Matthew raises an eyebrow, grins his half grin. “I told you, I have to save some things for the authorized biography. But get this. One of the other kids — You won’t believe this. He wired home for money on the spot, from this whorehouse, and spent the next four days there. At Irma’s. I swear to God. The rest of us covered for him, said he was sick, did his homework.” A pause. “So, anyway, Hester Hooker. But that’s not all.” Is there any stopping Matthew now? “We’re coming out with a line of handicapped dolls, because we think that kids will grow up to be more tolerant of deformities if they get used to handling them on a small scale. And a line of warriors who actually bleed, lose limbs, die, decompose.”
“Matthew,” says Richard.
“Ooops. Sorry. But wait, I have one more. A little pet project of mine. And I think it’s going to be a huge hit. A lifelike vinyl penis that little girls can strap on, sort of like a garter belt. It’s hooked to a water tank that fits in the small of the back, so girls can piss like boys.” He looks to Jack and Richard. “You remember those macho pissing contests when you were a kid? Now girls can enter! Not only enter, but win!”
“Pricks for Chicks,” says Belinda spontaneously. Matthew is stunned. She stepped on his punch line. Not that what she said was exactly his punch line. It was better. Belinda laughs at her own joke, and Matthew realizes that she too is drunker than she ordinarily gets.
“Do you realize,” he asks the whole table in a lowered voice, “that we’re all bombed?”
“It’s unavoidable,” says Richard. “They keep you waiting so long.”
“Do you think the waitresses notice?” asks Jack. “Do they wonder why most of the people in here keep bumping into the walls?” He touches Effie’s arm and asks, as if in the voice of one of the waitresses, “Mary, did you ever notice anything about these people who eat here?”
Effie glances around the room and answers as another waitress. “Nope,” she says.
“Well, they’re all drunk, dearie. Schnockered. Plastered. Blotto.”
“Well, yeah, you know, I have noticed that.”
“Why do you suppose that is, darlin’?”
Effie inclines her head and thinks. “It must be that a lot of drunk people come here to eat fish because there’s some myth about fish being good for warding off a hangover.”
“No kidding!” says Jack. “‘Warding off,’ you say! Warding off! Is that it, ‘warding off’? What the fuck would that mean, exactly, honey?’”
“Oh, shut up. Maybe fish is supposed to sober you up. The flaky fish flesh absorbs the alcohol or something like that.”
“‘Flaky fish flesh’?” says Richard.
Jack deals him a stern look, still in character, and says, “Now you keep out of this, Charlene, darlin’. Mary and I are having a serious discussion about the inebriation of our clientele. You just go off in a corner somewhere and practice saying ‘flaky fish flesh,’ okay?”
“Fish is brain food, too, you know,” says Effie.
“So?”
“So maybe, I’m only saying maybe, these people think that eating fish while they’re drinking will restore the brain cells that the alcohol destroys.”
Nobody laughs.
In Topical Guide 449, Mark Dorset considers Experiences: Unforgettable, Unusual, Unlikely; Annotator: Trials and Tribulations of; and Reminiscing: As Shared Experience (“Do You Remember?”) from this episode.
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