Читать книгу The Redneck Riviera - Richard N. Côté - Страница 8

SeaVue Apartments

Right off the bat, Dolly sensed that something was wrong. The sound of the washing machine running at 9 o’clock on a Saturday morning was unusual to the extreme. It was totally out of character for April, who was usually still in the sack at noon. Dolly opened the top of the machine and saw that April was laundering her sheets and clothes. Another mystery. Since she turned fourteen, April had to be constantly cajoled, prodded, and nagged to change the sheets. She’d gladly leave them on the bed forever if Dolly hadn’t insisted on changing them once a week. The load of clothes was also a mystery, since April wasn’t any more eager to launder clothes than sheets. Then there was the early hour....

Dolly knocked on April’s door, but there was no answer. She knocked again; still no answer. Gently, Dolly opened the door, expecting April to be up and alert, considering the work she’d already started. Instead, she lay diagonally across the width of the bare mattress, dressed only in panties and a soaked T-shirt. A body-length damp spot covered the center of the mattress. What on earth? Dolly thought. Did she have a heavy period and get everything bloody and clean it up with water? Is she ashamed and wanted to hide it? “Hey, Sweetie, you OK?” she called to April. “Honey? You OK?”

“Yeah, Mamma. Just tired. I want to sleep.”

Dolly sat down on the edge of the bed and put her hand on April’s shoulder. It was cold and clammy. She gently tugged on her shoulder. “Honey, what’s the matter? You have a bad period or something?”

“No, uh, yeah, Mamma. I’m just tired. Let me get some sleep.”

The feeling of her daughter’s cold, clammy skin alarmed Dolly. She firmly grasped her daughter’s shoulder and rolled her face-up on the mattress. The sight made her suck in her breath in fear. April was pale as a ghost – nearly colorless. The eyes that had twinkled like diamonds when April was an eight-year-old were dull and bloodshot; dark circles under her eyes emphasized her exhaustion. She’d been through this with others at the clubs so many times before.

“You were out partying last night, weren’t you?” Dolly demanded, knowing the truth all too well.

“I’m tired. I wanna sleep,” April mumbled as she rolled over on the bed, turning her back to Dolly.

“I told you not to go out! Where’d you go? Who were you with?” April’s head screamed with pain with each of her mother’s increasingly loud questions.

“I thought you had to work this morning. I was just doing some laundry to help you out. Gimme a break,” April said, and rolled over again onto her stomach.

The phone rang, rang, and rang again. Eventually, it stopped.

“Where were you last night?” Dolly asked again, this time in a louder, more demanding voice.

“No place. Can’t I get a little sleep on a Saturday morning? Is there some new law?”

“Don’t give me any lip, April,” Dolly said as the phone rang again. She knew who it was. She had an appointment with the district manager at 10:00 a.m. to discuss the store’s summer promotional plan. She knew she was going to get grilled on sales statistics, customer traffic counts, and sales trends. She didn’t want to risk her new promotion by keeping him waiting.

“Hello? Hi, Harriet. Yeah, I know what time it is. Tell him I had car trouble, and I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Keep him busy. I don’t know, show him how clean the place is. Tell him about the couple who got carried away in the dressing room last week. Give him all the details. He likes that kinda stuff. Make ‘em up if you have to, but stall him, OK? Gotta run.”

“You’re grounded until I get home. Got it?” Dolly barked to April as she raced out the door. “Grounded. Stay here. Inside. No visitors. Understand?”

April rolled over and said nothing, her head pounding like bricks falling on a steel drum. Even the noise of a passing car was enough to tear into her head. There was no danger of her getting out of the bed for the day.

The sales meeting went pretty well, all things considered. Dolly had good numbers to report for sales traffic, amount of average sale, and inventory turnover. “I told the girls to think about the customers as a package deal. You know, see what they bought, and always suggest something else that would complement the sale,” Dolly said.

The district manager had heard every store manager’s success claim a hundred times before. “Give me some examples,” he said.

“Well, for the first-time customers, for example, we always suggest trying flavored sex lubricants,” Dolly said. “First-timers are often a little shy and embarrassed, and they don’t want to admit they’re looking for some of the kinkier stuff. The lubricants are good, clean fun. They only cost a few dollars, but the profit margin is high. Since I took over, lubricant sales are up 37 percent – about $200 extra profit a month – so you can see how well my idea is working.”

“Hmmmm,” the district manager said, looking at the sales-by-category printout. “Yes, I see. Good job. What else have you been able to do?”

“Well,” Dolly said, clearing her mind of her personal problems and focusing on the job at hand, “Look at the dance outfits. You’ll see that we sold five more in the first two weeks of this month than all of last month combined.”

“Is that a fluke, or did you do something?” he asked.

“That’s my work,” Dolly said with a big smile. “I was a dancer for a few months after my divorce. I know a lot of the girls on the circuit. When I got the promotion to manager here, I called all seventeen of the club mothers – you know, the women who manage the strippers in the clubs. I know most of them and told them that they’d get real good prices if they shopped here.”

“Good prices – you mean you’re giving discounts?” the manager asked, a quizzical look in his eye.

“You bet I’m givin’ dancers a discount. It says in the Fantasia Lingerie Sales Manual, page 17, ‘Store Managers are authorized to grant discretionary discounts up to 10 percent to preferred customers who spend at least $200 a year in the store.’ Heck, the typical dancer who shops here spends $500 to $800 a year, and some of them twice that. Our basic markup on everything except movies is 200 percent – twice the cost. An outfit we sell for $75 costs us $25. We can afford giving a ten or twenty percent discount to a dancer who spends a lot of money here. A 10 percent discount makes the $75 outfit a $67.50 outfit, but we have only $25 in it. That’s $42.50 profit on a $25 cost, or 170 percent markup. We only need an average 150 percent markup to meet all of our profit goals, as long as we do $440,000 a year in gross sales. I only give the discount to the top 5 percent of our customers. About half of them are local regulars, and the rest are strippers. If what I’m doin’ holds up, we’ll do $600,000 this year.” Dolly permitted herself a modest smile, though she felt like the cat that swallowed the canary.

“I like that,” the district manager said. “It shows initiative and understanding of the market. Keep up the good work, Dolly. Keep sending in the reports on time every week. See you next month.”

He wasn’t out the door five minutes before a call came in for her. “Hey, Dolly, this is Ruthie at Captain Willie’s. Can you come in early, say, 2:00? Coupla girls called in sick. Yeah, the usual. They probably got fucked up at some bar last night. They said they’re sick, but they’re probably just hung over. In any case, they ain’t gonna show. Be a doll. Come in at 2:00, OK?”

It was already 1:15. Dolly sighed and shook her head. This was the third time in two weeks Ruthie had called with the same request. Why can’t Willie keep reliable help in the place? she wondered. And why am I the one who always has to bail him out? Dolly was still tired from last night, not to mention holding down her two jobs. Now April was acting up, and her father was no help at all. April was supposed to go off to study nursing at Horry-Georgetown County Technical College after graduation. Dolly needed the money from her second job to put April through school. “Yeah, Ruthie, I’ll come in,” she said with a sigh. Lord, I’m pushing forty. When will it get easier? Dolly thought.

She dialed April at the apartment, but the line was busy. Shoot, girl! she thought. I need to get through to you. Get off the darn phone.

Working at Captain Willie’s wasn’t the pits, and it was certainly a step up from her former night job as a cocktail waitress at The Pink Zone, one of Myrtle Beach’s all-nude strip clubs. At Willie’s, she at least got to wear decent clothes: white shorts and a navy blue “Captain Willie’s” golf shirt.

At the Pink Zone, all the cocktail waitresses wore sparkle stockings, garter belts, pink thong bikini panties, and tight white push-up bustiers with pink laces. Even though the servers – unlike the dancers – were supposed to be totally off-limits to the customers, they still got groped and propositioned almost every night. The hassles came mostly from jerks playing grab-ass, but occasionally, a drunk wanted to see more boob than the costumes displayed and literally took matters into his own hands. A bouncer usually appeared to keep him from doing any serious damage, but fun, it wasn’t.

The first time a new server complained to the management about the grabbing and touching, she was told the two basic rules:

1.Never piss off a paying customer.

2.When propositioned or groped, duck it, live with it, or work somewhere else.

The majority of the servers were single mothers or college students paying their own way. The base pay for servers was minimum wage, but a hard-working waitress at the Pink Zone could make $15 to $20 an hour extra in tips. Most of them just gritted their teeth, smiled at the customers, dodged the hands as best they could, and hung in there until closing time.

Dolly rolled into the parking lot behind Captain Willie’s at 2:20. Willie’s was one of the dozens of carbon-copy, all-you-can-eat seafood places that lined Myrtle Beach’s two-mile-long Restaurant Row. Atop Captain Willie’s, a simulated lighthouse with a simulated rotating beacon beckoned to passing tourists. Inside, fiberglass replicas of trophy fish lined the walls of the lobby. In the main dining room, fishing nets were draped on the walls. Heavy ships’ mooring lines separated the lobby from the dining area.

Red, green, and blue spotlights sprayed dots of light off a 1980s mirrored disco ball whose motor had burned out several years earlier. Nautical paraphernalia – oars, compasses, barometers, chronometers, and ships' nameplates – were displayed on every supporting beam. The walls were decorated with mass-produced beach scene paintings. At each table, a seashell arrangement framed a small oil lamp. It wasn’t much, but if Dolly could get a crowd of non-Canadian golfers, singles, and small families, she could make decent tips there on a good night.

Dolly immediately set to work. Most of the lunch crowd had cleared out, so she went to the empty front section and started to prepare for the dinner hours. Side work was the part of the job every waitress liked least: all labor, low pay, and no tips. First, Dolly collected all of the condiment carriers, condiment bottles, and oil lamps and assembled them on one table. From the storeroom, she brought two-pound cans of salt and pepper, a gallon can of ketchup, a funnel, and lamp oil. For the next hour and a half, Dolly worked on autopilot. First came the ketchup. She opened all the bottles, put a funnel in the first, poured in the ketchup, and moved on to the condiment tray as the ketchup was filling the bottle.

Her mind drifted back to the previous night at White Lightnin’ and Ron Pawley. On a zero to 10 scale for looks, he was a solid 8, maybe even pushing a 9. About 6’2”, she guessed, maybe 190 pounds. Not muscled, but firm, and definitely not soft. The deep tan showed that he spent a lot of time outdoors, but the 450 SL convertible and the designer shades made it clear that the time he spent in the sun wasn’t in a tobacco field.

He said he was in real estate and condos. Showing those to customers would account for the tan. And if he was good at it, that would account for the 450SL and the boat. So far, so good, she thought. It was obvious he had plenty of free time because he was a really good dancer, and that only came from lots of practice.

She took the tops off all the salt and pepper shakers, filled them up, and screwed the lids back on. Then she started to refill another jar of ketchup and went to the salt and peppers. When everything was full, she cleaned all the containers with a moist cloth. Next she restocked the sugar and sweetener packets, and refilled the bottles of steak sauce and the oil in the table lamps. Finally, she rolled 120 sets of cutlery in cloth napkins. By the time she had set the tables in her section with condiments, cutlery, and lamps, it was 4:15. The early diners would be arriving at 5:00. She looked around to see how the other servers were doing with their sections.

There were no other girls. She looked over to Ruthie, who gave Dolly an embarrassed shrug. “Will you....?” Dolly sighed in disgust. She picked up her cell phone and tried calling April again. Still busy. With another sigh, she started the entire table-cleaning procedure all over again in the outdoor deck section.

As soon as she settled into the side-work routine again, her thoughts went back to Ron Pawley. As girl-meets-boy-in-singles-bar-encounters go, that was a pretty good night, Dolly thought. He was tall and good-looking. He dressed well, smelled good, brushed his teeth, and cleaned under his neatly trimmed fingernails. When they danced, he held her close, but not too close for a first night.

He asked her on a date that night before they left White Lightnin’. He had suggested a day of cruising the Intracoastal Waterway on his boat, and she accepted. After they exchanged phone numbers, he gave her a nice, long hug – but not too long, and not too firm. And he didn’t go for the first-meeting-trophy-kiss. Yup, she thought, this one might be a keeper.

As soon as she was done setting up the deck section, she made another call to April, but the line was still busy. The first diners for the evening arrived at 5:03. Dolly put on her best “I’m-your-server-and-I-hope-you’re-big-tippers” smile and pushed her thoughts of motherly duties and romance to the back of her mind. “Hello,” she said to the party of four middle-aged men. “My name is Dolly, and I’ll be your server tonight. Looks like you had a long, hot day on the links. Can I get you fellas something cool from the bar?”

“Sure,” said the first man, dressed in khaki shorts, a white golf shirt, and a cap with a red maple leaf over crossed golf clubs. “Whiskey, neat.”

“CC on the rocks,” said the next.

“Got any Molson or Labatt’s?” the third said.

“Sure,” Dolly replied. “We stock lots of Canadian beer. We’ve got Labatt’s, Molson, Moosehead, and Karwatha Premium Pale Ale. We also have Guinness, of course.”

“I’ll have a Molson, my dear. And what are you and your two most beautiful girlfriends doing after work tonight?” he asked. “We have a wonderful night on the town planned, and we’d love you to be part of it.”

“Sorry, fellas,” Dolly said to the visitors from the North. “I’m afraid we’d all be too tired to be any fun.” Dolly had been tempted to say, “Next time, bring your wife and you won’t have to hit on the waitresses to get laid,” or “I’d love to – but my Mamma doesn’t let me date married Canadian men.” But, as always, she quickly stuffed the idea. She didn’t dare tell the customers what she really felt. She worked hard for a living and needed the tips.