“It’s not like Adam and I do anything, gosh Mark-ie.” Abel adds a cutesy –y or feminine –ie to the end of everyone’s name once he’s been around them long enough: a time table understood in his mind only. Nothing about Mark is cutesy or feminine. Like every evening during the limbo between what should have been dinner time and the end of happy hour, this unattractive fact is proven again by the glow of the television monitor recoiling off of Mark’s bloated features. Otherwise hidden in the stale darkness, Able illuminates the air around him with his Love Spell perfume. The plums of fragrance are degraded to yet another racial knock, “Mexican bath,” blindly stirring up resentment throughout the room. By the off chance that something appealing does enter this dilapidated hole-in-the-wall bungalow, its essence are quickly drained from its core to the surface by the time it steps over the broken door jamb to the time its sinks into the stains and filth on whatever surface it attempts to rest upon.
Mark is now sprinting down the wooden floor; he’s dodging those opposing him and meeting eyes with those on him team. He receives a firm pass, and he shoots and scores. Videogames have successfully replaced actual exercise and sincere imagination in this hellhole. Tugging the joy stick all around and remembering the sequence of buttons to push are enough to tire Mark’s swastika inked arms. His smoke abused lungs are heaving under the weight of his man-boobs. This is too much excitement as proven by the baritone coughing fit that follows the animated, provocative victory dance of the videogame basketball player version on Mark and Abel’s initial implausible guarantee.
“Does he fondle your two big, bouncing balls as part of these rub downs?” Mark is able to squeeze this question out with the characteristic “gay lisp” he’s coined himself, between muffled throat clearings. He drops the videogame controller into this lap in order to bring his hands to chin level. With palms up, he wiggles his swollen fingers one after the other in an attempt to recreate what his last inquest meant to illustrate.
Abel places his nearly completed cocktail on the makeshift side table, among the armfuls of now bone dry vodka half gallon containers, empty pill bottles tattooed with names of people we’ve never met, plates that never held any kind of food but instead hold unidentified powders and straws, and other piles of garbage that detail the remains of our forgettable lives. His face shows no sign of disgust or rage from Mark’s flamboyant gesture. Instead, Abel crosses his legs, clad in his easy slip off Victoria Secret athletic pants, crosses his arms, shaping his biceps with his hidden hands, and bunches his mouth to the far side of his face as if to keep what may flow out of it as far away from Mark as possible. Everything on Abel’s body is locked up besides his eyes. His stare bores to the back of Mark’s head. Intensity and truth burn the communication airway between these two men. Mark’s forced to retreat back to his childish videogame while Abel continues to nurse the remains of his cocktail.
“That isn’t a ‘no’,” Mark points out in a dim, slightly quizzical voice as he lowers his gaze to the TV stand in attempted observation. The mood has changed; nobody is sure which team they’re rooting for.
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