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.