"You like that?" I shouted jumping up from my seat and joyously brandishing a gray Playstation control pad above my head. "I told you, dude, I rule it with Yoshimitsu."

"Bite me," responded Ian, casting his controller away in disgust. He reached for the red, white, and blue of a Budweiser can, and took a long hard swig. "So you got lucky...it happens."

"Luck had nothing to do with that, my friend," I answered, lighting up a cigarette and leaning back in Ian's old ragged Lay-Z-Boy. Tekken II was perhaps the best fighting game of all time, and certainly the best game for Playstation, and I was getting pretty damn good at it.

Ian finished his beer with a loud "Ahh" and chucked the can across the room, missing the garbage pail by a good three feet. He reached over the side of the couch into an ice filled plastic cooler and produced two more cans of Bud.

"You need another, dude?" he said, one of America's finest held up for me to see.

"Hold on," I replied, pounding the last half of my beer and tossing the can in the general direction of the garbage. I let out a deafening belch that tasted like a mix of pepperoni pizza, and one too many beers. "Hook me up," I said, my eyes watering from the painful gaseous release.

Ian tossed the beer can in my direction, but the spinning blur of red, white, and blue was too much for drunken eyes to follow. I reached for the spinning can, but missed. Instead of the beer landing in my hands as I had predicted it would, it slipped through my fingers, collided directly with my forehead, ricocheted off of a wall, and wouldn't you know it, landed right in the empty garbage can with a loud bang.

Needless to say, Ian burst into drunken laughter, beer foam spraying from his mouth and nostrils, his wiry frame girating as if someone was pumping hundreds of volts of electricity through it. Fortunately for me, however, my cigarette remained intact and grasped tightly between my lips. And besides, I was far too drunk to feel the pain of something as slight as a full metal beer can colliding with my skull at sixty miles an hour. Ian toppled out of the torn corduroy couch onto the blotchy gray carpet, tears streaming down his ruddy cheeks as if they would never stop. I rubbed the lump on my forehead, and checked my fingers for blood.

"Alright, dickhead," I chuckled walking towards his crumpled spasming body. "It ain't that funny." I helped him off of the floor and back into the stained couch, his body limp and jerking in my arms. He laughed in sporadic bursts for a few more minutes before finally gaining his composure and the ability to speak.

"That was good, man," he grinned, wiping tears from his face with one sleeve and reaching for his mostly empty beer with his other arm.

"So, we gonna go out tonight, or what, man?" I asked, walking towards the garbage to fetch the projectile beer can.

"Shit...I don't know," Ian answered, a grin still etched into his pale thin face. He reached for a Playstation controller with a nicotine stained hand and pulled it into his lap.

"Now I'm gonna fuck you up for real though," he said, kicking the second controller in my direction.

"Bring the noise, motherfucker, bring it!" I said snatching the controller up and grinning menacingly at him.

"Get some!" he shouted, and we were locked in brutal combat.

Later that night, after a few more games of Tekken, and plenty more of the old faithful Bud, we ended up at Maura's apartment, a nice sized three bedroom place right downtown. Her roommates, who were both incredibly horrible bitches, were gone for the weekend and she had the place to herself. Mike had picked up a couple of kegs from the local liquor store on Maple Street, and the apartment was raging. I purposely wore a baseball cap pulled low over my eyes that evening to cover up the hideous black and blue lump in the center of my forehead. There were going to be a lot of hot girls there, and swollen throbbing blue lumps in the centers of foreheads never helped anyone I know to pick up any girls.

Maura looked good, as usual, as the two of us stumbled into the well-lit hallway. She was wearing baggy jeans and a clingy white tank top that accentuated her nicely shaped breasts.

"Hey guys," she said, beaming as she gave us each a big hug. Her eyes were bloodshot as hell, and they glistened with a glossy coat that said, "hey I'm drunk."

"Where's the cups at, baby?" I said, kissing her on the cheek.

"Upstairs." She gave a limpwristed point up a flight of stairs, and smiled at us the way that only attractive woman can. But it wasn't like that. Maura, after Ian, was probably my best friend in the whole world. I hooked up with her once, but it was so weird. I felt like I was kissing my own sister or something.

The three of us worked our way up the stairs and into the crowded apartment. KRS-1 boomed from the stereo as we pushed our way towards the overflowing kitchen. After pushing through the swarms of dropouts and college students home for the summer, we got red plastic cups, filled them to the brim with cheap light beer, and headed towards the living room. Every seat in the living room was taken, and Little Pete sat in the corner on the nicest chair in the room. Little Pete was one annoying bastard, and I was far too drunk to deal with being around him. This kid was just as white, and just as middle class as Ian or I, but from the way he talked you would have thought that he grew up in the South Bronx.

"Shit," I said, being the first one to spot Little Pete. "There's Little Pete."

"Fuck...about face, about face!" shouted Ian, frantically trying to push his way out of the living room and into the kitchen which was a living organism of moving flesh and t-shirts. But it was too late, we'd been spotted and would have to deal with the obnoxious little prick all night.

"Yo niggas! Whaddup?" he chirped, approaching us with his miniscule hand outstretched.

"Nothin' dude," I sighed, slapping his hand and rolling my eyes in annoyance. Ian said nothing and was still trying to escape from certain death by leech.

"Yo, kid? Aintchoo gonna say wassup?" screeched the skinny little white kid, tugging on the back of Ian's shirt and grinning stupidly. Ian had no tolerance for people he didn't like. He wasn't violent, or even overtly mean, he just got annoyed really easily by people he didn't like, and it showed, but for some reason Pete never got it. Ian turned around reluctantly, trying not to look directly at Pete.

"Hey man," he sighed, bringing his cup up to his lips to avoid any eye contact from his vertically challenged 'archnemesis.' Little Pete held out his tiny little hand for Ian to shake, but Ian pretended not to see it and fought his way into the living room towards the seat that Pete had previously occupied.

"Oh aaaiight, kid. I see wassup, nigga," whined Pete, rapidly nodding his head and shrugging his miniscule shoulders. "Yo, your boy Ian's always playin', kid," he said, smiling up at me stupidly.

Suddenly I noticed a seat free up on the black faux leather couch. Without so much as a word I hastily pushed my way towards it, my little buddy in tow. I flopped myself down in the cushy seat, spilling beer all over my lap.

"Shit!" I said, wiping the puddle of fermented grains out of my lap and onto the wooden floor.

"Daaamn kid!" laughed Little Pete, hissing through a gold encrusted hand and pointing at me with the other. This kid was just too much!

A cute little brunette with sparkling blue eyes was just to my left on the couch. Her name was Aaliya, and I knew her from my high school days. Her pants were baggy enough that her running shoes were hidden in a sea of denim, and she wore a skin tight half shirt pulled taught over her torso. Her belly (which was quite nice) had a silver ring through it which glistened in the orange halogen light. She must have caught me checking out her stomach, because when I looked up she was looking right at me with a devilish sort of grin on her face. Her slim caramel arm hung off of the arm rest, a plastic cup dangling between two of her fingertips.

"Hey," I said cooly, giving her a stupid grin. She smiled and looked away for a second, then turned back towards me, her shoulder length hair swinging across her face for an instant.

By this time in the evening, around 1:00 a.m., the alcohol had really gotten me by the balls. I didn't want to drink anymore, I didn't want to smoke anymore, I just wanted to work this girl. So I started hitting on her real hard. The only problem was that Little Pete kept butting in on our conversation with a "nigga" here and an "oh word?" there. He wouldn't leave us alone. And the part that really sucked was that Aaliya's father was black, and every time Pete busted out with a "nigga" she winced in pain. I glared up at Little Pete, menacingly trying to say, "get the fuck out of here," without actually saying, "get the fuck out of here." But, I swear to God, this kid must have had rocks in his skull, because he just stood there and yammered away. Aaliya just nodded and smiled up at Pete trying to be as nice to him as she could. But it was fairly obvious that she didn't want to deal with him.

"Hey Chris," she said, putting a hand on my thigh. "I've got to go to the ladies room. Will you save my seat?"

"Yeah, sure thing," I said as she pushed off of my leg to get to her feet, the rush of blood to her head causing her to wobble a little bit. She smiled at me and then worked her way out of the room as gracefully as a drunk in a crowded apartment could.

"Yo C. Didjoo see that bitch smile at me?" said Pete, slugging me in the shoulder. "Yo, I bet I could hook up, nigga." He stared off in the direction that Aaliya had just walked off in and licked his lips. I couldn't figure out how he could possibly be so stupid, but he was. I think he genuinely didn't see that I was hitting on this girl, but what could I do? He was a pretty nice kid, and I couldn't kick his ass just for being a moron.

A few minutes later, Aaliya slinked back into the living room, two full plastic cups in her hands. She plopped down into the sofa seat with little spillage, and handed me one of the cups.

"Oh, I filled up a cup for you on my way back," she smiled, batting her eyes at me. Ah...could she be the perfect woman?

"Oh what...none for me?" chirped Little Pete, shrugging his shoulders, that same stupid grin across his face. "No, it's aaaiight, I'm jus' playin'," he said, sitting on the arm of the couch. "Yo, I'm Pete," he said reaching an undersized hand out in front of Aaliya.

"Hey..." she said sweetly, reaching out her left hand.

He gripped it and shook it hard. He gave me a wink as if to say, "yo kid, I'm in there." I looked back at him in disbelief, his bright red hat sitting crookedly on his tiny head.

What happened next I'll never be able to thank Ian enough for. There's a time when someone shows you their true friendship through personal sacrifice, and that time had come for Ian. As if out of nowhere, the tall lanky Ian appeared next to Little Pete, his hood pulled low over his eyes. Ian always wore a sweatshirt, even in the summer.

"Hey Pete...let's go smoke a butt outside," he suggested, placing a long slender arm around Pete's shoulder.

"Word?" he replied, as if surprised by the suggestion. I sure as hell was.

Ian's a good guy, and I knew that he would never kick Pete's ass. They were really going to go outside and smoke a cigarette or two, and more than likely our hero would have an unlikely sidekick for the rest of the evening. As the two of them turned to leave, I mouthed a "thank you" at Ian. He just winked a smiling Irish eye at me as if to say, "get some."

I woke up in an unknown place the next morning, with little knowledge of what had transpired since the courageous rescue by my tall hero. My head throbbed with pain as the tendons that attached my skull to my shrunken dehydrated brain stretched with hangover. My stomach moaned with disapproval as I tried to sit up. I gave up on the idea and collapsed back down into a hard futon. I looked around at the piles of discarded clothing and empty beer cans, trying to get my bearings. Slowly, little bits of memory began to flash back into my head. Another beer, a kiss, another beer, more kisses, removal of clothing, and short bad sex. The end of the party was a total mystery to me, as was the ride to Aaliya's, and the sex was far from memorable. I smiled to myself as I looked across the futon, but to my surprise Aaliya wasn't there. Instead, I saw Maura's pale naked back, her smooth arm across my lap. Her face was buried in the pillow, a grin on the corner of her mouth. I slapped myself in the forehead, forgetting about the swollen lump. I cursed sharply and squeezed my eyes shut as the lump swelled with pain.

"Aw shit..." I said, hating myself for being so stupid. But I shrugged it off and smiled at my foolishness. This was going to be a messy situation when we woke up, but it was nice for now. I pulled Maura a little closer, and chuckling, fell into a semi-drunken sleep, visions of lazy summer days skipping across my eyelids.