2:00 AM. The neon sign outside Jose’s window was doing its never-ending dance. And the sign would’ve been kicked off Dancing with the Stars in the season’s first episode.
Normally, he’d be watching this show from behind closed eyelids, but tonight, the air was as heavy as late-career Marlon Brando and Jose’s sheets were sticking to him like a PLU sticker sticks to a red pepper and you can’t peel it off and then you then have to figure out how to scrub the remaining sticky shit off and you can’t quite get it and you just say fuck it and end up eating most of the glue in your stir fry.
Jose threw the top sheet off of himself and swung his feet to the floor, where his feet encountered a grilled cheese sandwich he’d left there days before, probably just in case he woke up needing dairy. It was also possible he’d left it there after passing out drunk.
He grabbed a pack of Camels off the nightstand and introduced one to a lit match. They hit it off pretty well. Sometimes a cigarette helped Jose kick the shit out of insomnia and then sometimes he just wound up with a scorched sheet.
He used to have a tape of old Reagan economic speeches he’d play to help him drop off, but then they went and stopped making VHS players and Jose’d never gotten the hang of the Google.
He was just about to test his theory that a fifth of scotch might be enough to summon forth the sandman when someone started banging on his front door. Jose wasn’t a fan of unexpected guests and hadn’t been since The Case of the Guy Who Showed Up out of Nowhere and Beat the Shit out of Me. That was not a fun case.
Even if he’d enjoyed folks dropping by, a visitor at 2:00 AM meant that vomit would be involved in the proceedings at some point. So he was wary.
Jose padded across the room because just plain walking wasn’t going to cut it. On the way, he stopped to grab his gun. It was either that or a bottle of mustard and the gun just seemed more useful.
A look through the peephole got him a view of a bald guy with his finger knuckle-deep in his left nostril, as unsteady on his feet as the housing market. The guy’s shirt was spotted with what was either blood, vomit or bloody vomit. Jose knew that opening the door would invite in a flatulent rhino-worth of bad smells, so he left it closed and put on his special door-buster voice.
“Jesus, Jonesy. It’s two in the goddamn morning!”
“M’sorry, Beigey. I got, it’s a thing. Y’gotta help me.”
Jose sighed and opened the door. The smell was like what you’d think Ernest Borgnine’s colostomy bag might smell like. Jose waved it off. “What the hell’s going on, Jonesy?”
Jonesy pitched forward, which was not the direction Jose would’ve requested him to pitch. He fell into where Jose’s arms might have been if Jose had had any intention of catching him. As Jose knelt down beside his--for lack of a better term--friend, Jonesy thrust a matchbook into his hand.
“My cigarette’s already lit, Jonesy.”
Jonesy wiped some vomit/blood off his mouth and sputtered, “Find Carla. She’s in trouble. Can’t…can’t… blehhhhh.” The last word meant nothing to Jose, but then Jonesy never had much of a vocabulary.
“Well,” thought Jose, “I guess I can give up on sleep for the night. Too bad. I was hoping to dream of a tall blonde with a built-in kegerator.” He looked at Jonesy’s body on the floor. This was tragic. Bloody vomit was hell to clean out of carpeting.
Happy Birthday, Beigey!
