Brett and Leslie: Chapter 10

Morals

“You have your own VCR in your room!” I yelped. “And a giant TV! That your dad bought you—I saw him bring it in! And where have you been for the past four days?!”

“Oh, hey, Lucy,” Paul drawled, rolling into the kitchen with a giant box of pizza.

Paul had a new tattoo oozing out from under his phat shorts, glistening with protective Vaseline; it couldn’t have cost him less than twice what my broken TV-VCR had cost. He also had a giant bottle of Coca-Cola, and Yollie in tow, carrying a new bong. He was so stoned he couldn’t close his mouth.

“Huh huh huh huh huh,” he added, plopping the pizza box on the filthy counter. Was he making fun of Yollie, or becoming her? “I got something to tell you about—so, we had a little accident…”

"What?!” I ground my teeth together. “Why would you think I hadn’t noticed you smashed my stuff?!”

“Well, I’ve never seen you watch a movie in your room before. I figured you never used that ole thing.”

“I JUST BOUGHT IT AN HOUR BEFORE YOU BROKE IT, YOU FAT F&CKING HOG!”

“Heyyyy, that’s not nice. Hog? That’s why I have self-esteem issues. People like you. Tsk.”

Hardly anybody talked like this yet, so it was maximally annoying. Maybe you’ve grown numb to people using fake diagnoses as moral litigation all your life, but believe me: It’s even more horrifying than you’ve come to think it is.

“Bullying is uncool,” he added, opening the steaming box. He twiddled his fingers over it in contentment.

“Why would you take my new nice breakable giant thing into your loft bed in the first place?! WHY?! Why couldn’t you watch your own shit on your huge TV in your big giant room?!”

“I don’t like to watch movies on my couch. I needed to watch movies on my bed… by the way, I took those tapes back to the store for you. You’re welcome.”

“Nrrrr… NRRRRRR…” I was sub-verbal. All I could keep in my head was the image of my hand grabbing his greasy, sparse tuft of bristly hair and using it to smash his teeth into the bannister.

He gingerly selected a slice of pizza and started jamming it in, making soft, “snarf, snarf” noises and smacking. It was like watching a cartoon.

“I never even got to watch anything myself!” I squeaked. “And you took it while I worked!! Do you know how many hours I had to—”

“It’s not my fault, though. We fell asleep.”

“You didn’t fall asleep. You haven’t fallen asleep since you were ten years old—you deliberately got stoned and you passed out.”

“Touché,” he said, proudly.

“You’re buying me a new one, you thieving pig.”

“NNNNNnnnno, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I can predict the future, and I’m not.”

“I will kill you with a f&cking machete.”

“That’s a kindness. I’m suicidal,” he said cheerfully. “Can you do it now? No—wait till I’m done with this pizza. Mmmm.”

“Why would you want to steal from someone you share a roof with? What’s wrong with you?”

“I’m an amoral piece of sh§t,” he gloated. “Also, I have a statute of limitations, and you did not ask me to replace your property before my statute of limitations ran out. Ergo—”

“What?! You’re not a legal entity. You’re a slug with shoes! And how—??—I haven’t even seen you since you broke it. Is that why you’ve been hiding?!”

“Yup.”

“Then why bother?”

“Why bother what?”

“Why bother having an arbitrary ‘statute of limitations’ if you’re going to hide until it’s over?”

“So I have something to say to the other person when they tell me to replace the stuff I broke,” he shrugged.

I was having a hard time believing a person like this existed. How did he live with himself? I supposed that was what the weed was for—except I needed to be intoxicated all the time myself to deal with life, and I didn’t even let myself be a bad person, when I could help it, as far as I knew.

Wait a minute… Paul had never had a genuine problem in his life—not even the problem of needing a job, or having to feed himself, or how to pay for rehab; it was all handed to him, and then he wheedled for extras. Is that what happened when your life was too good? You spent your time… making up things for your coping mechanisms to do?!

Good god. I decided that, until I could get something to drink, I had better concentrate on fantasising about killing Paul.

“Look,” he was saying. “I know how these things go. I’m out of money already for the month, so I literally can’t pay you right now. I’m too poor.”

“Poor?! You literally just got your free money—what was it, yesterday?!”

“Yes,” he said, with what he seemed to think was cutting, dry wit: “But then I spent it on frivolous things—like food. Ha ha ha.”

He gestured airily to the pizza in his paw. I saw restaurant food all day every day, and ate as many leftovers as seemed sanitarily sane, but the idea of paying for it—much less paying to have it delivered!—was incredibly decadent.

But Paul was one of those guys who loved to eat more than he loved his own life, avoided his parents like the plague till it was time to beg for bonus free money—and yet still, insanely, refused to learn to cook. He even made Yollie microwave his leftovers for him.

“Anyway,” he continued, with an implied “peasant”: “I know that, in a month, when I get paid again, I am going to be so hungry, and so obsessed with everything else I didn’t get to buy this month, that I will in-evit-ably decide that it is better to go on skulking around here in shame rather than paying you back, because that’s just how it goes.”

“Ask your dad for money! You ask him every time you run out of weed.”

“What…? Would you force me to talk to my abusive father more than absolutely necessary? Risking a flashback? Chancing an episode? For your own gain? No, I wouldn’t ask you to be such a terrible person. It’s not in my nature. So you see… there’s no reasonable way I shall ever be able to pay you back, I’m afraid. That’s why my policy is to put such things from my mind and cease to worry,” he said with a smile, crumbs dripping from his limp bottom lip. “Why bother skulking? Why feel bad? What would that change?”

“I don’t know—have you ever considered not being a piece of sh§t?”

“Not really,” he said. “I’m used to it. And I still get laid somehow, so…” He shrugged.

“Huh huh, cause I’m a piece of sh§t, too,” said Yollie.

“Yup,” I said.

“Whu—you’re supposed to laugh, that was a joke!”

“Nope,” I said, and pushed past her. I was really close to putting myself in prison, I had to get out of there. Every vision I had of a better life with better people somewhere down the line was flickering and blinking out for the final time.

A few years earlier, when I was waiting to finish high school, I thought people in the bigger world couldn’t possibly be as awful as the ones around me. Everybody had to be smarter than the brats I babysat in my small town.

But it doesn’t get better, kids: Whoever told you that was waiting for a trust fund. And now they’re looking for a henchman—yeah, their open arms are waiting for you, all right. Your parents and classmates are merely the beginning. High school is forever. The pep rally where your knees don’t hurt and there’s no HR manager is the GOOD version.

Everyone in the world is a nightmare?

I would have given anything to wake up… but what did I have to give, really?

If he drank the beer in the fridge, too… you know, being in prison means at least I don’t have to pay rent… NO, Lucy, DON’T THINK THOSE THOUGHTS…

I burst into the living room and immediately relaxed a little. Brett and Leslie were still in the good mood that had followed on Julie and Johnnie’s heels—and not only did they have plenty of my own beer left to offer me, they had scored a second case and a bottle of Taaka vodka.

They were the most upbeat people to be around lately, as nuts as that seems. Their increasingly open mockery of Paul didn’t hurt; he had pushed his luck when they first moved in, but the more we all got to know each other, Paul was becoming steadily more afraid of Leslie.

He should have been scared of Brett. Brett would stay silent when Paul was around, feeding him doses of a strange, mirthless smile. But behind his back, Brett would cheerily discuss trussing him like a pig with an apple in his mouth while paging through a zine about Jeffrey Dahmer.

They gave me a sympathetic nod. “I take it Porky’s back in his pen?” Brett said, looking like he was chewing on glass.

“Yeah. You were right, he straight up refuses to pay me back or replace it or… even apologise,” I realized. I could have chewed up a windshield or two myself. I might seem somewhat mild-mannered now, but I hung out with some hard-core delinquents, when I think about it. I thought I was always kind of breezily affable in my suicidal ideation, but I must have radiated some kind of street smarts, seeing as how I’m still alive. “Do you think the neighbors will complain if we dig a pit and roast him?”

We all laughed, like it was a kids’ sitcom and not me threatening our roommate with cannibalism.

“He ate my half a sandwich last week,” Leslie added, as the general laughter petered out.

“You had half a sandwich?”

“Yeah, I was panhandling before you guys woke up. I had a whole one, I was saving part for later.”

“Good luck with that pig.”

“Yeah. Anyway, I told him I was gonna eat all his food the next time I got a chance, so ever since then he’s been eating the whole pizza at once, every time he orders it. I’m hoping he’ll die of a heart attack before Christmas.”

We all laughed some more. Paul wasn’t actually fat, not by today’s standards, anyway, but Leslie had a weird fixation on people’s eating habits, so intense that it tended to infect the whole house—but it feels good to call an a&&hole an a&&hole. You guys ought to try it.

“Hey,” said Leslie— “you two feel like practicing? We got a gig, man!”

“Whoooo, look at the work ethic on you all of a sudden!” Brett said.

“Well, yeah, we got a gig!!”

I had never seen Leslie look so… human before. He might have even showered. As long as you aren’t Paul, maybe having some use in this world gives everyone a new lease on life. Paul seemed to have organized his one-celled existence around avoiding being useful, but Leslie maybe had merely had some rough luck. He wasn’t as old as Paul, but he was older than Brett and I, and he was flawlessly mysterious about everything that had happened before the Incognito Mosquitoes began; for all I knew, except for J and J, he could have hatched out of an egg at that party where I met them.

“I’m ready to go!” I said. “Except… you know, I haven’t gotten anything to eat today. Anyone else hungry?”

“Oh, I’m hungry,” Brett grinned.

“Hungry like the wolf!” Leslie sang.

“Heyyyyy, Pig-Pong-Paulie,” Leslie continued, as the three of us burst back through the kitchen door. “Thanks for getting us pizza! Too bad you ate most of it, but—thanks!” he said, grabbing the box and snapping it shut as Paul’s bony, useless forearm flapped ineffectually after it. “My drummer here is starving. Anything you know about that?”

“Starving!” Paul snorted. “She’s rich—she has a job. Now, give me back my pizza!”

“Your pizza?” Brett chimed in. “Suddenly somebody has developed a sense of private property over here! How very bourgeois of you! I’m sorry, but it seems that everything in this house is suddenly up for grabs.”

Leslie held the box with one hand, but as Brett stopped speaking he suddenly snapped the other back behind Paul’s rutabaga head and grabbed his hair, almost exactly like I had fantasised. He put his terrible-smelling mouth right by Paul’s terrible-smelling mouth and grinned.

“If you EVER,” he said, “touch ANYTHING belonging to me, or my rhythm section, EVER again, so help me god, you little skate punk, I will tie you up by your scrotum in the root cellar with a nail through your tongue and leave you there till alllllll this pizza slooooowly melts away and you goddamn starve to death. It’s gonna take a while. Are we clear, you piece of sh§t?”

Paul started crying so hard he couldn’t talk. We laughed for a few minutes, chewing, before we filed past Paul’s goddamn loft bed into the practice space.

Say what you like about pit bulls. Sometimes it’s nice to have one on a chain.

It was a great practice. By the end, we remembered three separate song-like entities, and we could run them all in sequence by the time we were through. This was largely a function of limiting our beer intake the end. Once we called it quits—we didn’t so much call it as we ground to a halt after Leslie ran completely out of guitar strings; his technique was 96 percent violence—we started making up for lost time, still giggling, and when the vodka came out, we couldn’t help but notice how much space that loft bed hogged.

“Why did we let him do that?”

“Lucy, how long’s it been since you changed the guinea pig’s litter?”

“Mmmm, I’m a lazy girl this month—it’s about time it got changed.”

When Paul came back from wherever he hid out that night, he found his loft bed in pieces in a pile in his bedroom, completely covered in Chumpy poop, but only mildly charred.

It wasn’t such a bad day.