The color grey sat looking at me like I was just a piece of shit, which I may have been. I say "sat," but as it was just a dollop of grey without form or nuance, unless you considered that it had been spat out of a tube of paint, it was hard to think of it as doing much of anything. Hardly something by which to pass judgment.
I wasn't a piece of shit, by the way, to clarify. I sort of felt like one and the greyness itself may have considered me to be such, but I wasn't taking its opinions into any account. There wasn't much of a difference between me and old Grey. So don't bother casting aspersions, my friend.
We were sitting or whatever it was we were doing on the stoop of some steps watching traffic and the rest of existence troll on by like it was on some kind of fucking float with glued-together picked-apart petals from dead flowers. That's what it was all right.
I told Grey, I said, "You know." But I didn't know. Grey was drinking a beer, one of mine because Grey didn't have any of its own beer, the leeching glob of paint that it was, not owning anything. The beer poured out of the bottle and sloshed over Grey's surface, diluting it.
I pointed at something, nudging Grey's shoulder.
"Check that out."
When I closed my right eye, I was pointing at one thing, and when I closed my left, I was pointing at something else. Which was I checking out? Both? What were they? Inflatable porcine superheroic figures? Femalian androidal combat bots? Yes, yes. Grey looked at some neutral area silently mysteriously soaking up the cultural nomenclature and the single malt heady hops.
There were no astute or profound statements I could make, so I devolved to the language I was born with: I belched. It seemed almost too poignant.
I thought there were clouds or something cloudlike, godlike, in the sky, zephyrs or zeppelins. Not these things, not anything, except it cast a shadow upon the grey and myself like we were simultaneously siamese twins. The shape of the shade was Italian, the country of Italy. The toe was upon my lip and the heel was cast betwixt where Grey's eyes would have been if they had not been elseewhere. The shadow was an ominous preconfiguration of events yet to unfold.
I would have queried the greyness about it, but it seemed wholy preoccupied by the fanfare of passing pompomettes waving pompoms and kicking bare legs into the empty space immediately in front of their pelvises. Each tiny foot of each tiny pompomette was encased in white leather defining the footwear which fulfilled the prophecy foretold by the previously-mentioned shadow and stuff. They were shod in the most exquisite of Italian leather boots.
Grey and I were not mere slackabouts, lounging lugubriously of a bright sunny midafternoon, no. So we got up and walked around a little bit, discussing matters of the day: the weather, politics, critical comparisons of Super Bowl commercials. We wanted to get into trouble, my friend Grey and I. Because the weather was nice, because the economy was down, because directors were making more emotionally-engaging commercials than they were movies. We wanted to throw heavy objects through tenuous membranes. We wanted to pentrate barriers, to find lines drawn in sand and kick more sand over them, obscuring them. We wanted to invent new mathematics, or not.
Grey had the idea that we walk down to the bridge, so that was what we did.
Half a block away from a completely random point in our walk, Grey stopped and told me it had a confession to make. There were birds all around but I couldn't hear them singing. Grey looked more viscous than usual.
"What is it," I asked.
I felt as if there was one of those eliptically-panning cameras capturing the moment, going round and around. Some crisis was about to crescendo or denouement declared.
What was it, what.
Grey said nothing, only looked achingly into my eyes.
"Oh, Brad," I heard Grey's tremulously treble voice say. I reached out and put a finger on Grey's trembling lip.
"Sh," I said. Grey shushed.
We walked hand in hand to the bridge where we jumped off, Grey's greyness pillowing out, catching on the air, people watching us, hoping we'd die, us not, being lifted up, rising up higher and higher until we couldn't be made out, our forms or formlessness brushed into thin atmosphere where we disappeared.