"Norman Spinrad - He Walked Among Us" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

But no, as usual, he had to follow his dick, he had to be a wise guy; and so, when the desk called the
Presidential suite (the suite they hadcomped him fer chrissakes) to invite the big time agent from
Hollywood to catch the floor show, even though he had already had a pretty good idea of how awful this
was going to be, he was hardly in a position with either of them to refuse.

Given his admitted propensity to pick тАШem for tits and ass rather than sparkling personality or witty
repartee, Jimmy all too often found himself wishing he were elsewhere once he had gotten his rocks
thoroughly off and his dick thoroughly unkinked, so he was not exactly unfamiliar with post-coital
depression. He even knew the fancy shrink's term for the phenomenon, having looked it up once to make
sure that he wasn't turning faggot or something.

But sitting in Kapplemeyer's Fabulous Sunset Room, forced by his own cleverness to watch an endless
succession of excruciating acts he wouldn't have tried to book into a prison benefit on Devil's Island die
in agony attempting to rouse this audience of brain-dead zombies from its collective coma, raised
post-coital depression to an Academy Award-winning level.

What a toilet bowl!

The walls were painted the pastel vomit green that seemed to be Kapplemeyer's signatureтАФprobably
because Old Man Kapplemeyer, if there had been one, had made a fantastic buy on a hundred year
supply of the stuff back when Uncle Milty was hot stuffтАФonly to jazz up the Sunset Room, someone had
dumped cheap glitter into the bucket before they slathered it on. The floor was covered in contrasting
scuffed dark green linoleum tile, and a big mirror ball depended shakily from the fly-specked white
ceiling.

The stage was just about big enough to handle a quartet and an act at the same time, the lighting
consisted of a single fixed spot, and the sound system seemed to have been scrounged from a bankrupt
biker bar in Bumfuck, Mississippi.

The room had about thirty tables, plus a cleared area which in theory served as a dance floor, meaning
that it could squeeze a hundred thirty, a hundred forty, in the summer high season, and probably did,
assuming this dump had one, seeing as how the nightlife within a thirty mile radius of Kapplemeyer's
consisted of an all-night gas station and an abandoned gravel pit.

At the moment, however, there were twenty-one, count тАШem, and Jimmy out of habit always did, people,
if that was the word, besides himself and Sabrina, in the audience. Some of them might even have been
alive, thought it was hard to tell. The only ones who seemed to be significantly under a hundred were a
traveling salesman type in his fifties with a nineteen year old hooker, a beefy good-old boy in his forties
with a severely overweight little lady who might have been the local deputy, and three Japanese guys in
identical sharp conservative blue suits who hunched over their drinks nervously as if slowly realizing they
had gotten off the subway in Harlem by mistake instead of the Village.

It was an audience that Texas Jimmy wouldn't have wished on Adolf Hitler and the Auschwitz Boys, an
audience that he wouldn't even have wished on the succession of acts actually condemned to face it.

Thus far, there had been a forty-year-old female vocalist in black leather and a pink mohawk
slaughtering covers of Madonna and Annie Lennox, a black ventriloquist and his whiteface dummy, a trio
of ancient hippies spastically warbling Golden Oldies from Woodstock, an actual fucking Gypsy violinist,
a superannuated magician so fried he could hardly shuffle the cards, and an Elvis impersonator gay as a
treefull of chickadees.