Sleeping With The Television On
Felix is usually the one who sticks tight to the television schedule, hand over heart as the Star-Spangled Banner blares dim and tinny from the speakers of their color set mounted on its rack. He's the one who watches at reasonable times, after all - Oscar finds himself so rigid in his own bizarre idiosyncrasies that he'll complain about Felix's vacuuming occurring "even at four o'clock in the morning when people are watching television" - who does that? Really, who does that?
But, no matter who else does, Oscar himself is a frequent culprit, even or perhaps especially on nights when Felix's patience has flagged out long before the first hour of the new day has rolled itself out. Monday to Friday, Carson comes and goes, but of course it goes its last going when the weekend has more officially begun.
Saturday isn't a day when Oscar doesn't work, necessarily, because there's always games to cover, or to coach for smaller, stouter souls, if that happens not to be true, but he doesn't go into the office. Even Felix agrees that it's a day where one can sleep in a little later, literally agnostic of any religious attachments (Oscar is Jewish, somewhere along the line, but he's not quite what one would call practicing, and somehow neither is Felix, perhaps owing to his penchant for rigid entrenchment in habits that become intertwined with one integral person or another as the days, weeks, months, years soldier on).
Did you catch that last bit? Oh, he's a stickler. What has been becomes what must be, and of course what must be becomes what will be, even though so many of his brandishile schemes, and Oscar's as well, fade all to fast into bumbling obscurity. Felix has nothing but his habits. Has nothing but his insecurities and the desperate ways in which he fends with and against them. Oscar, too, but he's just a heap of indistinguishable cope, of unpresentable hope for the dope, and you can't pick apart what makes him him. He's never tried himself.
What makes them tick, what makes them tock, the clock on the mantle swings idly by. Round about three bells, Felix shuffles out of the bedroom hallway because the static's buzz has gotten itself caught in his ears, tangled in the pristine canals that are always a-drumming, a-drumming, a-drumming. As he walks, back the closest to slumping-slouching it'll ever get, he flicks a pinky finger at the core of the issue. That won't solve it, Felix. You know it won't. That'll only make it worse.
Oscar is there, beer can thankfully empty and cigar ash thankfully shod, the classical slobbish heap on the couch. His shirt is rumpled but somehow not fully untucked, his hair is tousled and the dark roots have flipped over the gray tips (Felix hates this but doesn't know why), his jaw is slack and soft. Felix should be completely and totally ticked by the slovenly sight, but he isn't. Long has he learned not to be. Long has he learned that he can't be.
"Oscar."
No answer. There shouldn't be, the man is asleep. If he had suddenly lightened up so far as to get jumpy from noise practically as white as that perlining heather-fuzzled snowdrifts over the cathode tubes' production, Felix would have reason to worry, to pontificate, to catastrophize. His ulcer, perhaps, making it so that he'd never get a peaceful night's sleep again. Perish the thought, will you? He's told you he's been good lately. Don't chase down another reason to worry.
"Oscar."
This time, Felix accompanies the soft address with a gentle hand laid to shoulder, shaking first forth and back to nudge into the cushions, then side to side to engage the other man's neck in the unrestive motion. Oscar makes an incoherent groan, probably, and his nose twitches. That nose. Swapping over hands, left down and right up, Felix passes the pad of an index over the tender tip of the broad bulb.
"Oscar."
Maybe he considers something about optimal leverage of rousing mechanisms, maybe he's just itching to get off his feet again - he hadn't planned such an in-depth excursion when from his bed he'd arisen, disturbing the perfectly-pulled sheets - but he soon settles in next to Oscar, hand still on his shoulder but soon snaking around the back of his neck because even for a shorter, less gangled man, the cramped distance would have been uncomfortable.
Oscar, Oscar, Oscar. Felix doesn't say anything more, and if he tried it would come out muffled, because his head's gone bowed to the unquiet slumberer's deltoid. Yes, all the disturbance had achieved was setting Oscar to snoring by way of his mouth sliding sideways and slightly open. Better this noise than that of the static, however, and all of Felix's insomnia born of this irritating distraction is soon soothed away.
In the not-quite-morning, Oscar wakes to a surprisingly heavy Felix tucked over the right side of his chest, his legs crossed up way too tightly for any man's most crucial bits to remain intact, but Oscar doesn't question that impossibility any more than he does the one that is Felix conceding, acceding, to this wild and wanting arrangement.
"Couldn't sleep, Fel'?"
"Hmm? Oscar?"
He recalls, he recalls, he recalls. In his stupor, he doesn't jerk up, miraculously. That's as much as from his perspective as it is from Oscar's, or as it is from yours and mine, might I add. There's something to be said for small-screen magic, after all. Not that syndication inspires magic, particularly, but it does make beloved a routine, one where you've not got to be always jumping at the next best thing that's promised down the pipeline, but can instead simply settle with what you've got, what you've already had, what you've grown to trust and like the most.
"No, I slept just fine."
Oscar raises his eyebrows, makes an appraising face, but he's feeling sweet and accommodating all the same - just the same, in fact. "I'm sure you did, buddy. You wanna go to your own bed now, for another couple hours?"
He realizes his gaffe too late, because oh, such a scandalous suggestion, to invite yourself into your strictly platonic (ha) roommate's bed for a Saturday morning roll in the hay, but Felix doesn't notice, or if he does, he doesn't make mention.
"No...'d like to stay here with you."
And since he's said that, Oscar doesn't even bother leaning forward to shut off the set before it has to be Dinah's Place that serves as their alarm clock with its unexpected sounds quite different to-- Well, well, what have we here? What could Oscar possibly have been watching at such a time when the air wasn't even on to be on the air? Quite a few years left until that'll be possible.
So maybe it was just a subconscious conflation, that he'd like Felix to be around in the middle of the night when there is, otherwise, no friend but the almost-silent idiot box. Maybe.
Not really time to psychoanalyze, is it? The guests have gone, the interviews are through.
"Whatever you say, Felix."
Round about noon, Murray pokes his nose through the door, also anachronistically left unlocked, and promptly unpokes it and whistles off to mind his own business. Eventually, they wake, and peer blearily at each other, but neither speaks the rest of the clichés. Felix wanders into the kitchen to put coffee on, and Oscar, of all things, goes to brush his teeth.
It isn't the first time they've done this, necessarily, and it's also quite likely not to be the last. Who's to say? Tune in next time. I hope you've enjoyed the vulnerable if slightly voyeuristic program broadcast on this channel today. Good night? Well, and good morning.