Joseph had always liked how the streets in Miami Vice looked at night. Always slick, the darks darker, with color splashes and rays everywhere you looked. After the nice little small hours summer rain that kindly just doused him, this is just how South Cicero Avenue looked like. With perhaps, replace some of that pink neon with universal suburban incandescent orange. The cool night air smelled fresh, and competed little with the lingering smell on his fingers and taste on his mouth that reminded him that his recent encounter was real. Realer even than these empty streets, he thought. As if to contradict him, as if to claim its own presence in this world in light of such a self-centered assertion from this human, a large toad hopped its way to the center of the sidewalk, and Joseph sidestepped it. Just as dark and shiny as everything else, the toad, he thought. It would be daybreak soon, maybe in a half an hour. While no substances apart from his own -- other than some alcohol, some mixers, some other sodium; various fats, sugars and starches, and, of course, second-person singular saliva -- had crossed his mouth since that last coffee at the office hours ago, he felt surprisingly wakeful and alert. And he attributed this to this nice little walk he had been forced to take. Now back to substances. The taste in his mouth was a combination of… where was everybody? Was he, deep down, drunk out of his mind? That familiar, sweet, lightly metallic, ethylic breath that emanated from his lungs with each exhalation was definitely there. He sidestepped again - this time a couple of earthworms twisted about each other like a caduceus. Joseph’s tie is stuffed in his grey slacks’ left front pocket by his keys. His has-seen-better-days white dress shirt untucked, cuffs and collar unbuttoned, black leather oxfords in dire need of a shine, hair a far cry from his neatly combed usual, mousse long since evaporated, all testament of a long night and of a guy that really just needs to get home, take a preferably cold shower, and get some sleep. But there is no urgency in his walk at all. “Tah, dah… ta-dah da-da dah…”, he exteriorizes the melody lingering in his head. He says loudly, “So you want to do something that's a little bit not too Afro-centric-erotic-space-groove-jazz-funk-acid-punk??” He keeps walking down South Cicero. “Dirty little!” he yells, and his footsteps, his breathing, and now his sporadic singing, are the only sounds in the world.

But not for long.

Dribble, dribble, dribble, dribble.

Joseph stops.

Dribble, Dribble, dribble, dribble.

Jesus H. Christ. What tha fff..? Is that…?

He walks toward the sound ahead of him and to his right, stepping off the sidewalk and onto the grass, toward the outdoor public basketball court located at the edge of the small suburban park, not far from the street, where he spends half his free time. “Is that fucking Ian?” he wonders out loud.

Dribble, dribble, dribble, dribble. Louder. Joseph catches a whiff of Drakkar Noir. “Geezuuuuuhs..”

He picks up the pace. There. There he is. A pathetic, washed-orange chiaroscuro existence in the middle of the dimly-lit court. Ian beneath his oversized black JORDAN basketball jersey and matching shorts, black ankle-high socks crumpled down at the ankles and black Air Jordans, entrancedly dribbling the basketball, actually basketball-shoegazing in silence, in the center circle, facing side court. The bleachers behind him… are empty.

“Yo!”, Joseph stops at the edge of the court and calls out. “Ian!”

Ian stops dribbling and looks up. “Hey, what up homes? Couldn’t sleep bro… I can't shut my eyes.”

“They shot the father at his mom's building seven times?” responded Joseph. “What the fuck, bro! It’s like after midnight or something.”

“You what the fuck. The hell you’re coming from, by the way you look like shit again bro. Just like, you know, no sun this time to highlight it.” Ian’s holding the ball with both hands, looking at Joseph. “Just these two broken-ass lamps.”

“Yeah. No shit. Jesus. Yeah, lost my wallet, not like I had any cash on there but no credit card or ATM card. Phone’s dead.”

“You’re fucking nuts, homes.”

“Yeah, anyway. Go home, man. Nice seeing you. I’ll do the same, it’ll be morning soon. Call me tomorrow. Later.” Joseph turns around and starts walking back toward the sidewalk.

“Yo, hold up!” calls Ian.

Joseph looks back and sees Ian scuttling toward him.

“Hold up!” Ian calls again.

Joseph stops. “What’s up?”

Ian says, “Check it out.” He gives Ian the ball and turns and walks back to the other side of the court. Joseph utters a curse under his breath, but follows, letting the basketball drop from his side and bounce away. He follows Ian past the sideline, past the bleachers, and past the fence, by which there’s a sidewalk and a large shrub that Ian disappears behind of, emerging with a medium-sized yellow cooler. “Brewskys pour les broskys.”

“Damn, man…all right, just one beer,” Joseph’s expression does a 180. “Can’t pass up a cold one, you know that. Damn!”

“Knew I’d getcha.” Ian cracks opens both beers, offers one to Joseph, and they sit on the edge of a sidewalk by the bush. Both take long sips, followed by silence. Maybe a full half minute of utter silence. Maybe not surprisingly, it’s Ian who breaks it: “So, are you gonna tell me what you’re really doing out here dressed in trampled office clothes and hell-ass broke in the middle of the night?”

Joseph lets out a chuckle, takes another sip. He exhales long, loud. “Kinda a night I had, man.” He smiles. “Kinda a night.” He takes another sip. Exhales again. He looks over at Ian. Ian’s just looking back at him, attentive, expectant. “Ok,” Joseph starts. “Friday night, working late at the office, trying to figure out Cliff’s cave markings and hieroglyphics to close out the set with his revisions for the architectural for the Kane County Mental Ward project bid set, when I get this SMS.”

“The plot thickens.”

“Yeah.” Joseph takes another sip, and stares back at the darkness of the park. “So it’s this so-so looking Hindu American chick I know who rooms with this half-Polish, half-Native American total hottie I used to go out with and whom I’ve remained hot for to this day. And looking to encore. But she’s like, been avoiding me, right? So she tells me Zuzanna – my half Polish, half Indian, American Indian, that is, one -- got back from Minnesota Tuesday night, and that she, Sima, the hindi chick, has been putting in a good word for me these past few days, that I should drop by with a few beers and see what happens, that she just broke up with the asshole back in Minneapolis.”

“Mhmm..”

“So I QSAVE and split, stop by Pappaluccio’s downstairs for a 12-inch Italian…”

“That sounded gay, dude.”

“…then haul ass up to Lincoln Park before the bitch makes plans and scrams; stop at the corner store to buy some ales, I get two six-packs of Goose Island Bourbon County Stouts and head to their place. Joint’s this tiny crowded townhouse sublet, two-bedroom, lots of wood, wallpaper, fabric and incense, incense that’s having a mighty hard time masking out the overpowering funk of an inexistent dog – not that I think the slobs are burning it for that purpose but anyway - the hindi and a nondescript Armenian chick share the one room and ZZ’s got the other. So Sima, the so-so hindi, gets the door and she’s all like, “It’s gonna work!”, that she told ZZ I was coming, and that she, ZZ, was cool with it, and that she’s showering right now and getting ready to go out with me. I’m like, is this Sima bitch retarded? I mean, that’s kinda strange, right?”

“Bitch has been avoiding you,” burps Ian, then, more clearly, “yet she’s already made up her mind she’s hitting the downtown with you, plus, is so interested in seeing you, that she doesn’t even wait for you to show up. First saying fuck off Joe, and now it’s let’s hot-date, Joe. Yep, hindi’s a retard. She shouldn’t have given her the heads-up –now she’s the one, the Z bitch, the one in control of the situation. And probably disinterested if you ask me.”

“So I drink my porter and the Armenian and Sima got like bathrobes on and these green clay masks or whatever on their faces so they speak really weirdly; some old Alanis Morissette is playing on the radio, Million Dollar Chance of a Lifetime rerun on mute on the TV and all of a sudden ZZ enters stage right. Bro, this chick was looking fine!”

“No shit.”

“She’s wearing these ultra-short jean cutoffs, above the knee dominatrix-style black vinyl platform boots, a white tank top and a black leather jacket with a pair of giant red wings embroidered on the back, black Phillip Johnson-style glasses and a sort of little girl hairdo with the top of her hair pulled back and the rest shoulder-length. I’m all excited, she’s kind of like suspiciously serious and aloof and paying more attention to finding her keys and cigarettes, right?”

“Shiet.”

“So we hail a cab to West Town where there’s supposed to be, according to her, this amazing rave with this awesome new DJ from Russia, and we stop at a corner outdoor kebab place and she slowly, methodically deals death to hummus, a falafel, like six Kibbeh balls and half a Shawarma while I do all the talking. And she reserved the totality of her dinnertime eye-contact quota for the Kibbeh balls. I swear to God. And various blank spots on the table. The bottom of her glass, too.”

“Told ya before you even told me.”

“That’s nothing bro. We get to the venue, which is just a few blocks away. The place is an island – the commercial spaces to either side of it are closed, deserted - very few people around except a few guys standing outside the door, no other bars around on the rest of the block. I pay, we go in. The place is fucking packed. There’s a large bar right as you enter, a big square occupying most of the space, so it’s bar on all four sides, and built-in sofas and tables all along the perimeter walls. I say I’ll go get us drinks. I start noticing something’s not right. The rave music is so loud that I had to ask ZZ three time what she wanted and end up having to gesture. She yells back three times and it’s like she’s lip-syncing without the playback. Something’s strange here. The atmosphere. The crowd. Couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I turn to go to the bar and that’s when I finally notice the TV screens and the videos. The dress code here is jeans, boots, loafers with no socks or sneakers, loose plain t-shirts or tight fitting cardigans, and bro, there’s gay porn on the screens.”

“What?? The bitch!!”

“Bitch took me to a gay fucking bar, bro!”

Ian crushes his beer can in disgust, stands up, glaring back at Joseph, “Bitch!!”

“No shit homes, so, and wait, that’s not all. I just order two rum and cokes, pay with a twenty, keep the change, get back to where I last saw her, she’s nowhere to be seen. I look around with the two drinks in my hands, making my way across the frenetic fags, I’m holding the two highballs against my chest now, all of a sudden I see her, talking with some guys. I make my way over and I guess she said what’s up and takes one of the drinks and starts lip-syncing introductions to each of the four clowns. For some reason I’m guessing these have to be some of her Spanish friends she’s often talked about, and if it’s them they supposedly don’t speak a word of English. Not that it matters. Bro, long story short, all of a sudden she takes off with the shortest of the four, I mean with the platforms she’s a full head taller than the shrimp, he’s got this flattened Mediterranean afro that looks like some kind of inverted pyramidal mushroom over his stubbled Neanderthal face, chubby, double jointed, but one - if he’s who I think he is - of only two straight guys in the fucking place, me being the other. Yep, the other three are gay, or at least I just saw two of them kissing and one of the two is holding the remaining one’s hand.”

Ian’s been saying “no fucking way, bro, no fucking way… no fucking way, bro, no fucking way,” over and over in a low, bitter monotone for the last minute now. Joseph pauses to accept another beer, which Ian cracks open while continuing his background monologue. Joseph takes a sip and continues, “I eventually make my way over to the railing overlooking the main floor a level below, behind the bar area, this practically warehouse-size main rave dance floor with an at least five-story roof, high lateral walls with several stories of windows on them but they’re all boarded up, and at the far end, the stage, and this quote unquote famous fucking DJ with his hand up, in the fucking air, and jumping up and down… bro, there had to be thousands of people there.”

“Of queers you mean.”

“She’s jumping up and down with the twerp down there. He’s shaking his head to the fucking rhythm, I guess, hitting her face with his greasy fucking mess of a mop of hair, and she seems to be loving it. You have no idea, man. By now, guys are starting to notice my single status, bro, gays are fucking hitting on me!”

“Queer bastards,” Ian gnashes his teeth.

“They’re fucking worse than us! We wouldn’t hit on a chick like that ever, man. They’re classless, over-the-top.”

“You’re starting to sound like you into that bro! Eeeeehhh! Terry the merry!! Eeeeehhh!!”

“Fuck you, man. So I gotta pull out an escape plan before one of ‘em starts to want to pull out something else out of me, right? Or worse? So I execute: I rush the front door.”

Ian laughs as he cracks open a new can of beer. “Messed up, man.”

“Yeah, I somehow get to the door in one piece, bust it open, and who do I bump into?”

“Cliché, bro, overused trope, like in a B-ass movie!”

“Except it’s true. The girl from Kinko’s I’ve told you about. The one and only Almengor Almengor.”

“Oh yeeeaaah! Nothing like being saved by an angel! You lucky mofo, bro! Tell me something went down! You didn’t chicken out?”

Joseph was shaking his head. The night was still dark and crisp. Cool. Quiet. He noticed a toad in the grass, some ten feet in front of them. He said, “No way was I going to miss that chance. I mean we’ve been wanting to get a room for weeks now. Chick’s flirty as hell, but she won’t give up her number, right? I say, ‘Heeeey girl, what’s UPP!!”, she’s all with it, she’s like ‘What are you doing here’ and shit, all busting my balls, like mock surprised but in her classy discreet way, you know? Classy chick. She looks like an older Lacey Chabert.”

“Lacey who?”

“Chabert, you know, Claudia Salinger. Party of Five?”

“Oh. I don’t got no sisters bro, you know, and my mom doesn’t watch that.”

“Whatever, dude. Fine show and this B’s finer. She’s, wait, I forgot to mention she’s with a friend, right?”

“Chick?”

“Yeah.”

“No way! Whaient you call, man?”

“Dunno, anyway, they’re both wearing short jean skirts and pumps, Almengor yellow, her friend black; Almengor white blouse, her friend blue with light blue polka dots, both with long brown hair and big colorful plastic hoop earrings.”

“What did the girlfriend look like?” asks Ian as he crushes another beer, tosses it at the toad, misses by six feet.

“You’da dug her. Sort of like a black latina version of Nancy Olsen from The Facts of Life.

Ian: “Habla espaniol. A black Felice Schachter. Cool.”

“More mulatto than black, maybe. Anyway, so I’m like you wanna hang out, but lets bounce, and they’re like sure, let’s hang out but we wanna GO BACK IN, homes!!”

“FUCK!” Ian yells.

“Keep it down bro!” Joseph chugs down the last of his beer. He hears another can being opened: T-SHHKK. He grabs the new beer Ian’s handing to him. Joseph shugs down some more.

“Bitches, man… so what the fuck did you do, bro?”

“What the fuck could I do? There’s only so much you can argue in a situation like that… B’s like their guys straight but they won’t be diggin’ a homophobic bro, you know?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” said Ian.

“So I don’t argue too much. We go back in. Some gays are happy to see me again - I hope not figuratively - when they see me back, till they see my new company: a couple of 115-pound, vulva-equipped, gay-joint-grade human shields, man.”

“Still tripping on what the odds must have been that you ran into that chick, man.”

“I was ecstatic, for sure. Order drinks again, this time three rum and cokes. They want to go up close to the stage. I’m like ‘oh, fuck.’ We make our way to the stage through the crowd. I manage the foray sandwiched between the two chicks with Almengor in front of me and her friend right behind me. Worst experience of my life. Shields turned out not to be worth a half a fuck as fags still manage to walk up to me and say things like, ‘You’re such a beautiful boy’, and, ‘I want the meat in that sandwich’. And, ‘Marry me?’ Can you believe those fucking guys? I just buried my face in Almengor’s hair, furiously trying to remember some warm, safe place where as a child I’d hide, you know, holding her hand, drink in the other, her friend grabbing me by my belt.”

“Watch OUT bro! Sounds to me like you were actually enjoying that, eehh?? Careful, bro!!”

“Shiet. So we get to the front just by the stage. But I guess even to this pair of gay lovers I’m with, watching these gays jumping up and down and grinding against one another got old pretty quickly. And we’re literally spitting on each other’s faces from yelling to each other to try to make small talk and we still don’t hear anything. So now they want to scram, and believe me, I second. I’d already identified an escape route minutes ago. There’s an exit to the right of the stage and this time I lead the way, leaving my unfinished drink by a speaker and grabbing hold of them both. Surprisingly, the sort of corridor to the exit door is clear of queers.”

“Hey. That rhymed.”

“Door leads to another corridor, running sort of parallel to the back of the stage. Very grey and dimly lit, sort of a utility corridor with lots of pipes and MEP running along it overhead. We’re like so how the fuck do we get back outside, right? We walk along it looking for another exit to an alley or something. Nothing, it just keeps going. The other way around is no good either since it’s a dead end. Finally we come up to there’s a grey door with no signs or anything, on the right side. Leads to a stair. It only goes down. The sound of the rave is still audible but muted, volume getting lower with each step. The chicks want to turn back. I mean, there’s no lights going down along that stair. I’m like fuck it. Ok, let’s go back. We get back to the exit door, but now there’s no fucking way to open it. Exit only fire fucking door. So it’s the dark stair or else, right? Her friend bangs on the door and yells for someone to open but of course no one’s hearing us.”

“Damn.” Ian takes another sip from his beer, looks out into the darkness ahead of him.

“Her friend’s starting to freak out but we get back to the dark stair going down and they lend me their cell phones and with mine too I sort of make a sort of flashlight holding the three phones in front of me and we go down the stairs. I think had we been drunker that shit would have been more fun. So downstairs, we get to this vast, dark room with a very, low rectangular-grid, acoustical tile ceiling. There’s a faint white line by the floor by what looks to be a wall maybe 40 feet ahead of us. I’m thinking, ‘another fucking door’. As we approach we can hear activity, voices, beyond the door. Sounds, clangs, orders being barked. There’s boxes everywhere around us. There’s boxes of cans of tomato sauce and a few boxes of flour and pasta around us. We get to the door and I pull it open. Before us is an ultra-well-lit, HUGE state-of-the-art commercial kitchen filled with chefs, cooks and assistants in white chef uniforms busily stirring, sautéing, frying, baking, skimming, slicing, flipping, washing, sprinkling, boling, salting, breading, kneading…”

“DAMN.”

Joseph takes another sip. The toad has started over to the crumpled can Ian threw at it. Bumps against it. “We cross the kitchen looking for an exit. Everyone seems so busy no one seems to notice us. I even grabbed a piece of garlic bread from a bunch an assistant was spreading butter on and he didn’t even notice. One thing’s for sure, I’d never, ever seen a kitchen that big. After what seemed like ages we reach the door waiters keep coming in and out of. They don’t mind us either as we step through it and into a warmly lit, elegant dining room that oddly seems kind of too small for the kitchen servicing it. One of those understated-jazz-piano-amenitized, hushed conversation, very expensive with white tablecloths and seven forks and knives on each side of the four progressively smaller plates and eight different wine glasses on each place. Beige carpeting. Dark purple carpeting. Stuck-up, ceiling-scraping-tip-of-nose waiters with the white rectangular spotless napkin draped over their tuxedoed forearm and flowers and candles on each table. And it’s packed. There’s people by the door waiting to be seated. The good news is we finally find a way out. There whole far wall of the place is a curved curtain wall that leads onto an interior court, sort of between buildings. But there’s a sort of reception going on there – formal one, too. Like a pre-wedding reception or something. There’s waiters going around offering everyone champagne and of course they offer us, too; each girl grabs one and I grab two, immediately down one. We keep making our way across this mass of smiling faces, botox or otherwise, artificially tanned or otherwise, tuxes, dresses, five hundred-dollar hairdos, pearls, diamonds, gold and the occasional Cuban habano. Waiters passing around Hors D’oeuvres also appear. By the time we reach the street we’ve each had our share of Shrimps in Phyllo Cups, Rustic Tuscan Pepper Bruschettas, Bacon-Encased Water Chestnuts, Titicaca-Style Deviled Eggs, Garbanzo-Stuffed Mini Peppers, Sweet Pea Pesto Crostinis, Arctic Meatballs with Chimichurri, Apple-Gouda Pigs in a Blanket and Greek Olive Tapenades and I’m not making these up – the waiters had freaking nametags with the name of their appetizer on it – I mean, I’m literally talking, ‘Hi, My Name Is fucking Sausage Wonton Star’ - this all set against a lively festive New Orleans-style jazz backdrop.” Joseph chugs down some more of his beer, burps loudly.

“Free dinner, homes. Free music. Awesome, any hotties?” says Ian, and chugs down some more of his beer and burps, too.

“You’da made friends bro.”

“Word.”

“Anyway, we’re onto the street once again and I already got a light buzz. Don’t know about the girls. They look like they can hold their own. Out here, the 16-foot-wide sidewalk is packed, too, with your typical Heart-of-the-Loop Chicago crowd of jaunters, tourists – out of town, out of county, out of state or otherwise – families, Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, cops, hoodlums, groups of debutantes, dudes wearing oversize Flavor Flav-style clothing, grungers, hipsters, hookers and pimps, plus your regular, decent, been-happily-married-for-thirty-years Playbill-clutching nicely dressed couple every once in a while. And us, I guess.”

“A tall, handsome, alpha-male type with however deep-seated identity issues, and two hot broads in miniskirts and pumps. Yo, so, describe ‘em legs, man!”

“You’da had one of your episodes, bro. Skin, muscle, fat, bone structure, two pair. You’da died.”

“I wanna fucking die bro, I wanna fucking die right fucking now, bro.”

“You’re scaring me, dude. So, so now there’s this old guy standing before us in the middle of the sidewalk with one of those signs they wear with straps over their shoulders that’s got signs on the front and the back, gesturing for us to go down a flight of stairs on the side of an oriental food store – this old guy actually has some real-ass looking Old-Chinese-wise-man white mustache and beard – and the sign on him reads, “GET RAMMED BY OUR RAMEN!! $3.99 -- CHEAP!!!”, so we decide to go share one but mostly it’s just to go get sake.”

“Don’t make me puke, bro.”

“So we go down, we go in, I bump my head on I can’t remember how many of those red Chinese hanging paper lamp ball things, sit at the first empty table we see – orange formica, of course - and order a bowl of the Extra Spicy Sriracha Spicy Ramen Noodles Soup, and three sakes. Regardless of the crowds outside there’s only like four or five other tables with people on them here. The music’s very low-volume old Loudness, believe it or not. So it was kind of hot, no pun intended, sharing the ramen with these chicks, as we refused the waitress’ offer of extra bowls, and all ate from the same big one, heads and faces all against each others’. So I put it on Cliff’s Amex – it was like seventeen dollars - and we go back out on the street, which is not that chillier, then Almengor says, ‘Why don’t we see if the Ramen’s kitchen leads somewhere else too?’ To which I say, ‘Er, I’m not sure that’s such a great idea’, but her friend’s all like ‘Yes, let’s do it’, and they’re running back and down the stairs again before you can say ‘two crazy bitches’. So we’re back at the restaurant and these two chicks just rush the kitchen, there’s a fat Chinese dude washing some dishes, he keeps telling them something in Chinese over his shoulder and is all serious but never stops scrubbing, these chicks are completely ignoring him and find a door and go through it, fall and almost land on their faces since just behind the door is a perversely placed foot-and-a-half-tall Van Dyke Step, it was quite funny actually how they fell, and her friend broke the heel off her left pump; after helping them up and the Chinese guy’s voice is in the background now we cross a short dark corridor and hear some voices behind a bead curtain at the end of the corridor, go through it and we’re in a dilapidated messy sort of living room slash kitchen slash barrack with an at least 12-strong family in it, all ages and genders present, half eating noodles, a quarter maybe noticing our incursion at all, an eighth maybe start to bust our balls over our incursion…”

“These chicks she-males?” Ian burped.

“No! Man… when’s Lacey Chabert ever looked like a she-male?”

“You never know, bro.”

“That was random, bro. So this place smells like noodles, man, at… like… an… overpowering level; we cross the space to a stair in the corner and Lacey I mean Almengor leading the way and her friend who’s now walking sexier with a sort of erotic limp after losing her heel, behind her, and me, rearguarding, actually rearguard-reargazing in silence if you’ll allow.” Joseph tilts the beer again and chugs down a few more fluid ounces of the bitter P.A. Then reverses the motion and before the bottle comes to an almost vertical rest in the clutch of his hand on his knee, continues. “The stair leads to a small Chinese food mart or something, but it’s closed, all lights off, it’s the store I guess we saw from the street that sits above the ramen place. It’s dark as hell but we still make our way through the aisles, surrounded by jelly cups bags, shrimp chips bags, flour cake bags, sesame seed bags; soy sauce bottles, oyster sauce bottles, curry paste bottles; pho spice packets, spring roll packets, and, of course, noodles. Almengor’s friend grabs a jar of pine nuts, opens it up and inexplicably fills her mouth with a quarter of the jar’s contents. Had said she was hungry as she opened the jar. Now, I’m thinking we’re looking for the front door so we can go back out on the street somehow, right? These bitches were – get this – looking for the restroom. So I said, ‘Bro, can’t you wait till we get the fuck out of here and find a McDonald’s or something?’; still munching, the friend says something unintelligible as she starts to pull down her skirt, Almengor rushing to stop her, pulling it back up; I’m wondering if I should just find and crack open a bottle of Baijiu or some shit.” Both men drink some more of their beer, starting and stopping at exactly the same time, as if rehearsed. “So anyway these lunatics start to freak out that maybe some of the Chinese have followed us here from their cave and with torches and with portable ancient Chinese torturing devices and stuff; the friend grabs a small bottle of sweet and sour sauce and throws it on the floor, breaking it, saying, ‘This! We need to find a door that says this!’, while starting to write on the floor with the tip of her heel-less shoe ‘为了安全’, broad shoestrokes, then falls on her knees and starts to desperately use her hands and fingers, too; Almengor’s nodding this whole time, and if this will please the bitches I start looking for a door that says fucking ‘为了安全’, find one that instead says ‘傻瓜走了’, grab the girls and run for it. They’re screaming, ‘They’re coming, they’re coming,’ Almengor’s friend managing to limp-run, scream that, and lick the sweet-and-sour sauce off her fingers all at the same time. Must have licked some serious ultra-small-glass-splinters, too.”

“Bro, what does ‘为了安全’stand for?”

“To safety,” Joseph says and chugs down some more of his beer.

“To safety,” repeats Ian. “And what about ‘傻瓜走了’?”

“Translates loosely to ‘Begone, fools’.”

Ian ponders this as he slowly takes another sip, staring at the empty, dark expanse of grass before him.

Joseph continues. “So we reach the door and push it open, all three of us ramming against it, no pun intended, at more or less the same time. We bust into a well-lit service hallway that leads to what looks like a parking garage, but it’s in its final stages of construction, not yet done, the parking garage, very few workers on site. The smell of curing concrete is all over the place. We slow our pace back down again and the girls are laughing, they’re on each other’s faces, I’m like, so what do you crazy bitches want to do now, right? So…”

“You actually said that?” Ian interrupts.

“Nah. I said, like…”

Ian interrupts again. “’So what do you crazy ASS bitches wanna fuck up next, homes!’” The men high-five.

“…nah,” said Joseph. “I said, ‘Let’s go get a drink.’”

“Oooo.”

“So now we cross the floor slab to a retaining wall that’s flanked on the one side by a plywood partition and it’s got a computer-printed eight-and-a-half by eleven paper sign taped to it that says, “TO LOBBY” with big Arial bold letters and a big grey arrow pointing to the floor.”

“Portrait?”

“Landscape.”

“Cool.”

“So we take the door, leads to a set of service elevators, none working, now the friend’s saying she needs a new pair of shoes. Whining and whining, tiny orange-red sweet and sour sauce splotches and stains still drying all over and around her sexy fat lips. Now if this will make the bitch shut up I’m game, right? Get the bitch shoes!"

"Word."

"So I say ‘I got your back’. So, we take the exit stair to the lobby, ends up not really being the lobby but leads to yet another corridor that leads to yet another fire exit that leads to an alley. Remember now, Almengor’s friend is still walking her sexiest look-at-me-pa-no-left-pump-heel walk.

We go back and up one floor and this time the corridor does lead to a huge, John Portmanesque, busy urban lobby, A/C and marble and carpet and brass and suits and pearls and lipstick-stained highball glasses, and the dim whiff of remote frituras and sushi and the harder tang of a hundred twenty thousand after-dinner red meat belches and Cool Water and DK for Men and Santos Sport intermingled with Acqua de Miele and Sonia Rykiel and Zaharoff and Lolita Lempicka and freaking Ming Shu Fleur Rare; now back to the shoes -- the bitch’s fixated on these pair of freaking cowboy boots on the storefront of one of the boutiques on the street side, to the left of the revolving doors at the other end of the gargantuan atrium, these black, grey and turquoise faux snake skin cowboy boots and I put ‘em on Cliff’s Amex and say ‘My god, these will soon be puked on.’ She dumps her black pumps in a large black passing-by janitorette's small white trash tank, or was it in a small white passing-by janitor's large black trash tank? But she dumps both the broken no-heel pump and the good pump either way, and then Almengor says let’s get some dirty martinis. So we hang out in the dim light of the brown-marble-and-gold-clad, what seems like a half-a- football-field-long, white-shirted and cuffed and vested bartender-tended lobby bar. I end up paying for eight dry martinis, of which I drink two, Almengor half of one, her friend three; then orders and spills a fourth one, gulps down the whole of what's left of Almengor's, olive and all, and they're not of the seedless variety, then lashes out at the bartender for the spilled martini, saying that he did it, demanding a new one, all this considering the poor fucker was not even in the vicinity back when she spilled the drink all over my lap, olive and all. I put it all on Cliff's Amex." Joseph takes another sip, staring ahead into the darkness.

"Seedless fucking olives, man."

"No shit bro."

The two men stare together into the dark expanse of grass and parkland landscape of interspersed buckeyes, honey locusts, sugar maples and white oaks. The sky above the trees' silhouettes, maybe now a slight degree lighter than a minute ago. Dark bluer. Ian notices that another large toad is in front of them, maybe 5 feet away - and probably been sitting with them for quite over a few minutes now. He squirts some spit at it through the gap between his two central incisors, regards twin white projectiles miss it by about a foot on each side. He tilts the bottle home once again. Brew rushes indifferently down his throat.

Continues Joseph: "But of course, these two bitches ain't through yet."

"Plus, I'm still waiting for the part where you finally BANG this motherfucker. Or BOTH those motherfuckers. Fucking POV threesome, dude!!"

"Shut up bro. So they're advertising some venue called Bourbon on the Loop. Supposed to be taking place somewhere on the fifty-second floor. We hit the elevator, it’s a WASP senior couple, their afroed-teenage-apparently-grandson with the Geto Boys t-shirt, two other bitches nowhere as hot as the two I’m with, except maybe more sober, and, inexplicably, the janitor from before. But in street clothes. Turns out he was small white after. The proud flaunter, confirmed, of a large black… trash can. Bitch Almengor friend even bitchily demands can she have them back. He just keeps staring up at the red letters then ascending numbers on the digital indicator. The kid’s music - Dawn 2 Dusk, track two of the Geto Boys’ sixth studio album entitled Da Good da Bad & da Ugly - ”

“I know that shit man…”

“blaring through his earphones and with sound waves even insulated by his ‘fro still almost drowns out the Music-by-Musak instrumental version of Kris Kross’ Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do) released in August, 1981, that the hotel P.A. system is treating us with.”

“You mean Chris Cross, right? Christopher Cross?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

"Yeah, so." Joseph accepts another beer from Ian. "So we're the second-to-last ones to get off – the janitor stayed in – and as soon as the doors open we're in fucking, like, there's thousands of people walking around and the whole floor - this Bourbon on the Loop thing - seems to be they got like the bars and restaurants you would find on Bourbon Street, N.E.? They got them here. Like, this is just what I needed, right?" He takes a sip. "A place where these bitches can finally let their hair down, relax, and maybe order another twenty thousand drinks before finally burning the entire building down?"

"Hey. Just put it on Cliff's Amex."

"Just what I need after a hard day of work. So I lose the bitches, I literally go AWOL on the clowns, go out on my own, exploring; get inside this quasi-blues bar called The Abroad Frances Thighs – they make some out-of-this-fucking-world fucking spicy fried chicken, bro, you should definitely try it, I later learned - and treat myself to a bourbon. Take a fucking servilleta from the bar and wipe my face up. Shit. Feel like a new man already. All by myself without nobody, grab myself one of the few empty tables, just my Wild Turkey and I, and I bask in the twelve-bar tempo of the live band's ultra-extended cover of Muddy Waters' You Shook Me, and, you know, relax, think 'bout ol' times, ponder. Ponder. But sure enough, mid solo, 15 minutes later, guess who come storming in, all laughs and smiles?"

"The two bitches."

"They're not alone, bro."

"The janitor?"

"They're hand-in-hand on each side of some Asian dude... some grinning, middle-aged, spectacled, Armani-clad, tan, clean-cut, full-head-of-hair, got-Jacksons-flying-out-his-pockets Asian dude just slightly taller than them." Joseph finishes his beer.

"But you got Cliff's Amex, bro." Ian cracks open a new beer, hands it to Joseph.

"Jesus." Joseph drinks down maybe a third of the beer, continues: "So these bitches and the Asian dude, you guessed it. They're heading directly toward me's and Wild T.'s table. I mean. 1974 bitches come equipped with radar or some shit?" Joseph tilts the bottle in his favor once again, downs it to its half-mark. "They come up and introduce him, I guess the guy turns out he's Japanese, his name’s Taro, we shake hands, they occupy all three remaining seats on our table. Now, of course, they order drinks. Thankfully, the japster says they're on him. I say sure, hit me with another dubya-T on the rocks. By now I'm slightly buzzing. The waiter comes back with my Turk, his Perrier and two humongous Hurricanes. Fuck, bro. As these bitches start sucking on those fat ass straws, bro. I say it's time I make a fucking move, man. What else could I do now? So I ask her to dance. You know, to break the ice. A lively blues rock country tune is playing now and a few dunces are dancing so I say fuck it. I’ll be camouflaged. She said yes, of course. She'd already started looking at me kind of more like I remember her doing from Kinko's. So I'm guessing I'm on a roll. Her friend's going on about some "cajun" cuisine course she took, to the jap, their faces inches from each other and I can clearly see how she's spitting all over his face with every word. She says, 'Poutine!? Poutine?!? Poutine?!?!?!' spitting exactly six times and the dude can't stop beaming, dude's relishing it, dude's basking in it; by now it's like waaaaay after midnight, I guess. So we get to the dance floor, a new band’s taking the stage, they label themselves a “genreless” band, and that they’re there tonight solely doing covers for us nice folks. It’s all blokes except for the singer, this freaking spectacular, hotter than shit at-least-6-foot-tall miniskirt-wearing she-devil bodied shaved-headed angel face.”

“No shit. What’re her feet wearing?”

“Shiny red strappy vinyl 5-inch platform wedge sandals.”

“Fuck!!!”

“Olive-green Cons.”

“Fuck you!!”

“So anyway they start playing and she’s on the mic and says, ‘So you want to do something that's a little bit not too Afro-centric-erotic-space-groove-jazz-funk-acid-punk,’ and I was the only reaction, I say, “YEEEEAHH!!! WOOOHOOOO!! LAY IT ON ME, BABY!!” I look down at Almengor and she’s looking back at me like she’s about to break the 50-pound glass Hurricane goblet on my forehead, with the half a Hurricane and small palm tree still in it. I look back at the singer and she’s looking straight back at me, and she says, ‘Come on, what do you want? Come on, baby.’ I look back at Almengor. I actually see smoke coming out her ears. The singer looks at Almengor now, grinning subtly: ‘It's all about power, baby, you know what I'm saying? It's all about sleepwalking through this endless night.’ I’m entranced. Almengor drops the 50-pound Hurricane goblet, on my foot, mind you, Hurricane now flooding the dance floor, orange rodaja even surfing a wave toward the stage and she storms off, arms crossed, back to the table. I catch up with her and grab her by her arm and spin her around, and now we’re face to face, our gazes connect, and we mutually say to each other in time with the singer: ‘You want me to make you feel like you ain't never felt before, baby?’ The ensuing French kiss was epic, bro.”

“Yousa fucking bastard, bro,” Ian laughs.

“So now all I gotta do is find a room, right? So we head back to the table and guess what? Our food’s waiting for us, still steaming hot. But the jap and the friend are nowhere to be seen. Upon closer inspection, turns out they left a note. Hey, thanks guys, right? It says: ‘Found a room. U DO 2’. Almengor’s like ‘What the fuck?’ and, frankly, I am too. I catch a glimpse of a waiter, a young black guy with no hair and a goatee, say ‘Bro any idea where our friends went?’, and he says, ‘No sir, but it was all taken care of by that gentleman of Asian ascent, and they said they’d leave a note.’ Almengor says, ‘But there’s no room number! Could we at least, like, get this to go then?’, and he says ‘Of course, ma’am,’ and he leans over the table and starts to take the food away and as he’s doing that he pauses and turns to us and says, ‘Uh, sir, ma’am, you might want to take look at this.’ Still leaning, he’s holding a placemat with both hands and looking closely at the center of the table, where there are two chicken wings, but of the variety that are shaped like an “L”, next to each other, oriented the same way, and they each got a short piece of celery perpendicular to the L’s vertical leg, pinned in place with a toothpick, making each small food ensemble a sort of plus sign with a foot on it. As Almengor and I stare at it dumbfounded, the waiter goes on: ‘Looks to me like it says ‘77’ in Japanese, sir, ma’am.’ Almengor and I simultaneously turn away from the food art to look squarely at him. He turns his head to look back up at me, and alternatingly at Almengor, who’s standing on the other side of the table. ‘Uh, I took a year of Japanese in high school’. Almengor and I keep regarding him and we say at the same time: ‘We see.’ We look back at each other. She looks like she’s about to spit a laugh out on the back of the guy’s head, who’s still leaning over the table and looking at me. I say, ‘Soo.. which is room seventy-seven?’ To which the guy says he has no fucking clue. In more polite words.” Joseph finishes off his beer.

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Ian finishes off his beer. Ian disposes of both empty bottles, digs into the cooler and fetches a pair of new ones, opens them up. They each take a long drink. “So the fuck you do?” asks Ian.

Joseph sighs. “I’m guessing the guy’s room is on the 77th floor.”

“No shit.”

“We grab the food and hail an elevator ride up there. This time there’s no one on the elevator. Musik by Muzak’s playing Sergio Mendes’ Never Gonna Let You Go.”

“Ya grab her in the elevator or anything?”

“Nah, man. We’re all with like six bags of food, remember. We get to seventy-seven. Get off. Your regular luxury hotel carpeted elevator lobby and corridors lined with rooms on each side. It doesn’t take us long to catch the soundwaves of Lionel Richie’s 1983 hit, “All Night Long”. Along with the dueling voices of Allie’s friend and the upstanding Japanese gentleman doing karaoke.”

“Just follow the music,” says Ian. The “follow” was burped.

“Just follow the music,” repeats Joseph, sans burp. “We bang on the door, and I’m expecting the guy to be wearing his tie as a headband, but go figure, he’s still decently dressed and everything. Almengor’s in the back, on a small circular stage, flooded by blue neon and there’s a disco ball too, and we come in. He’s like ‘oh, so you got the message, that’s great, come with me,’ I glare at him as he leads me to the kitchen and Almengor stays behind with her crazy bitch. Now the J. Geils Band’s “Centerfold” comes up, and both the girls are singing it while back here in the kitchen Sushi’s offering me sake, which I appreciated. Fuck, I needed to get the edge off. Balls are starting to turn blue.”

“Amen, bro,” says Ian.

Joseph notices that what he had thought was a toad-sized rock to his left was actually a toad, as it suddenly starts hopping away. Holding his beer bottle with both hands, he takes a second to breathe in deeply and take in the night’s damp air, and bask in the amazing solitude and darkness permeating his view of the grass and dispersed trees ahead. He takes another sip from his beer and continues: “So before I can ask the guy if there’s an extra room that A and I can borrow he asks, ‘You like whiskey?’ I say, ‘Sure.’ He points in the vicinity of my crotch, says: ‘Press that blue button.’ I start to look down at my crotch but before I get there there’s this shiny half-dollar-sized blue button in front of me by the edge of the island we’re standing by of which I had not noticed before. Funny, given the kitchen is actually pretty brightly lit, unlike the living room which looks and sounds like a freaking 70’s discotheque. Remove everyone. Wait, except two crazy-ass bitches. At first I’m like: like hell I’m gonna touch no fucking blue motherfucking anything, right? The music now blaring from the living room is Cheap Trick’s ‘Four Letter Word’. He urges me, on. He says, ‘Go ahead. It will be fine, as long as you like whiskey. Scotch, actually.’ So I’m there with my index on the button wondering if it’s a bucketful of Old Parr is gonna drop on me from the ceiling or something. I actually look at the ceiling right over me to make sure there’s no threat from above. All I get above me is a lone downlight. Zander, Almengor and her friend are bellowing away in the next room: ‘Caught in the act, had no alibi, no reason why to let you down, oh…’” Joseph downs what was left of his beer. “So I press the damn thing. Mechanical noises, a click, and a two-foot-wide section of floor-to-ceiling kitchen cabinetry that’s just beyond the island, by the fridge, slowly starts to rise, revealing an equally wide, well-lit, wood-lined corridor. I’m like what the fuck. I follow him into it, and we go up a flight of stairs that’s at the end of it, to a tall, wooden black door. There’s a beep, then he says something in Japanese, then a click and the door slowly swings open, silently. He steps through the doorway, I follow. We’re in a huge, dimly-lit rectangular room, maybe 50 feet wide by 70 long by 60 high. The air’s noticeably crisper and cooler here. The floor’s black slate, the walls too, no windows, no skylight. The ceiling’s also black slate. This place looks impeccably clean. But at the back wall in front of us, bro…” Joseph trails off.

“What? And how the fuck can that room exist in that suite? Aren’t you in a hotel? Is it a condo hotel kind of deal?” asks Ian.

“Brother, the whole back wall, and remember I’m talking an at least 50 by 60 foot wall, is lined with bottles of Johnny Walker blue.”

“What the fuck? You trippin’, bud?”

“I trip you not. The whole wall’s this rectangular grid with what seem to be well over a couple thousand cubicles, with unopened bottles of whiskey in them, on display. Some of the bottles are missing, like there are random empty spaces on the grid. But most are there. Maybe 20 percent are missing. And where there’s no bottle, that space is dark. Where there is a bottle, the bottle’s lit from below. So like each whiskey bottle gives off its own glow. Matter of fact, the amber glow of those thousand-plus bottles is the only lighting inside that room.”

“Fuck Almengor!! Figuratively!! And literally too!!”

“Yeah man.. so anyway. The door shuts tight behind us, it’s like the door of a vault, and I don’t give a shit, I’m in pure awe. Now everything’s completely silent, just the Japanese guy’s and my own breathing is all you can hear. He gestures for me to follow and walks to the center of the room and I follow. He says, ‘This is where I like to come when I want to get away from it all.’ I’m still speechless. He says, ‘Feel like a drink?’ I say, ‘Yes, sure. What is this? How can this be here? How did you build this? How many bottles is that? How much did this cost??’ He just smiles back at me. He says, ‘Please take a step back for me.’ I look at the floor, and notice that I’m standing right over a quarter-inch wide gap on the floor, which I then realize actually went on to form a 2-foot by 2-foot square on the floor, with a one inch in diameter hole in the center of it. I take a step back. He utters a word, a different one than before, again in Japanese, and the square section of floor slowly raises from the floor, accompanied by some bassy mechanical whirring, and clicks in place once its top surface is at about 2 feet from the floor. Another word and two smaller, foot-on-each-side squares raise from the floor, to a height of about a foot and a quarter, at opposite sides of the cube, so that an imaginary line connecting them would be perpendicular to the side walls. He says, ‘Please take a seat. This next part’s not electromechanical.’ I sit on the cube to the left side of this “table”. He walks toward the wall, to the left corner of the room toward a floor-to-ceiling metal ladder I had not seen was there. The ladder’s built-in to an assemblage on rails running parallel to the back wall, maybe a foot in front of it, and he easily pulls this ladder across manually to about just before the middle of the wall, and starts to climb it, the ladder. He climbs it up to maybe about two-thirds the wall’s height and chooses a bottle, grabs it with his right hand. The instant he took the bottle off the shelf, the uplight at the bottom of that cell turned off. He climbs back down with the bottle of blue, just holding on to the left rail of the ladder with the one hand as he clutches the bottle with his right against his chest. Once down he walks back to the “table”. He offers me the bottle and says, ‘You do the honors, my friend.’ As I’m opening that thing of beauty, he reaches below the “table” and produces two glasses. I’m guessing there’s a kind of niche on the side of the cube over on his side. The glasses, very minimalistic, round, three-and-a-half-inch in diameter and with a perhaps one full-inch-thick bottom. He puts his right pinky finger in the small hole on the center of the “table” and pulls up a square, inch-thick slab whose edges I hadn’t seen yet, revealing a stainless steel hatch. He lays the slab on the floor, leaning it against the side of the cube facing the whiskey wall to his right, and slides open the hatch, recessing it away underneath the cube’s ‘tabletop’ top face, revealing nine 2-inch cubes of ice that are laid out neatly in a nine-square-grid pattern, about a quarter inch from each other. He takes an intricately-engraved golden ice tong that’s tucked to the side of the aperture and chooses an ice cube, the center one on the line closest to me, and drops it carefully in my glass. He chooses a second ice cube, this time the center one on the line closest to the wall, and drops it in his glass. He puts the tong away, closes the stainless steel hatch, then puts the center tile with the hole in it back in place, and says, ‘Pour’. I pour his first. Very slowly. I’m careful not to pour directly on the ice but to its side, in order to keep its top, dry, frozen, barren, misting, four-square-inch surface intact. As I’m approaching three-quarters of the height of the ice cube with the whiskey he says, ‘That’s good’. I pour mine the same way I did his. I close the bottle and set it on the “table”, to my left. He says, ‘If you don’t mind, please put it on the floor.’ I do so. I set it against the cube-table, facing the wall. He says, ‘Salud,’ holding out his glass toward me. I say, ‘Salud,’ and we clink glasses. We each independently then draw our glass to our nose and take in the glorious aroma. Then we each take a sip, and for what seemed like a full minute after that first sip, just sit there in silence. He eventually draws the glass to his mouth and takes another sip. I do the same, looking at the wall to my left. He breaks the silence. He smiles and says, ‘This place was slightly brighter when I started.’”

Joseph looks back at Ian and notices he’s listening attentively. He’s pressing his bottle’s rim to his lips. Joseph goes on. “I say, ‘It used to be the whole wall was filled with bottles, right?’ He says, ‘Yes.’ I say, ‘Why don’t you replace them?’ He looks back at the wall. He says, ‘You only get one chance at, one glimpse at, perception, perspective…existence. Have you, just one chance at being alive. Wouldn’t it be a shame that you’d speed through life, and not have the chance to experience something truly extraordinary to you? I’m not talking drugs or questionable or unsafe sex practices. Or the extreme so-called sports. I’m not talking about hurting yourself or others in any way. I’m talking the real deal. To me, the real deal is this room.’ He takes another sip, I follow suit.”

Ian takes a sip from his beer.

“He goes on: ‘The real deal,’ he says. ‘To come here, regard the wall, sit at the center of the room, like we’re doing right now, in utter silence, utter solitude, and enjoy a single glass of my favorite whiskey, with a single two-inch by two-inch by two-inch cube of ice in it.’ I take another sip. After a while I ask him, ‘How long have you been doing this?’ He says, ‘About twenty-five years.’ A minute passes, maybe two. We just sit there, enjoying the last of our whiskeys. I insist, I say, ‘Why don’t you replenish the wall?’ He smiles and says, ‘Don’t you think that’s enough?’ I reflexively look back at the wall. After about three seconds, I respond, ‘Good point.’ Then, ‘So, may I ask, what’s the plan?’ He says, ‘No plan. Just keep on living. Keep coming here. Keep drinking. And the day they’re all done, they’re all done, I’ll be all done, it’ll… be all done. And that will be fine.’ We continue on in silence for a few minutes. Soon we’re sitting with glasses empty except, for a couple of small and extremely beveled shiny ice cubes, just contemplating. Then out of nowhere he takes off his glasses, looks at his wristwatch for two seconds, then presses a button on it, and the watch’s rectangular dial lights up. Never taking his eyes off it, he says, smiling, ‘Looks like the girls are having a good time.’ The light given off by the watch lights up his face and eyes, the specular reflections on his features and contrasting hard shadows from the bottom-up lighting rendering him an almost completely different man. He keeps looking at the screen of his watch, smiling, slightly shaking his head, and he let out a small chuckle. ‘Ah, girls will be girls, eh?’ He looks briefly back at me, then back at the watch. ‘The ladies,’ he says, still smiling and looking at his watch. He finally lays his wrist back down and the light turns off, and his features are back to normal, and he puts his glasses back on, and turns to me. ‘We should probably go back downstairs to them, eh? Refill?’ So we refill our glasses with ice cube and Blue, and go back downstairs to the kitchen.”

Joseph chugged the last of his beer, lay the bottle down in front of him. Ian was just engrossedly staring back at Joseph, his own bottle empty, too, dangling from his index finger which he had stuck inside the neck. Joseph continued:

“And it was almost overwhelming, you know? The contrast was. Between the tranquility upstairs and the loud music downstairs and the city lights alive, beyond the curtain wall in the kitchen and living room and which seemingly surrounded the entire suite. The music’s now Joan Jett and the Blackhearts ‘I Love Rock and Roll’. The freaking lunatics are still dancing with each other on that little stage, doused in black light this time. Each with a half-empty champagne flute in her hand. Us with our whiskeys, of course. Soon as they see us they’re like, ‘Hey, where were you guys? We’re hungry! You got anything to eat!?’ to which our host replied, ‘Sure, we can… grill some Japanese Burgers.’ And they’re like ‘Yay!! Japanese burgers!!’ and storm the kitchen. So dude just smiles and looks down and shakes his head and follows, and looks back at me and again says, ‘The ladies’. I say, ‘Yeah, bro. I know.’ I’m slightly buzzing by now, I’m just cool as a cucumber, just sippin’ my whiskey, my Johnnie Blue, you know?”

Ian forays into the cooler once again, extracting two fresh beers. Each man pops his beer open and tilts in his favor once again.

“So. Long story short, he gets the grill going out on the balcony - big, brick-floored balcony - he’s got some smoochfest-approved soft warm lighting out there and actual firewood piled up by the grill, and the “Japanese Burgers”, turn out to be like these grayish-pink 10 ounce patties’ which of course this couple of maniacs didn’t even let my man finish grilling before they were grabbing ‘em and putting ‘em on buns and drowning them in ketchup and stuffing their faces up with them. We sat down at a beerhall-style table with running benches on each side he’s got over by the railing at the edge, and Thing One and Thing Two here both washing down those ketchup-flooded burgers with Johnnie Red – yeah, they had asked what we were drinking and we said scotch and they said we want some too and the fucker gave them Johnnie Red… motherfucker gave them Johnnie Red, bro…”

Both men laughed.

“…I shit you not, from a sticky half-empty bottle in the kitchen by the stove, no less, next to the fucking cooking oil… and they’re by now starting to slur like motherfuckers, these two. So as they’re stuffing their faces - I swear Almengor’s friend’s got ketchup not just on her chin and cheek and the tip of her nose but on the bridge of her fucking nose too and she keeps scratching her left eyelid with her burger hand, with the knuckle of her index finger, scratching a small, dark, paisley-shaped spot on her eyelid that I’m guessing is also ketchup but it doesn’t go away but in doing so she inadvertently smears her whole eyebrow with the half-eaten burger in her hand so yet more ketchup and more grease and more juice from the burger on her face, and Almengor, who’s sitting to my left, asks, ‘So how are Japanese Burgers different from, like, American Burgers?” and looks at Taro who’s sitting facing her, next to her friend. Friend who, I now notice - she’s right in front of me - is all of a sudden seeming to finally be running out of gas, with eyelids at half-mast, lost look, and some reeeeaal sloooow chewing. At half-speed, she takes another kilometric drink from her whiskey, as Taro responds: ‘Well,’ he says. ‘They are, pretty much, the same. Same basic concept. Only there’s no meat.’ Even the friend, no longer chewing, has turned her head, in slo-mo, to listen. ‘I use, basically, seafood,’ says Taro. ‘Seafood?’ asks Almengor. I say: ‘Um, but, I’m afraid these don’t really taste like your regular Filet-O-Fish much at all, my man.’ To which Taro says, ‘They’ll never taste like that, my friend. That’s junk food. This isn’t junk food.’ Taro at this point has got our undivided attention. He keeps munching away happily, pairs of Almengor and I reflected back to us from the shiny surface of his glasses. Almengor says, ‘So… what? Are these like gourmet or something?’ Taro says, ‘You bet.’ Almengor: ‘So… what kind of fish is it? Is it like tuna or something?’ Taro smiles and says, ‘Yes, some tuna. Sure.’ Silence as he munches away, all alone. Almengor: ‘Oh, so you buy them at like a specialty Asian food place or something?’ Taro says, ‘No, I make them myself.’ Almengor: ‘How?’ She drags out the ‘how’. Taro: ‘Depends. On like, you know, what I’ve had to eat that week. You guys are in luck. I always grind the seafood on Fridays at daybreak, and make the patties Friday evenings. It’s actually all I eat on weekends. These burgers. A way to save money.’ Taro takes another bite, chews rapidly for two seconds, swallows part of what’s in his mouth, continues with mouth half-full: ‘I make my own sushi too. So throughout the week, I put any leftover sushi or sashimi in a big plastic freezer bag, for the patties. The salmon, I buy whole and gut them right here at home. All the organs and stuff go into the bag too. Plus every good burger needs some grease. That’s the only part I do get at the specialty store.’ He takes another bite. ‘I use whale blubber for that.’ He finishes off the last of his ‘burger’. Almengor’s friend was the first to break the silence. Brother, the eruption of puke that that woman hurled at me was epic and that’s being kind. And the yell that went with it… bitch seemed like she was center stage at a death metal karaoke or something. Like she turned into the lead singer of Possessed for two seconds or something. I mean her utterings echoed across the Chicago night. I mean they must have heard that shit in the Western Suburbs. I mean, did you hear it? Anyway, she starts to try to get up, hurls once again, this time on the table, Taro’s gotten up and is trying to help her up, and patting her on her back, as if that’s gonna be what placates the onslaught; Almengor’s got up too, I’m still in shock and I look down at the barf on canvas, by ‘canvas’ meaning my white shirt, I’m now proudly displaying for all to see and behold and admire. Linda here bellows again and again and again – and with each bellow another quart of puke shoots out, now landing on the floor and on anyone who’s near. Almengor’s left leg is not spared; neither is Taro’s right hand or the Pukemeister’s own glass of whiskey. Eventually she sort of starts to pass out and Taro says - the fucker’s smiling - ‘Looks like Mara-san’s had one too many.’ I look at the chick. She has adopted a yellowish sheen. I’m about to hurl myself from the nauseous fumes rising up from both the bitch and my shirt. I asked him for the bathroom and he shows me one next to the front door, where I take my shirt off and spend like 10 minutes washing. On the sink. I do a pretty good job, believe me.”

“No shit, maaaaan.” The ‘maaaaan’ was belched out. “But ever heard of ironing?” Ian finishes the rest of his beer and tosses it at yet another toad, which just showed up. He hits a tree instead, of course.*/-*

“I leave it there, drying, draped on the towel bar, open the door to call out to Taro if I can borrow a t-shirt. He points back and says ‘Right there,’ and I guess he’d already left a t-shirt neatly folded on the floor by the bathroom door. It’s a Lollapalooza ’97 concert t-shirt, looks brand new. ‘Thanks man! You go?’ I say as I put it on. ‘No. Just helped Perry out a little with that last one.’ ‘You fucking know Perry Farrell?’ As expected, Taro just smiled. ‘You fucking know Perry Farrell,’ I say matter-of-factly, slightly smiling, shaking my head, as we walk back to Almengor sitting cross-legged by the limp, motionless body on the floor and now I’m helping Almengor and Taro carry this limp sack of dumb weight over to a sofa or something, they’re taking care of the torso, one holding each arm, and I got the legs.”

“Oooh yeah.”

“Actually, I got the black, grey and turquoise faux snake skin cowboy boots I put on Cliff’s Amex and I look at them and say ‘My god, these were soon indeed puked on.’ Almengor says, ‘Wait! You got a bathtub? Wouldn’t that be better than a sofa? Maybe put her in it, fill it up with cold water and see if that revives her?’ I say, ‘Yes, I’ve seen them do that. You fill it to the brim and hold her down in case she floats, then when she breathes in, the water up her nostrils will give’er a good burn and she’ll wake up.’ I pump my fist when I say ‘good’. Almengor glares at me. Taro says, ‘What she needs is to lay down for a while, somewhere soft and warm. Let’s go back to the kitchen.’ So we carry this lifeless lump of meat over to the kitchen, head thrown back, hair mopping the floor, or rather streaking the floor with this lines of vomit, and he leads us over to the far side where he’s got, we soon learn, a pizza oven. I mean a real pizzeria-style brick hearth with chimney and all. He says, ‘Let’s set her down right here.’ Taro and Almengor gently set their half of the body down, I just drop the legs. Kaboom. It ended up sounding much louder than I expected. Almengor shoots me a look like she’s going to like strangle me right then and there. “Mara-san” convulses once and gives out a tired, real bassy, low howl, finished out by a short but surprisingly loud burp. We all then see twin lines of what I guessed was bile starting to run down each nostril, down each cheek, to the floor. ‘So what do you think?’ asks Taro. ‘My very own pizza oven right here at home. Cool, huh?’ ‘Sheesh, Taro, I don’t know,’ says Almengor. ‘If it’s Japanese Pizza you’re making, IIIIIIIIII don’t know.’ Taro smiled. ‘Let me fix you guys some drinks.’ And he went back into the living room. Almengor and I sit at the kitchen island on these high, white, Eero Saarinen-designed bar stools he’s got by the island. Almengor says, ‘Joseph? Shouldn’t we be calling it a night? What time is it, anyway?’”

The quiet night air is broken by the sound of Ian loudly burping. “You good bro?” He asks. Joseph finishes his beer. “I’m good. For another beer.” Ian brings out fresh brews. Each man cracks his open and takes long drinks.

“So what then?” Asked Ian.

“So I say, ‘What do you plan on doing with her? Leave her here?’ She says, ‘Hell no. Are you nuts? This guy could be a serial killer for all we know.’ I say, ‘Taro? Naah.’ She says, ‘I don’t care. I’m not leaving her here.’ I say, ‘Isn’t there like a homeless shelter down the block we can drop her off at? Thought I saw one on the way here.’ And, quick as cat, she grabbed my balls.”

“The fuck? She take them out?”

“No, dumbass. But she’s really grabbing them. Grabbing my crotch with her right hand. Looks at me in mock reproach, slightly smiling, says, ‘You want me to squeeze, you fucker?’ I said, ‘What? Well. Depends. How hard?’”

Ian laughed.

“She said, ‘This hard?’ And motherfucking squeezed. I’m like, ‘Ouch, wait, no no no no no no no!!! Stop!!’ She eases her grip. Not for a second has she broken eye contact with me this whole time. She asks, ‘Promise you’ll be nice? To her?’ I said, ‘Yes, yes. I do. I do. Nice. I’ll be nice.’ She let go. I got up and pulled my sack a couple of times to ease the pain. I mean she did go easy, obviously. But still.”

“Jump on your heels a couple times. Like they teach you to do in karate as a kid after an accidental kick to the jewels,” Ian said.

“I know! You went to karate too? I did not know that that oriental solution to ball pain was universal, man!”

“You bet it is!” responded Ian.

“So I said ‘Let’s have the nightcap he offered and go. I’ll go find Taro. The fuck is he.’ And went back into the living room and he’s nowhere in sight. He’s not at the balcony either. I start calling his name. ‘Taro, Taro! Yo, whiskey brother!’ I’m not in the mood to start exploring, so I go back to the kitchen. ‘Yo, this dude either ditched us, or went for a shit… and fell asleep at the can or some shit. Let’s get the fuck out of here.’ ‘You do realize,’ says Almengor, ‘that in order to even think about leaving… we need to get Mara to walk, don’t you?’ I say, ‘Good luck with that.’ She says, ‘Then we stay right here.’ I’m like, ‘Look, we take her home, ok? You got a car, by the way? Back near that gay bar we met at?’ Almengor: ‘Actually, yes I do.’ Me: ‘Perfect. So we carry, er, Mara downstairs, hail a cab to your car, take her home, you drop me off, you go home, and it’s all dandy and merry.’ Almengor: ‘You mean to tell me we’re gonna take her down to the lobby, looking like this?’ She jut her upturned hand in her friend’s direction as she said, ‘this’. So hard her cheek shook a little.”

“Ass cheek?” Ian asks.

“You’re so predictable, dude. So she’s looking at me all pissed off, arm extended, palm upturned, pointing at her friend’s road kill of a face. Me: ‘Wanna roll her inside a rug or something?’ Well, she goes apeshit, even reaches out for a kitchen knife, I catch her arm in time, avoid a tragedy, hug her tight. And I’m laughing. ‘Course we won’t do that, right? Let’s get her a little washed up and maybe find a kimono or something and dress her up real nice with it and no one will have any questions.’ When I said the word ‘kimono’ her face lit up. She opens her hand and the knife hits the floor. So we did that – we carried the bitch to an upstairs bathroom, stripped her…”

“You stripped her, dude??”

“We did, and I wasn’t looking.”

“Beaver or cleaver?”

“Cleaver.”

“All right!” said Ian. Both men grab new beers, open and chug.

Joseph: “You’d have dug that.”

Ian: “I’d have what?? Shieettt.”

Joseph in effeminate sinsong: “I only have eyes for Almengor.”

“You got that faggy voice down, bro. I heard WMAQ-TV’s looking for a gay anchor. Your big chance.”

“So,” continued Joseph. “Fuck you. So.” He takes another sip from his bottle of beer. Almengor bathes this chick from head to toe, in the bathtub, then we carry her out, lay her on what I’m assuming is Taro’s California King...”

“Aren’t most of those guys like, vertically challenged?” Asks Ian.

“Yo, my man Taro’s on the right side of that Japanese-male-height bell curve my friend. Remember I said he’s slightly taller than those chicks. Or who knows, he likes to have some real estate south of his feet to feel more cuddly, who the fuck cares. Anyway, we lay her on the bed and Almengor’s freaking eager as hell. She dries her up with a towel, rubs some almond oil she found somewhere in the bathroom all over her body, front and back…”

“What?? Bro, you bust your zipper? I’m ready to bust my zipper right now, bro.”

“I swear to fucking god, man. So back to PG-13: she goes off into the walk-in-closet and says, like, ‘it’s heeereee.’ She says it like that little girl in Poltergeist would. I walk over thinking ‘now, what the fuck did this bitch find,’ and, inside the walk-in-closet, there’s like this like shrine of some sort and, inside a man-sized display case, of the kind with lights inside and everything, there’s this god damn kimono. There actually IS a fucking kimono in the house. Fucking Taro. I look over at Almengor’s ecstatic face and firmly say: ‘No, we are not.’ She just elbowed me out of the way saying ‘Oh, yes, we are,’ she actually sings those words out, as if we were inside a freaking musical, and up and opens the display case, starts taking down the kimono. ‘Couldn’t Taro’s great-grandma or whatever at least have chosen a less conspicuous color??’ I ask. So she dresses this bitch up in the kimono, including the sash, the wood sandals and white socks, gets me to find some flour in the kitchen – we assumed that other than Japanese Burgers Taro’s got to every once in a while also like make some entrail tempura fried in whale lard or some shit – and she powders up the bitch’s face with the flour. She then also does the bitch’s hair and sprays it jet black with Taro’s Hair Club for Men black scalp concealer spray; then the mascara and the false eyelashes, and the lipstick and the blush. The bitch looks primed up for an open-coffin burial…” Joseph takes another sip from his beer, sets it back down. “…in Kyoto.”

“So Operation Remove Geisha Clown Corpse from Building is underway,” said Ian.

“You nailed it. So we’re carrying her out, we get her through the front door and this time around I got the head side. We go through the door, and we’re a few steps down the corridor when Almengor stops and shouts, ‘Your shirt!’ And I stop immediately and let go of the arms and the bitch’s head hits the floor with a loud thud, and I run toward the closing door and dive to get my hand in the gap in the doorway before it closes shut and I swear I got the tips of my fingers in on time, bro. We’re talking Pete Rose ain’t got shit on my dive, man. I get up, go in, get in the bathroom, shirt’s still wet, of course, but fuck it. I take off the Lollapalooza t-shirt and neatly fold it and set it on the toilet seat. I’m tempted to write “THANKS FOR EVERYTHING” on the mirror like with a bar of soap but then thought that would be kind of weird, but I was about to anyway, but then Almengor called out, ‘Joseph! Let’s go!’ and I took off. While we did stop at the fifty second floor just to see if the festival kept going – it wasn’t, the place looked like a deserted war zone – we cross the lobby carrying this Kyoto funeral attraction home, and fucking security stopped us all like, ‘Hey, where you guys taking Mr. Shindo’s kimono.’ And I look at the security guy and I’m like ‘Bro, it was either a) this; b) the rug; c) a barfed-up dress and cowboy boots; or d) a naked, glistening, oiled-up bitch carried across your fine hotel’s lobby’ and the guy says, I swear, ‘I’ll go with ‘D’.’ Meanwhile the other guy’s insisting we return the kimono and we end up making a deal with them to let us remove the damn thing inside the cab, hand it over to them, plus a folded-up fifty Almengor produced, and they’ll return it, so as to not have to carry the bitch all the way back up again. So I hail a cab and we put the bitch in the back seat and remove the godforsaken costume, and now the bitch’s fully naked other than that thick layer of flour on her face and neck, the mascara, the false eyelashes, the lipstick, and the blush. Almengor hands the eccentrically-hued garment through the window over to the one guy, along with the gash, the socks, and the wood sandals, and we’re off. So of course the cabbie turns out to be an immigrant. Not Armenian, not Rastafari, but Haitian. A Phil Collins-loving Haitian, to be more specific. A Sussudio-by-Phil-Collins-loving Hatian, to be even more specific. Damn shit’s on repeat.”

“I like Sussudio…” Ian.

“I know, but..” Jospeh takes another chug.

“Bro, so you’re sitting on the back seat next to Allie and with this passed-out, naked bitch, what? In between the two of you? Or have you got her laying down across your laps?” asked Ian, in between sips of his warming beer.

“Laps, yep,” responded Joseph. “Initially we just propped her in between the two of us but she barfed up a half quart of radioactive-yellow bile on the cab’s floor and back seat AC vent – the guy did not notice at all, the music was that loud, he just keeps on bobbing his head to the beat -- so we just lay her down across our laps. Face down, in accordance with Almengor’s request, lest she might ‘go the way that Bonzo did.’ Which actually would have been awesome, now that I think of it.”

“Die like Bonzo,” Ian said.

“Die like Bonzo,” Joseph repeated, and the men toasted.

After a few seconds of quiet contemplation by both men, Ian asked, “You get the leg side?”

“Actually, I did, bro.” responded Joseph.

“Mother FUCKER!!!” yelled Ian. There was no echo.

“You’d have stuffed you face wit it, bro.”

“No fucking shit.”

“Anyway, cabbie takes us back to this parking garage some three blocks from Fags-R-US. Six-seventy. I put it on Cliff’s Amex. We carry the bitch out the cab, Port-Au-Prince drives off, and we’re like, ok, and Almengor says, ‘you wait here with her while I get the car.’ So we lay the bitch on its side on a grassy area by the garage exit, and I wait for Almengor to return. There was no one in sight. The night just then began to become the epitome of deserted.”

“Just kinda like now,” Ian said.

“Totally. So after a minute I can actually hear the faraway sound from her turning on the ignition, and the ensuing purr is a work of art. I’m thinking, ‘sports coupe’. I wasn’t wrong. She emerges from the parking facility at the wheel of a brand-new Prelude.”

“’98 Prelude? A hundred and ninety-five horsepower VTEC engine right there. We’re talking 156 foot-pounds of torque at 5,250 rpm. Manual?” asks Ian.

“Yep.”

“Red?”

“You fucking got it, bro. Red ’98 Prelude. So I’m thinking, getting this bitch in the back seat’s gonna be like, not even with Vaseline are you gonna achieve that, so, just imagine what it must have been like to prop her on shotgun then somehow get my ass back on the back seat. Plus her seat needs to be reclinded so there’s no more hurling, plus she needs to be face down – in accordance with Almengor’s instructions, lest she might…”

“Go the way that Bonzo did,” interrupted Ian, and the men toast again.

Joseph continues. “We put the seat belt on her and everything. Not that it made much of a difference, but. So I sit in the back behind Almengor, and this bitch’s face-down head is to my right. And we’re off to the Western Suburbs.”

“Where she live at?”

“Lille. Four Lakes Village, to be exact.”

“Fuck.”

“Yep,” said Joseph after tilting some more ale his way. “So. Long story short…”

“Seriously, dude?” interrupts Ian.

Continues Joseph, “The jaunt to the ‘burbs was surreal. Bro, literally, like we were the only car on the tollway.”

“The fuck?”

“Yeah. No gridlock for once. She’s got My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult’s ‘13 Above the Night’ blasting off the stereo. ‘The Velvet Edge’. And for some reason, when her right hand’s not on the steering wheel or on the stick shift, it’s on the Prelude’s handbreak lever. I get some funny thoughts, you know? She’s like blabbering away and her thumb’s like all slowly rubbing that release button. And she sort of has to lean a little toward the chick to do that, too. And of course her hand’s rubbing against her ass. I’m long past wood now bro, I’m fucking wet!”

“Me too?” Ian chugs some more beer.

“Every once in a while Almengor turns to look to see if the bitch’s still there. I mean, as if the bitch was gonna suddenly dematerialize or something. As if I’d be so lucky. There she is, motionless, skin glistening with sweat, sweat-glistened skin and the approaching and receding tollway lamps’ light documenting her anatomy’s 23-year-old bronce-hued three-dimensionality. She’s actually kinda hot, I suddenly think.”

Ian suddenly interrupts: “Dude, did you, ah, get laid? I mean, did you FUCK either of them or didn’t you, it’s probably almost fucking dawn, the god-damn sun’s probably gonna come before you do, are you getting to the punchline, you delayed-gratification Harold Robbins-wannabe prime-candidate-for-a-procrastination-support-group-whose-motto-is ‘why fuck today if you can fuck tomorrow, if it ever comes’, and-if-it-does-come-it’s-gonna-be-eons-before-you-do crazy motherfucker???” He took a long drink off his bottle, belched “Jesus H. Fucking Christ”, spat at a nearby toad that was staring at him, missed.

“Hold on.” Joseph says this as Denzel would say it. In slight singsong, with emphasis on the ‘hold’. “So we get to Four Lakes and she uses the chick’s card to get in. And, long story short…” Joseph pauses, looks back at Ian, appreciates the full hostility of his glare, continues: “…long story short we somehow get the bitch to the her building’s lobby. There is no one around, man. Like, ok, I know there’s no one on the road, but there’s no one around this place, indoors, either. The lighting is sparse, mostly fluorescent tube lighting. For the first time today I will say it, ‘cause for the first time today I felt it: place was downright eerie. And here comes the fucked-up part, man. So we call the elevator, same low, greenish-greyish-yellow, fluorescent lights inside the surprisingly small cabin. So the way we… if we kept carrying her like me on the ankles and she holding her wrists, her ass would be sweeping the elevator floor due to the close-quarters situation. So the way we propped her up was upright as best we could against the cabin’s back wall, veneer, and with Almengor’s pressing against her with her back, pinning her to the back wall.”

“To the veneer back wall.”

“Yep. Same color as the bitch, too. So Almengor, legs thrust forward, heels of her pumps pinned to the floor so as to in turn pin the bitch hard enough against the wall with her back so she wouldn’t drop to the floor; the bitch, a whiteface, deadly silent, glistening sack of bones, flesh, guts? Very little bile, and quite a few liters of air inside that pretty skull.” Joseph chugs down the final, warmest part of his beer, and sets the bottle down. “I press ‘4’, the bitch’s floor, Almengor had previously informed me, and also lean back. Directly against the veneer, me. Then guess what happened.”

Ian sighs, shakes his head, turns to reach inside the cooler for two fresh beers, cracks both open with his teeth, hands one to Joseph, takes a chug off his and watches Joseph take a chug off his own. After a second sigh and an unintelligible belch, he says, “Beats the fuck out of me, bro.”

“The elevator stops on the first floor. We look at each other. We’re like, what the fuck? I seriously started to freak out, man. It took a painfully long amount of time for the elevator to finally stop, another painfully long time for the doors to open.” Joseph takes another drink. “When they do…” Joseph drinks down some more beer “…in comes this… this chick, right? She’s what? Like she looks thirty but her skin much younger? Dude, this chick was strange. Like, I don’t know. She came in the elevator, not a ‘hello’, not a ‘hey’; I said ‘hey’, she didn’t say anything. Just walked in, to the back, to the left of Almengor, no eye contact, nothing, completely oblivious of the naked bitch pinned against the elevator’s veneer back wall by another bitch.”

“What made her strange?” asked Ian.

Joseph just shakes his head lightly, staring down at the greenish-grey grass in front of him in the darkness. “I know. I know. I don’t know. I can’t really put my finger on it. By the way, she’s… incredibly good looking. Dark, thick eyebrows. Big eyes. I think dark grey. Grey hair.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Grey hair. Skin like much younger than you’d expect from her gaze. She exudes this… and she’s just like staring right ahead, cool as fuck… she exudes this… totality about her. She’s holding something in her hand, a cigarette-pack-sized-and-shaped box that’s not a cell phone. Just a small black matte box. Oh, almost forgot. She’s at least a head taller than me. This bitch is like, really fucking tall.”

“No way. But other than the face, she hot? Bod, legs, tits, ass?” asks Ian.

“You know… and she’s wearing like a faded-pink Member’s Only jacket. Looks vintage. Like early 80’s? Underneath that a short leather skirt. Burgundy. Yeah. Yeah, she was hot. You’da loved the legs. She’s fucking barefoot. Did I mention that?”

“Fuck no, man. You had not mentioned that. Athletic legs? Thick? Any hair? What’s the knee-joint to calf to thigh proportion?”

“Dude. I didn’t have my fucking scale with me, you know? But yeah, dude. And there was a strange funk about her, too. Like she smelled slightly like… beef.”

Both men burst out laughing.

“Where’s the beef??” cries out Ian mockingly.

“Yeah. Like these weird “earth” bitches that come into the classroom smelling like incense? Vanilla incense?”

“Bro that shit don’t exist. They don’t got vanilla in the orient.”

“And but there was another aroma about her that I can’t quite place. Like a certain burnt smell. Like a certain spice. A certain burnt spice.”

Ian: “Maybe the bitch was cooking, you know? And burned shit? And is going up to her girlfriend’s in the 9th floor for more eggs, vanilla, spices, burgers and a bong hit. That’s why she’s barefoot. It’s just up 8 floors to her BFF’s. She wasn’t expecting to see you two clowns, even less see you two clowns with the limp dead body of a naked bitch squashed against the wall. And the guy like ‘Heys’ you. I would not have answered fuck either. Heck, the bitch was probably scared frozen at the sight of you two fucking killers. You killed that girl in cold blood. Probably right then and there going up to the roof to throw the bitch ass from the top of the building. I would have said squat too. Stared straight ahead like she did. And the black cigarette-sized black matte box in her hand, maybe it’s some sort of designer minimalistic keychain. Maybe Mies designed keychains too. Maybe the lighter she uses to light her stove with is by Mies too, and is exactly the same shape, size, color and texture as the keychain. Just fire comes out of it. Instead of fucking keys. Case solved”

“I don’t know, man,” Joseph said, dragging out the ‘I’. I was there. Sure didn’t seem like your basic chick just going up to her neighbor’s for sugar. Or salt or matches or freaking conditioner, Maxi Pads. I was there. There was a strangeness about her. But let me tell you, too: I was hot for that troll. Sexy, sexy bitch.”

Ian laughed. “So did you fucking screw all three of ‘em already??”

“Nah, man. Our floor came up. We carried the bitch out - not the strange, hot, burnt spice ‘n’ beef ‘n’ vanilla-smelling, barefoot, grey-haired towering hottie but our limp, glistening, whitefaced, false-eyelashed, passed-out bitch – and the elevator door shut behind us and that was the last I saw of her.”

“What floor was she going to anyway?” Ian asked.

“She didn’t press any button when she came in, bro. Beats the fuck out of me.”

“Jesus.”

“Now do you understand me? No eye contact. But it’s as if we were making eye contact. I’ve felt strangeness before, from the unfathomable, dead serious, cold, dark, terrifying look of a strange woman making eye contact with you. But in this case, we did not make eye contact.”

“Far out.”

“So we enter her apartment, the limp bitch’s, with her card. Almengor’s all like let’s tuck her in bed and I’m like no, bitch, we’re getting the FUCK out of here. So we lay her down face down, so as to not go the way Bonzo did, on the beige-carpeted floor right next to the storage room, then think better of it and decide to sit her on the floor, back against the wall, legs straight ahead, perpendicular to the length of the short corridor just before the open kitchen and the living-dining. She won’t stay straight up against the wall, but sort of leans forward, so we end up carrying her to the living-dining sofa and sit her down, and now it’s just her head that slightly leans forward and Almengor says ‘that will do’. When she turns away I cross Mara’s legs. But the way that real men do: foot on opposite knee and tibia parallel to the ground. I tilt her head to the side slightly and pose her arms and hands in a rap gesture but they won’t stay up. I turn my attention to the fridge and of course it’s a fucking mess. But almost hidden by all kinds of leftovers and junk food there’s the tip of what I recognize as a bottle of Goldschläger. So we do a shot each and take the bottle with us along with a half-eaten nacho pot pie for the ride back home. Almengor dropped the Pyrex with the nachos on our way out the building, though, so…”

“What? You left?”

“Indeed, my good bro.”

“So when are you getting laid, bro? Man, you had a room all to yourselves. What am I saying, a full apartment! Two girls!!”

“Guess what, man, nah, we just drove back to Fifth City taking swigs from the Goldschläger.”

“Jesus. Ok, so we’ve established you’re a pussy. That’s it: instead of getting yourself some pussy, you instead became one. Bravo. Now, why the fuck are you on foot?”

“So. We take the driveway, roads, and exits necessary to get us to the tollway, to get us back home. We crank Zeppelin up, How Many More Times to be exact, and we’re yelling and singing along with Plant, and all of a sudden she yells over the music: ‘So. Call it a night?’ I yell back, ‘Why?’ Plant keeps wailing by himself in the background. She yells, ‘I really do need to get back home. My shift starts at seven thirty A.M.’ Me: ‘Are you close to anyone who’d make copies at seven-thirty A.M.?’ She answers, ‘No.’ I yell back, ‘Cause I needed to ask, cause if you had said you were, I would have said, ‘’You got some loser friends, bro.’’ She yells, ‘Hey.’ She yells, ‘So you’re Cicero, right?’ Me: “I guess. But wait. You sure you wanna drive back to Fifth City on your own, at this time, along these creepy empty streets?’ Almengor: ‘But what do we do?’ Plant: ‘Ain't no need to hide, ain't no need to run, 'cause I've got you in the sights of my…’ Me: Waits for Plant to finish screaming ‘gun’. Plant: Finishes screaming ‘gun’. Me again: ‘Like… let’s just drive to your place, you get home and I take the car back to my place, and I’ll return it tomorrow. Noon, tops.’ She gave me this look, but, I guess, ultimately realized that she’d much rather just get home ASAP and not have to drive six miles on her sorry, defenseless own back to her house, and so she said ‘sure.' That her sister would drive her to work, no prob.”

“Tell me how that baby under the hood responded when you CRANKED the RPM’s mofo! Wait. Did you fucking CRASH that bastard??”

“Not exactly. So for some reason the music now is Caught In A Mosh by Anthrax, and she cranks that shit up loud. We’re singing along with Joey, and we’re laughing our asses off cause we’re like yelling the lyrics out at each other’s faces like at inches from each other, and we’re like totally spitting each other’s face up.”

“Stomp stomp stomp! The idiot convention!” Word, dude!!

“Yeah, we’re laughing and shit, and she’s even got her hand not on the emergency break but on my…”

“Dick?” Ian interrupted.

“No, man, it’s ‘thigh.’”

“Yawn.”

“Hold on,” Joseph, like Denzel, again. “So we get there. We get to her house and she parks in front by the curb, and I’m like ‘this is good-night kiss time, better not blow it.’ So I go with her up to the porch. And I’ll make a long story short.”

Ian rolls his eyes, says, “Whatever, dude.”

“Right by her front door, man: Smoochfest. Fucking smoochfest. Now I’m full redwood mode. She’s full Niagara mode, if you know what I mean. Our tongues, down each other’s throats - ok, not mine, mine’s a shorty, my tongue’s one – bro, what the hell did that bitch do to my mouth, man. Damn!!”

“I know what you’re talking about, my man.” Ian high-fives Joe. “Some bitches will do that.”

“Yeah, man! So then my fucking tree’s like almost reaching my sternum – a first – and I say, ‘baby, rub my tip off like you do your Prelude.’ And guess what? Bitch’s smart. She knew just what the FUCK I was talking about.” Joseph raises up his shirt. “See?” He’s showing Ian his belly, where just above his navel there’s an inch-long horizontal gash. “That’s her fucking right thumb manicured nail, left a souvenir for me to show off and to appreciate and admire.”

“Can’t see a thing, bro, too dark. But I believe ya.”

“Look.” Joseph raises his shirt higher.

Ian leans over and takes a closer look. “Oh yeah,” he says. “Cat’s got ‘em sharp motherfuckers. Haha!”

“Fucking word. And yours truly’s…” -- Joseph is holding up his left index finger and his right middle finger – “…yours truly’s…” -- he now sniffs hard on his left index finger and closes his puckered mouth around his right middle finger and yanks it quickly back out, producing a loud pop, continues – “fingers are up her pussy and up her ass, respectively.”

“Atta mutha-fucking boy. Finally! At least finger-fucking! Now which would you say is better? The pique of the pink or the stink of the stink?” asks Ian.

“Both are, like, awesome?? Right??”

“Word, bro.” The men high-five again. Ian smells his hand.

“So,” continues Joseph. “So after maybe 15 minutes of this, she’s like, ‘You better go.’ I’m like, ‘Ok.’ I pull my fingers out, and take a few steps back. I blow her a kiss. She just smiled at me and…”

“Gave you a Vegemite sandwich?” Ian interrupts.

“Nah, man. She turned to find her keys and open her door. I just look at her. She’s beautiful, in the twilight. Still diligently on her yellow pumps, jean skirt and white blouse, and she looks as fresh as ever. She looks like she’s just now going out the house to go out, not in to turn in. She turns around a last time and says, ‘Good night. Call me. Don’t forget to get my car back here before noon.’ I’m like, you bet. Hey. You’re beautiful.’ She just smiles again. And says, ‘I had a good time. Good night, Joseph.’ I said, ‘Good night, Almengor.’ And she closed the door. I must have stood right there on that porch staring at that front door for about a minute. Then I sighed and turned to leave. The red Prelude looked fucking amazing under the streetlights, bro. Red Prelude, here we go! I said to myself. Red Barchetta? Fuck that. Red Prelude’s the shit, Mr. Pratt, I said to myself. I reach in my pocket for the key, and I… don’t feel no key. I look in my other pocket. No key. I rub both ass cheeks and my left pec desperately looking for it. And then it suddenly dawns on me. Almengor never gave me the fucking key!! I run to the car to see if by any chance a door’s open. No dice. I reach for my cell phone to call her, phone’s dead! I run back to the house to the front door, knock, no response. I’m not gonna ring the motherfucking doorbell at that time. I don’t wanna wake up her entire nuclear and extended fucking family, you know, which probably includes that crazy aunt with the damn AK, right? I make my way to the side of the house, tap on the window pane of what I think should be a living room, two times. Then two more times. Nothing. She’s gone, probably upstairs somewhere. Jerking off. Joewood in her pussy. Joewood in her tushy. Joewood. On her mind.” Joseph takes a long chug off his beer. “Soooooo, two feet? Hellooooo transport. And then, of course, fate not missing a beat, a light rain starts to fall, right out of motherfucking nowhere.”

“I’d break both legs before I even think of even considering a hike like that, at this hour no less, brother. Keep my choices easy,” said Ian.

“It wasn’t too bad, man,” sighs Joseph. “The desolated wee hours urban landscape was beautiful.” Joseph takes another sip off his beer, looks at Ian. “I’ve always liked how the streets in Miami Vice look at night. Always slick, the darks darker, with color splashes and rays everywhere you look. And after that nice little wee hours summer rain that kindly just doused me, well, that’s just how South Cicero Avenue looked like. Maybe, you know, replace some of that pink neon with universal suburban incandescent orange. And the cool night air smelled fresh, too. But it couldn’t hold a candle to the sweet smell on my fingers. And the even sweeter taste in my mouth. Both of which reminded me that, yep, my recent encounter was real. Oh, yeah, you bet, bro…” Joseph finishes his beer, sets the bottle down on the ground, absently sticking his right pinky finger down the empty bottle’s neck, staring at the empty bottle, making circles with the base of the bottle on the ground. “…realer even than those empty streets.” He keeps playing with the bottle. “Damn,” he says. A toad enters his field of view as he’s contemplating the bottle. “Got any more of those brewskys, bro?” asks Joseph without taking his eyes off of the shiny brown glass. He eventually glances back over at Ian and immediately gets the feeling that his friend has not been listening to him for minutes. “Yo, bro?” said Joseph. Nothing. Ian just seems to be staring at something ahead of him, transfixed. Eyebrows slightly raised, lips lightly parted. “Yo, what’s up?” Joseph says this smiling widely, maybe a little too wide. “Bro?” he asks again. Joseph’s smile now becomes even wider. He has not taken his eyes off Ian for even a second. He snorted. He keeps looking at Ian, smiling widely. There’s just enough daylight now to well enough appreciate Joseph’s glazed-over, bloodshot eyes and dilated pupils; his dark stubble from almost 24 hours without shaving; deep, dark, purplish-grey bags under his eyes; dismantled-for-his-standards hair; greasy, open-pored skin; blackhead-colonized nose, wrinkled clothes, saggy socks, dirty shoes. He keeps grinning ever widely at Ian, exposing ever deeper crow’s feet around his eyes, exposing ever yellower, plaque-ridden teeth projecting from red, swollen gums, as he keeps saying to Ian, ‘Hey, bro? What’s up? Hey, bro?’ A decadent, humid, musky aroma, seemingly equal parts vanilla disinfectant, charred nutmeg and ground beef, all on steroids, suddenly impregnates the air around them.