"Wasn't there some kind of dust-up at your place in Florida? I saw
what they did to the ride here, what a bloody mess."
"Yeah," Perry said. He pointed at his casted arm. "Seemed like a good
time to get out of Dodge."
Hilda said, "We're getting some dinner, if you'd like to come along."
"I wouldn't want to intrude."
"No, it's no sweat, we've got a whole bunch of people associated with
the ride meeting us. You'd be more than welcome."
"Goodness, that *is* hospitable of you. How can I refuse?"
Luke and Ernie were there with their girlfriends, and there were more
kids, midwestern and healthy even if they weren't necessarily all
Scandic, some Vietnamese kids, some Hmong, some desis descended from
the H1B diaspora. They had a gigantic meal in a student place that was
heavy on the potatoes and beers the size of your head, which Perry
resisted for a couple hours until he figured that he'd metabolized
most of the painkiller and then started in, getting just short of
roaring drunk. He told them war stories, told them about Death Waits,
told them about the co-op and the plan to fight back.
"That just doesn't sound right to me," said a friend of Luke's, a
law-school grad student who had been bending Perry's ear all night
with stories from his law-clinic work defending university students
from music-industry lawsuits. "I mean, sure, go after the cops because
they roughed you guys up, but how much money do the cops have? You
gotta target some fat cash, and for that you want to go after
Disney. Abuse of trademark, abuse of process, something like that. The
standard's pretty high, but if you can get a judgement, the money is
incredible. You could take them to the cleaners."
Perry looked blearily at him. He was young, like all of them, but he
had a good rhetorical style that Perry recognized as something born of
real confidence. He knew his stuff, or thought he did. He had a
strawberry mark on his high forehead that looked like a map of a
distant island, and Perry thought that the mark probably threw off the
kid's opponents. "So we sue Disney and five years from now we cash in
-- how does that help us now?"
The kid nodded. "I hoped you'd ask me that. I've been thinking about
this a lot lately. Here's what you need to do, dude, here's the
fucking thing." The room had grown silent. Everyone leaned
closer. Fred poured Perry another beer from the pitcher in the middle
of the table. "Here's how you do it. You raise investment capital for
it. There's a ton of money in this, a ton. Disney's got deep pockets
and you've got a great case.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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