Wine? Fine.

“I’ve got so much energy! It’s that damn wine!”

And just like that he rips off his clothing, drops to a plank pose, cracking his wrists from the dramatic drop, does one excruciatingly zesty push-up, sits back up and touches his nose to the television screen. After a moment, he turns around and glares at me.

“Just like that! Another happy couple saved by the forces of therapeutic warrior killers and narcissistic capitalists.”

Now he’s on his back, again, thrusting his feet up in the air. Three repetitions and he’s beat. Laying flat on his back, gravity sucking his skin into cheap hotel crust, he rubs his belly, staring deeply and romantically, inquisitively into the ceiling.

“Naked body smells of marijuana, on the hotel carpet floor...I wrote a haiku!” And he did. And it’s ingenious. And I’m proud to call him my compatriot. Everywhere, now and forever he’ll be crouching in the darkness, ready to prance on my intellect.

I start thinking about my pounding headache and the miles we’ve traveled together, physically and metaphysically. Challenged by the tortures of tiny rooms, infinite horizons and alpine tremors, we have danced, drunken in the summer skies, meditating on nothingness and beauty. He crawls onto the bed and sucks my big toe.

“Dude, let’s go to India.”

I agree. But I tell him only after we hike the great expanse of South America. He agrees. I hate that I feel the only way I can appreciate life to the fullest would be to leave this America, this hasty dream wasteland stuffed with cheap stupors and expensive splendors, made for the blank anti-man whose shadow and idolatry brought the first torches down on the old virgin land now littered with Big K’s and Walmart’s; sex shops and fitness clubs.

Matters of the mind should be left for one’s skull cavity to ingest, while life should be left to one’s hands to manifest.

Now he’s on his back, his cheap classical Yamaha intertwined like camouflage to his bare skin and he’s playing some melancholic melody that reminds me of stranded sailors. I wish I told him more often how much I appreciate him. He’s like my reincarnated Gemini love twin but I can never decide whether I’d like him better as a friend or a lover. We’re more than a team, we’re like one holy mind-reading super-being, tackling the forces of life like quiet fishermen who oversee the ocean and her omnipotent tide. We’re tragically pathetic in the same way children are when they trip over their own shoelaces, only crying when someone notices their little failures.

We’re like medieval gypsies pawning our half-assed creations for your time and your stories and we really have no idea what’s going on, nor do we give a flying shit about what day of the week it is. We only care that you appreciate when we give the littlest bit we have to give: a rock. Or an ear of corn. Or a song about belonging or dying cowboys.

He realized I’m noticing his insanity and so he’s settled down on the bed next to me. Stranded, again, in another po-dunk town inhabited by deadbeat meth heads and glucose-filled half-humans, we get drunk and forget the dry heat and that disappearing money.