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charlatan,” Ronnie says, sipping from a foamy warm can of Dusch Light on the border of the kitchen and the so-called studio here in this filthy first floor of a rickety gray house on the eastern edge of the student ghetto, while Kelly sits at Meghan’s dirty green low-cut Chuck Taylors, oblivious to everything but the February 1996 issue of The National Review of Titties opened across his lap.) “. . .it’s going to be the best song ever, so . . . ” (And here, Mouse hums like a con artist about to con) “. . .doo dee doo dee doo. Let me try and find it here, and you keep doing what you’re doing . . . ”
    â€œUh. Mouse? What is this?” Meghan says with that lisp through a retainer (At nineteen and everything! hums Mouse’s fevered, feverish brain, because, with the dark bobbed hair, the overbite, the lisp—well, it’s better than all the dancing girls jiggling at the tittie bar) as she reaches under the trash-covered table (a wretched uneven example of what you find piled at the end of driveways when the students reach the ends of their leases and upgrade to better homes, better furniture) and pulls out a magazine. On the magazine’s cover, a woman with frizzed out 1985 white-blonde So Cal hair, dressed in a pink bikini, only the bikini bottom is lowered to her knees to expose her long, semi-erect penis. The magazine’s title, in yellow lightning bolt lettering, is PSYCH!
    Ronnie laughs at this and Kelly pays no attention, enraptured by the pictures of breasts in all shapes and sizes. “Oh, hee hee, that’s nothing, doo dee doo dee doo,” Mouse says. “It’s something I used for a flier, hee hee hee . . . ”
    â€œAnd what’s this?” Meghan says, laughing, pulling out from under the chair a . . . 
    â€œOh! That!” Mouse says. “Hee hee hee. Well, you see . . . ” (He strokes his long goatee.) “That’s all part of the nothingness too . . . ”
    â€œThat’s a big strange nothing,” Ronnie says, stomach empty, behind on meals, feeling and looking underfed, empty enough to already feel the one beer he has finished. “No, really. Tell the nice girl what it is, Mouse.”
    Mouse’s smile grows a faint tinge of a sneer towards Ronnie. “Thank you. I will. See, Meghan, it’s just one of those, you know, giant dildos coated in insulation foam to use in some performance art I did at the Nardic Track about a knight in shining bologna?”
    â€œOh!” Meghan laughs, holds the flute with one hand, swings the dildo onto the dusty living room’s no-longer-white carpeting like Roger Daltrey with a microphone, flinging it to the floor as it lands with a brittle crack.
    â€œI found the tape!” Mouse announces, holding it out for Meghan to see. “Now I’m going to put this in the 4-track, and we’re going to start recording, so before you play the flute, I need you to make up lyrics about dancing girls.”
    â€œDancing girls?” Meghan says, the nervousness rattling around her insides, finding an outlet in the right side of her face as a random twitch.
    â€œYeah!” Mouse sees the nervous tic, and it’s that same feeling like at the tittie bar.
    â€œI thought you’d want to sing about poop or jerking off or something,” Meghan says. Ronnie laughs at this. He is buzzed on a can-and-a-half of Dusch Light, unsure of what to say but smiling like a cretin.
    â€œNot today. I feel the need to go into a more commercial direction.” Ronnie, Kelly, and Meghan laugh at this.
    â€œOk,” Meghan says, free hand’s long fingers moving the sides of her hair behind her ears, stands, arousingly perfect nineteen-year-old breasts jutting out against the cotton of the green, yellow-lettered “LARRY’S PAWN SHOP ALL-STARS” softball thrift store t-shirt she