Everything Is Perfect When You're a Liar (20 page)

We drove the van to the island and spent an entire month sitting on a beach, doing nothing but smoking weed and talking, alone. At this point in our lives, we smoked a joint every few hours. I guess some people would have considered it more of a lifestyle than a habit at that point. I felt stranger being not-stoned than stoned.

I looked around the beach. We were alone again, us and the van. “What are we going to do now?” I asked, as we sat on a blanket in our bikini tops and shorts smoking and eating a bag of baby carrots. “This is more boring than I thought. I wish we were back in the whale's mouth, scaring the crap out of kids.” Other than the boredom, we didn't have much to complain about. But we were broke. We'd started with only $250. (Clearly we'd (a) learned nothing from the trip to LA, and (b) still had shitty jobs.) When you're a stoner living at home, $250 is a lot of money—as long as you already have your drugs. By this point, though, we were down to $100 between us.

“Why is this a problem?” Aimee said, putting out a joint.

“Oh, I don't know, maybe because we spent a hundred and fifty bucks in gas to get here, and even if we spent all one hundred dollars we have left on gas we wouldn't make it home?” I rolled onto my stomach to give my back moles a good dose of UV. Free health care is fantastic.

“You're making a decent point.” Aimee picked a carrot from the bag. “We
could
get jobs.”

I was angry. “Maybe there
was
no sign? Maybe the glowing van in the paper was just me on mushrooms?”

She shook her head. “Whatever. This place is great.”

“What do you mean it's great? It's
boring
. There's nobody here.” I watched Aimee stare far too intensely at her tiny carrot. “I thought this place was going to be like a Canadian hippie Bali, but instead it's just . . . Canada.”

She tossed the carrot into her mouth. And then she grabbed her throat. “EEEEEGGGHHRRR.”

I didn't want to move—my left cheek was comfortably ensconced in the warm sand—but Aimee looked like she might be choking to death. “Aimee?”

Her face was turning purple and a tiny bit of white froth had crept from the corner of her mouth. Then again, maybe I was overreacting.

“EEEEEEEEEGGGHHHRRR!”

“OH MY GOD!!” The Heimlich had always seemed violent, so I jumped up and started hitting her in the back.

“DON'T WORRY, AIMEE, YOU'RE MAKING SOUNDS! SOUNDS ARE GOOD—SILENCE IS BAD. TRUST ME. I OVERHEARD SOME NURSING STUDENTS TALKING ABOUT THIS ONCE AT THE SUGAR BOWL. JUST KEEP TRYING TO GET IT UP!!”

The baby carrot shot from her mouth onto the blanket. I got up and looked at her face. Her skin was still mottled red and purple and her eyes were full of tears.

“Holy shit,” she croaked, and rubbed her throat. “I almost died.”

I pulled my notebook and Sharpie out of my bag and wrote something. I turned the notebook around and showed her. “RIP AIMEE. Found in a pool of her own urine. Death by baby carrot.”

“This is totally what I would have written for your obituary.”

She laughed. I pointed at the carrot, covered in bubbly mucus on my side of the blanket.

“That's your side now,” I said. “Shove over.”

The showerhead stopped spitting lukewarm water onto my head.

“QUARTER!”

Aimee's hand shot into the public shower stall where I stood shivering, trying to warm myself with my wet arms. I grabbed the quarter from her fingers, put it in the slot, and cold water shot down from the showerhead, rinsing the ninety-nine-cent shampoo/conditioner combo out of my hair. There was only one good thing about coin-operated showers: 50 percent of the time, the water was so cold you never spent more money than you should. This is an important concept for people who have found themselves in a life position where they have to use a coin-operated shower.

When my quarter's worth of water stopped, I toweled off in the stall and then got dressed. Aimee hopped in the shower and it was my turn for quarter duty.

“YOU GIRLS USE UP ALL THE HOT WATER?”

In the distance I saw Jake, wearing a backpack and holding a six-pack of Lucky Lager. Jake was a single male logger, but he wasn't a threat to Aimee or me. We'd met him on our first day on the island, and in the month we'd been there he'd never hit on us. Obviously he was gay. A very manly, closeted gay logger.

“QUARTER!” Aimee yelled. I shoved my quarter-clenched fist through the curtain.

“AIMEE? IS IT STILL COLD? JAKE IS HERE AND WANTS TO KNOW IF WE USED ALL THE HOT WATER?”

“WITCH'S TIT!” she replied.

“IT'S COLDER THAN A WITCH'S TIT!” I yelled down the road to Jake.

“Well, sheeeeit,” Jake said. He dropped his cigarette and started walking up the hill toward us.

“You girls give me a lift across the island?” he said when he got there. “I want a hot shower, but I want to go to my boy's place over there to get it.”

“No,” I said, shoulders slumped to let him know I was telling the truth. “We don't have much gas or money left. Only driving up here for showers every three days.” We were totally cool with showering every three days; that's how stoned on the reg we were.

Jake stopped and nodded. “I just can't shower in that thing when it's cold.”

The shower turned off. “TOWEL!” I passed Aimee her orange-and-yellow towel as Jake pulled a Lucky Lager from the six-pack ring and cracked it open. It was nine
A.M.
He took a long swig from the can, then stopped.

“What if I give you girls a big bag of weed for a ride over there to my boy's house?”

I didn't need to check with Aimee. “Sure.”

Two huge, barking dogs charged the van as we made our way up the road to Jake's boy Kurt's house. They were so close we couldn't see them through the windows. Aimee stopped and turned to Jake.

“Are they going to run under the van?” Aimee asked. “I don't want to hit them.”

Jake cleared his throat. “Open your window.” He got up on his knees on the van floor between Aimee and me and crushed his empty beer can. “Open the window and sit back.” Aimee did as she was told, and Jake whipped the can out the window. “GET IT!” he yelled to the dogs, who were already chasing it into the bush. Jake turned to Aimee and said, “Go!”

Up ahead was a dirty white house surrounded by a makeshift fence made of what looked like ancient monolithic satellite dishes and firewood.

“Here.” Jake reached into his backpack and gave us a brown paper bag. Inside was one giant bud of weed, almost as big as my forearm. “It's still a little wet. Just put it on the dash to dry out.”

The inside of the house was just as filthy as the outside: the open main floor had stained white walls, a DIY-disaster kitchen, and a muddy dog smell. Jake left us in search of hot water, and I decided I would never need to see the condition of the toilet in this house.

“So dirty,” Aimee muttered.

“You want a beer?” some hairy guy offered.

“No thanks,” I said, not even knowing which one of the three guys on the couch was Kurt. These loggers were totally socially retarded; even the gay one hadn't made introductions.

“So this is how men live without women,” I tried to joke. No response from any of the men, who were watching three different football games on three different TVs.

The dogs came over and started violently sniffing our crotches. One of the guys turned around and passed me a joint. “Hailey! Stop it!” he snapped at the smelly German shepherd, whose nose I tried to crush with my thighs to fend her off. The dog slunk away.

“Thanks. I think she just committed a felony.” I took a long haul off the joint and passed it back to him.

“Kelly, look at that TV!” Aimee pointed. It was Steven, the guy we'd met at the Viper Room six months before. Steven, in a beer commercial. Steven, selling popcorn at a baseball game.

“Holy shit!” I exhaled. “Aimee, this is a sign.” I smiled and tapped the back of the La-Z-Boy couch in some weird rhythm, the nerd's official Morse code for happiness. “We're on track.”

Aimee nodded and returned my smile. “You're right. What are the odds?”

“Of Steven being in this room with us via television? I don't know. But I do know it's a sign!” And then, like any stoned person encountering an odd event, I started to feel a creeping sense of paranoia. If it was a sign, what did it mean? That we were actually
supposed
to be in some filthy house with a bunch of dogs and loggers? What the hell was that about? The house instantly seemed grosser, the dogs meaner. One of the loggers spit into a beer bottle.

“Let's get out of here,” I said.

We drove down to the one café in the middle of the island and sat at a picnic table next to one of the local hippie kids. “A van?” he said. “That's cool. We live in a yurt my dad made in the seventies. I was born in it.” This skinny kid looked exactly like Jesus. Not on-the-cross, all-bony-and-bloody Jesus, but young, hot Jesus. I mean, just like seventeen-year-old Jesus, only on this island he had no bros and no whores. Instead, he had the next best thing: Aimee and me.

I sipped my coffee, looking at Young Jesus's sandaled feet. “Do girls ever want to wash your feet because you look like Jesus?”

He shook his head and laughed. “You think you know what Jesus looked like?”

“Jesus was hot,” Aimee muttered. “Really hot.”

“So you've been here your whole life? On this island?” I asked.

Young Jesus nodded. “I've never left this island.”

“You've NEVER LEFT THE ISLAND?!” I shook my head. “That's crazy talk. What's your name, anyhow?”

“I'm Gryphon.” Of course he was. “So how long are you here?” he continued. “You guys want to go fishing sometime?”

“Maybe. But we're probably going to leave soon. We're almost out of money and we need to figure something out.” I finished off my coffee, ready to go back to the van, plan our next move, and sleep.

Young Jesus Gryphon sat back, stroked his whiskers, and smiled. “You only
think
you need money. You could live here and never need money again. We grow our own food, we trade. My family makes wine.”

Aimee's radar went off. “
Red
wine?” She looked at him very seriously. “
Vino tinto?
”

“Yes. It's very good. I actually . . .” He paused and started digging around in his burlap Jesus sack. “I have some right here. You can have it. On the house.”

“Oh my God, you know exactly what you're doing,” I said. “You sit there, looking like Jesus, and now you're giving us wine? Gryphon. Come on. Where are the loaves?” I wasn't kidding: it had been a while since I smoked that joint, and my munchies alarm was going off. I was
praying
he had some delicious homemade bread in that bag.

Gryphon feigned innocence. “I've never even been inside a church!”

“You invited us
fishing
!” I pressed on accusingly.

“Did Jesus even fish?” he asked, shrugging his shoulders.

“I have no idea. I'm sure he did. They were all living by the river. Seems like he'd be a fisherman.”

“Isn't Jesus's symbol a fish?” Aimee muttered again.

Gryphon finally passed Aimee the wine. “Coincidence.”

“Niiice!!” She held the bottle up to the sun, examining it like some old Italian vintner. “
Vino tinto!
”

“AIMEE! KELLY!!” It was Jake: wet hair, bag slung over his shoulder, yelling down the street again. “AIMEE! KELLY!! DON'T GO ANYWHERE.”

“We have nowhere to go, Jake!” I yelled back. “We live in a van on a tiny island!”

“WELL, YOU LEFT ME, GODDAMIT!!!”

Shit. I looked at Aimee. “Were we supposed to wait for him?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “He didn't say anything about waiting. Were we just supposed to wait for him to shower?”

I hate being an accidental asshole. I don't mind being an outright asshole, but doing it by accident is terrible. Accidentally being an asshole can lead to a snowball effect that cascades into something terrible horrible.

Jake marched up to the table, threw his bag to the ground, and dropped a newspaper on the table. “You didn't tell us to wait,” I said meekly. Aimee just ignored him. She spun his paper around on the table and started to read.

“I traded you girls some weed for a ride,” he said. “
A ride
means to
and
from.”

I tried to make my face look interested. Ninety percent of the time I'm listening to someone is spent wondering if my face looks interested enough.

“HELL, girls, my Lucky Lager is in your van. You drove off with my beer like a couple of goddamn Jezebel thieves,” Jake complained.

“Oh, shit. Sorry.” I guess I was an accidental asshole.

“Gryphon, these mainland girls don't know shit about rides.” Jake spit and sat down beside me, in the same dirty clothes he was wearing before his shower.

Gryphon patted Jake's hand. “But they do seem to know a lot about Jesus.”

“Don't mock me!” I said. “I don't go to church either! This is common knowledge, observational stuff! You look and act like Jesus. THE END. Aimee, let's go. Thanks for the wine, Jesus. Jake, come on, I'll get your beer.”

That night, Aimee and I entertained ourselves with an
Archie
comic routine. With no TV and nowhere to go, that had become our one source of fun. I'd brought a Discman with me, and the new Radiohead album, but the batteries were almost dead. So for entertainment, we popped open the roof of our van and used it as a makeshift stage. I'm sure the Eastern European brothers did the same thing.

“I'll meet you at the food court around noon, Ronnie! I have to pick up a gift for my cousin Marty at the electronics store.”