Brovada Moustache Tonic & Exorcistic Unguent

Brovada is how I pronounce Bovada whenever I swallow the “R” at the bottom of bottles of Dr Bovasa‘s patented Moustache Tonic & Exorcistic Unguent. That R must have wriggled its way back up my throat while I slept because I felt it moving behind my front teeth when I woke, trying to get a little purchase between my two front teeth, looking to set up a bookie’s somewhere warm with a decent view.

Before I laid me down to sleep I put a few ducats on Bovada‘s Ravens-Eagles moneyline. By breakfast I was telling anyone who would listen that my favorite sportsbook was Brovada, puffing my chest and insisting with the confidence I reserve for such moments as when I offer a false name to the local constabulary.

By game time I was rolling that R around with my tongue like un muchacho terrrrrrrífico. It isn’t Brovada. Of course I knew that. But my tongue didn’t, or wouldn’t, I couldn’t tell which. Either way, I couldn’t just abide, man.

So I made a call. The brothers were waiting. They knew I’d call.

The Brovada Brothers. Cousins of the Bewlay Brothers and two of the most magnificent specimens of masculinity this world has ever had the fortune to encounter. Each at the zenith of confidence and ability: tanned to toast, moustachioed as gods; able to shake off any hangover; and fall asleep mid-exorcism and wake moments later with an erection that demands the sacrifice of thirteen virgins. Brovada is synonymous with praeternatural masculinity; it’s no wonder therefore that I was possessed.

Each kissed both of my cheeks as they welcomed me in, a brother deftly reaching between my teeth as I passed tugging loose a length of a Bovada bet slip that spooled from my tongue like a magician’s hankie as I walked deeper into the Brovada abode. September, I saw spill from my mouth. October… Los Playoffs…

He wound the slip around his forearm as he followed, nodding at the spreads and totals as he scanned them. At February he stopped, tore it off against my incisors, and smiled like an enlightened Buddha. I’d swallowed the entire season.

He unwound the paper from his arm, wadded it, and threw it into the fireplace, lit a match with a streak across his drum-tight abdomen, threw the match onto the wad and watched it all burn. Brovadas don’t get exorcism – they give. I sank into a recliner, closed my eyes, and slept like I’d repaid a debt.

I woke and we walked to the municipal baths, pools of healing waters lobed like amniotics sacs into giant bags sewn from the bladders of pigs slaughtered in the abbatoire where the famous Brovada Sausage was made. The bath attendant knew the brothers. Everybody knew Los Hermanos Brovada. Doors sighed open as they approached and shut again as they passed. Women shivered in their britches. Sunflowers bowed.

In the baths, pale blobs of men floated in the salt-pink water, endlessly muttering odds on the infinite spectrum of possible turns of super-proximate future events, the odds adjusting endlessly on an endlessly varying stream of events everywhere, only going quiet when a particular stream was extinguished, it’s ceasing unnoticed in the din of innumerously legion alternate possibilities. An attendant handed me a towel, another took my phone, laying it in a pool of steaming water. It floated, grew teeth. There is truth in these waters.

We left our clothes at the rack and lowered our bodies into the scalding water and blanched, and as I soaked I felt my moustache come into being. No itch. No tingle. Just a momentary outward pressure as two black wings extruded from beneath my nose. Within minutes I could feel low pressure systems converge several miles away. Somewhere north of us, a man was about to call a six-leg parlay “conservative.” My left curl tightened painfully. The brothers showed me how to Brovada through it.

Downstairs, my past was in the pre-soak. I could hear the operator rearranging my pasts. He’d found the afternoon I first understood that adults could lose everything and still be expected to tell children everything would be all right.

Noone spoke. A brother put his hand over mine, his palm warm enough to hatch something, large enough for it to be a brood. With his other hand he parted the curtains of my mustache and looked into my open mouth. “There you are.” he said and with sheperd’s crook of a finger nimbly popped the R loose.

I held it between finger and thumb, a small red heart with a pulse. Brovada was just Bovada. I knew it perfectly. I brought my hand up toward my mouth, the R like a ghost limb itching, crying out for my tongue. The brothers saw and stopped my hand before it could reach my lips, gently shaking their heads, a single tear lobing out from each eye and running slowly down their cheeks to nourish the magnificent jungles of mustache. Four tears, four cheeks, two mustaches, two Brovados. Brovada was once again Bovada: exorcism complete.

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