Drinks 5: November First

The cold light of day hits the apartment of TERRY KEANE, who lies face down in a bowl of ice at the kitchen table, barely conscious and making a noise that has actually attracted two adventurous vultures to the window. They peck at it rather persistently. Enter RENEE with a limp and wearing a latex chicken mask.
RENEE: There’s a dead guy in the tub, if you were wondering about the smell. I think it’s a mix of shit and vitalis if the color of the water is anything to go by.

TERRY: Don’t sweat it; I borrowed him from the morgue at work for decoration last night. Did think the ice I put in there with him would have lasted longer, though.

RENEE (Not missing a beat): Well he’s worn out his welcome. Can you bring him back?

TERRY: Two problems. First, I think Jason has my keys.

RENEE: Is that safe?
TERRY: Nah, it’s fine, he hasn’t quite worked out how the gear-shift works yet. Anyway, I’m also still remarkably drunk. The pact I made doesn’t protect me from une mort imbécile<. The refrigerator opens up and VIC falls out stiff and shaking, a strange mix of something orange and green having destroyed his Han Solo costume. He spasms erratically.

RENEE: Just chill the fuck out for a minute. You’re free of the fridge.

VIC moans like the dead.

RENEE: Stop making noise. You have a massive hangover.

VIC: I can’t see.

RENEE: Liz must have maced you but good. Give it a day or so.

VIC: Where am I?

RENEE: Terry’s kitchen.

VIC: Who are you?

RENEE crouches down and flips VIC over on his back before pulling her mask off.

RENEE: Someone who hates you.

VIC: Dad?

TERRY: Let him thaw.

JASON, naked, walks out of the bathroom. He seems to have hastily toweled himself off but is obviously still covered in filth. Renee is taken aback.

RENEE: Wait, the body in there was you?

TERRY: Shit. If that was you in the tub, then where’s John Doe?

JASON: I think I remember Kevin leaving with him last night.

VIC: Blood…

TERRY: Han Yolo is trying to tell us something.

VIC: Bloody…Mary.

TERRY: Fresh out of celery, Cowtown.

VIC gurgles in despair.

JASON: I could make us some hash browns if there are potatoes around. Are there potatoes around?

RENEE: There are not.

JASON (To Terry): And you call yourself Irish.

TERRY: Go write a musical.

VIC: Wait.

The group looks at VIC expectantly.

VIC: I smell sex. I smell it everywhere.

RENEE: If you’re trying to direct the conversation to your penis again, I will take it upon myself to then direct your penis to a pencil sharpener.

TERRY: You’re learning, child. But Vic’s right. It smells like a fourteen-year-old’s wastebasket in here.

VIC: Someone got laid last night and it wasn’t me. This is fucking unacceptable; I distinctly remember calling Droit du seigneur at six in the evening before anyone got drunk.

RENEE: Vic, this is actually the first time I’ve been sober since Monday. You can call this bias because I don’t actually remember any of last night except for the occasional image of someone in a bandana trying to sing the hook from So Many Tears

JASON: Yo.

RENEE: Yeah. The point is that I don’t care and I don’t think anyone else does either.

VIC: Normally I’d just chalk the antipathetic apathy up as further evidence to your clawing sexual frustration and drop the issue, but my gut is telling me that this is too important.

RENEE: When has your gut told you anything other than to feed it more?

VIC, having picked himself up off the floor, looks down at himself. Disgusting though he may look at the moment, he’s certainly in pretty decent shape.

VIC: These conversations usually go differently.

TERRY: You’re oddly lucid when you’re hungover.

JASON: What am I?

TERRY takes a moment to contemplate JASON’s begrimed, unclad form.

TERRY:…Completely without shame and/or pride?

JASON: Fuck yeah; I’m a model of modesty. A ‘modelsty,’ if you will.

RENEE (Increasingly irritated): It does’t count if you brag about it.

TERRY: Hmm. This is interesting.

VIC: Of course it is. It’s a conversation I started.

TERRY: Quiet. The first thing here is the fact that Vic started a conversation without trying to self-promote.

VIC: I never self-promote. I never have to self-promote.

RENEE: This is boring. Where’s the triple-sec? I’ll make everyone hard orange juice for breakfast.

VIC doubles over and vomits twice; once at the word ‘triple-sec’ and again at the word ‘hard.’

TERRY (Distracted and annoyed): My Roomba has neither the time nor the patience for your lack of digestive fortitude.

JASON: Something just occurred to me.

RENEE: That the Women’s Studies course you took on the history of lesbian cinema might not have been the pornographic romp you originally thought it to be?

TERRY: That your ill-advised costume didn’t so much “break down the barriers” as it did reposition them to surround you and only you?

VIC: That you know it in your heart to be your place and not mine to clean up the puddle of sick on the kitchen floor?

JASON: Point goes to Renee. I mean, what was there to get wrong with Monster? Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci killing men and doin’ it; it seemed like the best of both worlds. The feminazis got their man-hate catharsis and I got Charlize Fucking Theron and Christina Fucking Ricci going at it! How the hell did they fuck that up?

RENEE: Truly, not even Solomon himself could ever divine the answer to such a timeless riddle. Now what occurred to you?

JASON: Terry wasn’t wearing a costume last night.

TERRY: Yes I fucking was!

JASON: I didn’t recognize it.

RENEE: You just shaved and put on your dress uniform. I thought you were going to announce you’d been redeployed or something.

VIC: My best guess was ‘soulless legionnaire.’ How close was I?

TERRY: I was Nicholas Brody! From Homeland! Christ, none of you people have changed the channel from HBO in over a decade, I swear.

RENEE (Referring to his accent): Sweah?

TERRY: Sway-err. Swear.

JASON: You should have heard him screaming his lungs off at game six on Wednesday. I don’t know what a Cahdnuhl is, but it apparently sucks coo-ocks.

TERRY: Laugh it up, bitch; all that pansy-ass peach schnapps you pretended you could stomach came courtesy of Stephen Drew in the fourth.

RENEE: This is no longer interesting. Can we go back to drinking?

VIC gets to the sink this time before violently and loudly vomiting.

JASON: This may sound weird, but no. No we can’t.

TERRY (To himself): I think it’s interesting…

VIC: Jason….Jason’s right. This has to stop. For our children’s sake, this has to stop.

RENEE: No one here is pregnant. Except maybe Vic. Vic, take the night off.

VIC melts into a fetal position on the floor, quietly alternating between pained sobs and the occasional gasp for breath.

JASON: You know, now that I think about it, it does smell kind of like sex.

TERRY: That’s what I was thinking of. As I was saying before Vic made the mess that he has yet to clean up.

VIC, defeated, crawls over to the vomit on the floor with a roll of paper towels and gets to work wiping it up, gagging occasionally.

TERRY: Thank you. As I was saying, I’ve noticed two things. We’ve been over the first. The second is that-

RENEE: Jason hasn’t called any of us a ‘cracka’ since last night?

TERRY: The second is that Renee is neither hung over, sickened, or at all interested in letting this line of conversation continue.

RENEE: I warn you now; if you continue down the path of inquiry you’ve started on, nothing but pain and suffering will await you.

JASON: Terry, I’m scared.

TERRY: It’s a womantrick, Jason. Don’t let it fool you.

JASON: I’ve blacked out before, Terry. And I always wake up to dark knowledge. Elder knowledge. Things that Sober Jason was never meant to have learned. Things that man was supposed to forget.

TERRY: Only fools fear such knowledge, Jason.

RENEE: Typical male hubris. You ignore the dark clouds on the horizon but beg the gods to save you once the storm has arrived.

TERRY: Cease your cryptic prattling, witch! Reveal to us the secrets you keep or suffer the pain of a hotbox your smug virgin lungs could nary endure!

RENEE: Very well. But blame me not when you come to regret the door you’ve opened.

LAST NIGHT

RENEE, in her chicken mask, stands alone with a glass of something potent in her hand. JASON, nearby, poorly raps along to the Notorious B.I.G. song that he’d covertly added to the playlist earlier for exactly this purpose. If a police officer were to walk in, the average BAC in the apartment would remain mostly unchanged.

MAUREEN, a friend of RENEE’s, stumbles over to her in an overly-elaborate Homestuck troll costume.

MAUREEN: Y’should be dancy-drink. Got pop a minute whisper after the main crash with the dead corn gone. Right?

RENEE: I believed you were that drunk up until you forgot to slur ‘whisper.’

MAUREEN: ‘Hammered’ is a state I’ve never been able to achieve, no matter how much effort I put into it. Though there’s a lot I don’t remember about my childhood.

RENEE: Your dad’s a dockworker, right?

MAUREEN: His philosophy was that parenting wasn’t about nurturing so much as it was about breeding out weakness. He weaned me off of breast milk with Coors and tends to seem proud that I survived whenever I talk to him.

RENEE: You should talk to Terry. If he’s to be believed, his upbringing necessitated stealing a piglet, hiding it in his room, raising it up to adulthood and then slaughtering it so that he could he could get some protein in his diet.

MAUREEN: How did he survive until then?

RENEE: By carefully rationing a large box of cheese crackers over the course of a about a year. The pig ate whatever his siblings didn’t properly secure.

MAUREEN: Right. Now, before the Bechdel Police arrive, what’s your excuse for not being depressingly drunk?

RENEE: Hard to drink through this mask. I’m also trying out maintaining a strictly moderate level of inebriation and seeing how that goes.

MAUREEN: Any thoughts so far?

RENEE: Well, I’m at that place where that sad sense of clarity kicks in. You know, where I look at all the drunk people around me, listen to Jason retreat further into the little world he’s created for himself where he’s the illegitimate son of Tupac Shakur, and think to myself “This is the life I’ve chosen.”

MAUREEN: Your problem is that you’ve been on whiskey all evening. Here, have some of my funrum.

RENEE shrugs and downs the startlingly full cup of rum MAUREEN offers to her in three or four gulps. After a few moments of quiet contemplation, she smacks her lips and nods.

RENEE: Yep. Time to do something regrettable.

MAUREEN: See? Funrum. Suitable for all ages.

RENEE: That giant cup wasn’t the Gosling’s, was it?

MAUREEN: Taking the fifth on this one.

RENEE laughs/coughs.

RENEE: Oh man, that’s part of Terry’s private stock. He’s gonna be pissed next time he tries making himself a Dark And Stormy.

MAUREEN: Shit. Should I go cut the bottle?

RENEE: Nah, finish it off. Fucker owes me fifteen large.

MAUREEN wanders off as RENEE turns her attention to TERRY, who has removed most of his clothes for a reason that probably only makes sense to him.

TERRY: F’ckin majestic as lions! RENEE! LIONS!

He “walks” over and props himself up against the wall.

RENEE: How many?

TERRY: In total? Somewhere ’round eighteen maybe nineteen adjust for inflation. Think I shut Vic inna fridge.

RENEE: Why on earth would you do that?

TERRY: H’got into the punkin paint annit was time for bed for him.

RENEE: Pumpkin paint?

TERRY: Yeah been paintin’ pumpkins everywhere ’round campus the UPD is pissed but they just ain’t in the Hallween spirit y’know?

RENEE: Oh, that’s been you.

TERRY: Whofuck else?

RENEE takes a moment to decide on something.

RENEE: If you fell asleep right now, you’d probably die, right?

TERRY: Not kill me kill it first.

RENEE: So that’s a yes. I’m guessing you probably aren’t in control of your own actions and blacked out long ago, correct?

TERRY foams at the mouth slightly.

TERRY: Fewer words.

RENEE: No, don’t worry, you answered my question adequately enough. Come on.

RENEE grabs his wrist and starts pulling him away from the crowd. He manages to follow her for a few steps before tripping over his own feet. This does not dissuade RENEE, however, who just puts her back into it and uses both hands to drag him.

TERRY (Barely coherent): Wherego and whaddo?

RENEE: I’m going to go do something spiteful and awful to you for its own sake.

TERRY doesn’t seem to understand any of this and giggles like a child to himself as RENEE drags him into his bedroom, tosses him on his bed, and then shuts and locks the door behind them. The party continues on outside.

BACK TO SCENE

TERRY stares, dumbfounded, at RENEE while JASON puts it all together in his head.

RENEE: Anything to say?

JASON: He hasn’t gotten this look on his face since Kutner offed himself. Also, I’m having a hard time understanding what happened.

TERRY: You…you took me. I’m remembering now…I’m remembering movement. And a really loud crash.

RENEE: Yeah, I fell off the bed at one point. That’s why I’m limping right now.

TERRY rests his forehead against his palm as he struggles to wrap his head around all this. VIC throws out the last few paper towels and comes to sit down at the table.

VIC: I’m done. Also, that story sucked. I only got a cursory mention. Three out of ten at best. Next time, don’t cut away at the good part.

JASON: What the fuck, Vic?

VIC: What? You even got a musical number. Kind of.

JASON: Not even remotely

TERRY: Wait.

Silence falls.

TERRY: How can you prove that you were motivated purely by spite?

RENEE: The safe behind your Guernica print was open and full of most likely dirty cash.

TERRY: It’s not dirty anymore, but continue.

RENEE: You passed out after twenty-five minutes or so and the safe was right there. For a few minutes, I sat there weighing my options. I could have robbed you blind and gone back to Canada about a hundred grand richer. If I had been in a more of a sitcommy mood, I could have made it rain at that party. I could have taken my fifteen hundred and then some, but do you know what? I didn’t. Because last night, I did something horrible, unforgivable, and unjustified even in your case. I did it because I could, and let me tell you that I enjoyed every second of it. The money doesn’t even matter. I beat you, Keane.

TERRY is very quiet for a few moments.

TERRY: Renee, that was fucking beautiful. I don’t know if my approval retroactively affects the severity of the Class A Felony you just committed, but I just want you to know that I have never been this happy in defeat. Bravo, madam. At this point, I feel like giving you your fifteen hundred would cheapen the moment.

RENEE: You’re not going to fucking gip me, Terry. But you’re right, it would cheapen the moment. Now stand up.

TERRY rises and doesn’t even miss a beat as he grabs RENEE by the back of her head and kisses her violently. In any other context, this would qualify as romantic. Not this one. Their embrace lasts way too long and grows exponentially disturbing in its sloppiness.

VIC: I’m leaving this godless place and I’m never coming back again.

JASON: Let’s go drink an unhealthy amount of liquor until we can force all of this to make sense.

VIC: Yes.

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