They’re finishing off their second round of drinks when Dickie starts wanting to tell them about this fat chick he’s been banging lately. Being Dickie, he doesn’t mind going into detail. How her tits clap when he’s taking her from behind. How you’d assume—he’d assumed, anyway—that she would be, you know, loose down there, but actually, surprise, surprise. “Gastro sex,” Dickie says, draining his Fireball. “Best sex I’ve ever had, hands down.”
“She has this big scar down her stomach from this gastric bypass she had, like, a year ago,” Dickie says. He leans back from the bar and traces a line down his own shiny shirtfront with his long, slender fingers. “Guess it didn’t work though or something because she’s still—”
“For fuck’s sake, Dickie,” Tom says, “I’m eating.” He stares down at his untouched mound of stale chips covered in half-melted Monterey Jack. The only thing grimmer than the Macho Nacho platter at the Dead Goat is the fact that he himself engineered the software that ensures its efficient expedition from the kitchen. Tom looks at Hot Pocket for reinforcement—he is, after all, their supervisor of sorts—but Hot Pocket is grinning at Dickie over the rim of the shot he’s about to take, saying, “You’re a sick man, Dick.” It’s so Dickie, these antics. Like the time he told them all about how he bought a rubber vagina and then returned it a week later—all banged up and soggy with baby oil—making a big stink in the sex store about how the pubes “didn’t ring true.” Dickie has a unique ability to forage deep into the peripheries of the perverse and come back, polo shirt collar popped and grinning like a guy in a beer commercial, like life is just one big, hilarious frat boy stunt.
Hot Pocket announces they’re going to need another round for this, even though he’s too drunk to drive and has one DUI already. He signals to their waitress.
“So how fat are we talking anyway?” Hot Pocket says.
Dickie appears to consider the question. Considering it, Tom thinks, like it’s a philosophical quandary. What is the sound of one hand clapping?
“Not like those chicks on the birthday cards that say, ‘Pick a Fold and Fuck It,’” he says at last, “but, you know, decent.”
“That’s disgusting,” Hot Pocket says.
“Sure, the belly’s not so hot.” Dickie shrugs with the air of a cult leader, above the understanding of the masses. “But I think pounding away at that ass might be curing me of PUP.” PUP is Dickie’s shorthand for Potentially Unable to Perform.
“Anyway, the best thing about fucking her?” Dickie continues, ignoring Tom’s dark look. “She’ll do anything.”
Tom gazes at Dickie from across the table, sitting contentedly under the antlered shadow of a goat skull on the wall. “What do you mean she’ll do anything?”
“I mean anything,” Dickie says, smiling.
They fall silent while their waitress approaches the table and sets down their drinks.
“I fucked Judy once,” Hot Pocket confesses quietly, after the waitress has left. He is referring to the plump, sad woman in IT who is in every way the physical opposite of Brindy, his ex-stripper-turned-freelance-interior-decorator wife, for whom he recently purchased breast implants.
“Judy doesn’t count,” says Dickie, like he’s a connoisseur of such things.
“What do you mean Judy doesn’t count?”
“What’s Judy, like, a size 12? I’m talking about an actual fat girl.”
“Jesus, keep it down,” Tom says, eyeing the group of waitresses behind the bar giving each other Can you believe him? looks.
“Don’t knock it till you’ve actually tried it is all I’m saying,” Dickie says. “In fact, you guys should. I’m sure she’d be up for it. She’s a real trooper, like I said.”
“Think I’ll pass,” Hot Pocket says.
“Don’t know what you’re missing. Tom knows what I’m talking about. Or he did anyway—right, Tom?”
“No idea,” Tom says, though his eyes say, Little prick.
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