Read The Chronology of Water for Free Online Page A

hangover and skip godforsaken cafeteria shitty instant eggs breakfast at 7:00 a.m. and skip classes at 10:00 a.m. 11:00 a.m. 12 noon drink hair of the dog beer eat cold pizza and Haagen Dazs ice-cream and listen to Zeppelin get high take a test once every week or so and weight training at 3:30 p.m. and swim practice at 4:30 p.m. and fuck dorm dinners they taste like shit and you have to sit with a bunch of West Texan fuckwaddery lets go out early and drink lets hit the Rock-Z and dance and dance and dance and drink and barf and screw every day every night.
    I lost my scholarship the second year. I flunked out the third.

Love Grenade I
    I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE THE KIND OF WOMAN JAMES Taylor would sing: I feel fine, anytime she’s around me now to. “Something in the Way She Moves.” You know that song. Don’t you wish someone wanted to sing that song to you?
    Alas, my song would be Blood on Her Skin, Dripping with Sin, Do it again, Living Dead Girl. Yeah. By Rob Zombie. Because in college I was a living dead girl.
    My first husband, beautiful boyman, reminded me of James Taylor. Of how exactly like his hands, exactly his voice, exactly his long lean body. Exactly his introverted acoustic guitar genius, exactly his artist eyes, exactly his ego underneath all that thin man. I shoulda been with Rob Zombie but I wasn’t. For a few years, in Lubbock, Texas, where I’d come on a swimming scholarship, I was with a JT man named Phillip.
    Me: Doc combat boots. Kohl-a LOT - racooning my eyes. Ripped to shit tights and plaid catholic girl skirt and black leather biker jacket. No hairspray, no fingernail polish, no purse. Utterly out of place in Lubbock, Texas.
    Those years were filled with him painting and playing guitar and me listening and getting high and making love and oh yeah, going to school. Which by the third year I’d flunked out of. The only As I received were in Philosophy. And that was because the professor was high every class so we just sat around shooting philosophical shit until we all started coming to class high too. Going to school, sleeping with Phillip. Trying not to fall
in love with my roommate Amy. And swimming - though every month of each year the swimmer in me drowned a little more in alcohol and oceans of sex.
    It was snowing the night of the first breakup in Lubbock. Snow in Lubbock looks weirdly dumb - Lubbock is as flat as flat gets. No mountains. No trees. No hills. When it snows in Lubbock one must get drunk and drive around. Don’t think badly of me. Remember what I told you - Lubbock is dry. So a woman gets … thirsty. And there isn’t much to “hit” in the dead of night, and even if there was you would see it a mile away.
    So it was a drive around night. After a while we stopped. And I was drunk as a monkey, and I climbed up onto the shoulders of the Buddy Holly statue in a cemetery-ish park.
    The Buddy Holly statue isn’t all that high, by the way. But I was acting like I was king of the world.
    The main event was Phillip. Phillip cut the fingertips out of his gloves and played guitar at the base of the Buddy Holly statue. He played the acoustic opening to “ Wish You Were Here.” Which he’d picked out of the sky by ear. He played “Sweet Baby James.” Then he played “Suzanne.” At Buddy Holly’s feet. With a drunk ass blonde lifting her shirt up to the 30 degree night sky going “FUCK ALL Y’ALLLLLLL. EAT ME. WOOOOOOOOOOO.” To no one in particular except Lubbock.
    I’d been with Phillip for about a year. How I fell for him was I heard his voice behind my head right after I walked past him in the dorm hall. He had the deepest voice I’d ever heard on a white boy. It was the kind of voice that curled around the top of your spine and jaw and made your mouth open, wanting. In my head was I am so far from my father I am so far from my father I amsofarfrommyfatherIamsofarfrommyfather.
    When I turned around, there he was. With shoulder-length locks of hair, thick as shit