YOUR BOYFRIEND INVITES you to move in with him, but he lives inside a mechanical bull and you dread spending the night there. That would be a less than ideal living arrangement, you explain.
I hardly even notice the cowboys anymore, he says.
But really the cowboys are a nuisance. You turn on the kitchen light at night and cowboys skitter across the floor in their Wrangler jeans, their spurs clinking. When you try to fall asleep, you hear the cowboys crawling around in the dust under the bed, singing prairie songs around a campfire.
I’ll call the landlord, your boyfriend says, but his landlord is busy running the country-western bar and he tells your boyfriend that there is a reason the rent for his mechanical bull is so low.
I don’t deal with cowboy infestations or motion sickness, the landlord says.
Your boyfriend asks if you will dress as a cowboy during sex, says it might help you get more comfortable in the apartment. You try to ease into it by wearing a bandana and a pair of boots but then you remember that time you left the butter out and came back to tiny boot prints in it, and you can’t keep an erection.
What if you moved? you ask your boyfriend. The truth is, you know your boyfriend doesn’t mind the cowboys. He tries to tell you how cute they are if you look at them right, and how they help keep other pests out with their small guns, but to you they all look like they’ve rolled around in the gunk underneath the refrigerator.
I’m just saying, there must be apartments that don’t have a cowboy problem, you say.
This is a very difficult real estate market, your boyfriend says. And it is, it really is.