Meanwhile on PBS, Vila & Norm Fashion
a Walk-In Closet from Balsa Planks with a Smooth Dark Stain

Sado and Maz, who were lovers as well as roommates, sat in their respective leather easy chairs, staring at the forty-two inch Mitsubishi High Definition television screen, which was tuned to Bravo Network. Together they watched Inside The Actors’ Studio, wherein a feral-looking sycophant named James Lipton shamelessly sucked up to Tom Cruise.

“My God!” Sado cried.

As he leaned forward to point derisively at the screen, Sado’s leather seat squeaked like some mortally wounded mammalian creature.

“ACK!” echoed Maz, in his Dresden brogue, “I see, vat you see. Yah.”

“Jesus, just look at the motherfucker... Every damned branch of a Top Secret Ugly Tree. That’s what he hit, alright. He done hit it, and then some... Look, Maz—look at Lipton’s upper lip! He’s like Predator, when Schwarzenegger rips its fucking face mask off!”

Maz chuckled, shuddered, and chided:

“You ahhh one ug-leee mothah-fuckah!”

This crack from Maz, it cracked Sado up, to the max.

Doubled over in the recliner, Sado laughed until hot tears sprang from his eyelid clefts; then, when he’d wiped his face dry with a loosely-rolled denim shirt sleeve, he was inspired to channel Robert De Niro:

“You talking ta me?” Sado said with straight face, “There’s nobody else here, Pony Boy, so I guess you must be—”

“Leesten,” interrupted Maz. “Deefer-rent subject now.”

Maz pointed to a rectangular blank spot on the wall, above and to the right of where the television was mounted.

“I vant a Shadow Box.”

At that, the lovers’ usually ultra-communicative bond lapsed—for a scintilla of seconds—into cross purposes; yet Sado, being Sado, got busy anyway, exploiting it. His cobalt-blue eyes sparkled with a bright, flinty glint, the pupils dilating like time-lapse sunflowers on Discovery Channel. With one ear, Sado continued listening to Lipton, whose reverence for Cruise seemed to choke the talk show host’s pompous breath into the harshest of squeaky whispers.

Both Sado and Maz, smirking in tandem, listened as Lipton said:

“October fourth, nineteen seventy three, and you, a tow-headed latchkey kid, fighting through the soporific torpor of an Indian Summer afternoon, nibbling your grilled cheese cum-cucumber sandwich as the credits rolled on another episode of Dark Shadows... Something happened then, didn’t it?—before all the years of training, the iron-willed discipline, the artistic vicissitudes, misunderstandings and controversy relative to your private life, all that would come later—but something terribly pivotal, and I daresay incontrovertible, happened that afternoon, to young Tom Cruise. Will you share it with us, now?”

Maz felt his cheeks getting hot and prickly, his cock stiffening in the loose-fitting knee-length khaki cutoffs he wore.

“Ha hah,” said Maz meekly, steering the conversation back to its cluster-fucked source. “Shadow Box. The Noun, yah. Verb, no. Hehe. A tiny meesunderstanding, maybe? Vat I vant, is a Shadow... Box...” Maz spread his forearms, as if cradling a crate. He pointed at the bare spot on the wall. “To be professionally hung,” Maz explained, “right over dere. Next to our spanking new DVR Upgrade which you previously promised—a Shadow Box, for placing of pink quartz paper weights, snow globes and othah memora-beelia!”

Sado sprang up from the leather easy chair.

He squared off, in a loose fighting stance— is right hand cocked, while the left lazily pawed the air, like a palsy. When he tried to imitate the Ali Shuffle, in stocking feet on the slick blonde hardwood, Sado nearly fell and broke his back. He caught hold of the corner of a teakwood armoire at the last second, steadying himself.

As he continued his advance toward the still-seated Maz, Sado’s head swayed in a circular, bob-and-weave fashion, like a cobra on the cusp of a venomous strike.

Maz, fully aroused now, listened—to the tiny cobwebs within the crystalline interstices of the chandelier, as they fairly crackled with static electricity. The dizzy mind of Maz half-formed the thought:

Meees-understandings...
Not always a very bad ting...

On the tube, Lipton wryly coaxed a flash of ire from the Raven-Haired Heartthrob:

“Will you set the record straight? The key to your control— over mind, will and fate. Will you, Tom Cruise, at long last come clean with us?”

Maz took Lipton’s lead, tried to follow suit, and fan Sado’s flames, just a little bit:

No, Leesten. Vat I vant... a Shadow Box. You understand? Long, gleaming hickory vood. Vell crafted. At Home Depot, surely vee can—”

Yet Sado heard only what Sado wanted to hear, and was, in fact, already straddling the spit-shined umber footrest of Maz’s Barcalounger. His open left palm, in a sudden vicious roundhouse, smacked hard against Maz’s cheek.

“Ahhhh, that stings like a Mothah-Fuckah!”

“Say what you said,” Sado said. “Say it again, Schroeder!”

“Nooooooooo!,” Maz cried. “I vant—”

With a deft left jab of 3 Stooges middle finger, Sado got Maz a good one—right on the bridge of the nose. Maz’s glasses went flying, and the blows began to rain down then.

“Remember?” said Sado, between grunts, “that time at Von’s?... We hit the Exit Bay, loaded with staples—my arms plum full of paper sacks, but on top—a green banana!”

Sado tweaked the very bridge of his partner’s nose—as if flicking away a mortally injured housefly trying to fashion a foxhole from the nostril there.”

“Yes,” Maz answered, “I put Nana in your mouth—whole-skinned.”

“That’s right! With only my teeth, I peeled her, then took it down so fast it’s sick!”

A heavy blow to the ear hole brought tears to Maz’s eyes: “Yah!” he cried. “You were fawking on that schtick, baby. All the way!”

“Now say what you said—before,” said Sado. “Say it now.”

Maz could taste a trickle of copper, leaking from his torn upper lip—into a greedily sucking mouth. He didn’t hesitate:

“Yah! You... Ahhhh one uggg-leeee mothah-fuckah!”

Maz’s endearing shrieks merged with the flickering cathode shadow-play on the warm walls—while he and Sado worked it out, and all was right with the world.