Brewster by Mark Slouka

won’t partake?”
    I shook my head.
    “Sure, if it’s cool,” Tina said.
    His wife came in and handed him a bag of weed and some papers.
    “Anyway, all I was saying was, you know, it’s been tried before, no ties, no guilt”—he licked the joint and lit it—“and it hasn’t worked out so well. All those utopian communities in the nineteenth century—it always gets fucked up in the end.”
    “So then how come you guys aren’t married?” Tina said.
    He handed her the joint. “Marriage was invented by the church to control sex—everybody knows that.”
    “See, that’s what I mean. All this shit that keeps us, like”—she passed it back—“tied down and miserable is changing, right? I mean, you guys are a perfect example of …”
    “Muddling,” the woman called from the kitchen. “We’re a perfect example of muddling.”
    He took a long toke. “Anyway, don’t get me wrong—I’m all for love. It’s just, you know, I don’t think it’s free.”
    He started rummaging around in a pile of books. “Ever read Marcuse?” He tossed a paperback into the hammock. “It’s about how—fuck, what’s it about? It’s about how we’ve been, like, pacified by stuff.”
    “Because affluence represses the need for liberation,” the woman called out.
    “Right. Exactly. It’s like we’re living in a big room so full of shit we can’t even see that we need to be liberated.”
    Tina took a hit and passed it back. “Sure, OK, but what’s that got to do with—”
    “OK, so you ever see Let’s Make a Deal ? Yeah, like on TV. So they give you a prize, some medium-sized piece of crap—let’s say a TV—and now you have to choose to, like, keep it, or trade it for something behind door number one—which the lovely Katie is pointing to—or door number two or whatever. If you guess right, you get to trade in your medium-sized piece of crap for a bigger one. If you guess wrong, OK, you get what’s called a Zonk—which could be a llama, or a lot of food, or a room full of old furniture—and everybody laughs. After the show of course you get to trade it in for bread.”
    “We once met a guy who took the pig,” the woman said, coming in and taking the joint.
    “You what?”
    She took a hit, let it out. “We met a guy who took the pig. This huge sow. He’s …” They were all laughing by now, squeaking out “he took the pig,” and “zonked with a pig.” “He’s supposed to trade it in after the show for, like, I don’t know, whitewall tires or the Encyclopaedia Britannica or something—”
    “It’s like Joseph McCarthy with hooves.”
    “—and he says, like, fuck you, I want the pig. It’s staring out the bars of this little Green Acres pen like it’s tryin’ to figure out who to kill first but they have to give it to him ’cause it’s in the contract so they bring it down in the service elevator and throw it on the forklift to get it in his truck and he drives away.”
    She walked back to the kitchen.
    The artist wiped the tears out of his eyes. “Jesus. Anyway, the machine is like Let’s Make a Deal , man. It controls all the options. Want to know what matters? Pick a curtain. Want to figure out who you’re gonna be? Pick a box. Because that’s your choice: door number one or door number two. When the truth is, we’re surrounded by doors, when every breath we take is a door.”
    Tina was sitting up in the hammock. “But that’s exactly why we have to, you know, get off the show or pick the pig or whatever—”
    “Sure, yeah, I’m cool with that.”
    “So—”
    “All I’m sayin’ is it’s not all out there, OK, it’s not all the man—that people are pretty good at poisoning their minds all by themselves. That while you’re, like, fighting to get free from Big Daddy you can’t forget the little daddy in your head because he’s busy knocking together a cell with your name on it. It’s like, I don’t know, original sin or something, except God’s got nothin’ to