FFF #28

So it's:

• a week late
• gone through countless iterations
• not really that good
• now posted

All based off of last week's FFF challenge of "The realization slowly dawned on me…"

She sat on the bench on her lunch break, her thumb marking time in her paperback book. “You certainly do look Irish,” said the bum with a wink to the girl on the bench. If portliness, a ruby red nose and cheeks were intrinsically Irish, he could also have been Irish. And bums too have a predilection for the drink. There was another bum on the sidewalk, sleeping. Shoulders hunched toward his chest and lying on his side in a bent-kneed L. Slowly, the realization dawned on the bum that his compatriot was about to piss.

“Hey man,” said the Irish gent with a flick of his chin. The other man’s hand was thumbing a seam at the crotch of his brown corduroys though his eyes were still closed. “Hey man. Don’t you be pissing here, man.”

The sleeping man’s beard brilloed out into a pillow for his chin on the pink, marble sidewalk. A sidewalk that was salmon colored with flecks of grey, silver grouting, bulbously artistic grey planters dotting the street at regular intervals. Tourists strolling between special occasion restaurants and trendy boutiques, the traffic-free quiet of a pedestrian mall.

“Hey man!” the tubby leprechaun spurted, toeing the other man with a scuffed, steel toe. “This ain’t no place to be whipping it out, asshole. Don’t you remember where it is you fell asleep?”

He stirred slightly and opened his eyes in slits against the afternoon sun. “I wasn’t pissing, dude,” he said, rolling around the sleep taste in his mouth as if he was about to spit. He was younger than the first and edgy. No jolly belly and rosy cheeks but both parts instead emaciated and sallow.

“You was about to. I saw you roll over onto your side and reach around for your dick.”

“You full of shit. I wasn’t pissing.”

“No, I said you were about to and you ain’t in private here. Catnapping on 16^th is where you are.”

He pushed himself up to sitting and ran four fingers through his beard. “I hear the buses.”

“Yeah you do. Think they sound like that anywhere else in this city? You need to watch your ass man ‘cause pissing in front of a young lady like that will get your ass kicked. You nasty, man.”

“Fuck you, who are you calling nasty? I’m just sleeping in the sun and the sidewalk’s clean and they haven’t cleared me off yet or nothing. It’s nice fucking day, dude, and you gotta go and talk shit about my dick.” He lit a cigarette.

“You were about to fucking piss and I wasn’t about to sit on my ass and watch that nasty go down. We got a girl over hear don’t need to see that.” They girl attempted to pretend she was still reading her book. Turned a page that she didn’t read.

“How the fuck am I to know with my eyes closed that there’s a fucking girl—”

“Don’t you say fucking and girl together! Don’t you insult like that.”

“How was I to know there was a girl here?” He waved the cigarette at the girl on the bench. She nodded and sat up to leave but instead made like she was repositioning her body in the spring sun.

“Well keep it zipped.”

“It’s zipped.”

“It fucking better be.”

He rose to his feet, lean and shaggy against the lounging Irish man, who had his hands crossed on his belly and his legs at the ankles, swinging idly under the bench. “It is zipped, you ass! You got eyes? There was no pissing, there will be no pissing, so shut the fuck up, you tubby bastard.”

The portly bum held up his hands, as if the confrontation was only a formality, a pre-friendship ritual that had to be gotten out of the way. He reached for his pack. “You’re right, man. How long has it been since you ate?”

“Not today. Last night?”

“Want a sandwich?”

“Whatcha got?”

“I got a veritable deli in here. You like turkey?”

The lean, young man sat down atop his military style duffel. He finally stopped gesturing enough with it to take a leisurely drag on his smoke. “Yeah.”

“Mustard?”

“Just make it how you would. I appreciate the favor.”

“You camp ‘round here?”

“This time of year.”

“I go down to New Mexico every winter. You ever been?”

“How you manage that?”

“I’m an old-timer. I still hop the rails. Have been on and off since 1978.”

“Nice to meet you, man.”

“How about avocado?”