All Tomorrow's Parties

37. A LITTLE SHIT MONEY

BOOMZILLA, with a little shit money tonight, debit chip he got off those truck bitches, goes down to Lucky Dragon. That's where he goes when he gets money, because they got all the shit.

Food he likes there, because it's not bridge food; food like on TV, out of a package. And everything: shit to look at, the games they got in there. Best place.

Someday he'll have his shit together right. He'll live in a house, and it will be clean as Lucky Dragon. All lit up like that, and he'll get those camera balloons like the truck bitches. Watch everybody's ass and nobody fuck with him.

Gets the chip out, walking up to the front, because if he has it in his hand, shows it to the security, security'd let him in. Security wants to know you're a player. Otherwise, you'd steal. Boomzilla understands that.

Tonight is different. Tonight a big white truck in front of Lucky Dragon. Biggest, cleanest truck he's ever seen. No writing on it, SoCal plates, couple of securities standing out by it. Boomzilla wonders if this what they bring the new games in? Never seen this before.

So in the doors, holding up his chip, and heads over, like he does, first to the candy.

Boomzilla likes this Jap candy that's like a little drug lab. You mix these different parts, it fizzes, gets hot, cools. You do this extrusion-molding thing and watch it harden. When you eat it, it's just candy, but Boomzilla likes making it.

Gets six of those, pissed there's no grape, and a couple or two chocos. Spends a good long time by the machine that makes magazines, watching screens, all the different shit you can get put in your magazine. Then back to get his noodles, kind you add water and pull the string.

Back there, deciding between beef and chicken, he sees they've unfastened a whole piece of Lucky Dragon wall. Next to GlobEx and the cash machine.

So he thinks this is what the white truck is about, some new thing to put in there, and he wonders if it's maybe a game.

White men in white paper suits working on the section of wall.

Watches them, then goes back to the front, shows his shit. Checker runs his shit over the window that counts, takes Boomzilla's chip and debits it, There goes his shit money.

Takes his bag outside and finds a curb to sit on. Pretty soon he'll start making the first candy. Red one.

He looks past the white truck to the screens there, by the front, and he notices white trucks on half the screens. So all over the world now, these white trucks sitting outside Lucky Dragons, so it must mean something new is being put in all of them tonight.

Boomzilla unseals the candy and studies the multistage but entirely nonverbal instructions.

Gotta get it right.