Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2016 01:33:49 -0800
From: Liina Koivula <liinakj@gmail.com>
Subject: It's the Water

The spring I was 20 I moved out of my room at my mom's duplex and into
Annie's dining nook. She tacked up a couple of queen sized sheets between
the nook and the kitchen. One was white with blue flowers. It looked like
it was printed in the late 70s. The other sheet was a canary yellow. Annie
got a hand-me-down futon from a co-worker who was dropping out of college,
and let me sleep on her old twin sized mattress and box spring.  It was
cozy. I kept my clothes in a duffel bag at the foot of the bed and slept
beneath an unzipped sleeping bag. I had room for a couple of stacks of
books. There was a nice big window facing a four-lane thoroughfare and
beyond, the Department of Licensing parking lot. Sometimes deer walked
through the lot, and one time a squirrel hurled itself off of a tree and
into the wall. I was going to school part time and selling weed, which was
much easier to do from Annie's than my mom's.
	She wanted to socialize with all my clients. She was a nurse who
liked to unwind with beer and cigarettes and card games in the kitchen. Her
best friend was this male nurse named Kenny. He'd grab my wrist as I
skirted around the table towards my room with a client. "God, Jeremy, when
are you going to stop working so hard and have a drink with us?"
	Mom would cackle, her plump, tattooed arms jiggling. "Who's your
friend?" she winked. "You boys want a beer?"
	My client was a high school kid barely into puberty, a brother of
someone I used to work with at some pizza place. "No, thank you," he
declined politely.
	"Call me sometime, Jeremy," Kenny sassed. The more he drank, the
campier he talked. "Sometime when your mom's at work. We'll have a party
without her."
	"Oh, for Christ sake, Kenny!" Mom swatted him with her hand of
cards. "Leave my kid alone! He doesn't date old men!"
	"Don't call me old, Sweetie. I'm only 33!"
	I shooed my client down the hallway.

Annie started having over this guy she worked with, Nick. He had longish
blonde hair he wore in a puny ponytail at the base of his neck, a shitty
goatee, and he always showed up wearing flannel pajama pants and Adidas
slip-on sandals with white athletic socks. He had pajamas in several
different plaids.
	"Is that the MacDougall tartan?" I asked.
	"Huh?" he said.
	"Nothing."
	He was a cook, and Annie was a server, at a takeout teriyaki
joint. They'd bring home Styrofoam clamshells full of greasy noodles and
limp cabbage that made me wake up crunched into fetal position with stomach
cramps in the middle of the night.
	We'd sit on the couch and take bong rips and watch movies. Annie
and Nick always sat with a pillow between them. They were holding hands
under the pillow.
	Nick made Annie laugh. He made her laugh harder than I'd ever seen
her laugh. He seemed surprised when she laughed, and he'd repeat whatever
he had said, with a blunt guffaw at the end, which made her laugh
harder. We had some really good bud, at the time. She laughed until she was
doubled-over. She laughed until she was crying and coughing. She dug her
fists into her eyes and smeared her makeup. "Oh, shit," she said, giggling
all the way to the bathroom. We heard her cough deeply and spit and run
water. She came back with glowing skin. Her eyes receded into her face,
without eyeliner. She smiled at me and Nick, and we smiled at each other,
and back at her.
	They must have known I could hear them having sex. I was right on
the other side of the bedroom wall, and they weren't quiet. He'd moan
raggedly while she let out high pitched grunts which crescendoed to a near
scream. Then they spoke muffled words around large spaces of silence while
I jerked off under my sleeping bag.

"Jeremy?" Annie said from the other side of the sheet-curtain.
	"Yeah?"
	"Can I come in?"
	"Yeah."
	She gingerly parted the curtains.
	"I miss my old bed. Can I get in with you?"
	"Yeah, sure."
	She was wearing flowered cotton briefs and a white wifebeater. Her
nipples caught the streetlight streaming through the window. I rolled onto
my side and lifted the sleeping bag for her to get in. She faced me,
awkwardly, our bodies unsure how to accommodate each other. But then she
threw her soft, fat thigh over mine, pulling my legs into a tangle with
hers. We wrapped our arms around each other to kiss for a while, and before
long I'd pulled up her tanktop, licked over her belly, and was sucking her
big tits while she humped my leg, wet through her panties. She groped
towards my crotch and cupped my pubic bone. I rocked against her hand; she
dug her knuckles into her own clit. I grabbed her ass to try and spread her
cheeks.
	"I love you," she pulled my hair and took my whole ear into her
mouth.  "I fucking love you."
	"You love Nick," I snorted, and she fingered my butthole through my
underwear, and we came at the same time.
	"I love you both," she sighed, breathless. "Why can't I love you
both?"
	We'd been getting it on semi-regularly since high school. But
mostly we were just best friends, and mostly, I was more into guys.

I answered a knock at the door and it was Nick. He was wearing jeans, and a
jean jacket, and Chuck Taylors, and a black baseball cap. His hair was
down. It was just before dusk on a Saturday in March, and it had been
raining all day.
	"Is Annie home?" he asked.
	"Nah man, she's visiting her grandma. Didn't she tell you?"
	"Oh. Yeah," he said vaguely. "Can I come in?"
	 "Yeah." He came in and I locked the door behind him. Most of my
clients and nearly all of my friends worked restaurant jobs, so Saturday
nights were usually my night off. "What's in the bag?"
	"I got us some grub." I let his farce of looking for Annie
slide. He cleared a space on the coffee table, making himself comfortable
on the couch. He extracted white deli bags of steaming jojo seasoned
potatoes, tough fried chicken that had spent too long under a heat lamp, a
little plastic tub of ranch dressing, ketchup packets, hastily folded paper
napkins, a paper cup of soggy coleslaw. I offered him a bong rip. He took
it and pulled a bottle of whiskey from his backpack before exhaling.
	I loaded another bowl and let him do the talking. But he didn't
talk. He just went into the kitchen and came back with two jam-jar glasses
of whiskey and ice, and a fork for the coleslaw.
	"I don't really drink," I told him, putting up a palm in gentle
refusal. I had assumed he knew that. "I'm more of a stoner."
	"Oh come on, you'll drink whiskey with me," Nick said, swirling a
glass and taking a drink. He handed me the other and I sipped it gingerly.
	The sun was setting, and we were getting stoned.

"Fuck, these potatoes are good. This ranch is good. It's probably full of
MSG."
	Nick spat a piece of gristle into a napkin and took a big,
open-mouthed swig of his drink. "The chicken is a little overdone, but I
kind of like it that way."
	The whiskey was making me warm, and I cracked the sliding glass
door to the balcony open for some fresh air. It was cool out.
	"Fuck, it smells good out there. Come and smell it."
	Nick stuck the fork he was eating off of back into the coleslaw and
came over to me. He braced his hand on the doorway just over my shoulder
and pressed his chest just into my back, leaning forward to smell the
air. He took a deep breath. "Fuck yeah. It smells fucking great out there."

We moved onto beers and I couldn't stop laughing and I could barely hold my
red eyes open. Nick smoked cigarettes on the balcony. I lay down on the
floor of the porch, propping my legs up the railing. He let me take a drag
of the cigarette and I got so dizzy I didn't think I could get up. He got
tired of waiting for me and went inside. I kept laying on the porch for a
while, laughing at myself a little.
	"Jeremy," Nick slurred, shoving the sliding glass door open and
sagging against the frame. "You're fucking kidding me. Come back inside."
	"OK." I got up and put a lot of effort into moving like
normal. He'd put on a Pixies CD. "I fucking love this album!" I said, and
we rock-out danced stupidly and air guitared the duration of "Bone
Machine." Then he collided his face with mine in a rough kiss and the jig
was up.

"What do you like?" he whispered. We were rolling around on Annie's futon.
	"Just don't stick it in my vag," I breathed, trying to find his
face without opening my eyes. Our whiskers rubbed together. "Anything
else."
	"Suck my cock," he begged, his tongue in and out of my
mouth. "Please."
	"Fuck yes, I'll suck your cock," I consented. He twisted to reach
under the mattress for a condom.

Annie had dark curtains in her room, and it was a damn good thing. Neither
of us were looking so fresh in the morning.
	"Oh fuck," Nick moaned. He'd been shifting around uncomfortably for
the last hour or so, while I couldn't be roused and kept falling back into
dream-sleep.  The air in the room was stale. I groped on the floor next to
the bed and found my glass pipe with a partially smoked bowl in it, and hit
it. Nick held his head in both hands and took the piece when I offered it
to him. He got up, boxers drooping, and brought us both glasses of water
and chalky Vitamin B12 lozenges. Then he spooned me, burying his nose in
the curls on the back of my head, and we went back to sleep for a
while. When I woke up again, he'd opened the curtain and cracked the
window. It was cloudy out. Nick was sitting at the edge of the bed, eating
the leftover coleslaw.
	"You want some?" he asked, mouth full, washing it down with a
beer. I nodded and I ate a few bites. "Hair of the dog that bit ya?" He
offered me the beer. "It'll make you feel better."
	"That's what my mom always says," I shrugged, taking a drink. Nick
belched, and then he farted.  We smoked some more pot and I got in the
shower.
	Annie got home while I was in the shower.

"Dude, you can't stay here anymore," Annie said, taking a deep breath.
	She'd been crying and screaming all afternoon.
	" I have to make my own fucking bed, after you and my boyfriend
fucked in it!" she screeched, ripping the sheets off. I was afraid a
neighbor might call the cops.
	"I'll change the sheets!" I rushed into her room and tried to help
her strip the bed.
	"Get the fuck away from me! Get the fuck out of my room! That's not
the fucking point!"
	Nick had conveniently slipped away. He was probably sipping mineral
water and nursing his hangover from the comfort of his own couch. When
Annie cooled down, he'd come back and make her laugh again.
	"As an ethical slut, I have to set boundaries. This was not OK with
me." She was drained, her eyes puffy.
	I felt nauseous. I hit my glass pipe, and passed it to Annie. She
hit it.
	"No dude, I mean like, you can't even stay here tonight. We are not
cool and shit is not OK."
	I let her words sink in and permeate me before I could stand up. "I
gotcha." I shrugged. "I'll call someone." I didn't have a car.
	I called Kenny.

"Well, Sweetheart, your timing is perfect," Kenny sighed after I told him
the short version of my story. "I'm literally just about to walk out the
door for Ocean Shores. I'm going to a 3-day conference on care for HIV
positive patients. It's all on the hospital's dime. I'd love to have some
company."
	"Is Mom going?"
	"Nope."
	I packed my duffel bag and my crate of books, and I rolled up my
sleeping bag. Annie was in her room with the door shut. I left her two
joints on the coffee table, wrapping my stash and my scale in a couple of
bandanas and placing it in a small backpack with my journal, my medication,
my cock. I had $960 wrapped around my ankle, inside of my left sock. I
knocked lightly on her door.
	"I'm leaving," I said through the cheap, hollow-core barrier,
knowing she could hear me. "There's some coleslaw in the fridge. If you
want it."

"He got me really drunk. I mean, I was down, I would have slept with him
anyway. But I just mean...I'm really hungover. I feel like shit."
	"You look like shit," Kenny agreed.
	"Ha. Thanks." I allowed a long pause. "I can't think. I don't know
why anyone gets drunk."
	Kenny shrugged. "Usually, to sleep with their roommates
boyfriends. No, really, Jeremy, it's just...these things happen. But I
guess it's worse when you're all in the same house."
	"Nick didn't live there. I mean, he didn't pay rent. I don't know
how much longer I could have stayed there, anyway. They were really getting
on my nerves." I loved them both, I didn't say.
	Kenny didn't say anything for a long time and finally I asked him
if he was cool.
	"Yeah, yeah, totally. I just haven't been stoned in a long time!"
he laughed.
	"Oh right." I nodded brusquely. We'd smoked a joint outside of
Shelton, but I didn't remember what it felt like to not be stoned.

The ride lulled me to sleep. I woke up when Kenny pulled into the parking
lot of the hotel where the hospital had reserved a room for him.
	"Hey, Sleeping Beauty."
	"Don't patronize me," I growled. I still felt queasy. Kenny could
make me act like a surly teenager. We checked in and jogged across the
foggy 5-lane street towards a diner. I had a grilled cheese and fries, and
Kenny ordered a chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes and green
beans. We drank decaf coffee.
	"I'm still fucking high," he hissed.
	I shrugged and grinned dopily.
	"What the hell is in that backpack you're always carrying around,
anyway?" he asked. I rolled my eyes and glared at him over the brim of my
glasses. "Oh, Christ, do you have all of your," he lowered his voice to
whisper "weed business in there?"
	I put up my palms. "It's cool man. Don't worry about it." He
sniffed curtly, tipping his head and forcing a smile.
	When we got back to the room, I realized my hangover had broken. My
arms and legs didn't feel like sandy noodles anymore. I yawned and
stretched and felt so relieved to feel kind of good again. Kenny was
already in the bed with the sheets pulled up to his chin.
	"Dude, what if I'm still high in the morning when I have to go to
my panel?"
	"Dude, you won't be," I assured him. I got into the bed as far
towards the other side as possible. I turned on the TV and channel surfed.
	"Hey Jeremy?" Kenny said quietly. "Can we cuddle?"
	I felt my brow furrow with unexpected emotion. I thought about how
much he teased me and figured he probably had wanted to get with me for a
while.
	"I felt like if I got into bed with you I'd have to sleep with
you," I admitted.
	"No," he said. "Nah man, it's not like that." He fell asleep in my
arms while I watched infomercials at a low volume.

In the morning, Kenny was on the balcony smoking a cigarette. I couldn't
figure out what he was doing at first. I put on my hoodie and went out
there. He had taken my paper box of leftover fries from the mini fridge and
was tossing them off the balcony, one at a time. Seagulls swooped by and
caught them midair. I laughed in astonishment and tried it. A seagull
caught the fry. I ate the next one. Kenny glanced at me with a mock frown.
	"Did you just eat that mealy old fry?"
	"I love cold old fries! It makes me think of when I was little and
my mom would go out on dates and bring me home little cut up bits of steak
and a few fries in a doggie bag and I'd eat them cold for breakfast the
next day."
	Kenny laughed until he coughed. "My god, your mom!"
	I grinned. "It was sweet. I still have fond memories of it." I ate
another fry and threw one to a seagull.

"I guess you're not still stoned," I suggested, loading a bowl while Kenny
shaved his face in the mirror.
	"No, thank god. And please don't blaze that until after I leave. I
don't want to smell like pot."
	He got dressed up for his day at the conference. I put on pants and
we went to the corny breakfast room off the lobby for blood-sugar spiking
blueberry muffins and orange juice in Styrofoam cups.
	I went back to the room and got stoned, threw the rest of the fries
to the seagulls, and watched daytime TV. I had the cozy feeling of playing
hooky. A late morning sun hit the balcony and I went out there, took off my
shirt and absorbed it. I couldn't remember ever seeing it sunny in Ocean
Shores before. In the early afternoon I walked a couple blocks and found a
grocery store and got a couple of pizza pockets from the deli hot case. I
ate them on my walk to the beach. It had clouded up again and felt more
like the Washington State coast I remembered. I walked from one "Private
Beach: Do Not Enter" sign to another, maybe a mile, along the water. I
picked up a couple of cool rocks and a nice blue sliver of beach glass. I
tried to stand before the ocean and feel its power, but I was putting it
on, and you can't fake a feeling like that. I swung back through the
grocery store for a couple of frozen burritos and a 2-liter Talking Rain. I
got back in bed, got stoned, and settled in for prime time.
	I dozed in the glow of the TV but I kept waking up enough to check
the clock. Kenny wasn't back at 10:37, or 11:49, or 12:23. I got up and
drank a cup of water.
	I was startled awake by Kenny's key in the door at 1:51.
	"No, I don't want a threesome with some kid!" a voice
sputtered. Kenny giggled.
	"Shhh, Christ, shhh, I'm kicking him out, hang on." His drunken
feet dragged towards me. "Hey Sweetheart-"
	"Don't patronize me," I mumbled sleepily. "What's going on?"
	"You gotta go, Babe. That diner we went to, it's open like 24
hours. Not the lounge. They closed the lounge and kicked us out." The other
guy snickered from the doorway.
	"Oh, for Christ sake." I sat up in bed, trying to wake up. "Give me
a second."
	Kenny was throwing my hoodie and my jacket at me. "Look Honey, his
cock doesn't have a second!" The guy in the doorway snorted with
laughter. "I don't want no kid watching me," he said in what sounded like a
fake accent, or mock fagginess, "Who even is this kid, man? I don't even
get it."
	Kenny palmed me a twenty-dollar bill. "Can you leave me a dime bag,
Baby?"
	"Fuck you," I said. I grabbed my backpack and split.
	The street was quiet except for a car pulling out of the diner
parking lot. Inside, a few friends of the servers sat at the counter,
drinking coffee. I slid into a booth and ordered a hot tea with lemon. The
waitress was just moving into middle age and looking at me with deep
sympathy. I liked thinking that she thought I was mysterious, a young man
ordering a hot tea with lemon in a diner in a tourist town, off-season
early on a Tuesday morning. I got out my journal and a pen. I thought I
might want to write down where I was, and what I'd gone through in the past
couple days, but I didn't know how to start. I drew a spiral and let my
eyes release focus.
	"Hi," a girl spoke to me. She was younger, maybe 16, with clean
hair and tidy eye makeup. She giggled wildly. "Hi. Hi. My friend," she
gestured behind her at a table of teenagers pouring creamers into coffee
cups and sucking milkshakes, "he wanted me to ask you if you are gay or
straight." Her friend was the only boy at the table. He had floppy hair and
a chiseled jaw. He grinned, squinting and blushing, probably feeling the
speedball of sleep deprivation, marijuana and coffee, and waved his fingers
at me. I flicked my chin towards him. "I go both ways," I answered
mildly. She turned towards her friends and made elaborate eyebrow
movements.
	"I'm Michelle," she stuck out her clammy hand for me to shake.
	"Jeremy," I introduced myself, feeling more amused than annoyed by
this intrusion.
	"Hey Jeremy, can I send my friend over here? His name is Ben. He
likes guys, but he doesn't know any other guys who like guys."
	"Yeah, yeah send him over."
	Michelle bared her braces at me ferociously and went to retrieve
the young man. I let myself indulge for a moment the possibility that I'd
die under the wheels of their redneck truck, but I believed the boy's blush
instead. He was rich, and in a couple of months he'd grow into his long
bones and never need to associate with queer punks like me again. But like
young faggots throughout history, he needed to slum it right now, and
whatever I did, he wouldn't forget. To him, I was the criminal class. I let
all of my selves fall into this posture before he lowered himself carefully
onto the vinyl bench across from me. It was easy, my THC content was
constant, my brain was clicking pleasantly on the black tea, I'd been
rejected by three people I loved in just a couple days, but I felt somehow
elated by that, more as if they had sent me out to sea, in a small vessel,
and this boy was a large whale lifting my crackling wooden boat slightly
out of the water. It was unnerving and exhilarating and all I could do was
ride it and try not to suffocate. To that end, I remembered to take a
breath.
	He smiled. He did not introduce himself. He launched into
talking. He laughed after everything he said. He was acting more femme than
the likely notch on the gender spectrum he'd eventually decide to hover
around. I didn't know why I felt so psychic about his conditions. He just
seemed to be the person whose story made the most sense. Because he's a
rich white man, I thought, disgusted with myself.
	"We drove here from Olympia," he explained. "I work in like, four
hours, so I'm just staying up. They wanted to see the ocean," he tossed his
head towards the girls. "What are you doing..." he bobbed his head
excessively, "around here?"
	"I'm distancing myself from a few problems, interpersonal problems,
in my life." My voice got a little hoarse and I cleared my throat and
sipped my tea.
	We chatted a few moments and I popped the question. "You think I
could get a ride to Olympia with you?" I banked on his thrill before his
logic would set in and I knew it was on when I saw it click through the
motion of his eyes. They drove me to the door of the hotel lobby and idled
outside. I asked the night clerk to send a note to Kenny's room. It read,
"Jeremy Left." I knew he'd take the rest of my shit to my mom's. I'd swing
back there eventually.
	It was nearly a two-hour drive back to their freeway exit. Around
the first hour mark, the three girls were asleep and I noticed Ben's head
nodding at the wheel.
	"Hey man. Hey." I poked him.
	"It's cool! It's cool." He shook his head vigorously.
	"Let me drive, man."
	"Yeah, yeah, totally." He pulled over and we did a Chinese fire
drill. The air was so fucking fresh out there, back in the inland [tree
word] trees.
	He didn't seem to fall asleep again, and directed me to each girl's
house, where they stumbled out of the backseat, blowing kisses and ambling
towards their parents' front doors. It was Spring Break.
	He changed into his uniform right in the passenger seat as I drove
him to the fast food restaurant where he worked. They had just opened. I
came in with him.
	"I only have a 3 hour shift," he explained. "You can totally sit in
here or take a nap in the car, and then we can go to my house or I can take
you wherever you want to go. You want something to eat? I can smuggle you
some hashbrowns."
	City and State workers in their stupid fancy clothes came and
went. I sat in the booth breathing the unmatchable smells specific to the
grease of this chain.
	I'd been writing notes in my journal for several minutes when Ben
swished by and slid a big Styrofoam tray onto my table.
	"They made this extra," he said, and plucked a warm syrup cup from
the front pocket of his pleated black slacks. He kept going without looking
back at me, swirling a sanitized towel over the tables he passed. I felt
too damn lucky as I untucked the tab on the lid. Gummy hotcakes,
too-yellow, too-smooth scrambled eggs, chemical butter, tough sausage. I
dumped the maple-flavored syrup over it all.
	I didn't last three hours. I slipped out and started walking. In
about 6 or 8 blocks I came to the downtown area. Some people walked to
work. Some people wandered around wrapped in sleeping bags with big
military backpacks. Aggressive bicyclists in spandex zipped past sloppy
stoned joggers. It hadn't rained, and the sidewalks were a patchwork of
puke and spit and sticky gum and smeared doggie doodle.
	A lot of the people with blankets and backpacks were gathered
around an industrial-looking pipe stabbing out of a concrete block off to
the side in a parking lot. Water poured freely from it. I hung out for a
while. I sold a couple of dime bags. I was offered heroin, but I
declined. The pusher told me from the pipe flowed an artesian well. Clean,
clean water thousands of years old. If you drink the water, he said,
crouching alongside me, when the end of your life comes, you'll die in
Olympia. That's what the Olympia Beer logo means. "It's the Water." This is
the water they mean. I had an empty, crinkley old water bottle in my
backpack, and I filled it from the artesian well. I drank it.