Wackos to Obliterate: Book One (Chapter 1)
Mavis watched herself in the bathroom mirror as she pursed her lips around an index finger. She noticed traces of ruby lip gloss clinging to the digit and smiled as she wiped it with a tissue. All in all, she was pleased at how full and luscious her lips appeared with the fresh coating. Glitzy advertising campaigns notwithstanding, it would take a lot more than this to get a reaction from someone as striking as the ranch hand she wrote into her latest romance.
As the mirror reflected back the crow’s feet around her brown eyes and the gray that was peppering her black hair, she wondered how her creation, Damian, would respond if he spied her skinny-dipping in a pond on a warm summer night. What would he do if she emerged wet and glistening from the light of a full moon? What would he do if they were alone on an isolated ranch nestled in the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains? Would the manhood of this testosterone-fueled young buck, with his six-pack abs, become as turgid for this woman of fifty-nine with her glossy lips and crow's feet as it had for the lonely but buxom single mother of twenty-nine on whose ranch he worked? What thirty years can do?
She left the bathroom for the dining alcove at which sat George, her balding and overweight husband, staring at the screen of his laptop placed on the table of the dining booth in their fifth wheel RV.
“You almost finished? I’m getting hungry.”
No surprise there. George was busy reading over what he just wrote in the comments section of an article posted on a webpage of a major news outlet.
Mavis walked over to see what he was typing. She glided a hand along the back of the gray sweatshirt she gave him last Christmas. Pictured on the front were Boris and Natasha, bumbling Soviet-like spies from a cartoon they both loved as kids. The couple held special significance since their daughter often said they resembled her parents: Mavis like Natasha was taller and slimmer than her partner and like Natasha she used to wear her hair long and wavy.
“Let’s go. There’s a piece of strawberry-rhubarb pie with my name on it.” She slipped a hand under his collar and ran her fingers through the curly hairs on his back.
“Just got to write a few more comments, but I’m having trouble finding a wacko to obliterate.” George scrolled down the comments. “There’s an asshole,” he said while he tapped on the keys; he failed to notice the change in his wife’s appearance.
Luscious Lips sat down on her side of the booth and waited for him to finish. She looked straight ahead and blew glossy kisses at him. He ignored her, stared at the backlit screen and continued to type. She rolled her eyes and frowned, more disappointed than pissed off that he did not bother to look up. A little lip gloss doesn't bring the results promised in the cosmetic company's propaganda? Forget Damian; not even George cares.
Mavis directed her eyes to the company logo on the cover of her husband's laptop. It was older than hers, but they were already living in the RV when it was bought. Purchases great and small were made in the decades since their wedding; how many did they really need? How many of their decisions were the right ones? Soon her thoughts returned to the angst of whether it was astute to retire early, sell their mortgage-free home and purchase a 39-foot RV and pickup truck.
Fifty-six was too early to leave the hospital. She was a receptionist there just shy a decade, but George had long lost interest in his mid-management position in retail. In fact, his desire to quit “nine-to-five” and dedicate his energies to online trading already started in the mid- to late-1990s during the hype of the so-called “new economy.” These initial plans for retirement, however, were shattered in March of the new millennium with the bursting of the tech bubble, but he regained his overall bullishness as the housing bubble started to inflate. By the time he felt assured his investments were guaranteed “infinitum,” their daughter Erica had flown the roost to begin a family of her own.
Employing some of the persuading skills he had honed in retail, George convinced Mavis they had played the game and won. A month after they began life as RV nomads, the real estate bubble popped, stocks plunged, and Mavis entered a cycle of remorse.
The bit of Yankee ingenuity they had, luckily, began to kick in. As their finances were a fraction of what they had projected, each found ways to help out. To George, the resiliency of the markets demonstrated that great drops in prices do have benefits if they are stocks you do not own. In addition to pulling together their greatly reduced assets to purchase some shares set to rebound, however, he discovered another golden calf: working at home as a political troll.
Mavis found help in a more indirect way: the growing popularity of electronic books. She had become an avid reader of romances after Erica had grown and Mavis started to work at the hospital. Escapist literature like mainstream bestsellers and romances were very popular in that inherently depressive environment, and most of her colleagues enjoyed sharing their books. She found once she quit working, however, she no longer had access to this lending library and had to purchase most of her reading material. This became more of a problem once their money became tight. To her relief, she discovered e-books online were cheaper than printed versions and that a large proportion of these were romances.
Within a month of purchasing an e-reader, she noticed a growing number of e-books were self-published, very reasonably priced, and quite popular. She began to ponder whether she could write a book-length romance herself. To her surprise, she completed a first draft in just a couple of months. Five months later she sold digital copies over the internet and was using social networking to help with the marketing. The more copies she sold, the less remorse she felt.
Driving back from devouring the strawberry-rhubarb pie, George stopped the pickup at a light. “I should replace that laptop,” he said as he waited.
Mavis glanced at his puffy silhouette; hunched over the wheel; a far cry from Damian.
“Why?”
“I used to spend hours on a desktop at work and rarely had a stiff neck. Not like now.”
“Maybe we should get a chair that allows you to adjust the height. The table may be too low.”
“Also the laptop screen is too close. I’d like to be sitting back more.” The red light changed and he gunned the accelerator as though he were racing the other drivers. Years ago, it used to irritate Mavis when he did this at lights; eventually, either he stopped it or she just stopped noticing it. After they bought this pickup, though, her irritation returned. It seemed ludicrous to her for a retired man to gun it when the signal turned green. Of course, within seconds, if the other drivers were younger men, they’d compete and make it a point to overtake him.
She looked at her childish partner and frowned. “I don’t think we have space for a larger computer. It’d be best to get a chair.”
“But then we’d have to worry about it rolling around while in transit.”
“You probably just spend too much time on the computer.” She looked out the passenger window at the night scene of this unfamiliar town, which appeared like most others they had visited in the past couple of years: chain stores, boxlike architecture, and empty sidewalks (no doubt due to the American insistence of traveling by car).
“Speak for yourself. If you aren’t working on one of your books, you’re glued to some SNS site.”
“You want us to make some money, right? Since I don’t have a juicy contract with one of the big publishers, I have to market my brand.”
“It’s the same with me darling; just paying the bills.”
“It’s certainly a strange way to do it, don’t you think: trolling message boards and trying to screw up other people?”
“Nah, nah, nah . . . they’re screwed up long before I ever get into the conversation. I’m just astroturfing the debate.”
“What a sock puppet.”
“Now Mavis, is that the way to talk to your lover boy? Oh, I forgot, your only lovers are those who pack a six pack. I guess a beer gut like mine is a far cry from the abs plastering the covers of romance novels; as pornographic as any skin mag, I’d say. Come to think of it, it’s illegal for men’s magazines to show exposed tits on the cover. How do your books get away with frontal nudes of men?”
“You’re just jealous.”
“You’re right darling, I am.”
Within minutes, they were back at the small RV campground where they had spent the past couple of weeks. It was reasonably cheap, it had the amenities they needed (dump station, LP gas and 50 amp electrical hookup), and it was on the outskirts of a farming community in central Indiana where George's troll supervisor forced him to attend a training session.
When they arrived, George discovered his supervisor was a classmate from high school. At first, it seemed implausible but not too improbable since they both fit the troll template: late middle-aged males with at least a moderate-level of education who found piece-meal work to be a suitable way to eke out a living; mid-level managers, journalists, technicians and computer engineers who were out to pasture before reaching the “golden years” of retirement; a cohort of skilled but frustrated individuals disposed to be manipulated by special interests with agendas.
When George began to promote Indiana as a great place to spend the fall, Mavis was a little suspicious since they were enjoying the sights and sounds of northern California - one of the loveliest spots in late September. Even so, she agreed and off they drove to Indiana; which, incidentally, turned out to be pleasant enough in the early autumn.