Wayne tugged his arm firmly. “Come on.”

Larry got all the miles he had felt he could walk. Except that he no longer felt that way. He had an ugly headache and his spine felt as if it had turned to glass. His eyeballs were pulsing and his kidneys ached dully. An amphetamine hangover is not as painful as the morning after the night you got through a whole fifth of Four Roses, but it is not as pleasant as, say, balling Raquel Welch would be. If he had another couple of uppers, he could climb neatly on top of this eight-ball that wanted to run him down. He reached in his pocket to get them and for the first time became aware that he was clad only in skivvies that had been fresh three days ago.

“Wayne, I wanna go back.”

“Let’s walk a little more.” He thought that Wayne was looking at him strangely, with a mixture of exasperation and pity.

“No, man, I only got my shorts on. I’ll get picked up for indecent exposure.”

“On this part of the coast you could wrap a bandanna around your wingwang and let your balls hang free and still not get picked up for indecent exposure. Come on, man.”

“I’m tired,” Larry said querulously. He began to feel pissed at Wayne. This was Wayne’s way of getting back at him, because Larry had a hit and he, Wayne, only had a keyboard credit on the new album. He was no different than Julie. Everybody hated him now. Everyone had the knife out. His eyes blurred with easy tears.

“Come on, man,” Wayne repeated, and they struck off up the beach again.

They had walked perhaps another mile when double cramps struck the big muscles in Larry’s thighs. He screamed and collapsed onto the sand. It felt as if twin stilettos had been planted in his flesh at the same instant.

“Cramps!” he screamed. “Oh man, cramps!”

Wayne squatted beside him and pulled his legs out straight. The agony hit again, and then Wayne went to work, hitting the knotted muscles, kneading them. At last the oxygen-starved tissues began to loosen.

Larry, who had been holding his breath, began to gasp. “Oh man,” he said. “Thanks. That was… that was bad.”

“Sure,” Wayne said, without much sympathy. “I bet it was, Larry. How are you now?”

“Okay. But let’s just sit, huh? Then we’ll go back.”

“I want to talk to you. I had to get you out here and I wanted you straight enough so you could understand what I was laying on you.”

“What’s that, Wayne?” He thought: Here it comes. The pitch. But what Wayne said seemed so far from a pitch that for a moment he was back with the Superboy comic, trying to make sense of a six-word sentence.

“The party’s got to end, Larry.”

“Huh?”

“The party. When you go back. You pull all the plugs, give everybody their car keys, thank everyone for a lovely time, and see them out the front door. Get rid of them.”

“I can’t do that!” Larry said, shocked.

“You better,” Wayne said.

“But why? Man, this party’s just getting going!”

“Larry, how much has Columbia paid you up front?”

“Why would you want to know?” Larry asked slyly.

“Do you think I want to suck off you, Larry? Think.”

Larry thought, and with dawning bewilderment he realized there was no reason why Wayne Stukey would want to put the arm on him. He hadn’t really made it yet, was scuffling for jobs like most of the people who had helped Larry cut the album, but unlike most of them, Wayne came from a family with money and he was on good terms with his people. Wayne’s father owned half of the country’s third-largest electronic games company, and the Stukeys had a modestly palatial home in Bel Air. Bewildered, Larry realized that his own sudden good fortune probably looked like small bananas to Wayne.

“No, I guess not,” he said gruffly. “I’m sorry. But it seems like every tinhorn cockroach-chaser west of Las Vegas—”

“So how much?”

Larry thought it over. “Seven grand up front. All told.”

“They’re paying you quarterly royalties on the single and biannually on the album?”

“Right.”

Wayne nodded. “They hold it until the eagle screams, the bastards. Cigarette?”

Larry took one and cupped the end for a light.

“Do you know how much this party’s costing you?”

“Sure,” Larry said.

“You didn’t rent the house for less than a thousand.”

“Yeah, that’s right.” It had actually been $1,200 plus a $500 damage deposit. He had paid the deposit and half the month’s rent, a total of $1,100 with $600 owing.

“How much for dope?” Wayne asked.

“Aw, man, you got to have something. It’s like cheese for Ritz crackers—”

“There was pot and there was coke. How much, come on?”

“The fucking DA,” Larry said sulkily. “Five hundred and five hundred.”

“And it was gone the second day.”

“The hell it was!” Larry said, startled. “I saw two bowls when we went out this morning, man. Most of it was gone, yeah, but—”

“Man, don’t you remember the Deck?” Wayne’s voice suddenly dropped into an amazingly good parody of Larry’s own drawling voice. “Just put it on my tab, Dewey. Keep em full.”

Larry looked at Wayne with dawning horror. He did remember a small, wiry guy with a peculiar haircut, a whiffle cut they had called it ten or fifteen years ago, a small guy with a whiffle haircut and a T-shirt reading JESUS IS COMING & IS HE PISSED. This guy seemed to have good dope practically failing out of his asshole. He could even remember telling this guy, Dewey the Deck, to keep his hospitality bowls full and put it on his tab. But that had been… well, that had been days ago.

Wayne said, “You’re the best thing to happen to Dewey Deck in a long time, man.”

“How much is he into me for?”

“Not bad on pot. Pot’s cheap. Twelve hundred. Eight grand on coke.”

For a minute Larry thought he was going to puke. He goggled silently at Wayne. He tried to speak and he could only mouth: Ninety-two hundred?

“Inflation, man,” Wayne said. “You want the rest?”

Larry didn’t want the rest, but he nodded.

“There was a color TV upstairs. Someone ran a chair through it. I’d guess three hundred for repairs. The wood paneling downstairs has been gouged to hell. Four hundred. With luck. The picture window facing the beach got broken the day before yesterday. Three hundred. The shag rug in the living room is totally kaput—cigarette burns, beer, whiskey. Four hundred. I called the liquor store and they’re just as happy with their tab as the Deck is with his. Six hundred.”

“Six hundred for booze?” Larry whispered. Blue horror had encased him up to the neck.

“Be thankful most of them have been scoffing beer and wine. You’ve got a four-hundred-dollar tab down at the market, mostly for pizza, chips, tacos, all that good shit. But the worst is the noise. Pretty soon the cops are going to land. Les flics. Disturbing the peace. And you’ve got four or five heavies doing up on heroin. There’s three or four ounces of Mexican brown in the place.”

“Is that on my tab, too?” Larry asked hoarsely.

“No. The Deck doesn’t mess with heroin. That’s an Organization item and the Deck doesn’t like the idea of cement cowboy boots. But if the cops land, you can bet the bust will go on your tab.”

“But I didn’t know—”

“Just a babe in the woods, yeah.”

“But—”

“Your total tab for this little shindy so far comes to over twelve thousand dollars,” Wayne said. “You went out and picked that Z off the lot… how much did you put down?”

“Twenty-five,” Larry said numbly. He felt like crying.

“So what have you got until the next royalty check? Couple thousand?”

“That’s about right,” Larry said, unable to tell Wayne he had less than that: about eight hundred, split evenly between cash and checking.

“Larry, you listen to me because you’re not worth telling twice. There’s always a party waiting to happen. Out here the only two constants are the constant bullshitting and the constant party. They come running like dickey birds looking for bugs on a hippo’s back. Now they’re here. Pick them off your carcass and send them on their way.”