LITMIR.BIZ

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around letting everyone call you Hickory,” Lucille said.

      Dinky burbled from the couch. “We don’t think that’s very nice, now do we?”

      “Who asked you to wake up, hey moron?” Basil said.

      “The middle name,” Hickory went on, “that was my father’s doing. They were farmer hippies.”

      “You,” I said, “come from hippies?”

      Hickory smiled. “I spent the first ten years of my life on a commune up in Oregon. We had beehives and everything. Organic bees. Organic everything.”

      “Poor, poor girl,” Basil said.

      Hickory put her chin in her palm and looked us over. When she stopped at me I knew what she wanted, but then she passed to Basil. “You, tough guy. Which will it be?”

      “Toss a mop on the floor,” I said at Basil’s show of squirming. “See which way it flops.”

      Even as I said this it struck me just how much we didn’t care what Basil did. We knew—or at least I knew, or thought I knew—that either way he turned wouldn’t change a thing. How could he choose when he had no choice, the difference between a Truth or Dare having collapsed beneath their emptiness? For Basil, to be honest meant to be daring. And however strangely, however sadly, daring was as close as Basil ever got to truth. The notions had become two mirrors reflecting only themselves.

      “Goddamn it,” Basil said. “Shit. Truth.”

      “Oh dear yes, quite lovely indeed,” Hickory said in this high-society debutante voice. “Now. What’s the most shameful thing you’ve ever done—sexually, I mean?” Basil looked blank, so Hickory said, “Of course I mean shameful in the traditional sense, the suburban sense.”

      “I can tell you that,” Lucille said. “It happened only last week, when he greased me up like a Thanksgiving turkey and tried to—”

      “I already heard that story,” I said. Lucille turned with gaping eyes. “He told me everything,” I said.

      “Everything?” she said.

      Basil cleared his throat. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I had a stuffed monkey.”

      “How old are we talking?” Hickory said.

      “Twelve or thirteen, I guess. My dad had given it to me before he took off. Anyways, it had this hole in its crotch. It started out little, but kept getting bigger.” Basil had been slouching forward as he talked. Now he planted his hands on the floor, as if the telling were over.

      “What kind of story is that?” I said.

      Basil’s face was flushing now. “There’s more,” he said.

      “Come, come,” Hickory said.

      “One day I was in the closet.”

      “Yes?”

      “With the monkey.”

      “Yes?”

      “And I was looking at pornos, you know, and, I don’t know, there it was.” Here Basil paused with great melodrama, worse than a creep on the tube.

      “Out with it!” I shouted.

      “So I fucked it.”

      “Really?” Lucille said, her face lit up.

      “That’s not all,” Basil said.

      “There’s more,” I said. “There’s always more with this guy.”

      “See, when I finished, I wanted to hide the bastard, but I couldn’t think of any place where my ma wouldn’t find it. There was also another lady and her kid living with us in this house. You can see why I had to destroy the facts. So I got out a big old garbage bag, one of those super heavy-duty Glad bags, and stuffed the monkey in there. Then I jumped on my moped and drove out to the mall. They had all those dumpsters in the alley behind the Mervyns there. Thing is, I didn’t just chuck it in there. I buried it. Dug through old tampons and shit, and chicken bones and diapers and soup cans, all that repugnant shit, and crammed that little fucker down at the very, very bottom, and then I covered it all back up.”

      “You interred it,” Hickory said. “As in a mausoleum.” Now she circled our faces with a look that said I’m going to tell you all what this really means. “Some people would say that was very symbolic.”

      “Not this again,” Lucille said.

      “I fucked a stuffed monkey,” Basil said. “Big deal.”

      “First of all,” Hickory said, “it wasn’t just any old monkey. It was the monkey your father gave you before he abandoned you. That’s why you killed the monkey. You fucked it, as you say. And then, because you couldn’t live with the guilt, you buried it someplace where no one would ever find it.”

      “You,” Basil said, “are a goddamned fruit loop.”

      “Check out the science,” Hickory said.

      “Ha!” Lucille said.

      “Seriously,” Hickory said. “I’m not surprised in the least. It was a very normal thing to do for a boy that age. Especially in our culture. He just did it in an abnormal way.”

      Dinky rolled up on an elbow and scratched his chest. “You know what Hermann Goering said about our culture? He said, ‘When I hear anyone speak of culture, I reach for my revolver.’”

      “You’re the one belongs in the loony bin,” I told Basil. He had a big whitehead on his nose I’d just noticed. “I’ll bet you even crammed that thing full of mayonnaise before you did it.”

      “It’s all right, baby,” Lucille said, rubbing his back. “I still love you.”

      “We think we’ll be going upstairs now,” Dinky said. “We’re going to lie down for a while.” He stood there in his Cal Bears rugby shirt and Joe Boxer boxers with their bologna-sandwich appliqués. Then he sniffled and wiped his nose and started away, dragging his feet like they were a couple of sleds. “We don’t suppose any of you would care to tuck us in?”

      “I’d love to oblige,” Lucille said, “but I know how you get when a bed’s nearby.”

      “Not that I’d worry so much about that,” Basil said. His face was waxy now, a veneer of cosmopolite ugly. “He ain’t exactly what I’d call, you know, at the height of his form these days.”

      Dinky picked his nose. Then, his face a model of serenity, he extended his arm and with a simple motion of thumb and finger flicked the booger onto Basil’s hat. “At least our dick is straight,” he said, looking at Lucille.

      “That thing better not have landed on me,” Basil said. “I’ll cut that straight dick off. Go ahead,” he said, “go to sleep. But beware.”

      “I knew a guy,” I said, “who woke up one morning and went to take a pee, and when he pulled his dick out, guess what color it was?”

      “You guys are so sick,” Hickory said. “I’m trapped in a shack with a grade-A bunch of sickos.”

      “Black,” I said. “As your crappy gaping pupils, I’m talking.”

      “In fact, to call you nothing but sickos is a kindness you scarcely deserve.”

      “Turns out,” I said, “the guy had got so blotto he didn’t even know his frat buddy’d taken the thing out in the middle of the night and colored it with a Magic Marker, one of those big-ass felt-tipped Magic Markers with the refillable cartridges even.”

      “I find a booger on me,” Basil said, “I’ll cut his dick off.”

      “Come on, Dinky,” Hickory said. “You go lie down, and I’ll make

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