CHAPTER THREE
Three Months Later
Rise and shine boys and girls, rise and shine.
Get up, get up, get up. Time for you to get your asses up!
And don’t forget to bathe them butts. Nobody wanna smell that!
And don’t forget to brush them teeth. Nobody wanna smell that!
Get up, get up, get up. And once your asses finally get up: Good morning!
Ricki heard that same wakeup call blare out over her phone every single morning, and she always woke up.
Even though she didn’t have to be to work for another five hours (she worked from noon to nine at the salon), she volunteered at a homeless shelter a few mornings per week.
And even on the mornings when she didn’t volunteer, she always got up by seven anyway. She was a creature of habit.
But as she sat on the edge of her bed, still trying to fully wake up, her head was already spinning.
She listened to that same DJ go on and on about what Trump was up to now and what the Congress was letting him get away with and which one of his enemies he was indicting this time and all of those ICE raids in all of those American cities and the high cost of groceries nobody was talking about and Ukraine and Russia and the chaos and the confusion and on and on and on until she couldn’t take it anymore and turned it off!
It felt like a drag on her promise to only embrace positivity in her life this year, and she refused to entertain that drag.
She, instead, dragged herself to the toilet. Then to the sink to wash her hands. And then she got into the shower where Calgon took her away if only for those quick fifteen minutes it took her to bathe.
When she got out of the shower, she removed the shower cap and looked at the reflection staring back at her in the mirror over the sink.
Although she knew nobody on the face of this earth gave a damn, she wasn’t going to let that stop her from acknowledging it to herself at least. Because today was her birthday.
She was the big three-0 minus one, as her boss Geraldine would say.
But as she stared at herself in that mirror, it wasn’t a pleasant feeling to be twenty-nine years old and still struggling like she was a teenager. Still living paycheck to paycheck. Still trying to make those stubborn ends meet when they weren’t even in the same city.
And she was still wondering, the way she’d wondered every year since high school, if this would be the year she would turn it all around and get that career she always wanted.
And get that good, hardworking brother she always dreamed about.
And that she would either finally find true love, which was all she ever wanted in the first place, or would find, once again, just another true loser who didn’t know the meaning of love.
“Because love has everything to do with it,” she said out loud as if she was disputing the great Tina Turner herself.
But she couldn’t stop staring at herself.
She looked every bit of her age, if you asked her.
Although all those men that had come and gone in her life always said differently.
She was the most beautiful girl in the world let them tell it.
But they would tell her anything to get what they wanted.
And it had nothing to do with her, and everything to do with her body.
They were stone-cold liars every one of them.
Her fellow beauticians disputed their assessment too.
They insisted she had what it took, alright, but only if she’d slap a little makeup on that always super-serious looking face of hers, and if she got out of those jeans and “fixed” herself up to be more ladylike.
As if she could be real cute if she became anybody but who she actually was, in other words.
At least that was how she heard it. And that was why she would listen to them, and then tell them to kiss her ladylike ass.
And they’d laugh every time. To them it was just mean old Ricki being mean old Ricki. But she meant every word.
She went back into her bedroom and got dressed in jeans and a tucked-in sleeveless blouse, and then threw on a jacket to blunt the chill in the air.
After slipping into her sneakers, she corralled her thick, long hair into a ponytail and then went into the kitchen, made herself a cup of coffee, grabbed a croissant, and sat at the tiny table by her front room window and people-watched: another routine.
She lived in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn and she could see the folks hurrying to get where they needed to be. Like her, they were living paycheck to paycheck too. But also like her, they were glad just to have a paycheck.
Some of the guys on the block kept trying to talk to her, but she wasn’t trying to hear it.
She knew what they were after and it didn’t resemble what she was after by a mile.
She wanted love. They wanted sex. She wanted commitment and trust. They wanted booty calls and lust. She’d been burned too many times before.
A part of her, if she were to be honest with herself, had given up.
She had only one vice now, and it didn’t involve men the way it always used to.
Every morning she’d smoke one cigarette, just one, to get her day going.
She knew it wasn’t smart to smoke at all.
She knew it was dangerous. But she never went beyond one smoke except when she was overly-anxious about something.
Or super-worried about something. Then she might pick up another one.
But only one more. She never went beyond her limits.
She pulled out her cigarette, lit up, and savored the moment.
There was a time when she could smoke nearly half-a-pack a day.
But when a guy she knew died from lung cancer, and he was a big smoker too, shit got real for her.
She tried to stop completely, but failed every time.
So she compromised. One every morning and only one.
But one additional one if she was distressed.
That was the deal she made with herself.
She knew she needed to stop completely. She knew how easily one could turn into five and she would be right back in serious danger zone.
But what could she do? Smoke weed? The brain killer?
She’d rather take her chances doing it her way.
Not smart, she knew, but nobody was perfect and she was nowhere near it.
And since she’d given up on men, and wasn’t all that crazy about food, she had to have something to keep her going!
But after her smoke, and after eating half of her croissant, she ditched the rest, got up, poured her remaining coffee in the sink, and then went to her bathroom to brush and gargle.
She stared at herself in that mirror again and exhaled as if she needed courage just to leave her house.
Then she made her way to the homeless shelter until it was time for her to go to work.
It wasn’t that life she always dreamed she’d have.
But at least it was a life.