It’s Saturday night, not too late but late enough to be resigned. The front door swings open, automatically we look to see, and there’s Frank, our very treasurer, cradling an absurd number of frozen corndogs. Three cartons slip to the floor. Frank curses his discharged cargo, looks halfway back at us scattered about the living room, and lumbering forward unloads the rest atop the beer pong table. That’s like a third of them, he huffs as if out of breath. I went to Piggly Wiggly, he says. Y’all hungry? I cleared ‘em out and also got some beer. Now who’s gonna help me with this shit? Kearney, who’d been packing a bowl at Frank’s arrival and whose deep laughter had broken the silence in its wake, leers at Frank from his corner couch. But Frank, he asks with a hint of tickled contempt, why? How much did you––where will we put––really, dude?
Really. And Frank knows what he’s doing. A theater major now in his sixth year at the university, he may not be a model student, and yet this hasn’t kept him from internalizing every line of every role he’s played, and deep within his eyes still tuned to a probable terror, the eyes of a Guildenstern, flickers an understanding of our social anthropology or enough, at least, to know we’re junkies for shark-jumping. He knows what people want. A steady flow of well-dressed bodies, tasteful lighting, polymathic cover band, the sub-religious comfort of being an adult. He knows they know what they’ll get here, when they’re tempted, inevitably, and when word is it’s weird enough to qualify an I was there. And, finally, he knows we’ve turned lazy enough that it seems three hundred bucks’ worth of cheap-ass beer and frozen corndogs will be the price of our motivation. Kearney holds the bowl to his lips, lights, tilts up his head and exhales at the smoke alarm.
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