Little Heroes by Norman Spinrad

Author:Norman Spinrad [Spinrad, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

“It’s not exactly The American Dream,” Karen agreed.

Slimy Mary’s was more or less as she remembered it.

A low parody of the dance floor of The American Dream done up with blinking bare colored bulbs and a tinfoil ceiling. A single video screen and slightly tinny-sounding speakers. Cable spools and old sprung sofas and nests of musty pillows around the dance floor, and the sense of an endless dark cave full of rats and roaches and worse creatures as a pressure at her back into which she dared not gaze.

The clientele was composed of all those savage streeties you tried to ignore when you saw them lurking at the edges of some Zone. Yet here, on their own home turf, they now seemed less like dangerous dirty streeties and more like people.

Maybe it was the long red hair more of them than not were wearing now. Even without a hit of the Jack, it flashed her back into that transitory sense of comradeship she had felt for these poor streeties the night she had flashed here and danced among them. I dream, therefore I am human, she thought.

How ironic that it took the ensign of someone who wasn’t human to remind her of that.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” she told Leslie softly as Larry Coopersmith and the big ominous black doorman sat down facing each other like poker players across the cable spool table.

“It don’t look so bad at all,” Coopersmith said. “At least it isn’t a fuckin’ Muzik franchise like the last joint we were in.”

“Yeah, well on the other hand, my man,” the doorman said, “something like a franchise operation is what I got in mind. ...”

Larry laughed. “Somehow I don’t see a chain of Slimy Mary’s in every shopping mall in America,” he said.

Paco came prancing in across the edge of the dance floor, nodding to dancers, flipping some remark to the vj behind his disc decks, strutting his stuff to the beat of some African metal MUZIK was playing. Karen smiled warmly at him and squeezed his hand as he sat down beside her. It was good to see him in a place where he felt like the cock of the walk.

“I was just telling your friends about a little business deal, my son,” Dojo said. The big black doorman made Karen nervous, but despite that she found herself rather liking the man for the genuine affection he seemed to display toward Paco.

He reached into a pocket, pulled out what Karen recognized as a Red Jack disc, and slid it across the table toward Larry. “One of yours?”

“Fifth Amendment,” Larry said with a wide grin.

“Look here, my man,” Dojo said, frowning intently at Larry Coopersmith, “let’s can the bullshit, we’re gonna have to be up front about our criminal activities if we’re going to get anywhere. I’ll tell you mine and then you’ll tell me yours.”

“Fair enough,” Larry said evenly, smiling back at him.

“One of my best was this nice little wire workshop coining me significant change upstairs,” Dojo said.

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