The Dishes

“Last week, there was a trans woman at Pride who had big hairy tits.”

My friend tells me this while ashing his cigarette into a plastic bucket. I imagine big hairy tits and can’t help but scowl. “You’re gonna burn this place down,” I scold him, pointing to the bucket with a sandaled toe.

He ignores me. “Oh, please,” he says. “You and I both know there’s someone out there who can’t wait to bury their face in those furry tats.”

I shrug. “Yeah, well, everyone wants to do ayahuasca, but no one wants to do the dishes.”

He crushes his cigarette against the bottom of his flip flop and lights another. He stares at me for a good ten seconds. “Sometimes, I like to imagine my friends as babies, and then I like to imagine what it’s like to hold them.”

I wonder if in his mind, I have a fat thighs and a big head, since I had both. I wonder if he knows I was a nightmare to hold, since I turned purple with colic the instant I was removed from my mother’s breast.

“You know when you bump into some dude from high school, and its awkward, because they were kind of a dick?” And you do the polite thing, and ask them how they’re doing, and they say they’re ‘living the dream?’ Well, all I hear is they can’t get hard anymore.”

My friend exhales smoke and points at me with his sandaled toe. “Lao Tzu says if you never assume importance, you never lose it.”

“And if you assume?” I ask, strangely annoyed.

“Stop being the only one who does the dishes,” he says, flicking the stub of a still-lit cigarette into the plastic bucket.