The truth about scallywags

Coffee had always been one of Ramona’s dearest friends. It had gotten her through many a life crisis, and it helped her to work hard and be more productive.

But Ramona also knew that coffee had become the death of her. She wasn’t sleeping well, and no matter how hard she tried to be diligent about her work and her increasing workload at The Office, she knew her company was a sinking boat and that all she could do was bale out water over and over again. Sure, there were different strategies, so the buckets were thankfully a different color each time, but in the end, she know none of it would matter and that she had to start looking at her life differently. All that coffee she drank just to stay aboard had taken it’s toll healthwise. So she wasn’t surprised on the day her doctor said. “Ramona, you need to get off the coffee.”

Ramona cried, just literally fell apart, right there on the little crinkly paper sheets while wearing her ridiculous looking paper gown.

There’s a reason you’re having heart palpitations and anxiety, her doc said. It’s all that caffeine. Why do you drink so much?”

“Because I think too much,” she says, “and I have to stay awake to finish all the stuff I gotta do. It’s not like life used to be, where at 5 p.m., you just go home and call it a day. And f I lose this job, there’s not another around the corner waiting. The manager down at my neighborhood Quik Stop advertised a clerk job and 200 people applied. So now, even though I’ve worked hard all my life, I’m not sure I could even get a job at my neighborhood Quik Stop, because I’d have to compete with 200 people, and I have bills to pay.”

“Tell me about it,” the doctor says. “I basically work for your insurance company, and as you may know by now, they’re not that generous.”

“Yeah, I do know.”

“Look,” the doc says, “You can still have a cup or two of coffee on weekends, but you gotta seriously cut back. I know your having anxiety about issues beyond your control, but here are medications that can help take the edge off, so you can function, just while you are going through this period. Why don’t we give that a shot and we’ll see ya back here in a few months to discuss the results.”

“I don’t know,” Ramona says. “I hate pills.”

“Alright, well, you could just continue self-medicating with those giant coffees and we would talk further after you keel over at their counter.”

Ramona laughed, but only because she could imagine that actually happening, that somehow it would all unravel down at the coffee shop one day. She accepted some samples of the magical pills and began the drive back to office hell. Along the way, she called her big brother, who knew better than to ever expect a call from his little sister in the middle of the workday.

“What the heck ya doing, scallywag?” he says.

“Did you seriously just call me a scallywag, you eejit?”

“Yeah, I did, he says laughing. “That’s what mom used to call ya … So why ya calling me, scallywag??”

“Cause I just got out of the docs and they gave me anti-depressants.”

“About damn time someone gave you some meds,” he said, laughing.

“Yeah, I know, but I’m not sure I wanna take them,” Ramona said.

“Well,” he says. “Do ya need em? I mean what did they say when they gave em to ya?”

“They said no more coffee, and then when I cried, they said I could have it on weekends. Only.”

Wally laughed really hard at that, but Ramona explained that even though the withdrawals might kill her, she was kinda sorta OK with the coffee thing, since having it every day made it feel not so special anyway, like something she needed rather than just wanted. She was afraid, she told Wally, that the coffee was becoming less of a treat and more of a crutch.

“Whadda ya need a crutch for?” Wally asked. “Can ya not walk?”

“Of course I can walk,” Ramona replied.

“So what’s the problem?”

“The problem,” she said through her tears, “is that I don’t know where to go.”

“Ah, I get it. But those pills will help you to figure all that out, right?” he asked. “They must be those ones they advertise on TV, he says, where at first people are holding their head in their hands all slumped over with the weight of the world on their shoulders and then they take the pills and suddenly they’re jumping through the air on a spring day catching Frisbees and throwing their heads back and laughing … while a summer breeze rustles the leaves of a big oak tree and people drink lemonade on front porches. Did they give ya that pill? Huh? Huh? Because I want some of those. I wanna catch Frisbees and drink lemonade too.”

Ramona laughed again, while crying. “Yeah, I think that’s the one,” she says. “I got a buncha samples right here, undoubtedly delivered to my doc’s office by a pharmaceutical rep who took the entire staff to lunch at whatever play place they demanded to be taken to.”

“Probably threw in a big old wide screen TV, too,” Wally said. “So you gonna take the pills?” he asks. “Start catching Frisbees?.”

“Whatever,” Ramona said. “I don’t really care about Frisbee. “I’m just tired of feeling like I’m ready to fall apart.”

“Yeah, you know what really sucks about feeling that way?” he asked. “That you have to eventually do something about it in order to stop feeling that way. But now that they have these pills, you don’t really have to do anything,” he says laughing. “That’s great! You could probably, in fact, go through the rest of your life without ever having to make decisions. That really will free you up, for Frisbee and lemonade and stuff. Maybe this whole thing is a blessing in disguise because once you feel the magic of these pills you could probably just quit your job and devote your life to something meaningful. You could become a pharmaceutical rep. … distributing pills and Frisbees to all who need them, and taking people to lunch … not a bad job if ya think about it. Hey, could you send me some pencils and clip boards and some of that other free stuff you guys always get? …. My little sister, a pharmaceutical rep ….. Wouldn’t mom and dad be proud? Maybe they’ll send you to one of those seminars or continuing education things they organize for doctors in Hawaii, or wherever they hold those things. That’s probably where your doctor learned about these pills. And if she says you should take them, you definitely should, ‘cause she wouldn’t prescribe pills you didn’t need. Just do what she tells ya.”

“Hey, did you take the first pill yet?”

“No.”

“Whatcha waiting for?”

“OK, I’m not taking the damn things,” she said rolling her eyes. “I’m just going to continue instead to feel like total and complete crap. Isn’t that what you’re suggesting I do?”

“Exactly, Wally said. “But remember that every time you cry or get angry or feel frustrated or uncomfortable ... it’s just a growing pain … If you continue to do nothing about the pain, it will become unbearable and you will eventually be forced to do something … that’s how life works. All the unpleasant things that you don’t want to feel right now, are also the very things that bring you closer to making a needed change.

“You are not broken. Frustration and despair are like the indicator lights on your car … they tell you when something is wrong and needs to be fixed. Your indicators are working fine. Maybe you don’t know how to fix everything yet …. But taking pills to mask your feelings is like seeing your check engine light come on and putting black tape over it so you can forget you’re having a problem.”

“By the way, is your engine light still on? Did you get that timing belt yet?” Wally asked.

“No, you said to do it by 70,000 miles,” Ramona replied.

“I did, but here’s a little secret,” Wally revealed. “You don’t have to wait until things break down completely to fix them …. I know you don’t have time to deal with this stuff …. But if you do it now, it will save you lots of time you don’t have later …. It’s kinda like life that way … you can rush through all your stuff till 3 a.m. every morning and keep doing that till ya keel over or your can save yourself from eventual breakdown by taking the time you need right now to think and listen to the voice deep inside you …. The one that goes, what the hell are ya doing, ya little scallywag? are ya in there somewhere?"

Ramona is at the Dunkin Donuts at 1579 S. Federal Highway in Fort Lauderdale ... on a shelf in the ladies room .... unraveling.

No More Reruns

Lucy pretends to listen while Jill rambles on incessantly about her crappy job, her latest no-good boyfriend, her meddling mother, her crazy neighbors and all the drama that constantly swirls around her life ... Lucy tries to muster concern, but sometimes she just gets tired of all the reruns. She realizes that people, much like TV sitcoms and movies, fall into categories. They might be a comedy, or a romance, or in Jill's case, a full-fledged drama but with no real closure. Lucy doesn't know how many times she can keep hearing those same stories over and over again. She's hoping for a new season, or a sequel, in which Jill finally learns from her mistakes, solves her problems and moves on to a place with new stories that aren't so draining.

Meanwhile Lucy is hiding under the sink in the ladies' room at Dough Boys Pizza on Southeast 17th Street in Fort Lauderdale. It's quiet down there, but it's kinda dark and a little dull. She's hoping someone will come and take her away to somewhere new, someplace cheerier, a place where there are no reruns.

Purr-fect Dilemma

Heide met someone she really loved but was afraid to get too close to him for fear he would discover her deepest secret: When she feels really happy and content, she purrs like a cat. She tries real hard not to do that but if she completely relaxes and lets her guard down, it just happens, usually as she is drifting happily off to sleep.

She blames Blackie, who had been sleeping curled up next to her for years. The purring must have somehow rubbed off on her in kinda the same way Blackie took to snoring. But Heide had no idea how to explain this to Joey. Then one Sunday afternoon while lying in a grassy lakeside field after a local hopscotch tournament, she involuntarily succumbed to her overwhelming feeling of content and drifted off and began purring.

When she awoke Joey was looking at her with a silly little grin on his face, and suddenly she realized she must have slipped up and begun purring. But Joey just seemed relieved. "And I thought I was the only person on the planet who purred," he said laughing.

Heidi is in one of the restrooms at Ice Box in Miami Beach. Not the cool one with all the nooks and crannies and hiding places, but the other one. She's beneath a stack of paper hand towels on a table just to the left as you walk in. If you listen real close, you can hear her purring under there.

Eyebrow

Ginny remembers looking through the old family photo albums that her mom had spent an entire summer organizing. One album for instance, would have several pages devoted to one child, with yearly school pictures from kindergarten clear on through high school. Ginny still remembers how all of her siblings would laugh at her photos and the one thing that remained constant year after year -- her big bushy eyebrows, the ones her mother always called "Irish eyebrows."

Her brother once got so hysterical laughing about the eyebrow pics that Ginny thought their mom might have to slap him just to stop him from laughing so hard he couldn't breathe. "Look," he says, "pointing to a baby picture of Ginny. You were born with those eyebrows." Unfortunately, it was true. She hardly had any hair on her head ... She was all eyebrows ... and they remained bushy right through 7th grade but in 8th grade she was hoping to change all that. Her brother, however, told her she was stuck with those eyebrows .... that they would just keep getting bushier until they were one big fat hairy brow. When he could see that Ginny was about to cry, he'd say, "Don't worry Ginny, you're still very special ... in a short-bus kinda way."

Ginny had always hated her eyebrows and pleaded with her mom to let her pluck them. Her mom, however, wouldn't let her anywhere near a tweezers, insisting that for every hair plucked, two more would grow back. "Besides," she told Ginny, "those eyebrows give you strength and character. They're what make you stand out. You just need to learn to make them work for you, and you'll figure that out with time."

But if there was one thing Ginny didn't want, it was to stand out. After standing out her whole life, she simply wanted to blend in, like camouflage. As for making her eyebrows work for her, she hadn't a clue how that would work. But as is often the case, it turned out that her mom was right. Ginny eventually learned to accept herself -- Irish eyebrows and all. Not that it was a smooth transition. As a teen, Ginny was frequently cited for behavioral problems and eventually was made to take the short bus to a special school for kids who who'd been getting in trouble. Fortunately for Ginny, she felt right at home with the group of outcasts she met on the short bus and made fast friends. eventually she recruited a few of them to start the bagpipe punk band she lovingly named Irish Eyebrows and the Short Buses. They got signed shortly after releasing their first CD, When Irish Eyebrows Are Smiling, and have since been touring in a short bus that runs on vegetable oil.

Ginny, now known simply as "Eyebrow," is happier than she has ever been and is overjoyed that many of her listeners refuse to pluck their eyebrows too. When she stands on a stage and looks out at the masses of bushy eyebrows, she smiles inside and can almost hear the voice of her sweet departed mother saying what she'd always say to Ginny when what she really meant was "I told ya so." ... "How now, eyebrow??"

Ginny is in an employment newspaper box near the mailbox at Southland Shopping Center on State Road 84 in Fort Lauderdale.

Poppy's Magical Hot Spells

Since that downer of a day when all the heat began emanating straight out of Poppy's head, she just wasn't feeling quite herself. Suddenly, she was having little hissy fits over minor things, crying at the drop of a hat. She couldn't even decide which clothes to wear, let alone which of her tasks to complete first. She was completely out of sorts.

Tired of frazzled nerves, sudden feverish sweats and a not-so-funny hairdresser who took to calling her Hotflash, Poppy decided to make the big M work for her. Now she imagines that these little hot spells are magical and that each will enhance her ability to paint, draw, write garden, sculpt and create music. So far, it's working. She also discovered that she could use her hotflashes as an excuse for expressing random bursts of pure honesty among total strangers.

Just this morning, for example, Poppy watched some woman who was on a cell phone and had one of those little froo-froo dogs in her purse sneak past a man who was in the line but was too busy gazing longingly at the apple fritters to notice the woman who butted in front of him. She gave Poppy one of those little looks that said "Hahaha, just between us," as if Poppy would think what she was doing was OK or somehow approve of her rude behavior. Poppy hated what froo-froo dog lady did and really hated that she would have the audacity to drag her into it. Poppy typically would just roll her eyes at such behavior, but today, she was having one of her little spells and feeling a little hot around the collar, so she just let her have it ... well, in her own Poppy way.

She interrupted froo-froo dog lady's phone conversation and said "Excuse me, but I think I speak for everyone in this line (even though it was her just her and jelly donut man) when I say that your inflated sense of self-importance is something we could all live without. I realize you're very busy, what with your silly phone conversation and your little purse dog ... and I know you think your time crunch is somehow more urgent than ours, but we won't tolerate your behavior and if you don't go to the back of the line like everyone else, well, you should be utterly ashamed of yourself.

When Poppy arrived at the counter, the cashiers who knew her so well and had never before seen her act this way, asked if she was OK. Poppy pulled out that little fold-up fan she now keeps in her purse and began waving it back and forth and said that she was fine, just fine, and that she'd like a small vanilla latte and a couple of those little munchkins.

Dotty, who looked like she had had some experience with hot spells, laughed and gave a her a big giant vanilla latte and a whole box of munchkins, and told her it was on the house. She said to come on back tomorrow, as they could use a little entertainment in the mornings.

Poppy is in the ladies' room at Starbucks near Southport Shopping Center, 17th Street Causeway, Fort Lauderdale.

Bonnie of the Patties

You’d never know Bonnie is 49 years old. She’s always stayed young-looking by doing every new thing that comes down the pike -- eye jobs, lifts, tucks, whatever it takes. She runs out to the mall after work, not to go clothes shopping but to get liposuction, because you can do that in her fancy schmantzy plastic little town.

But eventually some of the procedures that had served her well for so long began to take a turn for the worse. She thought, for instance, that her eye job was a success, but then her right eye began drooping in a way her left did not. She knew it was only a matter of time before her boob job did something similar. Despite all the pain and money, and all the fat she’d had sucked out of her at the mall, she still found herself craving those little peppermint patties she adored. She swore she wouldn’t have anymore after getting liposuction at the mall … but afterwards she went home and dropped into bed, and no sooner did her head hit the pillow than she was dreaming of peppermint patties galore raining down from the sky.

She awoke with an overwhelming urge to get the cool sensation. So, looking all tired and still wearing her blue jammies with the cows all over them, she drove down to the 24-hour grocery store, grabbed the biggest bag of Peppermint Patties she could find and a small carton of milk and got in line.

A sweet redhead named Roxy asked her what she was doing out in her jammies so late at night, and whether her work was keeping her up that late. Bonnie told her she didn’t have a job, and Roxy commented that she understood how that feels and how hard life can be at times. She was the nicest cashier ever, yet Bonnie was annoyed after realizing that Roxy only charged her for only the milk and not the patties. She had the feeling that Roxy thought she was poor or that she lost her job, when the truth is that she just didn’t need one, what with the trust find and all that.

Bonnie didn’t like being thought of as poor, and yet in this moment, as her well-intended efforts to look younger were backfiring on her, she too felt very sorry for herself, hence the undeniable middle-of-the-night craving for peppermint patties, which were sometimes the only way she could fill that big void in her life.

Roxy, of course, understood all that because Roxy is Roxy. She insists that it’s possible to be poor, worn out and abused by the system and this entire screwed-up society, and still have a wallet fat enough to buy plastic surgery and new parts that don’t always work out. “Those people might be financially rich,” she was always saying. “But that doesn’t mean they’re better off then the rest of us. Sometimes they need kindness too, and free stuff, even if it is just peppermint patties.”

Bonnie wasn't accustomed to people being kind to her, because she wasn’t all that kind to people, mostly because she didn’t really care about them. This whole cashier encounter irritated her, but then on her way home it also kinda made her cry because that cashier didn’t even know her and her niceness was probably the closet thing Bonnie had felt to unconditional love since her mom died when she was little.

So there she was in the middle of the night, driving down the road in her blue cow jammies, stuffing mini peppermint patties into her mouth, and crying, but just from the one eye, ‘cause the other one is all screwed up from her eye job. Sometimes Bonnie wished she never got all that surgery. Maybe she shoulda just tried to cut back on the peppermint patties and late-night ice cream, and tried harder not to get all bent out of shape about a few wrinkles.

Bonnie is in an Auto Guide box near the mailbox at Southland Shopping Center on State Road 84 in Fort Lauderdale. It's blue, like her jammies.

Roxy's Secret Mission

Roxy, a cashier at the local grocery store, is on a secret mission. She says that desperate times call for desperate measures, so when she sees people coming through her line who she knows are struggling really hard to feed their families, she conveniently forgets to scan many of the items in their cart. Roxy knows how unfair life can be. A friend is always telling her that "Hey, life IS unfair, so just get used to it." But Roxy would rather do what she can to help turn things around. She knows that grocery chain she works for has plenty of money and that these poor people in her line do not. She says it doesn't take a rocket scientist to fix that situation, just a well-meaning cashier. Roxy says in these hard times everyone must do what they can to help, even if it means breaking a few rules.

Roxy is in a newspaper box outside the Winn-Dixie on Cordova Road, alongside Southport shopping center in Fort Lauderdale. As cashiers go, she is one of the best,