Horse Latitudes | Page 3

or took him for just another wasted homeboy because she did not react at all. "Frida here plays music," said Virilio. "You ought to hear her tapes, she's real good. You ever play in a band, Ryder?"
"No," I said. "Always wanted to, but never found the time to learn an instrument." I looked at Frida the waitress and handed her the money. From this new angle I saw that along with her nose ring, =46rida's left earlobe was studded with a half-dozen or so tiny jewelled studs. There were more gold rings just above her left eyebrow, which was in the process of arching. Her not unattractive lips held a suppressed smirk that could only mean that she had noticed me noticing her.
"That's interesting," Virilio said. "I thought everybody your age had a little high school dance band or something."
"Sorry."
Frida folded the bills and dropped them into a pocket of her apron. "They're playing some of my stuff before the Yanomam=F6 Boys set on Wednesday. Come by, if you're downtown," she said. I nodded and said "Thanks." As she moved back to the bar, I saw Virilio shaking his head. "Freaking Frida," he said.
"What does that mean?"
"Frida was okay. Used to sing in some bands; picked up session work. Now she's into this new shit." Virilio rolled his eyes. "She sort of wigged out a few months ago. Started hauling her tape recorder over to Marin and down south into the jungle. Wants to digitize it or something. Says she looking for the Music of Jungles. Says it just like that, with capital letters." He shrugged and sipped his drink. "I've heard some of this stuff. Sounds like a movie soundtrack, 'Attack =46rom the Planet Whacko,' if you know what I mean."
"You ever been into the rainforest?" I asked.
"Sure. I've been all up and down the coast. They keep 101 between here and L.A. pretty clear."
"L.A.'s as far south as you can get?"
"No, but after that, you start running into government defoliant stations, rubber tappers, and these monster dope farms cut right into the jungle. Those farms are scary. Mostly white guys running them, with Mexicans and Indians pulling the labor. And they are hardcore. Bloody you up and throw your ass to the crocodiles just for laughs."
"I may need you to do your name trick again. I have some money in Chicago-"
"Not anymore you don't. Not for two or three months. Nothing but monkeys, snakes and malaria out that way, from Galveston to Detroit. If you have any swamp land in Florida, congratulations. It's really a swamp." The kid took a sip of his beer. "Of course, I could always do a data search, see where the Feds reassigned the assets of your bank."
"No never mind," I said, deciding I didn't particularly want this kid bird-dogging me through every database he could get to. "It's not that important."
Virilio shrugged. "Suit yourself," he said, and shook his head wearily at the bare-breasted young woman who bumped drunkenly into our table. "Run, honey," he told her. "The fashion police are hot on your trail," as she staggered over to her friends at the bar. The local scene-makers had taken the heat as their cue to go frantically native; the majority of them were dressed in Japanese-imported imitations of Brazilian Indian gear. It was like some grotesque acid trip combining the worst of Dante with a Club Med brochure for Rio: young white kids, the girls wearing nothing but body paints or simple Lacandon hipils they had seen in some high school slide show; the boys in loin cloths, showing off their bowl-style haircuts, mimicking those worn by Amazonian tribesmen.
"The Santeros say that this shit, the jungle, the animals, all the craziness, it's all revenge. Amazonia getting back at all the stupid, greedy bastards who've been raping it for all these years."
"That's a pretty harsh judgement," I said. "Are you always so Old Testament?"
"You've got me all wrong. I'm thrilled. L.A.'s gone. They finally got something besides TV executives and mass murderers to grow in that goddamed desert." Virilio smiled. "Of course, I don't really buy all that mystical shit. The FBI are covering up for the people who are really responsible."
"The FBI?" I asked.
"It's true," Virilio said. "They hushed it up--same branch that iced Kennedy and ran the Warren Commission.
"A couple of geneticists who'd been cut loose from Stanford were working for the Brazilian government, cooking up a kind of extra fast-grow plants to re-seed all the burned-up land in the Amazon. Supposedly, these plants were locked on fast forward-- they'd grow quick and die quick, stabilizing the soil so natural plants could come in. Only the bastards wouldn't die. They kept on multiplying, and choked out everything else. Six weeks after they planted the first batch, Rio was gone. It's