By William Gibson
She’d had this friend in Cleveland, Lanette, who’d taught her lots of things. How to get out of a car fast if a trick tried to lock the doors on you, how to act when you went to make a buy. Lanette was a little older and mainly used wiz, she said, “to move the down around,” being frequently downed-out on anything from endorphin analogs to plain old Tennessee opium. Otherwise, she said, she’d just sit there twelve hours in front of the vid watching any kind of shit at all. When the wiz added mobility to the warm invulnerability of a good down, she said, you really had something. But Mona noticed that people who were seriously into downs spent a lot of time throwing up, and she couldn’t see why anybody would watch a vid when they could stim just as easy. (Lanette said simstim was just more of what she wanted out of.)
She had Lanette on her mind because Lanette used to give her advice sometimes, like how to turn a bad night around.
Tonight, she thought, Lanette would tell her to look for a bar and some company. She still had some money left from her last night’s work in Florida, so it was a matter of finding a place that took cash.
She hit it right, first try. A good sign. Down a narrow flight of concrete stairs and into a smokey buzz of conversation and the familiar, muted thump of Shabu’s “White Diamonds.” No place for suits, but it wasn’t what the pimps in Cleveland called a spot, either. She was no way interested in drinking in any spot, not tonight.
Somebody got up from the bar to leave just as she came …
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Author: High Times / High Times
