2.

One Saturday as Marty sat in front of the TV, watching some 80s movie on one of their four functioning broadcast channels--it was about futuristic robots or something--Alex came walking through the door with five plastic bags packed with cans of baked beans. He had a grin on his face and said in a way that made Marty dread what would come next, “Guess what?”

Marty looked to him and cautiously asked, “What?”

Alex placed the bags on the coffee table next to the red plastic bong, where Marty could see that there were at least 60 cans of baked beans inside. “Where in hell did you get the money for that?” he asked.

“I fucked a lady,” said Alex.

“I’m about to ask that question again,” said Marty.

“Look,” said Alex--“I was walking down the street and this Asian lady--an old lady--she drives up and starts asking about how to get her cell phone to work. Well, one thing led to another and she sucked my dick in her car for eighty bucks!”

“That was a guy,” said Marty. “It had to be a guy.”

“It was a lady,” said Alex, turning red as the realization dawned on him.

“I thought you said you fucked her,” said Marty.

“It was a lady--I could tell--she . . .” Alex drifted into silence, then said, “Fuck! I hope I gave her warts all over her chin.” Marty could tell he was picking apart her image in her memory, searching for telltale signs of a drag queen.

“Why all those cans of beans?” said Marty. “Don’t tell me you spent eighty bucks on fucking beans! Do you eat beans?”

“I saw this in the mail,” said Alex, and he pulled out a card from Denver County on terrorism preparedness. He read part aloud: “Keep several days of non-perishable food on hand.”

“Do you eat beans? Shit!” said Marty. “Neither of us eats beans.”

“That’s why I got them,” said Alex. “So we wouldn’t eat them and would always have them around. If there’s a nuclear bomb that goes off here, we’ve got a month of food right here.”

Marty didn’t bother to mention that they wouldn’t have intact faces with which to eat the beans if there were a nuclear blast. “Why in hell . . .” he moaned, but he didn’t finish. Alex had got lucky and got eighty bucks to let some tranny suck his dick, and had managed to waste it all that very afternoon.

He leaned forward and took a pinch of marijuana from the cellophane bag on the coffee table. Careful not to waste a scrap of the army green weed, he stuffed it into the black metal bowl of the bong, then reached for the lighter.

“You just wasted eighty bucks,” he said.

Alex had sat across from him, holding his hands over his eyes with his head bowed low.

“Do you think . . . ?” he said. There was a long pause.

Marty didn’t answer. He knew what Alex was thinking. He lit the bong and sucked till thick smoke filled the chamber, then released his finger from the air hole and inhaled the cloud. Of course it was a guy. What lady pays eighty bucks to suck a man’s dick?

As Marty sat holding in the smoke Alex had picked up the bong where he’d set it. The bean cans still sat overflowing the coffee table in their white plastic bags. Somehow they seemed to make them both feel just a little rich.