Water, Water Everywhere

I picked up a friend the other day to join me for a movie, and just as we were driving away from his house he shouted, “Wait!”

The tone in his voice was pure panic. He bolted from the car, ran back into the house and reemerged with two bottles of water in containers strapped like bandoleers across his chest.

I said, “The movie’s in Santa Monica, not on the other side of the Gobi Desert,” but this wasn’t a laughing matter to him. He needed his water. When I said that they probably had drinking fountains at the theater, he looked at me as though I had suggested he swallow hog sweat.

“There is no way,” he said, “that I would drink that.”

He sipped his water all the way through the movie, which was “Eyes Wide Shut,” and I figured well, OK, all those naked women could make a man thirsty. But then he drank it all through dinner too, where absolutely no one was naked, and I began to wonder.

Later I noticed bottled water drinkers on foot, on bicycles and in cars. It seemed suddenly they were all around me, sipping and gulping like marathon runners in hell. There was a kind of desperation to the act, as though without their Evian or their Apollinaris they would crystallize and shatter.

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Bottled water has emerged along with the cell phone as a kind of security blanket for the gullible. Clever marketing makes us believe that without them we are alone in the world and subject to all kinds of human indecencies.

Forget that cell phones may cause brain atrophy and a lot of the so-called pure mountain water may not be all that mountain pure. The Natural Resources Defense Council reported earlier this year that of 103 brands of bottled water tested, one-third contained chemical or bacterial contamination.

The NRDC also discovered that some of it may have even just come from ordinary taps and not from the gleaming alpine streams pictured on the bottles.

This hasn’t seemed to bother anyone at all, especially in California, where all weird fads find willing adherents. We buy 25% of the 3.4 billion gallons of bottled water sold each year in America, probably most of it in L.A.

The water boom began sometime in the mid-’80s, based on a recommendation that we all drink eight eight-ounce glasses of water a day. When I tried to determine exactly who recommended this, all I got back was “health experts,” many of whom, I think, are members of the water industry.

A survey that did involve the International Bottled Water Assn. came up with the idea that people who exercise need an additional four ounces every 15 minutes. This has created a cult definition of exercise to mean that even sitting and staring can cause dehydration. Thinking wasn’t even considered.

I read in Life magazine once that sex, if done properly, burns 150 calories per act, so I guess if you don’t need water during or immediately afterward you’re probably not doing it right.

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At least some of the bottled water mania is rooted in the fear that what comes from the kitchen tap isn’t fit for human consumption. I remember a warning once that we shouldn’t put goldfish in tap water without first purifying it, which led a lot of us to wonder whether we should even be showering in something that kills fish, much less drinking the stuff.

Then just last year we discovered that some tap waters contain a chlorine byproduct called trihalomethane that could cause miscarriages in women. This was followed by the revelation that, in addition, a microbe in tap water known as cryptosporidium kills 900 people a year.

At just about the same time, the Environmental Law Foundation sued eight bottled water companies, claiming that some of their products contained levels of arsenic that exceeded state-mandated levels. Arsenic can also kill.

Is there no good news in waterland?

Well, maybe some. The very same year that trihalomethane and cryptosporidium were causing headlines, L.A.’s tap water was declared the best-tasting tap water in the West. Well, actually, the best non-tasting. If you can taste anything in tap water, you’re drinking either scum or industrial waste.

L.A. has always been considered a kind of nut farm with its obsessive-compulsive behavior patterns, and our emphasis on bottled water validates the contention. On the other hand, who can trust a fluid that kills fish? Thank God for the simple martini. It’s cryptosporidium-free and contains no dangerous trihalomethanes. I’m not sure about the olive.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online atal.martinez@latimes.com