Atlanta.

Bruce Willis and Poe were dancing and the music was so loud that each bass kick was like a nauseous gag wracking the body, except that no one looked sick, everyone looked good, the women inevitably gorgeous, a girl next to me in the far corner of the second floor of Planet Hollywood dancing as if in a trance, a black sports bra and sweaty arms that kept rubbing against mine which I did not mind, a crush of bodies thick beyond any hope of movement other than to gyrate with the bass and sway with the rest of the people standing and moving throughout Planet Hollywood as Poe finished her set, the stage tiny, the room packed beyond reason, hundreds of people with beers in their hand and nodding and eyes half-closed as Poe played and I was thinking: But these are all software people.

Except for some of us who were journalists, if that was the word you used to describe people who wrote for magazines and so got VIP invites to these trade show parties and got free bar tabs and drank until they could barely stand and then stood only to sway with the drunken girls and watch Bruce Willis and Poe do their sets and then maybe hopefully get lucky and fuck somebody back at their room at the Ritz-Carlton which was free. If those are journalists, then that was what we were, what I was, and Atlanta was hot outdoors but hotter inside Planet Hollywood and there was a press badge dangling from around my neck and a VIP invite in my pocket on the back of which was my bar ticket, which had put the bottle of Rolling Rock in my hand which was half-empty and which was my fifth since we'd reached the door at Planet Hollywood an hour--ninety minutes?--ago and elbowed our way through the congealed mass of people straining on the sidewalk to get into the restaurant and bouncers keeping them back and a beautiful PR girl on the lookout for press badges and seeing ours and waving us through and getting us a table in the back of the second floor where the stage was and where Bruce Willis and Poe were singing a duet of "Angry Johnny," though Bruce Willis didn't really know the lyrics.

I was thinking about what an astounding body Poe had and the girl in the sports bra next to me had an astounding body and kept leaning into me as the crowd moved. The physical contact was nice but she was not looking at me so nothing was happening there, so I was looking at different girls throughout the place and eventually I had given up on the girls and on the music and retreated to the corner table where the PR girl had set up my magazine staff, where everyone was drinking and shouting above the music.

The table was in the shadow of the gigantic prop bomb from "Die Hard: With a Vengeance." It was the size of a vending machine. I was sitting at the table facing it squarely, remembering the scene in the film where the bomb squad guy is sweating because he has to defuse this giant bomb and I was sweating, too.

Next to me at the table was a girl named Molly, a PR girl from one of the software companies that were there in Atlanta for the Electronic Entertainment Expo, which was what we were there to cover.

"Are you coming to our seance?" she asked me.

"What?"

"We've got a medium from here in Atlanta. We're going to do a seance back at our hotel to find out who Jack the Ripper was."

I remembered, as if through a fog, that her company was making a game about Jack the Ripper.

"When is it?" I asked, at top volume above the music.

"Right now, we're leaving if you want to come. But you'll have to sign a waiver because the medium told me that sometimes spirits will scratch or claw people."

Molly was good-looking but it seemed like too much effort, and the three other guys I was there with were looking fairly paralyzed, drinking, and I told her to head on without me. She was disappointed, and seemed to be really serious about solving the Whitechapel murders, and she told me she would call me after E3 and as she walked away I watched her trim legs scissor prettily and then watched Bruce Willis watch her walk to the stairs from the stage where he was singing with a squinting grin on his face.

It turned out that the guys wanted to leave anyway, since our drink passes were good for five drinks only and we'd all had five already. They didn't have any suggestions on where to go next -- there were five or six parties going on, each for a different software company -- so I suggested we get a cab over to a party where Luscious Jackson was going to be playing a private set for VIP invites. I'd always wanted to see Luscious Jackson, ever since I saw the video for "Citysong" and the scene in it where Jill Cunniff, who is Luscious Jackson's front, is in the back of a taxi on a dark night in New York City and she is looking out the windows with a loneliness that is real and cannot be faked. I was hoping that I could get into the show at the party and get up to the front of the stage and make eye contact with Jill Cunniff and have an epiphanal moment with her, maybe even as she was singing "Citysong," as she was singing "When I'm about to go crazy, 'cause I'm still living here..." and our eyes would lock and she would fall instantly in love with me as I was in love with her and her loneliness, and we would keep making eye contact through the rest of the set and when the set was over she would come down and find me and take me upstairs to her hotel room (the set was going to be in the ballroom at Luscious Jackson's hotel) and we would fuck and share our souls. I would prefer that it be with Justine Frischmann of Elastica, who has a better body, but she wasn't in Atlanta.

The guys thought the Luscious Jackson party was a good idea so we took one last look at Bruce Willis and I took one last look at that giant cabinet-sized bomb and we went down the stairs and out the front door of Planet Hollywood, and the bouncers let four more people in to replace us as we left, and we stood in the muggy night heat on the sidewalk until we could flag down a cab. The cabbie was Nigerian, and on the drive through downtown Atlanta he pointed out the Olympic monument, which was a pool carved in concrete in the shape of the five Olympic rings, and at the moment there were a bunch of black children playing in the pool, and then he drove us past CNN Center and Gatsby's Bar and Grill on Peach Street and then the cab pulled up in front of a hotel ringed by young industry people trying to get in. We piled out of the cab and started looking for a press line.

We found the press line and showed our badges and got let in, past a pack of developers and junior execs and PR babes who were furious to get in, and we were given drink tickets and found the bar after a slow trek through murmuring hedges of people. I stared at the glass of vodka that was put into my hand, not even remembering asking for it, and stared at the ice in the glass as it dissolved almost instantly in the crushing heat of the ballroom. I was looking for the stage, found it, the guys following me, and we made our way to the edge of the stage about ten minutes before the set started.

Luscious Jackson is a hard band to appreciate until you see them live, because their sound on CD is very tight, very produced, very engineered and digital and it makes you distrustful. But in person you are convinced, from the opening licks of their set. Jill Cunniff plays eloquently mournful bass lines to Kate Schellenbach's virtuoso drumming (which has come a long way since her nascent days drumming behind the Beastie Boys). Vivian Trimble adds perfect dressing with her lullaby keyboards and lullaby backing vocals, and Gabrielle Glaser (besides being a smoky, sexy dark bombshell) has a throaty voice that seduces without effort or malice. Their songs are practiced but alive on stage. There is a joylessness in Jill Cunniff's delivery that obsesses me, and watching them play I was watching only her and trying to draw her eyes, trying to get them to meet mine so that this epiphany could happen.

There were only a few hundred people in the ballroom and they were all software people, dressed for an official industry evening, casual but business casual and nothing like concert dress. Luscious Jackson obviously knew who they were playing for. There didn't seem to be much energy in their set. They played "Citysong" but she still hadn't looked at me, even though I was standing almost stock-still and just staring up at her hopefully, which I thought might set me apart visually from the panorama of bobbing people in her eyeline. One of the guys got me another vodka.

Finally, near the end of the set, between songs, Jill Cunniff leaned her lips to her microphone and said, "So are you guys the future of corporate America?"

The hundreds of heads cheered. Jill Cunniff's eyes found mine -- found mine -- and the look on her face was one of unbridled contempt.

The band played "Soothe Yourself" as their last song and then thanked the crowd and disappeared backstage.

Crushed but not too crushed because of the vodka, I followed the guys out of the ballroom and out in front of the hotel, where there were dozens of people standing around laughing and drinking on the sidewalks under a sky that periodically cracked white with lightning. On the sidewalk we drank with some people from another magazine and I found Molly. It had been a few hours since Planet Hollywood so I tapped her shoulder and she turned and smiled.

I asked, "How was the seance?"

"Huh?"

"The seance. Who was Jack the Ripper?"

"What are you talking about?"

I paused, knowing that this girl had no idea what I was talking about. But I was almost positive this was Molly. I was almost sure. But I took a long time saying my next thing, which was, "This city sucks. I can't wait to get back to San Francisco."

"I know," she said, at last on the same page as me. "It's way too hot out here."

"I know," I said. "Could you imagine living in a place this? Walking around all day feeling dead."

"I know," she said, nodding. "I've felt dead all day."

She ended up joining us with some guys from her PR firm and we all walked back four blocks up Peach Street to Gatsby's, the humidity sucking at us, her breasts arrogant through the thin shirt that was stuck to her. We were breathless when we got to the restaurant and we all had glasses of water before getting back into the alcohol.

After Atlanta, I flew back with the guys to San Francisco. The expo and the parties and the concerts were already ebbing from memory, fading as real experiences and becoming more like a snippet of TV that I remembered seeing once. Jill Cunniff plays a Fender bass with a Marshall stack.