🔵 By Jonathan Byrd. Photo by lauragrafie.
One summer day when I was sixteen I was sitting on the hood of my silver Mazda 626 by a lake sharing a fifth of cheap whiskey with homeless Jerry. We cut a strange pair. Jerry must have been in his late forties with salt and pepper hair shaved down into a short burr. He was always clean shaven with the exception of an outlandish handlebar mustache that he kept waxed into two perfectly symmetrical curling horns. He sat next to me wearing his typical red wife beater and cutoff jean shorts. His feet were bare and dirty.
I on the other hand wore a dark blue baggy pair of swim trunks and light brown leather sandals. I wore my sandy brown hair gelled and ramped in an imitation Carson Daily which was the fashion of vain self-absorbed teenage boys of that era.
Due to my youth and inexperience, I made sure to cut my whiskey with water. As I was adding water from a bottle into my blue plastic cup, homeless Jerry ventured forth a question which led to a very disturbing yet enlightening conversation.
“Why do you drink that shit?” He asked.
I looked over at him sitting beside me, the sun cutting through the pine trees and bathing us both momentarily in hot oppressive light. My eyes cut down to the plastic bottle of whiskey he held in his hand.
“My bad Jerry. I can’t afford better whiskey. You’ve never bitched before.”
He stared at me as if I had uttered a statement of abysmal ignorance.
“Not the whiskey, dumbass. Water, why the hell do you drink water?” Now it was my turn to look at him incredulously.
I knew Jerry to be a little off hence the whole living in a tent by the lake and buying alcohol for underage kids but this question made me reconsider just how off he might be.
“Jerry, you have to drink water in order to live.”
“Who the hell told you that?”
I looked at him aghast for a moment before answering.
“Everybody says that! They teach you that in school man.”
He actually harrumphed.
“All teachers are godless communists, kid. They teach you shit they think is the truth but they don’t know squat. They just parrot the shit they were taught.”
“Yeah, whatever Jerry. You still have to drink water man.”
He took a long pull off the fifth and shook his head at me.
“No kid. You just have to drink fluids. I drink everything else but plain water. Milk, juice, beer, whatever, but never water.”
“Okay Jerry. Why don’t you drink water?”
“Because I know what’s in it.” He said this like it was some deep mystery about what’s in water. “I’ll tell you kid but first you go on and take a big swallow of that water and whiskey.”
I couldn’t believe I was entertaining this shit but I took a huge gulp to humor him. As soon as I swallowed Jerry’s face lit up in a triumphal grin.
“Alright kid. Here goes. I’m gonna ask you some questions and you answer. Cool?”
“Yeah Jerry, cool.”
“First, is that bottle of water you got the real McCoy or did you fill it up out of the tap?”
“It’s from the tap.” I answered.
“Thought so. Now where does tap water come from in this city?”
“It comes from the lake right in front of us, Jerry.” I said, gesturing toward the lake.
“Yeah good. Do you know who Albert Einstein was?”
“Jerry what the hell does Albert Einstein have to do with water?”
He let out an exasperated sigh and took a long pull from the whiskey bottle.
“Do you know who he was or not?”
“Yeah man, I know who he was.”
“Alright, here you go Einstein. Smartest hombre that’s ever lived. So he figured out you can’t fully destroy energy. You can only transform it into some other form but really, on the atomic level, it’s still the same thing it was in the first place. You follow?”
“Yeah man, I guess so.” I said.
“Well then. Last week you screwed that blonde chick in the lake, right?”
“Jesus, Jerry! Goddamn Man!” I said as my face jolted in an expression of embarrassed horror. Jerry laughed.
“Kid, everybody knew ya’ll were screwing in the lake. Not like ya’ll hid it very good.”
“Jerry come one man.”
“Answer the question kid.”
“Yeah man, I screwed her in the lake.”
I drained half the contents of my own cup and reached for the whiskey bottle. Jerry took another sip before handing it over.
“So did you bust one inside her or pull out? I know you didn’t have a condom on out there in the water.” Jerry asked.
I shook my head wearily and poured more whiskey into my cup.
“I pulled out man.”
He reached over and took the bottle from me.
“There you go kid. The water you’re drinking is the same water you ejaculated into last week.”
As he dropped that revelation of twisted logic on me, I had just sipped out of my cup. I immediately spat out a spray of whiskey and water.
“Jerry that’s the dumbest shit I ever heard.” I said sputtering. “They purify the water before it gets to us.”
“No they don’t kid. Can’t really purify it. They just filter it and add a bunch of chlorine to it so you don’t get sick. There will always be small traces of everything that goes into the lake in your water, including my morning piss and bowel movements and that’s according to the smartest sum-bitch ever lived.”
I sat there processing for a minute.
“Jerry you’ve lost your goddamn mind man!”
“Not me dud. Just everybody else. Probably a side effect of drinking piss and fish turds every day.”
“Damn Jerry.” I said bewildered.
I went to take a sup out of my cup but couldn’t. I poured it out over the side of my car onto the gravel parking lot. I held out my empty cup to Jerry.
“Fill it about half full man.”
“Now you’re starting to get it kid.” He said as he filled my cup with straight whiskey.
“Yeah I guess man. You messed me up with this crap.”
He filled my cup a little over halfway and I quickly took a slug.
“We’re just getting started kid. You ever been to the ocean?”
“Yeah.”
“The Gulf?”
“Yeah.”
“You get in the water?”
“Yeah man, of course I got into the damn water.”
He took a long pull from the bottle.
“Okay, think about this kid. Over the course of time millions of people have died in the ocean. Hell, in World War Two alone forty thousand German set out in them U-boats and only ten thousand made it back. If you’re religious, God killed everybody and everything in the world with water. The one sumbitch God didn’t kill when he hit dry land did he go look for a drink of water? Hell no! He made some wine and got drunk.”
“Okay Jerry, so what?”
“So what?! Einstein kid. Pull your head out your ass. Can’t destroy nothing remember? See when you’re swimming in the ocean you’re really swimming around in a big pile of corpse soup.”
“That’s messed up, Jerry. Big time.”
“No kid. That’s the Bible. Read it man. God made man from the dust. That’s why teachers are godless communists. They teach that shit about us being eighty percent water. That’s bullshit! Dust is what we are. Jesus turned water into wine, not wine into water. Hell, one of them big evil monsters in Revelations comes out from the sea. Even if you ain’t Christian you can look at the pagans. Them Greek and Roman gods drink ambrosia. Viking gods was mead and wine. I’m telling you kid, stay away from water.”
I sat there dumbfounded. I couldn’t think of a response and Jerry didn’t seem to require one. I sat there sipping my whiskey and tried to enjoy the rest of the day but failed miserably. Every time I saw a girl coming out of the water instead of admiring her glistening wet body, my mind automatically pictured her covered in shit and death.
“Thanks Jerry. You have truly screwed with my head.”
“Just pointing out the truth kid.”
We finished the whiskey as the sun started to set. As always Jerry said thanks and walked back down to his tent. I got into my car and drove home. I walked drunkenly to the bathroom to shower and froze as I put one foot inside the tub. My conversation with Jerry replayed over in my mind, filling my head with disgusting images. It dawned on me that I didn’t ask Jerry how he bathed. I knew he did because I never noticed an offensive body odor coming off him. It was only due to drunken courage that I was able to shower without freaking out.
All through the next week though I still showered daily I couldn’t bring myself to drink tap water. I contrived all kinds of arguments to propose to Jerry on the upcoming weekend only to find out on Friday that Jerry had been arrested for having sex with a seventeen year old girl. I never saw him again.
As the years have passed I have convinced myself that he was crazy but deep in the recesses of my mind I think he might have been one of the wisest men I have ever encountered. Perhaps homeless Jerry was right in his assessment of what’s in our water. I no longer put water in my whiskey and the only water I drink comes from Fiji. They claim it’s distilled rain water. I hope so. I truly do.