Sunburned Honest – Chapter 1
 @2011 Michael Guillebeau 

Lizzie had never taken a thing that didn’t belong to her in her life, and this is where it got her.  She was grouchy from being up too early, tired from staying up too late, and the wig on Lizzie’s head itched like hell.  Just her luck to get stuck wearing a wig going in and out of the Florida Panhandle heat and the Hilton Hotel, the air in here cranked up to freezing just to show that the hotel could afford to waste money.  

She tapped on the door twice.  

“Housekeeping,” she said in a clear, cheerful voice.  Said it just like the corporate trainer had told her to do when he trained her for the job, as if you needed training to be a hotel maid and clean up a room, as if a guy in a suit would know anything about it anyway.    

The room didn’t say anything back.  She slid the pass key in, pushed the handle down and stepped inside to another room filled with the residue of joy and drunken celebration.  At least the occupants left the air conditioning on this time.  That was the worst, when they checked out and turned off the air and she’d come in hours later with the room baking and the odors boiling up and choking her.  Then it was clean it fast and get out.  She met the corporate standard of eight minutes per room on those.  

But this room was still cool and crisp and rich-smelling and new, except for the bed.  She pulled the door closed behind her to take a break in this room.  She peeled off the gloves, her hands soggy inside with sweat, and took off the wig to scratch her head.  She looked in the mirror at the bright red Mohawk staring back at her, stubble on the sides where she couldn’t decide whether to keep the Mohawk or let it grow back.  

The Mohawk had fit when she was in LA.  There it was all about attitude, more attitude and style, and she strutted, everybody telling her she had it all and was going places.  The crowds in the clubs loved her on stage, loved the way the little girl attacked the big guitar, loved the way she would stop in mid-song and sing a brand-new song made up on the spot with the band struggling to keep up.  They’d cheer while she scribbled the idea down on the big leather notebook she kept on the stage, cheer when she wrote down the things the crowd yelled to her, cheer because they knew they were part of the birth of a star.  So her shows ran long and the crowd screamed and dreamed of the day they’d hear her on the radio.  

They’d turn to their buddy on that day and say, “I was there, man.  I was there the night she wrote that one.  I yelled the line to her.”  She would be the mother of the songs, but maybe they were the fathers or at least a distant relative, and nobody loves a baby like their own.  

They eventually drug her kicking and screaming away from the crowds and into the studio and made her pick twenty tracks, choose twenty of her children out of all the others.  They got her into the studio and laid down the tracks.  Took three times what they had budgeted, every take interrupted when she had another idea and they had to stop the take while she wrote down a new song, better than the first one.  There were long meetings with producers and suits with Lizzie begging and demanding: can’t we please, please fit just this one new one in.  No.  If they’d let her, they would have needed a CD the size of a Frisbee to fit it all.  

But they got it down.  Leaked an early single to the deejays and LA ate it up, cute ballsy fresh-faced little girl doing Florida country rock with an LA edge to it.  The CD came out.  Lizzie Borden was the name of the band, Forty Whacks the title of the CD with Lizzie walking a gator down Rodeo Drive on the cover.  The rock mags gave the advance copies good press and called her the future of rock and roll.  

Then the company was sold.  Sold to the guy who used to be a talking head on TV, now playing soothing new age stuff, same note over and over drawn out to relax you and let you see all the peace and love in the world.  Not rock and roll.  Not edgy.  The CD was released only in LA and San Diego with no publicity at all.  It sold about twenty copies, including the eighteen she bought to send home to relatives around Panama City Beach in Florida.  To make things worse the suits decided they needed to squeeze as much cash as possible from the old catalog, so they retained the rights to all songs from the old label, including hers. They made her an offer: she could buy back the rights to her own songs for only a hundred grand.  Until then, no songs, no music.  Step on a stage as Lizzie Borden, or even hint about Lizzie Borden, and they’d sue her ass off.  

So here she was now, standing in front of a mirror in a dirty hotel room in Panama City Beach, Florida.  Back home, trying to save fifty grand on money from hotel work and an occasional shift down at the Waffle House.  Pushing the cleaning cart around every day with a notebook tucked under the towels.  She’d pull it out when new songs came to her, sitting on somebody else’s unmade bed and scribbling furiously, got to get it down and get the room clean, can’t get fired.  

The wig was the hotel’s idea.  No tattoos, no weird hair or piercings.  The Hilton was going to be the first five star hotel in Panama City Beach, and everybody had to look the part.  A couple of times, they caught her taking the wig off inside the rooms while she cleaned and threatened to fire her, right after they had threatened to fire her for taking too much time some days.  

So she stopped shaving the sides of her head a couple of days ago.  The hell with it.  I’m a maid now, Lizzie thought.  Let it grow out and go back to brown for now.  Someday things will be different.  

But right now, the room had to get cleaned in eight minutes.  She pulled on the rubber gloves, not going near the stains on the bed without gloves, and went to work.  A line popped into her head.  She started singing it as she worked.  Added a twist, a little bit of a downbeat blues riff with an angry vibe laid on top.  Then she was jumping on the bed facing the mirror and holding an invisible microphone, singing the song quiet to stay out of trouble, but singing it.  Someday, she’d sing this one loud.   

She hopped down and made the bed and looked back in the mirror as she finished. The defiant red streak of hair burned straight through the brown bristles on the sides of her head.   

“The hell with someday,” she thought.  “I’m shaving the sides tonight.  I’m the future of rock and roll.” She pulled the wig back on, stepped out the door and pushed her cart to the next room.   

She’d smelled some bad rooms, but God this one set a record, even with the air still blasting.  She expected to see a mess, body fluids and old food piled around, but the room looked almost unused with the lights on and the bed still made.  No sign of any people except for a suitcase on the stand and a small overnight bag on the dresser by the door.   

“Housekeeping?” she called quietly once.  She called again loud, hoping someone would answer and she could go away and leave it for the afternoon girl.  She propped the cart in the door to keep it open.  She paused as she went by the dresser and looked in the bag.  It was filled with neat stacks of crisp hundred dollar bills in paper wrappers.  She stared at it.  It was more money than she’d ever seen.  She tiptoed now, going to check out the bathroom where the smell seemed to be coming from.  But there was nothing there, just tiny bottles of shampoo and stuff unopened, no towels even used.  Maybe she could just back out carefully and not have to clean the room, get one for free.  

She tripped over something at the edge of the bed and jumped.  She saw where the smell was coming from.  There was a man in a suit lying on the floor in the space between the bed and the bathroom wall with his foot sticking out.   

“Sir?” she whispered.  Her voice wouldn’t go any louder.  She looked at his head lying in a pool of some kind of black-red liquid.  Blood.  There was a neat hole in the middle of his forehead.  No way to help him now.  She backed out to the door.  

Lizzie had never taken a thing that didn’t belong to her in her life.  She took the money.