4

‘Been any fucking reason for to get buddies, you and me?’

More than once criticized and whipped (metaphorically) for his pompously ornate figures of speech, Lex time and again, so as to keep on the safe side, ventured into the language that he believed was the street parlance and then he sounded like a damn putz. A kinda Sir Francis Bacon’s try at Ebonics or something before to take a shot at his own version of The West-Side Story.

The question just brought up could be asked much nicer and more modestly, in an acceptable tone of neutral communication, like, “why did we make friends with each other?” or else “what did become the foundation for our friendship?” but no! He preferred to act a yo-bro!-yo-bro! mobster.

‘Supposedly, the two lazy-bones were attracted and kept together by sloth of equally immeasurable dimensions, if you ever heard the word “gravitation”.’

‘What-what?’

‘Each and every of you and me are too lazy to counteract the habit of four years. Or is it five already?’

‘Numbers mean nothing!’

‘Tell it to your taxman, Pedagogue. Though, in part, yes, just one year is more than enough for real friends to call each other all the names under the sun and direct the partner to every petal in the Wind Rose so the quantity of later additions do not tell on the firmness of their valuable relationship.’

‘I see you’re cooking on gas today, chum, how about defining friendship? Taken as a notion, nothing personal. Yet in plain words, please, without the coefficients from the Material Resistance Table?’

Here is another of Lex’ quirks for you. He’s fond of starting a philosophical discursive speculations on this or that hooey which normal guy would feel ashamed to even think about because that hooey is too obvious for any lame ass: life is life, flower is flower, especially if from Morocco, and so forth without loosing his face and last crumbs of self-respect.

‘Well, leaving the Material Resistance Table aside, friendship is what suffice to make you happy after a single look at your buddy and realizing there is a more fucked up shithead than you yourself. Stupidity is the inherent vice even in the most ideal friend who you have to tolerate because you need a sidekick for your routines on stage which is the world.’

‘Your stage is pretty grave, man.’ With a sweeping chaperon gesture Lex embraced the bare walls in the room resembling the inside of sooner a cube than a parallepiped. Their severely white paint coat imparted to the closed space the air of ascetic rigor even though a humble glance around couldn’t target on any crucifix or symbols of any other faith or cult.

He occupied a low half armchair, whose sheer varnished wooden arms bore burns and scars of random marks from the times immemorial (“he” here is Lex and “it” is under him). The trajectory of his all-embracing gesture ended with the soft landing (without ever looking to coordinate the movements) onto the circle top of a beer can standing on the brown floor by the right hind leg of the half-blood (being funny) within the range reachable by the occupier.

The chaperon's head sank back onto the upholstery fabric in the gently oblique back of the half armchair, pretty worn by leaning of other heads before this here one, which turned it’s front to face the only window in the room—neither a flower-pot on the white sill nor even a view outside but simply a rectangle of blue from the standpoint of the eyes in his head dropped back restfully.

Atop the computer desk in the corner to the left from the window, there towered thin black tin in the PC box of the corresponding architecture (a collected by the cheap Indonesian workforce and stamped “Made in China” critter) in a close company with the monitor Philips. The couple of streamlined speakers in thick mesh of fencing masks protecting their mugs, though not armed with rapiers, secured the Hollander's flanks. The avant-garde position held the mouse and keyboard, both wired and black as the rest of the desktop’s equipment.

The wide swivel armchair—a jarring note contrasting by its throne aspect—aloof and alien in respect to the robust monk-cell design—showed its black back to the computer gone deeply into the hibernation mode because V, for a considerable stretch of time already, had been seated in it facing Lex.

With his right foot planted in the mock Cocobolo laminate flooring, he used the leverage of the skeletal structure in his leg (yes, also the right one) to impart driving impulses to the languid swings of the throne, hither-thither, describing a slight arc in reciprocating horizontal turns, both slow and not protracted, within a radiant or so, no wider.

The left of V’s ankles ascended as high as to be put across his right knee to serve a pad for the bottom of the beer can in an unfocused, careless grip by his hand’s digits. Quite naturally, the support as well as the beer (both consumed and still awaiting to be poured in) were also involved in the general movement, hither and thither, together with the rest of the contraption composed of organic (engine’s body) and inorganic (all the rest) stuff except for his foot firmly pressed to the same point, which served the anchor and source of the lazy half-radiant rotations. Wiggle-wobble…

At the meeting place of two perpendicular walls, in the catty-corner from the computer, there stood another, regular desk consorted with a hard wooden chair.

The neat cylinder smack-bang in the desktop center (once again black and of the same fencing-mask-like mesh) resembled a mini-pot for indoor floriculture hobbyists letting out—a little bit above its black rim—the exotic thin twig of a single ball pen. In a nurse-like solicitous attitude, the desk lamp craned its shade over the outgrowth. The strict business-like style of the desk was softened in part by the tight green roll of a synthetic yoga mat in its off-duty resting posture by the desktop right edge.

Two wall outlets, one ceiling light fixture, and, naturally, the door exhaustively completed the interior of the hermit’s lair.

‘As we know,’ pronounced Lex in the Oxbridge nauseous manner of meticulously nuanced articulation of each sound, ‘friendship presupposes presence of salubrious prerequisites and compliance to a certain number of necessary requirements, do we not? Consequentially, a fair stock of sloth plus shared disgust to puristic castration of the language alive for morality’s ends created us for each other. Anything omitted in my listing, dear colleague? Not a squat of a chance, I hope. If we approach this issue from the standpoint of applied logic.’

‘A widely accepted recipe does not exclude inspirational add-ons while cooking the meal. There’s no guarantee from the creative fancies of the chef.’

‘And which ingredient will add a charming spicy flavor to the subject of the discourse in hand?’

‘How about hate?’

The beer can (having started its ascend up in the air a second before) came back to rest on the Cocobola brown. Lex crossed his arms on his chest with each hand fingers splayed, wide and rigidly, over the biceps areas in the opposite arm.

‘Fuck! Given the percentage of jest in composition of your average jest, hence proceed with more deliberation, please.’

‘Nothing equals hate in being the most reliable pledge for a lasting relationship of any sort. Let’s turn to basics. Fiancee hates her Groom for all his feints and dodging before she milked the proposition out him, after all. Groom hates Fiancee for the misery he lived thru listening to the tons of her empty non-stop twits before she gave, at last. Then starts the agony of matrimonial life describable by only French “o-la-la!” Anyway, they have to stick together to repay and revenge for their initial sufferings, getting waylaid by further ones down the road. And what exactly pushes us to cover our buddy’s girlfriend? To make of him a damn dumb cuckold from now on? Can you guess? The word starts with “h”.’

‘It’s madness!’

’Nope. Wrong letter. And we are simply dusting down our ken of inductive logic here. Combining the pleasant with the useful down the road in our friendly relations.

‘Some fucking hooey. Completely. All of it!’

‘Yep. That’s my motto: All or Nothing. OK, forget it. I know as well as you do, it was not you who fucked her, it was she who used you, my dear friend.’

One hand was clutching the beer can while the other, at the same very moment, as ill luck would have it, was scratching the back of his head so Lex had, practically, nothing to grope for right retort with. Instead, he sipped from the can silently. Because some of V’s jests do stun you hundred per cent flat.