Small Town Outcasts

How the chicken thief from the country club and a gay, redneck landscaper found each other.

I’m considering a very long story or novella that would be released as a serial.  I’d really appreciate your thoughts and comments.   

Sugarbear grew up over in the country club. On the fancy street. You might not get it when I refer to her as Poor Old-Bear. But she was a lurker, hidden from the view of the country clubbers. Now, like me and the other landscaper guys, sort of invisible to them.  She grew up on a street that had its own extra gates, in a house that had a turret on the corner and too many ceiling fans on the porch.  No one ever cut them off.

Years later, after me and SugarBear got together, I tried to understand how living in the shadows might shape a personality. But I never knew the details of her early life. Until one blistering day downtown, a square-faced lady with her hair soaped up, wearing a leopard skin barber’s cape, caught me right out in front of the drug store on Railroad Avenue. 

I had just ordered a grilled cheese and tea at the lunch counter. I could still go in there and nobody said anything or cut their eyes at me.  The pharmacy was neutral ground, given everybody needed medicine, no matter what they’d done or how embarrassed they ought to be. Since they had an old-school lunch counter, when I was landscaping downtown, I went in. As usual, I ordered my grilled cheese, then stepped outside to look at my new little Motorola phone. But today, this short lady, hands lifted to heaven, ran out of Peter’s Spa and Salon. I recognized her as the wife of the turret house so I was sort of freaked out about what she might say to me but her blood-red lips were wide open in a big smile.

Peter seemed to know all the gossip. Even though we didn’t really know each other. Back in school, in a small southern town, people talked about us. As the only boys without girlfriends, they talked. Nothing mean, just talked about us like we were brothers or something. Probably the “or something” made them anxious. Peter couldn’t help it. He just talked gay. He was nelly way back in kindergarten. After graduation, he moved to Myrtle Beach, where he built a hair and makeup business on being fabulous and fun. I don’t know why he came back, but he brought fabulous with him and the country club ladies flocked in.

For most of school and adult life, even Peter didn’t know about me until I got into a little complication that got run in the paper. And I’m sure it ran all kind of ways around the beauty parlor. So now he and I are ‘out’ and we nod in the grocery store but that’s it. I keep my head down, but Peter seems to know stuff and tell it.

Today, when he saw me head into the pharmacy, he needed a new gossip topic and, for some reason mentioned my dog. I don’t know why. She wasn’t part of the drama. We didn’t even find each other till afterward.  But when he said Sugarbear the lady in the leopard-skin cape jumped up and ran out and up to me, bubbling, and I am not talking about the bubbles running into her neck folds. She put her hands on my shoulders and beamed, “ You have Sugarbear!  AM THRILLED? I am thrilled! I have to tell you the story.”

A glob of hot pimento cheese ran down my wrist. I felt just like it. Hot and wanting to slide away but this lady who’d seen me cutting grass a hundred times and never spoken to me now squeezed my shoulders and babbled, “Look at me!  In a cape and no shoes! My hose will be ruined.”  I looked at her squished toes in the flesh-colored stockings, and I mumbled, “After I eat?” But she couldn’t wait. “No, you cannot eat on the street. Come into the salon; I want to tell you right now!”