All You Have Is Cider?

Curly stopped by yesterday. Needed some beer but did not want to buy any.

"What do you mean all you have is cider?" he asked when I told him what I had lots of in the fridge.

I poured him one on ice. Gave him the glass and what was left of the bottle. He looked at it suspiciously but it was too fucking hot not to drink it. Down it went.

"That's not bad," he said to me in the kitchen from the living room, "for a girl's drink. You better get me another one."

I already had pulled another one from the fridge for him. Riding a motorcycle in the August sun can make a man thirsty as the Libyan rebels are for Kadafi's blood.

As we talked Marc Bolan's "Born To Boogie" played on the television. Music from when we were taking each other's heads off playing hockey in the street.

"They still haven't figured out what is wrong with my asshole," he told me. My buddies and I are mostly all old enough to be taking turns getting our assholes peered into on a fairly regular basis. "I even got a colonoscopy last week and they still don't know what's wrong. All I know is if I shit these ciders soon as I shit out some orange juice the other day my shit will still be fizzy as the the cider was when I drank it. The orange juice was still orange when it poured out of my ass."

"I thought a colonoscopy was the last thing they did to figure out what was wrong with your asshole," I told him. I do not even like to hear the word colonoscopy. Makes me want to vomit. (Most of us get knocked out cold before they stick the thing up our ass. Not my dad - he just lays there on his side and watches the whole thing on tv with the proctologist. Says, "It's better than watching the fucking Canucks.") "What do they do if a look up your ass doesn't show what's wrong with your asshole?"

"Next week it is an MRI and maybe a little exploratory surgery. They figure maybe it isn't my asshole that is fucked after all. I think it might have something to do with one of my other surgeries coming apart or something."

Curly has seen the inside of more surgery rooms than most of us. I guess some scar tissue or a little intermittent leak could be causing his problems.

"You shit orange?" I asked him.

"Want to see a picture?" he asked back.

Motherfucking cellphones. Now if people shit a cool colour they have to take a picture of it so they can put it on fucking Facebook.

"That's ok Curly," I told him in a hurry. "But make sure you save it so we can show it to everybody at your funeral if the docs don't sort you out."