By Michael Tunison
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 7, 2006

Imagine, if you will: Seated in your cushy red leather chair, you peer up from your laptop for a moment to concentrate on the poet onstage. Liking what you hear, you take a sip of the house special and gaze back toward the bar, where the logo of a famous rapper's record label engulfs the wall, and you wonder how they mixed the two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen just so.

Welcome to the water cafe.

And where is this luxe locale? SoHo? South Beach? Santa Monica?

Nope.

Lexington Park, St. Mary's County. In a strip mall with a Food Lion, a Chinese takeout, Radio Shack, discount stores and Buffalo Wings and Beer.

The Good Water Store and Cafe, which opened last month, is billed as the first of its kind in Maryland. You get your drinks here clear and clean -- actually, clean, cleaner and cleanest. Three grades of purity.

And there's another surprise: The word "Good" in the cafe's name is an acronym for Getting Out Our Dreams, which, not coincidentally, is shared by the music label founded by platinum-selling rapper Kanye West. For good reason: West's father, Ray, owns the cafe. He lives in Lexington Park.

The rapper, through his charity, the Kanye West Foundation, lent money for the creation of the cafe, and, his father notes, he may make the occasional visit.

The cafe, in St. Mary's Square, has all the trappings of the modern coffeehouse: WiFi, flat-screen TVs, performance space, relaxed neighborhood vibe -- all in a town with a six-lane main road littered with fast-food joints and big-box stores and an economy largely dependent on its military base.

Business is sluggish so far -- the cafe just finalized its menu last week and the sign on the marquee isn't up yet -- but it has generated excitement.

"This is something we don't have -- a place for people to come hang out, talk or use the Net," said customer Gloria Eisner, who said she's in her 20s. "You can go to a bar or you can drive to D.C., and that takes two hours."

If you're not quite sure what a water cafe is, you're not alone.

"This has never been done before, so there was bound to be some confusion," Ray West said. "We went to the county health department and they said, 'What the heck is a water store?' "

The cafe does serve more than water. It has a wide selection of teas, bubble tea, wraps, salads, yogurt, smoothies and coffee, but they are all made with premium distilled water. West hopes visitors will also rely on his store for regular drinking and cooking water. In the back, customers can purchase plastic drums and pump water from his taps.

West says his aim is to spur awareness of global clean-water issues.

"There's just so much in our water that there's no natural way of getting it out because these are man-made chemicals," West said. "We've reached the point where people have to take personal responsibility for what they drink, and that's what we're trying to teach people here."

West, 57, has lived in the region for 20 years. He moved from Atlanta, where Kanye was born and where Ray was the first black photographer for the Journal-Constitution. Kanye's parents split up when he was 2, and he grew up in Chicago with his mother but spent summers in the D.C. area with his father.

Ray relocated to St. Mary's County in 2001 to serve as clinical director at a mental health clinic, then later taught sociology at the College of Southern Maryland. During his teaching, West discovered that access to clean water was the second highest cause of global anxiety after oil.

"It just clicked to me, the way global warming is now starting to resonate with many people," West said. Around this time, Kanye's career was taking off, "and I wanted him to associate with something positive," West continued. "I knew at the time that he was touring with U2. I told him, 'Listen to some of the things Bono is saying. Wrap yourself in some of the things like that.' "

Ray West scouted the District but found the rents prohibitive. Gwen Bankins, a distribution system operator with Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative and special events coordinator at the St. Mary's County Teen Center, appealed to him to keep his business in St. Mary's because the cafe could offer an opportunity for local artists.

The economy of Lexington Park, population 12,000, has long centered on the Patuxent River Naval Air Station. As the base has grown considerably in the past 15 years, it has spurred commercial and residential growth, generating an influx of well-educated professionals. Median household income has jumped from $54,706 in 2000 to $62,939 in 2005, keeping the county more than $1,000 above the state average.

West saw an untapped market.

"Lexington Park is going to be a very nice place, and we are hoping to catch the front end of that wave," he said.

Although bottled water isn't the rarefied refreshment it once was -- the Beverage Marketing Corp. predicts that single-serve bottled water will overtake soda as the best-selling beverage by 2012 -- West said that in this region water access and purity issues are often an afterthought.

"The awareness may not have caught on on the East Coast, but in other parts of the country, they're forced to think about it. In Riverside, California, where my brother lives, every shopping center has a water store, because they have a water shortage."

To educate consumers, the Good Water Store offers three grades of water:

· "Good -- 85 percent pure," which sells for 79 cents a gallon, is water treated with a carbon filter, essentially what you get when you use a Brita filter.

· "Better -- 95 percent pure," 89 cents, is water treated with a reverse-osmosis filter, the method used by most bottling plants.

· "Best -- 99.9 percent pure," 99 cents, is water treated with the first two methods, as well a steam-distillation system, used in pharmacies, dentist's offices and U.S. embassies.

At a recent news conference to mark the opening of the cafe, Del. John L. Bohanan Jr. (D-St. Mary's) raised the concern that worrisome levels of arsenic had been found in the county's drinking water. West pointed out that many residents in Southern Maryland get their drinking water from wells, which don't receive regular state testing.

Steve King, director of the county water and sewer service, said that the system exceeds 2006 federal guidelines for acceptable levels of organic arsenic but that the utility is replacing the offending source with a deeper, clean aquifer. Otherwise, he said, the water is clean, and distillation is an expensive and "absolutely unnecessary" alternative.

"I'm sure the process that they use wouldn't remove the arsenic anyway," he said. "There are no industrial pollutants and there are no pesticides in our water. Some people don't like to taste chlorine, which is required to be in the water as a safety precaution."

West wants the cafe's ceremonial grand opening to coincide with the United Nation's World Water Day on March 22. He said there is "a strong possibility" that his son will be on hand.

"When I talked to my son, I told him rather than go to beers, shoes or all these other things they wanted him to get into, he could connect with a positive source for himself," West said. "I wanted to connect him with a concern that is growing, that is truly global."