitless of psychedelics. They had grown up afraid in a world they hadn't made, and even when it came to getting loaded, they were conditioned to play it safe. They preferred designer dust that was guaranteed to always take you to precisely where you thought you wished to go.

Glorianna O'Toole looked out over the smog-bound city, where a million lights were coming on, transforming the endless impoverished barrio of lowland Los Angeles into an immense shimmering wonderland of living jewels under the smoggy glory of the setting sun. How many times had she experienced such a magic moment of reality transformation from on high as the L.S.D or the mescaline or the peyote began its rush through her brain, as ordinary earth-bound reality dissolved into the multiverse of the infinite possible, taking her spirit with it?

Rock and roll, after all, as anyone who was there knew full well when they were still willing to admit it, had flowered to its full glory on acid. Leary and Kesey had turned on the world to the music of the Airplane and the Dead and Big Brother. It was the music of transformation, or it just wasn't rock and roll, it was product, Muzik—precisely the kind of technically proficient soulless shit Bobby and Sally had been turning out!

Without acid, would rock have ever been anything more than ass-kicking music for greasers? Where would your career have been without good old Owsley? Remember what the Dormouse said?

It's not as if I was going to tie them up and force it down their throats, she told herself. I'll just score some good stuff and leave it up to them, see what they're really made of. She laughed. “Lucy in the sky with diamonds …” she sang full out with what was left of her pipes into the fragrant Laurel Canyon night, “ah... ah... AH ”

Cackling merrily to herself, she picked up her phone and began to call connections.

But as it turned out, peyote and magic mushrooms would seem to have all but vanished from the face of the earth, nobody had anything they would even try to palm off as mescaline, and the only L.S.D available was in the form of tabs.

Glorianna did not trust acid in tabs. Nine times out of ten, the filler was some shitty form of speed, and half the time there wasn't any real L.S.D in the tablet at all, just some P.C.P or S.T.P or other brainburner that gave a nasty crude high powerful enough to convince the naive that they had dropped the Mighty Quinn.

It was against her religion to take acid other than blotter or windowpane or the actual pure liquid when you could get it. Since L.S.D was the only drug she knew that was effective in microgram doses, if all you were taking was a little blot on paper, or a tiny sliver of clear gel, or a single drop of liquid, if you got off at all, it had to be on the real thing.

And if she wouldn't drop a tab herself, she could hardly offer up such questionable goods to two innocent young lysergic virgins.

For a mad moment she actually toyed with the notion of descending from the Hollywood Hills into the flatland barrio and seeing what she could score on the streets.

Forty years ago she had done it all the time, thirty years ago she wouldn't have thought twice, twenty years ago she just might have risked it, but these days it really was another world down there.

The Third World begins at Pico, as they said up here in show-biz country, and while Glorianna might nurse a romantic nostalgia for the long-gone days of solidarity with The People, the closest she had gotten to same in the last five years was passing through at sixty on the Harbor Freeway, for the law ended at the off ramp when you drove through North Mexico, and an old lady in a Rolls would be spare parts and dogmeat by the time she hit the first stoplight.

A two-hundred-mile drive up the coast to Big Sur was, from this perspective, a much shorter trip than a suicide run down into the barrio visible from her mountaintop, so if she was desperate enough to even think about scoring on the street, it was long since time to call Ellie Dawson.

Ellie had been around almost as long as she had. She had been a rock journalist on the Berkeley Barb when Glorianna first met her, had gotten political and even been a Weather Underground fringie for a while until they actually began blowing things up in earnest, at which point she had segued into the Human Potential Movement, later on dabbled in the think tanks around Palo Alto, had married a computer wizard, and settled down in Silicon City, divorced him, and went back to traveling the upper-class guru farm circuit between Mendicino and Big Sur.

But if her official bio gave the impression that she flitted from this to that somewhat inconsistently, and with no more than ethereal means of support, the fact of it was that Ellie Dawson had been a dealer for almost all of her adult life.

A connoisseur dealer. Glorianna had never heard of Ellie dealing in anything as mundane as grass or coke, and she righteously refused to have anything to do with speed, smack, or downers. She specialized in psychedelics, of which acid was the least arcane, she refused on principle to deal anything she hadn't tried herself, and she gave honest reviews to her customers, which had run, during various incarnations, from rock musicians, to science fiction writers, to revolutionaries, to Human Potential devotees, to cyberwizards, and, so she claimed, to politicians whose names would surprise you.

If anyone could get Glorianna some proper acid, it would be Ellie Dawson, and the only reason Glorianna hadn't called her until she got desperate was that Ellie now lived in Big Sur, four hours up the coast.

After the opening pleasantries, Glorianna explained the situation to Ellie, leaving out nothing; not her considered obscene opinion of Carlo Manning, not her analysis of the psychic states of Bobby Rubin and Sally Genaro, not the sad fate of Billy Beldock, not the nature of Project Superstar, and not even the sling her ass was going to be in with the law. With Ellie's Silicon City connections, her phone was more secure than the Washington-Moscow hotline.

There was a long pause at the other end after her tirade had run down.

“Jeez, Glorianna, I'd really like to help you,” Ellie's voice finally said. “But acid is really rather tight just now. …” “Meaning even you don't have any…?” Glorianna moaned. “Nothing I'd care to drop myself, if you know what I mean. …”

“Shit”

Another pause.

“However …” Ellie said in a slow, cautious, conspiratorial tone.

“However…?”

“There's something rather peculiar going on in Silicon City, I mean, it's so murky that even I don't know which stories to believe.... You've heard about the underground wizard shops...?” “Stories,” Glorianna said.

Someone was turning out sophisticated devices that somehow enabled pranksters to temporarily commandeer broadcast satellite transponders. Everyone knew that much, since occasionally H.B.O or N.B.C or MUZIK feeds were interrupted with clips from grainy old porn movies. There were stories that military and diplomatic satellites had been monkeyed with too, the best of them being that a hotline tete-a-tete between the president and the Soviet chairman had been interrupted by some choice cuts from Deep Throat, but such stuff was obviously too hot for even the National Enquirer to handle, assuming for the moment that it was actually going on.

“Well the video pirates are real enough and so are the wizard shops,” Ellie said. “But no one seems to know who either of them are, or what they're really after, or even if it's the same outfit. But there's a piece of wire starting to turn up that—”

“Wire?” Glorianna exclaimed. “I ask you for acid and you're trying to peddle me wirehead shit?”

“Am I some burnt-out wirehead, Glorianna? Have I ever dealt wire before? Would I deal something I haven't tried myself? Will you at least hear me out?”

“Go ahead,” Glorianna said dubiously.

“This is no ordinary piece,” Ellie told her. “It's not a mess of breadboards and hand-wired circuitry. It's elegantly made and you can wear it around, and everything's on a single chip, and the story is that it's underground wizard shop product. Face it, Glorianna, this is the electronic age and we're talking state of the art.... Want to hear more?”

Glorianna was beginning to become intrigued despite herself. She had to admit that part of her prejudice against wire had to do with what circuitry had done to rock and roll. Then, too, most wire was brainburning garbage for juice junkies.

But so were chemical highs like speed and reds and smack. Acid, however...

“I'm still listening, Ellie,” she finally said.

“It's called the Transcortical Shunt—” “En ingles, por favor …”

“The Transcortical Shunt,” Ellie repeated, carefully enunciating the syllables one by one. “It gives the dream centers a tran-zee-unt zap and shunts the output across the cortex to the centers of waking consciousness. It shunts sensory input through the dream centers before it gets to the areas of the brain that process it into sense images. And it keeps the motor control centers active in the bargain too. I had one of the things taken apart by some of my friends up there before I even tried it, you better believe it.”

“Terrific,” Glorianna said dryly. “But as the wireheads say, what's the flash?”

“A bit like sleepwalking, a bit like a lucid dream in reverse. You've got motor control, you walk, and talk, and even make love, but you're doing it all inside a dream. You're interfaced with external reality as if you were aw.ake, but you're experiencing it imagis-tically. Like what the Australian aborigines call a Walkabout through the Dreamtime. You wouldn't believe what the E.K.G looks like!”

"Sounds mighty dangerous," Glorianna said. "I mean, what's to keep you from sleepwalking into a wall while you dream you're walking down the beach?"

“That's the real wizard touch! You're getting transformations, sure, but you're still processing real sensory input! You see and hear what's going on around you, but it's glorified into a Dreamtime Walkabout. You may not see that wall as a wall, but your unconscious transforms it into an image that lets you know something solid is there. And as for sex... Mr. Ugly can be Mr. Wonderful if your karma is clean.”

“An electronic acid trip …” Glorianna said softly.

"Why do you think I mentioned it?"

“But what's to keep a real Prince Charming from turning into a frog on you? What's to keep the dream from turning into a nightmare?”

“What's to keep an acid trip from turning into a bummer?” “What's inside of you …” Glorianna muttered.

“Exactly,” Ellie said. “Only this is safer. Each tap of the touchpoint gives you a flash that lasts something between ten minutes and thirty minutes, not hours and hours. And if the trip turns nasty, another tap pops you right out of it, like a reset button for bummers.”

“You've tried it?”

“You know me...”

“And what was it like?”

“What's a dream like? What's an acid trip like?”

“It's like …” Glorianna laughed. “It's like trying to tell someone about rock and roll.”

“Which according to you is precisely your problem.”

“So it is...” Glorianna said. “Fuckin'-A!”

The sun had fully set now. She breethd in the sweet eucalyptus and bougainvillea scent of Lookout Mountain and gazed out over the vast nightscape of Los Angeles spread out before her, a fantastic electric starscape that made the stellar display above seem pallid indeed. Who could deny that this was the age of electronic marvels? Who could deny that the future belonged to those who embraced the cybersphere? Who could deny that she who wasn't being born was busy dying?

“You gonna be home tomorrow?” she said into the telephone, itself an instrument of the digitized realm of bits and bytes.

“I'll be waiting,” said Elhe Dawson.

“See ya later,” Glorianna said, hanging up the phone. What the hell, she thought, I always loved the drive up to Big Sur anyway.

The Key to Any Door

Kayren Gold smiled, reached into her capacious purse, withdrew a bedbug disc in a brown manila envelope, handed it over, scooped up the cash, stuffed it away, and took another sip of her white wine. The balding man in the tan suit and red silk shirt seated on the barstool beside her slipped the envelope into a jacket pocket, glancing furtively around the gallery of The Temple of Doom for no particular reason, slugged down the remains of his Jack on the rocks, and then sauntered away from the bar and down the stairs to the dance floor, doing his somewhat ludicrous best to look casual as he completed his part in the time-honored pavanne of dealing choreography.

Eons ago it would have been a nickel bag of grass, later a gram of coke, currently a piece of wire more often than not, and now it was bedbugs. The items of commerce might change, but the moves remained the same.

And now, perched on a barstool sipping white wine, and surveying the gallery of a Soho meatrack over the lip of her glass with a hooded gaze like some desperado in an old gangster movie, Kayren felt fully entitled for the first time in her life to the sleazy thrill of dealer's paranoia.

While drug trafficking had always been an unequivocal felony, dealing wire to kibble eaters was winked at by the authorities, for the powers that be couldn't care less if indigents sold to other indigents wirehead devices that would fry their brains beyond employability. Indeed, since wire addiction generally shortened the lifespan, there was something to be said for encouraging such street-level commerce, economically speaking.

Peddling wire to the gainfully employed, however, was a definite no-no, tending as it did over time to convert taxpayers into kibble-eating vegetables. When Kayren had scored in New York for her wire-chipping friends at Rutgers, the people she copped from were somewhat desperate characters who were risking three-to-five on the average if they were busted, though a college kid like herself could expect nothing worse than an overnighter in the tank and a pompous lecture in the morning for serving as a connection.

The use of bedbug programs to defraud banks, credit card companies, utilities, or, God help you, the I.R.S or state tax authorities, was, however, an unequivocal felony under any number of computer crime, tax, fraud, and theft-of-service statutes.

True, it was impossible to prosecute someone for mere possession of something as insubstantial as a program you could keep in your head if you were wizard enough. True too, that as far as even Larry Coopersmith knew, dealing bedbugs on disc was a brand-new crime, limited thus far to the Reality Liberation Front, and therefore not yet covered by specific legislation.

But Kayren knew damn well that dealing bedbug discs would be treated as a serious crime one way or another if she were busted with the goods in her possession.

The bedbug that she had just sold for $400 was typical. With it, the guy she had sold it to, some kind of advertising executive apparently, could run up a huge balance on his expense account every month, and then cause his company's computer to spread it out in increments of a few cents each over every item of debit in the entire system. Malcolm McGee, who had written the thing, had made it invisible. You loaded it, did the dirty work, then erased the program from memory until you did it again. The accountants would go crazy trying to figure out how every debit on the books could be about seven cents too high, they would blame the software, the programmers would blame the hardware, and the repair techs would find nothing. When the monthly cost of continuing the few-tul search for the bedbug exceeded the system drain, they'd give up and write it all off to what Coopersmith called “system entropy.”

If, however, she should somehow be arrested in the act of dealing such a bedbug, they'd surely nail her for something. Conspiracy to commit computer fraud or embezzlement. Maybe even possession of burglar's tools if they couldn't come up with anything better.

But until the authorities realized that commerce in bedbug discs existed, the risk of selling one to an undercover cop was nil, and the dealer's paranoia that Kayren allowed herself to feel as she sat on her barstool finishing her wine was really just a cheap thrill, even as the part of intrepid streetwise dealer that she played for the benefit of her newfound friends at the R.L.F loft was a put-on that wouldn't have impressed anyone less naive than these innocents.

And in a very real way, the Reality Liberation Front was a cabal of innocents.

Tommy Don, grandson of industrious Vietnamese immigrants. Bill Connally and Iva Cohen, whose parents had sweated and scraped to send their offspring to college in the traditional hope that their whiz-kid children would rise above their own working-class status. Teddy Ribero, the first in his family to even complete high school since his ancestors came to New York from Puerto Rico. Malcolm McGee, scion of the black middle class from Tarrytown.

Eddie Polonski and Mary Ferrari, who had won scholarships to New York colleges, and thought they had made their escape from the permanent depression of the mid western Rust Belt.

What all these cybernaifs had in common was that they had all been computer wizards virtually from birth. They had grown up obsessed with computers, happily lost in the dance of the bits and the bytes. Unlike Kayren, they had no childhood memories of a lost New York Eden on the Upper West Side to torment them. Unlike Kayren, their degrees in computer science had been the ultima thules of their hearts' desires, not a grimly calculated escape route back to Manhattan from the exile of Poughkeepsie.

Oh yes, they too had been betrayed when their personal economic shit hit the fan, but now, blissfully ensconced behind their keyboards and screens and hacking away at bedbugs for the hell of it, living, eating, and breathing the ozone air of their beloved cyber sphere day and night, they had what they wanted. The bedbugs that they wrote, the computer babble that they conversed in, even the revolutionary raison d'etre of the Reality Liberation Front, were all like some vast computer game that encompassed their lives. They hardly bothered to leave the loft at all. They didn't even think about money.

The uses to which their programs were being put by the customers Kayren and Leslie Savanah peddled them to were mere abstractions. And the world of the streets might as well have been another planet as far as they were concerned.

Only Leslie Savanah and “Markowitz” were different.

Leslie reminded Kayren of herself. She too had no real passion for the bits and the bytes. She might have grown up in the Midwest instead of the Upper West Side, but she knew what it was to lose a share in a Manhattan co-op and find herself out on the street, broke and desperate, but unwilling to give up and leave the Apple. Her bedbug dealing might have been limited to lowlife bars and she had not spent the weekends of her college years scoring wire in fancy saloons and meatracks, but she was a dealer and she had picked Kayren up in The Clearing. So although Leslie Savanah had preceded her into the R.L.F by half a year and indeed had recruited her, Kayren thought of her affectionately as a kind of country cousin.

Larry Coopersmith, also known as Markowitz, was something else again, though no two people in the loft could agree on quite what, and he wasn't telling. Even Leslie, his occasional lover, didn't know his age any closer than somewhere between forty and fifty-five. He looked as if he had been a biker, he had a collection of books like a former college professor, and he spoke as if he had been both, mixing four-letter words and four-hundred-dollar words in the same sentence with impunity.

He never spoke of his past. There was no one in the R.L.F who had been there before he rented the loft. No one knew where the money to do it had come from. No one knew where “Markowitz” had come from.

He seemed to know programming but Kayren had never seen him write anything of his own. He insisted he wasn't a Communist or an anarchist and proclaimed his hatred of “anything that ended in ism.” Leslie had dubbed him “Markowitz” because Gregor Markowitz, an obscure political theorist Kayren had never heard of, was his main intellectual guru. He had piles of old hardcover books by Markowitz with titles like The Theory of Social Entropy, Chaos and Culture, and Order Against Itself, which he offered to let her read, but somehow Kayren had never gotten around to it.

All in all, Larry Cooper smith had more mysterioso than any other man

Kayren had ever met, and if someone other than Leslie had been what passed for his main lady, she just might have been interested.

And then again maybe not. For while Coopersmith might be a man of no little fascination, and while the R.L.F loft was a long way from crashing in the subway, and while she considered Leslie her friend, and while the vaguely defined goals of the Reality Liberation Front tickled her esthetic fancy, the truth of it was that in her heart of hearts she could consider the whole scene as no more than a station on the way, and certainly not a lifestyle to which she planned to become permanently accustomed.

No, it was scenes like The Temple of Doom and the lifestyle they implied that still represented the New York of her aspirations.

While not quite up to, say, The American Dream, The Temple of Doom was typical of the glitzy meatracks where those with the money to live in the fantasy New York of which Kayren had only childhood memories gathered to drink and score and make out and find their way to secret insider parties.

The bar at which Kayren sat ran completely around the gallery that encircled the dance floor below. The bar itself was a counter of black stone (or anyway a reasonably convincing synthetic replica) carved in vaguely Aztec motifs, and the mirror that ran all the way around the gallery behind it was of rosy red glass. The bartenders, naked to the waist and hunks to a man, wore short trapezoidal Aztec kilts brilliantly painted in subtly obscene abstract patterns and plume-crested brass helmets.

The waitresses who served the cocktail tables along the rail of the gallery wore somewhat more flowing skirts in the same vein, similar helmets, and skimpy brass halters. Gas lamps set above each table and simulating torches illuminated the gallery with a musky red glow.

The dance floor itself was brilliantly tiled in more pseudo-Aztec motifs, cunningly overglazed here and there with something that gave the appearance of permanent pools of bright red blood. Three large video screens displayed the visual tracks of the discs played by some hidden dj.

From the gallery one could look down upon the solid tangle of bodies dancing on the floor below and pretend to be a Princess of the City surveying the lowly peasantry from on high. The fact that Kayren knew full well that most of the people who paid their thirty dollars to get in and drank watered booze at twenty dollars a pop were buying the same illusion was something she tried her unsuccessful best to forget.

She finished her wine, thought of ordering another, looked around the gallery. There was no Prince Charming to be seen, only pretenders like herself, she had dealt her last disc to the same, and had $1600 in her purse, an excellent take for the evening. She might be a nobody here, but at least in the R.L.F loft she had attained the status of number one dealer.

Time to call it a night.

She descended to the dance floor, snake-danced through the wall of bodies and noise, went down a short corridor to the cloakroom, where she retrieved her parka, then outside past the doorman, bundled into an old raccoon coat and huddled into the doorway against the cold wet wind.

The Temple of Doom was on the Bowery at the eastern fringe of Soho two blocks north of Grand Street and well south of the R.L.F loft farther west on laa-fai-yet. On a better night than this Kayren would have detoured down to Grand anyway in order to walk home across this well-lit main drag.

But the fickle early December weather had taken a turn for the worse while she was inside. The temperature had dropped below thirty, a gusty wind was blowing a thin cold rain in her face, she hadn't any gloves, and this was a Zone, after all, so she flipped up the thin hood of her parka, hoisted her purse to her shoulder, stuffed her hands into her pockets, hunched forward against the nasty wet wind, and turned the northwest corner of the block, heading back to the warmth of the loft by the most direct route possible.

It was after midnight, and there were few people on the side street between the looming dark residential loft buildings, but she passed several scurrying for cover on the first block, and even the reassuring figure of a big black zonie pacing back and forth to keep warm and cradling the cold metal of his M-16 in thick greasy brakeman's gloves.

The parka hood cut off a good portion of her peripheral vision and muffled her hearing, the cold rain was dribbling down into her eyebrows and freezing her nose, the sound of her own high heels clacking on the pavement was the loudest thing she heard, and she was thinking of little else but getting out of the weather, so it wasn't until she found herself alone on the next dark block that she began to suspect that someone was stalking her.

It began as just a vague prickling uneasiness at the back of her neck, a cool queasy shadow of seemingly sourceless irrational dread creeping up on her from behind. Then, as her senses sharpened to full paranoid alert, she realized where it was coming from.

She had been hearing a subtle muffled afterbeat to her own footsteps, a mushy padded counterpoint to the sharp clicking of her high heels on the concrete of the sidewalk.

Or was she just being paranoid? Was it just some weird echo?

Something kept her from turning her head to look back. Instead, she increased her pace slightly, then broke stride with a momentary halt, and just as arhythmically began walking again at a much slower pace.

She clearly heard a series of stumbling, shuffling footfalls behind her for a moment before the sounds smoothed back into an afterbeat to her own sharp footsteps.

Cold claws gripped Kayren's guts. There was someone following her. Without thinking, still not daring to look back, she began walking faster.

“You like something hotter?”

Bad mistake!

The footfalls behind her quickened to an even faster pace than hers without breaking into a run, but getting louder and closer, as if whoever it was had surmised she was onto him and tentatively abandoned stealth, but had not quite yet made up his mind to pounce.

The next corner was at least thirty yards away, thirty yards of empty sidewalk, darkened ground floor windows, shadowy doorways, and the black mouths of ominous alleys. Terror-stricken, Kayren slowed her pace again, as if by not reacting to the presence of her oncoming stalker she might by some sympathetic magic make him disappear.

But the footfalls behind her broke into a near trot, and now it sounded like a whole army of muggers.

Ignorance blissful no longer, she had to turn and look now.

Oh shit!

There were two of them!

A big bulky figure in a filthy and ragged khaki army coat with some kind of raggy padding wrapped around his feet, a long mat of ratty brown hair, a leer full of rotten teeth, and a foul mass of scab on his forehead. An even taller man in an old peacoat, younger, thin almost to the point of emaciation, his face aflame with angry acne, his left hand gripping the crotch of his muck-smeared jeans, his tongue licking his bluish lips lubriciously.

Just a glance, then—

Seeing her turn to look, they broke into a dead run toward her— Kayren began running for her life, stumbling and sliding in her high heels along the wet sidewalk. She slipped, staggered, almost fell, regained her balance momentarily, and then—

Cruel rough hands grabbed her around the padded neck of her parka, hard in the crack of her buttocks, the sounds of grunts and ragged breathing, a heavy press of bodies slamming into her back and shoving her sideways and then forward toward a pile of garbage cans at the shadowy mouth of a dark alley—

From the depth of her loosening bowels, from the pit of her howling stomach, she screamed and screamed and screamed....

A warm fragrant Santa Ana wind blew the sweet and pungent perfumes of bougainvillea and eucalyptus across the deck of Glorianna O'Toole's Lookout Mountain tree house, tossing the crowns of the trees, susurrusing through the foliage, cleansing the air to near desert clarity, so that, for once, the rich sprinkling of pinpoint stars and the bright crescent moon shining down from the pure black sky were a fair mirror of the electrical brilliance of the jeweled cityscape spread from horizon to horizon below.

It was as perfect a night for a trip as Glorianna could have ordered up from the gods of special effects, but Bobby Rubin seemed considerably less than enthusiastic about embarking on this magical mystery tour.

“What is it, a pleasure-center jolter, a temporary-lobe job?” he said, standing against the rail of the deck with his back to the magnificent vista, holding out the limp net of fine wires and sniffing at it dubiously as if it were a dead fish.

“I told you, this isn't some crude piece cobbled together by the usual burnt-out wireheads,” Glorianna said in a tone of no little exasperation. “This is wizard wire from Silicon City.”

"Which you haven't tried yet, right?"

"Come on, Bobby, this could really be fun," Sally Genaro said brightly. She had already put her Shunt on and sat on a redwood deck chair, with the wirework helmet all but invisible in her frizzy hair.

Bobby glared silently at her, and in that sullen stare, Glorianna finally read the true nature of his reluctance. Being afraid of strange wire was not necessarily a sign of assholery or extreme chickenheartedness considering the shit that was floating around, after all, and no doubt his fear of frying his brain was not entirely feigned. But Glorianna would bet her last buck that what Bobby Rubin was really afraid of was that the piece would indeed work as advertised, and he would find himself sharing a trip of acidlike profundity with Sally Genaro.

Which, of course, was exactly what Elhe Dawson had promised.

Which, of course, was Glorianna's last hope of getting Project Superstar off dead center and saving her own ass.

Poor Bobby had gotten bitchier and bitchier with her since the gross barfing scene at that awful party, but while it was really starting to get under Sally Genaro's skin, especially since she had blown off seven pounds absolutely starving-herself on salad and grapefruit to look good for him, she knew she had to be patient.

After all, how would she be feeling now if she had been the one who had poured her heart out to him and then puked her guts out just when things were really starting to get romantic?

So Sally could well understand how he might still be embarrassed, and she could even understand how all her best efforts to assure him that it didn't matter to her, that she still thought he was snaky anyway, might need a bit more time to convince him. After all, he was a little nerdy to begin with, not exactly heavy on like savoir-faire.

But she never expected him to be such a chicken about a little piece of wire. What was there to be scared of anyway? It wasn't like some awful psychedelic drug, where, once you swallowed it, you were going to be stoned for hours and there was nothing you could do about it if it turned out to be a bummer. All you had to do was hit the touchpoint on the little box on your head, and you came right out of it.

Glorianna O'Toole stepped closer to Bobby. "It wouldn't have been fair for me to try it first without you," she said, putting on her own Shunt and smoothing the breadbox into a comfortable position at the back of her head. "Ellie wanted me to try it with her, but I said no, the three of us are in this together, and we should go into it as equals."

Sally got up off her deck chair, walked over to Bobby, and reached for the wire mesh helmet hanging limply from his fingers. “Come on, Bobby, it's a beautiful night, here, let me—”

Bobby snatched his Shunt away from her angrily, spread out the mesh with both hands, and pulled the net down into his hair in an angry series of impulsive gestures. “I can fry my own brains without your help if I have to!” he snapped.

Sally recoiled, hurt and uncomprehending. “Why do you always have to be such a little shit about everything, Bobby Rubin?” she flared, and then instantly regretted it as he shot her a look of poisonous intensity.

“Children, children, pleasel” Glorianna O'Toole moaned, rolling her eyes skyward. “This is not exactly the karma with which to begin a beautiful experience! Look at those stars! Smell that air!

Listen to the music of the wind in the trees! Get with it, will you!”

Bobby Rubin knew full well that any further protests on his part would only be postponing the inevitable. There was no way he was going to admit to having less courage than the Pimple

Besides, the truth of it was that he wasn't really all that afraid of this piece of wire in the first place, indeed the supposed effect, as described by Glorianna, had intrigued him from the beginning.

He had never tried any psychedelic drugs, but if he was a naif when it came to psychopharmacology, he certainly was a wizard of the bits and bytes, and as such, this device, unlike other wire, appealed to him.

Most street wire, messily soldered together on breadboards by burnt-out assholes and plugged into powerful 120-volt house current, was crude dangerous stuff that worked by jolting vague areas of the brain with an electrical overload. But the Transcortical Shunt was a low-current device that ran on small batteries, meaning that the effect, whatever it was, could not depend on brute electronic force. And one look at the workmanship of this thing made him believe Glorianna's story about Silicon City wizard shops.

No, if Glorianna O'Toole had taken him up onto a mountaintop into this warm fragrant Santa Ana night, showed him the stars above and the brilliant lights of the city below, and invited him to Shunt with her, he would have had no hesitation.

He locked gazes with Glorianna for a long moment. There was a warmth in those eyes, a wisdom, a spirit of adventure, God help him, a sexiness, that made him wish for a time warp, for certainly there was nothing he would have liked more than to embark upon this adventure with the hot young girl this old lady had so manifestly once been.

It was taking this Magical Mystery Tour with the Pimple tagging along that filled him with an entirely rational dread.

After all, look what had happened when he had made the mistake of merely getting drunk with her! She, and the booze, and the dust, and the frustration of it all, had somehow tricked him into letting his mouth run out of control, into giving voice to feelings that no man should speak aloud. Worse, without realizing what he was doing, he had let her touch him, put her arm around him, hold his hand, presume so far as to actually kiss him. The memory of it made his testicles shrivel and his stomach turn even now.

Worse still, ever since that night, Sally from the Valley had had it in her head that she knew the secrets of his soul; worst of all, he couldn't quite escape the knowledge that, in the most loathsome way possible, she was, in a certain sense, right.

Now she was convinced that this was a psychic bond between them, that it was only a matter of time and persistence before it ripened into... yech!

How much worse would it get if he shunted with her?

He certainly did not want to find out.

He glanced at Sally's hot eager eyes out of the corner of his own for a moment, and cringed inside.

But he was going to.

He shrugged, lifted his hand, and poised it above the touchpoint of the breadbox snugged against the back of his head. “We who are about to fry salute you,” he said.

Sally from the Valley goggled at him uncomprehendingly. But she too positioned her finger above her touchpoint.

Glorianna O'Toole winked at him, pointed the forefinger of her left hand above the back of her head, and waved the forefinger of the other up and down like a bandleader's baton to the downbeat.

“One-two, one-two-three!”

"You got in there what that shit-eating grin says you got in there, my man?" Dojo said, eyeing Paco Monaco's street bag with a mixture of surprise and approval that warmed the cockles of Paco's manhood.

He beamed at the big doorman. "I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours," he said, reaching into the street bag.

“Are you out of your fucking mind?” Dojo hissed. “Not out here!” He scanned his eyes up and down the dark street.

“Watch the door while I get the Count to take over for me and try not to blow anyone away with that thing while I'm gone,” he said, ducking inside, and leaving Paco actually serving as temporary doorman to Slimy Mary's.

Dojo was gone for almost five minutes, while Paco slung his street bag over his shoulder, crossed his arms, stuck his chin imperiously in the air, and imagined for the moment that he was Dojo, master of all he surveyed. He hoped someone, anyone, would try to get in before Dojo got back, because whoever it was, it would be no way, Jose, just to see what it felt like.

But before any such thing could happen, Dojo returned with the Count, scowling and muttering under his breath to himself. Fortunately, it was obviously the Count, rather than Paco, who was the object of his displeasure.

The Count was a tall figure in a ratty black leather jacket and blue jeans with a dirty black blanket wrapped around his shoulders like a cloak. He, or someone, had knocked out all his teeth but two, which he had filed into fangs. His head was shaved bald, except for a high greased crest in back like a vampire's collar. Paco remembered when the Count had been a powerfully built and intimidating figure, but now he was skeletally thin, the taut skin of his face was so sallow it was almost green, and his watery blue eyes looked as if someone had dribbled Tabasco sauce into them.

The Count's steady deterioration toward walking corpsheood was due to the fact that he was a heavy combo wirehead, there wasn't a piece he wouldn't plug into, and Paco had once seen him plugged into three at once. El Lizardo claimed to have seen the Count stick his prick into a light socket and just stand there grinning, and Paco almost believed it.

“Just don't let in anyone whose name you can't remember until I get back, you think you can still handle that much, asshole?” Dojo told the Count, and led Paco down the dark stairway into the meatrack.

“Gotta get rid of that zombie before he really starts to stink,” he grumbled to himself as he skirted the twilight zone around the dance floor, sticking to the darkness around the walls, and unlocking the door to a room Paco had never even known existed.

Dojo flicked on a dim ceiling fixture with a wall switch, revealing a cozy little room with an unmade bed which had obviously seen recent heavy action, a disc deck, monitor, and speakers, and three walls piled high with cardboard cartons.

“Let's see what you have, Paco,” he said, still standing.

Paco reached into his street bag, pulled out the Uzi, and handed it over. He thought he saw Dojo's eyes widen for a moment, but the big black doorman played it cool as usual, popping the magazine out, working the action, popping it back in, all without uttering a word or looking at Paco.

“Seems okay,” he finally grunted. Now he looked up at Paco and studied him speculatively. “How did you manage to snatch it?” he demanded. “Never thought you really had it in you,” he added in a clear tone of approval.

Paco hesitated. Unzipped my pants for a fuckin' maricon would not exactly make it. "Rolled a zonie, nigger, how else?" he said cockily.

Dojo eyed him dubiously. “Sure,” he said sneeringly.

“Okay, so I found it in el sub, you wanna believe that one,” Paco said in the same vein.

“You really did a crash and grab on a zonie?” Dojo said, allowing a certain open admiration into his voice now.

“You're holding the Uzi. …”

“How the fuck did you manage that?”

“Yo soy mucho muchacho, you better believe it!”

Dojo laughed dryly, shook his head, went over to a pile of cartons, laid the Uzi down carefully behind them, and fished out a Zap, neatly sealed in a clear plastic bag. “Here, killer,” he said, tossing it to Paco, “have fun.”

Paco struggled for a moment with the plastic bag, trying to unseal it, quickly lost patience, and tore the wrapper to shreds with his fingernails. He shook out the wire mesh, then fitted the net over his head, the sleek little breadbox with its magic touchpoint cool and snug and promising against the back of his skull, the whole piece completely hidden from casual sight in his bushy hair.

His whole body trembled with a wonderful anticipation. All he needed now was ten dollars to slip el Lizardo for five minutes of Mucho Muchacho, maybe Dojo would—

But before he could begin to try to hit up the doorman for ten, Dojo fixed him with a cold businesslike stare that drove any such asshole thought from his mind. “Just maybe you can handle it,” he said.

“Handle what, Dojo?”

“The fuckin' Count has fried his brains to vegetable tempura, I mean they're leakin' out his ears. I've had just about enough of that creep. I just decided I need a new relief doorman. …”

“Me?” Paco exclaimed, hardly able to believe his ears.

“I figure any dude can roll a zonie just might be able to hold his own with the brainburn cases here,” Dojo said. “Thursday through Monday, just when I need relief. Ten bucks a night and I don't care what you deal at the door, but I better not catch you collecting money to let anyone in. You got the balls to give it a try? Or were you just bullshitting me about being such a red-hot bad-ass, Paco?” “I'm your man, Dojo!” Paco declared without having to think about it for an instant, hardly believing his good fortune, but pouncing on it instinctively like a bird on a turd, you better believe it, muchacho. “For sure!”

Dojo smiled. “We'll see about that, my man. Starting next week.” He opened the door, ushered Paco out of the room, turned off the light, locked the door behind him. “Just one thing,” he said. “It's not my business if you fry your brains on your own time, but I don't want to see you wearing wire on the door. Let the Count be a lesson to you, my son."

“Uh... what about the Count?” Paco said hesitantly. “Do I have to... ?” He suddenly remembered that while the Count might be in terrible shape, he had a rep as a kung-fu killer or something.

Dojo laughed. “Don't you worry about the Count,” he said, favoring Paco with a suddenly chilling leer, and nodding significantly toward the ceiling, toward the legendary upstairs rooms, where Dojo supposedly kept burnt-out wireheads turning out pieces. “The Count just won himself a free one-way ticket to Florida.”

Paco shuddered a bit, and he hung back away from the dance floor deep in the dark shadows at the rear of Slimy Mary's as Dojo went back to the door to relieve the Count, for no way did he want the Count to notice him when he came back in. When the Count did come down the stairs a few minutes later, he marched straight to his customary pile of cushions in the twilight zone near the dance floor, picked out a piece from the assorted pile of wire, jammed it on his head, plugged in, and flashed out, staring up into the flicker pattern of the colored bulbs on the dance floor ceiling as if nothing had happened.

Maybe nothing had happened yet. Maybe Dojo hadn't told the Count anything. Maybe he'd just wait until the Count passed out, and when the mother woke up, he'd find himself plugged in upstairs in Florida. Maybe the Count was already so fried he wouldn't even notice it.

Paco laughed hollowly. No reason not to go on in and flash, he realized. The Count wasn't going to give him no shit. But still he hung back in the shadows.

Some stupid gordo thing with a lot of sparks and flashing lights and wailing weirdos was playing, about a dozen of the usual Slimy Mary's regulars were dancing to it, he didn't have the money to get el Lizardo to play a Mucho Muchacho disc, and besides, he remembered, the whole reason he had risked his sweet culo to get himself his own Zap in the first place was so he wouldn't have to flash on it with the puercas and puberdas in a shithole like this.

Paco grinned to himself. Chingada, que noche local Nearly cocked in the culo by a fuckin' maricon, kicked the fuckin' faggot zonie in the cojones, snatched an Uzi, hired by Dojo, and now I got me my own Zap, and I'm gonna take me a little trip to Chocharica City! Que noche grande, muchacho!

And this magic night, he had a feeling, was only just beginning.

Paco loped south to Houston, then west to the corner of Houston and West Broadway, not even noticing the chill that was blowing in on the rising breeze or the thin mist slicking his face as he felt the delicious tension building in his body like a slow-rising hard-on from his toes to the cool sleek pressure of the Zap's breadbox snug against the back of his head.

He stood there for a moment looking south through the bright lights of West Broadway, the main drag of Soho, the golden avenue of restaurants, galleries, plushie-tushie meatracks, saloons, fabulous bodegas, flash and neon glitter that opened up before him like a tantalizing peek straight up the skirt of Chocharica City.

He remembered that night, a few short weeks and a long lifetime ago, when he had stood more or less on this very spot and thought that very thought, staring forlornly up between the forbidden thighs of the queen of the city, and swearing to himself that one day soon he would return, not as Paco Monaco, dirty little streetie spick who dared not set foot in this forbidden Zone, but as Mucho Muchacho, Prince of the City, to ram his mighty machismo straight up its fuckin' chocha.

It had been warmer then, and West Broadway had been thronged with chocharicas and their putamadre maricon boyfriends, and the zonies had been out in full force. It was colder now, and it was beginning to rain, and there were fewer people on West Broadway, and they were scurrying back and forth between the brightly lit buildings, and the zonies were huddled in doorways.

But here he was, verdad, standing in the sombre, looking into the sol, poised on the edge of his own personal Hora Frontera, and the magic key to crossing over, the key he had won by his own courage and daring, lay just a touch of his finger away.

Paco reached up to the breadbox on the back of his head, singing softly to himself, but hearing the music pounding out to a max metal beat in the ears of his mind—

Nosotros somos gigantes (Tu ma-dre three...”)

Cojones de elefantes (Tu ma-dre three...”)

So pull down all your panties Y TU MADRE three...”!

—and hit the touchpoint.

Nothing seemed to change as he snake-danced effortlessly across the sparse traffic against the light to the stompada rhythm, his keening muscles bulging deliciously under his taut skin like the mighty hard-on chafing expectantly against his tight white cut-off jeans.

And then he seemed to have stepped through an invisible doorway from the sombre into the sol. The rain no longer fell in dead gray sheets but hung between the buildings like a warm shimmering summer fog, casting rainbow auras around the streetlamps and transforming West Broadway into a long glowing corridor of golden light.

Neon signs writhed sinuously like brilliant electric culebras in the pearly mist. The darkened windows of galleries and clothing stores and bodegas tantalized with heaps of shadowy treasures piled high within. The illumined windows of restaurants opened into dream vistas of endless dining room tables set with snowy linen, gleaming silver, shining china, where rock stars, old men in tuxedos, bemedaled generals, verdad, kings and princes of the city in gold-braided silken uniforms, gorged themselves on turkeys and hams and whole roast pigs and lambs, washing it all down with great goblets of wine, while elegant women in long gowns and festooned with jewels hung on their shoulders and laid out huge lines of dust.

Muttery musky music and the sound of nervous female laughter oozed out into the street from bars and fancy meatracks, and within, through smoky plate glass and walls through which he somehow peered with Superman's x-ray vision, were hundreds, thousands, millions of beautiful bejeweled and befurred chocharicas, rubbing their silken thighs together in desperate horniness for a real macho man, while pale fat gordos, hairy old maricones, pimply creeps in silk suits, drooled and slavered over their guava-ripe tits, and hopelessly tried to get their feeble trembling hands up their skirts.

Your sisters and your aunties Chocharicas elegantes Don't want no gay romantics ...

A mighty max metal band marched behind him, buoying him forward on a wall of music as the lyric poured up and out of him, and his huge hard cock throbbed in time to the drumbeat and the bassline chanted by an unseen rough-voiced chorus.

Tu Ma-dre TambiLin Tu Ma-dre TambiLin Tu Ma-dre TambiLin

A tall blond woman, her bare shoulders draped with a silver fur stole, her huge tits bursting from her low-cut white gown, her misty blue eyes staring hungrily at his bulging tight white crotch, came up the avenue toward him on the arm of a grotesquely fat hump-backed dwarf with terrified red eyes and a huge pimply beak of a nose.

Mucho Muchacho laughed, winked, cupped his huge throbbing cock, smacked his lips, and sang straight at her.

Get it while you can From a red-hot macho man We all remember when ...

The fat ugly dwarf rolled his eyes in terror and dragged his chocharica toward the nearest meatrack door as she sighed and moaned and came in her panties as Mucho Muchacho roared out the beatline climax with the mighty voice of his streetwise army. “Y TU MADRE three...”!”

He laughed, not deigning to follow, and danced off up through the golden spreading thighs of the glowing canyon of light opening up before him toward the throbbing cunt of the city itself just begging for it at the vanishing point, for there were other cho-charicas on both sides of the street, busty redheads in skin-tight jeans, luscious pale-skinned putas with coal-black hair, brunettes in furs, willowy ice-eyed blondes with great bulging tits and hard pink nipples revealed against the sheer white fabric of their gowns, and every one of them bent over with unbearable horniness, all of them licking their lips and drooling for his huge hard cock.

Verdad, there were gordos and plushie-tushies trying to hoard most of this treasure-trove of sweet chocharica flesh for themselves; walking beside them, scowling, tugging at their arms, snarling, scuttling, trying to shield them with their pale soft bodies, but hola, they were all putamadre mar icon weaklings, fat little overfed cabrones sin cojones and he was Paco Monaco, Mucho Muchacho, karate-killer rock star, and he was the Prince of Chocharica City, general of the avenging army of the night, macho master of all the chocha he surveyed, and tonight was his night to pierce the tight white cunt of the queen of the city with his mighty blade of vengeance.

Chingada, here came the perfect woman of his dreams floating up the street toward him; tall, and blond, and blue-eyed, and cool, hugging her mink coat around her, eyeing him hungrily, her high-heeled feet not really touching the ground, si, ella, this one, this one I fuck till her teeth fall out!

Mucho Muchacho danced his stompada up to the queen of Chocharica City, singing his love song.

Nosotros somos gigantes

Cojones de elefantes ...

He unzipped the fly of his cut-off shorts with one hand, reached for the quick of her with the other.

So pull down all your panties ...

“What the fuck?” The skinny old putamadre cabron who had been hanging on her arm stepped in front of her, the sincojones motherfucker actually was trying to shove aside Mucho Muchachol Paco laughed and sang in his face.

Besa me pica!

And ponga me your sister!

And caught him square on the jaw with a roundhouse right—

Better call me Mister!

—and flipped him backward on his ass as he started to go down with a karate kick to the guts.

Shrieks and screams pierced the glowing golden mist, turning to gut-wrenching prowl-car sirens. The blonde was staggering and stumbling down the street. The air seemed to shatter into a million razor-sharp shards. The temperature took a sudden bone-chilling drop and a hard wet rain began to fall.

And out of a nearby doorway stepped a motherfucking gorilla with an M-16!

It was the most horrible fuckin' zonie the world had ever seen. An actual gigantic ape covered with thick ropy black hair and about nine feet tall stuffed into a white T-shirt bursting at the seams and tight black leather pants with a huge gleaming chrome zipper halfway open to reveal the leathery black head of an enormous gorilla dick. It had little steel earrings up and down both earlobes, beady black eyes, and a mouthful of big sharp rotten fangs slavering blood. It was about three feet from him and pointing the muzzle of the M-16 right at his belly button.

Time seemed to stop. Everything was frozen.

Except the music.

Tu Madre Tambien! Tu Madre Tambien! Tu Madre Tambien!

A mighty max metal band belted it out behind him and a great army of rough voices chanted out the bassline. And Mucho Muchacho remembered who he was and smiled.

“Hey man, that's sure a big gun you have,” he sneered at the huge blood-drooling monster.

The beady black animal eyes of the gorilla thing widened for an instant, the mouthful of horrid teeth dropped, and then—

“too MADRE three...”, pooberdah!” roared Mucho Muchacho, his lithely muscled body already leaping forward with its left foot as it went into a spin-kick with its right, neatly catching the M-16 and flipping it high into the air out of the zonie monster's grasp. Mucho came down still whirling, and threw a counterspin kick with his left foot that got the fuckin' thing right in the cojones with his full weight expertly behind it. Mucho brought up his knee as the ape screamed and folded, bringing down the heel of his right hand at the same time, getting the motherfucker on the point of the jaw and the back of the neck.

The nightmare zonie shriveled away to nothingness, as if he had never been, like a burst balloon collapsing at his feet, filled, like all gordos and plushie-tushies and their goons, with nothing more than hot air, muchacho, when it came to standing up to a real man.

But dozens of giant rats were pouring out of bars and restaurants, evil red-eyed putamadres with needle-sharp teeth, dressed up like gordos and plushie-tushies in suits and jeans and sheepskin coats, dozens of ratones the size of dogs, man, cowardly sincojones motherfuckers in a one-on-one, verdad, but circling him in a mob, working up their courage, twitching their ugly naked pink tails like cats getting ready to pounce, and chittering to each other like ten million enraged cucarachas.

“Getta zonies! Calla cops! Spickmothafucka bastard!”

Mucho Muchacho pivoted slowly in the center of the circle, crouched over, flicking out karate punches and kicks, keeping the gordo rats at bay, sneering his contempt, flicking them the finger, daring any individual to step forward and try to be a man.

Far away, a siren began to wail, like someone stomping again and again on the same fuckin' cat, and even Mucho Muchacho knew it was time to run.

“Fuck you, assholes!” he screamed at the top of his lungs, lunging straight at the nearest bunch of rats in gordo clothing, windmilling his hands in mighty blows, brushing them aside like cockroaches, breaking through.

And then he was off and running south down West Broadway, soaring, leaping, his feet barely touching the ground, past bars and meatracks and restaurants, red and blue snakes snapping at him from neon signs, rats and roaches, cur dogs and feral cats, pouring out of buildings to nip at his heels as he ran for his sweet life down a long gauntlet corridor alive with pitiless and piercing actinic light—

—Paco Monaco was running through a bone-chilling rain down West Broadway a few blocks north of Grand, where the midway faded out into dark empty blocks of looming residential loft buildings. Glancing back over his shoulder, he froze for a long moment.

Chingada! What the fuck?

There was no horde of giant rats in gordo clothing chasing him down a corridor lit with eye-killing white light, no snakes snapping at his heels from neon signs. But there sure as shit were half a dozen fuckin' gordos cornin' down West Broadway toward him and for sure there were a couple of zonies waving their pieces, too, and chingada, the fuckin' siren was for real, 'cause that was a cop car turning the corner about six blocks up!

Near to shifting in his pants, Paco dashed to the next intersection, turned east on the side street. He ran forward about a block and a half and then stopped, panting, and terrified. Chingada, he finally had time to realize, what a time to pop out of the fuckin' flash, what am I gonna do?

Quien sabe? He didn't know.

But he knew someone who did.

He reached up and gave himself another tap of the Zap.

Mucho Muchacho turned, looked, smiled, and disappeared into the sombre that waited for him just around every corner from the sol, slowly, deliberately, his head held high. West Broadway, Chocharica City, the forbidden Zone of the sol, was just a distant muzzy blur of light from this perspective, fading from sight and memory like a bad dream.

It was a different world in here in the sombre, his turf, a world as forbidden to his pursuers as their turf was to him. Blocks and blocks of narrow side streets lined with dark and looming buildings stretched out before him in the falling rain, rising around him like the trees of an urban rain forest, his jungle, verdad, where he knew all the secret paths, where every alley and doorway was his refuge, where the dripping rain, and the far-off echoes of unseen traffic, and his own knowing and padded footfalls were the music of his night.

Mucho Muchacho, Lord of the Concrete Jungle, sauntered easily eastward, inhaling the cool night air, oblivious to the cold, his ears attuned to the subdued chitterings and mumblings of the night sounds, sliding along the sides of the buildings like a shadow, shielded from the worst of the rain by the canopy of their eaves high overhead, verdad, it was another world in here, with the sidewalks glistening with moisture and rivulets of water gurgling softly down the edges of the gutters and foaming and rushing down the drop into the sewer catchpockets, and nothing to disturb the velvety tranquility of the jungle night except—

A woman's screams!

They were coming from an alleyway halfway up the next block, shrill piercing cries of terror and pain, and behind them, like a loathsome bassline, guttural grunts and wordless male cursing.

He was running toward the alley before he had time for thought, without knowing why, and when he got there, what he saw filled him with a roil of conflicting emotions he did not pause to understand.

Two big filthy putamadres had a woman pinned against a pile of overturned garbage cans. Her long blond hair was soaked with rain, her coat was unzipped, her skirt was down around her knees, a big fat slob in an army coat with his dick hanging out was trying to pull down her panties while a thinner creep in a peacoat held her arms above her head, spread-eagling her backward over the garbage cans, and her blouse had been ripped open, revealing perfect upthrust white breasts, hard pink nipples glistening with moisture.

His mighty cock grew rock-hard, chafing cruelly against the zipper of his pants. At the same time, he was filled with red-hot outrage. Who did these motherfuckers think they were? How dare these dirty sons of bitches fuck his chocha?

Mucho Muchacho took three long running steps forward and on the third one kicked the man in the army coat in the base of the spine with all his might. He screamed horribly, bolting upright, and then falling backward into a straight-armed fisted punch to the back of the head. He went down and lay still like the sack of shit he was.

The other putamadre whirled around just in time to catch a kick in the throat which slammed his head into the wall with a sickening thud. He slowly slid down the wall into a heap with the rest of the garbage, smearing a long trail of blood on the brick.

Mucho Muchacho stood there with his hands triumphantly on his hips, gazing down on his prize, her panties halfway down her thighs, her wet blond hair fanned out behind her, rivulets of water running down the soft white flesh of her breasts, her full red lips open and panting, her ice-blue eyes slowly coming around to look up at him.

He smiled. He stepped forward to tower, erect and proud, over her. She slowly began to rise up off the heap of garbage cans. He licked his lips and his right hand went to his fly.

Sobbing, she threw herself into his arms, clutched him tightly, and buried her head between his neck and chin, her mouth pressed below his ear, her bare breasts heaving against his chest.

“Thank you, oh thank you, thank you, thank you....” she sighed, her warm moist breath pouring into his earhole like musky perfume.

He felt his hard cock pressed against her stomach. He felt a warm, hollow, and not at all unpleasant feeling in the pit of his guts. He felt a strange itchy tingling in his eyeballs.

He felt her trembling body nestled in his arms. He felt something he could not put a name to, something he had never felt before.

He put his arms around her, then started to drop one hand to feel the cleft of her ass.

“Oh God, it was … it was …” She started to sob uncontrollably.

He felt the hand that had been grabbing for her ass reach out to gently smooth her rain-soaked hair. He felt his other hand just as gently lift her chin so that her tear-filled eyes were looking into his, inches away.

“Hey, girl,” he found himself saying, “you're with Mucho Muchacho. Nothing can hurt you now.”

She smiled at him, choking back her tears. She planted a soft, closed-mouth kiss on his lips. He held her out at arm's length, and then gently pulled up her panties, smoothed down her skirt, wrapped her in her parka, and zipped it shut.

“Will you... will you take me home?” she asked imploringly.

He smiled at her. He put a protective arm around her shoulder. “For sure,” he said.

“It's not far …” She hoisted her bag to her shoulder, wrapped an arm around his waist, kissed him on the cheek, and snuggled close against his strong hard body.

And he walked westward with her through a city transformed. The wet gray loft buildings sparkled and glistened in an impossible silvery moonlight like the shining glass towers of Ciudad Trabajo, and the grungy Soho side street had somehow become Fifth Avenue under a golden glowing sunset as he promenaded past the great department stores and the jewelry shops with the blondhaired, blue-eyed, fur-clad woman out of his long-remembered dreams clinging tremulously to his side.

Like his dreams, and yet not like his dreams, for while he floated through the Ciudad Trabajo of his dreamtime with the blond chocharica of his wettest dreams, no avenging army of streeties marched behind him, and what he felt in this moment was nothing like the fiery lust to fuck the queen of the city into animal-eyed frenzy and slavering submission.

She led him to the entrance to a gleaming white town house and opened the great oaken door with a golden key. Inside, a long spiral staircase of black marble led upward, glistening under crystal chandeliers.

She paused outside the door, slipped out from under his arm, placed both hands on his shoulders, and looked deeply into his eyes. “I...I... don't even know your name,” she said, her blue eyes shining.

“Mucho... Paco,” he said. “Paco Monaco. Y tu...?”

“Kayren... Kayren Gold,” she said, smiling at him uncertainly. Actual tears came to her eyes. “I. . . don't quite know what to say. ... I mean, I've never met a knight in shining armor before.”

A delicious yet somehow embarrassing warmth poured through him, a warmth that made his eyes water and his feet shuffle in place, and his whole body seem to pulse with a radiant glow.

“Hey”

They stood there silently gazing into each other's eyes for a long, long moment, hardly even breathing. Then she hesitantly leaned forward and touched his lips in a short, chaste kiss.

"You gonna be okay now, momacita?" he said.

She nodded; she turned to look up the long marble staircase, but when she looked back at him, she was frowning, and her lower lip was trembling.

“This … I know this is silly of me, but would you mind walking me upstairs, I mean …”

“Hey, no problem,” he said softly, and hooking her arm in his, gallantly escorted her up the long staircase to a golden doorway at the top.

She withdrew a ring of keys from her purse, undid what seemed like a hundred locks, opened the door, peered inside, stood there on the threshold of the darkened interior for a moment, looking into his eyes. “Would you... would you mind coming inside for a bit?” she finally said. “Everyone's asleep, and right now... right now I really don't know if I can handle being alone. ...”

He nodded silently, and let her take his hand, and she led him across a huge dark room lit only by the wan light leaking in from two great walls of tall pearl-frosted windows, a vast magician's palace unlike anything he had seen or dreamed before, velvet couches and elegantly carved and gilded tables, si, but endless mysterious devices as well, a vision of the marvels of some incomprehensible future, reeking of wealth and power.

She parted the folds of a gigantic embroidered tapestry that hung across the room and took him by the hand into a fairyland corridor of tented chambers. Down the endless corridor, where she lifted up a golden velvet flap, and took him into a huge bedroom with a smoked-glass mirrored ceiling lit by a fireplace glow and papered in lip-red velvet.

She took off her long silvery fur coat, tossed it aside, kissed him, and sat down on the edge of a big round bed covered with golden satin sheets, looking up at him uncertainly.

“Want me to go now?” he said, not moving, knowing for sure that she didn't.

Kayren Gold hunkered on her cot, looking up at her rescuer, at this dark- skinned, starved-looking stranger, at this streetie dressed in rags, wondering why she didn't say yes, wondering why she had brought this creature of the streets up here in the first place.

She was safe now, one scream and Larry and Malcolm and the others would come a-running, safe from his rough hands grabbing at her ass, ripping open her blouse, slamming her down across a pile of garbage cans, kneading and pulling and poking—

She blinkeded. She flushed with shame at what was running through her head as she looked at Paco Monaco. This wasn't one of her attackers, this was her savior. If he had wanted to harm her, if he had any thought at all of raping her, he would have done it right out there on the streets, when she was helpless, with her breasts naked to the freezing rain, and her panties down around her knees....

But he hadn't. He had been fearless and strong, then tender and gentle, he had been everything she had needed a man to be in the worst of all possible moments. He had been a true knight in shining armor, and somehow there was a radiance coming off him still, a strength, a manly power, but a tenderness too.

He had been what she had needed most out there in the night. He had been a magic man.

And she needed that magic still.

“Sit down,” she said, patting the cot beside her. “Please.”

He squatted down on the cot, and sat there saying nothing, just being there for her. They sat there looking into each other's eyes for a long, long moment, hardly breathing.

"Touch me," Kayren finally said.

He reached out and placed a hand on her thigh. She cringed at his touch, waiting for it to turn hard and cruel and insistent. It never happened.

“Hold me,” she said after a long while. “Gently. I need to be held by a gentle man.”

“Yo se …” he crooned, and hugged her to him, softly stroking her hair.

She put her arms around him and clung to him for a long, long while, feeling his chest pulsing against her, syncing her breathing with his.

“Can I kiss you... ?” she finally whispered into his ear, and pressed her lips against his, spreading them slowly and hesitantly with her mouth, then opening it, and tasting his breath as it poured sighing into her.

“Make love to me,” she asked. “Show me how to forget.”

Once again, it was like an oft-remembered dream, and yet not like a dream. For when Mucho Muchacho finally found himself naked in the velvet chamber on the bed of gold satin with the blond chocharica of his longings, there was no ice in her blue eyes as she drew him into her, nor was there resistance between her satiny thighs as she spread them wide for him, nor was there a sense of vengeful triumph in his heart, nor was his cock a mighty battle ram prizing open the tight white cunt of look-but-don't-touch as it slid effortlessly home into snug harbor.

Verdad, he was Mucho Muchacho, the very cock of the world, and oh yes, his machismo was great, and he went on and on tirelessly forever as he had always known he would, and for sure she moaned, and cried, and screamed in endless ecstasy.

But there was nothing grudging in her warm and willing surrender, and he did not find himself watching his own perfect body in masterly performance from the ceiling.

And when, as she lay panting and sighing into sleep beneath him, he finally allowed himself release, it was no triumphant explosion of flashing glass shards, but a mighty wave of sweet soft fulfillment that swept up him and through him from his toes to his brain, to pour through his cock and into her, leaving behind only a long slow slide into mellow velvet blackness.

But just before he lapsed entirely into untrammeled sleep, he had the strangest little dream.

He was lying on a cramped and lumpy little cot in a tiny tent of musty-smelling old burlap. Beyond the wall of rags, he heard ragged gurgling snoring. Somewhere a leaky faucet was dripping. Somewhere someone farted.

There was a girl crammed against him in the little cot, sleeping on her stomach with one arm draped over his waist. She had a well-tousled mop of short, wet, honey-blond hair.

He had just enough time to wonder what color her eyes were before the dream faded into blackness.

The Ghost in the Machine

Goin' up, this thing isn't like acid at all, Glorianna O'Toole thought as she dropped her hand from her head, turned, leaned on the railing of her deck, and looked out over the familiar glory of home. There was no clenched-jawed waiting for it to hit, and there was no rush or somatic distortion when it did, which was immediately.

It had been an unreal Santa Ana night divorced from season and time anyway, with the atmosphere charged with ions and incensed with eucalyptus and incoming desert essences, and the temperature that of an eternal Southern California summer night. The wind whipped the trees around the house and whistled down through the shaggy canyons and out across the endless electric nightscape of Los Angeles below, scouring the smog from the air so that you could see clear out across the hard-edged blackness of the channel to the sprinkling lights of Catalina.

South toward San Diego, Baja, the Third World, Los Angeles glittered and sparkled to the horizon along the edge of the Pacific, and to the north, the electric amoeba oozed into every nook and cranny between the Santa Monica Mountains and the sea, before the coastline bent west, and the mountains advanced to meet it, and the city of man gave way to the long glorious wilderness of the coastline road between.

This was not the first time she had stood here stoned and wondered whether the city was rising and spreading in triumphant glory from the dark landscape of nature, or slowly sinking back into the black tarpits of terminal decay.

In the Sixties, when everything was young, and times were flush, and the Beach Boys were high on the charts with “Good Vibrations,” and you hitched up that road to San Francisco with flowers in your hair, and you just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind was movin', oh, the electric towers of power could be clearly seen to be ascending to the starry skies, even as the crystal ship of Rock seemed destined to become the crown of creation.

'Long about the Seventies with a bad moon a-rising and nothing for a poor girl to do but sing in a rock and roll band, the issue already seemed in doubt, and by the full fascist flower of the Eighties, Glorianna was already half-wishing that the Great Quake would finally arrive and drop lowland Los Angeles into the drink, leaving nothing south of Sunset but a Southern California version of San Francisco Bay.

Now, with her pipes gone and her body held together by metabolic enhancers, and the economy on its ass, and Muzik, Inc., long since having lobotomized rock and roll, and the fuckin' town full of people with nowhere to turn and no place to go, and jail a distinct possibility, and the end of her life a lot closer than the memory of glory days, Glorianna felt herself too personally close to the darkness herself to afford the luxury of welcoming the dying of any more lights.

And so now, as she looked out over the electric frenzy of the city nightscape from on high, with this thing on her head doing who the fuck knew what to her brain, and more things riding on this trip than she could quite yet put her finger on, she saw neither a celestial city arising to a rock beat from the virgin coast of the past, nor the fading lights of the future's slaughtered dream sinking inevitably back into the pitiless ocean of night.

Instead, she seemed to be standing center stage before a vast audience of unseen eyes out there in the ballpark grandstands on the hills of the natural amphitheater beyond the lights, waiting for the band to finish its endless tuning up, and knowing that when the music began to play, the outcome would at least in some measure be the result of what moved through her heart on this night.

You sure were naked up here singing lead; if you didn't have it tonight and you bombed, as Glorianna had certainly done from time to time even in her heyday, you might as well be standing there blowing off enormous loud farts. Nothing felt worse than the amplified vibes of your own bummer bouncing back at you off a huge pissed-off crowd.

But of course nothing felt more glorious than hitting the groove and knowing it, when your voice was riding the curl of the music's wave up you and through you, when those good vibrations came roaring back from the perfect audience, and you laughed, and danced, and belted out anything you fucking well pleased, knowing that on this magic night you could do nothing but right.

Glorianna shrugged and held up her hands, as if telling the audience, that was a long time ago, I'm an old lady now, don't expect miracles, what do you want from me, I was never really up there with Pearl or Slick or Tina Turner even then.

But they were all sitting out there in the darkness. The lights of a quarter of a million joints lit up the night in. Woodstock and they were toking up at Altamonte too. Mama Cass was there, and Hendrix, that grab-ass son of a bitch Jim Morrison, and Janis, already halfplowed. Bob Marley passed a huge spliff to John Lennon, and Elvis winked at her knowingly from on high.

Don't hand us that shit-kicking bullshit, Glorianna, they told her. It's time for your set now, and if you fuck this one up, none of us will ever work in this town again. You're all that's left now, kiddo, said Billy Beldock. Now go out and win one for the Big Bopper.

With great reluctance she finally turned her back on the audience of ghosts, and faced the real-time music.

Sally Genaro sat on a deck chair, drumming her fingers on the arm, a pudgy little kid with a bad complexion and an itch that no one wanted to scratch. Bobby Rubin stood beside her, wrinkling his nose, a nerdy little cyber wizard who knew he was far too good for her, and wondered why all the hot young numbers he leched for thought the same of him.

Fuck a duck! Glorianna thought. Is this how far we've come from

Woodstock? Are these poor kids really the last best hope of Rock and Roll?

Yeah, and who are you to talk, Glorianna O'Toole? A broken-down old has been, or to be honest about it, a never-quite-was, peddling wire in a schoolyard to try and save your own ass!

But the kids had the technical talent, she told herself, and while she may have never had quite the voice of Mama Cass or quite the fuck-it-all energy of Janis or quite the lysergic charisma of Grace Slick, and while she had never known what it was like to headline a grand tour or hit the top of the charts or be for a shining hour the voice of her generation, she had always been true to the spirit in her fashion, and it in its turn had never really let her down.

And if it all had to sink into the tarpits sometime, as long as there was still some life left in these old bones, it would go out rockin', or she wasn't the Crazy Old Lstdy of Rock and Roll!

Sally Genaro had chipped a little wire back in her horrid high school days, and the Razor Dogs had always had a dubious assortment of ups and down floating around, and of course she had done plenty of dust since signing her Muzik Factory contract, but the closest she had come to anything remotely like a psychedelic, anything that tripped her through her blighted inner landscape, was grass, and she never much enjoyed smoking dope.

Wire just like turned a piece of your brain on and made you indiscriminantly horny or had you staring mindlessly blissful into space;

downs were an escape from bummers into a gork-off; ups gave you energy and made you a little paranoid; and dust made you feel good.

But while grass sometimes made her feel like the rock and roll queen her face and her body would never let her be, and while it sometimes really made the music flow, she never knew when it would turn on her in the next breath, and torture her with the heightened perception of what a pathetic fat little creep she was.

She felt poised on that razor edge now, as she sat there staring out over Los Angeles from on electronic high.

She felt music moving through her; the millions of lights below seemed to shimmer and dance in flashing and interpenetrating rhythms like the magic dance of the electrons in a VoxBox and she was catching it in her fingers and rapping it out on the arm of the chair. Random bars of tunes emerged and receded and recombined in her head, and she was ready to sit down and commune with her rock and roll machineries.

But she was not alone out here with her VoxBox. Glorianna O'Toole turned away from whatever it was she had been staring at down there in the dance of the cybersphere, and looked at her with huge green eyes, around which her face began to go through like these weird time-lapse changes.

She was like this gray-haired little old lady old enough to be Sally's grandmother, and then she was this incredibly sexy redheaded young fox who was everything Sally could never be, and she was someone else, someone who had always been a million years old and who had never been anything but young and beautiful, solarized and computer-enhanced into eternal unreal perfection like one of Bobby's synthesized rock goddesses.

Back and forth and back and forth these faces pulsed in a heavy driving beat, one, two, three, one, two, three, three, two, one, three, two, one, one, two, three....

Sally hated Glorianna in that moment with a queasy puke-green envy; she saw something still singing in this faded old lady that it had never been given to her to know, and yet somehow she felt the same rhythm beating inside of her, and tapped it out on the deck chair arm, and the lyric her longing put to it threatened to make her pop out of her skin like pus from an angry little pimple.

Why Not Me, Why Not Me, Why Not Me, Why Not Me, Why Not Me!

Bobby Rubin's worst opinions of wirehead garbage seemed quite confirmed as he stood there regarding Sally from the Valley from within the flash of the piece Glorianna O'Toole had seduced him into wearing. What he saw was a poor little fat girl who realized all too well what a toad-lady she was, but who nevertheless presumed to allow herself to run pornographic pictures of him slavering to possess her unwholesome body on the video screen of her mind.

This much he needed no Silicon City wire to see; Project Superstar forced him to allow his nose to be rubbed in it for hours every day. But what this thing was making him feel as he saw the Pimple mooning at him now was a psychedelic vision he could well do without.

For he was seeing himself in a kinestatic flicker of perspectives and he didn't like what he saw at all. He saw himself in high school watching the jocks and the hunks make off with the foxes who wouldn't look at him twice and feeling like a pallid little nerd.

He saw himself screwing the leavings of the bands he did visual tracks for and trying to convince himself they were hot stuff.

Worse still, he saw himself from a foxy lady's perspective as he gave her the eye, and what he saw was a male version of Sally Genaro, a wimpy little creep with some nerve to presume such fantasies.

Most horrid of all was the sense of kinship this piece of evil wirehead shit was making him feel for the Pimple. She lusted after him just as he lusted after all the prime Hollywood pussy, and when they looked at him, they saw what he saw when he looked at Sally, namely a complete turn-off they wouldn't be caught dead in bed with.

He caught himself remembering the drunken scene at that party with more clarity than he had experienced it with in realtime. Oh yes, they had both been bemoaning the same eternal wallflower invisibility in the eyes of the Beautiful People, the same seemingly genetic inability to score with the objects of their dreams, the same mean-spirited envy of those who were born to be what they could never become.

But the final turn of the wirehead screw was that Sally had tried to comfort him at the end with a genuine caring that he absolutely could not tolerate, an understanding of that which he most emphatically did not want understood, and certainly not by the likes of her.

And that, judging by how he felt now, was precisely what had made him puke.

“Come on kiddies, time to boot up and boogie!” Glorianna O'Toole declared, fracturing the vision, and When Bobby turned at the sound of her voice beside him, he beheld something that might have, that should have, that must have come from his own image organ.

Glorianna O'Toole stood out against the backdrop of the brilliant pixels of the shimmering cityscape, outlined in their kirilian aura, her hair blowing in the wind. Her eyes shone with electronic luminescence. Her lips grinned a smirky smile.

She was like an album cover treatment of the rock and roll queen she had once been. Somehow the young child of the Sixties who still lived behind that mask of old flesh had found the power to shine on through.

This was Glorianna's Glorianna, this was Glorianna as his own A.P version of what must once have been, this was the Crazy Lady of Rock and Roll with the years shaved back with a wizard algorithm, this was his time- warped vision of the ultimate dream lover the likes of him would never know. This was every woman who would never even look at him.

But Glorianna O'Toole did.

She looked right at him, and she winked, and a rock and roll goddess out of the fabulous Sixties was giving little Bobby Rubin the eye. She winked again, and a dirty old lady was giving him a sarcastic perverted parody of same, and that was all right too.

He wondered if she was seeing what he hoped she was seeing, for no woman whom he had ever really admired had ever looked at him and showed him the Bobby he wanted to see reflected in her eyes, the Bobby he dreamed of being in his heart of hearts.

And something clicked.

Why not?

If her, why not me?

“Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name,” Glorianna sang at him.

But Bobby was already walking across the deck toward the living room, toward his image organ, toward the bits and bytes, toward the cybersphere where, he had suddenly realized, he had the power to make her see the Bobby he wanted her to see, Bobby Rubin, the Prince of Rock and Roll, Bobby Rubin as Bobby Rubin deserved to be.

“What are you doing, Bobby?” Sally Genaro moaned, the music leaving her head, the wirehead magic suddenly shattered by the truly ludicrous sight on the screen. “Jeez, that's a picture of you!”

“So?” Bobby said. “I've got to start somewhere.”

He had made a beeline for his image organ rig and started popping this silly picture of himself up on the monitors without even saying a word like he was in some kind of trance, and what peered out at her from her own monitor was a grainy old photo of a hunch-shouldered figure in baggy jeans and a funky old red lumberjack shirt squinting in bright sunlight and posing with wimpish pride beside his car.

The VoxBox and the image organ were set up facing each other, with a monitor beside Sally's VoxBox slaved to Bobby's output, so that they could look each other in the eye while they played and both view the visual track at the same time, Glorianna's inspiration for a set-up that might “intensify the creative vibes.”

But the Bobby who smiled foolishly from her screen was the same Bobby who looked at her from above their consoles, a little younger maybe, but still not even her idea of any rock star snaky enough to ship gold!

“So he's not really your idea of perfection?” Bobby said, grinning strangely at her. He did something with his controllers. The car and the background disappeared, leaving Bobby Rubin standing in blue matte space. He did something else and the picture snapped into crystal-clear color-corrected focus.

“What kind of body turns you on?”

"Huh?"

“What kind of body turns you on?” Bobby repeated blandly. “Is your dream lay a bodybuilder or a ballet dancer or a baseball player?”

“Bobby Rubin, if you think I'm—"

“Do it!” Glorianna O'Toole hissed peremptorily from behind Bobby, where she stood staring at his monitor with the most intense expression.

“Come on, Glorianna,” Sally whined, “this is like dumb\”

Glorianna glanced at her narrowly. “Do it, Sally!” she repeated. “And do it like... this,” she said, giving Sally's touchpoint a sudden tap.

“Surfer,” Sally found herself blurting.

Bobby Rubin's head squinted at her owlishly from a tall, naked, bronzed beach boy's body, downed with sun-bleached fuzz, his huge rosy cock crowned by a golden shock of pubic hair.

Sally's ears burned scarlet. "At least give him like a jockstrap!" she moaned. Bobby laughed and dressed his surfer self in a red bikini bottom.

Sally grinned at him. This silly game suddenly began to seem like fun. “Do something with his hair,” she said. “I like it long and blond. …”

Bobby's head grew a sun-bleached mane of thick straight blond hair flowing to within about two inches of his shoulders.

More than fun, it seemed as if Bobby, in the only way the shy little guy knew how, was at long last trying to turn her on.

“Make your nose a little smaller, Bobby. …”

Surfer Bobby's nose lost its slight bend, shrank, grew long, wide, expressive nostrils.

“Bitchin'!” Sally exclaimed. “Now like give yourself neater eyebrows, black ones, and you know, dark sexy lashes!”

She practically drenched her panties at the sight of what now appeared on her screen. There was Bobby Rubin, undeniably Bobby's recognizable face, but haloed by flowing blond hair, atop a surfer's fuck-me body, with a thin flaring nose like some picture of a Russian prince, and with his eyes set off by hot black brows and long dark lashes so sexy they were just this much away from being gay.

“The eyes …” she said. “Make them …”

“Leave the eyes alone!” Glorianna O'Toole snapped. “Fucking hell, I know that /ace!”

“Shit...” Glorianna muttered in frustration as she found herself popping out of the flash, staring at the face on the screen, trying to recall who or what had been looking back at her out of the dreamtime the magic moment before, who had seemed to say, remember me, babes....

“The hair's wrong,” she found herself saying. “Paint it black, black as night, black as coal. …”

His hair turned black. Goddammit, who are you? I know you, you smart-ass motherfucker!

Come back to me, you son of a bitch! she demanded. Fuck it, she thought, I'm coming in after you! And she gave her touchpoint another tap.

The face on the screen seemed to nod at her, beckoning her onward.

“Your hair's curlier, isn't it?” she said. “Falls to your shoulders in wild windblown waves.”

His hair curled and tumbled in the flowing breeze.

He was beginning to come back to her, this creature from her dream time, this lover who had never been.

Glorianna laughed. At this late date, was she quite literally about to meet the man of her dreams?

For that, of course, was who this was shaping up to be, someone who had never been, but someone who had never been very far away, someone who she had found in every man she had ever loved, someone whose spirit she had long feared had vanished from the world—Mr. Tambourine Man, the Mighty Quinn, Jumpin' Jack Flash himself, the Lizard King of Rock and Roll.

Glorianna stared at the face of the man on the screen, she looked at the face of Bobby Rubin, hunched over his console and creating it. The same, and yet not the same. As if the long-lost rocker inside this poor little thwarted kid, inside this whole fucking dead-ass sold-out generation of poor little kids, was somehow struggling up out of dreamtime to be reborn.

This wire was the wizard McCoy all right, something wonderful and weird was for sure beginning to happen.

“What would you like to wear, Jack?” she asked the figure on the screen.

“Blue jeans or sequins or bell bottoms or black leather?”

“This is the Electronic Age, not the Age of Aquarius, Glorianna,” he said with a wicked little grin. Glorianna was just barely surprised enough when he began to speak to realize out of a dim mundane corner of her mind's eye that Bobby Rubin had jacked a mike into his console and booted up a lip-sync program. He was talking to her through his transmogrified image.

Or was he?

Or was someone beginning to break on through to the other side through him?

What the fuck was I talking about? Bobby Rubin found himself wondering as he popped out of someplace wonderful into this dimmer realm, where Sally Genaro sat staring at her screen most strangely, where Glorianna O'Toole, her eyes glowing, regarded what he had wrought with rapt wonder. Who the fuck was I? What is this piece of wire doing to me?

He shrugged, he hit his touchpoint. For sure, he wanted it to do it to him again!

“In the Electronic Age, I wear everything, or I wear nothing at all,” he found himself saying through his alter ego on the screen. He sketched out tight pants tucked into high flaring boots, a form-fitting shirt open halfway down the chest with a high collar and flowing balloon sleeves that ended in bell bottoms just below the elbow. He laid it in over his body, and then matted it all to blue.

He keyed in three separate interface programs for the boots, the pants, and the shirt, so that he could moving matte them independently.

And zap, he was wearing tight black leather pants, gunmetal boots, and the stars and stripes for a shirt. He grinned sexily, wriggling his ass in narcissistic delight, preening like a peacock.

“Play me some rock and roll, Sally,” he said, “and let me dance for you.”

Sally Genaro couldn't take her eyes off the creature on the screen; the living room with its eucalyptus, Glorianna, even the figure hunched over the facing console, faded away into unreality. All that was real was herself and her dream lover.

It was Bobby, but it was Bobby as she had always wished him to be; perfect Bobby, a Bobby who didn't put her down, who wouldn't call her Sally from the Valley, who was opening up his secret inner beauty just for her, as it was always meant to be.

She stored a beat-loop in her sequencer, the same beat that had been going through her head since she had seen Glorianna O'Toole's face pulsing through its changes out there on the deck.

“One, two, three, one, two, three, three, two, one, three, two, one, one, two, three...”

She ran it through a muzzy bass drum, added a heavy conga, put a funky electric bass to it, saved the result, and slaved the visual track to the multiplexed rhythm sequence.

Smiling at her, he began to do a crude and jerky bump and grind. And his clothes began to change in time with the rhythm, in a kinestatic flicker of chromakeyed overlaid images, a flash of ever-changing shapes and colors too fast for the eye to follow, a mirrored strobe-suit that burned an infinite regression of overlapping afterimages onto her retinas.

She laid a trumpet across her keyboard, dropped it an octave, funked it up with filter programs, square-enveloped the vibrato, overlaid a guitar twang with feedback loops, and when she started diddling fragments of random melody with her fingers, out came something that sounded like Gabriel doing Jimi Hendrix on his horn spaced-out on wire.

Bobby was dancing, dancing as he only could in his dreams, letting the beat move his bones, and the notes nuance the flesh of his body, and the laughter inside come rockin' right on through. It made him feel like singing.

“I'm the me I always told me that I could never be...” he chanted in a ragged croak.

Sally ran the voice through her vocoder, syncing it to her leadline, squeezed it through filters, ran it through reverb, tinkered with envelope parameters. Out came a male lead singer directly on the beat, rough-crooning the words with a fluid liquid rasp that phrased itself insinuatingly around the melody like the snake in the garden singing the blues.

I'm the me I always told me That I could never be_ _

“Put some feedback in it, make it sound a little electronic,” Glorianna O'Toole said behind her. “Let's hear the old bits and bytes sizzle and spark.”

Sally adjusted some parameters and filters. She did things to the overtone mix. The figure dancing on the screen for her to the music coming out of her fingertips sang now in a voice that surprised even her; male, and powerful, yet with a female fluidity, rough around the edges when it wanted to bite, yet sticky-tongued sensuous when it was in a mood to purr like a smart-ass cat, and omnisexual in a way the world had not yet heard, the line between male and female blurred not by bisexual androgyny, but somehow encompassed by the vocal range of a third sex, the forthrightly artificial yet entirely human, indeed hyperhuman, voice of a rock and roll machine.

Sally's fingers danced across the keyboard. The Rock and Roll Machine danced before her, giving her the eye, strobing in a kaleidoscope of flashing patterns and colors, warping her into its cyberspace, inviting her to sing along....

Glorianna popped out of the flash, but this time the dreamtime magic did not entirely go away. What the fuck were these kids doing?

Out of the corner of her eye, she could verify that Bobby Rubin and Sally

Genaro were completely spaced into their controllers, microphones, and screens, like video-game junkies on amphetamine, their fingers flying, their mouths muttering into their mikes, zapped together into their cybersphere.

She knew that Sally was making the music and Bobby was creating the visual track, and they were both inputting vocals, but who was the singer, and from whence came the song?

I'm the you they always told me

That I could never be

I'm the crown of your creation

In your wizard dreams

Let me dance into your dreamtime

I'm your Rock and Roll Machine!

He sang in that unreal yet magically human voice, a singer with a range from shining crystalline clarity that could shatter glass on the high notes to subsonic bass that you heard only in your bones, and he had the tones and phrasing of every rock singer who had ever lived at his command in between, and oh did he let you know it, tying it all together with electronic swoops and glides and lightnings that never came from a set of human pipes.

He danced like Mick Jagger and he danced like Michael Jackson and he danced like Pearl on Southern Comfort and whites, and he danced like all of them together; he danced like Rock and Roll itself. She wouldn't have been the Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll if she didn't hit her touchpoint and dance along with him back into the dream time.

His strobe-suit vibrated her retinas, burning the vision on the screen into her brain in a cascade of afterimages, flashing him out of the raster-universe of bits and pixels, and then perspective reversed polarity, and as he came bursting out, she was sucked right in.

They met somewhere between, in the timeless onstage realm where they had always been performing their eternal set together, a long, long set that had begun when she and the world were young and that would never end while the music lived.

And what a band was backing them, the infinite grand touring road show of Rock and Roll Valhalla! Everyone was there for a few bars, living and dead, Grateful and otherwise, Hendrix and Lennon, Clapton and Ginger Baker, Charlie Watts, and Larry Ellis, Billy Preston, and Frank Fox, and every anonymous sessions musician who ever lived got to play too, even poor old Billy Beldock, hot and handsome as the night she met him, on his old acoustic drum kit.

Out beyond the stage lights, the audience clapped its hands to the beat and danced in the aisles, an audience that spread out to the far horizons in space and in time, rocks in black leather jackets and greasy pompadours, hippies in paisley and bell bottoms, bikers in their painted denim colors, skinheads, punks with pins through their cheeks and electric sparky hair, and clean-cut yuppies just droppin' in to boogie.

And wonder of all rock and roll wonders, Bobby Rubin and Sally Genaro and their whole fucked-over generation of nose-to-the-grindstone balls-to-the-wall hackers and computer wimps were there too, learning to boogie at last via the grace of everyone's fave raves of the dreamtime, the Queen of Crazy Ladies and their own electronic resurrection of the Jack of Rock and Roll.

Boot me up and boogie Sez this ghost in your machine I've been sealed up in your circuits I've been nowhere to be seen But now I'm here to tell ya Raise up your voice and scream You and me together We're a Rock and Roll Machine!

“Ya done good, babes,” he whispered into her ear during a long wild instrumental break.

“You're all right too, Jack,” Glorianna said, and she knew to her surprise that they were both telling the truth.

For out of the most evil notion the Muzik Factory had ever had, out of two nerdy little kids and a broken-down old second-rate singer desperately trying to save her own ass, out of the very bits and bytes that had all but automated real rockers out of existence, and a piece of wizard wire, that which had been assassinated by circuitry had contrived to be reborn in this new electronic avatar, as if he had been there all along waiting for this moment to arrive.

The break ended, and she found herself singing a solo riff whose words, as she sang them, she seemed to have always known.

You're standing here beside me Just where you've always been You've been hiding right inside me You're the ghost in the machine You're just bits and bytes and programs But baby, you ain't Mr. Clean_ _

The music thickened, grew ominous, more bassy, guitars wailed insinuatingly, drums sneered, somewhere in the distance the forlorn foredoomed sirens of the riot squad began to wail. Jack's long, curly, raven-black hair turned a brilliant punk American-flag red, frosted with a thin white web work that mimicked the Shunt as he pranced and swaggered to the lip of the stage, and chanted gutturally with the voice of the endless audience itself, the voices of all the boys and girls out there on the unarmed road of flight, and yet transmogrified by his circuitries into the mighty electronic voice of pure unpersonified Rock and Roll itself.

I make more of you You make more of me You make more of me I make more of you_ _

And over it, in the high hard voice of her youth, in the voice of her dreamtime, in the voice of her generation that she had not quite ever been, Glorianna O'Toole sang out her wicked triumph over Carlo Manning and all the other pinheads upstairs.

Red ripe anarchy

For all the world to see

What will the Fat Men do?

Red Jack swaggered over to her microphone, and they belted it out together, eyes linked, lips close enough to kiss.

You make more of me I make more of you_ _

Red Jack laughed, she laughed, the guitars and basses and synthesizers and saxes and drums all laughed after their fashion, the audience laughed, the whole wide world seemed to laugh a dirty Rock and Roll laugh, the one the world is always waiting for, the one that always laughs last.

After that, who wanted to stick around for an encore? “See ya later,” Glorianna said, reaching up to hit the touchpoint of the Shunt.

“Sooner than you think,” said Red Jack.

And she was standing in her own living room with a microphone in her hand and the fragrant Santa Ana wind blowing in from the open doors to the deck, rustling the leaves of her bonsai eucalyptus.

She blinked. She had no concept of the passage of time. Bobby and Sally were still zoned into their screens and controllers, their fingers flying, their eyes glazed in a cybersphere trance.

Through the speaker system came the last bars of the very duet she and Red Jack had been singing, and if Sally Genaro's VoxBox wizardry was not quite up to the ultimate rock and roll band of the dream time, what she had laid out across her keyboard with layer upon layer upon layer of interlocked emulation programs was pretty fuckin' close to the next best thing—lead guitar with rhythm and bass slaved to it, doubled and tripled on horn and sax, backed by at least three different synth voices, a whole rock and roll symphony orchestra at her command in realtime as her fingers danced across the keys.

And if there was no transmogrified Glorianna O'Toole singing along, the voice of Red Jack was everything it had been in the dreamtime, the collective electronically enhanced voice of Rock and Roll itself.

And there he was on the monitors, big as life and twice as nasty, his strobe-suit Jumpin' Jack Flashing, his long bright-red hair webbed with the white traceries of the Shunt and blowin' in the wind, and that paragon of male charisma he wore for a face lookin' right at her with Bobby Rubin's eyes.

Tell me this little man who isn't there isn't the mayor of Solid Gold City!

Tell me Bed Jack isn't for real!

Clearly this seance had done its work and then some; all that remained was to whip these raw tracks together into a demo.

She started to reach out for Bobby's touchpoint.

But something held her back. Maybe it was Red Jack himself, peering into her eyes from out of the screen. Even without the Shunt, she seemed to hear someone or something tell her that there was more to resurrecting real rock and roll than conjuring up out of nothingness a superstar who was a lock to ship gold.

Red ripe anarchy

For all the world to see ...

That was her line, now wasn't it? Hadn't it always been? She laughed wickedly. Oh yeah, there was more to rock than the fuckin' bottom line! She'd give Carlo Manning his gold, she'd give all the pinheads upstairs so much fuckin' platinum that they'd expire from heavy metal poisoning, and she'd give them the great big kick in the ass they so richly deserved in the bargain!

She moved closer to Bobby Rubin's ear. "Run it through from the top," she whispered. "Once more, with feeling...

Bobby Rubin danced through his dreamtime, through the halls of high school, through endless Long Island parties, through the corridors of the Muzik Factory, through a thousand and one horny Hollywood nights, and into Eddie Friedkin's mansion, where he had baptized his ultimate nerdhood in vomit on the lawn.

But this time around, he was another Bobby, the heavy metal hero of his dreams, Jumpin' Jack Flash, the Mighty Quinn, the Electric Red Jack of Rock and Roll, his long wild lightning-streaked red hair sparking and flowing in the breeze, the object of every woman's dreams, the me they always told him that he could never be, the rockin' cyberwizard, the Rock and Roll Machine.

“Hey Jack, let's you and me raise some hell together for old times' sake,” said the Queen of Rock and Roll, with a wicked wink and leer.

She stood there in the dreamtime with him against a backdrop of pixels shimmering like a nighttime cityscape, haloed and solarized in their kirilian aura, her green eyes flashing with electronic luminescence, the dream lover the likes of him would never know, every woman who would never look at him with the very look this Crazy Lady was giving him now.

“What did you have in mind, mom, as if I didn't know,” Red Jack said, laughing.

“You know the words, Bobby, you can hear the music now, so let's boogie, let's kick out all the jams and knock down all the walls, let's bring back the Revolution, and kick all the pinheads in their balls!”

“Red ripe anarchy for all the world to see? What will the Fat Men do?”

Sally Genaro played her heart out, she sang into her microphone from someplace deep inside, and Bobby winked and wriggled his pelvis just for her, and at long last, at long pimply fat lonely last, she knew what it was like to be part of him, to be smiled upon by a Prince of Rock and Roll, to feel the music trapped inside of her bursting forth in full unashamed and unafraid flower, to be onstage in the spotlight at last, to be released, to be the me every man's eyes told her that she could never be.

I make more of you You make more of me ...

Bobby took her hand and took her away, away from the San Fernando Valley, away from sucking the cocks of the Razor Dogs of the world, away from being the ugly duckling at Hollywood parties, away into the cybersphere, a brand new rockin ' cybersphere, where the fat and the meek inherited the earth, where all the nerdy little wimps and pimply little fat girls could be Queens of the starry pixels and Jacks of Rock and Roll.

We've been sealed inside our circuits We've been nowhere to be seen But you and me together We're a Rock and Roll Machine.

“All right my little rock and roll wizards, rise and shine!” Glorianna O'Toole burbled happily as she popped the touchpoints of their Shunts in rapid sequence and stood there grinning. Bobby looked at Glorianna, then back at Sally. Glorianna stared into his eyes for a long long time before trying to make eye contact with Sally. Sally had eyes only for Bobby. No one said anything for quite a while.

“What... what the fuck happened?” Bobby finally said. “Was I... ? Did you... ?” He didn't even have the words to form the concepts in his head as he stared at this gray-haired old lady looking straight back at him with the eyes of the queen of his dreamtime. His dreamtime? Her dreamtime?

“How much of it was real?” he finally managed to articulate.

“Quien sabe?” Glorianna said gaily. “Does a bear shit in the woods? Do we all live in the same yellow submarine?”

She brought Sally over to his console and punched up a replay of the rough master mix.

"You were synthesizing and editing all these tracks, kiddies, that's for sure," she said, "and I think we all had a hand in the vocals, but whoever or whatever did which to whom, meet the crown of our creation, Red Jack, the Superstar who isn't there, doin' 'Your Rock and Roll Machine,' and if our boy doesn't crack number one with his debut disc, I don't know shit about rock and roll!"

Red Jack, the A.P star on the screen, looked nothing like him, with his tall, well-muscled body, his long, flaming, white-frosted red hair, and yet the eyes that looked out at him were definitely his, and somehow that made Bobby feel that some essential and wonderful part of him was up there singing like the greatest rock star who had never lived.

I make more of you You make more of me You make more of me I make more of you_ _

And oh, was that set of clothing matte programs a wizard piece of software! As he danced and sang against a blue matte background, Red Jack's pants and shirt went through endless strobing changes, as bits of old movies, starscape still shots, crowd scenes, faces, endless data-bank footage and images even Bobby couldn't pick out, flickering across them continuously, proclaiming his discorporate existence, and waving it in the face of the world triumphantly like an electronic battle flag.

Red Jack dissolved into pixels for a long moment, colored confetti fining the screen, then reformed slowly out of a dissolving montage of ordinary homely little faces, including Bobby's own, as if tentatively coalescing out of electric dreams and secret desires.

I'm the you they always told me That I could never be I'm the crown of your creation

In your wizard dreams ...

Bobby found himself marveling at the visual tracks he himself had wrought, at the secret story of himself dancing to the music across the screen.

Audience footage from old concerts matted itself grainily behind Red Jack, conventional stuff everyone used from Woodstock and Live Aid and Beatles tours and Springsteen at the L.A. Coliseum, but segueing into a weird montage of nerd city, bits and pieces of computer training films and documentaries on the cyberkind generation, an endless dreary expanse of drudges and hackers beavering away at their consoles.

Red Jack danced through the endless aisles of computer consoles, tossing discs that appeared magically in his hands to all the hacking drudges like a crazy electronic Johnny Appleseed.

And all the little computer nerds began inserting the discs into their computers, which magically blossomed into glowing jukeboxes painted in fantastic neon swirls and paisley patterns.

And the montage of wimpy little faces melded into the face of Red Jack, a multiplexed multitude kicking out the jams. All the hackers danced in a crazy chorus line behind the figure in the strobe-suit, out of the computer room, and off down Hollywood Boulevard, Fifth Avenue, Bourbon Street, Telegraph, and Market.

More of them poured out of buildings, like cockroaches fleeing in a tide from their tenements, like huddled wimpy masses yearning to breathe free, their faces transforming into the face of Red Jack as they hit the streets and joined the parade, then flickering back and forth between the nerd masks of the cybermasses and the rockin' face of Red Jack in time to the beat and the colored strobing of his shirt and pants.

Then Red Jack was all by himself in close-up on the screen, looking right into Bobby's eyes with Bobby's eyes, annihilating thereby the psychic space between, and warping him into his own song.

You're standing here beside me Just where I've always been You've been hiding right inside me ...

Bobby actually found himself singing along to the cut, something he had never done before in his life, and wondering why the fuck he had never sung along with himself before.

We're the ghost in the machine We may be bits and bytes and programs But baby, we ain't Mr. Clean_ _

Red Jack sang on a stage before tiered grandstands that were also row after row of computer consoles. Behind them a vast audience of hackers played their keyboards like pianos, fingers flying, heads rolling to the beat, stomping their feet, and rolling their eyes. For a brief moment, Red Jack flashed in his multiplexed multitude across their features.

I make more of you,...

A reverse perspective over the shoulders of row after row of rockin' hackers behind blank monitors, their keyboards replaced by synthesizers, guitars, pianos, drum kits. And as they swayed to the music, the face of Red Jack appeared on each and every screen out of a cloud of pixels.

You make more of me— Back and forth between the figure of Red Jack performing on stage and his face arising out of the bits and bytes on every hacker's screen, four reversals to a bar.

You make more of me_ _

I make more of you_ _

A manic, rapidly cut Keystone Kops routine. Banks, missile control centers, tv control rooms, department store check-out counters, stock brokerages, offices of government and industry, monitors and industrious old farts everywhere, reacting in gross comic horror as the facts and figures and news features vanish before their eyes, to be replaced anywhere and everywhere by the leeringly triumphant Red Jack.

Red ripe anarchy

For all the world to see

What will the Fat Men do?

You make more of me I make more of you!

When it was over, Bobby sat there staring numbly at the blank pearly screen. He looked back at Glorianna, who was fairly cackling and rubbing her hands in glee.

“I didn't know I had it in me …” he croaked weakly. “That thing's …”

“Subversive?” Glorianna suggested archly. “No fuckin' shit!”

“You don't understand, I mean... something tells me that he's going to ... to get out. . .” Bobby stammered, without quite knowing what that might really mean.

Glorianna O'Toole winked at him, and for a moment, even without the Shunt, he wasn't looking into the eyes of any gray-haired old lady, oh no, in that moment she was the consort of Red Jack himself again, the ageless Queen of Rock and Roll he had met in the dreamtime.

“Why what will the Fat Men do?” she said, and laughed uproariously.

“I don't know about the Fat Men, but the pinheads upstairs will never release a thing like that!”

Glorianna flashed him a slow sly grin. “Oh yes they will,” she said with utter certainty. “Their beady little eyes will light up with dollar signs, and they'll go for the sure thing solid gold, and they won't even see anything beyond the bottom line.”

She shrugged. She winked at him again. “That, after all, is why they're pinheads in the first place!”

Sally Genaro sat behind the barricade of her VoxBox, watching Bobby make like goo-goo eyes at Glorianna O'Toole, watching the horrid old lady giving him the eye back as if they had, yech, made it or something, and not knowing whether she wanted to shout for joy or cry.

She knew full well that she had laid down the best tracks of her life, that she was really the one who made Red Jack sing, who gave him voice, who made him rock and roll, for without her it would all be just a bunch of words and pictures. And even the body and the face were the child of her longing and his fantasies of how he wanted to look for her.

He was the proof for all the world to see of the intimacy they had shared in their heart of hearts. He was the Bobby of her dreams, and the Bobby who had revealed his secret spirit to her and her alone.

It had been as good as balling him.

In some ways, maybe better.

For sure, this was going to ship platinum, for sure, this was going to make her career, and for sure, she had for a shining moment been the me they always told her that she could never be.

But it was Bobby who had somehow been transformed into an A.P rock star, not Sally from the Valley, and it was Glorianna O'Toole who he had turned his snaky eyes on in the aftermath of what they had shared.

The bassline with which she had started the whole thing beat like a mocking aural afterimage in her wounded heart.

Why not me, why not me, why not me, why not me, why not me!

Do Me Like You Did the Night Before

Kayren Gold awoke to the clanging and pounding cacophony of the morning's charge of steam rising into the loft's pipes and radiators, to the stirrings and gruntings and flushings of people abluting and relieving themselves beyond the maze of burlap curtains, to the pressure and smell of a hard, unwashed male body crammed into the narrow cot beside her,' to an alert pair of dark brown eyes watching her own open.

Memories of the night before swam up disjointedly into consciousness as her eyes brought his face into focus. The Temple of Doom, $1600 in bedbug sales. Hard brown eyes, under dark bushy brows, framed by almost feminine dark lashes.

Footsteps behind her. Those animals, tearing at her clothing, pulling down her panties. Olive brown skin, smooth and soft, a young face, younger than her, maybe.

Her savior, appearing out of the darkness. A short kinky afro of black hair strangely and subtly shot with unlikely filaments of silver. A tender creature, and then a demon lover, without a doubt the best she had ever had.

A Puerto Rican!

The night before and this morning after coalesced into a more or less coherent skein of events, one leading to the other, but as they did, Kayren shut her eyes again, not yet quite ready to deal with today's reality, which presently found her curled up in bed with some Puerto Rican streetie.

Like most educated white New Yorkers of her generation, Kayren would never admit to racial prejudice—Malcolm was black, after all, Tommy was Vietnamese, Teddy Ribero himself was Puerto Rican, they were her friends, she was living in the loft with them, wasn't she—so, like most of her compeers, she felt quite mortified when such feelings nevertheless arose in extremis, as they did now.

Particularly since... what was his name, Paco... had gallantly rescued her from two vile rapists at considerable risk to himself, and been such a perfect gentleman in the aftermath that she had actually asked him to make love to her to wipe the memory away.

If this guy was your white knight in shining armor, you'd be giving him a tender thankful blow-job right now instead of trying to pretend you're still asleep so you don't have to deal with him! she told herself angrily Then again, maybe this wasn't racial prejudice at all, which certainly was reprehensible, but prejudice against streeties, which, being a matter of self-preservation, was entirely rational and forgivable....

Jeez, there was $1600 in my purse! she suddenly realized in a hot flash of paranoia. Did this guy...?

This was more than enough to snap her eyes wide open without further thought, as she shot a hurried glance past Paco into the corner, where her clothes, his crummy rags, her purse, and his unmistakable street bag lay piled in a hurried heap. Once having done this, there was nothing for it but to meet his gaze, smile, and say, “Uh... hello.”

“Hello …” he said quite guardedly. He looked quickly around the little tent of burlap hangings in some confusion. “Chingada,” he said uncertainly, “where the fuck is this, muchacha…?”

A very strange look indeed passed across his swarthy face. He started to say something, obviously thought better of it, said something else. “It was dark ... it looked... different. ...”

Kayren was suddenly quite conscious of his hard, thin, naked body entwined around hers, and despite the situation, despite the fact that something about his attitude was beginning to piss her off, indeed perhaps because he was acting so paranoid and distant, she found herself becoming aroused.

“And what about me?” she demanded. “Did I look better in the dark too?”

His eyes widened. It almost seemed as if he were about to laugh. This was about all Kayren could take. She grabbed his limp cock, squeezed it rhythmically. “What about this?” she said. “You do remember at least that much, don't you?”

His sudden soft moan and the quick stiffening against her palm told her that he wasn't quite that far out of it. Clumsily, crudely, he started to roll himself over onto her, pumping into her hand and moaning. She resisted, slid him inside of her as they lay side by side, put her free hand over his mouth.

“Be quiet about it,” she whispered. “There's a lot of people to the out there who don't even know you're here. …”

She slung one leg over him and began rolling her pelvis as best she was able in tight, smoky little circles. He groaned softly, kneaded her breast with one hand, and came in about two minutes, leaving her more confused than hot and bothered, though there certainly was that too.

Nor did he even plant a perfunctory kiss on her lips when it was over. Instead, he lay there regarding her with narrow-eyed suspicion. “People?” he hissed. “This ain't your apartment? What kind of people? Que pasa? What kind of place is this, muchacha?”

“This is the Reality Liberation Front.”

“That will take some explaining,” Kayren sighed, rolling away from him off the cot and onto her feet. “I'm sure Markowitz will fill your ears with more than you want to hear over breakfast,” she said, rummaging in the pile of his and her clothing and dressing quickly before he got up to cover her covert search of her purse.

“Breakfast?” he said sharply behind her. “Kibble … or real food?”

“We've got some cornflakes and milk, some coffee, and I think some bread,” Kayren said, stepping into her shoes of the night before and turning slowly to face him.

He was climbing off the bed now with an eager but still guarded look on his dark, dangerously attractive face, and she saw how thin his body was, well-muscled in a wiry sort of way, yes, but with ribs clearly showing through the tight skin of his flanks, and the knobby line of his breastbone not quite fleshed into invisibility.

He eyed her narrowly. "I got no dinero..." he said uncertainly. "I mean ..."

Kayren felt like a perfect shit.

The $1600 was still in her purse, this poor half-starved kid was a hero who had saved her life, the first thing she had done fresh from his arms had been to check whether or not he had ripped her off, and here he was with his ribs sticking out, shuffling his feet and trying to work himself up to panhandling a bowl of cornflakes!

She smiled at him. She went to him. She put her hands on his shoulders and gave him a great big tender kiss. "Paco," she said, "you can eat as much as you want of whatever we've got."

“Verdad?” he said wide-eyed, as if not quite ready to believe in such an incredible bonanza.

“For sure,” she said softly, taking his hand. It was pathetic, it was touching, but she could hardly afford to feel superior or patronizing about it. For after all, not so long ago she had been looking forward to an existence of eating kibble and crashing in the subway herself, now hadn't she? And from the look of him, this poor sweet guy had probably never known much of anything else.

There but for fortune . . . she thought. If I hadn't gotten caught in the rain, if I hadn't ducked into that bar, if I hadn't met Leslie...

If Paco hadn't come along when he did ... if he had really been the savage monster she had always assumed such starveling streeties to be...

She shuddered. It didn't bear even thinking about. She felt quite ashamed before him and not because of his nakedness.

“Come on,” she said with real warmth in her heart, “put on your clothes, and let me introduce my friends to a real hero.”

As he pulled on his pants, Paco considered a tap of the Zap, but immediately decided that until he at least knew where the fuck he really was and que pasa, it had better be no way, Jose.

Verdad, the Zap gave him powers, he sure had handled himself a whole lot better with this muchacha last night than he was doing so far este manana. But then, last night this place had seemed like a palace and she had been a chocharica princess of the city with mucho dinero. Better play it cool and straight, muchacho, at least till you figure out who and what you're playing with

Kayren, si, that was her name, Kayren Gold, led him out of the tent of old potato bags and into a corridor made of more burlap, bedsheets, tarps, and smelly blankets, sewn together and hanging on ropes from a high unfinished ceiling.

“Fuckin' weird,” he muttered, looking up, around, and down. “What is all this shit?”

“Just the living part of the loft,” Kayren told him. “We've all got curtains around our beds for privacy.” She blushed. “But everyone can hear just about everything.”

Paco put on his best Mucho Muchacho swagger as she lifted the corner of a big curtain that ran across the whole width of the place, admitting him to a huge room cluttered with all kinds of dingy, mismatched furniture and incomprehensible junk, where eight people sat at a long table made out of sawhorses and boards at the far end.

Three muchachas and five men, all'clocking him as Kayren led him by the hand through the clutter as if they had for sure heard every moan and scream of last night's performance.

Two of the girls, one thin and brown-haired, the other a little pudgy with spiked black hair, whispered dumb shit to each other like they hadn't gotten laid in years. The third one wasn't that bad at all; short blond hair, a tough little mouth, blue eyes that looked him up and down and then glanced knowingly at Kayren.

Two of the men were gordos, one was some kind of chink, and another was a tall, thin, vaguely faggotty-looking nigger with thick glasses that made him look pop-eyed. The fifth was a lightskinned Borinqueno a little older than Paco, a Blankriqueno by the look of him, who Paco would have bet had never really spent time out on the streets.

In the light of day leaking in through tall grimy windows, this joint looked like anything but a plushie-tushie palace, and they were all wearing old jeans, faded workshirts, T-shirts, and shit that did not exactly mark them as rich gordos, but they obviously weren't a bunch of kibble-eaters like him, either.

There was a refrigerator and a sink and a stove close by the table. On the stove was a big urn of coffee sending a delicious steam into his nostrils that went straight to the back of his throat. On the table were a king-sized box of cornflakes, a liter container of milk, almost a whole loaf of sliced whole wheat bread, a box of sugar, bowls, cups, and plates, and what looked to be a fuckin' half pound of soft golden butter!

“This is Paco,” Kayren Gold announced, “Paco...” She shot him an embarrassed sideways glance.

“Monaco,” Paco said distractedly, pulling up a chair and filling a bowl almost to the rim with cornflakes.

“Hey...”

“What the ...”

“I told Paco he could have breakfast,” Kayren said sharply, picking up two cups and filling them from the spigot of the coffee urn. Paco glared around the table, daring anyone to try to stop him, snatched the milk container, poured so much milk on his bowl of cornflakes that it dribbled over the rim, and began rapidly spooning the wonderful, wet, milk-sweetened golden flakes into his mouth, gulping them down and shoveling in more as fast as he was able.

“Jeez…”

"Who told you you could..."

“Paco saved my life,” Kayren said, handing him a cup of coffee and seating herself beside him. “Or anyway, kept me from being raped ...”

“Yeah, well that's not what it sounded like last night,” the pinkskinned, beefy blond gordo said with a leer.

Paco glared at him and slurped in a big swallow of coffee that burned his tongue and went straight to his head like a flash of wire.

“Just because he's a good lay doesn't give you the right to give him our food!” the pudgy chocha with spiky black hair whined.

Paco smacked his lips loudly at her, grabbed a slice of bread, and slathered it with about an inch of soft greasy butter.

“It's communal food, Kayren,” the nigger said mildly. “Paid for with R.L.F money …”

Kayren reached into her purse as Paco bit off a big chunk of well-buttered bread. “Like this?” she said, slapping a huge wad of bills down on the table.

Paco's jaw dropped so far open he almost lost his mouthful.

“Last night's take at The Temple of Doom,” Kayren Gold said. “Sixteen hundred dollars. I sold a lot of bedbugs. Paco saved that too. Think it's maybe worth a bowl of cornflakes and a piece of bread to the Reality Liberation Front?”

There was a long moment of dead silence. They all looked at Paco quite differently now. Paco began chewing again, but he had lost the ravenous edge off his appetite.

Sixteen hundred dollars! Chingada, hijo de puta, you asshole, this chocha had $1600 in her bag, and you let it slip right through your fuckin' fingers playing hero! Sixteen hundred! He had never even seen a quarter of that much money at one time in his life!

It was literally inconceivable to him. Some fuckin' crash and grab artist you are, muchacho! Sixteen hundred dollars yours for the taking, and all you end up with is a bowl of cornflakes, a piece of bread, a cup of coffee, and a piece of ass!

A toilet flushed loudly behind him, and a big, burly, strong-looking putamadre with long wavy black hair and a full black beard came out of the crapper.

“Who's this?” he said, measuring Paco with piercing blue eyes.

“Name's Paco Monaco,” the little chink said.

"Saved Kayren from some muggers last night."

“Saved the R.L.F sixteen hundred bucks, Larry,” said the lightskinned Blankriqueno.

“Is that so?” the big man said evenly, drawing himself a cup of coffee, taking a seat across the table from Paco, and studying him carefully with those no-bullshit eyes. He took a slow sip of coffee. He smiled a wary smile. “You don't look like a rich man to me,” he said, “so you must be an asshole.”

“Markowitz. ” the short-haired blond girl groaned, rolling her eyes.

Paco stopped eating and started thinking as he locked gazes with the jefe, for that was obviously who this putamadre was, and stupid he was not.

“Why you have to say a thing like that, man?” he said, as if he really had to ask.

“'Cause sixteen hundred dollars is a lot of money.”

"And if I ain't rich, why didn't I grab it?"

The jefe just shrugged.

“Maybe I'm an honest man.”

Nada.

“Maybe I didn't know she had it...”

“Which is it?”

Paco smiled thinly at him. "Maybe I'm not ashole enough to tell you."

The black-bearded jefe continued to stare at him for a long moment. Then he suddenly burst out laughing. “You're okay, Paco Monaco!” he said, holding out a beefy hand. “I'm Larry Cooper-smith,” he said.

Paco shook his hand. Unlike a lot of big men, this Larry didn't bother to turn a handshake into a macho squeezing contest. Paco found himself liking this gordo; in a funny way the putamadre reminded him a little of Dojo.

Paco took another big bite of buttered bread and washed it down with coffee, his mind racing. The $1600 on the table was gone money, but just maybe there was more where that came from.

These people had this loft, didn't they, and all this real food. That meant dinero....

Chingada! What was it Kayren had said, the $1600 was last night's take at The Temple of Doom, she had sold a lot of, what did she call it... bedbugs....

Well he didn't know what the fuck that was, but The Temple of Doom was a fancy meatrack, and Kayren must have been dealing something....

He took a good long careful look around the loft for the first time. A videodisc deck and a wall screen, more fuckin' telephones scattered around than he had ever seen, dozens of what looked like the screen parts of old tv sets. That much he recognized. But there were endless heaps of all kinds of old electronic junk, cables and wiring all over the place, soldering irons, bits and pieces of stuff sloppily connected to each other. He had no idea what most of this stuff was or what it really did, but it seemed obvious that they were taking it all apart and putting it back together, and that added up to only one thing.

“Wire,” he said. “You're making wire.”

A chorus of groans went up, and then all of them were giving him hard nasty looks like they thought he was wire heat or something. All except Kayren, who was smiling a thin little smile, and Larry Coopersmith, who seemed to be studying him very carefully.

“Hey …” Paco said uneasily. “No sweat. I'm no fuckin' cop! No problem! Maybe we can do some business.”

“Oh... ?” Coopersmith said slowly.

“Yeah ... I mean, I know some people. ...”

"Do you?"

“For sure,” Paco said. “I've got some good connections, man. Hey, I'm the doorman at Slimy Mary's! I could move a lot of pieces for you there!”

Well, why not? Hadn't Dojo said he could deal whatever he wanted at the door? If Dojo gave him any shit about competing with the stuff he had his zombies turning out upstairs, he could always cut him in for a piece of the action ... a small piece....

“Slimy Mary's?” Coopersmith said.

“Yeah!” Paco said. “Everyone knows Slimy Mary's. The fuckin' place is full of wireheads! We could really clean up, man! What you got? The Prong? Uncle Charlie? The Blue Max?”

“Not exactly,” said Larry Coopersmith. “What we're making here is bedbugs, Paco.”

“The Bedbug... ? That's a new one on me, man! What's the flash?”

“That's a little hard to explain …” Coopersmith said slowly.

Paco laughed a secret laugh inside. Sure man, he thought. As hard to explain as the flash from the piece I'm wearing under your nose right now, huh? Somehow he doubted it.

“It's not exactly wire, Paco …” Kayren said.

“But I suppose you could say it's not exactly not wire, either,” the blond girl said.

The black guy's eyes kind of lit up behind his thick glasses as if he had just flashed a piece of something himself. “You could think of it as wire for computers, Paco,” he said brightly.

“Huh?”

“How do you feel about computers?” Coopersmith said.

“Quien sabe?” Paco said. “I don't know shit about no computers....”

“But they know everything about you,” the chink said.

“So? Who gives a shit? What's there to know?”

“Well think about this,” the black guy said. “Most of the money in the country is inside computers. Credit card balances. Stock market accounts.

Savings accounts. Corporate cash flows. Just bits and bytes zipping around inside computers.”

“So what? I ain't got no plastico, I ain't got no savings account, and I sure as shit don't play the fuckin' stock market!”

“But the gordos who own the whole fuckin' world sure do, now don't they, man?” said the Borinqueno. “That's how Ciudad Trabajo runs, no? The big money is all stashed inside computers, man, where the likes of you can't get at it.”

“Chingada …” Paco muttered.

How many times had he done a crash and grab and netted only a few bucks in cash and a wallet full of plastico he couldn't do anything with? Even those cash machine cards couldn't get you any money unless you managed to beat the secret number out of someone....

The banks, the fancy department stores, the cash machines, verdad, that was where most of the money was, any asshole knew that. But somehow he had always thought of it as great big piles of high denomination bills, jewels, furs, appliances, tvs, furniture....

That most of it was really just floating around inside computers, that it wasn't exactly real, that there was no way you could get your hands on it no matter how good a thief you were, that was a revelation of the obvious, of something he had always known but had never considered before, the sudden contemplation of which somehow managed to piss him off at someone or something he couldn't even name....

“How do you feel about that, Paco?” Coopersmith said. He smiled a crooked little smile and stared at him with those hard blue eyes. “Does it seem like the world is being run by people and things you can't even get back at...?”

“Verdad...” Paco said softly. “Fuckin'-A!” Was this putamadre reading his mind? “But what the fuck does all this have to do with wire?”

“Everything,” Coopersmith said. “Most of the money there is just bits and bytes moving inside computers. They keep track of who owes who what. They send out bills.

They cash checks and collect taxes. They keep track of parking tickets. They're the brain of the whole system. …”

He smiled evilly at Paco. “So what happens when you plug a brain into all different kinds of wire all at once?” he said.

“It turns into the fuckin' Count!” Paco exclaimed.

“Who?”

“This burnt-out combo wirehead I know,” Paco told them. “A fuckin' zombie …”

The black guy got up from the table, went over across the room to a big pile of what looked like videodiscs, came back with a big heap of them, and spread them across the table like a hand of cards.

“Bedbugs,” he said proudly. “Wire for computers.” He began picking them up at random and displaying them like a street dealer. “This one makes your electric bill disappear. This one convinces the I.R.S computers that you never existed. This one lets you transfer funds into your bank account.

This one scrambles a whole data bank. This one wipes out traffic tickets. This one makes voice synthesis software speak in tongues. …”

Paco stared speculatively at the goods. He eyed Kayren Gold. “This stuff is what you were dealing before those putamadres jumped you?” he said.

She nodded.

“And you turned sixteen hundred dollars in one night?”

She shrugged, then smiled. "Business isn't always that good," she admitted.

“What do these pieces go for?”

“Depends on how complex the program is and how hot people are to have it. I guess three hundred is about average.”

"And how much is your cut?"

“It doesn't work that—”

“You got something in mind?” Coopersmith interrupted sharply. “For sure, man,” Paco said, and for sure he had more things in his mind right now than had ever been there at one time before.

In just a few hours he had stolen an Uzi from a zonie, scored a Zap, gotten hired as relief doorman at Slimy Mary's, saved this gorda Kayren, met all these weird people, and let $1600 slip through his fingers!

And now he was looking at a way to make more money than he had ever conceived of laying right out there on the table just beyond his fingertips. Chingada, a chocha had sold $1600 worth in one night! And he was Paco Monaco, he was a fuckin' meatrack doorman, wasn't he...?

He knew that he had to make his move right now, or he'd be kicking his own ass for blowing his only chance at a lot more than the $1600 he had already let get away....

“Look, I told you, I'm the doorman at Slimy Mary's,” he said. “So?”

“So? Don't you know what that means? A doorman don't get paid shit. What I make, I make from dealing. …”

“You want to deal bedbugs for us?” Coopersmith said.

“At a streetie meatrack?”

Paco nodded. “I'll give you back three hundred dollars on each piece I move,” he said. “That's what you're making now, right? I'll take my chances on jacking the price. You got nothing to lose.” The nigger laughed. “These things aren't really wire,” he said. “You need a computer with a modem to drop a bedbug in someone else's system.”

“What's a modem?”

The nigger groaned, rolled his eyes behind his thick glasses, and threw up his hands. Paco half rose out of his chair, fists clenched to punch out the motherfucker, and held himself back only by grabbing hard onto the lip of the table and thinking only of the money.

But the others had caught the aborted move. He could see it in the way their eyes flinched back. Kayren inched away from him to the other side of her chair.

Only the jefe kept his cool. He shot the rest of them lidded glances, then gave Paco a thin little smile and an almost imperceptible shrug.

“What Malcolm means is that bedbugs are as useless without a computer attached to a phone as wire would be without juice,” he said. “No offense, Paco, but we just don't see how you'd find any customers.”

Paco looked down at the bedbug discs scattered across the table, let his hand crawl toward them. “Let me worry about that,” he said. “Just let me have a couple and see what I can do. ...” Coopersmith cocked his head to one side thoughtfully. He shrugged. “Well, if you've got the front money....”

“Front money?”

"Three hundred bucks apiece, like you said."

“Three hundred bucks! Shit man, I don't have three hundred fuckin' cents!”

“You expect us to trust you for the money?” the chink exclaimed. Paco's first impulse was to punch the putamadre out, but he found himself thinking with unaccustomed cunning and unfamiliar self-control. “Give me two of them for three days,” he said. “If I don't bring back six hundred dollars, I'll bring back the pieces.” “Trust you, man?” the Blankriqueno sneered.

“You calling me a liar, motherfucker?” Paco shouted. He was on his feet with his fist cocked before he caught himself this time.

But his mind was really moving now. “Sorry,” he said, sitting back down again. He looked at Kayren Gold sweetly, with a wounded expression. “But it's kind of hard to listen to you people afraid to trust me with a lousy six hundred dollars' worth of pieces, seeing as how I've already proved what kind of man I am.”

“How so?” said Coopersmith.

Paco never took his eyes off Kayren Gold. “I've already saved you sixteen hundred, haven't I?” he said.

There was a long moment of frozen silence. Gotcha! Paco thought. He put on his best hangdog expression and played it for all it was worth, which was plenty, muchacho.

“You all think I'm just some dirty spick off the street would rip you off in a minute if you gave me the chance, right? But I'm the guy that risked his life to save Kayren's ass, and I'm the guy that got her back here with your money instead of grabbing it myself. Wasn't for me, you'd be out sixteen hundred already, verdad? Way I see it, you're a thou ahead even if I do rip you off.”

“He's got a point …” the blond-haired girl said.

“Give him a couple of cheap ones, Larry,” Malcolm said. “The ones that bedbug Con Ed...”

“Hey, wait, you're not gonna—"

“Besides,” Paco said, “either I can sell the fuckers, or I can't. If I can sell 'em, I do better coming back with your money so you'll let me sell more than I would ripping you off for two lousy pieces. And if I can't get money for 'em, why the fuck would I steal 'em?”

He locked eyes with Larry Coopersmith. The big man glared at him expressionlessly for a long moment, as if he knew everything that was going through Paco's head, as if he knew fuckin' well that if Paco had known about the $1600 in the first place, he and it wouldn't be here now, as if he knew full well that Paco was running a number, but as if he also knew that, number or not, Paco really did have more reason to play straight than to disappear with two bedbugs.

Coopersmith finally cracked a smile. He laughed. “You sure you never studied symbolic logic?” he said.

Well Paco might not know what the words meant, but he understood the music, especially since Coopersmith started sorting through the discs.

So, however, did the others, and not all of them were liking it. Malcolm, the blond girl, Coopersmith, and of course Kayren, were on his side, and the Blankriqueno sat there quietly giving him a funny look, but the rest of them took to bitching and moaning.

“Hey, wait a minute, Larry—”

“We should vote—” “Yeah, this is a communal decision—”

Coopersmith had picked out two discs, but now he was rubbing them together, hesitating. Chingada! What would Mucho Muchacho do?

Then Paco smiled to himself, for he suddenly knew what Mucho Muchacho would do.

What he had done already.

Grinning shyly, he took Kayren's hand. She didn't attempt to break free. He pulled their locked hands up in clear sight and placed them right out on the table.

“Anyway,” he said softly, looking into her eyes, “I've got an even better reason for coming back here, don't I?”

Kayren looked back at him uncertainly. Hidden from sight by the table, he reached out and placed the palm of his free hand on the inside of her thigh. Her lower lip trembled.

Her eyes softened. She blushed. She giggled. She snugged her chocha right into his hand and wiggled it around.

Coopersmith handed over the bedbug discs. “Now that's what I call class self-interest!” he said, breaking up at his own joke, whatever the fuck it meant.

The mood broke up into raucous laughter.

Paco found himself laughing too. And even though he didn't quite know what he was laughing about, even though he had a feeling the laugh was somehow on him, he laughed from the heart, feeling that he had somehow crossed over some invisible frontera between the sombre and the sol, between the only world he had ever known and an unknown new world that was opening up before him, a world between Chocharica City and the sombre side of the streets that he had never even known was there.

And somehow he found himself promising, to his own surprise, that he would return, that he wouldn't fuck these people over, that he would try to show these newfound friends that he could be the man he pretended to be.

Chingada, he thought as he rose from the table with their cornflakes and milk and bread and butter and coffee warm in his belly, maybe I've run a number on myself.

For while honor may have been a word he had never heard, there was a warm aching tenderness behind his breastbone where such a feeling had never been, a feeling that made him want to throw open his arms, and declare to all the world, yo soy Paco Monaco, Mucho Muchacho, and hey, I won't let you down.

Leslie, Markowitz, Tommy Don, and Teddy Ribero were still sitting at the table when Kayren came back from walking Paco Monaco to the door, and, after the fact and behind his back, the second thoughts were getting a bit heated.

“You really think we can trust a streetie?” Tommy was saying.

“You really think we can trust a spick, isn't that it?” Teddy Ribero shot back.

“Come off the racism bullshit, Teddy, you really detect people around here not trusting you?” Leslie said with a disparaging wave of her hand.

“No, but—” “Yeah, Teddy,” Larry Coopersmith broke in, “if Paco wasn't Puerto Rican, you'd probably be bitching and moaning about how naive it is to trust some hard-core street punk with anything. …”

“Well, okay, now that you put it that way, why should we trust him. Larry, seems to me you're talking against what you've just done. …”

“Yeah, well, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds,” Larry said with a shrug.

“You're the one with the most, ah, intimate knowledge of the subject at hand, Kayren …” Leslie said as Kayren drew herself another cup of coffee from the communal urn. “What's he really like? Do you trust him?”

“That's a good question …” Kayren muttered, sitting down and pondering it over a long slow sip of coffee.

Paco Monaco had certainly been a prince the night before; not merely a rough and ready rescuer, but a tender and understanding gentleman of the streets, a perfect paragon of the manly virtues.

But on the other hand, he had certainly turned into a bit of a frog the morning after; crude, foul-mouthed, paranoid, confused, and an entirely inept lover who had let her do all the work, came in a couple of minutes without even a perfunctory attempt at reciprocation, and hadn't even bothered to thank her afterward.

Still, he had even had a certain charm as a frog, so thin and half-starved, so disbelieving in the possibility of anything like gratitude that he had assumed he would have to pay for a bowl of cornflakes and a cup of coffee, so pathetically wide-eyed and grateful when she had told him he could eat breakfast for nothing.

You could forgive a certain lack of savoir-faire in a man to whom a free bowl of cornflakes was so clearly an event of cosmic significance.

“Well?” Leslie persisted.

Kayren shrugged. “All I can really tell you is that there's more to Paco Monaco than what you saw this morning. …”

“Really?” Leslie said. “I don't suppose you'd like to fill us in on the juicy details...?”

Kayren gave her a good-natured drop-dead look.

“Well, at least you can tell us whether you think he'll come back...”

Kayren thought about it. The prince of the night before, she had a feeling, would feel honor-bound to come back with the money or return the bedbugs. The frog of the morning after was a creature she could not really trust or fathom.

“To tell you the truth, your guess is probably as good as mine,” she finally said.

“Well, what about you, Markowitz?” Leslie said. “Do you really think a streetie meatrack doorman is going to be able to sell bedbugs?”

Coopersmith shrugged. “Seems unlikely on the face of it,” he admitted. “But on the other hand, I agree with Kayren, there's more to Paco Monaco than meets the casual eye. …”

“Oh?” Tommy said dubiously.

“The kid may be completely uneducated, but he's fuckin' smart, he's fast on his feet, he's streetwise, he ran some nice numbers on us....” Coopersmith laughed appreciatively. “Shit, he even backed me into a moral and logical corner, now didn't he?”

“So he's a cunning little streetie with a sharp eye for the main chance,” Tommy said. “Is that really a good reason to trust him with our merchandise?”

“Yeah, Tommy, I think it is,” Coopersmith said. “It's a long shot for sure, but the stakes are real attractive. I mean, what are we really risking? We can copy those programs onto blank discs for about five cents' worth of electricity, so if he rips them off, all we're really out is the cost of the blanks, which is what, maybe forty bucks. But if he somehow manages to sell them and brings back the money …”

“We're six hundred ahead.”

Larry Coopersmith leaned back in his chair and seemed to stare off into space, into some vision inside his own head. “Much more than that, maybe...” he said dreamily. “Much more.... It'd be a breakthrough. ...”

“To what?”

“Let's face it, in a certain sense we're bullshit revolutionaries. I mean, we sell bedbugs to people who already have money, who are already wired into the system, so they can use them to fuck over the system and steal a little more, but while we're playing our little games, there are millions and millions of Paco Monacos running around out there on the streets with nothing to lose. A whole other street-reality that might as well be another planet. So if by some chance Paco Monaco can serve as our vector into all that …” “What, Larry?” Teddy Ribero said. “What would happen then?” Larry Coopersmith laughed. He positively beamed with anticipated pleasure. “Pure fuckin' Chaos!” he exclaimed. “So I'm sure as shit willing to lay down forty bucks at any odds in the hope of seeing that! Take it from me, it beats playing the ponies any day of the week!”

“And what about you, Kayren?” Leslie said. “If the guy does come back, are you willing to play the Mata Hari of the Reality Liberation Front?”

“Yeah, Kayren,” Coopersmith said, pinning her with those hard blue eyes. “How committed are you to the cause? Will you give your ah... all for the R.L.F if our boy Paco does come back for more?”

Kayren thought about it.

She thought about haunting the meatracks in the forlorn hope of connecting up with a dream prince of the city who would rescue her from poverty and restore her to her rightful station. She thought about the real prince of the streets who really had saved her, who had so gently pulled up her panties, and wrapped her up in her parka against the cold and the dark, who had tenderly embraced her in his hard strong arms and kept her safe from harm, who had made such wonderful love to her in the aftermath of his knightly rescue.

She thought about the skinny little kid who had come in two minutes, who had been so touchingly grateful for the pitiful boon of a simple little meal. She thought shamefully about what she had felt upon waking up in bed with a Puerto Rican streetie.

“It's a test, isn't it?” she said softly. But of whom? Of whose dedication to what?

Larry Coopersmith nodded. "Yeah, you could say that," he said.

Kayren sighed. Somehow, in that moment her heart was far closer to that skinny little kid, to that prince of the streets, than to these friends who had given her shelter, or to any abstract cause.

"Well, if he passes," she said, "if he does come back, I'll sure take him." If he passes, she thought, then maybe so do I. But I won't be doing it for any cause. I'll be doing it for myself.

“You don’t remember?”

“We do owe him something.”