"MISS HALE'S HOME PHARMACY... AND OTHER TALES OF SELF EMPLOYMENT IN THE NABE"

BY :  FRITZ VON LUDWIGSLUST

CHAPTER EIGHT



    Infamous Faux-ville tart Hale's other phone line (the red-hot extension) is ringing, but that C.O.D. call/delivery will have to wait.
 Small town, career adulteress (and now candy stand girl added to her resume) Hale is too busy trashing her current (wife beating-alcoholic) husbands ex-victims...  I mean ex wives...  on her ever handy wall phone, that she hangs from like a human vine of toxic Poison Ivy for hours at a time.  Unfortunately, the gal that Hale is verbally vomiting on (Trudy), has no clue how friendly her husband is with good-ole Hale when shes out doing her aerobics class every Tuesday and Thursday night.
    A large, glass container on the counter is filled with what looks like "Good-n-Plenty", but this candy didn't come from any corner store,  it was "borrowed" from the nursing  home where Hales works.
     You see, Hale has become a very successful part time, self employed entrepreneur.  It all started when lil sis Sammy got busted for writing her own "scrips".  Hale started to "borrow" meds from the facility she worked in...  pain killers, uppers, downers and everything addictive in between to help her little sibling.  Ever resourceful Hale found it necessary to buy enormous glass canisters to store her harvest, so she purchased several dozen from a wholesale candy/confectionery supplier.  It soon looked like a 1950s candy store in her pantry and the smart tart branched out and started supplying all the locals with meds for every possible need...   but always in exchange that is, for many "things" besides just the typical payments in cold, hard cash... but that is for a future story.
 The Nabes new pharmacist is in... get your prescriptions out!  Home delivery available, or easy call-in ordering on Hales special color coded "Chem-menu".  Have a good day.

    There were many other self employed "entrepreneurs" in the Nabe as well,  including a few like...

    Violetta Falschmuschi:

    Who looked like a blow up doll from an adult shop on 42nd street.  She supplied 30 minute fantasies and words of carnal encouragement to the unwitting in Faux-ville.  Violetta started this home "love line" for the lost and lonely... cash only, to be sent to a P.O. Box on the other side of the tracks of town.

     Nigel McGilliham:

     Who started his own herb garden in an undisclosed, remote area of the power lines several miles outside of the Nabe.  No delivery available, but happy to do pick-ups by the third power line pole behind the V.F.W.  Gil often cut his herbs with whatever feral weeds were around...  wild strawberry leaves were his claim to fame, he insisted that they intensified his home grown herbal "experience".  Mrs Krauter could never figure out how and why all of a sudden she was going through two boxes of plastic glad sandwich bags in one week.

"FAUX-VILLE U.S.A."

BY: FRITZ VON LUDWIGSLUST


CHAPTER SEVEN



  You could smell the cow and chicken manure from the dairy farm down the street the day that Dora - short for Pandora - was "spotted" coming out of the woods (and not alone) by the Nabe's own little "snake-in-the-grass"  Mrs Masterhorn, as she sat drinking 101 proof out of her fake, trademark coffee mug.   Mrs M had been coiled up in her window all morning like a timber rattler waiting to strike and inflict some poison and some pain on someone... anyone.  Even her pretty, off-white curtains with embroidered garlands of yellow roses couldn't hide the evil pit-viper look on her face... she had new, dirty fodder for gossip and she was now in telephone-line-ecstasy again after a too long and very uneventful week in the Nabe,  also known as "Faux-ville U.S.A."
    Don't feel too sorry for Dora though,  she was a born again (several rebirths) serpent from the garden who had more dirt to hide than the hundreds of spirits that hid in the original Pandora's box.

"What are best friends for...?"

    Mrs Masterhorn was swigging her brandy out of her coffee cup in her snake pit and waving happily to her "dear friend" Pandora who was now walking up the street on her way home from a "nature hike" in the woods (while brushing grass and leaves off of her clothes).  Of course Dora had no idea that Mrs M, (Ida) was trashing her to death on the horn with head-gossip and fellow snake-in-the-grass Darian as she blew kisses to her thru her rose coloured, tobacco stained window.  Ida put the red-hot receiver down to run to her door and yell...  "Coffee in twenty minutes Dora doll,  I made some toll house cookies for us".
    Pandora barely heard Ida as she was frantic to get back home.  She had forgotten to take her "scrips" before her walk on the wild side, so she would have to double-up on her Oxycontin and Percocet before entering the "snake pit" across the street for "coffee talk".
    It was twenty minutes later but babbling Ida Masterhorn did not hear the knocking on her door as she sat, still coiled like a cobra spewing venom about poor Pandora.  "Six down, four more to go" she hissed as she started to dial another "snakes" number.  Dora walked away thinking that Ida had forgotten about their coffee clutch and was out.  She barely had the key in her own door when she heard her shocking pink, rotary princess phone ringing off the hook...  it was Darian up the block (just off the horn with Ida)...  Dora would need a few, deep brain numbing snorts of Stadol (permanent hay fever Pandora insisted) to handle this call.
  It seems that Darian was on a vicious roll, like a tumbleweed in a hurricane.  The poor thing was back on a starvation diet and her steady side kick was away with his wife so she was a dangerous, frustrated little pudge of patty pan squash ready to lash out at anything that moved.  Of course, downing black beauties with drambuie didn't help at all.
     Soon Ida and Dora had two or three working calls (call waiting) going at once, as they waved to each other from their window burrows, saluting each other with coffee cups filled with liquor. The vicious gossip was burning the telephone lines so bad that it scorched the feet and feathers of several Crows and Blue Jays that were perched on them.
     The ladies were in such a verbal frenzy that they soon had no idea which one they were talking too and nasty rumours crossed the lines.   Ida was soon gossiping to Dora about Dora...  and vice versa,  but since it was all nameless chatter ("she" and "her"), they never knew that they were trashing each other to filth.  Wild tales and vicious rumors about wife swapping, cheating, booze binging, candy trading, gambling addicts, character defaming, kleptomaniacs and "tutoring" under age proteges flew around like a bat out of hell...  It didn't really matter though,  each one had a long rap sheet on the other that would make Xaviera Hollander look like a cloistered Nun.  
      It was so much for Ida and Pandora that they had to go outside and sun themselves on giant rocks to digest that banquet of gossip, like a couple of diamond back rattlesnakes that had each just swallowed a dumpster full of garbage.
     They were still good to go though, because after all,  that's what best friends are for...  in a town called Faux-ville U.S.A.










 
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