~~~
Lula/Stephanie/Valerie ... walked into a bar (just kidding)
~~~~
“I hate those no-nothing, nothing doing punks on social
media,” Lula said. She pressed a button
on the side of her phone to shut it down and tossed it into her purse.
In the beginning of my bounty hunting career, the only social
media that seemed to touch my life was the grapevine in the Berg. It never mattered what my supposed or real
transgression, if it happened within five minutes of home, my mother and
grandmother would have been informed. Depending on the source, the details
varied, almost always embellished in some way shape or form. But the framework of what happened was
there. There was no escape. Not unlike
social media. With the blooming of all of the forms of social media, I opted
out. Provided I remained in the Garden
State, I had enough connections, friends and family to do my job without
technological embellishments. Mostly.
For a Tuesday morning, things were slow in the bonds
office. Connie and my cousin the weasel,
were out doing who knew what and I was babysitting Lula. I put down my cup of coffee and wiped the
remaining doughnut crumbs from the corner of my mouth. “What’s wrong, Lula?”
The last time she turned off her phone and chucked it into her purse, she had
given up on Tank. It had only lasted about two weeks before she saw her way
clear and knew he was missing her, but it was a long two weeks for me. I
crossed my fingers that it wasn’t Tank related.
She huffed, shrugged, and sighed. “Everyone’s a hater. Everyone’s a critic.”
In my experience, that was true enough. “You know what my Grandpa Harry used to say,
right? Opinions are like assholes.”
We said in unison, “Everyone’s got one.”
“Exactly,” I said. “So,
who said or did what?” I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know, but she’d talk about
it one way or another.
“You remember the last time Sally Sweet and I played the
bowling alley after hours?”
Just this last weekend, Sally Sweet and his band of Lovelies
had lost their regular gig at the Liberty Ballroom. The management had wanted to change things up
and started Swing with the Swingers night, combining a place for swingers to
meet others, but not to swap, set to the old big band tunes circa World War
II. At about the same time, the local
bowling alley was looking for new streams of revenue and turned into an after
hours place for kids to hang out after curfew on Saturday nights and they
wanted a band. On a provisional basis.”
“So anyway, we did one set and had my cousin Peanut take
some pictures and put them up on FriendSpace to try to improve our cache. We
are building our brand.”
Peanut was a makeup artist cum stylist Lula had trained in
her personal style for many years. This
meant that the color wheel had a flat. The
more things opposed each other, the more they were obviously meant to be
together. This color chart had no subtle tones, no pastels, it had neon. A lot
of neon. The hair and the hair pieces,
the shoes, the outfits, the makeup, everything seemed to be neon. Or black
trimmed in neon.
“Okay.” I had a really sick feeling in the pit of my stomach
where this was going to go.
“Well anyway, there’s fat shaming involved.”
Lula had made the executive decision it was better to have
dangerous curves than no curves. She was
on the plus-plus side of plus size, but most of her clothes came from the
Junior Miss Department. Her clothes
tended to wear out from the inside out.
“Ouch,” I said. “Some
people just aren’t kind.”
“No shit. Let me show you the picture they are all hating.”
I wanted to cover my eyes and look through my fingers. I had seen the best of Lula and some of the
outfits she wore to perform were far from the best of Lula.
“It’s on my FriendSpace page,” she said. She pointed to my phone and said, “You still
haven’t friended us yet. We need all the exposure we can get.”
I sighed. I really
didn’t want to do the social media thing now or ever. As soon as an account opened, I was sure it
would be filled by my mother’s friends keeping better tabs on me. Worse still,
over the years there have been multiple less than flattering pictures of me and
I really didn’t want to see those posted on the internet for the whole world to
see. It was bad enough receiving them in
text messages or on email, but to my knowledge, they weren’t available for the
entire world. Even if they were some
days it paid to be an ostrich.
Lula tapped me on the shoulder so I would evacuate Connie’s
chair and she could control the computer. I guess some pictures were best seen when they were larger than
life. We traded places and Lula logged
into her account. After a few clicks and
a minor delay waiting for the page to load, there it was. Possibly one of the most unflattering pictures
of all time of a woman’s denim clad posterior as she was bending over a
refreshment table. To make things worse,
her pants had split and a tramp stamp was visible.
I recognized both the jeans and the tramp stamp with clown
faces on each side and which proclaimed her to be the property of her snuggle
bunny, Albert.
“Oh, God,” I whispered.
“Yeah, that’s what I said.
Your sister’s got to be hating life right about now.”
My older sister Valerie had always been the taller,
prettier, smarter, and more successful one.
Until recently. Recently
divorced, she married Albert Kloughn on the rebound and immediately settled
into life as the perfect homemaker and babymaker. The two of them put the mild
in wild.
TBC?
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