The room is dim save for a focused champagne lights that illuminate the green felt-covered table at the center. The room is unremarkable save for the table itself and therefore, irrelevant. Seated around this table, which maintains a vaguely circular appearance by virtue of it's octagonal design are presently three people. To my left, there is a man I will never meet outside of this place as, outside of this place, I'm pretty sure we'd try to kill each other – one Hal Jordan, or more affectionately known by his alter ego: The Green Meanie. The brown-haired handsome man glances in my direction.
“Deadpool, are you narrating in your head?” he asks. He sounds irritated, but clearly he doesn't understand that without narration, this would merely appear as a black blank page in an open word processing program on some idiot's computer.
“Just let him be,” says the man on my left, famous actor of the big and small screen – Ryan Reynolds. “You know if he doesn't narrate he'll disappear in a puff of logic.”
“Why did I agree to this again?” Hal inquires, his irritation clearly increasing.
“Because,” I reply, shuffling and bridging the cards expertly and definitely NOT sending 50 of the 52 cards flying across the table. “Joe needs to reconnect to the source material.”
“Which is me,” Ryan states, entirely not gathering the cards that flew onto the floor.
“Not even a little,” Hal rebukes, stacking up the blue, red, and white chips. “You know he doesn't give a hoot about popular culture which excludes you,” he gestures to Ryan, “and he has been a DC Comics fan since he was 10 years old, which entirely excludes you,” he finishes his argument with a computer-generated flourish toward me.
“But he has said more than once that YOUR movie was the worst DC movie of all time,” I counter. “And he fucking LOVED my movie.”
Hal bristles. “DC writers suck and Warner Brothers doesn't have the cojones to do a rated-R superhero movie…”
“Or a superhero movie with a female lead, or with an anthropomorphic rodent as a main supporting character….” Ryan murmurs as a not-so-subtle aside.
Hal glares. “Hey bite your tongue, you weren't even IN that movie!”
“Oh shut up, both of you!” I snap. “He is just out side the door.”
Hal stares at me. “How do you know?” The door opens and in walks the REAL Cheeky Joe.
Ryan stage whispers to Hal: “He's breaking the fourth wall and reading the meta-plot.”
I shrug. “Really it's more like I'm NARRATING the whole thing,” I shoot Ryan a Vaudevillian wink before greeting our newcomer by standing.
He is tall and bearded and bespectacled, big to the point of overweight, but wide-shouldered and walks with a great deal of confidence. “Joseph,” I say.
“That is not my name,” he replies.
“I know,” I say, and I do of course but that isn't the point. “But for today, your name is Joseph. Sit down.” I gesture to the one remaining seat. He glances at it. Reaches out a tattooed wrist and pulls out the chair to sit. I sit too.
“Hal, Ryan, you know Joseph.” I say. They both shake their heads.
“Nope,” says Hal.
“Never met him,” says Ryan. Joe seems not at all bothered by this, shrugging his broad shoulders.
“I know both of you,” he states.
“Good enough,” I say and deal out the cards. One to the kitty, two face down to each of them. They stare at the cards on the table as I place the rest of the deck down. Then they stare at me.
“Now what?” asks Hal.
“Don't you guys know how to play Texas Hold 'Em?” I ask, incredulous. Everyone answers negatively. “Well fuck, neither do I.”
“Perhaps we should get to the point,” Joe stats, resting his thick forearms on the edge of the table. “Why am I here?”
“You're here to answer a simple question,” Deadpool answers in the third person, then switches back to first. “How are you gonna' win this tag match?”
“Okay,” Joe says, glancing between the three of us. “Why are THEY here? And for that matter… You?”
“You tell us,” the three of us say at the same time causing a vaguely creepy echo effect that makes my nuts shrivel.
He considers the question. “I hurt my back this morning,” he replies. “Right this second I am doped up on so many prescription strength painkillers that I don't know what is the what.”
“So not a great time to write,” Hal nods knowingly. Ryan shrugs.
“I don't know,” he states. “Lots of writers write while impaired. Poe had opium, Hemingway had alcohol-”
“And cocaine,” Joe informs, smirking slightly. Ryan nods.
“And cocaine,” he agrees. “Perhaps fucked up on painkillers is the way to go.”
“What do you feel like writing?” I ask Joe.
“I've always enjoyed the notion of writing a blatant meta-plot but I could never quite accomplish it while sober,” he admits.
“Ah yes,” I say with a smile. “Something where you feature yourself as a character but not the narrator surrounded by different iterations of the same person up to and INCLUDING the very person who has come to represent these iterations of said character and then have a whole speech about catering to the meta-plot within the meta-plot of the text that you are writing, choosing of course the individual you chose to represent the character you are writing this for and but instead of plugging him into the scenario, describing yourself in his place because let's face it: You ARE the real Cheeky Joe.”
Joe considers this. “Something like that, yeah.”
“But how do you couch that into a roleplay?” Hal asks.
“You could do the 'it was all a dream' ending,” Ryan suggests. “It's a cheap get but it does the job.”
“Kind of fucks with the readers though,” Hal says. “And like you said, it's a bit cheap. It's kind of like giving the reader a giant middle finger.”
I nod. “And then shoving it up his ass and wiggling it around but don't you see? I spread my hands wide, giving Hal and Ryan the finger and waggling them suggestively. “That is what Cheeky Joe is all about. He's not here to win matches, he is here to have fun and if dry-penetrating the collective rectums of his audience is how he gets off, let him have his cheap get. He'll cum on in their poopers and smear the resulting frothy mixture of fecal matter and sperm all over their faces and ultimately get his jollies… which is the whole motherfucking point.”
“Besides,” Ryan says, breaking the fourth wall and addressing you, the reader.
“No one reads this shit anyhow,” Hal states, doing the same thing. I smile in smug satisfaction because I've been breaking the fourth wall the entire time. And the three of us disappear in a puff of logic, but JUST before I wink out of existence, I think of something, and pull my dissembling molecules back together. The Real Cheeky Joe just looks at me from across the table. I point as his crotch and yell:
“BOOYA!” causing immediate and painful ejaculation. I puff away as he shouts at me in rage and pain, a satisfied smile on my face.
Cheeky Joe snorts awake and glances around. He is in the front passenger seat of Average Mike's Prius, en route to Lonestar State Civic Center. Mike glances over. “Power nap?”
Joe blinks. “Yup.”
“You were talking in yourself. Were you having the Hal Jordan, Ryan Reynolds, and Deadpool play poker dream again?”
Joe pushes himself into a better seated position. “Yup. I really oughta learn Texas Hold 'Em cuz we only get so far before we have to stop and they have to lay some kind of existential lesson on me.”
Mike just nods, he's heard this before. “Any idea how you're gonna beat John Rikers and Terryl Fexxfield tonight?”
Joe snorts. “No fucking clue. I'll think of something.”
A long pause draws out between them.
“I'm gonna need to change pants,” Joe says.
“I know.” Mike replies, keeping his eyes very pointedly on the road ahead.
Fade to black.
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