To Lie Between the Loins of Perky Pat

TO LIE BETWEEN THE LOINS OF PERKY PAT An excerpt from Mock-Up, an abandoned novel, by Marc Laidlaw

When Morris was seventeen, he didn't see much of his parents. His stepfather was a hot tub salesman who spent most of his time either installing tubs or partying with his customers in those same tubs. Morris's mother had accompanied her husband to some of these parties at first, but clearly her husband's behavior--though she tried to endorse it in the spirit of the times--had uncovered some rigid puritanical scaffolding inside her, and she had taken to spending her own evenings at home, alone with her bottles of wine and a variety of value-neutral pharmaceutical companions. Morris could relate neither to his mother, his stepfather, his much more distant biological father, nor the small-minded suburban idiots whom the society around him considered his peers. Because he had no interest in wandering the burbs at night in search of mildly vandalistic activities such as spray-painting his name on the soundwalls going up alongside the new freeways, nor in pursuing the few girls who might be even remotely interested in him, he found himself wandering farther and farther afield from the tracts of Torrance. In a battered fake-wood- panel station-wagon with a clumsily grafted bubble-roof, he cruised the city canyons of downtown Los Angeles. He glided from Watts to the San Fernando Valley in search of something he would know when he saw it--in search of some magic that might give his life meaning. He idled in the smog-drenched traffic jams as if he were a commuter. The freeway lamps dodged overhead, strobing him with light while the radio spewed Barry Manilow ("At the Copa--Copacabana...") and Eddie Money ("I got...two tickets to paradise...won't you...pack your bags and we'll leave tonight,") and he realized with vague nausea that this was the music left to his generation; realized with greater anguish that the music actually struck him full of pitiful sentiment, that Eddie Money actually touched him--as if the dream of packing his bags for paradise were something his spirit yearned for. He nearly drove into the freeway divider at that realization; nearly rammed himself into oblivion. Instead he pulled himself down an offramp, cruised down the usual strip of Dennys and Copper Pennys and 7/11's, until he saw a glaring sign outside an otherwise unremarkable Holiday Inn: "Welcome Sci-Fi Fans!" He had borrowed enough money from his mother (or at any rate, she had not complained when he dug into her purse, under her very nose) to pay his admission to the event; but once inside, he wondered what he had expected to find. Rooms where wretched B-movies were unreeling, the very same you could watch any weekend afternoon on television. Rooms where dispirited souls lethargically debated the long-term impact of Star-Wars at long tables. Small, hot, crowded suites where people packed into even more crowded bathrooms in search of beer, and no one objected or asked for i.d. when Morris filled a plastic cup with Johnnie Walker Red (his stepfather's drink of choice) and drained it, and filled it again, and then a third time before braving the party again. He was a half-hearted reader of science fiction, and there were faces around him he vaguely recognized from the jackets of novels he had glanced at, if not actually finished. The faces seemed to swim and bob around the room, so he was less than eager to approach any of them, until two came rather close to him. A woman and a man, both like enough to have been brother and sister, with similar hair long and curled, although the woman was tall and very thin, while the man was quite short and plump. Hers was the deeper voice; his was very faint and distant, almost indistinct, as if lost in his thick moustach and bush of beard just shot through with a few strands of grey. Her hair had much more iron in it, threads that stood out like

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