Little Heroes

by Norman Spinrad

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

Muzic Inc had become a music industry giant by staying one step ahead of the game, but for some reason APs (totally cybernetic rock stars) had failed to ship gold. That was where Glorianna O'Toole came in. The Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll was well into her sixties, but with her producer they hoped to synthesize an AP that would really take off. Glorianna hated everything Muzic Inc had done to the rebel music of her youth, but for the sake of a steady supply of designer dust she was prepared to try and rekindle the revolutionary music spirit of the 1960s. Meanwhile, at street level, the wire wizards had come up with a new piece of technology: a portable trip machine that made Owsley acid look like a vitamin supplement...

Release date: December 21, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 727

Sample

Glorianna O’Toole had seen better times and worse.

At the occasional peaks of her long career, she had opened for the likes of Pearl and the Airplane and Springsteen, and had even gotten out two solo albums of her own, though neither had come within a light year of ever shipping gold.

At various karmic nadirs, she had been reduced to dealing acid in the Haight, suffered through a two-year amphetamine jones, and been forced to sing voice-overs in cheap TV commercials.

In between the heights and depths, which is to say most of her forty years as a rock and roll singer, she had done more back-up work on other people’s albums than she cared to remember now, had taken an endless succession of tank-town tours of the universe, and while it had taken her a very long time to stop hoping for better, who could say that it had not been one long blast?

Certainly not the self-styled Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll as she tooled along the freeway in her monstrous old Rolls-Royce convertible.

She had lucked into a deal on the car as the buyout of his debt on a fucked-up coke deal by a rock star who need be nameless, her sometime lover and never again partner, who had laid it on her as a basket case. Over the years, with this and that score, she had used her charms to have it lovingly restored at cut-rate prices by the best in the business. It hadn’t even started out as a convertible. That had been done as a surprise birthday present by Sam Perry to get her over her case of the over-thirty-five blues. Replacing all the metalwork with solid brass she had done slowly over the years at her own expense. The free paint job must have cost her thousands in retouching over the past ten years, but who could slap a new coat of lacquer over such a work of art?

One mad afternoon, she had turned on a trio of New York graffiti artists to mescaline for the first time at her Laurel Canyon tree house. Within two hours, they had turned the Rolls into their piece de resistance with their spray cans, not so surprising, since in those days one of those dudes was capable of putting up a throw on a whole subway car in thirty minutes.

But Glorianna’s Rolls had been a unique throw even then, a fitting memorial to the lost art, for there, under the shade of the eucalyptus, looking out over Los Angeles to the Pacific on a clear mescaline-blue day, these three refugees from Manhattan had been moved to create what may have been the world’s only example of graffiti pastorale, a phantasmagorical stylized arabesque rendering of mountains, and sea, and sunset, of the jeweled cityscape of night and the night city of the stars, all done up in brilliant blues, and forest greens, and neon swirls, and of course with the Hollywood sign rendered in psychedelic gold across both front door panels.

The stereo system, on the other hand, was a much more recent manifestation of her current ectoplasmic means of support. This she had suggested Tod Benjamin lay on her back when he was still president of Muzik, Inc. in return for procuring certain necessary substances for obstreperously sensitive talent.

Glorianna had her scruples about actually dealing dope. Long experience had taught her that the paranoia of dealing was terminally bad for the psyche, and morality insisted that participating in the obscene profiteering that had been going on for the last twenty-five years was karmic poison to the soul. But if she could assist the needy without becoming one of the greedy, well that was her good deed for the day, and it certainly was worth a present from the Factory’s A&R budget.

Glorianna had been luscious jailbait when she hit the Haight in sixty-six, a sexy rock and roll queen in her long youth, a red hot mama in the flower of her maturity, and now, with her pipes long since honorably retired, and her looks gone to gray hair and wrinkles, the Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll got by on her chutzpah and her connections.

And north of forty years in rock and roll had cushioned her shaky retirement as a singer with plenty of both. Though part of the karmic contract seemed to be that none of them had held her full interest for more than a year or two, a red hot mama of a sometime lead singer who really knew how to boogie had had her pick of lovers well through her fourth decade, and while none of them had stuck as her one and only, more of them than not were still her friends.

And inevitably, since she had met so many of them through the music business, and since all of them had long since reached their mature years, a good many of them were placed where they could assist her in her survival enterprises.

So if Glorianna’s golden years were not exactly financially sound, at least she was well set up to boogie through them. The mortgage on the house had long since been paid off, the Rolls she owned outright, she made sure she had more dinner invitations than she could ever accept, she hadn’t had to pay for getting loaded in twenty years, she had instant imperious access to the freebie list of every club and concert in the known universe, and so all she really needed money for was gas, clothes, utilities, and metabolic enhancers.

It was by way of obtaining a fresh supply of same that she had deigned to take a meeting with Billy Beldock at the Muzik Factory. For while she loathed just about everything that Muzik, Inc. had done to rock and roll, even the Crazy Old Lady thereof could hardly afford to turn down an offer to talk business from the latest president to pass through the revolving door of the conglomerate monstrosity that had come to so utterly dominate the music business.

Glorianna took the Wilshire exit off the 405, and sailed through the traffic east on Wilshire amid the usual bug-eyed stares a couple of blocks beyond Westwood Boulevard to the Muzik Factory.

This was a twenty-story tower of mirror glass the color of a motorcycle cop’s shades. Rainbow glass pillars ran up the four corners to form a false deco pagoda roof at the top supporting the Factory logo – ‘Muzik’ lettered in gold like notes beneath a tie-line. At night, they ran laser beams through the whole thing, so that it reminded Glorianna of some ancient Mafia jukebox in a sleazy Valley bar.

An appropriate corporate image for Muzik, Inc. as far as Glorianna was concerned.

For while no one could accuse Muzik, Inc. of being owned by some petty mob of gangsters from Sicily or yaks from Yokohama, the yaks and the maf could certainly learn something about big league sleaze from the Muzik Factory.

Muzik, Inc. pressed forty-five percent of the videodiscs sold in the United States, and moved the lion’s share of them through their own nationally franchized chain of Muzik Stores. They had Muzik clubs in New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, and San Francisco. They had a string of twenty-four-hour music TV stations all across the country hyping their own product. They were to the music business what IBM was to the computer industry or McDonald’s still was to grease burgers, and somehow there was nothing that what was left of the antitrust division of the Justice Department cared to do about it. They were employing people, weren’t they?

Glorianna showed her permanent pass, parked in the underground garage, and took the express elevator to the twentieth floor. Even here there was a screen and quad speakers subjecting her to the national satellite feed from MUZIK, some dead-ass plastic max metal thing with a ton of swagger and rubber underwear and a spec sheet for a soul.

Oh yes, Muzik, Inc. had by far the biggest payroll in the music business, for sure they employed more people than they would like. They employed techs to program the production robots in their disc factories, and they employed bartenders, bouncers, waitresses, and assorted flunkies in their clubs, and they employed five VJs and a small team of workers to beam the MUZIK feed to their satellite and maybe a hundred or so others to handle it at the TV stations at the other end.

But mostly they employed the people who turned out this shit.

They didn’t employ drummers or keyboard players or guitarists or any other kind of session musicians. They employed instead VoxBox wizards who could replace bands, orchestras, and even back-up vocalists, with a keyboard, a vocoder, and a black box full of wizardware.

They employed platoons of shrinks and unemployed former Pentagon psy-war spooks to think up best-selling scenarios for their songhacks and VoxBox mercenaries to turn into lyrics and music, and they employed producers and sound crews to record the audio, and once in a while they even still hired cameramen to shoot some footage their image organ hacks couldn’t quite conjure up from raw bits and bytes or stock footage.

And of course Muzik, Inc. was an endless gravy train for PR people, market experts, demographic analysts, disc pluggers, and the ‘consultants’ who were the beneficiaries of their freebies, among them, admittedly, Glorianna herself.

The ubiquitous Muzik motto assaulted her eyes as the elevator doors opened onto the twentieth floor. Even here at the top, the golden letters were emblazoned on the wall directly across from the elevator bank, as if nobody in the Muzik Factory, and especially the head honcho of the moment, had better forget it:

‘MUZIK is Music!’

Maybe, Glorianna thought sourly, but it sure ain’t Rock and Roll!

The head honcho of the current moment, Billy Beldock, sat in the familiar black leather throne in the big corner office with the frazzled look of a man who expected to have it yanked out from under him at any moment.

Glorianna, over the years, had seen many asses perched in the black leather chair behind the big polished gunmetal desk, and over the years they had changed the president’s office little.

There were two picture-window walls – one gazing up at the eternal dream of Hollywood, at the houses and condos and villas glitzing and glittering up the hills, the other looking out from on high over the vast smog-shrouded barrio of lowland Los Angeles, where most of the city’s people struggled for survival, an endless genteel favela in full sight of the city on the hill. As if to say to all who entered here, there but for show biz, go you, kiddo, no matter how far you’ve managed to climb, your plug can always be pulled.

There was a wall-sized video screen with the current state-of-the-art decks, and there was a whole wall of miniature yellow videodiscs to remind the current occupant of the gold shipped by his predecessors, just in case he missed the point.

The only possible personal touches were changes of incidental furniture and bric-a-brac, since the sadist who had designed the president’s office had cleverly seen to it that there was no blank wall upon which to hang personal artwork.

Billy had filled the place with the sort of horrendous mismatched collection of antique French couches and chairs that decorators used to embellish the waiting rooms of superstar transplant surgeons.

Poor Billy certainly looked uncomfortable in this ultimate motel room of music industry power as he sat there in a two-thousand-dollar powder-blue suit smiling peculiarly at her with his shoulders hunched slightly, as if to say with some embarrassment, ‘What a long strange trip it’s been.’

He had been a drummer back in the early seventies when they were lovers, not a great one, but a real rock and roller, and good enough to keep himself riding around in a Porsche. When sophisticated Drumulators and percussion synthesizers enlisted drummers in the great army of the unemployed, Billy had read the writing on the video screen wall well enough to go with the wizard ware rather than go out rockin’ with his drum kit. He got hold of one of the early primitive VoxBoxes, went with the enemy, became the producer of some early VoxBox hits, and gained entry to the business end, and now, here he was, at the top of the corporate pyramid, about to have his heart ripped out and sacrificed to the Great God of the Sacred Bottom Line, by the look of him.

‘You look as sexy as ever, Glorianna,’ he said by way of greeting.

‘You look like an old man, Billy,’ Glorianna replied, resting her bones as best she could on the uncomfortable chair in front of the desk.

Actually, as a physical specimen of mature manhood, Billy still really wasn’t so bad. He kept his body trim with the best metabolic enhancers, he gardened his luxuriant crop of long silver-gray hair with expensive German scalp fertilizer, and he had the perfect leathery tan of endless weekends in Hawaii and Mexico.

But as John Lennon once observed, one thing you can’t hide is when you’re crippled inside.

Billy shrugged, and grimaced owlishly at her. From the Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll, the president of Muzik, Inc. would take this shit; indeed, he craved it, as Glorianna knew full well. Her attitude was her major stock-in-trade in these dim days with all these poor old rockers who had become the people they had long ago warned themselves about. Oh, yes, they could feel like winners feeling sorry for this poor old broken-down anachronism from their musical prehistory, but some sad part of them needed to know that Glorianna O’Toole still felt sorry for them.

‘Yeah, well, I’m not going to get very much older in this chair unless I start shipping some AP gold,’ Billy said frankly. ‘The stuff just isn’t making it big enough, and our stock is down seven points from its fifty-two-week high.’

‘Maybe there is a God, after all, and maybe he knows how to boogie.’

‘Aw, come on, Glorianna, you know that APs have to be the future of the industry,’ Billy whined. ‘It’s too cost-effective not to be inevitable.’

‘What do you want from me, Billy?’ Glorianna asked. ‘You know how I feel about AP rock stars. It’ll never work.’

‘But it does work!’ Billy insisted. ‘I got here proving it, didn’t I? We’re shipping respectable numbers on Lady Leather and Gay Bruce and the Velvet Cat and even Mucho Muchacho, and nobody outside the industry even believes the rumors that they’re APs. I just haven’t been able to come up with a big hit, is all. You just don’t want to believe we can synthesize a major league rock star.’

Having long since replaced sessions musicians and backup singers with VoxBox cyberwizards, Muzik, Inc. had turned their cost-cutting attention to automating out rock stars themselves. They collected big royalties, didn’t they? They were egotistical pains in the ass who frequently showed up at recording sessions stoned or not at all. They didn’t want to listen to the demographic experts or the marketing department; they wanted the songhacks to turn out material to their own specs. Fuck ’em! Who needed ’em? Let’s replace them with Artificial Personalities who we don’t have to pay royalties to and who won’t give us any prima-donna shit!

The wizard ware was certainly there. Journeyman VoxBox players had been synthesizing back-up vocals out of voice programs for years, syncing them to the bass or counterpoint line, so in theory all you had to do was play the synthetic voice track with the instrumental lead, and you had yourself a lead singer. As for the visual persona, APs starred in half the TV commercials made, and you couldn’t tell the footage from something shot with a live actor. You gave your image organ player a still photo and he danced it through the bits and bytes, or even created an AP visual out of pure specs if the little nerd insisted on being a cyberpurist.

What was more, Muzik, Inc. had turned hit-making into a science, hadn’t it? The psychological profiles of the total mass audience had been broken down into fine demographic slices, and the boys in the research department had a trillion kilobytes of words, images, rhythms, chord progressions, and inaudibles keyed into their inner mythic structure. And the marketing department, making full use of the Muzik clubs, and the Muzik Stores, and MUZIK was for sure the Big Green Machine.

So why had Lady Leather and Mucho Muchacho and the Velvet Cat and the rest of Muzik, Inc.’s stable of well-crafted AP software never shipped gold or cracked the charts with a megahit?

If this was an arcane mystery to poor Billy and everyone else who had forgotten the obvious, it was crystal-clear to Glorianna O’Toole, and anyone who had to ask was never going to find out.

‘That soulless crap is to the real thing as white bread is to pumpernickel,’ she declared from the bottom of her heart. ‘It’s –’

‘I know, I know,’ Billy sighed, joining her on the chorus.

‘It’s just not Rock and Roll.’

Billy laughed; he reached into a drawer and came out with a dust kit, a silver mirror, a golden straw, a tiny golden switchblade that he snicked open with a flourish, and a crystal vial of the blue powder. And for a moment he was forty years younger, laying out lines for her in one of the hundreds of motel rooms they had once shared together.

‘I haven’t become quite that much of an asshole, Glorianna,’ he said as he cut a pile of the synthetic into hits. ‘I know what’s missing. That’s why you’re here today.’

‘It is?’ Glorianna said with a sinking feeling, grabbing for the mirror. ‘Give me some of that designer dust, will you? I’ve got the feeling somehow that I’m really gonna need it.’

She tooted up a line of the tailored blow, so much better than the crude Peruvian extract of her youth and middle years that an old doper like her needn’t worry about overtaxing her cheaply enhanced metabolism or developing a jones again in her dotage. Soft on the nose, sweet to the taste, non addictive, and a blast of energy to the brain. Just what the geriatrician ordered.

‘Look, Glorianna, we’ve got one of the best young VoxBox players in the business, Sally Genaro. And we got Bobby Rubin, who’s the absolute state of the art on the image organ. They’ve both worked on AP discs before, so we know the wizard ware is there, and we know that these kids can make it do anything …’

‘Except boogie.’

Billy shrugged. He did a line of dust. ‘So she’s a little fat girl from the Valley and he’s a second-generation computer nerd,’ he admitted. He beamed at her falsely. ‘That’s why we want you.’

‘To do what?’ Glorianna demanded dubiously, declining another hit with an imperiously upraised palm.

‘To make them, boogie.’

‘Huh?’

Billy leaned back in his chair and played presidential. ‘For old times’ sake, I’m about to give you the chance of a lifetime,’ he declared expansively.

‘I’ll bet you are, Billy,’ Glorianna said with dripping sarcasm.

‘I kid you not, Glorianna, I’m offering you a chance to be a producer. Ten grand a month. Four-month trial period. All you have to do is get these kids to come up with one AP rock star that ships gold two discs in a row and I’ll give you a three-year contract.’

‘Fuck you, Billy,’ Glorianna said genially.

‘Aw, come on, don’t bullshit a bullshitter, I know you need the money, but okay, okay, twelve grand a month, that’s really as far as I’m going to go.’

‘You want me to produce an AP rock star?’ Glorianna said with angry passion. ‘You want me to take the bullshit cranked out by your songhacks and your marketing department’s specs and somehow get two dead-ass cyber-wizards to spin it into gold? You want me to collaborate in the creation of a best-selling rock star who exists only as software?’

‘You got it,’ Billy said approvingly. ‘You’ll be in charge. We’ll give you sets of specs, and you choose which ones to go with. You can order up whatever you like from whichever songhacks you choose. Do it your way. Give me a viable AP rock star, I don’t care how.’

‘Why me?’ Glorianna said, and she found herself up and pacing before she could think about it. ‘You know how I feel about APs, you know how much I hate the whole idea, you know as well as I do that a disc with no soul will never be real rock and roll!’

‘Two out of three ain’t bad,’ Billy said.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

Billy Beldock leaned across his desk, pushing the dust kit toward her, and practically purred at her, the way he had the very first night that the sexy young drummer had coaxed her into bed. He even gave her what was left of his bedroom eyes.

‘Why you, Glorianna?’ he said slyly. ‘Because you’re the Crazy Old Lady of Rock and Roll. Because inside that, ah, mature body, there still beats the heart of a rock and roll queen. Your voice is gone and you hardly ever wrote your own material, and you can’t play the VoxBox or the image organ, but what you’ve got left is all that we need to complete the equation, the soul without which, as you say, no disc can ever really be rock and roll.’

‘What a line of bullshit,’ Glorianna scoffed. But she sat down and tooted another line of free dust as Billy Beldock spun out his temptation.

‘Look at it this way, Glorianna, you’d be falling all over me in gratitude if I was offering to let you take a band and some song-writers and a raw lead singer with technical virtuosity and try to turn them into the Beatles or the Rolling Stones at our expense even if I wasn’t paying you twelve thou a month for the privilege; can you deny that with a straight face?’

Before she could answer, he had snorted another line, and was off and running again. ‘So what’s the difference? Like the man says, it’s not the singer, it’s the song, right, so if a disc needs soul to ship gold, then if it ships gold, it’s real rock and roll, and what’s the difference between a live lead singer and a wizard piece of software when you pop it in your disc deck? Either way, all you really see or hear is a digital playback.’

‘Even if it were possible, even if I could really do it, it would be wrong, Billy,’ Glorianna said quite earnestly.

‘Would you mind explaining why?’ Billy said smugly.

‘Because … because …’ She threw up her hands. ‘Because you fucking can’t make real music without a single real musician! Jesus H. Christ, Billy!’

‘For sure!’ Billy Beldock agreed. ‘But don’t you see – that’s you!’

‘Me? I don’t write lyrics, I don’t write music, I can’t play anything, and my voice is shot! I don’t have any way to make music anymore, goddammit!’

‘Wouldn’t you like to?’

‘Wouldn’t I like to what?’

‘If we conjure up Mucho Muchacho or the Velvet Cat out of nothing but chips, programming, and data base, we can sure as shit do you, Glorianna,’ Billy cooed. ‘Think of it, your cyborged comeback at the age of sixty-three! We could take your cracked old voice and run it through vocoders that will make it better than young again, better than you or anyone else ever was back when you were never quite good enough to have a real career as a recording artist. We could lay down visual tracks in which you’ll be what you were in the sixties, young and beautiful, and solarized forever. You just do the best you can and our wizards will cyborg you into a superstar. Wouldn’t that be real rock and roll?’

‘Fuck a duck …’ Glorianna whispered softly. ‘You really could do that, couldn’t you?’

The president of Muzik, Inc. just smiled a shit-eating smile. ‘You squeeze an AP rock star that ships gold two discs in a row out of my little cyberwizards, and we do you next,’ he said.

Glorianna snorted a line up her left nostril. ‘Do I have to sign a contract in blood?’ she asked, and took another up the right.

‘I gather I’ve made you an offer you can’t refuse?’ Billy Beldock said.

Glorianna’s brain was working in overdrive now. Sure, giving Muzik, Inc. what they thought they wanted would seem to be treason to the spirit of everything she had ever been or believed in.

Nevertheless, she felt that long-remembered spirit moving through her now like the music of a braver and grander age waiting to be reborn through her frail and age-drained body and wizard ware circuitry.

Because if by some miracle she succeeded, if she could somehow fulfill her end of the bargain with the corporate powers, why then the assholes would get far more than they had ever bargained for. They would get themselves the Glorianna O’Toole that had never existed except in her heart of hearts.

For forty years and more, her one great dream had been to become, if only for one shining hour, the great voice of that spirit which had now all but vanished from the world. And if it was given to her to become at this late date, through the machineries of the enemy, the reigning queen of rock and roll she had never in her youth quite been, why then real rock and roll might yet be reborn, and with a vengeance that the powers that be would not like at all.

Because real rock and roll was music that kicked their kind of ass.

And for the chance to do that great deed this close to the end of her road, she would indeed have signed on the dotted line with Satan.

‘Billy, my love,’ she told the president of Muzik, Inc. almost gaily, ‘you’ve made me an offer that you can’t understand.’

Nada, man, zip! Paco Monaco had scored nothing in the past eight days – no dinero, no chocha, no wire, and now the wan October sun was oozing down the flinty gray sky over East Fourteenth Street, and it was La Hora Frontera of another wasted day.

You’re getting too old for this shit, muchacho, Paco told himself once more. La Hora Frontera did this to him lately, he hated this twilight time between day and night in his bones, even as the gordos feared it in their tight white culos, if not for quite the same reason.

One by one the lights behind the windows of the Stuyvesant Town co-op towers on the north side of the street were coming on as the hordes of the gainfully employed sidled nervously past him into the safety of their nighttime holes. The zonies guarding the open gate in the high electrified barbed-wire fence paced in paranoid little circles stroking their Uzis, and then the mercury vapor spots snapped on, searing the cracked gray pavement with cruel television-blue light.

Without conscious thought, Paco found himself dashing reflexively across the gutter to the sombre side of the street like a roach scuttling into the shadowland beneath the sink after the kitchen light came on.

He stood there with an empty street-bag in the shadows by the stoop of a burnt-out building staring across the Line at the ancient redbrick apartment houses and cursed himself for the pettiness of his longings.

For he was still haunted by the faded early childhood memories of a life inside the walls of a project not that much unlike this one, over on Avenue D, when he, and his mother, and his two sisters, and two teenaged uncles had lived in the two-bedroom apartment of his abuelos. Memories of hot stuffy steam-heated winters and sweaty stinking summers, of rancid cooking odors, and farts, and toilet sounds, and the cries and grunts of fucking.

There had been real food daily in those long-lost days; chicken hearts with spicy rice, cuchifritos, eggs, Coca-Cola, bread, and cheese, and even the occasional ice cream.

Hijito, those were the days, his mother had never stopped telling him, after Abuelo Gutierrez had lost his job in the garment center, after the Devaluation, after the welfare checks dwindled away to a daily ration of kibble, when she staggered back, stinking of wine and cum, to whatever shithole they happened to be squatting in after a long night of hooking.

And then one morning when he was maybe fourteen, she just never came back, ODed, knifed in an alley, busted, quién sabe, and chingada, here he was seven years later, wishing he were what, some pale white gordo with a shit-ass job pushing a rack in the garment district or sweeping the floor of Macy’s, with a quarter share in one of these two-bedroom co-ops, and a fat momacita he was too tired to fuck?

‘Chingada, man, you just need some wire,’ he muttered aloud to himself as he turned on his heel, kicking a paper Coke cup to vent his ire, and headed west along the sombre side of Fourteenth.

But the thing of it was that wire required dinero, and he had been Ciudad Nada for eight days now, and there were only two ways he knew to score.

He could head over to West Street or someplace even worse and sell his dick or his culo to some disgusting old maricón, which he had not had the stomach to do since he turned sixteen, or he could cruise Round the Corner and hope to catch some stupid gordo too stoned to know when he crossed over the Line.

Of course that was just what he had been doing for these past eight days, but mostly up in midtown, where the Line between sombre and sol was clearly drawn by the city cops, and the gordos scurried around in hordes for safety like cucarachas, and Round every Corner lurked little gangs of streeties with a muy malo attitude about solos poaching their turf.

Verdad, during the nine-to-five, the gordos ruled Ciudad Trabajo, the world of gleaming glass canyons in mirror shades, of crumbling loft-factory buildings watched over by hard-eyed zonies, and natch at night, the vecino was deserted by prey and predators alike. When the sun went down, the plushie-tushies retreated in cabs and limos to the Zones – Upper West, Sutton, Lincoln Center, Park Plaza, Soho, ’Beca – where it was all town houses, glitz palaces, fancy restaurants, floodlights, and whole armies of zonies with a license to blow you away just for showing your brown-skinned face.

And the gordos, by their sweaty little millions, stuffed themselves into the subway for the ride home to their half-a-room share in a co-op; even now Paco