he Sports Network?
Anyways, Mike, no Joe, yeah it was Joey, he looks at me and says, “Sports is like the news that isn’t important.” And he takes a hit from Mike’s bong, you know that glass dong looking thing, and drips water down his chin like a total slut.
So I say, “Important news is the news that we find important. Sports is cultural, would you disagree?”
And Mike, who’s totally shitting himself by now, pulls his tongue from the foil of his empty bag of Ruffles that he’d turned inside out. “Sports is tribal,” he says to us. “It’s not culture like art is culture. Sports is society’s way of reenacting war without killing each other.”
And Terry, no Terry wasn’t there, it was Mike, he looks at me smiling because there’s a hammering on the wall from upstairs and Joey’s mom’s boyfriend is over. So Mikey pretends he’s cupping a set of balls and pushes his tongue into his cheek and Joey sees him do it. He catches him in mid-stroke as he’s pretending to be his mom sucking a big one.
Joey looks to Mike and tells him, “You’re becoming a stereotype. And for your information, Steve was asked to come over to hang pictures: a series of Monet prints that I helped curate from a large and rather impressive collection of impressionist reproductions from JC Penny.” He flicks to The Sports Network.
Mike belches through his nose, “I find reproductions a great value, and with today’s technology, near-perfect. Although, personally I would have gone with a masterwork from the classical period, as Monet’s more textured style exposes the work as a print. Most people should just know it’s a Monet, but some don’t. With advances in modern 3D printing, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see repros that can mimic brush strokes in the not-so-distant future. I, for one, will be first in line for San Giorgio Maggiore At Dusk when it happens.”
Joey just rolls his eyes at him like, screw yourself for making that joke and screw yourself for having an opinion about the finger paintings. And we sit there, me and Joey and Terry, and Joey rolls a joint and we sit there watching highlights of the Leafs getting screwed in the sphincter but at least they’re not like the Habs, who are taking it in every hole. Did I say, Terry? Terry wasn’t there.
It was me and Joey and Mike.
And Joey decides he’s going to roll his joint on the glass table and he uses the envelope of his government cheque to scrape it onto the paper and I could swear there’s a good third of it that’s actually crumbs from Mike’s bag of chips. Anyways, just then, as he’s licking the thing, his mom comes down with some beers and she’s looking fine for nearly fifty, but don’t tell Joey I said that. And she sees Joey struggling to shape the joint and, no lie, she asks us if we need more papes because her and Steve are going to get high and Steve has a new pack of papes.
The point is, I’m getting to the point. The point is, Joey’s mom is a little sweaty and there’s a damp spot on the neck of her shirt and you can tell she’s been scrubbing it because there’s a lint of toilet paper visible like white hairs. Mike looks to me and I look to him because we got the CSI evidence to prove Joey’s mom wasn’t hanging no finger paintings. I crack a beer and Joey’s mom leaves and I’m expecting Mike to go all in like this is his big moment or something. I’m expecting World War 3 but all Mike says is, “Can you turn it back to the news channel? I just got paid and I put all two-hundred-fifty dollars into the Dow.”

R.J. Patteson is an author/screenwriter from Toronto. His other stories can be found in Ghost Parachute, X-R-A-Y, MoonPark Review, and Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine. He tweets @rjpatteson.