With a warped passion, Blondie delighted a bit too much in scattering the reeking contents of four kitty litter boxes onto the newly installed, expensive white carpeting throughout the house where she lived for years with her boyfriend and his four cats. She wanted to make sure that he at least thought of her for the number of days that it took him to clean up the stinky mess. It was her last act of defiance towards him. She felt so good, so proud of herself for creating such a disgusting inconvenience and mess for him to clean.
She walked back through the house looking around the rooms, laughing and feeling so thrilled in her brat trademark kind of way. She about broke her arm patting herself on the back for being so clever to think of the disgusting idea in the first place. This would teach him for demanding that she be moved out before he returned from his business trip. She intentionally did not buy kitty litter while shopping so that the boxes were overpoweringly putrid from the front door. Then with it scattered everywhere and the empty boxes thrown down the basement stairs, the four cats would add to the mess throughout the house the next three days before her boyfriend returned home. She laughed wickedly when one cat already started to add to the mess so quickly in front of her.
What Blondie didn’t realize was that her cowardly act of destruction so accurately characterized her lack of character and would be just one more tale that she gave people around town to tell when gossiping about her.
Blondie was, by all means, the oldest barfly in the small town where tongues wagged if you just went outside in a matronly robe to get your morning newspaper. She had her rare sober moments and rare brilliant ideas, but for the most part, those days were long gone for her. She was 54 years old and looked much older. She didn’t age well, but most alcoholics never do. Blondie turned heads when she walked into a room when she was a young girl, but those days were long gone as well. Now all she turned were people’s stomachs and their heads in the opposite direction when her loud and vulgar mouth and she entered a room.
The day before she emptied the kitty litter boxes onto her boyfriend’s expensive, new white carpeting, Blondie rented herself a hotel room above a downtown bar. She told herself it would be just for a short time until she got back on her feet. A perk of moving there was that she would be spared future legal problems of getting arrested for driving while intoxicated. She wouldn’t be driving anywhere since she could just walk upstairs.
But ten years later, she still lived there. And one could be certain that nightly Blondie could and would be found parked on a barstool downstairs, being the loud, obnoxious drunk who caused patrons to move to the other side of the room or move a bit closer to grope her aging body. The owner always made her third drink much stronger so that she would pack up her purse and word search and puzzle books to head upstairs.
Being the oldest barfly in town meant that she had arrived at a place in her life where she had to turn it all around or go on the rest of the downhill trip as though she were running with scissors. She told herself that the best part, albeit the only good part, of being the oldest barfly in town was that young men looking for an easy, free lay always found her. She broke in quite a few virgins in her time. While she fancied that they boasted to their friends about their time with her, few of them ever admitted to anyone that they had anything to do with her- especially the nice young women they eventually found. Blondie sometimes would see them afterwards and only a limited few who came back for more ever spoke to her. One was in his late 20s and became her toy boy on alternate Friday nights for about 3 months last year.
In a way, he came to care about Blondie as much as anyone possibly could. He didn’t share her obsession to be plastered on a regular basis and tried to make her cut back. He thought she was still beautiful and didn’t need to be loud or vulgar or wear tops too small that showed lots of cleavage to draw attention to herself. He was visibly embarrassed when she got loud and stupid in the bar, but was the only one to ever ask her to leave her barstool or bed to have dinner down the street or take a walk. He hung around for a while, but eventually threw in the towel when he saw traces of cocaine on her dresser that one of the newer young men left for her. His Blondie was into that as well and he was not.
Blondie missed her young man more than her hard heart would admit. He was the first man to stay overnight and the only one to run to get her coffee, bring her flowers, pour her bath, wash her back or simply ask how she was and sincerely want to know.
One Christmas Eve, Blondie’s old boyfriend came by to see her, but only for a moment. Apparently, she never had contact with her sister or brother all those years and never gave them her new flop house address. The old boyfriend put a letter down on the bar and told her that he would not deliver any future letters, only send them back. Blondie had already had her third stiff drink in her system since the bar would close at 5 p.m. that day, so she reacted in silent disbelief that the letter addressed to one Lyndall Kaufmann was actually real in front of her. She hadn’t been Lyndall since she was fired from her cushy job fifteen years ago. She thanked the old boyfriend for driving across town on Christmas Eve but he had already walked away and didn’t hear her. She opened the letter from her brother and started to read.
Blondie read the letter twice to make sure she understood it. The bartender asked if it were bad news. No, she told him. Her sister died. The bartender just shook his head in disgust with her cold heart. In spite of the fact that her family did not talk to her for years, Blondie was included in her sister’s will. She was to receive their mother’s diamond bracelet that Blondie once removed without permission from her father’s home after their mother died and was made to return it or face arrest.
In addition, her sister also had money, stocks and investments that she in part was giving to Blondie. There was a catch. Blondie had to enter a detox program and then have her sister’s financial planner be her payee. Nonetheless, it meant she could leave the hotel and live a more comfortable life by anyone else’s standards. It beat the $1,000 per month disability check she got for being an addict.
However, Blondie already had the comfortable life she wanted.. When she got up from her barstool to leave, the bartender couldn’t help but notice that she had wet her pants again. He called her name to tell her that she left the letter on the bar and that she did not leave her lighter and cigarettes behind as part of their nightly agreement. She was not allowed to smoke in her room because she would surely fall asleep with a lit cigarette as she sometimes did sitting up at the bar. Blondie stopped to put her cigarettes and lighter down but did not take the letter from her brother.
Instead, from the payphone upstairs in the hallway, she called her brother who did not recognize her voice. She told him that he could shove the bracelet up his ass and give the money to any of his sister’s favorite charities. She didn’t want any of it for herself. Her brother explained that the will was exact and that nobody but Blondie’s heirs could ever have what was intended for her. That’s easy, she said; the brother was her sole heir. She congratulated him and said she was sure he would look beautiful in their mother’s bracelet because she would never want it on her wrist again. And she hung up, thinking Merry Christmas.
Blondie woke up from a two-day sleep late at night on December 26th after having taken five seconals before midnight on Christmas Eve. A fire truck blaring its siren rolled by down the street and she heard music from the bar juke box to confirm that she was definitely alive. The five pills did not take her where she intended to go. She called the man who sold her the five seconals and asked to buy eight or ten. He was all out until after the first of the month. She said she could wait a few more days.
On the morning of December 28th, Blondie’s old boyfriend dropped by again with a package from her brother. It contained the bracelet previously discussed, some other jewelry, some photos of the family and some of her when she was a child. There was a document inside requiring her signature allowing the financial planner to set up an account in trust for her. Her old boyfried tried to reason with her to accept it and get her life together. Did she really want to die in this old hotel, he asked her as he slammed the door behind him and did not wait for her reply.
Rather than stop downstairs at 10 a.m. for a breakfast glass of wine when the bar opened, Blondie had a shower and took a walk. She went to a deli down the street and ordered some real breakfast food. It was the first breakfast she had had in about a decade. She didn’t think she would keep the omelet down, but she did. She had an appointment to get her dark roots touched up and dyed blonde to match the rest of her bottled hair color. Instead, she used that money to buy dinner and call her brother back.
She decided to accept the deal. She said she was going home to fill the papers out and would have them in the mail that afternoon. They talked a little and she smiled for probably the first time in years. She canceled the second order of seconals.
Blondie kept walking back to the hotel thinking how nice it will be to live in a real apartment with neighbors around. She would take a walk later to a new development area of town to put in an application there since they had garden apartments and balconies. She started to walk faster to the hotel to get the papers signed and in the mail. She stopped at another pay phone to call her brother back again to ask if she could spend New Years Eve with his family. She wouldn’t drink. She wouldn’t laugh loudly. She would be Lyndall Kaufmann again. She cried real tears of joy when he said yes.
Blondie kept walking back towards the hotel to start packing her bag, though she wouldn’t leave for two more days. She was excited and started to walk faster.Maybe she would get her dark roots died anyway, since it was a special occasion and she wanted to look nice. All these thoughts raced through her mind as she saw the hotel down a block and kept walking. Blondie didn’t see the car coming to make a right turn and stepped out right in front of it. There just wasn’t time for the driver to stop. Her body flew right out of her shoes and through the air and across the street at least 20 feet before hitting a concrete wall with a loud thud.
Blondie’s brother wondered why she didn’t come to his home or why she didn’t call back to say what flight she would be on. At first, he thought she might have got drunk instead and was angry that he told his whole family that she was coming. He was looking forward to seeing her. He found out late in the day on New Year’s Eve that she had significant head trauma and would not make it through the night. He made arrangements for her to be buried next to their parents and other sister who had died a few months earlier of cancer.
At Blondie’s wake, her brother spoke of the once brilliant Lyndall who brought life to their home with her little girl laughter and how disappointed everyone was that she returned home only once after their mother died. To the few gathered, mainly his children and his wife’s parents, he announced that his other sister had a death bed confession and admitted that she stole their mother’s bracelet and returned it along with other jewelry that Lyndall was accused of taking. He wished that had never happened, because he felt that there never would have been a Blondie if Lyndall had been welcome to come home sooner.
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