SmokeLong Quarterly

When I was in college, my roommate had a talking dog. My roommate was also a mime. We shared one dorm room with twin beds, two closets and two desks. The mime’s closet was full of suspenders and berets. Every morning he’d wake up, white-faced, and pretend to get out of bed. He’d throw the pretend covers back, take a pretend leak, brush his pretend teeth, all that. Then when he really got up it was anti-climactic, you know. Then he’d go to his desk and mime doing a line of coke. Then he’d actually do a line of coke on a little mirror. You get the picture.

The talking dog was a bull terrier, that breed with the football head. Remember Spuds McKenzie? The dog lived in the dorm with us and he had the worst grammar. Seriously bad. He’d say stuff like, “I’m going to lay down and take me a nap.” The mime wanted to correct him, you could see it in his face, but it’s hard to explain the rules of grammar from inside a glass box, especially to a dog. Sometimes when the mime was in class and it was just me and the dog, we’d raid the mime’s drug stash and make microwave brownies. We’d try on the mime’s spare berets and pretend to walk into the wind, and we were just as good as the mime except the dog couldn’t ever shut up. “That mime, he whack,” the dog would say, waggling his big head sadly from side to side, leaning against a pretend wall. “Why don’t he talk? It’s a crazy world.” He’d go on and on. All I could do was agree.