Sit back and tolerate...

"Damn, man. The place is actually starting to look pretty good. More like someplace an adult would live in, you know? It doesn't look like an oversized college apartment anymore."

"I dunno," said Clint. "I'm thinking this room needs just one more thing to make it seem a little less empty. There's a little too much space between the couch and everything else."

"That's not a bad thing, except there's really nowhere to sit if you have more than three people over."

"Exactly. I think I need some kind of chair over on that side, to make it feel like more of a complete room instead of a hallway you go through to get to the office."

"You know what would look fuckin' great if you wanna spend the money?" I asked.

"Well, yeah," he replied. "I do. I was thinking about getting some kind of leather club chair type thing. Some kind of dark brown leather to give the place a little ambience."

"You read my mind. I think that would look great with the hardwood floor, and the color of all this other wood stuff you have going in here."

"I'm thinking I might go with a recliner."

"No," I said. "I wouldn't do that."

"Why not?"

"Because to me, nothing says 'white trash' like having a fucking recliner in your house. Think about it. My dad had a stupid fucking recliner, and when the thing wore out, he went out and bought another one with that stupid fucking lever on the side because he was too fucking lazy to thrust out his fat fucking pelvis and make the thing go back by himself."

"A little bitter, are we?"

"You have to admit I have a point," I said. "I'll never have a damned recliner in my house because of those pieces of shit my father insisted on having in the den. You know what he did once?"

"What?"

"You remember those old cable remote boxes with the wire that ran to the thing you sat on top of the TV?"

"Yeah," he replied.

"My dad got drunk one night, and he got that wire tangled up in the recliner mechanism somehow while he was sleeping. He woke up, put his feet down, and clipped the wire all the way through clean. Then he started playing the fucking thing like a piano, trying to change the channel, and nothing happened."

"Nice."

"Yeah," I said. "Nice. But my dad being who he was, as soon as he realized that the wire was cut, he took the remote and threw it as hard as he could into the drywall. Took out a huge fucking chunk. Then he fucking made me and Rip spackle, sand and repaint the wall while he sat there in his white trash fucking recliner with a Michelob and watched."

"At least he had something to see while the cable was out."

"Exactly," I said. "Then there was the time me and Don were sitting in the den watching a fight..."

"The black guy you were friends with in high school?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"Uh oh."

"I guess you see where this is going," I said. "Anyway, me and Don are watching this fight, like on a Saturday afternoon or something, and my dad walks in with his fucking beer, takes a look at the TV and asks us who's fighting. I don't think we were even paying attention, so I said I didn't know. He stares at the fucking TV for a minute and says, 'Ah, who gives a fuck? It's just a spic against a spook,' and then he walks out. Right in front of Don, who was about ten years old at the time, and now he has to sit and listen to some big drunk white guy talkin' about spics and spooks. Great, right? I'm sure his fucking parents just loved having me over."

"Very progressive thinker, your dad."

"Oh, hell yeah. You don't even know. I remember when my cousin was going to school at some SUNY upstate, and she was takin' the train home and got stranded at Jamaica somehow. For whatever reason, the trains weren't runnin', and my aunt came over and asked my mother to come with her to pick my cousin up. We had some kind of cowboy hat up on the mantle, so my father takes it down and throws it at me and says, 'Hey, if you're gonna go with 'em, wear this. Black people are afraid of cowboys.'"

"Where the fuck did he come up with that?" he said.

"I'm sure it was the beer talkin', but the thing is, I fucking believed that for the next, like, five years. I was prob'ly around seven years old at the time, and believed everything that SOB said. I figured if I walked around the neighborhood with a fucking cowboy hat on, that all the black people would be afraid of me and leave me alone."

"Did it work?"

"You tell me," I replied. "You see me walkin' around in a fucking cowboy hat lately?"

"Maybe you didn't give the idea enough time."

"Oh, believe me, I gave due consideration to everything that motherfucker ever said, which is how I turned out to be such an amusement to you people."

"So," he said, "in other words, you don't think I should buy a recliner."

"No. Not unless you want to give me the douche chills every time I come here."