Glad One: Starting Over is a %$#@&! (Val & Pals Book 2) Read online

  Gladys sat up and slapped her knee, startling me slightly. “I was hooked like a snook, Kiddo! Blue sky. No chance of snow! There was even a place that gave away free ice cream if the sun didn’t shine on any given day. I liked that. St. Pete had – what’cha call it – an optimistic vibe about it.”

  I shook my head. Over the years, I’d heard countless tourists tell how, after taking a gander at the sugar-white sands and turquoise waters of St. Pete, they’d decided to ditch their old lives like losing lottery tickets. But nobody, before or since, ever matched Gladys for grit and gusto.

  “Woo hoo! Honey, I grabbed onto the Sunshine State’s ass with both hands,” she said, standing up and grabbing her own scrawny butt cheeks in a quite literal visual accompaniment.

  Gladys lowered her arms and sat back down. “Nope. It didn’t take me long to hatch my escape plan, Kiddo. Last day of Bobby’s dang revival, I snuck out the back of that church tent and into the driver’s seat of a 1966 Minnie Winnie RV.” She winked at me salaciously. “I’d got it real cheap off the guilty husband me and Bobby done been staying with.” Sparks danced in Gladys’s eyes as she recalled that day. “I climbed into that Minnie Winnie and shifted gears in more ways than one, you know? Drove to Sunset Beach and never looked back.

  “It was 1974, by golly. Back then a body could do that. Just up and disappear.” Gladys drained her Fosters and shook her head wistfully. “Nowadays, they ain’t no good place to be a vagabond. Some uptight asshole with property rights always chases your ass away.”

  “Yeah, you’re right about that, Gladys,” I said. I envisioned all the quaint little beach houses I’d seen bulldozed over the years in the name of so-called progress.

  “Name’s Glad, Kiddo. Not Gladys,” she said. “I ain’t that woman no more. No more Pious Patty. No more Blowjob Betty. No more Gladys. I’m just Glad now, plain and simple.”

  I studied her a moment and a smile crept across my lips. “The name suits you.”

  Glad beamed at the compliment. “That’s mighty nice a you. What’s your name, Sugar?”

  “Name’s Val. Nice to meet you,” I said, surprising myself by actually meaning it. I reached over and shook Glad’s boney brown hand.

  “Sure you won’t have a beer?” she asked with a wink, holding up a shiny silver can.

  Since tossing that fateful coin on New Year’s Eve, I’d tried to set some kind of standards as to just how low I would let myself sink. My last ground rule remaining was no drinking before 8 a.m. I checked the time on my cellphone. It was 8:03. I smiled at the old woman and took the pint of Fosters she offered. I cracked the tab, tilted my head back and took a long, deep draught.

  Chapter Three

  May melted into June and I fell into a comfortable routine of sharing a brew and a blab on the beach with Glad four or five times a week. No matter when I showed up, she never failed to be there, sprawled out on her beach lounger like a pack of spilled beef jerky. “Fuck you, Kiddo!” she’d say as I set my stuff down next to hers. Then she’d shoo me off with a flick of her sun-spotted hand, encouraging me to take a walk on the beach. The walks didn’t help much. I usually wasted the time wondering what was wrong with me.

  A little over a year ago, I’d known precisely who I was – the “exotic” American wife of a handsome but moody German vintner. I’d lived in a fabulous, ancient winemaker’s house made of stone in a quaint country village nestled in a picturesque fairytale land dotted with vineyards and apple orchards and castles on hilltops. Now that I was back in St. Pete, I was living in a hovel above somebody’s garage and couldn’t even land a job as a waitress. Literally.

  Even worse, the long years abroad had slowly turned me into a stranger to everyone I used to call a friend. Sometime during the long years of sporadic phone calls and rushed holiday visits, the cozy familiarity I once enjoyed with them had eroded into the kind of arms-length, shallow kindness afforded the lost and the elderly. I had become nothing more than a random tourist wandering the outskirts of my former relationships. Worse still, to some I had morphed into a curiosity – an odd puzzle they couldn’t comprehend. Perhaps my all-or-nothing, sink-or-swim life choices had made them fearful of wading out into their own deep waters. Maybe they didn’t have any deep waters. Whatever the reason, since my return, the majority of my estranged family and former friends now labeled me as reckless at best – pathetic at worst.

  I had begun to fear they were right.

  ***

  “My life seems to be one fuck-up after the next,” I said to Glad at the beach one morning. “Career down the drain. Three bad marriages. I wonder what my next mistake will be.”

  “Maybe it’s that bathing suit,” the old lady quipped and stuck out her lizard tongue.

  Her sharp humor made me wince. “Fuck you,” I shot back, only half joking.

  The withered prune of a woman studied me from under her Gilligan hat. Finally, she spoke. “Girl, don’t you know by now? Mistakes are just thangs you hat’n figured out the reason for yet. Once you do, their worth shows up. You either learn somethin’ or get somethin’ from ever’thing that happens to you.”

  “Yeah, sure. Everything’s a lesson or a gift. I’ve heard that before.”

  “Then maybe it’s time you started listenin’.”

  A surge of restless energy jerked my body to standing. I looked down at my stomach. It spilled over the bottom of my two-piece bathing suit like a fallen soufflé. Suddenly, I became as self-conscious as the runner-up at a Ms. Middle-Aged Muffin Top Pageant. Maybe Glad was right. This bathing suit was a mistake. I shifted my gaze from my belly over to Glad. “Glad, have you ever made any mistakes you’ve never found the reason for?”

  Glad twisted her beer can slowly into the white sand and looked out toward the Gulf. “Just one, Kiddo. Lost my true love once. My only real regret in this lifetime.”

  “Who was it?” I asked. But Glad didn’t answer. She just kept staring out at the sparkling water as a single tear snaked its way down a ravine in her wrinkled raisin of a cheek.

  ***

  Sunset Beach was on the back burner this morning. I had plans to meet my old friend Tamella Fitz-Franklin at a coffee shop in downtown St. Pete. While I was in Europe, Tammy had married a bigwig banker and moved into his mansion on Snell Isle (aka Snob Isle) off Coffee Pot Bayou adjacent to the swanky Old Northeast neighborhood. In anticipation of seeing her for the first time in ages, I’d applied full makeup, blow-dried my hair, and donned a dress and heels. No big deal for most. But for me, it was an effort I usually reserved for first dates and funerals, which, given my track record, often proved difficult to distinguish one from the other.

  I was heading out the door to meet her when my cellphone pinged. It was a last-minute text from Tammy, cancelling for the third time in a row. It read, “Something’s come up. Maybe next dweeb.” I was contemplating whether I was a victim of auto correct or a Freudian slip when I realized that maybe I was neither! Maybe she really thought I was a dweeb! A dweeb who no longer fit in her social circle, obviously. Shit! The only thing “circling” me these days was the credit vultures – my FICA score stunk to high heaven.

  “OK,” I texted back, then kicked off my heels and unzipped my dress. I hated that shit like this still bothered me, but it did. I hung up my dress and wondered if Tammy was ashamed to be seen with me. Or maybe I’d sunk too low to be worth her time anymore. It wouldn’t have hurt so badly if she had been the only one to reject me like this. But like life itself, Tammy had moved on, and so had almost everyone else I used to call a friend.

  Painful memories stung my heart and caused my eyes to water. I’d let go of so much lately. Tammy was just one more drop in a huge barrel. So why did it hurt so much? Then I looked in the mirror and realized that even I was embarrassed by me. Oh shit!

  I thought about that old lady Glad, and what she must have given up. She was homeless as far as I could tell. Still, she had found a way to be happy despite it all. I hoped I could, too. I just needed time – a
nd a new set of skills. Specifically, I wanted to figure out how to become immune to the stinging hurt of other people’s judgement. I also wanted to learn how to be free to live my life my way, with no regrets. But, to be honest, what I wanted most of all was to master how to not give a crap anymore about what anyone else thought of me. Period.

  From what I’d witnessed the past few weeks, Glad was the Jedi Master of Don’t-Give-A-Shit University. Her carefree attitude and genuine, everyday happiness did more than intrigue me. It made me envious. More envious than I was of Tammy, to be sure. Who needed a bitch like that for a friend, anyway? I pushed up my chin, pulled on my best bathing suit, grabbed my purse and headed to Sunset Beach, still sporting my full-on war paint.

  ***

  “How do you do it, Jedi Master?” I called out as I picked my way across the sand in Glad’s direction. The summer sky and lazy ocean were the same gorgeous shade of azure blue. The late-morning sun set about frying the back of my neck like eggs in a skillet. Thank heaven for the slight breeze, I thought as I stood over Glad sprawled out in her cheap pink lounge chair. My body cast a shadow of shade across her face. Taking advantage of the respite from the sun, she flipped her bug-eyed sunglasses up on her forehead and stared at me with eyes as blue and piercing as a glacier shard.

  “What you mean, Kiddo? How do I do what, exactly?”

  “Stay so upbeat. It’s like nothing gets you down.”

  “Oh!” She laughed. “There ain’t no magic hocus pocus to it, Kiddo. You just gotta remember that you decide how you feel about whatever’s happenin’ around you. You’re in

  complete control a your feelin’s. Don’t let nobody take your power, Child.”

  “But what about….”

  “No buts!” she said, cutting me off. “You wanna be sad, Val, be sad. You wanna be happy, be happy. It’s always a hunnert percent your choice. Own it, girl.”

  I grabbed a beer and plopped down in my chair. I didn’t say anything for a while. Actually, I was kind of pissed. So that was Glad’s secret to a happy life? It was so freaking simple. So utterly profound. So undeniably true. How had I never figured this out before? And why was I so pissed about it? I was on round three of beating myself up inside when Glad sat up in her lounge chair and studied me.

  “Why the makeup today, Kiddo? You don’t need it.”

  “I was going to meet a friend…or should I say, ex-friend for coffee this morning. She ditched me. I guess I’m no longer up to her standards.”

  Glad leaned across her beach lounger and took my hand in hers – something she’d never done before. “Let me tell you something, Girlie. Who gives a shit what that cow-brained heifer thinks a you? All that matters is what you think a you. And if you don’t mind me sayin’ so, I think you’re kind a wonderful, Val.”

  Hot tears sprang up and spilled from my eyes, tightening my throat so badly I couldn’t talk. Glad smiled, let go of my hand and sank back into her lounger. After a while, I wiped my eyes on my beach towel, picked up my beer and took a big gulp. Jedi Master Glad chose that precise moment to lift a scrawny butt cheek and trumpet out a magnificent, flappy-assed fart. My reaction was involuntary and immediate – I choked and spewed two foamy furrows of Fosters straight out my nostrils like a rabid beach dragon. While I nearly suffocated between gasps and giggles, Glad shrugged her shoulders nonchalantly and smiled back at me with a grin Jimmy Carter couldn’t match.

  Weird. A few short weeks ago, I would have been aghast at Glad’s behavior. But at that particular moment I realized I felt nothing remotely on par with horror or disgust or shame. Glad’s flatulent act no longer represented an embarrassing faux pas to me. Instead, it represented a refusal to be defined by social mores. It represented…total freedom! Glad’s words were not just some bullshit theory from an old gasbag. She had mastered total, who-gives-a-shit self-acceptance.

  I wanted that!

  Glad sat up and drained her can of Fosters, then tossed it at me playfully, startling me out of my inner machinations. “We all create our own dad-gum prisons, Val,” she said. “But I’m here to tell you, we always got a-hold a the keys. We got the power to set ourselves free anytime. Anytime. All you got to do is choose to feel good, no matter what kind a shit rolls your way.”

  I nodded. Glad’s right. I sniffed back a drop of inhaled beer tickling my nose and looked out at the ocean. A single thought whirled around in my head like a water sprite. I have the keys. I have the keys. So why am I still loitering around in an orange jumpsuit, waiting for someone else’s permission to go free?

  Chapter Four

  Over the next few weeks, a new feeling began to take hold in my heart. I wasn’t sure what to call it, but I think it might have been hope. In a surge of renewed optimism, I dusted off my old resume and writing portfolio and began to look up some old contacts in the advertising industry. I also applied for waitress positions at a couple of restaurants on the beach and downtown, just in case my old copywriting career was as dead on arrival as I had felt on that plane from Frankfurt.

  Yes. Glad’s crazy-but-effective, no-bullshit tutelage had started to take root. I noticed I felt freer, looser somehow, like a crab that had sloughed off an old carapace that no longer fit. With new room to breathe, a tightly bound knot of rubber bands had begun to unravel in my chest. The unexpected snaps pinched and hurt, but the relief always outweighed the pain. Glad, it seemed, turned out to be good medicine, even though her words were sometimes hard to swallow.

  ***

  One morning, as I pulled Shabby Maggie into Caddy’s parking lot, my cellphone pinged. It was a text from Cannon & Tate Advertising thanking me for my interest in a position there. Unfortunately, the feeling was not reciprocal. Another rejection. Shit.

  I grabbed my beach chair out of the backseat. As I picked my way across the parking lot, I stepped on a broken clam shell and blew out my flip-flop. Crap! I hobbled and hopped my way along the parking lot on one foot. When I reached the soft beach sand, I took off my good flip-flop and tossed both cheap-ass shoes in a garbage bin. I looked up and saw Glad waving at me. I started to wave back when my phone pinged with another text message. I read it. Shit. Apparently, Beachshore Grille didn’t think I had what it took to be waitress, either.

  “Shit, shit and double shit!” I yelled loud enough for Glad to hear.

  “What’s up, Kiddo?” Glad said from somewhere under her floppy hat and sunglasses.

  I walked up to her and held my phone out for her to see. “Look. Two rejections in five minutes! With my luck, I don’t think I could get a job cleaning shoes in a shit factory.”

  Glad took off her hat and glasses and glanced at the phone. “Don’t sweat it, Kiddo. You’ll get a job when you set your mind to it.” She smiled and wagged her McDonald’s-arches-for-eyebrows at me. The perfect half-crescents of black eyebrow pencil scrawled on Glad’s sun-spotted forehead gave her a permanent look of astonishment that had, at first, made me secretly embarrassed for her. Now, seeing the double arches in action caused a smile of endearment to curl my lips, despite my frustration over my unemployment situation.

  “But I really need a job now,” I whined. I pouted as I set up my beach chair, then fumbled through my bag for a copy of The St. Petersburg Times I’d folded to the job classifieds.

  Glad sat back in her lounger and returned her pink Gilligan hat to its perch atop her short shock of silver hair. She reached a long, Slim Jim arm toward the cooler for another beer and said, “I think you should hold out for the job you really want.” She punctuated the end of her sentence with the click and vacuum-whoosh of a fresh can of beer opening.

  As I watched her take a slug of beer, my smile evaporated and my own eyebrows scrunched angrily together. “You don’t get it,” I argued. “I lost my career, Glad! I need to get back in the workforce. Otherwise, how am I going to be a worthwhile citizen?”

  Glad shot me a sideways glance and began laughing so hard she spilled beer all over her purple, polka-dotted swimsuit. She slapped her knee and sai
d, “Worthwhile citizen! What kind a horseshit is that?”

  My mind raced around for the right answer. Somehow it wasn’t as easy to pluck black-and-white from my grey matter anymore. Glad watched my struggle with what appeared to me to be the kind of patient amusement reserved for kindergarteners and idiots. I finally fumbled out something that sounded familiar. “To be productive, Glad! To keep the economy going. To make a difference in the world. It’s what we were taught to believe!”

  Glad sat up in her pink lounger, dug her bony brown toes in the white sand and beamed at me like a mother who just taught her daughter to go potty all by herself. “Bingo, Kiddo! You hit the dang nail on the head!” Glad’s blue, laser-beam eyes stared intently into my own dark-brown ones for what seemed like a minute, searching for something but failing to find it. Finally, she explained, “It’s what we were taught to believe. But whose beliefs are they really, Val?”

  “I don’t know, Glad!” I shrieked, then shriveled into a growing grey uncertainty. “Everyone’s, I guess.”

  “Not mine!” Glad slapped her thin brown thigh and cackled out a laugh. Not a cynical laugh. A genuine, hearty laugh laced with a good Southern helping of joy. “I haven’t done much else but sit my ass in this chair and drink beer for the last twenty years. Do you think I’m a worthwhile citizen, Kiddo? Tell the truth now. You know it’s all the same to me.”

  I turned the ignition on my old belief system, but the judgmental engine just sputtered and failed. I got out of the old jalopy and slammed the door defiantly. “Before I got to know you, I might have said no, Glad, you weren’t a worthwhile citizen. But now…now I’d say yes.”