C12 Don't tickle me!
Sony Boy was sitting in the gold lame chair, dressed in blue sequins and six-inch heels.
She wore her hair piled in twirls on top of her head like some cotton-candy courtesan in the court of Louis XIV.
Dinkleberry liked to think of Sonny Boy’s style as Gaudy Chic.
She always said the fuchsia streaks in her long black hair were a leftover from her days of turning tricks on the streets of San Francisco.
When she was sixteen, she became so obsessed with completing a personal project that she got fired from three jobs in five months.
She decided to work her own hours, her own way. She started turning tricks.
She liked the attention.
The money was great for a sixteen-year-old drag queen.
And breaking into NASA was such a bust.
In contrast to the dark blue sequins, she wore violet eye shadow and blood-red lipstick and nails.
She always wore the gold collar—not unlike a dog’s— because, she said, it went with her gold lame chair.
Dinkleberry often wondered what exactly Sonny Boy’s relationship with Shroud amounted to.
She seemed to have him by the balls.
But the gold collar—not unlike a dog’s—might suggest something even darker.
“What up, Dink?” Sonny Boy asked from on high, waving her long pink cigarette holder with one hand and lifting her Martini with the other.
The gold lame chair, apparently special-ordered by Shroud, sat a foot higher than the wheelie stools most of the other stiffs used.
All the stations were the same in Deep 6.
The walls were mounted with monitors from ceiling to floor.
The wheels on the stools made them easy to maneuver when a stiff needed to shoot around the room to follow a rapid sequence of information showing up in one monitor and then another, and then another in which it might be broken down in numerous ways and then appear through a sequence of monitors, like fireballs of shooting stars crossing the screens, and then merging into fleeting light formations that had to be interpolated in a few seconds for negative indicators or unexpected trends.
The job of the operator was to reach a conclusion and respond appropriately.
These conclusions could have global repercussions.
“I needed a break,” Dink said. “I thought you might be able to fix me up.”
“Oh, dear, did some vicious rumor-monger tell you it was snowing in Deep 6?” she asked, leaping up and going to the jewel-encrusted case sitting on her desk. “Did some vicious rumor-monger tell you it was all fresh powder?”
“Fresh?”
“Fresh from the Andes, girl. From coca leaves picked by human hands baking with blisters beneath the tropical sun—packed and shipped by those blistering hands—and then delivered by some poor union lackey who’s content with his lousy paycheck—all for our personal pleasure.”
“Straight from Peru?” Dink asked.
“Hand-delivered by one of our favorite junta generals.”
“It’s pure?”
“Pure as a baby honkey’s ass,” Sonny Boy smiled.
It was little surprises like this that always made Dink wonder about Sonny Boy’s relationship with Shroud.
There hadn’t been a shred of shit in Deep 6 for three days now.
Stiffs were licking wrappers that the shit didn’t even come in.
Candy wrappers, tinfoil, cellophane from cigarette packs.
Sonny Boy had pure shit—on a Friday afternoon.
Sonny Boy lifted the baggy, fat with white powder.
“Sweetie Boy,” Sonny Boy said. “We could have a snowball fight with this shit.”
Three ounces of it, Dink thought.
“We could go sledding, Sonny Boy.”
Pure. Not a bit of shit.
No speed.
No baby powder.
Nothing to give you the shits.
Dink was sure he had come across such a phenomena one afternoon when he was doing eighty a week for a software company in Silicon Valley and everyone was snorting up in the stalls of the men’s room.
He found it on the back of the toilette seat when he locked the door behind him.
Someone had forgotten his stash.
Someone had actually taken a shit.
He saw the guy walk out with a great big smile.
Everyone in the line behind Dink was laughing.
Dink discovered what the man found so humorous.
He walked out of the pisser with the same big smile.
The smile lasted till quitting time.
Sonny Boy sat down in her gold lame chair with the onyx tray on her lap, and began chopping up the crystal with a razor blade.
As always she had a rolled up thousand-dollar bill at her side.
Sonny Boy was convinced that larger bills provided a better drug delivery system.
She talked about making counterfeit billion-dollar bills so that the Great Unwashed—as she referred to everyone but herself—could have the pleasure of battering their nasal membranes with a bill bearing the likeness of Sonny Boy on her wedding day.
Sonny Boy could really get strung out sometimes.
She offered the thousand-dollar bill and onyx tray to Dinkleberry.
Dink tightened the roll of the bill and slipped it up his nostril.
Holding the bill with one hand, he brought the tray to his chin and pulled air through the bill.
The soft white powder left a light burn along his nasal passage.
There were two lines on the tray.
Dink couldn’t be sure if the second one was for him, or for Sonny Boy.
He repressed himself from stealing it.
He hated people who assumed a second line was theirs and then got so animatedly guilty when they realized the— supposed—mistake they’d made.
He lifted his head and pressed his one clean nostril so he could suck more air through the coke nostril, making sure to suck every little sign of the shit up into his brain.
And then his brain began to buzz.
“That’s sweet shit,” Dink said to Sonny Boy who feigned politeness in a grand gesture of relieving Dink of the tray.
The second line was going to be Sonny Boy’s.
“Tell me something,” Dinkleberry said. “Have you come across a video of naked boys under twelve being drawn and quartered?”
“Why do you ask?”
“There’s a Shadow freak who wants me to track it down for him.”
“Don’t those fucks even know how to use a search engine?”
“They’re accustomed to getting other people to do things for them.”
“Where?”
“Where-what?”
“Where’s the kid getting drawn and quartered?”
“Somewhere in Russia.”
“Shit, that’s a slap on the wrist in the Russian porn industry.”
“Have you come across it?”
“Of course I’ve come across it. I’ve watched it three times!”
“Do you know where I can find it?”
“I’m telling you,” Sonny Boy said while bringing the onyx tray up to his chin. “It’s not nearly as good as the boys getting sliced live in Central Asia. They cook the little shits!”
“What’s it called?”
Sonny Boy lifted his head and let out an uproarious laugh.
“It’s called Don’t Tickle Me!”
Sonny Boy celebrated the hilarity of that with a second line.
Dink went into a trance watching a ball of shooting stars travel around half the monitors in the room and then disappear into a white vapor that evaporated into nothingness.
“Do you ever have any doubts about what we’re doing here, Sonny Boy?” Dink asked Sonny Boy.
“I got no doubts about nothin’,” Sonny Boy said. “When the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse come leaping across this planet while we’re watching it go up in ashes, there won’t be nothing left to believe or doubt. There won’t be nothin’ left of nothin’. And I’m going to be right here at the helm with the Good Lord standing right beside me.”
Dink hated it when Sonny Boy started ranting about this Apocalypse shit.
“How much is the new shit?” he asked Sonny Boy.
“Two hundred a gram.”
“Jesus!”
“This shit can take you to the man himself.”
“Do you have any of that cheap shit left?”
“You mean the shit with the speed in it? You’re gonna do that shit instead of this shit?”
She was flinging her arms all over the place with her usual flamboyance to illustrate how lame he was.
“Maybe next month,” Dink said. “I’m a little short right now.”
“You been losing at the Level Seven Casino?”
“I never gamble, Sonny Boy—you know that.”
Sonny Boy sat back in his gold lame chair and thought it over.
“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “I’ll let you have the first one for a hundred.”
Dink knew damn well it was the old cheap-addiction trick. Get hooked on the first cheap hit and pay full price for the rest of your life.
Dinkleberry reached for his wallet.
“I’ll take it,” he said.
Sonny Boy expressed pleasure at this and handed him the onyx tray with a second line.
“This one’s for love,” she said with a seductive wink.
By the time Dink got back to his station, TransGlobal was a forgotten memory.
He couldn’t even be sure if he’d fucked Sonny Boy or not.
But he did remember the title Don’t Tickle Me!
That was what was important.
