"You okay today? You look like crap."
"Thanks, Reggie. Actually, we put down my mom/mine/ex-wife's dog yesterday. So I'm a little sad. But I'm not sure what I feel exactly, either. I'm so dead inside I don't even know anymore."
"You need to get out and lay some pipe, son. I was at the Eagle last night and, whoo-ee. There was this chick, gorgeous, all in leather, being whipped by another. Just a fine-ass lesbian. She was whipping her. The one being whipped asked if I wanted to see her titties. I said..." Wide-eyed, he nodded vigorously. "And I looked around. Her breasts were big, and the nipples like this..." He held up his fingers in a nipple-measuring pincer. "It was a special night. They're going to do it again next month. You should go."
"Yeah, sounds great. Let me write that down." I wrote with my pretend pen on a pretend piece of paper.
"Yeah. A fine-ass lesbian. Mm, mm!"
Then Reggie farted. Floating my way was a gaseous cloud of the deathless variety, the kind that gives your nostril hairs a Brazilian. I was feeling faint.
"Yeah." Reggie was searching for another topic to kill time with. "My son, you know, is still in the hospital..."
My nose twitched violently. "Maybe you should be in the hospital, too...?"
"I told you how he got run over by that drunk forklift operator? Well, he's got both legs up in casts and he's starting to come out of his drug haze. I talked to him about God and he got angry with me, not wanting to hear about that 'God shit.' I said to him, 'They got you too, huh?' Can you believe that? It's a sad world we live in, brother."
"Mm."
"They've got balloons in his legs now, too."
"Balloons."
"Yes, they put balloons in his legs so they can heal in the right way. They inflate them every morning."
"Maybe he can float away like that old guy in that one movie. Just keep inflating. That way he can fly all the way to heaven. With his balloon legs."
Reggie had tears in his eyes. "That's beautiful, man. Sometimes I think you have no human feeling in you at all, but then you say something like that."
I had tears in my eyes, too. But it was from Reggie tootling again.
RIP ARTEMIS
RIP Artemis.
ReplyDeleteYou weren't referring to UP were you? I got a Dr. Strangelove vibe instead.
Dr Strangelove Vibe... Wasn't that a Captain Beefheart "song"?
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