Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [56]
Like the other day. Packed in my usual buzzbomb was a silly tag from one of my sillier friends telling me that everyone was saying behind my back that I was the most retro creature they’d ever heard of. I tagged back to tell Old Sillyhead that not only were they saying it behind my back, but also behind my front, too, and in front of my back and all that, and so what.
Anyway, it’s not like I’m detoxing and then relapsing just for the wallop that first sinful sip will give you. I know people who have gone through three and four livers that way, even with top-of-the-line blood-doping. But I don’t consider them drinkers. And personally, I think Teflon™ on the central nervous system is cheating.
And in spite of what you may have heard, the aromabar really is just for amusement, I don’t do aromatherapy of any kind. Of course, anyone who does is welcome to mix themselves a bouquet with my essences and if they want to claim it gives them some kind of therapeutic fizz, I’m not going to argue with them. After all, we all sing our own particular song in our chains, don’t we.
But you’ll want to know about the last remake, won’t you. That last remake. Everybody always wants to know about that. I swear, I’ll do a thousand projects before I go gentle into my subterranean homesick blues and the one thing I’ll be remembered for is that damned remake. Everyone’ll still be mad at me for one of two reasons and by god, they’ll both be wrong.
So, one more time, for the record and with feeling: I did not rediscover Little Latin Larry, and I didn’t kill him.
Who did?
Well, I was afraid you’d ask me that.
First of all, let’s get all the facts we know — all right, all the facts I know — straight. You’ll pardon me if I go over to the bar and fix myself a few memory aids. This brown stuff here, this is an esoteric drink called Old Peculier, which is the liquid equivalent of wrapping yourself in a comfy blanket on an uncommonly bad day. Fair Annie — you wouldn’t know her, she liked the low-profile life—introduced me to it. But this other stuff that looks a lot like, well, frankly, urine—it’s no-class lager. Cheap beer was the term for it then and it was sought after for both its cheapness and its beerness, if you see what I mean.
The Old Peculier is for drinking, just because I like it. But the lager is for smelling, because I can remember Larry best when I smell cheap beer. It was just about the only thing you ever smelled around Larry.
And let’s get something else straight: the full name of the band was Little Latin Larry and His Loopy Louies, His Luscious Latinaires, and His Lascivious Latinettes.
Little Latin Larry was, of course, lead vocalist, conductor, arranger, and erstwhile composer. Which is to say, for a while, he was trying out some originals on the playlist. I’ve heard them. They weren’t too bad, you know; they were just meant to be songs to dance to, or jump up and down to, or puke to, if you went that way (not like the Bulimic Era stuff — that was later, and didn’t have much to do with having a good time). But every time Larry tried to slip in an original, everyone would just kind of stand there looking puzzled. There’d be some people dancing, some people nodding along, a few of the hard-core puking, but most of them just stood around with these lost expressions, and you could tell they were trying to place the song and couldn’t. So Larry forgot about being even a cheap-beer ditty-monger and went back to covers. There were skintil-lions of bands that played covers for anyone who hired them, but when Larry and the band did a cover it was…I could say that when Little Latin Larry and Co. covered a song it was, for the duration, completely their own, as if no one else had ever sung it. And if I did