"Allen Steele - A King of Infinite Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Steele Allen)

doesn't need to work; like Shemp and me, Erin's a trust-fund kid from a wealthy Lake Forest family
who's impatiently waiting for her to get over her dreams of becoming a novelist so she can return to
Chicago, marry some dude with an MBA, and settle down in the 'burbs to become a baby machine. That
might happen once she gets tired of waterbeds, cinder-block furniture, and cold pizza for breakfast, but
for the time being she's cohabiting with a rich kid who works part-time at a record store while working


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 Steele, Allen - [Near-Space 05] - A King of Infinite Space

on a novel about cohabiting with a rich kid who works part-time at a record store.

And then there's Shemp, whose seldom-used proper name is Christopher Meyer: twenty-four years old,
six-feet-one, overweight by about fifty pounds, with buzz-cut dark hair and a soul patch under his lower
lip. I've known Shemp ever since eighth grade at Country Day School; his German-American genes had
been unkind to him, because when puberty hit us Shemp became a teenage reincarnation of one of the
Three Stooges, and thus the nickname, which somebody gave him in the locker room after gym class.
Our families both live in Ladue, and since the Meyers own the Big Bee Supermarket chain, his dad is
constantly on his case about joining the family business.

Shemp aspires to be a comic book artist, though, and after one summer of wearing an apron with a
grinning bee on it and asking old ladies if they had any coupons, he decided that he'd rather work on his
indie comics creation, The Slack, which he eventually hopes to sell to Dark Horse, while playing drums
with the Bombers on the weekends. He's a lot smarter than he looks; when Erin started staying over at
our apartment every night, he realized that it was time for him to find his own place. Erin and Shemp
never really hit it off, but after I made it clear to Erin that Shemp's my best friend and to Shemp that I'd
rather see Erin getting out of the shower every morning, they've learned to tolerate one another. Sort of.
Getting reserved seat tickets for Lollapalooza for the three of us is one more attempt on my part to get
them to be pals.

And then there's William Alec Tucker HI... but we'll get to him later.

So now it's quarter to five, the sun still high in the sky, and the thermometer standing at ninety-two in
the shade. We park the Saturn in the back of the Riverport lot and join the line at the turnstiles as it
shuffles through the usual daypack searches and metal detector sweeps by the rent-a-cops before we get
our tickets ripped. No one finds the joints I've hidden in my cigarette pack, and Erin manages to get
through the pat-down without being groped by some cop, and in another minute we're through the gate
and in the middle of thirty thousand other members of Gen-X and Gen-Y.

Riverport Amphitheater is an artificial hill in front of an enormous open-sided shed, with long asphalt
walkways circling the hill to plazas on either side of the stage. You've got your punks, your ravers, your
frat boys, your stoners, your teeners, your slackers, your over-the-hill hippies looking for one more
summer of love before they finally cut their hair and get a job. Up on the hill, they stand, sit, or sprawl
on blankets trampled by countless sneakers and hiking boots, listening to Jesus Lizard thudding from
distant speakers; down on the walkways, even more shuffle past tents set up by hucksters touring with
the show. T-shirts, jewelry, window stickers, incense, dope paraphernalia, CDs by bands no one has ever
heard of, sunglasses, cheap dresses and parachute pants, underground comic books, hemp hats: an open-
air mall of the hip and hip-five-minutes-ago, mobbed by kids in search of something that won't look
stupid three months from now. It's all loud and crowded and sweaty and hot, just the way I like it.