June 23, 2015

Jerome:

He's doing it again. He's spread out on the couch, staring blankly at his phone like he's getting brainwashed by aliens or some shit. He's really out of it anymore and if it was anyone else acting this way, I'd think they were on drugs. It's been a long time since he was always zoned out like this and it's fucking scary to watch. Constantly blank, constantly pissed, constantly sad. Mitch's body is sitting right here like three feet away but he's not really here. I don't know where he went but I want my best friend back.

"You okay?" I look over at him and pause the movie I thought we were both watching and he glances over like he just realized I was still sitting here. He's off in his own little world, answering comments or watching YouTube or whatever the fuck he does anymore. I don't even know.

"Yeah. I'm fine. Just peachy." His voice's monotone with a thick smear of sarcasm on top to make it look acceptable. I wouldn't buy that shit from a gas station donut case.

"Don't lie to me, Mitch." He rolls his eyes and his arms flop limply down on his stomach like they just turned into big ol' rubbery noodles. Now I'm talking to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. "What'd she do to you? I'll screw her over so hard her empty head'll implode like a fucking jack o' lantern." He looks over at me from under his hood, but there's nothing there. He just goes through the motions and shuts down.

"I'm not lying. I'm fine, dood, so just leave me alone."

"Well, you don't look fine. I'm just worried about you, Biggums." He huffs and stuffs his phone in his pocket and gets up and heads around the corner to the kitchen. I give him a couple seconds before I get up and go after him, with just enough time to see him slip past the fridge and up the stairs. Typical Mitch – always running away from everything. Living with him is like living in a never-ending match of the Hunger Games. I lean against the wall by the puke sink for a few seconds, trying to figure out what to do. If I go after him, he's gonna get pissed and bare his fangs at me like a fucking rabid animal. But if I don't go after him, he's gonna keep floatin' along on this little rain cloud of his that's gonna evolve into a hurricane if he doesn't stop running around in circles with it. They both sound bad but I'd rather have him mad at me than mad at himself. Fuck it. Ready or not, here I come.

I turn my hat backwards so I can see better and I slink up the stairs like a cat, hoping to get the jump on him. I'm gonna be a Pokemon master and catch 'em all. There's a fresh mini bag of nasty ass cooled Cheetos tossed on his bed but I don't see him anywhere. It's dark as Satan's deep, ungodly ass crack up here and the only light is coming through the doorway from the living room downstairs. I feel like I'm playing Resident Evil right now and something's gonna jump out and scare the shit outta me. I hear something click shut in the bathroom and I duck around the side of his monster TV that he never uses. I see his shadow emerge from the bathroom and he heads over to shut the bedroom door, like that's gonna stop the Endy Bac from gettin' him. You'd think I just met this guy last week. I wait until he turns around to go after his crunchy, cheesy drug before I pounce on him from behind and wrap my arms around his chest so he can't move his arms. It's the only way to beat the Benja Canaw-dah and he fucking knows it.

"So are you gonna tell me what's wrong, or am I gonna hafta hack into your phone like a criminal?" He tries to pitifully pull away but he just pulls me with him. He's like a cat with booties on, trying to shrug me off and get away again. If there weren't walls holding him here, he'd take off like a goddamn ocelot. I've never wanted to see a grown man cry so much in my life. He finally stops struggling and we just stand there awkwardly in the dark in the middle of his room. "Are you finished yet?"

"What do you want, dood?"

"I want you to tell me what's going on with you. If she's tryin' to blackmail you or some shit, I need to know about it so I can shut her down."

"It's nothing like that. I'm fine, Jerome, seriously."

"This isn't what fine looks like. You troll around in your office all day then you come out long enough to eat or drown yourself in the pool, then you walk around hunched over like a dog in a rainstorm until it's time to record again or sleep. Fine doesn't look like that." He huffs at me again and I wait for the snotty remark, but it never comes. He tripped and fell on something and now he can't get up. "I'm waitin', Mitch."

"I just realized how stupid and fucked up the whole thing is."

"What thing're you talking about?"

"Me transitioning." Dammit. We're swimming with sharks now and I don't have a metal cage to hide in. I'm way outta my league here and he hates sappy crap. What am I supposed to do?

"Why's that fucked up?"

"It didn't do anything, Jerome. Look at me – it didn't do any good."

"What're you talking about, bud? It did lots of good. Up until a couple weeks ago, you were the happiest motherfucker who ever walked the face of the Earth. Then Goldilocks showed up and turned it all to shit with her anti-Midas touch and her looting sword. Don't let her take that away from you, man."

"Don't let her take what away? My blinders? All of this was here the whole time, but I was just too fucking naïve not to see it. Nothing has changed. It's just as ridiculous as it was the day I learned what it was called. I have been lying to myself for so long because I thought I could persuade myself that it would make a difference, but it didn't. All it did was put me in a shitload of debt for a year. I'm in the same spot I started from and now the green screen is gone."

"This isn't YouTube, Mitch. I don't know about you, but I haven't been acting."

"That just means that you are even stupider than I am."

"Stupid is as stupid does. And if stupid makes you laugh, I'm glad to be stupid. But I haven't been acting. I'm not a fucking sociopath. And I know you haven't been acting. I saw how you were before you transitioned and I saw how you were a couple weeks ago and I know none of that's an act, either. Seeing you happy like that... It makes me happy. And seeing you like this just makes me wanna go deck the asshole who did this to you, girl or no girl." He goes back to his usual stoic silence, like he thinks that letting me say my piece'll get me to let go of him sooner. Doesn't work that way here. "Whatever you're thinking right now – it's wrong."

"I'm just so tired of dealing with this shit. I thought that I would be able to play the game and go down the checklist, then I would come out the other side and not have the same problems over, and over, and over, and over again. I just want to be like everyone else. I don't want to be a guy with an asterisk next to his name. I just want to be a regular guy."

"Who says you aren't?"

"Heh. Good one."

"No, I'm serious. There're guys who take T for other reasons and no one bats an eye about it. And even Barbie Bitch wouldn't've known about it if you didn't tell her."

"I didn't tell her. She found out on her own."

"How the hell'd that happen?" He laughs bitterly and the sudden movement reminds me how loose my grip is around him. I get a better hold on him so he doesn't get any bright ideas.

"It's pretty hard to have a girlfriend and hide something like that for long. I don't exactly look normal."

"You look completely normal to me."

"That's not what I mean."

"Oh." That'd fuck any guy up. No wonder he's taking it so hard. And from what I heard, she went after him pretty deep when she ran upstairs like a little kid on Christmas morning. "But that's no excuse for her to act the way she did. You can't sit here and punish yourself for her being a dumbass. That's on her."

"Something tells me she doesn't give a shit."

"So neither should you. Since when did you start putting stock in anything she said? She can think whatever the hell she wants as long as she keeps it in her balloon of a head. Look, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you you're perfect and all that bullshit. I know you don't wanna hear it and neither of us believe it. But it's not about being perfect, Mitch – it's about being happy. I just want you to be happy again. Is that so bad?"

"If it was me saying this, you would be making syrup jokes."

"Yeah, well I'm waitin' for the nose jokes. Any time now, bud. I'm ready for it." He stays silent so I start rubbing the bridge of my nose against the side of his neck and sniffing his extra-strong chlorine cologne. "At least I dig for my own gold, if you catch my drift." I breathe out against the back of his ear before I give it a good slurp, and he starts laughing like a little kid. He's like a six-foot-tall ten-year-old.

"Oh my god, dood. Can you not?"

"Can you just not, mate?" I run the tip of my tongue along the rim of his ear and he shakes his head and tries to pull away. When that doesn't work, he leans forward and starts pulling me towards the bed after him like a fucking bulldozer while my shoes slide across the floor and bring the rug with us. We struggle for a minute before he manages to swing us around so my back's facing the bed then he slams back into me so we both go falling backwards on the poor fridge Cheetos. And just my luck, his ass lands right on my crotch with an earth-shattering force. "Oh, fuck! Don't sit on that!" As much as it physically pains me, it's good to hear him laugh like that.

"I thought you wanted me to sit on that. I thought that was the whole point, Jerome."

"Yeah, but not like that. Jesus, Mitch. I need those." He pries my arms off of himself and climbs off so I can curl in on myself like a kid during a 1960s atom bomb test. He's still snickering somewhere over on the left in the dark.

"Are you okay?" he asks with that Gengar smirk of his. I can't even see him but I can still see it in my head. If I didn't know any better, I'd say he did this on purpose.

"Yeah, I think so. Gonna feel that in the mornin'." My balls are still throbbing pretty good and I try to sit up but I just flop back down. That ain't gonna be pretty in a couple hours.

"After all of the T jokes you've made over the years, it looks like you might actually need me to hook you up with a prescription."

"Probably not a bad call. I think I need a cast. And I used to wonder why they called it a boner." I hear him walk back over and yank the crushed Cheetos out from under my cheeks and open the bag. He plops down next to me and unlocks his phone while he crunches through his nasty ass chips, and all of a sudden the theme song from Super Smash Bros. Brawl starts playing outta his speakers. Sarcastic fucker. I reach over and snatch his food and stuff as many in my mouth as I can even though I could go the rest of my life without seeing another fucking Cheeto. He flops on his back and just starts eating the spilled ones off the bed. Dammit, Mitch. I stiffly turn over and crawl across the foot and a half space between us and put the mouthful of mini dick-shaped chips in his face where he can't see his phone screen. Maybe if we're lucky... But instead of going for the chips, he grabs another one off the bed and tries to squeeze it in the side of my mouth. It's like that fucking chubby bunny challenge but twenty times worse. And salty as hell.

"In your dreams, dood." I grab the now empty bag and regurgitate the sick things in there like a mama bird before I start eating them unhappily. Why couldn't he eat the nasty fuckers for me? Instead of calling his parody 'Endstone,' he shoulda called it 'Cheesedust.' He's like Lachlan with his crappy burritos. We have a staredown while he nibbles on another bed Cheeto and I can see a little bit of his usual mischievous idiocy in his eyes in the light of his phone screen. I've really missed that. "It looks like you're having a pretty rough night: deflated balls and soggy Cheetos. It doesn't get much better than that."

"I just need some roaches crawling on me and layin' eggs in my ears and we'll be good to go." He smirks and he locks his phone, putting us back in complete darkness. It's nice being here with him, being so close for no particular reason. I could get used to this. There's still a little fluffy cloud hanging over our heads but it's nothing like it was when I came up here to find him. "But really, though. Are you okay?"

"Yeah. I'll be fine. It will probably take a little while for things to go back to normal, but they will. Eventually." He goes completely still before he lets out a long breath and I feel his arm brush against mine as his hands go up to his face. That's my cue to get my ass outta dodge before I screw something up. This whole thing went better than expected and the last thing I need to do is make it all come crashing down on my head now. "Look. I'm just not ready to be in a relationship right now. She fucked me over really badly and I can't deal with anything else yet."

"I'm not sayin' anything. Do what you need to do to get back on your feet. You know I'm not going anywhere anytime soon." I rigidly head over to the door and unlock it, pausing for a second to look back over at him in the dim light. I don't wanna leave him alone with his thoughts but he needs to work through this by himself. He's staring up at the ceiling like I'll be doing all night, wondering what color my nuts are gonna be in the morning and searching for ninja roaches. I wonder how many're gonna spawn now because of that Cheeto dust. U-gh. Don't wanna think about that. " 'Night, Biggums."

"Try not to blow anything up."

"I'll try my hardest. No promises, though." With that, I'm out in the hallway by myself with a closed door behind me. For it being sweltering summertime in Floor-Hell, it's fucking cold out here.