Free Bucky F*cking Dent by David Duchovny

talk?”
    â€œDo you?”
    â€œI’m asking.”
    â€œWhatever you want.”
    â€œWell, it seems we are talking.”
    â€œAre we?”
    â€œMy lips and tongue are moving and I am forcing air through my teeth.”
    â€œThat is talking. You’re right.”
    â€œOr talking about talking. Feels good, don’t it?”
    â€œSure do.”
    â€œWhy did we stop talking?”
    â€œYou wanna know how we could give this up?”
    â€œYeah, yeah.”
    â€œI sent you a book. You called me a name.”
    â€œI called you a name?”
    â€œI sent you a book, you called me a homo.”
    â€œNo, I didn’t.”
    â€œYou did.”
    â€œOh.” Marty laughed at the memory. “Is that bad, Dr. Brothers? Should I say ‘homosexual,’ not ‘homo’? I can’t keep up with the fucking word police.”
    â€œI don’t care what you say.”
    â€œApparently you do. Very much.”
    â€œIt didn’t bother me. It’s neither here nor there. You bothered me. I sent you a novel for your opinion and you called me a name.”
    â€œI didn’t call you a ‘homo.’ I said you write like you might be a homo.”
    â€œOh, well, that clears it up.”
    â€œCome on, I was just trying to say you need to live a little.”
    â€œWhat does that have to do with being homosexual? Homosexuals don’t live?”
    â€œIt’s a figure of speech.”
    â€œBullshit. It’s like any sexism or racism or whatever. It’s not important.”
    â€œIt’s something like a figure of speech, Joe College. You’ll never be a writer if you worry about the word police. Your mind can’t be Singapore, your mind has to be Times Square.”
    â€œFine.”
    â€œWould you have preferred if I quoted your beloved Berryman and said your life is a fucking ‘handkerchief sandwich’? More palatable? Same fucking thing.”
    Ted exhaled hard and audibly, his breath and lips almost forming a word, but not quite, and that seemed to be the end of that, but then he just could not let it be.
    â€œMaybe it also had something to do with the fact that your last three girlfriends were younger than me. And that made me a tad…”
    â€œJealous?”
    â€œDisgusted. Totally fucking skeeved out.”
    â€œBonnie!”
    â€œWas that her name? I knew her only as ‘the infanta.’”
    â€œBonnie. Bonnie, and before her, Amber.”
    â€œStripper name.”
    â€œShe was a stripper.”
    â€œThank you.”
    â€œAnd a PhD candidate in African dance, FYI.”
    â€œYou can’t get a PhD in that.”
    â€œSays you.”
    â€œTwenty-five?”
    â€œWho cares? Twenty-three. Her smell, Ted, her smell gave me health.”
    â€œJesus.”
    â€œMonica. I should call her.”
    â€œHave you looked in the mirror lately?”
    â€œAsshole.”
    â€œCan we not?”
    â€œOh, oh, yes, we can not. We can not all day.”
    Ted couldn’t take this, he felt the anxiety rise in his chest. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a joint. Marty looked disapprovingly at him, but then reached into the pocket of his robe and pulled out vials of pain pills—an escalation in the drug war. He shot Ted a sideways glance: My shit is better than your shit, I win.
    â€œWhat is that, Valium?”
    â€œMaybe. I don’t know if I’m feeling Valium or feeling Quaalude. You know, sometimes I feel like daffodils and sometimes like daisies.”
    â€œSometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. Quaalude ’s a good Scrabble word, gets rid of an overabundance of low-scoring vowels.”
    â€œI hate Scrabble. ’Lude it shall be.”
    Ted shrugged and fired up a laughing bone. Marty popped the Rorer 714 along with some horse-pill-sized vitamin Cs and said, “Don’t worry about the smoke, I just have lung