BY STEPHEN M. TOMIC
“I need a PB&J.”
Tyrone, who was already leaning back against his futon, stretched a muscular tattooed arm behind him, making it look like he was getting serviced below view of the webcam. We both knew that neither of us had had any carnal relations lately. Days had turned into weeks; weeks blurred into months; months dissolved into the unerring awareness that every day was now Sunday. It was a despairing thought. Usually by now we’d be at the beach, working on our tans, hitting on hot chicks, getting wasted, then waking up to do it all over again. The irony doesn’t escape me.
“Kinda late in the day for peanut butter, innit?” I asked, looking at all the little hairs on the knuckles of my hand. I then turned my hand over to look at the crisscrossing lines and grooves of my palm and wondered if there were some sprouting hairlets that meant I’d been masturbating too much. I once knew a girl who had read the word ‘masticate’ in a dictionary and tried to convince us it meant some perverted thing. If you consider chewing perverted, I guess. It can be annoying when you hear someone doing it. When I had a girlfriend she used to go to the fridge and grab a yogurt and then sprinkle a spoon of muesli into the too-small plastic yogurt cup and start mixing it while walking back to the living room. I’d normally still be in bed since she was an early riser and all, but I could hear those irritating and repetitive squishy yogurt sounds every time she dipped the spoon in and out. Sometimes it’s the tiniest things that will make you slowly go mad.
“Dude, not a sandwich. A PB&J stands for a piss, a beer, and a joint.” He stood up, revealing he did indeed still have on pants. “Speaking of which, I’m gonna go take care of two out of three right now. Be right back.”
“Word.” I looked at the time of our call. We’d been talking for over an hour. No real reason needed. Why not shoot the shit? We made it a ritual, a way to insulate ourselves from the insanity of a broken world, reaping the combined benefits of inebriation and stories as a way to pass the time, since that’s all we had these days. No beaches, no bitches, no sports, no new TV shows to talk about. If this is the “new normal”, I’d almost rather die.
My friend Scratch told me I was lucky to still have a job. And I suppose he’s right — three cheers for the greased wheels of capitalism to keep turning — it’s better to work indefinitely, perhaps permanently from home than to not work at all. If you’d told me when I was like sixteen or twenty-one that I would someday be spending 90% of my day
Working from home in pajamas, I would have called you a genius or a loon. The reality, however, is much more mundane. When all your interactions are mediated through a screen refreshing its thousands or millions of pixels every second, it’s easy to lose track of what really matters.
Psst. It sounded like the start of a secret, but I knew Tyrone had just opened a bottle of beer off-screen. There was something deeply satisfying about that sound, that sudden hiss of carbonation, those subsequent bubbles rising to the surface, that first thirst-slaking sip. Ahhh. It made me jealous I didn’t have any beer stocked up. Instead, my own supply had dwindled down to the vilest pineapple hooch and a bottle of peppermint Schnapps that was so old the liqueur around the twist-off cap had partially solidified and became crusty. I thought again of my unused member and the ensuing chafing from a rather, shall we say, involved solo misadventure, involving much dispersion of back sweat that dampened my bedsheets; and instead of reaching porn star levels of eruption, I found myself feeling more tired than horny, my member flopping around in my hand at half-mast. I don’t know if it’s because I’m approaching middle age or due to the total lack of action lately. It’s enough to drive a man insane.
“Dude, are you still there?”
“What?”
“You looked lost in space.”
“Sorry. I was just zooming out.”
“You mean zoning?”
“Whatever.”
“You gonna roll a joint?”
“Yeah.”
“Me too.”
I tapped my glass of hooch up against the webcam. Tyrone did the same. We took a drink and then I started thinking about the rain.
