"Norman Spinrad - The Fat Vampire2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

them a bit long in the tooth for starlets, with a sprinkling of walk-on credits extracted on low- budget
casting couches, a garage apartment in the hills, and a cranky twelve-year old used Porsche. Women
just short of enough acting talent to make it as tv bit players, possessed of just enough pride to prevent
them from sliding into hookerdom or the fading porn industry, and too indolent, face it, to wait tables in
topless bars.

Women, who, like Christine, surfed through life at the fringes of The Industry via affairs with tv
writers, minor-league actors, and production managers, odd jobs in Santa Monica boutiques, a very
occasional walk-on in a commercial, ectoplasmic this, and crystal- channeling that.

The Count Kubescus and the Barons of Brentwood worked the feminine flip-side of much the same
turf, and while the competition from them might be rather oblique, the idea of actually dating one of
them had always struck Christine as the moral equivalent of fag haggery. Like, what was the point?
To see whose reach for the check could be slowest?

But Armand Kubescu was different.


The man could eat.

It had been fascination, if not exactly lust, at first sight.

Allie Ellison had been one of Christine's closest girlfriends before she married Alex the Plastic
Surgeon; in fact it had been Allie who had taught her the art of vomiting. How to tickle the back of the
throat with a forefinger, the necessity of brushing after every in between course barf in order to avoid
both halitosis and enormous dental bills.

"Bulimia, schmulemia," Allie had assured her, "Everyone who's anyone does it, hon. Jackie Onasis.
Jane Fonda. Margaret Thatcher. Nancy Reagan. It's as American as apple pie alamode with chocolate
sauce. Or you rather spend the rest of your life on lettuce and Rye-crisp?"

Christine had always had a sweet tooth, had always loved pasta, and barbecue, grease burgers and
fried chicken, mashed potatoes with country gravy, huge steaks, slabs of bread slathered with butter or
cheese, guacamole, cheetos, anything with chocolate, everything with whipped cream, and it all had a
tendency to go straight to her belly and ass.

Having spent most of her adult life on starvation diets punctuated by occasional guilt-ridden binges,
Christine had nursed a secret hatred for the sylphan Allie, who seemed capable of cramming anything
and everything down her dainty throat without ever gaining an ounce, until Allie had revealed the
Hollywood Diet Secret.

Then they had become the best of bathroom buddies, even engaging in projectile vomiting contests
for accuracy and distance from time to time. If only men knew what really went on when the girls went

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off together to powder their noses!