Late Sunday night, they returned from their trip to Las Vegas. Pleb and Wholefoodzzz had taken the last plane out of Sin City, a trail of gold doubloons spilling out of Pleb’s back pocket. For three days they had been researching the limits of human heat tolerance in this singular desert estuary, where hell frothed over and onto the Earth.
Pleb knew he had to record all he had seen in the city that low pressure systems forgot, so when he finally made it home, he sat at his computer to jot down his observations.
But nothing came.
His fingers hovered above the keyboard, miming keystrokes, but as he lowered them down to touch the keys, they would freeze up. He’d eaten at Bouchon and seen the nadir of restaurant marketing in the same day. He’d eaten $25 burgers and drunk gatorade from a licorice straw. Why couldn’t he write about it? What was he so afraid of?
For two days he sulked and slept at his computer screen. He cried human tears for the first time in his life. When the tears dribbled down his plump cheeks and spilled into the corners of his mouth, he would taste the briny nectar and recall with regret the salty, sweaty, fishy taste of the brandade beignets he’d eaten over the weekend. He felt impotent.
Then, on the third day, he awoke to the sound of trickling water. Of course I’ve gone and pissed myself again, he thought. And indeed, purple urine was pooling into a small puddle on the wooden floor beneath him. The puddle grew until at last the surface tension could no longer hold and a rivulet sprung forth, jetting off for a nearby space between two floorboards. He watched, his forehead resting on the edge of his desk, as the stream flushed crushed staples and crumbs from the tiny ditch.
Wait, purple urine?
He sat up, startled. Why was his piss the color purple? It wasn’t blood. This was nothing like blood. It was pastel-hued and opaque. It didn’t even seem human.
Suddenly, an idea struck him. He looked to his blank computer screen. He hit the power button to rouse it from its slumber.
He waited for it to load up.
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(Could it be?)
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(Had he pissed his writer’s block out?)
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(We’ll find out in a second)
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Fucking loaded at last! He clicked the bright blue orangutan nutsack that represented the application Cellphone Novelist Pro.
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(He suddenly remembered how he’d seen a blogpost all too similar to this on Goodjobbb recently, and swore at himself for stealing again from Quilty)
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A white sheet of pixels finally appeared, and a cursor blinked at him like a just-awoken puppy. He cautiously lowered his fingers to the keys and began typing.
Harry Potter and the Prosty Kickbacks
Harry stirred around ten-thirty a.m.. He raised his head from the mattress. The folds in the bedspread had imprinted themselves onto his cheek. With sleepy eyes he squinted at the alarm clock, then over to the opposite bunk where Ron had collapsed not three hours ago. Still sleeping.
It was then that Harry realized he was in a most uncomfortable position. He was laying stomach-down on what appeared to be a gigantic dreidel. He rolled over with great effort, and was surprised to feel the dreidel move with him. But the dreidel wasn’t solid. It moved like a medicine ball filled with gelatin and strapped to his torso. Harry looked down. His stomach had grown distended, and now sagged down to either side of him like some great half-deflated balloon.
“Blimey,” Harry said.
“Harry? Are you awake?” came a muffled voice from Ron’s bed.
“Aye, I’m awake, mate.”
“Where’s Hermione?”
“I think we ate her,” replied Harry.
Both of them laughed. It was the first time they had laughed in what felt like ages. It felt good.
“Do you remember what happened last night?” asked Ron, his head now above his pillow so Harry could hear him.
“We went to Bouchon. We ate a billion pounds of food. Most of it was great. Some of it was downright rotten.”
The night before, Harry, Ron, Neville, Luna, Bill, and Fleur had eaten at Thomas Keller’s restaurant at the Venetian Hotel. The sixsome had dined on chilled spinach soup, salmon rillette, brandade beignets, sweetbreads, duck confit, roasted lamb with ratatouille, boudin blanc, mussels, steak frites, parisian gnocchi, duck breast over red rice, and to top it all off, chocolate profiteroles. Today they were paying the price. Everyone else had apparated back to Hogwart’s for the spring semester, but Harry and Ron were slowest to get up and had not yet even begun to consider the journey back to school.
“What was wrong with those brandade beignets?” Ron yawned.
“It was total rubbish. They either messed up this batch, or else they are doing terrible things to brandade. Professor McGonagall always stressed how important it is to rinse your salt cod before making brandade. It can be absolutely awful otherwise, like bogey-flavored jelly beans. It seems that they forgot to do it.”
“How do you know that that’s what happened?”
“It tasted so salty and fishy and pungent. The beignets weren’t at all light and airy like they are at your mum’s.” Harry sniggered.
“Bloody hell,” Ron said, shaking his head. “My cocktail was delicious, though. What was in it? Nivolio? Nardslab?”
“Navan—bartender’s breath,” answered Harry. “It’s the rarest liqueur in the world. You’re right, though. Everything but the beignets was pretty great. I thought the boudin blanc was brilliant.”
“I can tell,” Ron replied, pointing at Harry’s sizable paunch.
“Reducto,” said Harry, aiming his wand at his torso.
Harry’s belly shrunk back down to normal size, letting out a great whining sigh as it did so. Two straight days of gorging their supple young bodies hadn’t been exactly healthy for the boys. The night before Bouchon, they’d each paid twenty-five quid for sliders at Fix at the Bellagio. Harry had even ordered a rather sub-par side order of lobster mashed potatoes.
“There, that’s better. Now, let’s get something to eat, shall we?”
“I thought I was the hungry one!” exclaimed Ron.
The two set off for the casino downstairs. After winding their way through the labyrinthine MGM Grand, they found themselves on the Studio Walk. It was noticeably darker in this corridor than in the rest of the hotel. The scar on Harry’s forehead started to prickle.
“Are you okay, Harry?” Ron had noticed Harry wincing.
“It’s okay. Just some heartburn.”
And then they saw it. They’d almost walked right by. Harry and Ron stopped dead in their tracks and turned to face what they had so far been lucky enough to avoid in Las Vegas. Now it was staring them dead in the eye. The Dark Lord had been here.
Ron didn’t immediately see the problem. But as he looked closer, he noticed the restaurants listed at the farmer’s market.
“Let’s get out of here!” screamed Harry, grabbing Ron by the dick.
A loud CRACK, and the two boys vanished, having apparated far away from the casino. They were now in a taxi cab. The driver, evidently accustomed to young wizards trying to flee the area with all haste, was unperturbed when Harry and Ron landed with little grace in the backseat of his coach.
“Where to, boys?”
“The airport,” Ron and Harry said simultaneously.
“The correct answer is the strip club.”
The boys chuckled. They weren’t sure if the driver was kidding, but it felt good to be away from the Farmer’s Market. The cab was cool, insulated from the sweltering heat just outside the windows. A familiar tune seemed to be playing on the radio, but before Harry could make out what it was, Ron spoke.
“D-do you get a kickback if you take us to a strip club?”
“Ah, I assume you’re talking about the Prosty Kickbacks.”
Ron nodded, but Harry looked confused. The cab driver seemed to sense Harry’s confusion, although he hadn’t even glanced at the Boy Who Lived.
“The Prosty Kickbacks,” repeated the driver, “are what we get for taking you to a strip club or a den of iniquity. If I were to take you both to the Rhino right now,” said the driver—referring to what the boys assumed was the Spearmint Rhino Gentlemen’s Club—”I’d get $120. Sixty quid per head.”
“What about the ranches?” asked Ron. Harry was slightly taken aback by this question, but listened intently for the driver’s answer.
“Ah, I get thirty-three percent of whatever you spend. If I took you both there now, and you each spent a grand, I’d get $660.”
“Wow,” admired Ron.
“One time I eff’d a hot doctor there. It was a Canadian couple. The wife was a doctor. She was hot. She had had a near-death experience and the two had decided to live their lives to the fullest. So I took them to the ranch, and they ended up getting two girls. And then they said, ‘What the hell, let’s invite Brian.’”
Harry and Ron now deduced that the driver’s name was Brian, and continued to listen with awe.
“…So I got to join them, and the best part is I got to do the wife. Now we’re friends. We get on IM and chat all the time. They’re real cool.”
The stunned silence that followed allowed Harry to finally hear the song on the radio.
My Dumbledore’s black
My Weasley’s blue
And I’ll be goddamned if my Potter ain’t, too.
It wasn’t possible. Was Young Jeezy rapping about Harry? Stranger things had happened, admittedly, but this was uncanny.
“Let’s go to the Rhino,” Ron blurted.
“Trevor, er, Ron, no!” Harry exclaimed.
The driver didn’t hear Harry, or at least he acted like he didn’t. “You got it,” he said.
And with that, they were off.
Pleb felt flushed. His face was covered in perspiration. He rubbed his shirt sleeve against his upper lip, tracking a long string of snot across his arm that whipped back as it ran off the end of his hand. He hadn’t gone to a strip club, but it didn’t matter. He could fix that later. He’d done it. He’d blogged about his Vegas trip. At last, it was time for a reward. He fired up Youtube and sat back.
SUBSCRIBE?! 