Ain't That America

Eleonore "Gothic" Guthrey surveyed the paint chipped front door. She jammed her hands in the pockets of her Sandor slacks, her faded leather vest open at the front. The silver in her slacks was far from new. She wore nothing beneath the vest and the tight lines of the slacks revealed she wore nothing beneath them as well. The door opened before she could knock, revealing a slender man in his late forties.

"Elen." He spat a greasy, dark wad of tobacco juice between her feet. "What a fucking surprise." His voice was smooth and the tone demonstrated his apathy that she even bothered to return.

Sometimes you just have to come back home. As many times as she dreamed of letting Gary torch the flat, she had to admit there were still memories she had left here. If she could have packed them up as easily as she did her deck and her bags five months ago, she sure as hell would have.

Eleonore patted her backpack, the only thing she ever bought with real money, not the play dough money of sex and drugs. God, how she hated fucking someone just to eat or for a single hit. Afterwards, it never seemed to matter. "I brought your deck back. It still works. I had to slim jim the case for some nicads, but those are cheap."

The man looked back at her blankly, "Who cares? You left, remember? You walked out on me and never looked back. Missed your own birthday and Christmas."

Somewhere behind her, a jay chattered, oil covered wings beating fruitlessly. A tire skidded and it shut up, feathers and blood on a treadless tire squealing down the street. Eleonore remained quiet and the man finally opened the door fully, permitting entrance. The place looked decent. Not run down like the shit hole she called a home for the past five months. She couldn't smell fried wires. The walls weren't smoking from blown sockets and the light bulbs weren't removed so one more power source could be exploited.

She set the pack down on the ground and felt his hand against her neck. Pushing it away, she stepped forward, walking into the living room so she could feel momentarily safe from his touch. "Jesus, Dad, I wanted to come home and see if we could be a family again. If I wanted a fuck I would have stayed where I was."

Gerald The Usher Guthrey hit her across her cheek. "None of your lip, now, Gothic. You think you're such a big shot, traipsing about space like some angel and screwing all the big leaguers. Don't forget who set it all up for you. Never forget who made it possible for you and your boys."

Eleonore whipped around and stomped her foot. "You have no right, no right! to call me that. Not here. Whatever you were then you sure as hell aren't now."

The TV news yelled at her and she couldn't hear what he said when he hit her again. New York had burned down again. Three times now in the past four years. They planned to rebuild. The Scape, they called it, the place where all the deckers went to learn. She had been lucky. Her father was The Usher, the person who crashed the whole damn thing just when it looked like he might lose. He never lost. He always got what he wanted. He made it big, had a family, had her, then screwed her when her mother died. The same day after the funeral. He wouldn't let anyone console him. It was dark. Those three days were darker than she could remember. On the last he slapped her for the first time when she came home, threw her to the ground and fucked her. The Usher always got what he wanted.

"No right? I have every damn right there is, Eleonore. How many people actually own the place they live in? How many can afford to send their kids to the schools. Not the life schools for everyone that teach you how to tie your shoes and why you need to stay away from space, but the good ones. The kind that cost money. Money most people don't have. And you pissed it all away for dick." Gerald sat down.

Some hero, Eleonore thought darkly, leaning against the wall. Old, broken down, yesterday's news. "How many fathers treat their daughters like garbage? Like prostitutes they can do with as they please?"

"I always told you I would be fair, Gothic, and treat you exactly how you wanted to be treated. For a while, like a princess, and you were one. Now, look at yourself." He stood up and pushed his hand against her chest, groping her breasts in the process.

Eleonore looked away. She remembered the nice clothes, the ones she was hassled about. A princess with all the pride. Oh how she wanted to be the pauper, to be dirty. She didn't think she could feel more dirty than she did right then. "It's the style, dad. You've pants with the ass cut out, I can walk around like this if I want."

He shook his head, his hands in his lap. "Do what you want Eleonore. Just not here."

Her heart sunk. She couldn't go back to it. Not for five more months. Not even one month. Her life couldn't be lived between the guys Gary brought over. Screwing them for food and drugs. "Dad, you're the man. You've got the connections I need to make it. Out there," but she was cut off.

"I know out there, Gothic! I was out there. You want to know something, you've got it made. No matter how low you go, you at least got one thing to sell. You can at least fuck somebody for a place to crash, food or a hit of whatever it is you are strung out on. Try being male out there. All you can do is run space and pray you find a dead account with credit left in it." Gerald stood up and walked into the kitchen, the kind that opened up into the living room for convenience's sake, but actually was just one more way to demonstrate how small the flat really was.

With tears in her eyes, Eleonore flung her fist at empty air, "You think it's so God damn easy, don't you? Being The Usher's bitch-kid? You know that I never had a chance to tell them you screwed your own daughter. It was dead news before you finished that night. Everyone already knew. Who wants to mess with Usher's daughter, much less his bitch? Everyone! Damn you, everyone wants to fuck me just so they can prove how low you really are and when you are hungry and need a hit you got to let them do it to you."

He never looked back at her. His voice was suddenly silent. "It was so easy, Gothic. So damn easy and I can do it again if I have to."

Eleonore sat down and dutifully closed the front of her vest. "Why, daddy? Why did you have to crash the whole thing?"

"They had us, Gothic. They had us all. Law makers controlled us. At first it was the stupid stuff. Have to wear a helmet when riding a bike, have to wear a belt when riding in the car. Then it got worse. After Clinton bought out Microsoft and left Gates broke and in debt with taxes that no one even heard of still riding up his ass, they got that bitch in there, the right to lifer. I told you about her. The Government run Microsoft starting churning out the decks as the wave of the future for space, but they never controlled it. God, they were close to, but they just couldn't. Genetree, that bitch, made it a law that the military was cut down so low that the unemployment rate went up a good ten percent. Boeing, Lockheed, they all were ready to go out of business. The country was so broke that all the police and teacher's quit, most moved to Canada or Britain."

Gerald open the door, his anger vented upon Eleonore, obviously a lot calmer. He took a beer from the bottom shelf and popped the plastic lid, suds pouring over his hand. "It was the big time, baby. We were broke, no jobs, not enough money to get drunk and forget about it."

He sat down on the couch and watched amusedly as Eleonore slinked away from him, obvious thinking he would take her again. "The net was still simple if you remembered the basics. The only difference was they were now using virtual goggles for monitors. Christ, we ran the whole thing using a monitor. Their big error was letting Gate's set up a Windows based system. All we had to do was jump down to the raw system and heckle with a few toggles and bounce some core dumps around to people. That was it. When Gate's system crashed, it was a chain reaction. The whole thing crashed and crashed hard. And good old Clinton had Gate's down and out, broke as the rest of us. No surprise the good, hometown president couldn't find him to fix it. The whole country was caught in one, monstrous GPF."

"I thought you were this big hacker guy. You just mailed a core?" She looked at him in disbelief.

Gerald snatched at her backpack and took out the deck. "We never had any of this then. It wasn't a matter of who had the fastest reflexes or the smartest programs. All we had to work with was finding some addresses and sending so much garbage at them, assuming they would take them, that they crashed. That was running the net. None of this space shit. It isn't space, it is a fucking net."

"And Usher?"

"The idiots." Gerald laughed, his face calm, red. He had been drinking already. He moved closer to her and put his hand her knee, his eyes looking over her vest. With vacant eyes, he nudged his fingers between the seam of the vest, feeling her nipples against his fingers before she shrugged away again. "All we had to do was change our account name. Sure, they could lock our site later on, or find our account, but unless they could get sys admin access, they were in whatever dark we wanted them to be in."

Eleonore was against the side of the couch and couldn't move further back anymore. Gerald's hands found her breasts and opened her vest, his fingers sliding down her chest and stomach, pushing against the tight seem of her pants until they rested against her pubic hair, already trying to slip between her legs.

Gerald smiled, a lost look in his eyes. "There was so much we wanted to do. We never wanted to crash it. There was a girl I loved, I really loved her, somewhere on the net. Maybe, just maybe, she loved me too. But Gates, fuck Gates! was charging us by then. Ten dollars an hour. Who could afford that for very long? That was one reason Clinton set up the whole scam to fire him."

Eleonore shivered. She didn't like his hand in her pants or his eyes on her chest. She felt helpless. This was the last place she could turn. She shouldn't have expected more than she did. "Gothic?" His voice was quiet and she didn't know where it was coming from.

Eleonore looked at him but could only shake her head helplessly.

"Take it off, Gothic."

Eleonore trembled but managed to unfasten the catch on her Sandor's. She peeled them off her hips, down to her ankles. Gerald climbed on top of her and opened his slacks. He pushed himself into the dry space of her loins.

"Daddy .." and she wanted it to sound helpless, she wanted him to stop. But it was ecstasy and she needed it.

Gerald waited. He waited until Eleonore climaxed before he allowed himself to spend himself inside of her. He remained between her legs, buried deep within her.

"Now, look outside, Gothic. It's a rat hole. The whole country. A redneck's paradise. We haven't had a president for three years, not since the Constitution was elected as religious text and therefore politically inviable. You have to have a gun to survive. You have to have a deck to make a living, taking the scraps from the Japs and the Brits. Even the Mexicans won't come here anymore. They shoot illegal immigrants, most of the Californians who try to jump their border patrols."

Eleonore buried her head in his shoulder. "Daddy," she whispered. She hated him for taking her. She loved him for being inside of her then. "There was a place I saw in the space. It was so beautiful. I wanted so much to go there."

Gerald belched and pulled himself from his daughter, fastening his slacks. He stopped her from fixing her clothes, looking over her naked body. "Russians. Damn commies. The Japs own the world, the commies own all of the net, and the Brits own everyone's souls with their religion. The only thing America still has are her values."

Gerald placed his mouth on Gothic's breast and started to remove his slacks, intent on taking her again. For a moment, he stopped and looked up into her eyes, kissed her fully on the mouth, his tongue swollen against hers. When he drew his mouth away, he said, "be thankful we still have our values."

And he screwed her again.

Epilogue

Hans The Witness Guthrey, son of Eleonore Gothic Guthrey and Gerald The Usher Guthrey was a sickly fellow. The same day his mother died, his father tried to touch him. Fortunately, his mother had always insisted on his carrying a gun. No doubt he would be the next president, the one to revive traditional American standards, reinstate the constitution, and lead the country out of darkness.