Bubbles, Wine, and Smoke
I’m a sixty-eight-year-old woman sitting in a plastic lawn chair in my shower smoking pot. The steam makes it difficult to keep my joint lit, but I manage.
“Honey?” my boyfriend, Eric, called through the bathroom door. “You okay?”
He needs to shower before work. He works in a toll booth and gets ecstatic when someone hands him a quarter older than 1965, because of its silver content.
“Never better,” I replied.
Last night I poured whiskey into my chardonnay. The wine wasn’t working fast enough. Tasted horrible but did the trick. I never drank or smoked pot until I turned sixty-six. I even have my own web site now, BubblesWineandSmoke.com. I started it seven months ago after attending a class at the senior center. I signed up hoping to meet someone, and I did; Eric.
I make four thousand dollars a month off BubblesWineandSmoke.com. I stream video from my smart phone on a stand in the corner of the shower, get stoned, drink wine, and take a shower. Nothing sexual. Nothing perverse. Every now and then I mix it up with a bubble gun. Bubbles float all over the place as I sit in the shower. Recently I added episodes of me cooking and cleaning in the nude. It’s a hit.
I don’t accept requests. The craziest thing I do is wash beneath my boobs. I have a long-handle brush for my back and my feet, and you get to watch me do it all for twenty-nine dollars a month. Google Analytics ranks my site twice as high as those of strippers a third my age.
I have a niche.
The site has done wonders for my self-esteem. I feel better about being naked now than I did forty years ago. I imagine some college kids sign on for laughs, but I know a few of them feel a little tingle below when they see me, their little hormonal minds curious about what it would be like.
My only concern is one of my kids or grandkids stumbling across my site.
“Mommy!” I can imagine one of my grandkids screaming out for my daughter. “Grandma is a pot-smoking porn star!”
My daughter’s eyes widen as she leans into the screen and then turns away in disgust. “Yes,” she stutters. “That’s Grandma in the shower. She’s just being a safe smoker.”
Truth is I’d actually like someone to find out. I’d like to talk about it. But I can’t initiate the conversation. Could you imagine me saying, “I sit naked in my shower getting stoned, drinking wine, and blowing pot bubbles while recording it via a live feed on my paid subscription website. What do you think about that? How does that make you feel?”
I certainly can’t tell Eric. He has a low self-esteem as it is and he’s certainly no Casanova. In the kitchen I have two special salt and pepper shakers—one full of yellow salt, the other full of blue pepper. For you slow people, crushed Viagra and ground Cialis. I add a pinch of each to his dinner. He thinks they are imported Himalayan salts with rare minerals. I like Eric but not a lot.
The truth is I don’t like to make a dinner reservation for just one or go to a movie alone. Been that way my entire life.
I watch Eric sleep at night, not in a romantic way, but instead I wonder how he can snore so loud and still sleep. I sprinkled pepper in his mouth one evening. It was a sight—him sneezing and thrashing about, cursing, fussing, and throwing pillows.
I go to church every Sunday. Two Sundays ago a man walked past me, and I could tell he was trying to figure out where he knew me from. He looked back wide-eyed. I smiled. He blushed and quickly looked away. Church keeps me centered. It’s good for me. I need it, and at the end of each service I pray Jesus doesn’t have Internet access.
A part of me is proud of what I’ve created. I’m an entertainer. An entrepreneur. I support myself, and I’m happy. Another part of me feels shame, but I’m not certain why. I’m gonna shower regardless. I’m gonna smoke pot and drink wine, and with my website I don’t have to do it alone. I enjoy the attention too. I didn’t get much as a young woman. I was average, worked as a teller, married as a virgin, had children, and cooked dinner every night. My parents didn’t believe girls should wear make-up, believed that Elvis was the devil, and that no one should kiss in public.
I’m comfortable being nude. My husband, God rest his soul, and I used to go to a nudist resort in Florida every year for two weeks after our kids moved out. It was comical, watching all those little peckers flopping around. My husband was different though. He was a white elephant. He was pathetically average at everything but his size. First few times we made love it was horribly uncomfortable. Truth be told, I think that’s why he enjoyed going to the colony. Even the men would stare at it. If he were still alive I’d add him to my site and triple my profits. “Now showering with Bubbles, Big Pecker Mike!”
I gazed at the tiny little lens at the top of my phone in the corner of the shower, something I usually avoided. It was like a peephole in a front door. I ponder what those watching me really thought. A woman simply showering? An old lady at the tail end of pitiful? Or a woman holding on to the last bit of joy, grateful she found a way to communicate, even if in such a peculiar way?
I turned up the hot water. I actually missed the days when there were two knobs, hot and cold, to adjust the temperature. You had to know your stuff when you stepped into the shower. Overnight guests had to adjust the knobs slowly, but I knew the secret; made me feel significant. Now, like everything else, it’s easier. One knob turned to your liking.
The longer I remain in the shower, the hotter I want it. Steam fills the air like a cloud shielding me from the world except for those who paid to see me. I wiped condensation off the lens of my phone and leaned back into my chair thinking about people long gone—my husband, my parents, and friends who passed. Could they see what I was doing? Did they understand why? I stood and looked up into the showerhead. Like a rain storm there was no avoiding the deluge. I closed my eyes and let the water wash away my tears. I was not sad or happy; instead somewhere in between, and crying felt good. A release of sorts.
“Honey?” Eric knocked with more urgency.
“Okay, okay,” I replied. I sounded like a fifteen-year-old boy being rushed out of the shower.
I pulled out my bubble wand and blew smoke into the bubbles. White balls slowly burst all over me. I winked, whispered into the mike, “Till tomorrow,” and then turned off my smart phone.
• • •
Charles R. Stieren lives in Orlando, where he works as a Nurse Case Manager. His short stories have appeared in Adelaide Magazine, Thorny Locust, The Avalon Literary Review and others. You can find him at charlesrstieren.com.