"Marc Laidlaw - To Lie Between the Loins of Perky Pat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laidlaw Marc)

TO LIE BETWEEN
THE LOINS OF
PERKY PAT
An excerpt from Mock-Up, an abandoned novel, by Marc Laidlaw
When Morris was seventeen, he didn't see much of his parents. His stepfather
was a hot tub salesman who spent most of his time either installing tubs or partying
with his customers in those same tubs. Morris's mother had accompanied her
husband to some of these parties at first, but clearly her husband's
behavior--though she tried to endorse it in the spirit of the times--had uncovered
some rigid puritanical scaffolding inside her, and she had taken to spending her
own evenings at home, alone with her bottles of wine and a variety of value-neutral
pharmaceutical companions.

Morris could relate neither to his mother, his stepfather, his much more distant
biological father, nor the small-minded suburban idiots whom the society around
him considered his peers. Because he had no interest in wandering the burbs at
night in search of mildly vandalistic activities such as spray-painting his name on the
soundwalls going up alongside the new freeways, nor in pursuing the few girls who
might be even remotely interested in him, he found himself wandering farther and
farther afield from the tracts of Torrance. In a battered fake-wood- panel
station-wagon with a clumsily grafted bubble-roof, he cruised the city canyons of
downtown Los Angeles. He glided from Watts to the San Fernando Valley in
search of something he would know when he saw it--in search of some magic that
might give his life meaning. He idled in the smog-drenched traffic jams as if he were
a commuter. The freeway lamps dodged overhead, strobing him with light while the
radio spewed Barry Manilow ("At the Copa--Copacabana...") and Eddie Money
("I got...two tickets to paradise...won't you...pack your bags and we'll leave
tonight,") and he realized with vague nausea that this was the music left to his
generation; realized with greater anguish that the music actually struck him full of
pitiful sentiment, that Eddie Money actually touched him--as if the dream of
packing his bags for paradise were something his spirit yearned for. He nearly
drove into the freeway divider at that realization; nearly rammed himself into
oblivion.

Instead he pulled himself down an offramp, cruised down the usual strip of Dennys
and Copper Pennys and 7/11's, until he saw a glaring sign outside an otherwise
unremarkable Holiday Inn: "Welcome Sci-Fi Fans!"

He had borrowed enough money from his mother (or at any rate, she had not
complained when he dug into her purse, under her very nose) to pay his admission
to the event; but once inside, he wondered what he had expected to find. Rooms
where wretched B-movies were unreeling, the very same you could watch any
weekend afternoon on television. Rooms where dispirited souls lethargically
debated the long-term impact of Star-Wars at long tables. Small, hot, crowded
suites where people packed into even more crowded bathrooms in search of beer,
and no one objected or asked for i.d. when Morris filled a plastic cup with Johnnie
Walker Red (his stepfather's drink of choice) and drained it, and filled it again, and
then a third time before braving the party again.

He was a half-hearted reader of science fiction, and there were faces around him