"Where the devil should this Romeo be?" Mercutio asked me, now having changed from his duck costume to something less likely to attract passing quack machines, namely a giraffe outfit. He had no reason for it, which was exactly the reason he had for wearing it. "Came he not home tonight?"
"Not to his father's," I shrugged. "I spoke with his man."
"Why, that same pale hard-hearted wench," he continued, and it wasn't as sexist as it sounded, "that Rosaline, torments him so that he will sure run mad."
"Tybalt, the kinsman to old Capulet, hath sent a letter to his father's house."
"A challenge on my life."
"Romeo will answer it," I assured him, although I was tempted to answer it myself, since there was bound to be something in that letter about how Tybalt thought his afro was better than mine.
"Any man that can write may answer a letter."
"Giraffes can't write," I said.
"Alas, poor Romeo, he is already dead, stabbed with a white wench's black eye, run through the ear with a love-song, the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy's butt shaft." If you are under the age of ten, this is your cue to laugh because Mercutio said, "butt". If you're older than that, I hope you can appreciate his alliteration in describing Cupid and his arrow having struck Romeo. "And is he a man to encounter Tybalt?"
"Why, what is Tybalt?"
Upon my asking this question, Mercutio then went into a speech about Tybalt's exceptional fencing skills that was so hilarious in its description, during the course of it our laugh track got replaced with a live audience, comedians from all over the globe (among them the newly risen corpses of Rodney Dangerfield, Mitch Hedburg, and George Carlin) joined the crowd to show him their unwavering support, scientific medicine ceased to be of any necessity anymore, and unfunny people who undeservedly got the same attention as those they stole their jokes from, Dane Cook in particular, finally learned to shut up and were forced to have a minimum wage job cleaning New York City public bathrooms as punishment for their evils.
"Here comes Romeo," I said in the middle of the performance, and perhaps because they knew he was the main character, the several hundred people in the audience all turned to see him walking this way. "Here comes Romeo," I shouted to that one jerk in the eleventh row, who hadn't turned yet because he was absorbed in his text messaging. He quickly closed his cell phone, acted like he had been paying attention the whole time, and joined the rest of the Mercutio fans in watching Romeo step up beside me.
"Good morrow to you both," Romeo said with a simple wave that we could all tell was masking an obvious trauma he had experienced earlier. We didn't know what it was, but on the bright side, it couldn't have been more tragic than his death at the end of the play. (Is it too late for a spoiler warning?)
Mercutio left the stage (which was followed by an "aww" from the disappointed audience) and joined Romeo and I at the corner of one of the sloped triangular seat contraptions.
"What counterfeit did I give you?" Romeo asked us.
"The slip, sir, the slip," Mercutio replied. "Can you not conceive?"
"I sure hope I can, or else what's the point of being a man?" He studied the large crowd behind Mercutio and I, and then squinted to look at a pair of people interacting in a manner inconsistent with almost everyone else there. "Is that…are my eyes…why is George Carlin eating that ladies' brains?"
"I'm sure being in heaven has given him new fodder for his jokes, and he just felt like sharing one," I suggested. I looked at that same lady, who for some reason was slumped over, motionless, and covered in some kind of red bodily fluid that was getting all over her terrified husband's nice shirt and tie, and yelled back to her, "I know, isn't he a riot?!"
"Why did you run away?" Mercutio said to Romeo.
"Pardon, good Mercutio," he answered, "my business was great, and in such a case as mine a man may strain courtesy."
"That's as much as to say such a case as yours constrains a man to bow in the hams."
"Meaning, to curtsy."
"Thou hast most kindly hit it."
"I wish," Romeo said with a nervous laugh.
"Right," Mercutio said.
Going against the precedent that had been set minutes before, Mercutio then engaged in a battle of wits with Romeo that was so fascinatingly dull, as the two of them exchanged plays on words, the sizable audience Mercutio had attracted demanded that I give them their money back (even though it had been a free show), our laugh track was reinstated with accompanying precautionary legislation, millions immediately died due to a complete lack of any medical resources whatsoever, and Dane Cook dropped by to steal some of Romeo and Mercutio's material. In other words, everything that been accomplished during the previous appearance of this running gag was negated, relegating the world back into neutral. Just how dull was their conversation? I can't even find a way to end this paragraph with an entertaining joke, that's how dull it was.
"Stop there, stop there," I said, urging my friend and cousin to stop making our lives worthy of some of the filmed scripts in Master Capulet's movie collection.
"Thou desirest me to stop in my tale against the hair," Mercutio replied.
The perpetuating dullness I had just been witness to prevented me from giving Mercutio a satisfactory response, but luckily excitement decided to make a comeback tour, strolling back into town in the form of a rotund black woman, none other than the Nurse. As any American history teacher won't admit to you, if it weren't for the presence of blacks, there wouldn't be much of a class to teach. They automatically make everything more exciting. For that very reason, the decidedly whiter European continent is stuck in boring ol' peace, while Africa seems to be in perpetual turmoil. Ah, minorities: making things fun for the rest of us.
"Here's goodly gear," Romeo said, which basically meant he thought the Nurse was attractive, which meant, had he hooked up with her instead of Juliet, the taboo wouldn't just be familial, it would be interracial, and when you consider the fact that she's fat and he's hot, and that he's a teenager and she's middle-aged, this whole "star-crossed lovers" thing with Juliet seems like a pretty uninteresting plot, doesn't it? "A sail, a sail!" he added, for no reason other than he was thinking about boats.
"Two, two," Mercutio said, cleverly saying the word twice. "A shirt and a smock."
"Peter," the Nurse said, referring to the hilariously subordinate white man standing beside her.
"Anon," Peter said, in what must have been an attempt to sound relevant.
"My fan, Peter," the Nurse ordered, opening her hand for Peter to place her fan there. He did as he was told, and because Peter was a white man doing the bidding of a black superior, Malcolm X (who, I should stress, is not a Marvel comics superhero) had an incident he could later cite as proof that his cause could be a success. But then somebody killed him in the same way I just killed the mood.
"Good Peter," Mercutio said as the Nurse took the fan and waved it in her face, "to hide her face, for her fan's the fairer face."
"Up yours, motherf—!" the Nurse squealed, the last five letters conveniently censored by the galloping of an oncoming giraffe. How we longed for the days when the lusty female animals rushing to a costumed Mercutio didn't weigh two tons. The animal gave Mercutio some John Lennon-certified instant karma and began humping the poor fellow (this despite the fact that, being the female, she was supposed to be on the receiving end, but I guess even giraffes like to go a little crazy sometimes). "Gentlemen," the Nurse continued, "where's Romeo?"
"During the first act you knew who he was," I said. "I know that because you were the one who told Juliet who he was. You specifically said, 'his name is Romeo, and a Montague, the only son of your great enemy.'"
"I'm Romeo," someone who doesn't need their name pointed out in this dialogue tag because it was stated in the dialogue itself said, raising his hand.
"Come with me," the Nurse said, pulling Romeo away from us. Mercutio would have made a dirty comment about Romeo's situation, but he was stuck in his own dirty situation with a camel leopard that made such an act nearly impossible. As for me, I found myself enjoying watching Mercutio being raped by a horny giraffe too much to either help him out or to abandon him and follow the Nurse and Romeo to see what they were up to.
"I will follow you," Romeo said to the Nurse, and then, to make Death Cab for Cutie happy, he added the otherwise meaningless phrase, "into the dark."
"Who the hell was that?" the Nurse asked Romeo, pointing to the boy being crushed under the giraffe some distance away.
"A gentleman, Nurse, that loves to hear himself talk and will speak more in a minute than he will stand to in a month."
"Bastard deserves to be ass-raped by a giraffe," the Nurse said casually.
Because she looked like marginally a better mother figure than Lady Capulet, a little girl then ran up to the Nurse, tears welling in her virgin eyes, and asked what was happening to Geoffrey and if this had anything to do with the toy store being closed. The Nurse answered the child's question by slapping her on the cheek, giving her the quickest explanation of the birds and the bees and the giraffes ever told, and finally telling her to stop being so materialistic, starting by acting her age (which was five). The horrified girl ran home crying, but considering the toy store was still closed, this was hardly a matter of concern.
"I hate being used by men," the Nurse said to herself. She hadn't been used by any men lately in any sense other than Mercutio's one condescending remark from earlier, which had already been dealt with (and, if Mercutio's screams were any indication, still was), but being a minority, she had the right to complain about anything regardless of its pertinence to the actual subject being talked about or the legitimacy of the complaint.
"I saw no man use you at his pleasure," Peter said. "If I had, my weapon should quickly have been out. I warrant you, I dare draw as soon as another, if I see occasion in a good quarrel, and the law on my side."
You'll notice nobody acknowledged him.
"Juliet told me to scope your white ass out," the Nurse told Romeo, putting her hands on his face and confirming that he did in fact look like Arnie Grape without the mental retardation. "You better not have any sick shit planned, kid. The last thing I want to hear about is you going anal with my dumb, precious little bitch."
"Nurse, commend me to thy lady and mistress," Romeo told the Nurse, putting his hands on her breasts in what he mistakenly believed was a proper, mannerly response to the Nurse's previous bodily contact with him.
With both feminism and black power on her side, the Nurse immediately retaliated to this unwanted groping by gripping onto Romeo's genitals tightly and then doing to them what is normally reserved for fruit being made into juice, except for the selling them on the street for five cents a cup aftermath. That would have certainly made her point, but then again, who would really want to buy such a liquid from such a vendor anyway?
"I protest unto thee—" Romeo said, barely able to speak. His voice was so high-pitched at this moment that the glass windows on several nearby shops broke, and the fun of the riots planned for later that day was thus ruined.
"Do you respect Juliet?" the Nurse asked, and although the answer Romeo gave was honest and correct, in his position he clearly didn't have the choice to say the opposite.
"Yes, ma'am," Romeo nodded. She then let go of his manhood, and he quickly pulled down his pants and underwear to expose said organs to the free air. Luckily for him, the Nurse understood he was doing so as a personal remedy and not as a further act of sexual violation. In fact, she studied carefully the genitals she had nearly crushed in her deceptively powerful fist in order to assess what Juliet was up against in the days to come. "What wilt thou tell her, Nurse?"
"Damn," the Nurse said, staring at his crotch like the Friar before her.
"Thou dost not mark me," Romeo said. The Nurse wasn't listening.
"I'll tell her…" the Nurse began, carefully deciding what to tell the dumb bitch once she returned home. "…Wow, I am so sorry. Is there a doctor you can get to?"
"Mercutio," Romeo said. "He has an M.D. Actually, this is pretty much his specialty."
"Okay."
"Anyway, bid her devise some means to come to shrift this afternoon, and there she shall at Friar Lawrence' cell be shrived and married." He reached into his pocket in his pants on the ground and pulled out his wallet, which wasn't actually his (it said "Bad Motherf***er" on it, but without the annoying censoring this story's rating asserts on it) and offered the Nurse two $20 bills. "Here is for thy pains."
"Do I look like a hooker to you?"
"No, but this for thy pains."
"My pains?!" the Nurse laughed. "Boy, get your white ass to a doctor, I damn near crushed your junk."
"But I touched you inappropriately."
"Get that money out of my face!" the Nurse said, slapping Romeo's hand and thereby knocking the bills out of it. "Juliet will meet you this afternoon, then?"
"And stay, good Nurse, behind the abbey wall," Romeo said. "Within this hour my man shall be with thee and bring thee cords made like a tackled stair, which to the high topgallant of my joy must be my convoy in the secret night. Farewell. Be trusty, and I'll quit thy pains." He picked the money up off the ground and once again offered it to the Nurse. "Farewell. Commend me to thy mistress."
In response to the boy's stupidity, the Nurse then said the f-word followed by the "you" word.
"What sayst thou, my dear Nurse?"
Reluctantly, the Nurse took the money from the boy who'd need it for the medical bills her actions would soon produce, and then proceeded to ask Romeo the kind of motherly questions Lady Capulet was too Lady Capulet-like to say. "Is your man secret?"
"Warrant thee, my man's as true as steel."
"You know what? Screw it. Both Juliet's mom and I think Paris is the better man for her, but you make her happy, and I guess that's all that matters, right? Don't rosemary and Romeo both begin with the same letter?"
"Ay, Nurse, what of that? Both with an R."
"What the shit? You're a pirate?"
"Huh?" There was an uncomfortable pause where Romeo briefly thought the Nurse was about to unleash the full strength of the RIAA on him, but this fear waned, and he changed the subject to make sure the Nurse understood what to do. "Commend me to thy lady."
"Get your balls checked out," the Nurse replied, giving him back his money.
Romeo took this to mean the Nurse knew what to tell Juliet, and not wanting to incite her wrath a second time, he hurried away with the money in his hands and his pants still off.