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.

This one was one that I asked for before I thought it through.  I might disappoint myself, but I could pray.  What happens when your heart goes out to someone, but baggage arrives with them?

I sent the private jet to pick up four homeless people in Florida.  With the recent hurricane devastation, there would be a lot of candidates that might be better qualified, who might really want to move to Tracy and work at Lily the Pink.  Their story is found HERE. But I was playing the favorite auntie card, and I had not seen Easter Yeggs, my nephew, in a few months, other than one Sunday at church, and then briefly.

He had posted a video of him giving a human-interest report.  It seems a pregnant woman was abandoned.  She was about to give birth.  Her friends tried to get her to the hospital, but the hurricane did not cooperate.  She gave birth in a half-filled bathtub, delivered by a weather reporter and her professor.  The reporter even shifted the baby inside the womb to correct a breach delivery.  Then Easter ended his report by saying that the biological father had been killed on the highway in the storm, which was the obstruction that prevented the friends in getting to the hospital.

I called Easter’s fiancée’s satellite phone, Jemima having one of two that the storm chaser team had, and Jemi, code name Stinker, gave me a little backstory on the biological father, a very nasty backstory.  Billy Bob Nutt was the owner of an RV park between Cross City and Jena, Florida.  He sold RVs.  He rented RVs.  And he had parking slots with hook-ups if you wanted to park your RV.  But he was also a silent partner in the Dixie County Gentleman’s Club, owning a third interest with the two managers of the club.  He was the “recruiter.”  Basically, he picked up strays, that is: undocumented immigrants, homeless women, and runaways.  He also had a side business on the dark web that will be explained later.  He had a compatriot at the DMV to make real IDs with fake information, making teenagers legal for working at the Gentleman’s Club.  He had a doctor that kept the ladies healthy, not pregnant, and fit with large breasts, one way or the other.  He was a human trafficker.  There was no evidence that he had ever sold a girl that did not cooperate, but he was pretty nasty.  I was glad I never met him.  The state police in Florida shut down the club until further notice.  The people who came to me had nothing to go back to, other than a home that had been mucked out by a faith-based crew, with a tarp on the roof, no occupancy until things were fixed.

Now for the four people that I flew to Tracy.  There was Mary Jo Lynn, and her newborn son Frank Lynn.  Maybe Mary Sheltie might have suggested a different name if she had known the mother’s last name.  But since Mary Jo was a runaway, that wasn’t her name anyway, and her real age was less than what the driver’s license said.  Mary Jo had finally confessed what was going on with Billy Bob.  With the testimony given, it made no sense that if he left in the morning, why he was trapped by the storm in the early evening?  And if he was halfway boyfriend / girlfriend with Mary Jo, why did he have five half naked women in his RV with him?  One died at the point of the RV flipping along with Billy Bob.  Two of the others bled out before help arrived.  The last two were not expected to survive.  Hurricane Frank picked up the RV like a toy and did terrible things to it.

Mary Jo was never supposed to get pregnant, and she was never supposed to deny an abortion if she did.  As punishment, Billy Bob assigned her to cleaning duties, all the rentable RVs.  Billy Bob was probably hoping the overexertion would abort the baby, but Frank Lynn was determined.  But then, God probably had something to do with it too.

Mary Jo had no home to go back to.  She had few friends.  She loved the idea of coming to Tracy.  With a newborn, I allowed her to start out as Jochebed’s assistant in the nursery.  There was a little awkwardness in the beginning.  She had never worked for a black woman before, but she wasn’t really prejudiced.  She just didn’t know what to think about it.  She had never met a black woman with a French accent, who used a lot of French words that she did not know.  But she recognized the voice as being the one who guided the professor and the reporter that delivered her baby.  And Jochebed had an immediate concern as well.  She thought Mary Jo cleaned things too well.  Mary Jo used a toothbrush and cotton swabs to detail every corner in the nursery.  The abuse that Mary Jo had endured was starting to show.  We could work on that, but was it a bad thing?

Next was Darrell Driver.  I really have to talk about the next three as one group, but first the Driver family basic points.  Darrell’s father died when he was ten and Emma Rae was five.  He had been a truck driver and there was a horrible crash on icy roads.  There was a life insurance policy with the trucking company.  Darrell’s mother had enough to bury her husband, pay off the mortgage and trade in their car for a newer, more reliable one.  But to pay the bills and put food on the table, she worked two jobs, until she got sick.  The money left over from the life insurance was supposed to go to college for the children, but it went to doctor bills.  There was nothing left when she died and Darrell graduated high school, with only his sister to watch him receive his diploma.  Darrell had been working a fishing trawler, one of those tourist things, mostly catching junk fish, but for someone who had never caught a fish…  While in high school, he swabbed the decks, mostly cleaning up when someone got seasick and did not throw up over the side.  But being the bread winner of the family, they promoted him to helping the customers bait hooks and teaching them what to do.  He eventually moved to the job of tending the gear and icing down the “trophy” fish.  They were training him to be the assistant engineer.

His attitude was that he would go wherever Sally Mae told him to go.  He gladly went to work for Jim Kaiser, doing maintenance.  With one or two more, we might not have to rely on our vendors to supply vat cleaning and other types of services.  We would have to see about that.

To describe where Sally Mae fits, I have to give the backstory of our problem child, Emma Rae Driver.  She was a problem in that everyone at Lily the Pink saw the need to leave the life they had been in.  They were trapped and Lily the Pink set them free.  Emma Rae was the opposite.  She loved the life of prostitution and exotic dancing.  Within the first couple of days, she had propositioned nearly every man on the Lily the Pink campus.  And she saw Lily the Pink as a prison, something to escape from, not a place that provided her with freedom.  At five, her father died.  At thirteen, her mother died.  She was totally dependent on her brother, and he made hardly any money.  Soon after her fourteenth birthday, her brother got her the job of swabbing the decks.  Mostly she stayed out of the way.  Her biggest job was when they docked, but in case someone made a mess on deck, she had to be there.  It was minimum wage, but half the time, she sat and got some sun.  One time, the boat was filled with, as she called it, old geezers.  I wonder if she thought of me as an old geezer.  Never mind.  I’m sure she does.  But one dirty old geezer stopped by where she was sitting.  He started a conversation.  Then he said that if she lifted her blouse, he’d give her ten dollars.  She thought that was an easy ten dollars to help her brother with the bills.  The old geezer laughed and suggested that if she did it again, he could kiss her breasts, for an extra ten dollars.  Now, with that in mind, Emma Rae started asking the old geezers instead of them asking her.  She cleared $300 each week.  Darrell never asked where the extra money came from, thinking her being the only woman on board, he just thought they gave her tips.

But then one day, Billy Bob was on the boat.  He wasn’t like the others.  He was rough.  When he went to do the kissing part, he took his free hand and shoved it into her pants.  He faked an apology and gave her a fifty-dollar bill, along with a business card and invitation.  She went to Billy Bob’s RV and was taught a lot of things that a fourteen-year-old had no business knowing.  Within two weeks, having served her notice to the fishing trawler, she was a bus girl at the Gentleman’s club, making love to a customer or two each night.  Her uniform at the club was a G-string.  Everyone could tell she was underage, but her driver’s license said she was eighteen.  Truth was that she had never driven a car, but she did fine driving soon enough, long before she was of age to do so.

Then on another fateful day, Billy Bob asked her if she’d like to go on a road trip.  Billy Bob rented RVs, but on the dark web, he provided an RV with “entertainment.”  Emma Rae, still fourteen, was told to act innocent around a divorced father who wanted his two sons to have a good time.  She was basically their slave for a week, but it paid well.  And her uniform changed from a G-string to a bikini.  But then, came another road trip, a special one that paid even better.  There were two girls going.  That is when Emma Rae was introduced to Sally Mae.

Sally Mae Sewell was like Darrell Driver, in that she was orphaned just before she graduated high school, in the same class with Darrell.  But unlike the Drivers, Sally Mae had just moved there from Atlanta, Georgia.  Her father was a dentist, and he opened his practice in Cross City, Florida.  Then, he and his wife decided to go on a late afternoon swim in the Gulf.  They went to a secluded, no-lifeguard beach.  A rip tide carried Sally’s mother out, and in a panic, her father went to rescue her.  Both drowned while Sally was at home, doing her homework.  When Sally Mae went to the employment service, Billy Bob saw the most beautiful girl he was ever about to entrap.  He pulled her from the line and within a couple of months, she was the best lap dancer they ever had at the Gentlemen’s Club.

This special road trip with Sally Mae and Emma Rae on board was a fantasy thing.  Two lesbian lovers would see a father and son and find out that men were more fun to play with.  For a week, the two watched porn films to make sure their act was almost believable, and they practiced.  Sally Mae had volunteered in that she was behind on mortgage payments, nice house, but mostly empty with just one person living there.

After that week of fantasy “entertainment,” Sally Mae said that Billy Bob had shorted her on the pay he’d promised.  She was about to lose the house.  Emma Rae invited her to the Driver home.  Sally Mae put her big house up on the market.  At the low price she offered, it sold fast.  Sally Mae started sleeping in the master bedroom, but after no time at all, Darrell joined her there.  When Darrell and Sally Mae started getting serious about their relationship, she told the managers at the Gentlemen’s Club that she would not do any lap dances.  They were furious, but Sally Mae was a draw when she danced.  Other girls would gladly take over the lap dances, for the better tips.

Sally Mae gladly took any job at Lily the Pink and wanted to learn them all.  Of the four, she was the smartest and most motivated.  Before they left Florida, she and Darrell found out that I was strict about non-married people sleeping together, so they asked Mary Sheltie’s Joseph Jones to marry them in the hotel lobby before they were picked up to fly to Tracy.  Sally Mae insisted on Dr. Elvira Quinn as her maid of honor and with a lack of any other guy that Darrell knew, Easter Yeggs was the best man.  We filed all the legal paperwork after they arrived in Tracy.

But back to the problem child, Emma Rae, the one that did not want to be here.  What I had done in the past was to show them the door.  I wanted no one at Lily the Pink who did not want to be there.  This is not a prison, but Emma Rae had nowhere to go.  Being a prostitute at Envy Apple’s brothel was not a solution.  Emma Rae had basically been a bus girl, waitress, and finally a stripper.  The tricks for tips were not the sole focus.  She never considered what she did prostitution, but it was the only life she had ever known.  Changing careers was scary.  And I would hate to hand her over to Envy.  Showing Emma the door would be tantamount to that.  But we are now a family organization.  Some people just use Lily the Pink as their residence, but in many cases, we have families where more than one member of the family works here.  We cannot have a freelance prostitute wandering the halls.

I suggested, “Emma Rae, how old are you really?  Not what is on your driver’s license.”

She snarled, “How old do you think I am?”

I shrugged, “I know roughly what your brother’s age is.  You look about thirty years old, but I am thinking no more than twenty-two?”

She laughed, “I’m nineteen.  I’ll be twenty in a few weeks.”

I thought she was young, but her lifestyle had already taken a toll on her.  She had aged fifteen years in the past five years.  “Sex workers” have a low life expectancy.

I suggested, “I have noticed that you have borrowed several books from the library, and they are all classics.”

Emma beamed, “Oh, yes, I love those books.  They are a lot better than TV.”

I mused, “And what do you learn by reading them?  Why do they attract your attention.”

Emma looked at the floor.  “I don’t know.  It is all a bit of a fantasy.  I have never had a relationship that those people had.  I doubt if I ever will.  Maybe that is the way it was, but it ain’t that way now.”

I smiled, “It could be.  Did you read the Scriptures I asked you to read, the ones about relationships that do not involve having sex?”

She again looked at the floor.  She did not answer.

I continued, “I have a different idea.  I am moving your work schedule to a different shift.  Oh, you said that you and Sally Mae watched a lot of porn when you prepared for your joint road trip.  Did you ever see something involving a birthday cake?”

Emma smiled, “Oh, that old thing.  That’s all fake.  The cake would have melted under the lights.  The girl is too perfectly shaped, probably a lot of surgery to get those curves.  It had to be some camera magic.  And they must have done a lot of takes.  But I watched a few on that channel, just for the laughs.”

I chuckled.  Then I pressed a button.  Anna Hill came in.  “Anna, this is Emma Rae Driver.  She is the girl I was telling you about.  I am moving her to your shift.  Since you are in your long weekend, you will have time to get to know each other.  Introduce her to your family.  That sort of thing.”

Emma turned around to see her new boss.  Then she gasped.  She squeaked.  “It’s you!!  You are the birthday cake girl!  My new boss is the birthday cake girl!  Wow!!!”

Anna growled and stared at me.  “Ms. Pink, you have done it to me again.  I try to forget that former life and then you send me more fans.  I do not need fans.  I need people that can pay attention to instruction.  I need people who will be safe while they are working.  I need people who will do the job right the first time and obey instructions to the letter.  I really need another fork truck driver.  And my best friend and safety person is already in Washington state with the skeleton crew there.  What I do not need is another porn fan.”

I huffed, “Are you finished?  It has worked before.  It can work again.  God is a God of miracles.”

Emma asked, “Just a few questions about you being a porn star and then I will zip my lip on the subject.”

Anna said, “No!  Off limits.  The porn life is long hours, exhausting, degrading, nasty, and humiliating.  The birthday cake scene was done in one take.  It was real cake.  It was my sixteenth birthday, but my mother said I was eighteen to make it something other than kiddie porn.  And no, I ate right, had the proper supplements to a regimented diet.  I did as you have done and had estrogen treatments, but do you realize that too much estrogen can kill the thyroid, leading to a life of exhaustion, weight gain, and no sex drive?  But my body has not been under the knife.  I recently gave birth, and I am struggling to lose the last few pounds, but I am an exercise fanatic.  The tummy will be flatter soon.”

Emma finally sounded like a teenager, and she squeaked as she said, “You look great!”

Anna asked, “Did you read those Bible stories that Ms. Pink Lady asked you to read?”

Emma looked at the floor and huffed.

Anna laughed, “Never mind, we will read them together.  Let’s go have some girl talk.  You can meet my three children.”  She handed Emma her cellphone.  “The boy is Resurrection.  The girl is Esther, and I just gave birth to Timothy.  He’s five-weeks old.”

Emma snarled, “These are all your kids?”

Anna smiled, “The older two were brought here a year ago.  Their natural parents were killed, and Tyler and I adopted them.  Esther was just a toddler herself then.  She will have no remembrance of her parents, but they are as much our children as Timothy is our natural child.  I hear you have had no education past the eighth grade.  A Lily the Pink policy is that we train and educate so that any employee who wishes to leave will have the skills and knowledge to get a job elsewhere.  I will get you started on your GED.  But that is for another day.  Today is going to be fun.”

Anna turned to me with her hands in together as people might do while praying.  She bowed.

Emma asked, “What is that about?  Is it some Buddhist ritual or something?  Do we bow in Ms. Pink’s presence?”  Anna Hill simply laughed and told her to get moving.

But I knew that Anna was asking me to pray.  She did not have to give me the signal.  I was already praying.

Credits

The idea of Pink Lady being unable to guess Emma’s age came from an old memory of my wife working in the Aiken, South Carolina Hospital.  We lived in North Augusta, SC.  Between us and the county seat in Aiken was a series of textile factories and lower income housing.  Because of a constant supply of lint floating in the air in the area around the factories, the derogatory name for the people there was “Lint Heads.”  Frankly, she and I knew a lot of wonderful people in that area, but one day in surgery, they had a young woman on the surgical table, opened to see the lower torso internal organs.

The doctor asked my wife, knowing that she had not lived in the area for very long, “How old would you say this woman is?  You saw her come in.  You see what you see now of her internal organs.  I know you to be very observant.”

My wife replied, “With her facial features, I would say that she had to be in her upper thirties, maybe lower forties.  With the deterioration I see here, I am thinking early to mid-forties.”

The doctor nodded, “I thought you would say something in that range.  If I did not know any better, I would say about the same thing, but this woman is twenty-two years old.  Life in the ‘valley’ is hard, and life expectancy is not that good.”

The life expectancy comment regarding sex workers stems from past research on the subject.  Much of the poor life expectancy of sex workers is that of disease transmission, but the life is hard in general.  With those who stay away from sexually transmitted diseases, it is possibly as much as 20 or more years shorter than the average.

And you might be disappointed that Anna Hill Hill-Hill Hill did not name her son a cute name to accompany the last name of Hill, but she did.  She named him Timothy Hill.  The highest point in the state of Wisconsin is Timms Hill, or Tim’s Hill.