Valjean had a screen for every porn channel, jammed together in the wall so that food porn overlapped med porn overlapped war porn overlapped sex porn overlapped news porn overlapped disaster porn overlapped tech-fantasy porn overlapped porn she had no idea how to identify. Maybe nobody did, maybe it had just bypassed the stage where it would have been anything other than porn. Meta-porn, porn porn?
I don't know what it is, but it makes me horny, and that's all that matters.
"Fucking right there's nothing fucking wrong with porn," said Quilmar. Quilmar was one of the stone marathoners. He'd taken so many years off his age, he'd have been nine when he'd cut his first single (okay, maybe eight and a half), and he'd had it polished and tightened so much, his lovers said the dimple in his chin was actually his navel. Maybe, Gina thought, the Beater hadn't been so rucked after all to do what he'd done. "Porn is the fucking secret of life, sister-mine. If you can't fuck it and it doesn't dance, eat it or throw it away. That's the fucking order of the universe, and I'm at the fucking top of the food-fuck-and-dance chain."
Then he tried to corner her in Valjean's long, narrow kitchen but he got a little bit confused, and she left him dry-humping the refrigerator door. Wait till he tried to throw that away.
"Talent squeezes out brains." Jolene, looking older, but good-older, wiser, full of dignity. "Shit, you told me that the first time I helped you drag Mark home. How's he surviving the corporate life?"
When she couldn't answer, Jolene took her up to the top floor, to Valjean's secret oxygen supply, and gave her a few hits off the mask. This was how she kept track, she thought, by who was helping her find Mark and how toxed she was herself. The O2 helped; there was a little more in it than God's pure oxy. She and Jolene sat out under the eaves and looked down the canyon, held hands, didn't say much. Didn't have to.
"I get some work," Jolene was telling her after a while. Jolene's head was resting on her shoulder. Gina was a flaming hetero, but Jolene liked to keep her options open, as Jolene herself said. Being with someone who wasn't afraid of knowing you needed to be touched was okay whether your options were nailed down or wide open and flapping in the fucking breeze. "I get work from some of the indies, outlaws most of them with one leg over the fence, thinking about going legit. Don't get much legit air, but that's where the scene is getting to be. The Dive'll have people crawling through the clubs on their hands and knees to steal from us soon. Except you, Gina, because you're there already, aren't you?"
"Yah. They tell me to come, but I'm already there."
"Walk," Jolene said, suddenly urgent. "Walk away, what are they gonna do, throw you in debtors' prison?"
Gina nodded. "Does the phrase 'contempt of court' do anything for you?" She drew up her knees, rested her chin on them. "You know you could theoretically spend the rest of your life in the can on a c-of-c charge? Die of old age in the can for nothing more than saying, 'Fuck, no.' "
"You're lost, girl."
She laughed. "Oh, no. What it is, is, I been found. That's the fucking problem, I'm found, and they're gonna keep me. And Mark's the one so found he's lost for good."
– -
!! U B THE *!!
Many Main-Run Features Starring U!
Available Now:
Raid on Buenos Aires * Thrash-Out * Love Kills
The Buddy Holly Story (3rd-and BEST!!-remake)
1000s of others available, come in and BROWZE!!!!
Complete Rock Video Catalog, Too!
(Take-Out Xtra)
She read it through and then went back to the first line, puzzled. U B the asterisk? Was she too toxed or not toxed enough?
You be the ass to risk.
Gina nodded. For all she knew, she was looking at the secret of life. You be the ass to risk. Love Kills. 3rd-and BEST!!- remake.
Complete Rock Video Catalog, Too! Where old rock videos went to die, hers, Mark's, everyone, here in the wannabee parlors, in the wannabee pipe on the dataline for those who could foot that kind of FOB.
Quilmar hadn't had it quite right. If you can't fuck it, and it doesn't dance, eat it, be it, or throw it away.
A woman with tiny old-fashioned movie reels twined in her hair and arcs of silvery spectrum mylar instead of eyebrows was trying to get a rabbity-looking guy in a rented bodyshield to step through the beaded curtain in the open doorway. "Anyone can say they'll make you a star, but we're the only ones who can really do it, whaddaya say? What you wannabee?" The mylar wiggled up and down, the beads swaying in the doorway clacked lightly, and the traffic on the boulevard nattered and chattered and popped.
"Come on, homeboy, it's so easy. What you wannabee? You wannabee Buddy Holly? You wannabee a raider on Buenos Aires, you wannabee a killer and get away with it?" She pushed up the sleeves of her slatternly kimono and took both his hands. "Come on, homeboy, tell me. I'm your Hollywood landlady with a full pot of coffee or whatever else you drink and all the time in the world to listen to you. Just tell me what you wannabee."
The guy looked around like he was afraid someone was going to catch him at this. "You got full-body hotsuits?" he asked. "Full coverage?"
"Homeboy, where are you from? We got the full coverage, the full coverage, they don't make em better than the ones we got. Ain't no part of you gonna be neglected, just tell me what you wannabee."
He looked around again, and his gaze snagged on Gina where she was standing by the sign. The woman frowned a little, no mean trick with mylar eyebrows. "That stuff with you?" she asked him.
"No," he said, but uncertainly, as if he weren't really sure. Gina wanted to laugh. Yah, I'll tell you what him wannabee. Him wannabee somebody who doesn't live in Culver City or Inglewood or some other damned place like that in a three-roomer with a two-screen dataline subscription, not knowing what to do with himself when he's used up all the series and the movies and the videos and the insty-parties and wondering why he can't go out and find a life like what he sees on a high-res screen, or at least why he can't afford a hotsuit with full coverage.
The guy's expression was a mixture of defiance and embarrassment as the woman pulled him through the curtain. The beads rippled, and then the woman poked her head through them again.
"You wannabee getting off my sidewalk, okay, homegirl?" Gina gave her the sign of the horns and moved off, laughing to herself.
"What's so funny, homegirl?" A real homegirl, a green-haired boulevardette wrapped in a red trash bag with the words Hazardous Waste stenciled in large repeat all over it and the same thing tattooed on her forehead.
"I'm lucky I can dance," Gina said.
They were all dancing in Forest Lawn, whether they actually could or not. The music was cranked up so loud that the cops had to be comatose not to hear it. Hit-and-run, but Mark wasn't there, either. Some little snipe named Dexter with a laptop had her backed up against Liberace's tomb, claiming he was a fucking orchestra, and off to one side a familiar figure with a cam was trying to look like he wasn't taking her picture.
He looked good tonight, too, and she could hear the sexy laugh in her mind, and what the hell, she could pretend there wasn't anything he wanted to know about, at least for the duration. But even if there hadn't been, all he'd be for her was another furnished room: whatever she needed, none of it hers.
"What's new?" he asked, coming over.
"You mean, what's news."
"However you want it," he said, sounding honest.
She glanced at the snipe, who was standing by on a wish and a prayer. "Whack the road," she told him, and he moved off trying to look too chill to be hurt.