looked at him soberly. She spoke with her lips only, “I’m going to
straddle your mouth.” He felt a rush flood through his body, and then
checked it. She might have actually said, “I’m going to shatter your
myth.” He wasn’t sure. Most people didn’t realize that they moved
their mouths differently when they weren’t speaking out loud. That’s
why most lip-synchers looked so stupid, and also why at that
moment he wasn’t sure if he was about to get the lay of his life, or shit
on by some second-rate rag.
It wasn’t until the crowd had dispersed and she was leading him
by the hand out to her car that he knew for sure. She stopped,
touched his face gently and told him, apparently in total earnestness,
“Lemon, you are going to be a god. And I’m going to help you.”
Then she curled her tongue deep into his left ear.
After the exquisite rush of ecstasy passed, Deaf Lemon Hopkins
asked her who she was. She explained that she was applying for the
position of his manager, lover and guardian angel.
“Well,” said Hopkins politely, “I’d have to think it over. I
presume you’d get fifteen percent.”
Later, in bed, when Deaf Lemon tried to test their working
relationship, she declined to accommodate him to her full capacity.
“What’s wrong?” Hopkins protested.
“Fifteen percent is only a tip,” she declared, then laughed and
pulled him in as deep as he could go.
•
Architecturally, the VTV Metro Plaza Building looked exactly as
Gareth Schlechtmann felt it should: like a giant missile about to
hurtle into the stratosphere and beyond—one which would most
likely tear out a huge chunk of the earth’s crust with it when it took
off, along with any nearby urban sprawl or living debris caught
unawares. A more traditional interpretation might have been that it
looked like an enormous penis; a tremendous phallus that could
never fail, could never be bowed or brought down. Unlike his own, of
course, but that was the beauty of metaphor. With enough money
behind it, a good metaphor could render reality totally irrelevant.
Gazing up at the monolith from Wilshire Boulevard, he realized
just how complete his vision of the new world was about to become.
VTV, originally decried as “the most self-serving, base form of
H O L Y S H I T !
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