The Frumious Bandersnatch

downtown, cruising the waters between the two states, moving at a leisurely pace toward the bridge.

On the video, the short hair made her look like a blond Prince Valiant. Or more like a Peter Pan, she guessed. No question there was a girl in that tattered tunic at the end of the song, though, the beast clawing and biting at the garment till it came away in shreds under his talons and teeth, no question about that at all. They’d even had to edit out a thirty-second shot where her left nipple distinctly showed, and another longer sequence where too much cheek and almost some pussy were revealed when Jonah lifted her; you couldn’t risk offending all those soccer Moms out there, as if they didn’t have pussies and nipples of their own.

Started her quest in what looked like a sturdy-enough white thigh-length tunic, sandals strapped to the calf, subtly heeled to give the leg its essential curve…

He took his vorpal sword in hand:

Long time the manxome foe he sought—

So rested he by the Tumtum tree,

And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood…

That was when Jonah burst upon the scene wearing the first of his masks. That was when the innocent boy in the song began morphing into a female rape victim as more and more of Tamar’s body was revealed in the shredding garment. There was a lot of meaning to this song. This song spoke to gender problems and crises of identification. This song spoke to adolescent boys and girls in turmoil. This was a very deep song.

She was worried that some of its depth and meaning might be lost in the live performance tonight. It had taken hours and hours of shooting time to capture the dual morphing effect. Tamar’s transformation from adolescent boy to vulnerable maiden to ferocious defender of her virginity had required repeated costume changes to achieve the effect of a gradually more girl-revealing garment, the rape becoming in effect a subtle strip tease. Nor had it been simple to morph Jonah from a merelysomewhat threatening creature (albeit with eyes of flame) that came whiffling through the tulgey wood in a blue mask, burbling as it came, into the raging monster in a red mask, slain and bleeding at the end of the battle. How on earth would they convey all that tonight? Eyes of flame? Wouldn’t it have been simpler and better merely to show the video? But it had previewed last night on all four music channels and tonight Barney wanted something to top that. Something like Tamar Valparaiso, live and in person!

And scared to death.

IT WAS ALREADYnine-thirty, and Honey Blair hadn’t yet shown up. Binkie Horowitz had busted his ass setting up the Channel Four interview, but now he was beginning to wonder if the PD for the Eleven O’Clock News had changed his mind. Or else sent Honey somewhere else where hotter news was breaking. Binkie couldn’t imagine what might be hotter than Tamar Valparaiso performing the new Hit Number One Song from her Platinum Album (aluvai and from your lips to God’s ear!) live and in person, right here on this little old yacht, but then again he never knew what the hell went on in the heads of program directors.

As VP in charge of Promotion at Bison Records, he’d been working the PDs at radio stations all over the country for the past two months now, courting them the way he would a young girl (some of them were, in fact, young girls), making them familiar with the tricky lyrics of “Bandersnatch,” playing the single for them over and over again, hoping they would come to like the song well enough to add it to their rotation. Binkie was shooting for plays on both Top-40 Teen and Top-40 Adult stations, hoping to catch the pubes and their soccer Moms as well. Your dead zone on radio was from seven to elevenP.M. , a time slot the big-money advertisers shunned. That’s where the Teen-Appeal records usually landed, square in the middle of Death Valley. In radio, your big bucks were in the eighteen-to twenty-four-year-old market. Binkie secretly suspected that Tamar’s appeal would be to the teenybopper crowd, but nobody argued with Barney Loomis, and besides, there was plenty of time to go after the younger crowd later on.

For now, what he was looking for was some ninety to a hundred weekly spins on each of Clear Channel’s twelve hundred stations. Used to be a record could take off with as few as forty, fifty spins a week, without going into power rotation at any of the stations. Nowadays, if you did a sampling of top hits around the country, you came up with 83 spins in Bakersfield, 86 spins in Des Moines, 95 in San Antone, as many as 115 spins in Vegas, and so on. Moreover, the biggest stations tended to utilize high spins early on in a record’s life. They’d play a song for a week or so and then conduct random telephone surveys, calling listeners and playing a snippet of the tune for them, asking if they recognized it. If they got a positive reaction, they added the song to their rotation. Binkie’s job, though, was to get the damn song played in the first place.

He knew that Bison had to sell 500,000 copies of Tamar’s single before they could turn a profit. In their wildest hopes, the “Bandersnatch” single would hit the Top 10 before the album was even shipped. But not too many records achieved that goal. Of the close to 6,500 albums shipped by the major labels the year before, less than two percent of them turned a profit. A lot of time and energy and talent and money— especiallymoney—was riding on Tamar Valparaiso’s first outing. So where the hell was Honey Blair?

Higgins sidled up beside him, leaned into him.

“Where’s the blond cooze?” he whispered.

“She’ll be here, don’t worry,” Binkie said.

But hewas worried.

IN THE MAINstateroom of theRiver Princess, Tamar was starting to get nervous herself. Too many things were bothering her. Would the dance floor be too small or too slippery for her and Jonah to perform the strenuous dance routines that simulated a young girl struggling in the clutches of an animal intent on raping her? Would the audience be sitting too close for Jonah’s mask changes to be effective? They’d morphed twelve masks for the video, but tonight they’d be depending solely on a few masks and some dramatic light changes to enhance the effect of increasing menace. Would her tunic, admittedly skimpy to begin with, but certainly intact and pristine, break away strategically when and where it was supposed to, gradually revealing her long shapely legs and firm boobs, but not too much more than that, not with Channel Four’s cameras taping her performance.

So many things could go wrong.

Would she be able to hear the lyrics clearly enough through the pickup tucked in her hair? Were the Channel Four sound people any good, and where the hell were they, anyway? She’d hate to be rap-ping “One-two, one- two, and through and through, the vorpal blade went snicker-snack!” and instead have the sound from the video telling the cameras and later tonight the world, “ ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.” Well, she’d got her start in karaoke clubs, she supposed she could lip-synch her way through tonight, which would be sort of karaoke in reverse, she supposed.

But what if somebody had spilled a drink or something squishy and sloppy on the floor? All Jonah had to do was lose his footing and his grip on her—his grip onhimself, for that matter—for this whole thing to go out the window in three seconds flat, Tamar Valparaiso and the rapacious beast doing a comic pratfall in front of millions of viewers when they aired the tape on the Eleven O’Clock News. Goodbye dreams of rock stardom, goodbye little Russa-Mexicana-American girl making it huge in the big bad city and the wide wicked world.

“How do I look?” she asked Jonah.

“Hot,” he said, the friggin faggot.

Tamar’s father used to go to church in Mexico every Sunday morning and pray for something to eat the next day. Tamar’s mother was born in a Communist country and didn’t know from religion or from praying.

Tamar wasn’t praying now, either.

But she was wishing with all her might that after tonight she would be the biggest fucking diva who ever came down the pike. “So don’t let anything go wrong,” she whispered to Whomever. Tamar’s ambition was to bury J. Lo, bury Britney, bury Brandy, bury Shakira, bury Ashanti, bury Pink, bury Sheryl Crowe and Christina Aguilera and Michelle Branch, bury each and every one of them, bury them all.

Was that such a crime?

THE SUBJECT MATTERhad finally got around to ambition and crime.