Bleeding Edge - Pynchon Thomas (список книг .TXT) 📗

She makes a point of taking from her purse a dispenser of Handi Wipes and with housewifely thoroughness disinfecting the pole, slowly fondling it up and down while casting demure glances along the bar. Their skins in the spill from this fluorescent indigo lighting register the same pallid hue, as if permanently stained from too much cathode radiation.

Considerately, Stu Gotz, or somebody, has put on a MILF-night mix, which includes a lot of disco, plus tracks from U2, Guns N’ Roses, Journey. And pandering to this crowd, way too much Moby for Maxine’s taste, except possibly “That’s When I Reach for My Revolver.”

Maxine’s never had what you’d call Big Tits, although the connoisseurs here don’t seem to mind as long as they’re Bare Tits. The one body part they won’t be staring at much is her eyes. This Male Gaze she’s been hearing about since high school is not about to intersect its female counterpart anytime soon.

In the course of a dance routine somewhere between vanilla and cherry ripple, including leg hangs, helical descents, upside-down humping of the pole and so forth, Maxine notices this one party out on a remote curve of the bar, drinking you’d say relentlessly what will prove to be Jagermeister and 151, through a Day-Glo straw out of a twenty-ounce convenience-store cup he has brought in with him, and showing no signs of alcohol poisoning, which could mean either unnatural immunity or unreachable despair. She undulates over for a closer look, and sure enough it’s him, Eric Jeffrey Outfield, ubergeek, looking, except for the bare upper lip and a newly acquired soul patch, just like his ID photo. He is wearing cargo pants in a camo print whose color scheme is intended for some combat zone very remote, if not off-planet, and a T-shirt announcing, in Helvetica, <P> REAL GEEKS USE COMMAND PROMPTS </P>, accessorized with a Batbelt clanking like a charm bracelet with remotes for TV, stereo, and air conditioner, plus laser pointer, pager, bottle opener, wire stripper, voltmeter, magnifier, all so tiny that one legitimately wonders how functional they can be.

About then on comes Jamiroquai’s “Canned Heat,” whose bass line Maxine has never found a way to resist, and seized in some post-disco swoon she forgets temporarily what she’s come here for, ignores the pole, and succumbs to just dancing, and by the time the music has segued into “Cosmic Girl,” she’s squatting on the bar in front of Eric, who seems more fascinated by her glittery aqua shoes than anything, staying there till the tape ends and everybody takes a break, then slithering over the bar and down onto a barstool next to him.

“I’m out of singles,” he begins.

“Honey, it’s them NASDAQ blues, we all took a bath, it sucks, but maybe you can do me a favor, I’m new in here and you look at least like a semiregular, maybe you can tell me where the Champagne Lounge is in this joint?”

“I’m out of twenties too.”

“No obligation.”

“Next you’re gonna say, ‘But wait!’” He looks quizzically into his lethal drink for a while, as if for the answer to some personal problem to come floating into view printed on one face of a dodecahedron, then in a slow lurch gets carefully to his feet. “I’m headed for the toilet, c’mon, it’s on the way.”

He leads her toward the back and down a flight of stairs. The lighting drifts more and more into the red end of the spectrum. From below ooze romantic string arrangements Maxine thought had been retired in the seventies, no more inviting tonight than they were then.

“I’ll be in here, in case you want to talk. No fees. Promise.”

The Champagne Lounge is cozy in scale, more like a Mad Dog Utility Room. Video screens, some showing only noise, others flickering porno tapes of a low-res Kodachrome vintage, are mounted here and there on wall brackets. Girls sit alone at tables taking smoke breaks. Others straddle clients in the stained velour shadows of “privacy booths” in back. There’s a miniature bar with a couple shelves of bottles whose labels are not immediately familiar to Maxine. “You’re new,” observes the fashion-doll-faced bartender, in a perky voice at some odds with the sullen set of enhanced lips it emerges from. “Welcome to geek heaven. You get one mojito on the house, then you’re on your own.”

“Full disclosure,” sez Maxine, “I’m a civilian, thought tonight was MILF night, guess I got it wrong.”

“You bring a customer?”

“Just my neighbor’s nephew, she asked me to keep an eye on him. Sweet kid, basically, too much time on the Internet maybe.”

At which point Eric puts his head through the bead curtains.

“Oh no not this guy, uh-uh, he’s been 86’d, hey creepazoid, you want me to call Porfirio down here again, show you where the sidewalk is?”

“It’s cool,” Maxine smiling, shrugging, sliding out the doorway. “All good.”

“Assholes,” Eric mutters, “can I help it if I like feet?”

“Where do you live? I’ll take you back.”

“Manhattan, downtown.”

“Come on, I’ll spring for a cab. Just let me run in and change.”

“I’ll wait outside.”

“What’s with Footboy,” Stu Gotz wants to know when she’s street legal again. “Nice company you keep.”

“Oh, it’s business.”

“Which reminds me—at this time we are delighted to offer you a one-month contract, provided only that you attend our Introductory Profiling Seminar, which will acquaint you with the many varieties of technoscum and psychosocial misfit all too sadly apt to be overrepresented among our clientele.”

She takes his card, which may come in handy someday though in ways neither can see right at the moment.

•   •   •

ERIC LIVES IN A FIFTH-FLOOR walk-up studio in Loisaida, a doorless bathroom wedged in one corner and in another a microwave, coffeemaker, and miniature sink. Liquor-store cartons full of personal effects are stacked around haphazardly, and most of the limited floor space is littered with unwashed laundry, Chinese take-out containers and pizza boxes, empty Smirnoff Ice bottles, old copies of Heavy Metal, Maxim, and Anal Teen Nymphos Quarterly, women’s shoe catalogs, SDK discs, game controllers and cartridges for Wolfenstein, DOOM, and others. Paint peels from selected ceiling areas, and window treatments are basically street grime. Eric finds a cigarette butt a little longer than the others in a running shoe he’s been using for an ashtray and lights up, lurches over to the electric coffee mess, pours out some cold day-old sludge into a mug with a rectangular outline on it and the words CSS IS AWESOME running outside the frame. “Oh. Want some?”

They light up a joint, Eric comfortable on the floor. “Now,” in a voice she hopes is firm enough, “about this foot situation.”

“Here, let’s just get your shoes off, don’t worry. You don’t have to deal with the floor, you can rest them on me.”

“My thought also.”

It has been a while, like forever, since her feet have received attention like this. She has a moment of panic, wondering, am I weird, allowing this? Eric, with an extrasensory grin, looks up and nods. “Yeah, you are.”

Her feet seem to have been resting in his lap for a while, and she can’t help noticing he has this, well, hardon. Out of his trousers and between her feet, actually, and sort of moving back and forth . . . Not that this happens to her a lot, which may account for why she begins tentatively now to explore, whatever the foot equivalent of handle is, maybe “footle” the aroused organ, her toes always having been prehensile enough to pick up socks, keys, and loose change, her soles, could it be the cannabis? unaccountably sensitized, particularly the insides of her heels, which reflexologists have told her connect directly with the uterus . . . she slides the polished toes of one foot under his balls and with the pads of the others begins caressing his penis, after a while switching feet, just to see what will happen, all out of experimental curiosity of course . . .