Reggie’s on day 86 of nothing special. He’s stuck in Lodi again.

I’m on day 3 of the Michael Thurmond 6 Week Body Makeover. You know the Bicep Buddhist on Extreme Makeover who tries to get at what the lipo didn’t? Rumour on the fat boards is this miracle makeover knocks 30 pounds off in six weeks…… or……….wait for it……..your money back. Courtesy Provida.

For the curious reader, there are five simple rules. No fat. No salt. No sugar. No wheat. No dairy. It doesn’t say anything about wine but I’m assuming that’s off the menu too. You also have to eat every 2 to 3 hours.

Now, I’m not some rookie dieter. I’ve been at it for years. Nothing knocks off 30 pounds in 6 weeks except maybe a scalpel and a few suction tubes. But, in the lead up to the pigfest that is the holiday season, a girls gotta do what a girls gotta do. Also I’m tired of always wanting to fit into those jeans. Skinny jeans No.1 have now dry rotted. I’ve given up ever being 105 pounds again. No.2, a good size and a half larger, are now the gold standard. I’ll get there if it kills me.

My mother thinks I’m crazy. She would. The woman weighed 126 pounds when she was nine months pregnant – with twins. But I know better. I know it’s never good to feel awful. It’s always better to feel fit and fabulous. Nothing tastes as good as thin feels. It’s the truth. If you don’t believe it you’re either fat or ugly. That’s the truth too. Thin is a fabulous floating on air feeling. Fat is a stuck-in-a-rut-and-i-cant-get-out- so-i-might-as-well-puddle feeling.

I don’t like stuck. And I won’t settle for it. See ya Reggie.

Im drawing characters at the moment. Another little procrastination trick I’ve learned. I have several hundred to choose from.

For years I’ve been in the habit of people watching. I carry my notebook everywhere. Sketch what I see. With words instead of lines.

The man who wears the dirty Octoberfest tshirt to let everyone know he went to Germany 13 years ago. He never did anything else. Not in his whole life. But he went to Germany. And he drank beer. Once. I drew him.

I drew a man with heavy jowls. Blue suit. Red tie. Explosives expert in the 2nd world war. Before he became a preacher. His voice was soft. It rolled like thunder. The slow kind that lets you know something’s coming…but not yet.

I drew a woman with six children. Her husband left her. Her boyfriend didn’t want her but he let her support him. He was hungry and she was fat. She loved her children. They hung from her. The weight of them made her short.

I draw people at a glance. If their lives are anything like I imagine I never know. It’s better that way. They are my peoples. They are what I want them to be. What I need them to be for my fiction. I have books and books full of people. Ready to come to life. When I need them to.

I draw with words. Sometimes im a bit long winded.

It was Bluefield. What did queens do in Bluefield? Sit at home and wish they were some where else. Every night but Thursday.

I was working at a grocery store in West Virginia when I saw my first drag queen. It was after midnight and she sloshed through the door in stripper heels and gold stockings. She looked like Mariah Carey. I watched her browse the pickles and low sodium ritz crackers. The lunch meats and the cakes. The after-hours bread men whispered and the ladies in the office made upset faces. I stared because I knew she wouldn’t mind; and wondered who got all dressed up to peruse confectioneries on a week night. She bought a case of Bud Light, hopped in a mustang and drove away. The night manager kicked a coke display and broke his foot. I laughed. He called me a sheep dog.

Every Thursday night, between studying for stats and ringing up the milk, I rang up Bud Light for a queen in a mustang. Word got around. People started dropping in just to see what one looked like. To roll their eyes and look shocked. The store was quiet when she patroned. Something wicked this way comes.

I wondered if she wanted to get away as much as I did, and if she knew I knew she was a pentecostal preacher on Sundays. I recognised her grandson’s car.

Someone asked me the other day if I was named after Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’m serious. So was he.

The thing about names is they sometimes suck. I hated being a Buffy. The absolute bane of my existence until I was 18 and realised I could never be anything ordinary. I never let on that I despised the name, or the incessant ‘oh I have a dog called that’ giggles that I put up with from friends and foes for years.

No. I couldn’t complain about the name, because it came from Blue.

You need to know this: I invent my own people – my own characters. If you think you recognise someone – you don’t. They are all creations of a thunked-out mind. All people, places and things fall from my head the way dead pigeons sometimes fall from the sky. Any similarities between my peeps and actual peeps are strict coincidence. Promise.

That said, I will make one (Read it. One.) exception. Brother Blue.

Blue bares a vague resemblance to my grandfather’s best friend. Ex special forces, city boy and butcher. Blue was a pastor. When my father couldn’t be bothered to show up for the birth of his first child my grandfather took his place – By his side was Blue.

“Her name is Tiffany.”

That was my mom. Her heart was set on Tiffany. She had wanted a baby with the scary pink moniker since she was twelve. But I guess being an unwed mother and having to look into the eyes of the church elder after 26 hours of labor took its toll on a person because when Blue said “She looks like a Buffy to me” – that was it.

Blue was one cool cat. He had been places. Places the people I knew didn’t even read about. Books from France and Italy loitered his house. Pottery and papers from far flung corners covered his living room. He cried at the Wailing Wall and laughed in gangland Chicago.

He knew things too. Blue whizzed through Oxford as a young man (I’ll tell you about it sometime), studied long gone languages (Not this parle vous francais crap – I’m talking Indiana Jones stuff) and could tell you the exact amount of crushed birth control needed to make your roses ribbon worthy.

Mountain men didn’t grow roses and they sure didn’t speak ancient Aramaic. But Blue wasn’t really a mountain man. He was….just a man.

When I moved to England a retired Blue took a trunk full of him and moved back to his old army base in Fort Bragg North Carolina. His wife was dead and he went to share a house with his sister and her husband. I phoned him every month. Wrote him from time to time. He had a stroke two years in and they said he forgot things. My calls grew more infrequent. He was sick and I was busy with a new life. I didn’t want things to be uncomfortable and I didn’t know what to say. But Blue always knew who I was, as soon as I said his name, and even on his bad days we were never at a loss for words.

He died in his sleep.

Later, when his sister was going through what few things he had, she found a shoe box. In it were letters from me. When I was six. Ten. Twenty One. A picture of a turkey I drew with my hand when I was five. Just one trunk in a much lived life – and a shoe box of it was me.

I never thought about death – or about how we just ‘sometimes go on and forget’ – until Blue died. Since then, thats all I think about. Maybe I’m just getting older. Maybe I’m just thinking more than I should.

The day before I left home Blue took me out to lunch – his favorite mom-and-pop on a wind-about road in the hills of McDowell County. He told me to stay warm. To always remember him. And to go see the White Cliffs of Dover – the most beautiful place in the world, even when you weren’t coming home from four years of war.

I never saw him again.

I don’t cry much these days, but when I do, it’s because of Blue.

I sure do miss my Blue.

The first song I learned was Jesus Loves Me. It came from my grandmother. The second was Sixteen Tons. I got that one from her husband. At three I didn’t know a lot, but I knew who loved you and I knew who owned your soul. If you were a coal miner it wasn’t Jesus.

When I turned four my horizons broadened. I started hanging out with my 13 year old aunt and her friends. I fell in love with Boy George and sang Karma Chameleon to anyone who would listen. Went something like this ‘come-a, come-a, come-a chameleon‘ and ‘every day is like a bible‘. I still have a crush on the man.

Those are the songs I remember the most. The ones that send me back to Iaeger and childhood. There are others. Music and lyrics that remind me of important times and feelings that I’ve almost forgotten. So here I go. Here’s me being Nick Hornby. If my life had a soundtrack, this would be it.

Sixteen Tons, Tennesse Ernie Ford
You load sixteen tons, what do you get. Another day older and deeper in debt. Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go. I owe my soul to the company store…

Karma Chameleon, Culture Club
Islands in the Stream, Dolly Parton
Country Roads, John Denver

American Girl, Tom Petty
Well she was an American girl. Raised on promises. She couldn’t help thinkin that there. Was a little more to life, Somewhere else. After all it was a great big world. With lots of places to run to. Yeah, and if she had to die tryin. She had one little promise she was gonna keep…

Groove Me, King Floyd
Crimson & Clover, Tommy James & the Shondells
Aprils Fool, Rufus Wainwright
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony

Freebird, Lynyrd Skynyrd
If I leave here tomorrow. Would you still remember me? For I must be travelling on, now. ‘Cause there’s too many places I’ve got to see.

Hotel Yorba, The White Stripes
Be For Real, The Afgan Whigs
Sittin on the Dock of the Bay & That’s How Strong My Love Is, Otis Redding

1. I have nice nail beds.
2. I know a scientist.
3. My laugh. When it’s genuine. (It rarely is.)
4. I’ve studied ancient languages.
5. My hair sometimes shines.
6. I try to be polite and well mannered despite being raised by a barn, on a farm, in a holler, in WV.
7. Before I was a writer, I was a criminologist.
8. I once jumped off a cliff.
9. I know the international sign for ”Help Me. I’m choking.’
10. TD&H

I hate when people give me diet tips. Save your breath. I’m not after tips. I know them all. I don’t need earth mommas telling me to up my fiber intake or keep an eye on those extra sugar grams. I am the lentil queen and sugar makes makes my neck spasm. I don’t eat processed foods. They taste like feet. I don’t like fat because it sticks to the back of my throat. Gross. Salt makes my hands swell. See how healthy I am!!

“Maybe if you didn’t eat a whole steak hoagie …”………. this is my gran talking here………..”those things are too big for a woman. I only have half of one. With mustard and mayo and just a little bit of….”

I haven’t had a hoagie in ten years. what’s she on about? (As a side note, don’t put cheese in front of me. I will swallow it whole!)

My sister-in-law, is a dietitian. She walks and does aerobics. So very eighties. Works wonders. My brother is a fitness freak. The kind who notices serious muscular atrophy when he misses a single weight training session. He has a dozen egg whites for breakfast. Two cans of watered down tuna for lunch and twelve protein shakes in between. Neither of them can do anything with me. The brother just gives me the once over with a single raised eyebrow. Like he knows something i think he doesn’t. He doesn’t. The sister-in-law just smiles and looks like she wants to poke me in the stomach. stay puff. heeeheeheee.

She better not.

It was four in the morning when she woke me.

“They’re there. They wont go away. They’re so mournful and sad.”

Turns out two Edwardian chics were standing in the corner of her room. Crying alot. She could feel their pain. It was killing her. I asked if she was on crack and handed her the bottle of scotch I kept under my bed. She drank it and fell asleep in the floor. The next morning she explained.

“Blah blah blah. I see dead people. Blah blah blah. ”

I was late for class and didn’t care. My flatmate was a flake and I knew it. But I still had to ask.

“What? Like that kid in Sixth Sense?”

“I wont have you belittling my kind.” She said it like she was serious.

“Your kind? What are you, a wookie or something?” I was just kidding. “I’m just kidding.”

She didn’t think it was funny and left.

Two nights later, pretty much the same thing. She tore the front door open, half-ran-half-crawled up the stairs, and started tearing her room apart. This time it was a kid from the seventies. Dead as a doornail, just like the girls in her room. Followed her around all day.

“My crystals! I need my crystals! I cant take this anymore. I have to seal my aura!”

I should have ignored her. She was pretty insane that night. But she was making a mess of her room and I cant stand when people do that. It’s like on Sweet Home Alabama, when Dempsey covers Witherspoon’s apartment with rose petals. She’s looking all happy and I’m like ‘You know you have to clean that up, right’. So I couldn’t just stand by without a word.

Here’s me being clever. “You ever think maybe they just need your help.” You know. Like in the movie.

She screamed at me. “Thats not how it works! Don’t you know anything at all!”

“OK.” Here’s me being cleverer. “Maybe they’re just after you.” You know. Like to GET you.

I made a face when I said it. She passed out. Cold.

Her father collected her later that night. Took her home to their 500 year old manor house where the ghosts were more docile. She came back on Saturday to apologise. Off to Tibet. Something about ancient temples and finding her place in the universe. She would see me in a month. In the meantime she was sorry. She didn’t mean to cause upset. I told her it was ok. I didn’t care about her fits or her ghosts. As long as they stayed out of my room.

I really didn’t.

Bertha was a dying swan. The kind who said “Lawd Lawd” and “My heart, My heart”. Matriarch of a rather large family, she introduced 9 children to the world before her husband died. They, in turn, gifted her with 32 grandchildren. Three gingers by the youngest were, in her eyes, the crowning achievement of her clan. The rest of the family hemmed and hawed on her every whim in the faint hope she would just have a heart attack and get it over with, or come to care for them as much as she cared for her three copper-topped grandchildren. She did neither.

The memories I have of the woman are unpleasant ones. A biting tongue. A pockmarked face. Black stringy hair that sat on top of her head in a beehive. She babysat my brother and me for years. Pleasantries aside, when our mother left, she locked us out. Brought us in only to feed us. Chicken and biscuits. Some kind of good, but not good enough. Her grandchildren would stare at us through windows and laugh when they felt like it – because we couldn’t come in – and the weather was awful. Hot or cold. Didn’t matter. We were locked out just the same and took shelter under a tarp-covered rose bush.

Bertha hated us. She disliked me because my name was Buffy. The stupidest name she ever heard. (Oi Bertha!) She couldn’t abide my brother because he was never discontent. He was placid, he was sweet. Bertha didn’t like placid sweet things. Her tastes ran more acidic.

As for those……….I lived in the vague but incessant belief that Bertha was the witch from Hansel and Gretel gone underground, who would one day, having fattened us up the desired amount, boil us as soup for the reds.

She never tried to cook us – as far as I know. But those reds would have eaten us alive all the same had I not, in a coming of age moment, beat the tar out of ‘em one evening after school. That was the end of chicken and biscuits, and the end of Bertha. If I could take down three reds in the parking lot of Montcalm Junior, I could take care of my brother.

The girls at the gym were talking about cosmopolitans – and how they drank them sometimes because of Sex & the City, even though they tasted terrible. I could call them sad but I wont because I’ve been there. Done that. Bought the tshirt. I admit it. I love chic lit. I don’t know why.

Like most, it started with Sex & The City. If you didn’t envy Carrie Bradshaw you weren’t a wanna-be-writer. Going to work (i.e. bedroom desk) in your tshirt and Uggs. Fabulous, if not painless, salon trips. Partying all night with Mr Big. Coming home to a closet full of Manolos. Living large, I tell you what. Fiction or no.

It was a Carrie moment (me, in front of the telly, doing my nails and reading Vogue) when I first thought “What the Hell. I’m doing this thing”. I spent two months reading Bushnell and a dozen others like her. Then I went to work. Forty thousand words in – i quit. Why? Because I didn’t care. I wasn’t interested in my own writing. Chic lit is like Vogue; it’s there and it’s easy (to read not to write). Great for flying. But do you really care enough about it to sit down and produce it? I don’t think you can, unless you’re Stephanie Klein, maybe, and I’m so not. My love life has never been that interesting. (Dig that hair though.) Also, I don’t do romance very well. It smells of cheese.

I want to write about the weird and the strange, posing as normal. I guess they’re everywhere, but I only know them well there. I know a few other things. I think I’ll mix ‘em up and see what I get. In the meantime, I still haven’t read Bergdorf Blondes. Been fooling myself into thinking I was better than that. I’m not (ordering it now). I love chic lit. I just cant write it.