"Spider Robinson - Very Bad Deaths" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

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didn't mind. I had always been considered weird in the extreme . . . but this immediately weeded even
my oddball circle of friends down by a good twenty percent.
I regarded it as something of an achievement. The people I hung out with, loosely known as the Boot
and Buskin Gang, were a hard bunch to shock. They were the ones who usually did the shocking.
Theater people. Poets. Philosophers. Musicians. Behavior that had been deemed borderline acceptable if
not necessarily admirable, the previous year, had included soft drug dealing, gross sacrilege, treason,
sexual relationships involving odd numbers of participants, pipe-smoking (by a female), chastity (by a
male), blatant plagiarism, being kept by a 45-year-old divorcee with two kids who called you Uncle
Bob, semipro porno work, pro vandalism, pig drunkenness, shoplifting food, reading poetry aloud,
nervous collapse, attempted suicide, and even voting Republican. It was a point of honor with my crowd
to be unshockable, nonjudgmental. Most of us would rather have lost our pants than our cool in public.
But coolness lives in the forebrain, and aversion to morbid stench lies further back, involves neural
circuits that were laid down millennia before the forebrain evolved. Even the hippest had trouble dealing
with Smelly. And some of them, it developed, had a problem with me because I didn't have a problem
with him.
"Man, I don't care," Slinky John Walton said loudly in the dining hall, a few days later, "Understanding
is far out and everythingтАФbut if you can live in the same room with that guy and not kill him, you're as
sick as he is."
I sighed. "Slinks, you of all pots have no business criticizing how other kettles choose to live their lives."
Slinky John wore, at all times, a wrinkled black ankle-length coat beneath which lurked God knew what,
a Mephistophelean black beard with greased mustachios, and a black eye patch which kept moving from
eye to eye. He was an anarchist and saw no reason to hide it. Nobody would have been much surprised if
he had reached into that coat one day and pulled out a cartoon anarchist's bomb, a black ball with a lit
fuse sticking out, and hurled it at some politician's passing motorcade. This year he had added to his
costume a button, pinned to his lapel, which he'd obviously made himself by crudely painting over some
other slogan and hand-lettering his own message. It now read, "GO LEMMINGS, GO!"
"There's a difference between healthy, therapeutic weirdness and pathology," he said stiffly.
"Nice to see you and Dean Dizzy agree on something," Bill Doane said.
"Fuck you," he riposted, and I knew Bill had reached him with that shot. Slinky John and Sidney
Disraeli, our universally despised Dean of Men, had tangled more than once over the subject of
decorum, and would again.
"You think you're man enough?" Bill said. He was a big shambling rawboned guy with a red beard as
big as his head, curly red ringlets of hair down to the base of his shoulder blades, and a booming laugh.
He and Slinky John were close friends.
"I think I'm right, and Russell has gone over the edge," Slinks insisted. "Granted, I frighten small
children and some adults. But I do not cause plants to wither, small birds to fall from the sky, and strong
men to weep. Russell's roommate does."
"I hate to admit it, Russ, but he has a point," Bill said. "I tried talking to Smelly, once. You know, stand
upwind, breathe in through my mouth, out through my nose. I gave him ten minutes; that was all I could
take. Forget it. Cat wasn't a bad conversationalist, reallyтАФbut rancid, man."
"A walking pestilence," Slinky John said. "No, a waddling pestilence."
"Do you stop noticing after a while?" Bill asked. "I've had that happen with some bad smells, that's why

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