*FRIENDS* The Final Season

FRIENDS : The Final Season


1.

Salt was looking at Sundance intently.SecondPrize had handed her a rolled-up fag.Her lips parted,& she nervously licked them in anticipation.She was going to wet it. Damn. Salt sighed.Noone had tapped the joint for a while.The ash still clung to it like a pathetic memory from times gone by,like a girlfriend who refused to leave the morning after.Sundance sucked at the filter hungrily.The party was her requiem.The job had been hers.Chief dubbing artist at Butch Cassidy- the studio she worked in. Artist. Salt smiled wryly at his choice of words.Butch Cassidy made lesbian fisting movies for chrissakes.And the broad was too dumb to hold on to the job.Replaced by a French accent in a miniskirt…What could they be saying,anyway?Can’t be much more than faster faster, or the occasional yes .Hm.Maybe it was different with dykes,maybe they tend to let go…SecondPrize said that Salt’s life was where Irvine Welsh met Albert Camus;except that Salt himself hadn’t gotten around to meeting either of them yet:his choice of reading material contained precious little prose,nearly all of it punctuated by random eleven digit-numbers,exhorting him to punch them out on his telephone for a really good time.The ladies featured above the numbers spoke to Salt,communicating with silent gesture their desperate need for his company,their universe suspended by the hope that he would call them up. Salt never called them.Playing impossibly hard to get was his principal strategy of courtship.Let the pussies wait,he thought viciously,uniting with synecdochical ease the entire female race.Sundance handed him the joint,&Salt took a long drag,reefer pinched between thumb and forefinger,pausing just to survey himself in the mirror.

It was April’s mirror.Picked up cheap off a gypsy at a flea market. Crack’d. From side to side.April had once played a page in a Christmas fete depiction of Camelot.It had rained,the tent had fallen, and April’s part had been washed out by fate.So she told everyone that she played the Lady of Chalot; she figured it didn’t matter either way.Since she didn’t get to play any part, by default,she could have played any part…April’s memories were a middle-eastern minefield;effortlessly blowing up the guileless children marching through. (Will February march? No. April may.).She lapsed into a fit of the giggles;rocking slightly as she did so.Noone paid her much attention… April was born in January;conceived in april.Two damp seats in the back row of an empty cinema screening a Japanese movie festival.It was a short and terse performance;& Tsutomu Yamazaki had roared with rage as she wriggled up her mother’s womb….April had a steady job which paid well:she shaved women at the labour room at the local hospital.The hours were punishing,but the money was good, & she’d be no Sundance, ‘coz everyone knew French women never shaved.She lapsed into another fit of the giggles.

Sundance was not giggling.After all those rehearsals for Butch Cassidy’s latest production: The isle of Lesbos- part 8.She had even suggested an alternative title: “Sapphology: Ball out, box in.” That hadn’t gone down too well. Sundance sniffed,and ran her fingers through her hair, agitated.What did they know about classical history,anyway? Things might be tight for a while,now that the job was gone.Maybe she would apply for that job on a party chat line.The hours were killing, but it was fun.Sundance didn’t mind the husky male voices breathing throatily into the receiver;simultaneously trying to sound her out delicately & getting her to give them some smut before three minutes in enhanced call rates were lost. It was the other kind she hated : the ones that wanted to talk about their feelings.And wanted you to listen and hum sympathetically.She had no patience with their sniveling self-pity,their pathetic self defence, their desperate search for approval from a complete stranger. They filled her with utter contempt...Reflexly, she looked at SecondPrize in the mirror.The crack was obscuring his face- a jagged line running through him,neatly splicing his identity into two asymmetric halves.

SecondPrize was looking at the mirror. The crack was obscuring Sundance’s face- a jagged line running through her,neatly splicing her identity into two asymmetric halves.He wondered idly if she were really schizoid;he’d done enough psychology at college to know that she’d be a dead cert at the Rorschach tests….SecondPrize was the mickey mouse at the local supermarket.In the winter he was Santa Claus; in the summer he was Yogi Bear.All through april,may and june,little kids slammed into his groin, the occasional brat striking all the way home with a sickening crunch.In December, they came back, and soaked his lap with their pee as he emitted whiskered ho-ho-ho’s… Salt handed him the joint, and he raised it to his lips.Damn.It was wet.His cheeks collapsed inwards as he sucked at it hungrily, like a bizarre fellatrice from a Swedish flick.The tip glowed red,quickly counting down the millimeters to the yellow finishing line.SecondPrize sighed,shifting uncomfortably in his chair.He hadn’t been with a man for almost a month now,claiming celibacy would revitalise his Kundalini, now perched precariously atop his sacrum.As he drily observed,it was too perilously close to the site of all the action for his comfort.For the moment,he busied himself with reflection and writing,hacking through the dense existential undergrowth with Okham’s razor,pausing every now and then to survey the clearing that he had made….Two women and a sad looking man now sat in the clearing; a cracked mirror reflecting their dejection onto the world.Somewhere deep within the undergrowth, a cellphone was beeping,faint but insistent: beep-beep-bip - beeep-beeep - beep-beep-bip…SecondPrize looked around: Deadboy was not here. Late. As usual.SecondPrize smiled.He hated Deadboy.Beyond reason.Beyond prejudice. Pure, unselfish hate. Loathed the sight of him, the smell, the sound, the thought of Deadboy in the same room as he…He felt a bubble of vomit push its way up his throat, and clamped down hard, killing its ascent, feeling it splash back over his insides in slow volte face…They were twins: Deadboy and SecondPrize. Identical.Cleaved apart in the first week of life-never to reconcile again…..Swing low,sweet chariot; coming for’ to carry me home...Clapton was through crooning his pseudo-evangelical psycho-babble.SecondPrize waited for the opening riffs of the next song, and the familiar knock- knock-knocking on heaven’s door.

Salt heard the knocking first.Low and insistent, it seemed to rise in intensity, till April heard it too. Then Sundance. Then SecondPrize.It rippled through the group in slow undulating waves, washing over each of them with terrifying clarity.Paranoia. Scuttling out of the woodwork like maggots in heat.Running as fast as their short squat legs would take them, just stopping to lick the gooseflesh here and there.Salt looked at the rest,terror etched on his face.A gaggle of geese were doing the Macarena on his grave.April was ashen,mouth slightly parted in petrified pantomine, like an unfaithful Columbine caught red-handed by Harlequin. Sundance sat still, the still-smouldering joint slipping from her fingers on to the carpet.SecondPrize had slumped back on to the cushions, his face a crumpled ball of pulpy newsprint.Eternity held its breath for a moment.Then, somewhere in the distance, a cellphone beeped,louder this time: beep-beep-bip - beeep-beeep - beep-beep-bip…

2.


I burst into the room after knocking for over fifteen minutes on the door.Had to break it down. Suspect I’ve cracked my shoulder or something.The carpet was smoking.A circular hole in the center was spreading outwards- eating the fabric- growing fatter as it continued to devour the carpet.salt was not there.No sign of Sundance either.Ditto April.And what of my brother?His mickey mouse suit was hanging on a peg, but he was nowhere to be seen. I turned to look around the room.There, in the corner,was the mirror.Smooth, unblemished; all its cracks disappeared.April must have replaced the glass.It looked like smoked glass,the surface dark and shiny; and strangely, rippling. I could see dark gusts blowing slowly across the surface;eddying and rising. Unable to believe my eyes, I stared into it, the dark depths softly falling away into sooty nothingness.From somewhere deep within, a cellphone beeped, then was abruptly cut off….

…….bip….


occam's razor,
2004