Short Fiction: What's Cool

For Josh's uncle...

I used to pee a lot. Now I do a lot of cocaine. The two are not exclusive. They go together. What happened was this: I spend a lot of time dining out. I drink too much wine. I have to pee.

And, well, the walk from the table to the bathroom is embarrassing.

I mean, have you really ever walked through a crowded restaurant, to go pee, five or six times? Maybe you did it once, not five times. And I know you didn't do it six times because that's the record. Trust me, I contacted the people who keep the records and everything.

They told me: Six times, yeah, that's the record.

This is terribly uncool. All this peeing. But you know what is cool?

Cocaine!

Cocaine's just about the coolest thing ever. It's right up there with the girl who wears paperclips on her shoes. I love when she finds paperclips laying on the street. I mean she's full of magic or something because she finds the most boring thing in the world laying on the street and she transforms it, magically, into an emblem of coolness.

My emblem of coolness is my rampant cocaine habit.

One night, at my favorite place Table, I was peeing. I was embarrassed. It was like the seventh time, a new record. I was thinking of how uncool it was. Then I was hit with an epiphany or something.

I thought: What's cool is cocaine.

Now when I get up to pee everyone knows I'm really getting up to do more cocaine. Trust me, I can see the looks on the people's faces.

They're not saying: Look at that fucking dork, peeing again.

They're saying: Look at that Mythical God of Love, doing more cocaine. Isn't he cool? He probably doesn't ever even need to pee.

At least that's what Paperclip Girl says. I'm her Mythical God of Love.


Once, after dining, I drove Paperclip Girl to an abandoned parking lot and fucked her in the backseat of my car.

She was like, That's good.

But that doesn't include the sounds she was making, or the volume. That's just the words.

That's good. That's good. That's good.

A bunch of times, just like that, with a lot more Os, and real loud.

Afterwards we just sat there, not having to pee or anything. It was cool. She was fiddling with a paperclip which I had lovingly clipped on her nipple.

We laughed and laughed.

I said: Why is it that sex ends in laughter?

She said: When it ends in crying that means you fucked up somewhere along the line.

But anyway, I like it best when I get up, I go pee, I do more cocaine, and when I come back Paperclip Girl is there waiting, the food has been served, and everyone in the whole place knows, really knows, that I only got up because I wanted to do more cocaine before eating.

Only thing, I'm never hungry when I dine out anymore. I don't get it. I just keep thinking about "after dining", about, you know, making love, which I previously called fucking, but now realize is probably just loving.