Two drunk assholes sit in chairs nailed to a wall. They don’t fall down. They’re gravity-proof.

MORT: Hey Destro. Know what my problem is? Last week, out of all the ladies that came to visit me, my favorite lady brought along this old bag who was either her Mother Superior, her real mother, or some broad she hired to make me behave. Know what I mean? Well, I had too much to drink, and the details … Shit, I don’t know the details. I always have too much to drink and I don’t remember much. I assume this happens to everybody. Booze culture is the only culture anybody knows. The world tells me to drink, so I drink, right? So my favorite lady comes in and we play chess for awhile as her chaperone stares at me with her chin upturned and her eyes real wide, like. Just as I’m about to checkmate my girl, she gets mad and quits, saying I cheated. The chaperone agrees. So I bring out the angel dust and we all smoke some and then we head to a Mexican joint to get margaritas and tacos. Right? So these weirdos get hammered and attack a bus boy and I gotta sweettalk the cops out of arresting them. We go back to my place. The mom or whatever passes out and my girl and I, we get in the shower. That’s right. Things go well for a few minutes. I’m washing her and she’s washing me and everything is nice and friendly and kosher. Know what happens next? She punches me in the nose! The nose, mind you. My glasses fly off and she stomps on them with her bare feet. Yeah, I wear my glasses in the shower. So? So we get out of the shower and I chase her around my place for awhile. Eventually we get tired. At some point we get dressed. Mind you, I’m a little discombobulated right about now, and I don’t see it coming when she punches me again, multiple times. She says she’s on the phone with the police and sticks the phone in my face. I grab it and she yells, “Gimme my phone! Gimme my phone!” and punches me, like, twenty more times in the nose. So I give back the phone and tell her I’ve been nothing but kind and respectful to her and she says she’s gonna kill me. I realize she’s just really high and really drunk, like me, and with uncanny precision and competency, I gently escort her out the front door, then bolt the motherfucker. She kicks the shit out of the door. I figure the police are en route, but they never come, and eventually my girl loses steam and goes away. Next morning, I’m hungover like a promontory. I go outside and the sunlight knocks me over. I get up and go to my car and guess what? Guess what? It’s keyed to shit! My girl keyed the fuck out of it! Both doors on the driver’s side look like Cubist sneezes. “Ak!” I cried. “Ak! Ak! Ak! Ak! Ak!” Like that, mind you. But that’s not my problem. I mean, it’s a problem, but it’s not the problem I’m talking about. Know what my problem is? [Falls out of chair and slams into stage. Cries out; groans. Crawls back up wall and repositions himself in chair.] Know what my problem is?

DESTRO: Is it the fact that you rely too heavily on gas-station dick pills? I saw you in a gas station the other day. Remember, Mort? Mort? Mort, are you alive? Mort? Mort?

MORT: I’m alive! Jesus, you henpecking son of a bitch.

DESTRO: Ok, take it easy. Like I was saying … what was I saying? Oh, dick pills. You were thumbing through the dick pills like a man with no fingers. The cashier stared at you as if you might be a Giant Disease. Behind you, these two jive hags were talking about how they’d never sleep with a man who relied on dick pills to get manly. Did you hear them say that? Did you get what you needed? Don’t answer that: you always get what you need. See, your body wants to rot. When you get a sore, that’s just your body showing you what it’s gonna do when you’re in the grave. You understand. All this came to me during my last post-binge hallucination. The man with the collapsing fist-face harrowed me endlessly, as did the woman with the white chin and every last shiteater in the universe. You think Hell’s bad? I saw what lies beyond Hell. It’s bad. It’s not good. You don’t want to go there. Stick to your dick pills. They’re cheap. They’re fun. They make the world a better place, those things. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Of course not. I stayed at the Surf Motel a few weeks ago and I’ll tell you something: the world is beyond repair, which is to say, humanity is a rotten egg. You know the Surf Motel. It’s right there on Lake Erie in Marblehead, Ohio. My room smelled like eggs, too, incidentally. There were bugs everywhere—mayflies, I think. The towels were clean but the pillows were flat. The coffee maker worked but the TV wouldn’t turn on. The bathroom mirror cracked when I looked in it but the water pressure in the shower was better than what I got at home. So on. Do you see the pattern? Yin and yang. Good and evil. You understand. Coincidentally, they sold dick pills at the motel bait store where I checked in. House of Jerks, it’s called. You’ve been there. There’s a picture of you on the wall behind the cashier, actually, holding a gillnet of perch in one hand and a big satchel of dick pills in the other. Well, I didn’t have much going on, so I decided to get some pills myself and hang out. I took five or so and sat on the bed and waited for something to happen. My face turned red and my arm fell asleep. That’s about it. I took more. My face turned redder and my other arm fell asleep. I couldn’t move my upper body for an hour or two. During that period of intense reflection, I realized that dick pills weren’t for me. Substances are a subjective business, like life. Clearly they work for you, though. You love them. You can’t live without them. I know you better than you know yourself. As for your problem, well, it’s not dick pills, obviously. I was just kidding. Honestly, you seem to have a pretty good life. I don’t have any idea what kind of problem you might be experiencing beyond having to occasionally interact with other human beings. That’s hard. That’s bad. But we all have to do it. It’s what people do. [Falls out of chair but catches himself, hanging like a monkey from an armrest. Crawls back into chair.]

Long pause.

> MORT: Nobody has to do anything. I certainly don’t have to do anything. Don’t tell me what to do. See, that’s a big part of my problem. Right? Like—

A coven of old, consternated JIVE HAGS enter, interrupting MORT with a steady, almost musical flow of unintelligible prattle. They scurry all over the stage and across the walls for several minutes, and at one point they flow over MORT and DESTRO like a militia of ants, making the men squeal and gesticulate in discomfort. Then the JIVE HAGS abruptly exit.

Long pause.

Tableau.