Once or twice every month, Elias would ask me to be his third wheel whenever he’d find some new hole on Tinder—I’d be there in case something went awry and he needed a drinking buddy to finish the night with. I never minded being an accessory to his casual hookups if I got some free drinks out of it, and it’s not like I ever had anything better to do.
From the moment he came into our apartment, I could tell Luis was something special. He seemed unimpressed with our modest digs and our less-than-stellar score of low-grade sativa mixed with high-grade poa pretensis. He still smoked it, the haughty asshole. He was generally a sour lemon, but I was interested to notice how he’d start sweetening up at our jabs and provocations—the crueler the slander, the cuter he’d get. Elias caught on to the act and just started insulting him for anything and everything, which apparently aroused something deep and masochistically whorish in Luis—I’m not qualified to psychoanalyze further, but he was basically begging to be fucked right there on the couch while me and my roommate took turns just absolutely hollowing him out on Street Fighter.
We crawled out the apartment and made our way toward a bar down the street. Luis made some snarky remark when speakers outside the place started hoarsing out Back Door Man. I nudged his side, offered a cigarette. “Hey, you know this song’s about butt sex?” He didn’t laugh—Elias did. My memory fuzzes into static somewhere in the bar, snapshots of a billiards bouts. Luis clawed at Elias’s crotch every time he’d lose a game—I think he was losing on purpose.
Elias, our reluctant DD with a blood-alcohol level somewhere around .20 if I had to guess, stopped by a Taco Bell on the way home. Luis was one of those joyless healthy types that never ate fast food. I stumbled inside, almost falling headfirst into the plate glass door. Staggering back into the car with my food, interrupting a game of grabass, the inside reeked of Luis’s candy-flavored vape nectar. I was gulping down the burrito in hopes that it would soak up all those shots of tequila, curb their nauseating effects. It didn’t work, but Taco Bell’s still delicious when you’re browning right at the cusp of a full-on blackout. I wiped liquid cheese off my lip.
“You know how much micro-plastic has got to be in that burrito?” The candy cancer mist poured from out his mouth, wisped through the gap of my open window. I could taste the shit in my food when I took a bite.
As Elias’s wingman, it was partly my duty to help him seal the deal. I said, “I don’t give a fuck. You’re literally inhaling shards of metal into your lungs right now, dumbass. You’ve been a dour little bitch all goddamn night, so why don’t you just shut the fuck up, get over yourself and stop ruining my dinner? You self-important sonofabitch, fuck you.” I didn’t really mean it, angry outbursts not being in my nature—but I did it for Elias, knowing he would’ve done the same for me.
Elias said, diplomatically, “Hey, man. How about you head inside and cool off? We’ll be up in a bit.” Luis chuffed, but I could see him patting around at Elias’s groin in the dark, giddy to fuck.
I slammed the door on my way out to really sell the show. Whipping out the dick n balls to piss out some venom in the grass, I shared an enthusiastic thumbs-up with Elias—he knew what I was getting at, and he was stoked. The last I ever saw of Luis was his silhouette shifting to straddle my roommate in the driver’s seat, under the sparse light of the night filtered through a massive oak overhead. I was already passed out when they came back in to screw some more on the couch and smoke off the rest of my grass—which Luis was a huge fan of now, apparently.
Lee Pearson is a writer that lives and works in Northwest Arkansas. He has no credentials or accolades.
Back Patio Press 