Tram 83 Read Free

brother.”
    â€œYou haven’t changed a bit.”
    â€œYou don’t age here. You simply exist.”
    â€œRequiem …”
    â€œIt’s New Mexico, here. Every man for himself, and shit for all.”
    Tram 83 was one of the most popular restaurants and hooker bars, its renown stretching beyond the City-State’s borders. “See Tram 83 and die,” was the regular refrain of the tourists who blew into town from the four corners of the globe to conduct their business. During the day they wandered zombie-like through the mining concessions they owned by the dozen, and at night they ended up in Tram 83 to refresh their memory. This gave the place every appearance of a true theater, if not a massive circus. Here’s the kind of thing you might hear as background noise:
    â€œI want to massage you by way of foreplay, then slowly suck you off, suck your whole body, suck you till my mouth runs dry.”
    Not only at Tram 83, but even at the university and in the mines, unmarried women didn’t hold back from accosting potential clients with the same psalms.
    Inadvertent musicians and elderly prostitutes and prestidigitators and Pentecostal preachers and students resembling mechanics and doctors conducting diagnoses in nightclubs and young journalists already retired and transvestites and second-foot shoe peddlers and porn film fans and highwaymen and pimps and disbarred lawyers and casual laborers and former transsexuals and polka dancers and pirates of the high seas and seekers of political asylum and organized fraudsters and archeologists and would-be bounty hunters and modern day adventurers and explorers searching for a lost civilization and human organ dealers and farmyard philosophers and hawkers of fresh water and hairdressers and shoeshine boys and repairers of spare parts and soldiers’ widows and sex maniacsand lovers of romance novels and dissident rebels and brothers in Christ and druids and shamans and aphrodisiac vendors and scriveners and purveyors of real fake passports and gun-runners and porters and bric-a-brac traders and mining prospectors short on liquid assets and Siamese twins and Mamelukes and carjackers and colonial infantrymen and haruspices and counterfeiters and rape-starved soldiers and drinkers of adulterated milk and self-taught bakers and marabouts and mercenaries claiming to be one of Bob Denard’s crew and inveterate alcoholics and diggers and militiamen proclaiming themselves “masters of the world” and poseur politicians and child soldiers and Peace Corps activists gamely tackling a thousand nightmarish railroad construction projects or small-scale copper or manganese mining operations and baby-chicks and drug dealers and busgirls and pizza delivery guys and growth hormone merchants, all sorts of tribes overran Tram 83, in search of good times on the cheap.
    â€œWould you gentlemen care for some company?”
    Barely sixteen, trussed into a couple of tiny corsets, the two girls welcomed them with inscrutable smiles. Requiem settled on the one with hair like wooded savannah.
    â€œYour breasts quench my thirst.”
    â€œSir.”
    â€œHow much for a massage session?”
    The girl stated a figure.
    â€œYou know the Tokyo stock market is in freefall?”
    She held him by the wrists.
    â€œProfit equals retail price plus wholesale price minus packaging.”
    A large sign on the Tram’s frontage stated:
    ENTRY INADVISABLE FOR THE POOR, THE WRETCHED, THE UNCIRCUMCISED, HISTORIANS, ARCHAEOLOGISTS, COWARDS, PSYCHOLOGISTS, CHEAPSKATES, MORONS, THE INSOLVENT, AND ALL OF YOU UNLUCKY ENOUGH TO BE UNDER FOURTEEN, NOT FORGETTING THE ELECTED MEMBERS OF THE TWELFTH HOUSE, PENNILESS DIGGERS, SADISTIC STUDENTS, POLITICIANS OF THE SECOND REPUBLIC, HISTORIANS, KNOW-IT-ALLS, AND SNITCHES. Requiem took the girl’s phone number. They entered the establishment. There was nothing special about Tram 83. It was dark all around, like the