Chapter 15: Megan

I arrived on British Columbia’s Mainland in June of 1990 with very little money and very few possessions.

I had spent the last decade in the North, and I was done with it. The North was cold, isolated, violent, and there was nothing left for me there. I had been living on my own in a little bachelor’s apartment while I attended college, but I wanted to transfer to University and get a real degree.

I had been surviving on student loans but that money was long gone. My choice was either stay in the North and find a summer job to support myself, or leave immediately, and try to find a summer job on the mainland.

This choice was slightly complicated by the fact that I didn’t want to leave Nick behind. But despite my asking, pleading, and begging he had refused.

But as much as I cared for him and wanted him to come with me, there was no way I could stay up there. If I did, I’d be stuck paying for my apartment while I tried to save up enough to move down south. Then, I’d have the problem of trying to find a place to live at the same time I was enrolling in University and figuring everything out.

It made way more sense to leave at the beginning of summer, get to the Mainland, find a job, get a place, and have everything lined up when the semester started in the fall.

Thankfully, I had a few friends from high school that were already living on the mainland who invited me to come live with them until I got on my feet.

So, I threw my few meager possessions in a backpack, bought a bus ticket, and made the horrific overnight trip through British Columbia’s interior. Neither Kyle nor Sam had a car, so I had to figure out which bus would get me within walking distance and navigate the rest of the way on foot.

I arrived at the house, a huge, dilapidated, run-down affair. A huge porch ran across the front, littered with an assortment of lawn chairs, tables, empty beer cases, and trash. The yard was bare, save for a pair of wild, unkempt bushes on either side of the stairs that led up to the porch.

“Hey, what’s up?”

I hadn’t noticed that there was someone on the porch, smoking. He was super skinny, wearing only a pair of denim shorts. His hair was cut into a blonde mohawk and he appeared to have a crappy tattoo on his shoulder.

“Um, I’m looking for Kyle? Or Sam?”

He took a long drag off his cigarette, then pointed it behind him, at the back yard.

“Go through there,” he said, motioning at a gap in the overgrown bushes on the right side of the house.

“Thanks.”

I pushed my way through the undergrowth, and found a chain link fence with a gate hanging off its hinges. I pushed the gate open, and walked into the back yard.

It was just as unkempt, with huge unruly shrubs around the perimeter and a dark canopy of tree branches blocked out most of the light. Off to one side was what appeared to be an old military surplus canvas tent. Further back, up against the fence, a very old VW van sat up on blocks with its sliding door open. As I looked more closely, a slight cloud of steam wafted out of it.

“Hey!”

I turned, shocked.

“Oh, hey,” I said.

Kyle had opened the flap on the tent and poked his head out.

“You made it.”

“Barely.”

“Yeah, that bus ride fucking sucks, huh?”

Kyle climbed out of the tent wearing a pair of baggy shorts and hoodie. He slipped on a pair of sandals and headed for the VW van, motioning for me to follow him.

Kyle wasn’t a close friend. He was a friend of a friend in high school and if I saw him at a party or other outing, I’d hang out and chat with him. But we were never close friends, just acquaintances.

Kyle was a lot like me-- really laid back, easy going, didn’t take things too seriously.

He was well known at school because he’d take any bet. Once, at an outdoor party a group of cops showed up to shut it down and someone bet Kyle he couldn’t steal the hat off one of the cop’s heads. He spent the night in jail.

Another time, I was sitting with a group of people around a fire pit made from an old truck rim that was glowing red hot. Someone bet Kyle he couldn’t put his hand on the glowing red outside of the rim for five seconds, and his friends had to physically hold him back so he wouldn’t do it.

Kyle was an okay looking guy, and he did all right with women. He wasn’t fit, he wasn’t overweight, he was just - normal - for lack of a better term.

The VW van interior had a bench seat and a cabinet with a small sink in it. It appeared to have been someone’s camper at some point in its life, but now it was just a husk of its former self.

A small Coleman camping stove sat beside the sink with a little pan of boiling water on it. Kyle opened a rickety door on the cabinet and produced a jar of instant coffee. There was a sleeve of styrofoam cups lying on the floor that had assumed were garbage, but he peeled back the plastic wrap and pulled off two cups.

He opened the jar and shook it, eyeballing the right amount. Then, he poured the water from the pan into each cup and handed me one.

It tasted terrible.

“Sorry,” he said, “It’s bad. But you’d better get used to it because everything back here is awful.”

As we chatted, he filled me in on the situation. The house was a shared rental, with four male roommates sharing. Kyle and Sam were friends with most of the roommates and paid a token amount to live in the backyard.

Sam was a cook at a local pub and worked evenings until very early in the morning. He slept most of the day, so he wasn’t seen much.

We weren’t allowed to use the washroom in the house, but we did have running water in the form of a garden hose connected to an exterior faucet. It wasn’t really a problem since we were close to a beach and there were public bathrooms and showers just a block away.

The tent was army surplus, a big old smelly thing meant to be semi-permanent. It was just big enough to hold our three cots with a little walking space in between.

For cooking, all they had was the camp stove in the VW van. There was no refrigeration so they had to buy food and cook it every day.

“The only cool thing,” he said with a smile, “is that.”

He pointed to a small fire pit covered by a tarp. It was ringed by faded lawn chairs, empty beer cases, and a little wooden table covered with empties.

“It’s the only place to relax around here.”

I nodded, accepting the fact that I was now basically homeless and my life was going to suck badly for the foreseeable future.

But I really didn’t care. Within a few days Kyle managed to get me hired as a laborer on the construction site where he worked. I had around fifty dollars to my name, and had to spend half that on a pair of shitty, worn out work boots at a nearby thrift store.

It was a terrible job and I hated it. If you took every awful, shitty, dickhead bully from your high school and put them in a hierarchy in which each subsequent level has a tiny amount of authority over the lower level, you can imagine the ‘Lord of the Rings’ situation that would naturally evolve.

As a laborer, and a newbie laborer at that, I was the lowest of the low. Guys working on the upper levels of the building spit on me and laughed as I carried boards, tools, supplies, or whatever bullshit was needed.

The workers on the upper levels pissed down the empty elevator shaft so they wouldn’t have to walk all the way down, and the foreman thought it was hilarious to make the newbie laborers dig out the piss-saturated sand and replace it with fresh.

It was a dismal existence and I dreaded going to work every morning. But it paid better than retail, and there was no way I could handle serving the public.

Things got better on the work site after the assholes grew tired of their hazing rituals and moved on to screaming at me for not bringing them the right supplies, tools, or whatever bullshit they needed. Being yelled at is much better than being spit or pissed on, so it didn’t get to me.

My routine was that I’d get up, get coffee and something to eat on the way to work, kill myself at work, then come home, have a shower in the public facility, buy something to eat, and then hang out with Kyle, Sam, and whichever roommate emerged from the house.

I wasn’t crazy about showering in the public change rooms down at the beach. They were, as you’d expect, not private in the least, with just a long row of shower heads lining a concrete wall. The floor was ancient tile and while it was cleaned regularly it had a constant orange mildew tinge.

The water was lukewarm at best and freezing at worst. Since I showered in the evenings after work, it was always filled with bulbous, gray, hairy old dudes.

Kyle, thankfully, would usually come shower at the same time so I’d have someone to talk to and distract from the depressing surroundings.

As I said before, Kyle was an okay looking guy and he had a decent body, but I didn’t find him attractive at all. He just was not my type in the slightest.

And, I’m sure you’re wondering: what about masturbating? I don’t know about Kyle or Sam, but I just didn’t. There was no privacy in the tent, no privacy in the public change rooms, no privacy anywhere. So I just didn’t.

In the beginning it wasn’t bad, but after a few weeks my hormones were raging and I would sleep consumed with cold sweats and a rock hard cock that refused to relax.

But after a month or so, Kyle told me his half-sister was having a hot tub party and I was welcome to come with him. Kyle’s parents were divorced and he had lived with his mother up north. His father lived on the mainland, and I came to find out that Kyle was living in the tent because his father had a whole new family that Kyle wasn’t part of.

Kyle’s half-sister was the daughter of his father’s new wife so they were not biologically related. She was older, in her early 30’s, had a real job, a boyfriend, and rented a house.

The evening of the hot tub party, Kyle and I showed up in shorts, sandals, and teeshirts with a cold case of beer. The house was a nice small bungalow in a moderately upscale neighborhood. I was certainly impressed.

Kyle’s half-sister Megan greeted us wearing a neon pink two-piece bikini. She was small. She was five feet tall at the most, and she was lucky to weigh a hundred pounds.

She had an absolutely amazing body. Super fit, flat stomach, tiny a-cup boobs, and an incredible round ass with cheeks that seemed to defy gravity.

Her face was a different story, however. She wasn’t ugly, and I am not in any position to judge anyone’s looks, but to me she was very weird looking. Her eyes, nose, and mouth were sort of squashed together. She had a very prominent, round jaw.

And her hair. She was a brunette with silky, smooth hair. But it was cut into a mullet. Short on top and the sides, and quite long in the back. Her ears were tiny but they were very prominent because her hair was shaved around them and up the side of her head.

But I felt a weird attraction to her as she led us through the house to put our beer in the fridge. Her body was just so incredibly sexy that it was hugely turning me on. But then I’d notice the mullet and be turned off.

In this era, there were companies that rented and delivered hot tubs for parties like this and it had been dropped off a few hours prior and wasn’t quite up to temperature yet.

There was a small group of people in the backyard and she introduced us to them. They were all in their late 20’s, early 30’s, and looked really boring. One of them was her live-in boyfriend, a nerdy looking nondescript guy who also had a mullet. I assumed it was their thing.

Kyle and I stuck together since we didn’t know anyone, and we stood off to the side by ourselves drinking beer.

“Hey,” said Kyle, “want some?”

He produced a little bag of dried brown mushrooms.

Up until this point in my life I had only ever smoked pot. I had never done any sort of psychedelic drug, but I was certainly curious. And I expected that the party would actually be really boring, so I thought at the very least that being high on magic mushrooms would make things more entertaining.

“How much do I take?”

He shrugged and handed me a few of the dried mushrooms.

“Are you sure,” I asked. “That seems like a lot.”

“Well, you’re big. You have to take more.”

I picked off one mushroom and handed it back. It still seemed like a lot but I really had no idea. I chewed them up, swallowed, and chased it down with beer.

Megan came over and told us the hot tub was ready so we pulled off our shirts, kicked off our sandals, and jumped in. It wasn’t really hot, it was just warm, but it was fine. There were jets, and I hadn’t had a bath in months. It felt great.

After we’d been in for a while, I wanted another beer so I got out, dried off using one of the towels that was provided, and went into the kitchen in just my shorts.

Megan was there chatting with two guys, and she watched me with interest as I opened the fridge and grabbed a beer.

“Luc,” she said, grinning. “We were just talking about pick up lines.”

I leaned against the counter to join the conversation.

“Ah,” I replied. “You are talking to the wrong guy. I’ve never successfully picked up a girl with a line.”