1987

Posted on Jul 7, 2011

Mr. Fish

By Mr. Fish

(Page 2)

“Hey, jackass,” I said, throwing my backpack down onto a chair and walking into his bathroom, trying not to spill my bladder.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” he said, like somebody suddenly finding a dead cricket in the pocket of an old raincoat.

“Hang on for a second,” I said, flipping on the bathroom light and lifting up the toilet seat with my shoe and pulling down my zipper to have the bowl, as brown as a steam shovel, yowl up at me with a bright stench like mayonnaise, airplane glue and possum, its rim covered with enough pubic hair to appear mammalian. 

“Is everything all right?” said my brother.

“Give me a second,” I said, contemplating the diarrhea and vomit scabs splattered across the porcelain above the water like an exploded guinea pig that had been gorged on overcooked asparagus spears and raw oysters. I felt as if I were standing over a vivisected cat with a pitcher full of oily chicken broth wondering if what I was about to do would be doubling disgust or diluting it. “Huh?” I finally said.

“Dude, what are you doing here?” he said.

“I gotta take a piss,” I said, reminding myself.

“You rode 200 miles to take a piss?” he said, tossing the pizza box toward a wastepaper basket overflowing with empty beer cans and crumpled candy bar wrappers and cellophane from miniature doughnuts, corn chips and hardcore porno magazines. “That makes a shitload of no sense,” he said. “You got off early for Thanksgiving or something?”

“No,” I said, pushing the door closed with my foot. “I dropped out.”

“Whoa whoa whoa,” he said, pushing the door open with his hand. “You did what?”

“I dropped out!” I said, pushing the door closed again with my foot. “I’m joining the Gay Movement.”

“You’re doing—what?” he asked, opening the door again with his hand.

“Fuck art school,” I said, “I’m through; it’s all bullshit. I’m joining the Gay Movement. There’s a rally in Washington tomorrow and I’m going to be there. Now,” I said, turning to remove the mascot of the movement that I was aligning myself with, “do you mind?”

“What gay movement? This one?” he said, doing a sloppy pirouette in dirty sneakers.

I didn’t answer him, letting loose with a piss stream that was thick and serrated enough to saw a hockey puck in half, my eyes shut in glorious praise of what Emerson once referred to as … an intelligence served by organs.

“Hang on for a second,” said my brother over the applause of my bubbles, walking across the room and closing his bedroom door to keep the controversial stench of homosexuality from rolling down the stairs like Judy Garland on Benzedrine and Rodgers and Hammerstein. “Since when did you find out that you were gay?” he asked, his question a lopsided whisper as he walked back toward me, fascistic heterosexuality Berlining through the house below us.

“I’m not gay, you prick!” I said.

“Well, what the fuck are you joining the Gay Movement for, the prestige of having people think you take it up the ass?” he said.

“Not everybody in the French Resistance was French, you know,” I said.

“Does Mom know?”

“Does Mom know what?” I said. “That not everybody in the French Resistance was French? Fuck if I know.”

“No, that you’re dropping out of school because you want to make fellatio through a handlebar mustache an amendment to the Constitution,” he said, cracking himself up and then sniffing his armpits like a baboon. “If you want, I can call her,” he said, walking over to his dresser to uncap a deodorant stick and to shove it up under his shirt, while I, tethered to his toilet bowl by my own piss stream, politely refrained from socking him in the mouth.

“Why would you call her?” I said.

“It might be less traumatic if I told her your gay news instead of you.”

“I’m not gay!” I said, turning and closing the door with my hand hard enough to send a herd of tiny curlicues of hair like little black tumbleweeds across the bathroom floor. “Forget I said anything,” I hollered.

“And just so I don’t embarrass myself by using the wrong terminology or whatever,” said his voice through the door, “when I’m talking to her, do you prefer the term cock chomper or heiney pirate?” He laughed.

“Fuck you!” I said, my piss stream finally beginning to cool. 

“Now where’s that key?” he said to himself.

“Not only am I not gay,” I said, “there’s a girl in the basement that I wonder if you know.”

“A girl?” he said. 

“She looks Spanish or something, tits like a loud noise, fucking unbelievable. She was reading a book—”

“Polish,” he interrupted.

“Polish?” I said. “You know her?”

“Yeah,” he said, “his name is Manny Ron Ron Racowski, he’s always got a book in his hands; of course it’s usually upside down. Did he have a harelip and nostrils like a bowling ball?”

“I’m not gay!” I said again, my piss stream collapsing into a sloppy chain of falling links.

“He’d be perfect for you, by the way, if you can stand the stuttering. He’s only got one nut.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” I said.

“Fewer calories. He’s like the Jenny Craig of oral sex. His nickname is Tab.”

“Listen, you fucking douchebag! I’m joining the Gay Movement because it’s a civil rights movement!” I said. “Think of me as a white Joan Baez in 1963 wanting to march with a black Martin Luther King.” I shook my pecker like shaking the flame off a match. 

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