Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

I’m Pink Lady Apple Yeggs, and my friend Deviled Yeggs suggested that I record each project that I set up in the hopes of reforming the people who continue to work for Lily the Pink Enterprises.  If for no other reason, it would show how God is at work.

With the last report, we had a stowaway on our borrowed airplane from Portland, Oregon to Tracy.  She was the niece of my new “partner”, Dalton Hill of Sam Hill of Portland.  Her name was Anna Hill Hill-Hill Hill or “Hill to the fourth power.”  She had a checkered past, having been groomed by her mother to be a porn star.  She felt a connection with the prostitutes and strippers that we rescued across the Great Northwest.  She got on the aircraft hoping to learn how we at Lily the Pink evangelized to these women.  After the year in Tracy, she had planned to go back to her husband and her job at Sam Hill.  I had other plans.  Her college degree was in accounting, and I needed her skill set at the Washington state Lily the Pink location.  Her husband was the chief buyer for dear uncle Dalton, and I needed a buyer too.

We never considered her as an entry-level project, not as an employee or in working in a Christian environment.  She had accepted Jesus as her Savior before starting college.  She married one of the men who led her to Christ and had been active in Christian organizations on her college campus, alongside her husband.  Our concern was that she had never been alone.  Her mother had orchestrated everything from an early age.  Then she married an employee of her uncle’s business.  Now, she was with fifty people who had a lot of street savvy.  And while being a porn star might seem like the same kind of thing as a prostitute, these jobs were considerably different.  We needed to keep our eyes on her, but she almost immediately had trouble.

We had the new people on the third floor of the apartment building.  The rooms were tiny, with room for a twin sized bed, a dresser, armoire, and a toilet and sink in the back.  That left showering in a common shower room in the middle of the floor.  We had surveillance everywhere in the halls, but not the rooms or the showers.  The showers were individual showers, but there was a space outside to place your robe and towel.  The ladies should not have had problems seeing other ladies without clothing, after what they had experienced at their previous employer.

Her shift started on graveyards, eleven in the evening to three in the morning.  She had three graveyards before her crew rotated to a long weekend, but not for Anna, as we hoped to have her work some overtime in accounting with Tommie, our newly promoted comptroller.  Having just flown in from Portland, Oregon, it felt like one am to nine am on her graveyard shifts.  We noticed that Anna did not dawdle.  She ran to the showers, trying to get in and out of the showers before the rest of the shift.  I will let her tell the tale.  She wrote a letter to her husband recently and she let me have a copy.

I was finishing my shower, thinking that like the two previous days that I would have the shower room all to myself.  But as I was finishing washing my hair, the shower stall door opened and Dyani and Nina were staring at me.

Dyani said two words that should have cost her money into the swear jar.  I won’t write them or I will have to add money to the jar.  She used the “D” word for the structure that holds the water in a reservoir followed by the “B” word for a female dog.  I didn’t turn her in.  But then she said, “You musta been a high-priced ho with a body like that!”

Then Nina said, “Naw, naw, naw.  Look at her close.  I recognize her, but I ain’t saying ‘til somebody agrees with me.”  Dyani looked closely.  She leered, just inches from my body.  My towel and robe were just out of reach.  And these two ladies, both bigger than I, were blocking my exit.

Then they both stepped back.  Dyani said, “You right, you right.”

Nina smiled and started to shake, “I knew it!  I knew it!  I would never forget a body like that!  You’ Birthday Cake Girl!  Right here at Lily the Pink!  I told you, Dyani, she Birthday Cake Girl!”

I sank against the wall.  I moaned, “No, no, no.  I just want to fit in with everyone else.  I’m not proud of my past.  Please let me go.”  The tears started to flow, but then with them congratulating each other at recognizing me, they gave me an opening.  I darted for my robe and put it on and then ran to my room.  I could dry my hair after I got in my tiny room.

I thought I had escaped, but then everyone on Echo shift, my shift, started leering at me.  Then within a couple of days, all the ladies, including some of the long-standing Lily the Pink employees started staring.  I went to Pink Lady.  She had an open door most of the time.  She’s married, so not all the time.  I told her what happened.

She said that since it was common knowledge now around Lily the Pink through gossip, which she hates, that I should give my testimony and talk about how I was groomed to be a porn star by my mother and how for my first sexual encounter with a boy, I was dressed as a birthday cake, on my sixteenth birthday, qualifying for kiddie porn, but little did I know that my mother was even filming it.  And I never got paid for any of it.  I even had to return the sports car when I became a Christian and quit doing her little movies.  I talked about how Uncle Dalton tricked me into thinking I was going to have a sexual encounter with you and George.  I told them how you led me to Jesus, and that is all that has mattered ever since.

Pink Lady’s idea about a testimony to everyone in an all-employee meeting was that you could not gossip about something that is common knowledge, told by that person directly.  At the meeting, Pink Lady talked about how much harm the gossip had caused, and these women would have to work together, regardless of the harm done.  There needed to be trust there.  Pink Lady gave me the option of switching to another shift crew or going to accounting full time on days, but I refused.  I wanted to work it out with my fellow shift people.  It was Echo Team, all the way.

Pink Lady then had Dyani, Nina, and I go into her office for a private conversation.  Dyani and Nina thought they were done, fired, finished, but Pink Lady wanted to know why they were so interested in this Birthday Cake Girl.

Now, I will take back over the narrative.  Nina spoke up.  She had many clients at her whorehouse who wanted the birthday cake girl experience set up for their sons, but Nina had never heard about it.  She found it on the Internet, passed off as Anna being eighteen and playing the part of a sixteen-year-old.

Nina said, “In our whorehouse, we tried to duplicate the experience, but there were two problems.  It was hard to duplicate.  It got messy.  You pretty much had to throw the sheets away afterwards. And the second problem is Birthday Cake Girl here.  She has a body that looks like every piece was hand made by a sculptor.  That’s why I wanted Dyani to look close.  I didn’t think that it was making you uncomfortable.  We just had to know.  Now, after what you said, your Momma fed you chemicals and you exercised and probably some of it was just good genes, but I am amazed that you hadn’t had any work done.  You know, work under the knife.  You are a goddess among women.”

Then Dyani said, “And all we wanted was your autograph.  And after we knew it was you, we just had to tell everybody that we were on the same crew with a movie star.”

I sputtered, “Movie Star!?!  It was a porn film.  I have not seen it, but that does not make her a movie star!”

Anna spoke up, “Dyani, I do not hand out autographs because I would rather be known as just about anything other than being a porn star.  But how about let’s be best friends, all three of us.”

Nina squealed, “Birthday!  You got a deal!  Dyani, we be riding with royalty.”

I was about to correct them, but Anna snickered and waved me off.  Anna had finally connected with her crew.  She might be well-known in some circles, but she was now one of them rather than sneaking into the shower room to be alone.

Over the next two weeks, except when Anna worked with Tommie in accounting, Nina and Anna were paired as a team.  They were inseparable.  Dyani had gravitated toward a Native American lady who had been with Pink Lady a long time.  When the three of them got together, along with a few others, was when Anna started a Bible study.  With the bedroom packed, far beyond the capacity, security dropped in to see that nothing strange was going on.  When security found three ladies sitting on the bed and three sitting on the floor with their Bibles open, they nearly laughed.

Echo crew, with Dyani, Nina, and Anna, had started on graveyards, but then they went to days and then to nights.  They were about to rotate onto the daytime classroom training shift.  They only had one night left.  Nina and Anna were assigned that night to shipping and receiving.

On that last day of nights (3pm to 11pm), the only forklift operator on that shift, due to illnesses with the other operators, was indisposed, a simple trip to the ladies room.  A trucker needed his truck emptied and he climbed aboard the forklift.  The shift instructor had her head turned, and Anna went to the driver to tell him he needed to wait just ten minutes.  The driver then swung an unsecured load around to curse at Anna.  His thought was “What does a young girl in pink coveralls know about anything?”  Besides, he was late getting to his load to be picked up and driven west.  A fork truck wheel caught the transition between the truck and the work platform, and the unsecured load tipped, bringing the load over in Anna’s direction.  Nina ran and shoved Anna nearly to safety.  Anna got a hairline fracture of her left arm, hitting the concrete floor too hard, but Nina took the direct blow from the load.  She had no internal organ damage except for a rib that punctured a lung.  Her hip was broken and one leg.  She was very lucky, but the punctured lung became a medical emergency.  We got the two of them to T.R.U.S.T Medical Center (Tracy Regional University for Science and Technology).  After a few surgeries, Nina was going to have a long rehab, but Anna could return.  Anna refused to return until she could talk to the woman who had saved her life.

For the story, I’ll let Anna tell it from her letter to her husband.

When Nina woke up, I was looking down at her.  Nina said, “Birthday!  You made it!”

I showed my soft cast. “When you save someone’s life next time, Nina, do a better job.  This won’t leave a scar, but my body is no longer perfect.”

Nina laughed, “Oh, that hurts.  Don’t make me laugh, Birthday!  It hurts!”

I got serious for just a second, “Nina, with all our Bible studies, I hope you have accepted Jesus.  I could have lost you forever.”

Nina quipped, “Of course, I accepted Jesus.  Anyone who could forgive you, could forgive me!  And I wondered if some of them people that hovered over me when I was out cold were angels.  Yes, I believe, and I don’t have anyone else that I could trust more.”

I then changed the mood again, “That’s good, because they put parts from dead people in you.  You’d have a hard time walking through the pearly gates with some heathen’s leg in you.”

The nurse came into the room.  “Please don’t say any more about that.  We need to keep the patient calm or her stitches might burst open.  That is the funniest story I ever heard.  What if the dead in Christ rise first?”  And then the nurse did a high leg kick.

Nina mumbled, “I’m curious now.  I gotta see that, even if it hurts.”

I said, “I was loaned a laptop.  You can watch Mark Lowry’s broken leg story later.  Pink Lady wanted us on the clock for a few hours each day.  We can watch the classroom training over the computer.  As for me, Tommie and I are swapping roles.  She is making data entries and I have been asked to double check her work for accuracy.  As for you and me, we will both be up and making apple cider before you know it.”

“Anna,” Nina said softly, “I don’t remember much.  Since that load of apples fell, I can remember the angels hovering over me and not much else.  What happened?”

I held Nina’s hand.  “You shoved me to safety, almost, but this is not much of a break.  You had one pallet hit you in the chest.  It broke three ribs, and one of those ribs punctured your right lung.  A second pallet crashed into your hip.  Your femur was crushed.  That is where the bones from dead people are.  They pinned the hip together.  Don’t try to run through airport security.  You have a lot of metal in your hip now.  The biggest surgery was fixing the lung.  But we got here by helicopter.”

“I flew in a helicopter, and I missed it!!”  Then she got serious, “Anna, will I walk again?”

I never hesitated.  “Of course, you will, Neens.  We’re the Bobbsey Twins.  With Dyani along, we are the female version of The Three Musketeers.  You might need a lot of therapy, but Pink Lady’s new sister-in-law is the head of a department here at the university.  Naomi Yeggs is some kind of genius with physical therapy and the mental side of it.  If she does not have you dancing, no one can.”

Nina frowned, “I never was a good dancer.”

And if you are wondering about the truck driver, the company is paying all of Nina’s medical bills clear through the recovery and rehab, as well as Anna’s little bit.  I trust the company.  As for the driver, he will never return to Lily the Pink.  The company said that they would not fire him due to being short drivers already.  That was why the driver was there, since those that had been around Lily the Pink were on other assignments.  The company set up a retirement account for both ladies in fear of me bringing them to court over pain and suffering.

The rest of the new hires were working out admirably, and no one whined or complained about the Bible studies.  Everyone who was not on shift showed up for the Vespers services, and most of the new ladies were in one Bible study or another.  We are still hopeful that the stragglers will come around.

And as for Anna’s “mission” of finding out how we evangelize, she wrote this in conclusion:

I wanted to conclude my letter with my mission report.  I was doing everything wrong at first.  I immediately was found out and the lady who singled me out, Pauline, told me that the only way to evangelize effectively in the Lily the Pink fashion was to love those that you work with.

I have learned that it takes one more step.  After the shower incident, I take my shower with the crew.  We talk to each other through the shower stalls.  We joke around.  We have fun together.  When we laugh, we all laugh together.  When one of us cries, there are those who huddle around and shed a tear also.  We eat the same food.  We work together.  We sweat together.  The ladies on my shift crew still think it is my exercise routine that gives me my body shape, so they join me in my exercises.  I think the bottom line on Pink Lady’s project is that she loves everyone here and we are all family.

Credits

Dyani is a Native American word for deer and is often used as a girl’s name.  Nina means pretty eyes, little girl, or mighty, but spelled differently it could mean a girl resembling her father’s mother.

Lily the Pink is one of my favorite silly songs.  It is adaptable for adding new verses, as long as the “cure” is far from what was wanted or expected.  Although The Scaffold, a group that wrote the song, has a very British version, I prefer the Irish Rovers version, with a few of the same verses.

The writers of the song are the members of The Scaffold: John Gorman (comedian), Mike McGear (a pseudonym, really Paul McCartney’s brother), and Roger McGough (poet).  The Scaffold had back singers and musicians to fill out the “band” that included a young Elton John, Jack Bruce, and Graham Nash.  The song is based on a poem written about snake oil sold in the USA under the label of Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, with a picture of a sweet young girl on the label.  The poem states that the snake oil is sold by this face that only wants to love others.

The chorus of the song is:

We’ll drink a drink, a drink
To Lily the Pink, the Pink, the Pink
The savior of the human race
For she invented medicinal compound
Most efficacious in every case

Of course, Jesus is the Savior of the human race, and He cured people rather than selling them snake oil that promised cures that did not work.

If you need a good laugh, here is the video that Anna and the nurse talked about.  I have seen this video several times and my wife and I once saw Mark Lowry perform the routine live (or the story from the actual events), and I still laugh.  Maybe those are the tears that God will wipe from our eyes, tears of Joy and Happiness.