(S)wine — “Fiction…sometimes”

The thing is, they can’t be too long. These stupid stories. They can’t go on forever, otherwise people stop reading. Believing. And so I need to find a way to end it.
“I know how, Dude.”
We need to find a way to end it.
Benny says: “We off your old man, Dude.”
Trite but…
“It’s Hollywood, Dude. It’s what they want. The denouement.”
I say, “how do you know that word.”
And Benny makes the double-guns with his thumbs and forefingers and does that chack-chack noise with his mouth and tongue.
See also: Isaac the Bartender.
“We off your old man with a pillow.”
“And then what?”
“He leaves you all his shit. His homes, cars. He leaves all that to you.”
Trite but…definitely Hollywood. And there has to be a kicker, too. A set-up for a possible second part, if this does well at the box office.
Benny says: “There’s a detective who…”
Only this time I don’t follow the two conversations. Just mine. Benny’s tale spins out like a screenwriter’s paradise. Twists and turns down Sunset. Hollywood archetypes.
I’m on to the new one. The one about the two guys who work at a major troubleshooting call-in center and go around wealthy neighborhoods at night, drinking the bait beer out of people’s slug traps.
“That’s sick, Dude.”
Maybe, but those kinds are the best. I ask Benny if he thinks I’m a good guy. Overall, I mean.
“No way, Dude. You’re an asshole.”
And he’s right. But it’s how I get off.
“What kind of beer is it, Dude?”
It’s a wealthy subdivision so it’s imported stuff. So it gets you drunk quicker.
See also: Tuborg.
See also: Stella Artois.
See also: The Slug-X Trap.
“Kick ass, Dude.”
Everything is a story. For the good ones, you just charge more per word.

I am listening. I can follow two conversations at the same time. Benny’s nonsense as well as my own. Everything is a potential story.
1983: Burger King opens on Governor’s Island and serves beer.
No Fear, Inc., a popular retailer, is being confused with the National Organization for European American Rights (N.O.F.E.A.R.), a white supremacist group.
The state of Missouri names a stretch of highway adopted by the Ku Klux Klan, the “Rosa Parks Highway.”
During an interview with Congress of Racial Equality’s (CORE) National Spokesman Niger Innis, MSNBC displays a graphic identifying him as “Nigger Innis.”
Not even the best urban legends can surpass true stories like the ones above. You can’t make that stuff up. Well, yea you can. You just have to bill more per word.

There is a white short bus that comes and picks up the residents of Sunny Vale Assisted Living every Wednesday. Those that still have their faculties about them walk onto the thing and go grocery shopping. Some bring along their own bags. Colostomy bags, Ileostomy bags. My father is not one of them. He is not allowed to leave the campus. The room, even. Not without an orderly. Assisted leaving.
“Here ya go, pops.”
That’s Benny as me. He hands my father a vacuum-sealed pack of sliced ham and a Kosher pickle wrapped in white paper. I’ve never called him pops.
“He won’t remember anyway, Dude.”
Three hundred and fifty dollars. In travellers’ cheques. That’s how it’s spelled. American Express. That’s what Benny gets from my father this time around. Benny as me. Me as my father’s accountant. Benny as the Roto-Rooter man. Me as my father’s physician. His Lithuanian cousin. Last month we got two hundred. All Benny wants is a slice of pepperoni and anchovies. Large Mountain Dew and garlic sticks. The rest is acting chops. Training ground.
“Pocket, Dude. Gotta have pocket.”
The problem is they’re going to amputate my father’s foot. The other problem is, he needs a new liver.
The Corporate Angel Network, an organization that coordinates free air travel for cancer patients, began when Coca-Cola executives arranged for the Blue Angels to fly a liver from San Diego to Houston in time for a transplant into a little girl.
My most popular story was the one about the home video showing an attractive, scantily-clad woman licking under the rim of the toilet at an extended-stay hotel in the South, demonstrating how clean their apartment homes were.
That was unclassifiable veracity, which somehow turned legend. The ridiculousness of truth is unsurpassed.
See also: honesty.
See also: pathological displacement of erotic interest and satisfaction to a fetish.
See also: advertising for Extended Stay U.S.A.
Benny says, “Yea Dude I bet every guy ran home to get off on that one.” And then he gives me the travellers’ cheques.
“Checks, Dude.”
That’s how it’s spelled.