"We Didn't Use a Potato-Launcher, I Swear."

We never use the hallway light so the tealeaf walls are steeped in dusk though it is the middle of the afternoon, and the sangria carpet just looks like mudpie. I rap on the faded but still glossy Benny Beaver’s bucktooth, and his door coughs a series of short, hollow, muted notes. A grunt is issued from the other side and I open the door.

His room reeks of boy – there’s no term more apt for that unique pungency. It makes the air thick and heavy and I postpone gulping it in as long as I can, which isn’t long. I offer to buy him lunch (or breakfast since he’s been conscious less than an hour) as a means of changing venue, but he declines. He’s “too lazy” to get dressed, which would explain his 3 pm getup of flannel pajama bottoms and a bleached wifebeater were I not already aware that this is also his 10 pm getup and his 7 am getup and every getup in between.

His walls are Pabst Blue Ribbon blue, and the single drop curtain is the color of deep ocean from space. The dresser, the shelves, the floorspace not occupied by furniture, and the half of the bed he’s not currently inhabiting are all mounded over with clothes that are in need of laundering whether or not they’ve been worn recently. The television screen lights the room and sports commentators buzz to make their voices hoarse until he mutes them.

“Sec.” He lopes his six-foot-three-inch, well-muscled frame past me to the kitchen and returns with a small mixing bowl, a spoon, and an already working jaw; even on my feet, it’s only after he’s seated that I can see over the rim to the cereal. “Aight, go.”

Straight and to the point, he mumbles unornamented responses between mouthfuls of Fruit Loops and 2%. “Bout 2:30.” “Bulls Celtics.” “Meat, mostly.” “The gym.”

Sharing a womb lets you skip formalities. Unfortunately, it doesn’t mandate intimacy, and since monosyllables don’t sell, I prod. To no avail.

Tell me about your friends. “Uh, Jamo… Zack… Craig.” Uh, tell me about them. “Iunno, they’re chill.” What do you do together? “Baseball.” Positions? “Drinking game, not with the bat.”

It’s not that he’s withholding; he is a man of few words. Still, if he had a wall clock, its marking of seconds would deafen and arrive hours apart.

He burps, no, belches. The creak of the metal bed frame as he stretches to place the bowl on the television stand. Long, satisfied sigh. He chortles softly, offhandedly launches into a gut-buster involving the sliding door of a green minivan, a five pound bag of Russets, and a field full of Holsteins. Paints the scene: the boonies way out off State Street, once you get to the gravel and dirt roads, the driver slowing to forty, you leaning out of the gaping hole in the side of the van and chucking spuds straight at the longhorn’s domesticated cousin.

My eyeballs explode in their sockets. He doesn’t notice.

He admits it was not an isolated incident. He vehemently denies potato-launcher involvement. “That’s cheap fun right there. And it’s not like it’s going to hurt the cows, man we were just feeding them.” So cows eat potatoes? A shrug of the shoulders. “Yeah, why not.”

Apparently that’s true. Cows love potatoes.