Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [63]
I have to say that as soon as I got used to the split-screen, I loved it. On one side, you could see the band getting ready, all the members psyching themselves up and getting into character. The Loopy Louies were like bikers, guys in denim and old sweatshirts who whaled the hell out of their instruments. Three guitarists, one drummer, and they were all in a little world of their own, of course. Bass guitarist is a husky guy with a lot of thick black hair, a day’s growth of beard and carrying around a bottle of something amber-colored with a label that says “Jim Beam” on it. He offers everybody a swig, including the Latinettes, who are teasing each other’s hair and putting on make-up on top of make-up on top of make-up. And then up in the top left corner of the screen, you get his bio: Lionel LeBlanc, graduate student in English, writing a thesis on Milton. Yes, Uncle Miltie! The guy is a scholar of Berle’s Divine Comedy and he’s wandering around with a bottle of Jim Beam and burping. You’ve got to love it.
The Latinaires are such a precision dance team that they can take the bottle from the Uncle Miltie scholar, swig, and pass it on to the next one without missing a beat or a hand gesture. They’re all mouthing something about a great pretender, the purple satin shirts look like liquid metal, the tight pants and the pointy shoes are positively low-rider classic.
But you just know that the Latinettes did their hair for them. The four girls keep running over and putting more spray on their curls, even though the Latinaires are protesting left and right that they don’t need any more. Then the girls tease each other’s hair even higher — they’ve got great big bubbles on their heads, and in back it’s something called a French twist. They’re all wearing halter-top dresses in a leopard print and pointy-toed flats that they can do the Twist in.
And then there’s Larry. Little Latin Larry. He really is little—maybe five feet, four inches, about as tall as the next tallest Latinette (the tallest one is close to six feet, over that if you include the hair, of course) and very Latin-looking, even more so, somehow, than the Latinaires, who are all, to a man, perfectly Spanish, according to their bios. The three Rodriguez brothers and their cousin the Cheech man. Larry is also their cousin on their father’s side; on Larry’s mother’s side, however, he’s Italian. Or so the bio tells me.
Meanwhile, out front in the bar, the audience is getting into character. This is, apparently, one of those time-warp occasions, where everybody would pretend it was a time that it wasn’t anymore. Which is to say, the kind of music, the kind of performance the band gives is mostly something from twenty or thirtyyears before—everything here is a little vague, but that’s a product of the Collapse and we’re all used to it.
The crowd in the bar doesn’t seem to be aware of any time difference. Either they’ve always liked this music, or they don’t know any time has passed. Orthey don’t care. Or they wouldn’t care if they did know. As the bar becomes more crowded, you start getting audience ghosts—a common occurrence, really, for a lot of these sorts of events. Usually, you don’t worry too much about them, they’ll disappear after awhile if they’re real ghosts and if they’re not, they solidify and fall into place wherever they’re supposed to fit in. These did neither.
Ghosts kept following me around in the bar and I couldn’t decide what was really happening — whether they were some product of the memory bit, either the ancestor’s imagination at work or the descendant’s, or whether the memory bit had been corrupted or polluted