Читать книгу The Redneck Riviera - Richard N. Côté - Страница 3

Murrell’s Inlet, South Carolina

Early May

Yahoo! Life rocks! Dolly Devereaux’s heart raced as she fluffed her platinum blonde hair and checked her blue eyeliner in the bathroom mirror. Outside, the light mist of rain from the gray clouds above did nothing to dampen her spirits. Nothing, she thought, is going to get me down today. Yesterday I was an employee, a drone, a seven-dollar-an-hour sales clerk. Today I’m the store manager, the boss, the queen bee of Fantasia Lingerie Store #23 in Myrtle Beach. Recalling a phrase she’d learned from her grandmother when she was just a baby growing up in rural Darlington, Dolly grinned and thought, Honey, you’s in high cotton now!

She couldn’t believe how casually the lingerie chain’s district manager had made the announcement to her and the other employees the day before. Maybe it wasn’t a big deal for him. After all, he supervised thirteen stores in three states. Wanda, the previous manager of Dolly’s store, had quit without warning just two days ago, and he had to make a quick replacement. “What the heck,” he probably thought to himself. “Take the blonde. She’s the oldest, and she can’t do any worse than the last one.”

It might have been a routine decision for him, Dolly thought, but it sure was a big deal for me. Yesterday I was working by the hour with no benefits. Today I have health insurance, sick leave, and in three more months, a 401(k). What the hell is a 401(k)? she thought when he told her, never letting on for a minute that she had no idea what it was. Who cares? she thought, smiling. It’s a benefit, it’s free, and nobody else in my family ever had one.

For Dolly, life in the North Myrtle Beach mobile home park where she spent her teenage years had centered around earning money after school to help her mother, Anne, with the cost of food, rent, electricity, and dodging the hands of her mother’s succession of boyfriends. The "trailer trash," as the city kids called her kind, didn’t spend much time worrying about 401(k) plans. But now, at the age of 36, her years of hard work and overtime had finally paid off. She had finally made it out of the trailer park and into the middle class. She was a manager. She was on a roll. She hoped the promotion wouldn’t cause trouble with the other three girls. But if it did, well, she was the manager now and they’d just have to live with it.

Dolly swung her long, dancer’s legs into her rusting blue Honda Civic and slammed the door shut, hoping the passenger side window wouldn’t jump out of its track again. She pulled out of the SeaVue Apartments parking lot in Murrell’s Inlet, turned left, and headed north toward Myrtle Beach.

As she pulled onto King’s Highway, as U.S. Highway 17 was known locally, a long, silver gasoline tanker sped by on the left, shrouding her car in a light-brown fog of rain, dirt, and road oil. Her windshield wipers, long overdue for replacement, smeared the thin brown soup across the windshield, making it even harder to see. Tomorrow, she thought, I might celebrate the Big Event by taking the car into the shop for some maintenance. Heck, maybe I’ll even splurge for some overdue dental work. The pay raise would bring her nearly $200 more a month. She was rich! Or as close to rich as any member of her family had ever gotten. She knew that she couldn’t give up her waitress job at Captain Willie’s yet, but the thought of the extra money from her day job made her head spin. Maybe it’s even time to move up from Budweiser to Heineken’s. But she quickly reconsidered. Nah. I like Budweiser.

As she drove towards the store, thinking about how she’d handle her first day as manager, Dolly scarcely noticed the non-stop blur of signs and billboards that lined both sides of King’s Highway. Just north of Murrell’s Inlet lay what the Chamber of Commerce promoted as the family oriented, fun-in-the-sun and golfing heaven known as the “Grand Strand.” To many local wags and far-away travel writers it is known as “The Redneck Riviera.”

A two-hour drive north of Charleston, South Carolina’s Redneck Riviera is a forty-mile-long strip of coastline that runs south from the North Carolina state line and includes Little River, North Myrtle Beach, and Myrtle Beach and ends at Murrell’s Inlet, ten miles south of Myrtle Beach.

Each year, the region hosts twice as many visitors as the entire state of Hawaii. On a typical summer day, nearly a half-million people enjoy its wide, clean beaches and fill its 60,000 hotel rooms, 200+ tennis courts, 100+ golf courses, amusement parks, theaters, mini-golf courses, factory outlet stores, seafood restaurants, bars, and two dozen strip clubs.

Civilization – as most traditional South Carolinians conceive it, anyway – starts a couple miles south of Murrell’s Inlet at Brookgreen Gardens. The historic former rice plantation and its magnificent outdoor statuary is the first pearl in an unbroken chain of natural beauty that lay to the south of the neon, plastic, and T-shirt shops of the Redneck Riviera. Further south lies 150 miles of the state’s greatest natural treasures, including South Carolina’s legendary rice plantations, the incredible eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture of Charleston, and the lush sea islands, which stretch down to the beautiful historic town of Beaufort.

Heading north from Murrell’s Inlet is another story. The closer Dolly got to Myrtle Beach – Ground Zero for rampant commercialism and tacky excess – the harder it was to tell one Redneck Riviera community from another. The endless procession of nearly identical beachwear and T-shirt shops was evidently designed with the assumption that no addition of more fiberglass sharks, neon lights, or chrome could possibly be bad for business. The countless tourist traps that lined King’s Highway formed a continuous commercial blur. When a boyfriend took her for a weekend rendezvous at a romantic nineteenth-century bed-and-breakfast hotel in Savannah, Dolly began to realize that the Myrtle Beach area lacked some of the finer things in life. She immediately upgraded her aspirations another notch.

On King’s Highway, the traffic, signs, and billboards increased in density the closer she got to the center of Myrtle Beach. In bright colors and pulsating neon, they all hawked the wares and services of the Redneck Riviera.

The Pirate’s Cove Gift Shop – Welcome Canadians –Free fireworks with purchase – Liquidation Sale – Up to 80% off – Beach Breeze Souvenirs – Myrtle Beach towels $5 / 2 for $9 – The Pussycat Lounge – Girls, Girls, Girls – Bikers welcome.

Will Melissa show up for work on time today? Dolly wondered. Melissa, the twenty-year-old girl who was hired a few weeks before, had been coming in late and tired for the past several weeks. Just like I did when I was eighteen, out of control, and dancing till 2:00 a.m.. at the Wild Canary Lounge, Dolly thought. Dolly had always been the mother hen of the lingerie store, looking out for the younger girls who worked there. She was particularly worried about Melissa. The day before, Melissa said she was burning up, but her skin was cold and clammy. Shaniqua, another young clerk, said Melissa was taking medication for a migraine, but Dolly knew better.

Oh God, don’t let it happen to this girl, Dolly thought, recalling a night she’d spent years earlier, holding the trembling body of a fellow eighteen-year-old stripper as she came down hard and fast from a bad heroin high.

Water Melons $2.00 each – Ice – Peaches – Corn – Beachwear Outlet – Free Myrtle Beach decals – 48-item seafood buffet – All you can eat, $14.95 – Casino cruises – Las Vegas-Style Gambling – Two cruises a day – Horsefeathers, a Gentlemens’ Club – Beautiful Women – wet T-shirt contest Tuesday nights – Saturday Night Football – Ladies Welcome.

Ladies welcome. Yeah, right. Like some fifty-something golfer from Toronto or the Rust Belt is going to bring his wife, fiancée, or girlfriend along to watch him get a hard-on while he slips dollar bills into the g-strings of teenage girls with silicone boobs. In the eight months that Dolly had worked the strip clubs after her divorce, she occasionally saw a woman come in with a man. Not many qualified as ladies, she thought.

On the left, just past the Pancake Palace Restaurant, a thirty-foot, round-bellied fiberglass Buddha smiled enigmatically at the mini-golfers who putt-putted their way across the green plastic grass. Across the street, a happy mermaid holding crossed Canadian and American flags rode a huge fiberglass killer whale, poised as if plunging into the blue-dyed water of yet another miniature golf course.

Harriet is the one most likely to be jealous, Dolly thought. She’s been at Fantasia almost as long as I have, and she’s been kissing up to the district manager for months.

“WATCH OUT!” she yelled as a big blue Oldsmobile with Ontario license plates cut across her lane without warning. She leaned on her horn, but the balding driver in the Hawaiian print golf shirt paid no attention and drove on. He was obviously intent on enjoying the annual Canadian-American Days festival. Each year, it lured thousands of snow-weary Canadians south when the Grand Strand’s Atlantic beaches – still frigid by local standards – were seductive when compared to the gloomy weather north of the U.S. border. It was no accident that the timing of the annual event fit in with the frost-bitten Ontario’s school holiday.

Wouldn’t that be just my luck?, Dolly thought. Yesterday, I’m a clerk. Today, some golf-obsessed Canadian tourist almost totals me before I get the chance to enjoy my first day as a manager.

The traffic was light – nowhere near as bad as during the main tourist invasion that started on Memorial Day weekend, when all the theme parks and attractions officially opened for the summer.

One mile to go. How will Melissa and Shaniqua take it? They both wanted the manager’s job. They’ll probably figure I got it because I’m so much older, she thought.

A paunchy, long-haired biker on a chromed-out, candy-apple-red Harley Softail cruised by, his sunglasses, black T-shirt, and graying ponytail dripping water from the rain. The back of the shirt read, “If you can read this, the bitch fell off.”

How does he do it? Dolly wondered as the driver guided the massive motorcycle with one hand, holding onto a large nylon mesh bag of groceries with the other. Gunning the engine, he flashed her a big, gold-toothed smile as he thundered down the road.

Here we go again, Dolly thought, remembering that Myrtle Beach Spring Bike Week, an annual spring invasion of 150,000 mostly white Harley Davidson motorcyclists, followed by a second week of 100,000 mostly black speed bikers, was only days away. The biggest challenge, she knew, was that the bikers’ largest swap meet – five acres of T-shirts, jewelry, leather goods, and performance parts vendors and twenty acres of parking for tens of thousands of bikes – was headquartered at Inlet Square Mall, just a few blocks from her apartment. At her lingerie store, Bike Week was great for business. The biker crowd loved to shop for sexy leather and lace, but the crush of motorcycles would add an hour to her usual fifteen-minute commute to work.

King Kong Golfland – Live turtles – Every item $1.00 – Papa Primera’s Pizza – Large 4 toppings $10.95 – T-shirts R Us – Free Sand Dollar (with purchase) – Myrtle Beach mugs 3 for $5 – Swimwear – Fantasia Lingerie and Novelty Shop – Where Lace and Heaven Meet – Welcome Canadians.

As if on cue, the sun broke through the clouds as Dolly turned into the parking lot next to Fantasia. She drove behind the store to the staff parking area. When she arrived, her heart nearly burst with joy. There, at the back door, stood Melissa, Shaniqua, and Harriet, each with a big grin on her face. They posed on both sides of a shiny new metal sign. It read, “Reserved For Manager.” Hand-lettered below, in flaming-red glitter nail polish, was the name, “Dolly.”

Dolly yanked the keys out of the ignition and ran to the girls. “Congratulations, Dolly,” said Melissa, giving her a big hug.

“Way to go, girl!” said Shaniqua, who kissed her on the cheek. “You deserved it.”

“You’re the best,” said Harriet, smiling, though her heart was breaking at having lost the promotion.

The foursome walked happily into the store, talking about the sudden change in management with their hands and eyes as much as with their lips.

“It’s gonna be soooo cool!” said Melissa. “Wanda was a real witch.”

“Now we’re gonna run this place right,” said Shaniqua. Dolly was in heaven. She truly liked her co-workers and had been praying that they wouldn’t be jealous.

“Ok, ladies, let’s get this show on the road,” Dolly called to the chattering women. “We’ve got shelves to stock and displays to clean. Melissa, open that case of vibrators and get ‘em priced and on the shelf.”

“Where do the vibrators go?” Melissa asked. Dolly and the other women glanced at each other and spontaneously broke into uncontrolled laughter.

With a wicked grin, Dolly asked, “You’re twenty years old and you don’t know where the vibrators go? You grow up in a convent or WHAT? Don’t they sell AA batteries in your part of town?” Melissa turned red. The other women convulsed with laughter. Dolly knew it was going to be a good day.