GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1097: PLAYBOY 4: TRUMP VS CUBAN

 Back when I was a subscriber, Playboy interviewed both Donald Trump and Mark Cuban (separately over the course of years, I should add). Here are a few highlights that I thought you might be interested in.

I wonder if Hochman is still "comfortable" with Trump. Also, "sumptuous" is possibly the grossest way to refer to Trump's office. But the part about him being enthralled with himself is by no means a stretch of  my imagination. The Duke of Mammon only thinks about other people when he's in a room with an attractive blonde woman, and it's not because he's considerate.

How's the Taj Mahal doing these days?

That was probably the extent of it back then, but now I want to know who does his combover. Ever watch Penn & Teller's Bullshit? There was an episode on hair featuring a Vegas magician with the most elaborate combover ever. I suspect Trump might use that guy. I mean, Trump knows Penn, so . . .

He keeps talking past tense here. I think he's still a brat, which is a little weird considering how, in the 2024 election, it was his opponent that kept getting called a brat. But did you notice the lie he told in this answer? He lies so often that it's hard to catch them all, but he just claimed to not be violent, yet he gave one of his teachers a black eye?

Everything you need to know to understand this piece of human offal is right here. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if Fred Trump had only told his son that he loved him, we wouldn't be going through this fucking disaster.

This interview was in 2003 or 4, so he really hasn't changed all that much. He's been using the same tactics all these years. Also, there's that V word again. I've listened to a lot of Washington insiders who used to work for him talk about the experience, and they all agree: if Trump doesn't get his way, and he's not in front of a camera, he throws a temper tantrum, which I think is a more accurate term than "controlled violence."

That part about the Guinness Book of World Records is true. He was very, very briefly listed for this comeback. However, per Politico, they dropped it a year later because the idea of a comeback "was subjective and not standardizable across the globe." I wonder how he feels about no longer having that record. Is he even aware of it?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! If you're wondering what my laughter is in reference to, look up how that foundation is doing these days and, uh, why it doesn't exist anymore.

I do believe him when he says he's never had booze or drugs. I even believe the coffee thing. He gets his caffeine from Diet Coke instead. The good news is, when we get to the Nuremburg part of this shitshow, he can't say, hey, I was drunk at the time. Or, I was high at the time. All of this madness is him. Sober. No excuses to save him from being found guilty. Also, why are you talking to people who are fucking on a table in front of you? They're busy, and that's rude.

So. How's that call to Saudi Arabia going?

I would pay good money to see that clown doing his jerking-off-two-tall-invisible-men dance while listening to Eminem.

Hm. Something sticks out in that block above. What could that possibly be? When you see it, please join me in wondering where *that* Donald Trump went. Oh right, he never existed. This is just more bullshit.

I'm just going to let that one stand on its own. Because holy shit, that is a staggering level of hypocrisy. I mean, he had no way of knowing that one day he would be in such a leadership role, but still, if you're going to talk about how the world should be, and then find yourself in a position to make those changes, and you do the exact opposite? I don't believe in Hell, but I'm pretty sure that if Hell existed, it would be built specifically for people like Donald J. Trump.

And don't get me started on John Trump.

(I guess I didn't let that one stand on its own. Ah well.)

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. This was Trump vs. Cuban. Don't worry, there aren't a lot of excerpts from Mark Cuban's interview.

There are two things happening here. Remember those insiders I mentioned earlier? They all agree that almost all of Trump's bullshit is performative. Behind the scenes he's polite, and he always apologizes for giving someone a hard time publicly. So if he's on TV calling you names, he usually gives you a call after to say, hey, sorry for all of that, but you gotta play the game.

The second thing is, of course, Trump's love affair with himself. I'm sure Cuban has a high opinion of himself. He's a billionaire. It comes with the territory. But it's refreshing to see someone on his level note this about Trump.

This probably goes without saying, but this was before streaming was a thing. This idea was clearly ahead of its time. Playboy was right in this case. It was too early. There's more:

Here is the key difference between Trump and Cuban. Trump clearly cares more about money than anything else on the planet except maybe for himself. That makes him like almost every CEO on the planet. To them, the purpose of a business is to make money. And while it's true that this is *a* purpose, it's not *the* purpose.

Cuban understands the latter. He concerns himself with the consumer experience. A business exists to solve a problem for the consumer. The byproduct of that is putting money into the hands of the business. Also note that he wants to cut the theaters in on the profits. If Trump had come up with this idea, sharing the profits would be unthinkable to him. That's why, if I had the choice to work for either Trump or Cuban, I would pick Cuban. Trump's employees get yelled at. Cuban's employees make money. Just ask the people who worked for him at MicroSolutions. How many of them walked away from that business as millionaires? Almost all of them.

I'm ending on this note because Cuban is warning businesspeople not to buy their own line of bullshit. Sure, it's easy to look back on that particular bubble and say, yeah, it was destined for failure. Yet here we are again, except this time the bubble is AI. The techbros are drunk off their own shit, thinking they have the ability to print money.

Except . . . do you keep an eye on the Stock Market? I do, enough to know that facts are meaningless in the current market. Confidence is the only thing holding it up. What's the percentage of the market that's currently propped up by AI technologies? I've seen numbers ranging from 30-45%. Even if it's closer to the former, what happens if that bubble pops?

I think we're about to have another depression, one that will put the Great Depression to shame. I know in America we're trying to turn the clock back to when heterosexual rich white men held all the power, not just most of it, but can we not rewind to the 1930s, please?

I'm at a loss as to why we don't do what we usually do: wait for someone else to figure out the AI thing, then kill them and steal it and claim it as our own. We'd save a lot more money that way. Although to be fair, we don't have a lot of weapons right now due to our quixotic Iran jerkoff fantasies*, so if China beats us to the punch, we probably wouldn't be able to take them in a fight.

All right, that's all for now. The Playboy series will continue. I already have a new batch of shit, including a Dustin Hoffman fart joke told by John Malkovich, but we'll get to that at some point in the future. I'll try to make tomorrow night's GF shorter.

______________________________________

*I think we went into Venezuela first because Trump's administration knew, 100%, that we'd be in Iran for months, if not years. The oil in Venezuela is supposed to tide us over until we conquer the Strait of Hormuz. And by "us" I mean US oil companies.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1096: RIP ZEB CARTER

I'm sitting here trying to remember the first time I met Zeb Carter. I was almost certainly drunk at the time. I'm sure it was at a party thrown by the Forced Viewing folks, Jason and Jori. They threw great booze parties. It was probably 15 years ago? Maybe longer? But he and I have had many great conversations over the years. He wrote for Forced Viewing under the name Blick Tolkien, and almost all of his reviews were Walking Dead related. I probably haven't seen him in two years, but every time we met I always asked him about his fucked up superhero anthology. It was a work in progress for him for nearly the entire time I knew him. I liked to rib him a little over it (and even offered to help him with it!), but now I can't believe I'll never get to have that conversation with him again.

I heard this morning that he passed away. He was a friend, but he also had a special place in my heart because of one night/early morning four years and 53 days ago. By that time I knew I was a full-blown alcoholic, something I'd been denying for many years, and my life had gotten so lousy that I found myself in a state of emergency over what to do about it. I called everyone I thought might pick up, but it was one or two in the morning, so it was a lost cause.

I remembered Zeb had said something about always being there if I needed to talk, so shot in the dark, I reached out to him on Facebook Messenger, and he dropped everything. He got on a video call with me, and without his help, I don't think I would have called Sonny next, and Sonny was the guy who got me into Recovery Centers of America. I'm reasonably sure that I'm alive today because of Zeb.

And now Zeb's gone, and I'm absolutely stunned to say that. This is a man who sat in my lap on several occasions. If I ever get back to one of those Halloween parties, I'm not going to see you there. I won't get to ask you about that anthology. Well fuck.

Rest in peace, Zeb.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1095: JOHN'S APARTMENT, PART 3

 [This happened before the exterminator came by to spray my apartment down.]

I'd just finished filling the left side of the kitchen sink so I could soak my dirty dishes overnight. I went to my bedroom, took off my clothes except my boxers and sat on my bed, hand on my laudanum bottle for my last dose of the night. Then, I realized I'd forgotten something in the kitchen, so I put my slippers on and went back out. As soon as I turned on the light, I saw three roaches on the floor. They're smart, I think. They know all the signs that point to my bedtime and stay out of sight until they see them.

Except I forgot something tonight. I felt cornered, like a rat, no weapon, so I took a fighting stance and waited for the end of my life. Because I wasn't going to die alone tonight, no sir.

All right, I stomped two of them. The third got away. And that's when I noticed a fourth chilling on my kitchen counter. The only thing I had close to me was the dish soap bottle, so I grabbed that and brought it down on the cockroach with the fury of a thousand suns.

And missed. Little fucker jumped into the full kitchen sink and evaded me. I figured he'd make his escape while I was asleep. Or I'd find him the next day when I did my dishes.

Fast forward to the next morning. I'd forgotten about the roach by then, so it was a surprise when I found his corpse floating at the top of the water. Huh. I didn't know cockroaches could drown, but there it was, the evidence before my eyes.

I did my dishes--very, very diligently--and when I unplugged the drain, I said to the dead roach, "So long, sucker." I checked to make sure it did, indeed, swirl away.

I then went about my day. It was maybe an hour later when I realized, you know, it seems really absurd that roaches can drown. Aren't they supposed to be able to survive a nuclear holocaust? A little water shouldn't be able to kill a survival machine like that. So I Googled it, and much to my relief, the first thing I saw was that yes, cockroaches can drown.

My victory was snatched away instantly by the second sentence: that roaches can drown, but it's very hard for them to do so. They breathe through holes in their bodies instead of a mouth, and they have the ability to close those holes and survive without oxygen for 45 minutes. So they are very good at playing possum. How likely was it that the roach had actually drowned in my sink?

Out of curiosity I went back to the kitchen JUST IN TIME TO SEE HIM RISING FROM THE DRAIN LIKE JASON FUCKING VOORHEES. But I think he was wearing the hockey mask just to intimidate me. I brought down the dish soap bottle again and watched with satisfaction as bits of the little bugger came off and stuck to the bottom.

Victory, yes. But for how long? FOR HOW LONG?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1094: JOHN'S APARTMENT, PART 2

 

I usually wake up sometime between 3 and 4 in the morning because I have to take a piss. The problem is, I can't go back to sleep after that, so I'm pretty much up after that.

Two weeks ago I got up for the usual. As I went, I blew my nose and dropped the tissue into the toilet, where I promptly peed on it. Then, as I washed my hands after, I glanced up and saw a glob on the spot where my neck and chest meet. What the fuck? Did a booger escape the Puffs?

I peered closer at the mirror and discovered, much to my horror, that it was not an errant clump of nasal beef. That was a dead fucking cockroach.

Oh yeah. They've been back for a bit. They trickled back in, but now I have to kill about a half dozen of them before I've even made breakfast.

Not too long ago I went out to run some errands to see the cops evicting my downstairs neighbor. They were wearing protective suits. One of them advised me to stay away from the stuff they were carrying out. "You don't want to get any bugs on you."

My dick shriveled at that, thinking BEDBUGS. No, we were later notified that she was the source of the cockroaches, and that the exterminator would be coming by periodically to spray everyone's apartments for the next month or two.

A couple of days before I saw that dead roach on me, the guy came and sprayed the kitchen and bathroom. The day after I'd noticed that they were now hanging out in my bedroom. I keep my Mom's ashes on a small table next to my bed, and while I was having a word with her (as I sometimes do), I noticed one of the little bastards crawling around next to her urn.

Back to the mirror. I scraped and scrubbed, and that clump of bug body just didn't want to come entirely off. I figure I must have rolled over on him in my sleep, and he'd just sorta . . . stuck around for hours before I woke up. It did not bring me joy to know these fucking things are so brazen that they'd crawl into bed with me in it.

So yeah, ever since then I've occasionally woken up to feel a tickle on my back. My first thought used to be, oh, that's just sweat, I'll wipe it off. Now, after feeling something tickle my finger a couple of times, my first thought is, oh, for fuck's sake.

They're starting to thin out. I only saw two of them this morning when I went for my 3:15 am Morning Piss (TM). Maybe we're finally on our way to being rid of them once and for all.

Because one time, while I was heading out the door to go to work, I saw three roaches between the door and the frame at eye level. I had to turn back, get my Raid, and return to spray them with all the force I could muster, like Hunter S. Thompson with a can of mace and Nixon within arm's reach. I'd rather not have to do that again.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1093: AN OPEN LOVE LETTER TO ANDERSON'S

 My favorite indie bookstore is Anderson's, specifically the one in Naperville. They have other great locations, but this is the original and best. It's a great place to find new and interesting books (and to support bookstores that aren't Amazon or B&N, etc.). It's also a business owned by women, so if you're desperate for such a place, look no further. And yes, they do have an online store, and you can buy signed copies there. Hell, it looks like Chuck Wendig is going to be there tomorrow. I wish I could make it. Now that I live in DeKalb, my visits are unfortunately going to be few and far between going forward.

Merely walking in the door is enough to raise my spirits. My first stop is the fiction section, but I'm likely to spend the most time in the biography and nonfiction section.

There is a high possibility of finding books signed by the author. They're still at cover price. And you never know who might sign there. I have books autographed by Andrew McCarthy, Henry Winkler, Curtis Armstrong (Booger himself!), David Spade, the list goes on.

And they're legit. These celebrities have all signed here. (Or, because there's more capacity, at the nearby college instead.)

I try to go to as many signings as possible. I love meeting authors here. I've gone to see Clive Barker, Chuck Palahniuk, Chuck Tingle, Irvine Welsh, Cory Doctorow, Sarah Pinborough and so on. I also saw Weird Al and Penn Jillette, among others from different media there. If I was so moved, I could have met former President Bill Clinton (at the college, of course) when he was on tour with James Patterson.

I am much more of a worldly man because of Anderson's. This is my love letter to them. Thank you for years of service. I wish many more on you.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1092: A FAMILY DINNER

 One of the most frustrating things about going through Grandma's photo collection of the family over the century (and I mean that literally; many of them go back to before 1926) is that she didn't write on the back of all of them. I have so many pictures of strangers I am probably related to, but I have no way of knowing who they are. I've sent them to my aunt, the only person on Mom's side of the family older than me, and she's unfortunately at a loss most of the time.

I've had to let that go. On the off chance that someone else posted their copies of the pictures online, I ran them through Lens, and I still came up with nothing. Ah well.

One of the good things of going through this collection, though, was finding a treasure trove of letters from Gramps's cousin, Bessie, which oftentimes also had photos in them, although there were a few that were photocopies of the originals. So now I have a bunch of other pictures of strangers I'm probably related to, and I'll never know who they are.

But then I found this utter gem of Gramps's family taken back in Greece:

I don't know who almost all of these people are, but I recognized a few faces. I'll point them out below:

This is my great-grandfather, Nick Kyriakopoulos, Gramps's dad. This is one of two pictures I have of him before he was horribly burned in a fire that happened at his shoe repair shop in Chicago.

That little girl is Gramps's sister, Helen. I also have a few of her letters, in addition to her last will and testament, of which Gramps was named executor. She also sent him lots of info copied from medical journals about colitis, which he suffered from back when I was in college. Oddly enough, the gastroenterologist who helped cure him of that is currently *my* gastroenterologist.

[Side note: One of Helen's sons, like me, is named after Gramps. I found a picture of him sitting with Gramps in front of a coffee table with some books on it. Among them is The Anarchist's Cookbook, so he and I may have more in common than who we were named after.]

This little baby will grow up to be Bessie Gruning, Gramps's cousin who sent this package to him. She is flanked by her parents. I believe his name is Harry, but I'm not 100% sure.

That is my great-grandmother, Jennie Demeroukas. She couldn't read or write, and when she had to sign things, she had to "make her mark," meaning she would write an X or a + on the dotted line. I have one paper she signed with her thumbprint. She couldn't speak English, only Greek.

These two are George and Mike Demeroukas, Gramps's uncles. They, too, would come to America, and I found pictures of George at Grandma and Gramps's wedding. Mike was Gramps's godfather. I have a separate picture of him holding baby Gramps with that info written on the back.

Not even Bessie knew who all of these people were, but she did have a few notes with names. Even though I have some names for the faces, I still don't know how they're related to me. But then I saw she made a note that one of the people in this picture was her grandma. Meaning, Gramps's grandma.

MEANING MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDMA.

Holy shit! I raced to find which one she was. I look like Mom. Mom looks like Gramps. I discovered Gramps looked like his mom. I wanted to know if she looked like *her* mom. I wanted to see how much of me I could find in her. And what did I see when I got to the position she was supposed to be in?

Dammit! Now I'll never know! Although I could see a cheek that looked kind of like what Gramps had going on when he was in his old age. I had to assume that Jennie looked like her mom, but I would never know for sure. Disappointed, I got back to looking through the rest of the letters Bessie wrote to Gramps.

There were quite a few of them, so it took me a week before I found this picture in one of them:

You'll recognize George and Mike in the back and Helen on the bottom left. It's hard to tell from the other picture, but the woman standing above her is Jennie. And who is that sitting in the chair?

According to the back of the photo (in Helen's handwriting, by the way) it states that this is her grandma. My great-great-grandma. Helen had sent this to Bessie, who had sent it to Gramps, but Helen had written on it, "Her name's Bessie, too."

Bessie Demeroukas, my great-great-grandma. I think that's about as far back as I can get to see the evolution of faces that would eventually become mine. Photography goes back a lot farther than most think, but it was usually reserved for important or rich people. Maybe one day I'll discover more, but wow. I can't believe I managed to find a picture of my great-great-grandma.

That baby she's holding? In case you were wondering, that's Gramps.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN THE POWER OF LOVE? excerpt

 

Hey! Did you know I have a new book out? Do You Believe in the Power of Love? is now available! I'll have copies with me at Printers Row next month, but if you don't plan to be there, you can get it here. If you're on the fence, I have an excerpt for you below.

Nelson is down on his luck, moneywise. He just got out of a rough relationship, and he's neck deep in debt. He'd do anything to get out from under his troubles. A friend then introduces him to Ania, a young woman from Poland who is studying to be a nurse. Her visa is almost up, and she doesn't want to go home. So in exchange for enough money to cancel out his debt, he will marry her so she can get her green card. Sounds simple, right?

Well . . . my name is on the cover of the book, so it's anything but. Ania is not who she claims to be. She's hiding an ugly secret. Will Nelson spend the rest of his life never discovering what it is?

Probably not.

The set up is, Nelson and Ania are meeting for the first time in a bar. It's noisy on the ground level, so they're going to the bowling alley in the basement. Here you go:

While there were a ton of people playing pool at various tables throughout the very crowded bar, no one bowled downstairs. The desk with all the bowling shoes in nooks behind it was empty, so he had to find some help. The woman, who usually handed out pool ball trays, didn’t seem to know what she was doing as she figured out which shoes where what sizes. She barely knew where they kept the bowling balls.

Nelson figured it out. While he wasn’t exactly a string bean weakling he knew he’d probably break his wrist with a 12-pounder. He went for something much lighter: eight.

When she selected a black one with the number 10 stenciled on it he felt kind of amused. In a weird way she did seem stronger than him. Her five-ten frame showed off her solidly built body, and he wondered if she worked out every day. He supposed one had to be in good shape to be a nurse, but he still felt grateful that the 8 on his ball had faded almost to invisibility on hot pink.

She made no note of his choice. “You play much?”

Christ. He cast his mind back, trying to remember the last time he’d done this. “Well, I used to bowl with my mom when I was a kid.”

“Oh. Were you good?”

He wanted to tell her how fucking awesome he was, but then he remembered his mediocrity, and any display he could put on here would prove it. “No. I’m all right, I guess.”

“I’ll let you warm up,” she said. “Looks like this is one of those old fashioned places, so it’s not computerized. Go ahead. Let ‘er rip.”

Nelson glanced down to the only lit set of pins at the other side of the room. He wouldn’t have minded loosening up a bit, but what if he wasted a couple of really good shots just practicing?

“I’m good,” he said. “Wanna go first?”

“Flip you for it.” Her stout hand struggled to get into her skin-tight pants pocket, but when it came out—one harsh red line across the wrist—she held a quarter. “You call it.”

He watched as she flipped the coin. “Heads,” he said. Whoever called tails?

She caught the gleam of silver in the air like an owl plucks up a mouse in the dark and slapped it on her unmarred wrist. “Tails it is.” She showed him, just to prove herself.

Her hand that close to him made his flesh start to heat up. He wanted nothing more in that moment than to hold it to his lips.

What the fuck is wrong with me? Am I a pervert or something? Calm down, for Christ’s sake. He took a deep breath and forced out what he thought would be some of the baser thoughts running around in his head. When that didn’t work he purposely brought back to mind the moment when he spilled his beer all over the table and Lisa.

That did the trick.

“You remember how to make notes?” she asked.

He took up the blank score sheet and a miniature pencil. “I got this.” In big block letters he wrote her name on the first line and his on the second. Only then did he look up to see Ania at the line, poised to begin her attack on the pins.

He glanced down and got an eyeful of her ass, the first time he’d gotten a glimpse of it. Her black jeans were so tight he could see the curve of each buttock, leaving nothing to the imagination. Mesmerized, he watched her muscles work against each other as she fast-walked down to the final line and let loose with her ball. He didn’t even watch to see the damage. Her ass consumed his attention.

Somewhere, far down in the folds of his brain, he wanted to look away, to be a gentleman, but that tiny voice had no effect on the whole.

Then something tingled in his perception, and he jerked his eyes away, just in time to see her turn around, a look of victory on her face.

Keep it together, Jeffries. He still had his glass with him, so he took a swallow of whiskey, hoping he’d played it cool enough.

She ambled back to the desk. “Not bad, eh?”

He surveyed what remained of the pins. Only one, at the far right end. “Think you can get your spare?”

“Hell yeah.”

Her ball thumped up through the return, and she wasted no time in proving herself. Dutifully he put a slash in the small box on her line.

“Now let’s see what you got,” she said. She handed his eight-pound ball over, almost like flipping a softball to the pitcher at the start of an inning.

He took the ball with a slight smile. He hadn’t done this in many, many years, and he knew in his heart that he’d wind up with a gutterball. Much to his surprise, when he took his shot, he knocked over three pins. A terrible attempt, but he felt just as victorious as she had when getting her spare.

“That’s all right,” she said. “It’s not over yet, though.”

On the next roll he managed to get three more. Not great, but not awful, either.

They continued their game, keeping up a healthy banter, ripping on each other when appropriate, congratulating when needed. When the game ended she’d obviously wiped the walls with him, but he had gone down fighting.

“That was pretty cool,” she said. “Wanna go again?”

Nelson felt a sting in his wrist. “Nah. I think I’ve had my fill.” Why risk further embarrassment?

They gave their bowling shoes back, but they stayed downstairs with fresh drinks, sipping among the darkened pins, listening to the pounding music from above, remaining isolated from the party.

“I suppose you want to talk business now,” she said.

He scratched at an imaginary itch on the back of his neck. “I guess that’s what we’re here for.”

“Yeah. I mean, I like you and everything. I’d probably hang out with you again. But we are here for each others benefit.”

“Yeah. Mac said five thousand.”

She rubbed at the back of her arm with one hand.  “That’s right. I really can’t go any higher than that.”

Nelson noticed something on her arm when the short sleeve lifted against her touch. It looked like some kind of drawing, and it took him a moment to see it was a tattoo. He nodded to it. “What’s that?”

Her eyebrows lifted, and then she saw what he meant. “Oh. Check it out.”

She bared her entire arm, showing off a colorless tattoo of a nuclear power plant. In the center twirled the symbol of an atom.

“Neat,” he said. “Why that, though?”

“Chernobyl,” she said. “I was a kid when it happened. I was far enough away so it probably wouldn’t affect me, but just in case we all got these anti-radiation inoculations. I got sick of looking at the scar, so I got a tattoo over it. Pretty cool, huh?”

“Scar? I didn’t see a scar.”

She pointed to the middle of the atom where the protons and neutrons should have been. At that moment he realized he stood very, very close to her, close enough to smell a little sweat under her perfume. It reminded him of sex, so he backed away. “Oh. I see.”

Ania rolled her sleeve down. “Anyway, I don’t want to sugarcoat this. Pretending we’re married isn’t going to be easy, and if we’re caught I’m just going to be deported. You, on the other hand, will be stuck with a huge fine and possibly jail time.”

That last part didn’t sit well in his mind. He thought he could deal with monetary punishment, but going to prison? Did he really want to slay his debt like this? “I . . . I understand.”

“And that’s not it. We’re going to have to live together, because they send people out to make sure we’re really married. We’ll need to set up pictures of us and stuff. You know, the usual things families have.”

He nodded, recalling everything that Kris had told him. It had sounded like a warning from him. From her it sounded almost exciting.

He sipped at his drink. “Why do you want to stay here? Not to sound like a dick, but if the roles were reversed I wouldn’t mind going home, you know?”

She smirked. “You’ve never lived in Poland. Granted, I’ve only been in America for a few years. There are many things wrong with this place. But, given a choice, I will take America any day over Poland.”

“That bad?”

She took a drink from her own glass. “Maybe you missed the part about Chernobyl.”

“Well . . .” Fuck, I’m an idiot.

“There’s more. When I was younger I was gassed in my own apartment building by the government. Have you ever been gassed?”

“Uh . . . no. Can’t say I have.”

 “You’re lucky. You grew up in a country that didn’t have any war fought on its grounds in recent memory. When I was a kid playing with my friends, we discovered a skeleton in the forest. It was a Nazi soldier, helmet and all.”

“Holy fuck.”

“I don’t like talking about it, though. Maybe now you can see why I don’t want to go home. There are skeletons everywhere.”

Nelson felt the urge to tell her that when you thought about it, the world was one big cemetery, but something told him to keep his mouth shut.

“I want to help people. I like nursing. There aren’t enough opportunities back home. Here? I’m almost done earning my degree.”

Nelson didn’t know how easy or hard it would be to earn a nursing degree in another country, so once again he kept his mouth shut.

“Next year, I should graduate.” She stopped, looking at him expectantly.

Now he had to open his mouth. He gave it some thought for a moment and hoped he had the right words. “I want to help you, mostly because you can help me in turn. But as I’m sure you can imagine I’m not well off, myself. You’re going to school, and I’m sure that’s just sucking your money away. I don’t know if I could support the both of us.”

“I’m not asking you to. When I said five thousand was as high as I could go, I meant it. But I can still contribute to us living together.”

Nelson nodded, trying to figure out the most polite way of asking the next question. Finally he downed the rest of his drink and decided to charge forward. “If you don’t mind me saying, you’re a beautiful woman. You probably have a boyfriend. What does he think of all of this?”

“I did have a boyfriend,” she said. “Well, we were more like fuck buddies, I guess. But he came from Poland, too. He couldn’t have helped me. Studying to be a nurse doesn’t leave a lot of time for personal relationships. I don’t like to get involved in anything, really. Every once in a while there’s that itch. It helps to know someone who can scratch it for you, but an actual relationship? I find that to be too distracting.”

Nelson’s cheeks flushed. He hadn’t expected such a frank answer, and he didn’t know what to say to that. A part of him felt excited as if maybe, just maybe, she would select him as one of those people to help scratch certain itches. But he had to remind himself that it would probably never happen.

“You all right?” she asked.

“Uh . . . yeah. I’m fine. It’s just, I didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes, you know.”

“No worries,” she said.

This was it. The moment. He hoped he didn’t sound too nervous. He could feel a tremor working through his lungs, his body trying to betray him. But he knew, after all of this, that he’d made up his mind. He’d be marrying this girl in exchange for five grand. Hell, he’d known it from the very moment he’d seen her. But now everything had weight, a certain reality, to it. If he said what he wanted to, there would be no turning back.

“I want to help you,” he said. Proud that his voice sounded strong, he plowed forward. “And I would certainly appreciate the money. I only have one bedroom at my place, though. I don’t have room to accommodate you.”

“We’d have to sleep in the same bed. If they sent a guy to check up on us, he wouldn’t be pleased too much to find out that we’re sleeping in separate rooms.”

Nelson’s heart beat just a little bit faster than it had before. He felt his face grow hotter, and he hoped he wasn’t blushing. “Well, just to warn you, I fart a lot. If you can put up with that, I think we can do business.”

She barked with laughter, head tossed back, every tooth in her mouth shining. He couldn’t stop himself from cracking up, too.  They cackled together, unable to stop. His belly ached, but he couldn’t cease the constant hilarity pouring out of him. Finally, when he thought he’d never be able to breathe again, she wiped sweat from her forehead. She panted. “I think . . . I think if I couldn’t deal with a bit of . . . of flatulence . . .” And the both of them howled again, so loudly that a few revelers from above peeked their heads downstairs.

Finally they sighed the tension of joviality out of their bodies and leaned on the table for support. Something twinkled in her eyes. “If you think your farts are bad, wait ‘til you get a load of mine.”

Even though both of them hurt badly from their previous jag of laughter, they broke out again. When this bout died down Nelson breathed out heavily. “Seriously. I think we have a deal.” He held out his hand.

She took it. “Deal.”

“Maybe we should go over the, I don’t know, the logistics of it all.”

“Let’s get together and do that tomorrow,” she said. “I just want to have fun right now.”

“Absolutely.”

She cast her glance around the bowling alley, down every darkened lane to the gloomy pins at the end of each. “It’s too quiet down here. Let’s go play some pool.”

Nelson stood and bowed, gesturing toward the stairs. “After you, my dear future wife.”