The tip was pointed outward like a canon from the bow of a ship and when he fired across her deck, she moaned with intensity. He boarded her like a pirate taking a schooner. There was a clamor across the poop deck.
‘Do you do banal?’ he asked.
‘I do,’ she said. ‘I do.’
He pumped away for 10 minutes and climaxed. He rolled off of her and peeled the condom away from himself, hefted it for weight, and tossed it into the waste basket. She yawned and lit up a cigarette in the bed.
Banal sex.
Main Entry: ba·nal
Pronunciation: b&-’nal, ba-, -’n[a’]l; bA-’nal; ‘bA-n&l
Function: adjective
Etymology: French, from Middle French, of compulsory feudal service,
possessed in common, commonplace, from ban
: lacking originality, freshness, or novelty : TRITE
synonym see INSIPID
‘That wasn’t very good,’ she said.
‘It wasn’t bad either,’ he countered.
‘But it also wasn’t very good,’ she said. ‘I’ve had better.’
‘I’ve had worse.’
She turned the television on, just to shut him up. There was a reality show on television. That is to say, there was a television program that purported to be about reality, but in all honesty, was a program about real life morons acting up for a camera. It also wasn’t very good.
Banal, in fact.
‘How can you watch that shit?’ he asked her.
She shrugged and turned the volume up. He rolled over and tried to sleep. She turned the volume up more so the television was blasting out sound like a concert at an amphitheater. The walls vibrated and the windows started crashing out. He wrapped his pillow around his ears, but it wasn’t doing much good. The sound was thundering and distorted and on the verge of white noise.
Finally he got mad.
‘Can you shut that off?’ he shouted.
‘What? I can’t hear you!’ she yelled back at him.
He shook his head, leaned down to the floor and picked up one of his loafers. He took the loafter and tossed it as hard as he could at the television screen and shattered it. There was a cloud of smoke, electrical shorts, and static for a few seconds and then total silence.
‘Do you do banal?’ he asked her again.
‘Every single goddamned day.’