We were playing pool, Simon, Wayne, Jim and I.
The JCR was mostly empty.
The four of us, a few other people standing around.
Kristi sat on the couch, reading. She looked up occasionally.
We were playing doubles, I think, or maybe we used both tables.
Wayne had a tape that we used to listen to,
after we'd come home from drinking.
It was Peter Cook and Dudley Moore
doing an improv radio show in their alter-egos,
Clive and Derek.
What made the tape so funny was that they were drunk, too.
They did the show while they were hammered.
So we'd come stumbling across the square at Pendle,
drunk, bumbling into Wayne's room,
and we'd listen to the tape,
crying, sometimes, from laughing so hard.
One of the funniest parts of the tape
was when Clive and Derek would talk about various
cancers that they had,
outdoing one another as small children might.
"I've got cancer of my overdraft,"
"I've got cancer of the mortgage,"
"Well, I had cancer before you did,"
"I had cancer before I was even born,"
"Yeah? I have cancer of infinity, and I had that
before I was born which was before you."
And so on, laughing,
making light of a serious subject.
During our pool games, then,
not many people around,
we kept saying "I've got cancer of that shot,"
or "I've got cancer of the pool cue,"
or "I've got cancer of your face."
It was funny.
We laughed until we cried.
my gums had been bleeding for three days.
i had been sleeping twelve to fourteen hours a day,
but still awoke exhausted.
the ring finger knuckle on my right hand
was lost in a bruise.
i kept drinking my beer, as we were playing,
so that the blood would wash off my teeth,
so that i could smile and laugh with everybody else.
I leaned against a pinball machine, tired.
Kristi sat on the couch, not really reading anymore,
watching us play pool, listening to our jokes.
"That's not funny," she said,
as we laughed about Jim's cancerously bad shot.
"That's not funny at all. There are people with cancer, you know. It's not a funny thing."
"Bollocks," Wayne said. "I've got cancer of their cancer."
We all laughed and smiled
and i cleaned my teeth with my tongue, first,
so that the blood wouldn't show.
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