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Admin Note: The story contains a brief discussion of gender identiy.
Smokin’ in the Rowboat
Enzo Stephens
“C’mon girl! Put yer back into it already.”
She was lithe and tawny, her dirty blonde hair tied into a sweaty, bouncing ponytail that currently flopped over her left shoulder, partially obscuring the strap of her pink LuLuMon yoga shirt. “I…”
“AM!”
The massive man with the misshapen head sat in the rowboat, fishing out an innocuous plastic rectangular container from his denim shirt that was adorned with a professional football team’s emblem over the right breast.
He flashed her puffing, straining self a bright, ebullient smile, and she smiled back.
From the plastic rectangle, the man pulled a wonderful little device called a ‘one-hitter’ and not for the first time in the past three months since he’d discovered this wondrousness, Edgar McMichael wished to the good Lord above that he’d been the genius that invented it.
On one end of it was a thin strip of metal that slid along the wood frame, exposing a small, metal bowl that contained a tiny tight-mesh screen.
From the other side of that bowl was a packing box in which the product was stuffed. Closing the packing box meant pressing it against the side of the body of the one-hitter, pulverizing the content, making for a much cleaner smoke.
Tamping the packing box down over the bowl dropped an appropriate amount of weed into the bowl, and pressing a small button compressed it down into the bowl.
Seems a lot more complicated than it actually was; all told the entire preparatory operation took all of about 15 seconds.
From the body of the wooden frame rested a one-touch, battery-powered glow-coil, which ignited the spleef just fine, lemme tell ya.
The man leaned back and exhaled that first big gulp and stared at the cloud-studded sky. The oars of the rowboat clunked against the sides of the boat; the sensation of a slight rhythmic pull ceased, distracting him from his celestial musings. “Why did you stop?”
“Because it’s your turn.”
“Look, honey. I could probably throw this boat with you in it across the lake, so I really don’t think I need to harsh my buzz with physical exertion.”
“Eggsy, you are a Grade-A Asshole.”
“Happy to share it with you.” He gave her a slight mock bow, complete with a sweeping left hand.
“Happy to stuff my steel-toed boot in it.”
And true enough, the lean, svelte, tightly-muscled blonde woman did indeed have a pair of steel-toed cowboy boots on, and then she had nada-empanada over tanned legs that stretched on forever up into a skimpy, tattered pair of denim shorts. And Eggsy had no misgivings about her capability of planting one or both of those boots up his keester, thank you very much.
She stretched her hand out. “Gimme some. If I’m gonna do all this work, I might as well be buzzed.”
Eggsy handed her the wonderfully-engineered one-hitter. “Know how to work it?”
“Like it’ll take a law degree from the university of eat shit to figure it out, ya big putz.”
“You got some fragging mouth on you, girl.”
She pulled a massive drag that belied her slim stature. Held it. Then let it drift out of her nostrils in wispy streams. “Whoa, shit man, that’s good. What is it?”
“It’s a hybrid of black Kush with some Thai-stick and dash of good ole Kentucky skunk.”
She handed the one-hitter back to Eggsy. “That’s one of the things I love about you, dude. Such creativity. Plus you got a screwed-up head that makes you look like a retard.”
A thundercloud passed over his heavy brow. She pealed with laughter over his expression. Eggsy dashed the ash from the pipe and reloaded; applied the glow-coil and drew lustily. A soft, fuzzy cloud of warmth floated over him and he found himself lying back in the rowboat, head against the back bench seat, and watching the sky.
“Hey, Wendy.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll start rowing again.”
“No, my lil chicka. What do you think about people who are gender-confused?”
“Hah!”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Meaning that it’s a bizarre question.” Eggsy felt the oars bump against the sides of the small watercraft. “I mean, what the hell do you care about that?”
“Well, I don’t. But…why now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like it’s become prolific over the past ten or twenty years, as opposed to three hundred years ago. Is it something in our food supply? Water? Something in our environment that’s making our hormones go haywire?”
A soft grunt from the front of the boat, which surged forward a bit. “Beats the hell outta me. I’m good. You’re good. No confusion here.”
Eggsy sat up, took another hefty drag, then let the smoke slip out of his nostrils. “I know I’m good, and there’s no question that you’re good — nice rack, by the way. But it just doesn’t make any sense to me, ya know?”
“Maybe that’s because you’ve never had those kinds of questions. I mean, you are pretty one-track.”
“My focus is irrelevant to this conversation. Want another hit?”
“How about a fresh one?”
Eggsy went about the business of loading up a fresh bowl for the lady doing the heavy lifting for the two of them. He handed it over and she applied the built-in ember.
The woman’s lung capacity was a thing of wonder!
“Your focus keeps confusion at bay. I mean really, how often have you been confused about anything in your life? I’ve not known you for more than a few months, but the word ‘confused’ is not something I’d pin on you, even though it seems like you’re constantly stoned.”
“Being stoned keeps me from being a mass murderer.”
Wendy laughed, but then caught his serious expression and the laughter died in her throat. “You’re not kidding, are you?”
A long pause where the two stared at each other through reddened, bleary eyes. He stuck a thick, meaty paw out. “’Course I am. Now gimme.”
She handed him the pipe, watching him warily. He polished off the bowl and leaned back again to watch the sky.
“How much money you got?”
“You mean in my pocket or in my bank?”
“Your bank.”
“Enough. Why do you wanna know?”
“Weed ain’t cheap.”
“It is when you grow your own.”
“You must have a shit-ton.”
“I’ve got healthy crops.”
“Sell any of it?”
“Nope. All mine.”
“So you can mix ’n match and use that creative genius to come up with new strains of weed.”
“Is that a question?”
The boat nudged forward. A mosquito landed on his coarse forearm. He watched it struggle to bury its proboscis into his flesh but be daunted by the thick mats of fur covering his limb. He chuckled, dashed the ash, and reloaded for another round.
“So, back to my earlier question.”
“Which is?”
“What are your thoughts about people who don’t know what sex they should be?”
“Well, I guess I don’t really understand it either. I mean, if you’re a dude, you look south of the border and you see junk, no more questions, even if the junk ain’t all that.
“Same thing with a woman. When there’s all that physical stuff, where’s the question? A person’s one or the other.”
“That’s a pretty black-and-white perspective there, Wendy.”
“Well, genius, what do you think?”
“I think it goes deeper than just questioning which way a person wants to swing. If you look at the Bible, especially the Old Testament, you can see that one of the most pervasive sins of humanity is sexual deprivation. There’s a lot of references bashing homosexuality. Stories like a bunch of dudes turned down gang-raping a woman in favor of doing the same to another dude.”
“Those peeps needed some better television.” That brought a belly laugh out of Eggsy. Girl could be damned funny when she didn’t try.
“I mean, imagine how bad things must have been for God to blow away just about everything on the earth with a flood. I’ve seen some opinion pieces stating that fallen angels were banging men and women, creating Nephilim.”
“C’mon dude. Quit bogarting.”
“Later, there are references to ‘impure spirits’ making people do all sorts of sexual filth. Which leads me to ask, what opens a person up to possession by impure spirits?”
“Why? Do you wanna do some sexual filth?”
“Right here. Right now in this boat, baybee! If the boat’s a rockin’…”
“Why don’t we control ourselves until we get to a place where I won’t get splinters in my butt?”
“I can pick ’em out with my teeth. Now nothin’ says True Love like pulling splinters out of your girl’s butt with your teeth.”
She pulled in a hefty draft; let it float out of her nose gently. “Gotta hand it to you, goofy-head. You sure know how to romance a girl.”
“Confusion!”
“What?”
“That’s what I think opens a person up to being possessed. Confusion. More specifically, identity confusion. And I think that comes from some kind of heavy emotional abuse people experience in their adolescence, which is when people come into their sexual identity, ergo, their identity as a Man or a Woman.”
Wendy was chuckling. “You said ‘Ergo.’ Who the hell says ‘Ergo’?”
“Yeesh, Wendy. Try to keep up, wouldja?”
She gave him a loopy smile, then plopped oars back into the water and began pulling. Girl was hammered.
“So maybe that emotional abuse causes people to not have confidence in their sexual capability, ya know. I mean, confidence is shaky enough during those formative years.
“Seems like the devil would see that as an opportune time to swoop in and wreak havoc, and then before ya know it, James becomes Jamie, gets his willy lopped off and he/she thinks they’re in business and good to go.”
Wendy reached for the pipe. “I don’t really get you, Eggsy. Sometimes I think you’re as crazy as a bedbug in an orgy, and then you start rolling out stuff like this. And then I find out that you’re a student of the Bible. I mean, what the hell?
“You’re as chaotic as those people you’re talking about, only yours ain’t about your gender. It’s about everything else, dude.
“I mean look at us right here and now. We’re out in the middle of some big-assed lake in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the day, getting stoned off some hybrid bone you slapped together, talking about people who are gender-confused and Satanic possession. What the hell man?”
Eggsy watched her through hooded eyes. The sun was still beneath its peak, and this trip was supposed to be about fishing with his girl while being stoned, which was in and of itself quite the unique experience, especially without a fishing rod. “Are these musings not to your liking?”
She shook her head in frustration, or maybe it was to slap at a mosquito or something. “It’s just how you think. Increments of your personality. Sometimes it gives me a headache trying to keep up with you, and then I feel like a dumbass when I can’t.”
He was up and over to her side of the boat in a flash, not even giving the little craft time to rock in the water properly. He sat beside her, wrapping his burly arm around her lean shoulders. “I’m sorry, baby.”
She looked up at him, eyes welling. “You should be.”
He smiled, which turned into a savage snarl. “Like hell!” And he slammed his powerful arm right through her chest and out her back and relished the look of dawning shock on her face.
“Wh…”
Eggsy flipped her into the water, hung his gore-covered arm over the side to clean it, upon which he spied his amazing one-hitter lying in the bottom of the boat. Satisfied that his arm was clean, he straightened up, snagged that pipe, dashed the ash, reloaded, and proceeded to relish nature orally, and as the familiar cloud of soft fluffiness washed over him, he was glad that he would no longer have to share his hybrid weed.
“Bogart that.”
He snagged the oars, turned the boat around, and began pulling.
Please visit Enzo on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Enzo.stephens.5011
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