Free Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick Page A

features. “What’ll it cost me to have you leave me alone? I always knew that some twerp fan would eventually—”
    “Stop calling me a twerp fan,” Jason said bitingly; it infuriated him absolutely. It struck him as the ultimate in something or other; maybe a bird down, as the expression went now.
    Heather said, “What do you want?”
    “To meet you at Altrocci’s.”
    “Yes, you’d know about that, too. The one place I can go without being ejaculated on by nerds who want me to sign menus that don’t even belong to them.” She sighed wretchedly. “Well, now that’s over. I won’t meet you at Altrocci’s or anywhere. Keep out of my life or I’ll have my prive-pols deball you and—”
    “You have
one
private pol,” Jason interrupted. “He’s sixty-two years old and his name is Fred. Originally he was a sharpshooter with the Orange County Minutemen; used to pick off student jeters at Cal State Fullerton. He was good then, but he’s nothing to worry about now.”
    “Is that so,” Heather said.
    “Okay, let me tell you something else that how do you think I would know. Remember Constance Ellar?”
    “Yes,” Heather said. “That nonentity starlet that looked like a Barbie Doll except that her head was too small and her body looked as if someone had inflated her with a CO 2 cartridge, overinflated her.” Her lip curled. “She was utterly damn dumb.”
    “Right,” he agreed. “Utterly damn dumb. That’s the exact word. Remember what we did to her on my show? Her first planetwide exposure, because I had to take her in a tie-in deal. Do you remember that, what we did, you and I?”
    Silence.
    Jason said, “As a sop to us for having her on the show, her agent agreed to let her do a commercial for one of our quarter-time sponsors. We got curious as to what the product was, so before Miss Ellar showed up we opened the paper bag and discovered it was a cream for removing leg hair. God, Heather, you must—”
    “I’m listening,” Heather said.
    Jason said, “We took the spray can of leg-hair cream out and put a spray can of FDS back in with the same ad copy, which simply read, ‘Demonstrate use of product with expression of contentment and satisfaction,’ and then we got the hell out of there and waited.”
    “Did we.”
    “Miss Ellar finally showed up, went into her dressing room, opened the paper bag, and then—and this is the part that still makes me break up—she came up to me, perfectly seriously, and said, ‘Mr. Taverner, I’m sorry to bother you about this, but to demonstrate the Feminine Hygiene Deodorant Spray I’ll have to take off my skirt and underpants. Right there before the TV camera.’ ‘So?’ I said. ‘So what’s the problem?’ And Miss Ellar said, ‘I’ll need a little table on which I can put my clothes. I can’t just drop them on the floor; that wouldn’t look right. I mean, I’ll be spraying that stuff into my vagina in front of sixty million people, and when you’re doing that you can’t just leave your clothes lying all around you on the floor; that isn’t elegant.’ She really would have done it, too, right on the air, if Al Bliss hadn’t—”
    “It’s a tasteless story.”
    “All the same, you thought it was pretty funny. That utterly dumb girl with her first big break ready to do that. ‘Demonstrte use of product with expression of contentment and—’”
    Heather hung up.
    How do I make her understand? he asked himself savagely, grinding his teeth together, nearly biting off a silver filling. He hated that sensation: grinding off a piece of filling. Destroying his own body, impotently. Can’t she see that my knowledge of everything about her means something important? he asked himself. Who would know these things? Obviously only someone who had been very close physically with her for some time. There could be no other explanation, and yet she had conjured up such an elaborate other reason that he couldn’t penetrate through to her. And it