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sell a lot of these?” Billy asks, fingering one of the jackets.
    “Five or six a game. When we’re winning we might do better than that.”
    “Damn. Your peeps got some juicy cash flow, huh.”
    The manager smiles. “I guess that’s one way to put it.”
    The Bravos thank the manager and leave. “Dawg,” Mango says once they’re outside. “Six hundred seventy-nine dollars,” he says. “Billy,” he says, then, “Shit.” And that’s all they say about it.

THE HUMAN RESPONSE
    “FIFTEEN MILLION,” ALBERT IS saying as Billy and Mango resume their seats. “Fifteen cash against fifteen percent of gross, a star can do that when they’re running hot. And Hilary’s running very hot these days. Her agent won’t let her read without a guarantee.”
    “Read what?” Sykes asks. Albert’s eyes slowly track that way, followed by his head.
    “The script, Kenneth.”
    “But I thought you said we don’t have a script.”
    “We don’t, but we’ve got a treatment and we’ve got a writer. And now that Hilary’s interested, we can slant it in a way that really speaks to her.”
    “I love it when he talks like that,” says Dime.
    “Look, the script’s not the problem, just telling your story’s gonna make a compelling script. The hard part’s getting the damn thing in her hands.”
    “You said you know her,” Crack points out.
    “Hell yes I know her! We got bombed off our ass a couple of months ago at Jane Fonda’s house! But this is business, guys, everything she reads has to go through her agent, and he won’t let her so much as touch a script unless it comes with a firm offer from a studio. That way she knows if she says yes, the studio’s on the hook. She can’t get turned down.”
    “Uh, so, do we have a studio?” Crack asks. He knows he should know this, but everything about the deal seems so abstract.
    “Robert, we do not. There’s tons of interest out there, but nobody wants to commit until a star commits.”
    “But Swank won’t commit until they do.”
    Albert smiles. “Precisely.” The Bravos emit an appreciative ahhhhh . The paradox is so perfect, so completely circular in the modern way, that everyone can identify.
    “That’s kind of fucked,” says Crack.
    “It is,” Albert agrees. “It’s totally fucked.”
    “So how do you make it happen?” asks A-bort.
    “By making it inevitable. By making it a goddamn force of nature. By scaring these guys so bad that somebody else is gonna buy it that they have to commit or their heads’ll explode.”
    “People,” Dime announces, “I think I just figured out what Albert does.”
    Billy and Mango are sitting at the end of the row, then it’s Crack, Albert, Dime, Day, A-bort, Sykes, and Lodis, then an empty seat for Major Mac. Billy has noticed that Albert is never far from Dime. Not that Bravo needed proof of how special their sergeant is, but it arrived anyway in the form of Albert and his instant fascination with the Bravo leader. Billy has decided that Albert is gay for Dime, in a nonsexual sense. Dime interests him, Dime the person and Dime the soldier, the entire phenomenon of Dime-ness loosed upon a square and unsuspecting world. In the pantheon of Albert’s attentions, Dime comes first and Holliday a distant second, and even that seems more of a proximate sort of interest, conditional, complementary, a function of Day’s black yin yoked to Dime’s honky yang. Day deigns not to notice his secondary status, like now, for instance, as Albert and Dime huddle in intense conversation while Day perches on his seat back surveying the field like an African king high on his throne, looking down on all his little subject bitches. And as for the rest of Bravo, they might as well be so many shares of corporate stock that happen to talk and walk and drink a lot of beer. “Dime the property, ” as Day muttered to Billy last night, in a rare drunken moment of resentful candor. “The rest a you just the produck .”
    Which made Shroom