Down on the drag

I fumbled and lost the original post, but I managed to read it before it got flushed.

I woke up last night and wrote down a dream I had. In the morning, I had only a fuzzy recollection of it, and I probably only had that much because I'd bothered to write it down. Insight into my psyche follows:

Jenna Jameson and Maya Rudolph, and a couple of guys, came over to my apartment (not this one). After the obligatory orgy, we had some tapas and drinks and sat around attempting to interact in a sociable manner. It also seemed from context that we were all workmates, and that I was interested in Jenna. It's possible I had only worked "at the office" for a short time, as we didn't seem to know each other too well.

Anyway, the conversation was stilted and regardless of what I said, it seemed to be the wrong thing. I was getting hurt/puzzled expressions from Jenna, and sympathetically amused irritation (try saying that when you're drunk) looks from the rest of them. An example:

Jenna: "So, how did you get into selling real estate up in Alaska?"

Rimmy: (nodding sagely) "I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't sell Alaskan real estate."

Jenna turns to look at the short line of real estate-ish pictures I have on one area of my wall. I hadn't noticed them before, and that's only fun in a detective sort of dream. But upon seeing those, they were immediately slotted into the events thusly:

Rimmy: "Oh, those aren't mine, those are my ex's. (notes hurt expression on Jenna, pained winces on everybody else) I suppose I really should take those down, we broke up one... no, two years ago and she never even lived here!" (sits back triumphantly, having saved the situation)

Of course, the situation wasn't saved, and it just got more and more awkward. Eventually, everybody got up to leave and I caught Jenna before she got into the elevator.

Rimmy: "I'm sorry, nothing seemed to quite work out tonight and I'm not sure why. I really like you, and if you want to give it another go, call me. I won't bother you otherwise."

She smiled a hurt smile and the elevator doors closed. Maya and the two guys were waiting in the hall.

Unknown (but possible "the funny guy") Guy #1: "Boy partner, you sure know how to say the wrong thing. You may have an IQ of 130, but tonight you just proved that's only the brilliance of 260 gym teachers."

Maya: "You really need to remember what you're doing. You did say that you sold Alaskan real estate, to your secretary this morning. But who'd believe that stupid bitch?"

Rimmy: "I did?"

Maya: "Everything will fall into place once you start selling it. (puts arm around me) I mean, the startup costs are nothing, and you can use your home. Well, not use your home for selling, but as an office. Then everything will be all right."

They all head into the elevator and the doors close. I have no sense of what I do at the office, and what's with the constant real estate references?

And, more importantly, in real life I'd take Maya Rudolph over Jenna Jameson any day.



That's Jenna above, and my Maya below. Go on, tell me I'm wrong.




Since last I posted (Tuesday, I think), I dropped my pants for the client.

Normally this would be a stupid thing to do, but... I was in one of the conference rooms on the third floor about twenty minutes before my shift. None of them were in use, and I needed a place to change into my costume for work. I had all the stuff in my bag out, including all the things I load my pockets with while on duty, when there was a sound at the door, and the client let herself in.

"Oh, hi." she said.

"Hi," I replied. "Just getting changed for work here."

"Oh yeah." she said, continuing into the room and starting to move chairs around.

Screw it I thought, and kept on getting ready. My shirt goes on over my t-shirt, but when it came time for the pants, I said "Please don't sue me for sexual harrassment here." and dropped trou to pull on the work pants as quick as possible. She laughed, but didn't stare. Meh.

On Friday, it was the day for a bunch of people at the site to move. They'd packed their stuff, and had to vacate by 1500. We had movers coming.

The client (Eyes and Ear's boss), and her boss were both on site. The company had flown in movers from Montreal, but only the two brothers who were the owners/operators. They used a bunch of daylabourers for the grunt work.

And what a motley group they were! A few showed up drunk or under various chemical influences - they were sent off. The rest looked like they'd spent time in orange jumpsuits.

That said, they worked like dogs. There were complaints of course, and some confusion (client's boss was a bit of a dick, demanding that things be done to the workers, contrary to the mover's orders). And they were all pretty nice guys. We had bottled water and pizza for them. Somehow I became Mr. Elevator, since we weren't going to give them access cards and I was the only one with a key to lock off the cargo elevator. Yay. Hot enough in a plastic jacket, in a building that shuts the air conditioning down at 1700, but to then be trapped in a metal box? Sigh.

According to Eyes and Ears on the phone today, I apparently managed to frustrate the client's boss on Friday. Which is interesting, because we had very little interaction, he and I.

While he was expounding on this frustration to some of the on-site managers, they apparently jumped to my defense. That's kind of nice, although I still don't know when I would have had a chance to irritate him. Maybe I'll make up for that if he's still around next week. I mean, what have I got to lose? ;)

-----

Mona woke as they were landing.

Prior was listening to Eddy and nodding and flashing his rectangular smile. It was like the smile was always there, behind his beard. He'd changed his clothes, though, so he must've had some on the plane. Now he wore a plain grey business suit and a tie with diagonal stripes. Sort of like the tricks Eddy'd set her up with in Cleveland, except the suit fit in a different way.

She'd seen a trick fitted for a suit once, a guy who took her to a Holiday Inn. The suit place was off the hotel lobby, and he stood in there in his underwear, crosshatched with lines of blue light, and watched himself on three big screens. On the screens, you couldn't see the blue lines, because he was wearing a different suit in each image.. And Mona had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing, because the system had a cosmetic program that made him look different on the screens, stretched his face a little and made his chin stronger, and he didn't seem to notice. Then he picked a suit, got back into the one he'd been wearing, and that was it.

Eddy was explaining something to Prior, some crucial point in the architecture of one of his scams. She knew how to tune the content out, but the tone still got to her, like he knew people wouldn't be able to grasp the gimmick he was so proud of, so he was taking it slow and easy, like he was talking to a little kid, and he'd keep his voice low to sound patient. It didn't seem to bother Prior, but then it seemed to Mona that Prior didn't much give a shit what Eddy said.

She yawned, stretched, and the plane bumped twice on runway concrete, roared, began to slow. Eddy hadn't even stopped talking.

"We have a car waiting," Prior said, interrupting him.

"So where's it taking us?" Mona asked, ignoring Eddy's frown.

Prior showed her the smile. "To our hotel." He unfastened his seatbelt. "We'll be there for a few days. Afraid you'll have to spend most of them in your room."

"That's the deal," Eddy said, like it was his idea she'd have to stay in the room.

"You like stims, Mona?" Prior asked, still smiling.

"Sure," she said, "who doesn't?"

"Have a favourite, Mona, a favourite star?"

"Angie," she said, vaguely irritated. "Who else?"

The smile got a little bigger. "Good. We'll get you all of her latest tapes."


Mona's universe consisted in large part of things and places she knew but had never physically seen or visited. The hub of the northern Sprawl didn't smell, in stims. They edited it out, she guessed, the way Angie never had a headache or a bad period. But it did smell. Like Cleveland, but even worse. She'd thought it was just the way the airport smelled, when they left the plane, but it had been even stronger when they'd gotten out of their car to go into the hotel. And it was cold as hell in the street, too, with a wind that bit at her bare ankles.

The hotel was bigger than that Holiday Inn, but older, too, she thought. The lobby was more crowded than lobbies were in stimes, but there was a lot of clean blue carpet. Prior made her wait by an ad for an orbital spa while he and Eddy went over to a long black counter and he talked to a woman with a brass nametag. She'd felt stupid waiting there, in this white plastic raincoat Prior had made her wear, like he didn't think her outfit was good enough. About a third of the crowd in the lobby were Japs she figured for tourists. They all seemed to have recording gear of some kind - video, holo, a few with simstim units on their belts - but otherwise they didn't look like they had a whole lot of money. She thought they were all supposed to have a lot. Maybe they're smart, don't want to show it, she decided.

She saw Prior slide a credit chip across the counter to the woman with the nametag, who took it and zipped it along a metal slot.


Prior put her bag down on the bed, a wide slab of beige temperfoam, and touched a panel that caused a wall of drapes to open. "It's not the Ritz," he said, "but we'll try to make you comfortable."

Mona made a noncommittal sound. The Ritz was a burger place in Cleveland and she couldn't see what that had to do with anything.

"Look," he said, "your favourite." He was standing beside the bed's upholstered headboard. There was a stim unit there, built in, and a little shelf with a set of trodes in a plastic wrapper and about five cassettes. "All of Angie's new stims."

She wondered who'd put those cassettes there, and if they'd done it after Prior had asked her what stims she liked. She showed him a smile of her own and went to the window. The Sprawl looked like it did in stims, the window was like a hologram postcard, famous buildings she didn't know the names of but she knew they were famous.

Grey of the domes, geodesics picked out white with snow, behind that the grey of the sky.

"Happy, baby?" Eddy asked, coming up behind her and putting his hands on her shoulders.

"They got showers here?"

Prior laughed. She shrugged out of Eddy's loose grip and took her bag into the bathroom. Closed and locked the door. She heard Prior's laugh again, and Eddy starting up with his scam talk. She sat on the toilet, opened her bag, and dug out the cosmetic kit where she kept her wiz. She had four crystals left. That seemed like enough; three was enough, but when she got down to two she usually started looking to score. She didn't do jumpers much, not every day anyway, except recently she had, but that was because Florida had started to drive her crazy.

Now she could start tapering off, she decided, as she tapped a crystal out of the vial. I looked like hard yellow candy; you had to crush it, then grind it up between a pair of nylon screens. When you did that, it gave off a kind of hospital smell.


They were both gone, by the time she finished her shower. She'd stayed in until she got bored with it, which took a long time. In Florida she'd mostly used showers at public pools or bus stations, the kind you worked with tokens. She guessed there was something hooked up to this one that measured the liters and put it on your bill, that was how it worked at the Holiday Inn. There was a big white filter above the plastic showerhead, and a sticker on the tile wall with an eye and a tear meant it was okay to shower but don't get it in your eyes, like swimming pool water. There was a row of chrome spouts set into the tile, and when you punched a button under each one you got shampoo, shower gel, liquid soap, bath oil. When you did that, a little red dot lit up beside the button, because it went on your bill. On Prior's bill. She was glad they were gone because she liked being alone and high and clean. She didn't get to be alone much, except on the street, and that wasn't the same. She left damp footprints in the beige carpet when she walked to the window. She was wrapped in a big towel that matched the bed and the carpet and had a word shaved into the fuzzy part, probably the name of the hotel.

There was an old-fashioned building a block away, and the corners of its stepped peak had been carved down to make a kind of mountain, with rocks and grass and a waterfall that fell and hit rocks and then fell again. It made her smile, why anybody had gone to that trouble. Drifts of steam came off the water, where it hit. It couldn't just fall down into the street, though, she thought, because it would cost too much. She guessed they pumped it back up and used it over, around in a circle.

Something grey moved its head there, swung its big curly horns up like it was looking at her. She took a step back on the carpet and blinked. Kind of a sheep, but it had to be a remote, a hologram or something. It tossed its head and started eating grass. Mona laughed.

She could feel the wiz down the backs of her ankles and across her shoulderblades, a cold tight tingle, and the hospital smell at the back of her throat.

She's been scared before but she wasn't scared now.

Prior had a bad smile, but he was just a player, just a bent suit. If he had money, it was somebody else's. And she wasn't scared of Eddy anymore; it was almost like she was scared for him, because she could see what other people took him for.

Well, she thought, it didn't matter; she wasn't growing catfish in Cleveland anymore, and no way andbody'd get her back to Florida again.

She remembered the alcohol stove, cold winder mornings, the old man hunched in his big, grey coat. Winters he'd put a second layer of plastic over the windows. The stove was enough to heat the place, then, because the walls were covered with sheets of hard foam, and chipboard over that. Places where the foam showed, you could pick at it with your finger, make holes, if he caught doing it, he'd yell. Keeping the fish warm in cold weather was more work; you had to pump water up to the roof where the sun mirrors were, into these clear plastic tubes. But the vegetable stuff rotting on the tank ledges helped, too; steam rose off when you went to net a fish. He traded the fish for other kinds of food, for things people grew, stove alcohol and the drinking kind, coffee beans, garbage the fish ate.

He wasn't her father and he'd said it often enough, when he'd talked at all. ometimes she still wondered if maybe he had been. When she'd first asked him how old she was, he'd said six, so she counted from that.

She heard the door open behind her and turned; Prior was there, the gold plastic key tab in his hand, beard open to show the smile. "Mona," he said, stepping in, "this is Gerald." Tall, Chinese, grey suit, greying hair. Gerald smiled gently, edged in past Prior, and went straight for the drawer thing opposite the foot of the bed. Put a black case down and clicked it open. "Gerald's a friend. He's medical, Gerald. Needs to have a look at you."

"Mona," Gerald said, removing something from the case, "how old are you?"

"She's sixteen," Prior said. "Right, Mona?"

"Sixteen," Gerald said. The thing in his hands was like a pair of black goggles, sunglasses with bumps and wires. "That's stretching it a little, isn't it?" He looked at Prior.

Prior smiled.

"You're short what, ten years?"

"Not quite," Prior said. "We aren't asking for perfection."

Gerald looked at her. "You aren't going to get it." He hooked the goggles over his ears and tapped something; a light came on below the right lens. "But there are degrees of appoximation." The light swung toward her.

"We're talking cosmetic, Gerald."

"Where's Eddy?" she asked, as Gerald came closer.

"In the bar. Shall I call him?" Prior picked up the phone, but put it back down without using it.

"What is this?" Backing away from Gerald.

"A medical examination," Gerald said. "Nothing painful." He had her against the window; above the towel, her shoulderblades pressed against cool glass. "Someone's about to employ you, and pay you very well; they need to be certain you're in good health." The light stabbed into her left eye. "She's on stimulants of some kind," he said to Prior, in a different tone of voice.

"Try not to blink, Mona." The light swung to her right eye. "What is it, Mona? How much did you do?"

"Wiz." Wincing away from the light.

He caught her chin in his cool fingers and realigned her head. "How much?"

"A crystal..."

The light was gone. His smooth face was very close, the goggles studded with lenses, slots, little dishes of black metal mesh. "No way of judging the purity," he said.

"It's real pure," she said, and giggled.

He let her chin go and smiled. "It shouldn't be a problem," he said. "Could you open your mouth, please?"

"Mouth?"

"I want to look at your teeth."

She looked at Prior.

"You're in luck, here," Gerald said to Prior, when he'd used the little light to look in her mouth. "Fairly good condition and close to target configuration. Caps, inlays."

"We knew we could count on you, Gerald."

Gerald took the goggles off and looked at Prior. He returned to the black case and put the goggles away. "Lucky with the eyes, too. Very close. A tint job." He took a foil envelope from the case and tore it open, rolled the pale surgical glove down over his right hand. Take off the towel, Mona. Make yourself comfortable."

She looked at Prior, at Gerald. "You want to see my papers, the bloodwork and stuff?"

"No," Gerald said, "that's fine."

She looked out the window, hoping to see the bighorn, but it was gone, and the sky seemed a lot darker.

She undid the towel, let it fall to the floor, then lay down on her back on the beige temperfoam.

It wasn't all that different from what she got paid for; it didn't even take as long.


Sitting in the bathroom with the cosmetic kit open on her knees, grinding another crystal, she decided she had a right to be pissed off.

First Eddy takes off without her, then Prior shows up with this creep medic, then he tells her Eddy's sleeping in a different room. Back in Florida she could've used some time off from Eddy, but up here was different. She didn't want to be in here by herself, and she'd been scared to ask Prior for a key. He fucking well had one, though, so he could walk in any time with his creep-ass friends. What kind of deal was that?

And the business with the plastic raincoat, that burned her ass too. A disposable fucking plastic raincoat.

She fluffed the powdered wiz between the nylon screens, carefully tapped it into the hitter, exhaled hard, put the mouthpiece to her lips, and hit. The cloud of yellow dust coated the membranes of her throat; some of it probably even made it to her lungs. She'd heard that was bad for you.

She hadn't had any plan when she'd gone in the bathroom to take her hit, but as the back of her neck started tingling, she found herself thinking about the streets around the hotel, what she'd seen of them on their way in. There were clubs, bars, shops with clothes in the window. Music. Music would be okay, now, and a crowd. The way you could lose it in a crowd, forget yourself, just be there. The door wasn't locked, she knew that, she'd already tried it. It would lock behind her, though, and she didn't have a key. But she was staying here, so Prior must have registered her at the desk. She thought about going down and asking the woman behind the counter for a key, but the idea made her uncomfortable. She knew suits behind counters and how they looked at you. No, she decided, the best idea was to stay in and stim those new Angie's.

Ten minutes later she was on her way out a side entrance off the main lobby, the wiz singing in her head.

It was drizzling outside, maybe dome condensation. She'd worn the white raincoat for the lobby, figuring Prior knew what he was doing after all, but now she was glad she had it. She grabbed a fold of fax out of an overflowing bin and held it over her head to keep her hair dry. It wasn't as cold as before, which was another good thing. None of her new clothes were what you'd call warm.

Looking up and down the avenue, deciding which way to go, she took in half-a-dozen nearly identical hotel fronts, a rank of pedicabs, the rainslick glitter of a row of small shows. And people, lots of them, like the Cleveland core but everybody dressed so sharp, and all moving like they were on top of it, everybody with someplace to go. Just go with it, she thought, the wiz giving her a sweet second boot that tripped her into the river of pretty people without even having to think about it. Clicking along in her new shoes, holding the fax over her head until she noticed - more luck - the rain had stopped.

She wouldn't've minded a chance to check out the shop windows, when the crowd swept her past, but the flow was pleasure and nobody else was pausing. She contented herself with sidelong flashes of each display. The clothes were like clothes in a stim, some of them, styles she'd never seen anywhere.

I should've been here, she thought, I should've been here all along. Not on a catfish farm, not in Cleveland, not in Florida. It's a place, a real place, anybody can come here, you don't have to get it through a stim. Thing was, she'd never seen this part of it in a stim, the regular people part. A star like Angie, this part wasn't her part. Angie'd be off in high castles with the other stim stars, not down here. But God it was pretty, the night so bright, the crowd surging around her, past all the good things you could have if you just got lucky.

Eddy, he didn't like it. Anyway, he'd always said how it was shitty here, too crowded, rent too high, too many police, too much competition. Not that he'd waited two seconds when Prior'd made an offer, she reminded herself. And anyway, she had her own ideas why Eddy was so down on it. He'd blown it here, she figured, pulled some kind of serious wilson. Either he didn't want to be reminded or else there were people here who'd remind him for sure if he came back. It was there in the pissed-off way he talked about the place, same way he'd talk about anybody who told him he scams wouldn't work. The new buddy so goddamn smart the first night was just a stone wilson the next, dead stupid, no vision.

Past a big store with ace-looking stim gear in the wondiw, all of it matte black and skinny, presided over by this gorgeous holo of Angie, who watched them all slide by with her half-sad smile. Queen of the night, yeah.

The crowd-river flowed out into a kind of circle, a place where four streets met and swung around a fountain. And because Mona really wasn't headed anywhere, she wound up there, because the people around her peeled off in their different diections without stopping. Well, there were people in the circle too, some of them sitting on the cracked concrete that edged the fountain. There was a statue in the center, marble, all worn-out and soft-edged. Kind of a baby riding a big fish, a dolphin. It looked like the dolphin's mouth would spray water if the fountain was working, but it wasn't. Past the heads of the seated people she could see crumbled, sodden fax and white foam cups in the water.

Then it seemed like the crowd had melded behind her, a curved, sliding wall of bodies, and the three who faced her on the fountain rim jumped out like a picture. Fat girl with black-dyed hair, mouth half-open like it stayed that way, tits spilling out of a red rubber halter; blonde with a long face and a thin blue slash of lipstick, hand like a bird's claw sprouting a cigarette; man with his oiled arms bare to the cold, graft-job muscle knotted like rock under synthetic tan and bad jail tattoos...

"Hey, bitch," cried the fat girl, with a kind of glee, "hope y'don't think y'gonna turn any 'roun' here!"

The blonde looked at Mona with her tired eyes and gave her a wan grin, an it's-not-my-fault grin, and then lookedaway.

The pimp came up off the fountain like something driven by springs, but Mona was already moving, cued by the blonde's expression. He had her arm, but the raincoat's plastic seam gave way and she elbowed her way back into the crowd. The wiz took over and the next thing she knew she was at least a block away, sagging against a steel pole, coughing and hyperventilating.

But now the wiz was all turned around, the way it went sometimes, and everything was ugly. The faces in the crowd were driven and hungry-looking, like they all had their own private desperate errands to run, and the light from the shop windows was cold and mean, and all the things behind the glass were just there to tell her she couldn't have them. There was a voice somewhere, an angry child's voice stringing obscenities together in an endless meaningless chain; when she realized who it was, she stopped doing it.

Her left arm was cold. She looked down and saw that the sleeve was gone, the seam down her side torn open to the waist. She took off the coat and draped it over her shoulders like a cape; maybe that made it a little harder to notice.

She braced her back against the pole as the wiz rolled over her on a wave of delayed adrenaline; her knees started to buckle and she thought she was going to faint, but then the wiz pulled one of its tricks and she was crouching in summer sunset light in the old man's dirt yard, the flaky grey earth scribed with the game she'd been playing, but now she was just hunched there, vacant, staring off past the bulks of the tanks to where fireflies pulsed in the blackberry tangle above a twisted old chassis. There was light behind her from the house and she could smell the cornbread baking and the coffee he boiled and reboiled there, till a spoon stood up in it, he said, and he'd be in there now reading one of his books, crumbly brown leaves, never a page with a corner on it, he got 'em in frayed plastic baggies and sometimes they just fell to dust in his hands, but if he found something he wanted to keep he'd get a little pocket copier out of the drawer, fit the batteries in it, run it down the page. She liked to watch the copies spool out all fresh, with their special smell that faded away, but he'd never let her work it. Sometimes he'd read out loud, a kind of hesitation in his voice, like a man trying to play an instrument he hasn't picked up in a long time. They weren't stories he read, not like they had endings or told a joke. They were like windows into something so strange; he never tried to explain any of it, probably didn't understand it himself, maybe nobody did...

Then the street snapped back hard and bright.

She rubbed her eyes and coughed.

Texas Radio

When I went in to work yesterday, Eyes & Ears was sitting at a table in the atrium with a couple of other guys. After getting my radio and gear, I went over to join them. Eyes & Ears fixed me with a bit of a gaze (which I later figured was meant to convey something important) and writes something on a napkin for me. As he slides it across the table, he says "This is all I can tell you, man."

Go On 2 Next Exercise

He looked at me expectantly.

I said, "Well, it could be there's something on the second floor you want me to see, or down in the fitness centre..."

"Man, how can I spell it out for you any more than that?"

"Here, let me try," said one of the others at the table, as he frowned at it.

Turns out that if you take the first letter of each of the words, it spells g o n e. He finally heard today from an "official" source. So we are out of there.

Of course, I already knew that. It was the when part I was more interested in, but he doesn't know that yet. I assume after the rennovations are done. That's in a few months.

-----

Mona could see the sun through a couple of rips in the black plastic they kept taped over the window. She hated the squat too much to stay there when she was awake or straight, and now she was both.

She got quietly out of bed, wincing when her bare heel brushed the floor, and fumbled for her plastic thongs. The place was dirty; you could probably get tetanus from leaning up against the wall. Made her skin crawl to think about it. Stuff like that didn't seem to bother Eddy; he was too far gone in his schemes to notice his surroundings much. And he always managed to keep clean, somehow, like a cat. He was cat-clean, never a fleck of dirt under his polished nails. She figured he probably spent most of what she earned on his wardrobe, although it wouldn't have occurred to her to question the fact. She was sixteen and SINless, Mona, and this older trick had told her once that that was a song, "Sixteen and SINless." Meant she hadn't been assigned a SIN when she was born, a Single Identification Number, so she'd grown up on the outside of most official systems. She knew that it was supposed to be possible to get a SIN, if you didn't have one, but it stood to reason you'd have to go into a building somewhere and talk to a suit, and that was a long way from Mona's idea of a good time or even normal behavior.

She had a drill for getting dressed in the swuat, and she could do it in the dark. You got your thongs on, after giving them a quick knock together to dislodge possible crawlies, and then you walked over to where you knew there was a roll of old fax on a Styrofoam crate beside the window. You peeled off about a meter of fax, maybe a day and a half of Asahi Shimbun, folded and creased it, put it down on the floor. Then you could stand on it, get the plastic bag from beside the crate, undo the twist of wire that held it shut, and find the clothes you wanted. When you stepped out of the thongs to put your pants on, you knew you'd be stepping on fresh fax. It was an article of faith with Mona that nothing was going to wander across the fax in the time it took her to step into a pair of jeans and get the thongs back on.

You could put on a shirt or whatever, carefully reseal the bag, and get out of there. Makeup, when required, went on in the corridor outside; there was some mirror left, beside the derelict elevator, a Fuji biofluorescent strip glued above it.

There was a strong piss smell beside the elevator this morning, so she decided to skip the makeup.

You never saw anybody in the building, but you heard them sometimes; music through a closed door, or footsteps just gone around a corner at the far end of a corridor. Well, that made sense; Mona had no desire to meet her neighbours either.

She took the stairs down three flights and into the gaping dark of the underground garage. She had her flashlight in her hand, found her way with six quick little blinks that steered her around stagnant puddles and dangling strands of dead optic cable, up the concrete steps and out into the alley. You could smell the beach, sometimes, in the alley, if the wind was right, but today it just smelled of garbage. The side of the squat towered away above her, so she moved fast, before some asshole decided to drop a bottle or worse. Once she was out on the Avenue, she slowed, but not too much; she was conscious of the cash in her pocket, and full of plans for spending it. Wouldn't do to get taken off, not when it looked like Eddy had wrangled them some kind of ticket out. She alternated between telling herself it was a sure thing, that they were practically gone, and warning herself not to get her hopes up. She knew Eddy's sure things: hadn't Florida been one of them? How it was warm in Florida and the beaches were beautiful and it was full of cute guys with money, just the spot for a little working vacation that had already stretched into the longest month Mona could remember. Well, it was fucking hot in Florida, like a sauna. The only beaches that weren't private were polluted, dead fish rolling belly-up in the shallows. Maybe the private stretches were the same, but you couldn't see them, just the chainlink and the guards in shorts and cop shirts standing around. Eddy'd get excited by the weapons the guards carried and describe each one to her in numbing detail. He didn't have a gun himself, though, not as far as she knew, and Mona figured that was a good thing. Sometimes you couldn't even smell the dead fish, because there was another smell, a chlorine smell that burned the roof of your mouth, something from the factories up the coast. If there were cute guys, they were still tricks, and the ones down here weren't exactly offering to pay double.

About the only thing to like about Florida was drugs, which were easy to come by and cheap and mostly industrial strength. Sometimes she imagined the bleach smell was the smell of a million dope labs cooking some unthinkable cocktail, all those molecules thrashing their kinky little tails, hot for destiny and the street.

She turned off the Avenue and walked down a line of unlicensed food stalls. Her stomach started growling at the smell, but she didn't trust street food, not if she didn't have to, and there were licensed placed in the mall that would take cash. Somebody was playing a trumpetin the asphalt square that had been the parking lot, a rambling Cuban solo that bounced and distorted off the concrete walls, dying notes lost in the morning clatter of the market. A soapbox evangelist spread his arms high, a pale fuzzy Jesus copying the gesture in the air above him. The projection rig was in the box he stood on, but he wore a battered nylon pack with two speakers sticking over each shoulder like blank chrome heads. The evangelist frowned up at Jesus and adjusted something on the belt at his waist. Jesus strobed, turned green, and vanished. Mona laughed. The man's eyes flashed God's wrath, a muscle working in his seamed cheek. Mona turned left, between rows of fruit vendors stacking oranges and grapefruit in pyramids on their battered metal carts.

She entered a low, cavernous building that housed aisles of more permanent businesses: sellers of fish and packaged foods, cheap household goods, counters serving a dozen kinds of hot food. It was cooler here in the shade, and a little quieter. She found a wonton place with six empty stools and took one. The Chinese cook spoke to her in Spanish; she ordered by pointing. He brought her soup in a plastic bowl; she paid him with the smallest of her bills, and he made change with eight greasy cardboard tokens. If Eddy meant it, about leaving, she wouldn't be able to use them; if they stayed in Florida, she could always get some wonton. She shook her head. Gotta go, gotta. She shoved the worn yellow disks back across the painted plyboard counter. "You keep 'em." The cook swept them out of sight, bland and expressionless, a blue plastic toothpick fixed at the corner of his mouth.

She took chopsticks from the glass on the counter and fished a folded noodle from the bowl. There was a suit watching her from the aisle behind the cook's pots and burners. A suit who was trying to look like something else, white sportshirt and sunglasses. More the way they stand than anything, she thought. But he had the teeth, too, and the haircut, except he had a beard. He was pretending to look around, like he was shopping, hands in his pockets, his mouth set in what he might have thought was an absent smile. He was pretty, the suit, what you could see of him behind the beard and glasses. The smile wasn't pretty, though; it was kind of rectangular, so you could see most of his teeth. She shifted a little on the stool, uneasy. Hooking was legal, but only if you did it right, got the tax chip and everything. She was suddenly aware of the cash in her pocket. She pretended to study the laminated foodhandling license taped to the counter; when she looked up again, he was gone.


She spent fifty on the clothes. She worked her way through eighteen racks in four shops, everything the mall had, before she made up her mind. The vendors didn't like her trying on so many things, but it ws the most she'd ever had to spend. It was noon before she'd finished, and the Florida sune was cooking the pavement as she crossed the parking lot with her two plastic bags. The bags, like the clothes, were secondhand: one was printed with the logo of a Ginza shoe store, the other advertised Argentinian seafood briquettes molded from reconstituted krill. She was mentally mixing and matching the things she'd bought, figuring out different outfits.

From the other side of the square, the evangelist opened up at full volume, in mid-rant, like he'd warmed up to a spit-spraying fury before he'd cut the amp in, the hologram Jesus shaking it's white-robed arms and gesturing angrily to the sky, the mall, the sky again. Rapture, he said. Rapture's coming.

Mona turned a corner at random, automatic reflex avoiding a crazy, and found herslef walking past sunfaded card tables spread with cheap Indo simstim sets, used cassettes, coloured spikes of microsoft stuck in blocks of pale blue styrofoam. There was a picture of Angie Mitchell taped up behind one of the tables, a poster Mona hadn't seen before. She stopped and studied it hungrily, taking in the star's clothes and makeup first, then trying to figure out the background, where it had been shot. Unconsciously, she adjusted her expression to approximate Angie's in the poster. Not a grin, exactly. A sort of half-grin, maybe a little sad. Mona felt a special way about Angie. Because - and tricks said it, sometimes - she looked like her. Like she was Angie's sister. Except her nose, Mona's, had more of a tilt and she, Angie, didn't have that smear of freckles out to her cheekbones. Mona's Anglie half-grin widened as she stared, washed in the beauty of the poster, the luxury of the pictured room. She guessed it was a kind of castle, probably it was where Angie lived, sure, with lots of people to take care of her, do her hair and hang up her clothes, because you could see the walls were made of big rocks, and those mirrors had frames on them that were solid gold, carved with leaves and angels. The writing across the bottom would say where it was, maybe, but Mona couldn't read. Anyway, there weren't any fucking roaches there, she was sure of that, and no Eddy either. She looked down at the stim sets and briefly considered using the rest of her money. But then she wouldn't have enough for a stim, and anyway these were old, some of them older than she was. There was whatsit, that Tally, she'd been big when Mona was maybe nine...


When she got back, Eddy was waiting for her, with the tape off the window and the flies buzzing. Eddy was sprawled out on the bed, smoking a cigarete, and the suit with the beard, who'd been watching her, was sitting in the broken chair, still wearing his sunglasses.

Prior, he said that was his name, like he didn't have a first one. Or like Eddy didn't have a last one. Well, she didn't have a last name herself, unless you counted Lisa, and that was more like having two first ones.

She couldn't get much sense of him, in the squat. She thought maybe that was because he was English. He wasn't really a suit, though, not like she'd thought when she'd seen him at the mall; he was onto some game, it just wasn't clear which one He kept his eyes on her a lot, watched her pack her things in the blue Lufehansa bag he'd brought, but she couldn't feel any heat there, not like he wanted her. He just watched her, watched Eddy smoke, tapped his sunglasses on his knee, listened to Eddy's line of bullshit, and said as little as he needed to. When he did say something, it was usually funny, but the way he talked made it hard to tell when he was joking.

Packing, she felt light-headed, like she'd done a jumper but it hadn't quite come on. The flies were fucking against the window, bumping on the dust-streaked glass, but she didn't care. Gone, she was already gone.

Zipping up the bag.


It was raining when they got to the airport, Florida rain, pissing down warm out of a nowhere sky. She'd never been to an airport before, but she knew them from the stims.

Prior's car was a white Datsun rental that drove itself and played elevator music through quad speakers. It left them beside their luggage in a bare concrete bay and drove away in the rain. If Prior had a bag, it wasn't with him; Mona had her Lufthansa bag and Eddy had two black gator-clone suitcases. She tugged her new skirt down over her hips and wondered if she'd bought the right shoes. Eddy was enjoying himself, had his hands in his pockets and his shoulders tilted to show he was doing something important.

She remembered him in Cleveland, the first time, how he'd come out to the place to look at a scoot the old man had for sale, a three-wheel Skoda that was mostly rust. The old man grew catfish in concrete tanks that fenced the dirt yard. She was in the house when Eddy came, long high-walled space of a truck trailer up on blocks. There were windows cut down one side, square holes sealed over with scratched plastic. She was standing by the stove, smell of onions in sacks and tomatoes hung up to dry, when she felt him there, down the length of the room, sensed the muscle and shoulder of him, his white teeth, the black nylon cap held shyly in his hand. Sun was coming in the windows, the place lit up bare and plain, the floor swept the way the old man had her keep it, but it was like a shadow came, blood-shadow where she heard the pumping of her heart, and him coming closer, tossing the cap on the bare chipboard table as he passed it, not shy now but like he lived there, right up to her, running a hand with a bright ring back through the oiled weight of his hair. The old man came in then and Mona turned away, pretended to do something with the stove. Coffee, the old man said, and Mona went to get some water, filling the enamel pot from the roof-tank line, the water gurgling down through the charcoal filter. Eddy and the old man sitting at the table, drinking black coffee, Eddy's legs spread straight out under the table, thighs hard through threadbare denim. Smiling, jiving the old man, dealing for the Skoda. How it seemed to run okay, how he'd buy it if the old man had the title. Old man getting up to dig in a drawer. Eddy's eyes on her again. She followed them out into the yard and watched him straddle the cracked vinyl saddle. Backfire set the old man's black dogs yelping, high sweet smell of cheap alcohol exhause and the frame trembling between his legs.

Now she watched him pose beside his suitcases, and it was hard to connect that up, why she'd left with him next day on the Skoda, headed into Cleveland. The Skoda'd had a busted little radio you couldn't hear over the engine, just play it soft at night in a field by the road. Tuner part was cracked so it only picked up one station, ghost music up from some lonesome tower in Texas, steel guitar fading in and out all night, feeling how she was wet against his leg and the stiff dry grass prickling the back of her neck.

Prior put her blue bag into a white cart with a striped top and she climbed in after it, hearing tiny Spanish voices from the Cuban driver's headset. Then Eddy stowed the gator cases and he and Prior got in. Rolling out to the runway through walls of rain.

The plane wasn't what she knew from the stims, not like a long rich bus inside, with lots of seats. It was a little black thing, with sharp, skinny wings and windows that made it look like it was squinting. She went up some metal stairs and there was a space with four seats and the same grey carpet all over, on the walls and ceiling too, everything clean and cool and grey. Eddy came in after her and took a seat like it was something he did every day, loosening his tie and stretching his legs. Prior was pushing buttons beside the door. It made a sighing sound when it closed.

She looked out the narrow, streaming windows at runway lights reflected on wet concrete.

Came down here on the train, she thought, New York to Atlanta and then you change.

The plane shivered. She heard the airframe creak as it came to life.


She woke briefly, two hours later, in the darkened cabin, cradled by the long hum of the jet. Eddy was asleep, his mouth half-open. Maybe Priot was sleeping too, or maybe he just had his eyes closed, she couldn't tell. Halfway back into a dream she wouldn't remember in the morning, she heard the sounds of that Texas radio, fading steel chords drawn out like an ache.

Squat

I got a company report card to fill out in my mail this week. None of my guards at the site got one, and the field manager knew nothing about them when I mentioned it. I'm going to be pissed if I bother to fill this thing out and I'm the only one that got one. That said, I'll be entirely unsurprised if anything I write can and will be used against me in a kangaroo court of dumbassery. I'll throw the card on here later, maybe. I'm too lazy to do it now.

One of my guards called me last week and said that he'd found a pile of crap on the second floor during his first patrol. It seems that the previous guard didn't note down who was on site, didn't kick them out for having a dog, and took the dog on patrol with him when the coil was sprung. Twit.

-----

Mona dreamed she was dancing the cage back in some Cleveland juke, naked in a column of hot blue light, where the faces thrusting up for her through the veil of smoke had blue light snagged in the whites of their eyes. They wore the expression men always wore when they watched you dance, staring real hard but locked up inside themselves at the same time, so their eyes told you nothing at all and their faces, in spite of the sweat, might have been carved from something that only looked like flesh.

Not that she cared how they looked, when she was in the cage, high and hot and on the beat, three songs into the set and the wiz just starting to peak, new strength in her legs sending her up on the balls of her feet ...

One of them grabbed her ankle.

She tried to scream, only it wouldn't come, not at first, and when it did it was like something ripped down inside her, hurt her, and the blue light shredded, but the hand, the hand was still there, around her ankle. She came up off the bed like a pop-up toy, fighting the dark, clawing hair away from her eyes.

"Whatsa matter, babe?"

He put his other hand against her forehead and shoved her back, down into the pillow's hot depression.

"Dream ..." The hand was still there and it made her want to scream. "You got a cigarette, Eddy?" The hand went away, click and flare of the lighter, the planes of his face jumping out at her as he lit one, handed it to her. She sat up quickly, drew her knees up under her chin with the army blanket over them like a tent, because she didn't feel like anybody touching her then at all.

The scavenged plastic chair's broken leg made a warning sound as he leaned back and lit his own cigarette. Break, she thought, pitch him on his ass so he gets to hit me a few times. At least it was dark, so she didn't have to look at the squat. Worst thing was waking up with a bad head, too sick to move, when she'd come in crashing and forgotten to retape the black plastic, hard sun to show her all the little details and heat the air so the flies could get going.

Nobody ever grabbed her, back in Cleveland; anybody numb enough to reach through that field was already too drunk to move, maybe to breathe. The tricks never grabbed her either, not unless they'd squared it with Eddy, paid extra, and that was just pretend.

Whichever way they wanted it, it got to be a kind of ritual, so it seemed to happen in a place outside your life. And she'd gotten into watching them, when they lost it. That was the interesting part, because they really did lose it, they were totally helpless, maybe just for a splite second, but it was like they weren't even there.

"Eddy, I'm gonna go crazy, I gotta sleep here anymore."

He'd hit her before, for less, so she put her face down, against her knees and the blanket, and waited.

"Sure," he said, "you wanna go back to the catfish farm? Wanna go back to Cleveland?"

"I just can't take this anymore ..."

"Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow what?"

"That soon enough for you? Tomorrow night, private fucking jet? Straight up to New York? Then you gonna quit giving me this shit?"

"Please baby," and she reached out for him, "we can take the train ..."

He slapped her hand away. "You got shit for brains."

If she complained any more, anything about the squat, anything that implied he wasn't making it, that all his big deals added up to nothing, he'd start, she knew he'd start. Like the time she'd screamed about the bugs, the roaches they called palmetto bugs, but it was because the goddamn things were mutants, half of them; someone had tried to wipe them out with something that fucked with their DNA, so you'd see these screwed-up roaches dying with too many legs or heads, or not enough, and once she'd seen one that looked like it had swallowed a crucifix or something, its back or shell or whatever it was distorted in a way that made her want to puke.

"Baby," she said, trying to soften her voice, "I can't help it, this place it just getting to me ..."

"Hooky Green's," he said, like he hadn't heard her, "I was up in Hooky Green's and I met a mover. He picked me out, you know? Man's got an eye for talent." She could almost feel his grin through the dark. "Outa London, England. Talent scout. Come into Hooky's and it was just `You, my man!'"

"A trick?" Hooky Green's was where Eddy had most recently decided the action was, thirty-third floor of a glass highstack with most of the inside walls knocked down, had about a block of dancefloor, but he'd gone off the place when nobody there was willing to pay him much attention. Mona hadn't ever seen Hooky himself, "lean mean Hooky Green," the retired ballplayer who owned the place, but it was great for dancing.

"Will you fucking listen? Trick? Shit. He's the man, he's a connection, he's on the ladder and he's gonna pull me up. And you know what? I'm gonna take you with me."

"But what's he want?"

"An actress. Sort of an actress. And a smart boy to get her in place and keep her there."

"Actress? Place? What place?"

She heard him unzip his jacket. Something landed on the bed, near her feet. "Two thou."

Jesus. Maybe it wasn't a joke. But if it wasn't, what the hell was it?"

"How much you pull tonight, Mona?"

"Ninety." It had really been one-twnety, but she'd figured the last one for overtime. She was too scared to hold out on him, usually, but she'd needed wiz money.

"Keep it. Get some clothes. Not like work stuff. Nobody wants your little ass hanging out, not this trip."

"When?"

"Tomorrow, I said. You can kiss this place goodbye."

When he said that, it made her want to hold her breath.

The chair creaked again. "Ninety, huh?"

"Yeah."

"Tell me."

"Eddy, I'm so tired ..."

"No," he said.

But what he wanted wasn't the truth or anything like that. He wanted a story, the story that he'd taught her to tell him. He didn't want to hear what they talked about (and most of them had some one thing they wanted real bad to tell you, and usually they did), or how they got around to asking to see your bloodwork tickets, or how every other one made that same joke about how what they couldn't cure they could put in remission, or even what they wanted in bed.

Eddy wanted to hear about this big guy who treated her like she didn't matter. Except she had to be careful, when she told it, not to make the trick too rough, because that was supposed to cost more than she'd actually been paid. The main thing was that this imaginary trick had treated her like she was a piece of equipment he'd rented for half an hour. Not that there weren't plenty like that, but they mostly spent their money at puppet parlors or got it on stim. Mona tended to get the ones who wanted to talk, who tried to buy you a sandwich after, which could be bad in its own way but not the kind of bad Eddy needed. And the other thing Eddy needed was for her to tell him how that wasn't what she liked but she'd found herself wanting it anyway, wanting it bad.

She reached down in the dark and touched the envelope full of money.

The chair creaked again.

So she told him how she was coming out of a BuyLow and he'd hit on her, this big guy, just asked how much, which had embarrassed her but she told him anyway and she'd said okay. So they went in his car, which was old and big and kind of damp-smelling (cribbing detail from her Cleveland days), and he'd sort of flipped her over the seat-

"In front of the BuyLow?"

"In back."

Eddy never accused her of making any of it up, even though she knew he must have taught her the general outline somehow and it was always basically the same story. By the time the big guy had her skirt up (the black one, she said, and I had on my white boots) and his pants down, she could hear Eddy's beltbuckle jingling as he peeled off his jeans. Part of her was wondering, when he slid into bed beside her, whether the position she was describing was physically possible, but she kept on going, and anyway it was working on Eddy. She remembered to put in how it hurt, when the guy was getting it in, even though she'd been really wet. She put in how he held her wrists, though by now she was pretty confused about what was where, except that her ass was supposed to be up in the air. Eddy had started to touch her, stroking her breasts and stomach, so she switched from the offhand brutality of the trick's moves to how it was supposed to have made her feel.

How it was supposed to have made her feel was a way she hadn't ever felt. She knew you could get to a place where doing it hurt a little but still felt good, but she knew that wasn't it. What Eddy wanted to hear was that it hurt a lot and made her feel bad, but she liked it anyway. Which made no sense at all to Mona, but she'd learned to tell it the way he wanted her to.

Because anyway it worked, and now Eddy rolled over with the blanket bunched up across his back and got in between her legs. She figured he must be seeing it in his head, like a cartoon, what she was telling him, and at the same time he got to be that faceless pumping big guy. He had her wrists now, pinned above her head, the way he liked.

And when he was done, curled on his side asleep, Mona lay awake in the stale dark, turning the dream of leaving around and around, bright and wonderful.

And please let it be true.

I was halfway to work before I realized I'd forgotten my car... I was just running down the freeway.

But that isn't a problem anymore. I got a motorcycle.

And not any motorcycle either - I now am the proud owner of a 2005 black Ninja! Vroom vroom, bisnitch!

And the best part is, I didn't pay a cent for it. It was given to me by the client's Eyes and Ears. w00t!

Of course, it's only on paper. Evil Property Manager's company changed the parking system, and now everybody has to haul around a separate access card if they want to get in and out of the underground. And you can only get one if you have a vehicle registered with them.

So Eyes and Ears invented my motorcycle. I'm thinking of trading it in for a Ducati, but we'll see how this one works out.

Knock knock.

Jesus, it's seven in the morning on my day off!

(opens door) Yes?

"Good morning sir! Would you like these eggs and bacon? There's waffles too, with strawberry syrup."

Er... what?

"Here are your eggs, sir. Have a glorious day."

(closes door, breakfast in hand)

Fucking Jehova's waitresses.

Work continues to be what it always is. My guards seem to have a learning curve best described as "level", or possibly "in slight decline" as they seem to actually forget things I've taught them as they get set into their routines.

Just once, for one guard, I'd like to describe their learning curve as a hyperbola.

2x^2 + 5xy + 3y^2 + 4x + 16y +9 = 0 is a hyperbola. Why isn't this easy for my guards?

A few weeks ago, I was trying to explain emo to both Valium Wailer and Fictional Correspondant, so I hit wikipedia to find something to clarify my explanation. And when I regurgitated that emo came from punk, it occured to me that comparing punk to emo is like comparing chocolate to shit, based solely on the fact that both are brown in colour.

Because I'm in that kind of mood, lately. ;)

Do you like Ali G? Do you know the Borat character? Here's a trailer for you that you might enjoy.
























































I used to think this was really funny, until Doonesbury did it better. I love the hypocrites over at Intelligent Design Corporation.

So go check it out, since Doonesbury wisely keeps me from stealing it directly.

And, since you're so keen to click on my links, apparently there's a Transformers movie coming out. Live action. o_O

And finally, this article on parents pushing for simplified spelling bears a read. Everybody is stupid if they go for this, final answer:

Puush for simpler speling perzists

WASHINGTON (AP) -- When "say," "they" and "weigh" rhyme, but "bomb," "comb" and "tomb" don't, wuudn't it maek more sens to spel wurdz the wae thae sound?

I already hate aol and sms speak. It's a no brainer where I am on this.