The Big Sugarbush

by Ana Good

  It took three rent-a-cops to pry Dylan Redford off Ginger Fitzgerald.

  Not one to take physical assault lightly, Ginger pressed charges.

  “Art bitch,” grumbled Dylan in the courtroom the next week.

  “What did you call me?” asked the San Francisco judge, who happened to be a lesbian, but also a Republican. Without waiting for an answer, she sentenced Dylan to six months in women’s prison — this was her third felony assault charge — or one month in rehab with a year of pissing in plastic cups thereafter.

  Dylan arrived in Vermont at Sugarbush two weeks later dragging her duffel bag in the snow. It was loaded with sculpting and welding tools. She was so high on coke she thought she was checking in at a queer art resort in Switzerland. She wondered for a moment when she saw the owner, Lily Rockworthy, manning the check-in. She’d never seen a seventy-six-year-old counter girl, dripping in diamonds, but heh, she dug older chicks, especially ones who were stacked, a term which clearly applied to Lily.

  Only later, when Dylan awoke to find herself neatly tucked into a twin bed, wearing striped pink cotton pajamas, did she realize how dire her life had become.

  “Oh fuck,” Dylan moaned. “Not another psych ward!”

  Nan Goldberg, the Manhattan bond broker who was booked in the bed across from Dylan, poked her head out from under the covers where she’d been enjoying a Lisa Scottoline novel (Dirty Blonde) and a smuggled pack of Dunhill cigarettes. She fanned away a halo of smoke before speaking. “Actually, dear, it’s lezzy rehab.”

  Rehab? Shit, thought Dylan. This was worse than she’d thought. At least in the nuthouse they gave you drugs.

  3. Poppy and the Pop Tarts

  They told Poppy Zigfield, lead singer for the British all-girl band, Poppy and the Pop Tarts, that she was going to perform at Disneyland alongside Taylor Swift. Poppy was understandably pissed when the private helicopter her mum had commandeered dropped her down at Sugarbush rehab, a veritable snow cone in the middle of an unimpressive pile of rocks called Vermont.

  No Taylor Swift.

  And not a Mickey Mouse in sight, either, just a monstrous brown-eyed creature, pawing the snow in search of an edible morsel. The moose stared sad-eyed, with icy smoke curling from his nostrils, as Poppy leaped from the helicopter that had shanghaied her from New York’s Madison Square Garden, her last American gig.

  The helicopter pilot tossed a tiny pink leather overnight bag out onto the snow at Poppy’s feet and yelled, “Good luck, mate!” as she swirled away, back up into the clouds.

  Poppy swallowed hard when she saw the moose ambling toward her. She’d never faced such a large, hairy, unruly creature up close — unless one counted her ex-girlfriend, Tubby McGuire, after three days on Ecstasy.

  Fuck that moose.

  Poppy had to get inside quickly or she was headed for a bad case of chapped quim. Ambling to one side, clutching her polka-dotted micro-mini in an effort to warm her stick-thin thighs, and grabbing her bag, Poppy slid across the ice field toward the front door of the farmhouse.

  Poppy and the Pop Tarts were an awesome girl band. The global press had tagged them the hottest act ever to tread the boards in West London. Their global record sales made the Spice Girls and old broads like Lady Gaga look like warm-up stunts at Brighten Beach. But one split second of bad judgment had done poor Poppy in.

  One effing mistake.

  Poppy had gotten into a fight with her fuck buddy, B-Bo, Britain’s star girl soccer player, and accidentally torched the superathlete’s East Hampton mansion.

  Big deal. Like B-Bo would miss a five-million-dollar beach shack. B-Bo made more than that standing around in a g-string looking good for European underwear ads.

  But apparently arson was a big deal to the Americans, who seemed to have no empathy when it came to drug-induced crimes of passion that destroyed prime real estate. The Hamptons’ district attorney’s office charged Poppy with felony arson. Her mum had booked her into Sugarbush hoping to force her to abandon recreational drug use before she did a total Winehouse and popped off the planet for good.

  Dear-old wanky Mum, in Poppy’s estimation, was overreacting. Menopause — mental pause — or something like that, as near as Poppy could tell. She, Poppy Zigfield, lead Love Tart, did not have a problem with drugs. The only problem she had was with Dame Diane, her dear-old Victorian mum.

  A multimillionaire by her twenty-first birthday, Poppy was managing just fine, thank you. Sure, she weighed less than her pet pug, King James, but thin was in. Her dark eyes popped from her head like a love-starved puppy. Her big red lips, plump with collagen, played kissy-face with the world.

  On a good day her generous use of mascara made her look like a refugee from the Twilight trilogy. Poppy Zigfield thought of her blood-starved look as her trademark, like Dolly Parton’s huge breasts and hay pile of hair.

  Lily Rockworthy, owner of Sugarbush, eyed Poppy as she shivered toward the registration desk. Lily had been running Sugarbush for so long she could diagnosis a girl’s favorite addiction with one glance. She held out a ziplock bag with Poppy’s name stenciled across the front. “Laxatives,” she demanded as she peered over the bridge of her turquoise half-glasses.

  “What’s that, love?” Poppy twisted her long black hair around her pinkie as she spoke. On stage she belted out her songs. In real life she spoke more softly, like the prep school princess her mother had hoped she’d become.

  “Everything you’re holding goes into the bag. Can’t bring stash with you. If you still want that stuff at the end of your thirty days, we’ll give it back.”

  Poppy puffed her cheeks. “Piss off, queenie. I don’t belong here. I’m supposed to be performing with Swift at Disneyland. Call me a car service, a freakin’ dogsled, whatever.”

  “No taxis up here. Next ride out not ’til next week.”

  Poppy rolled her eyes as she took in the shabby lobby. “What is this place, love? Hell on a budget?”

  “Your mom arranged a winter vacation for you.”

  “Well, it smells like old-lady farts to me.” Poppy fished through her micro-mesh bag and yanked out a finger-length cigarette flecked in gold dust, which she stuffed into a carved ivory holder.

  Lily reached over and plucked the cigarette from her lips. “No smoking in the house, love. That’ll be in the rule book come morning. Might as well warm up.”

  Pouting, Poppy plucked an ebony Montblanc pen from her purse and attacked the register with her trademark P. She slapped down the signature as large as she could in an act of defiance.

  Sod it. I’ll stay seven days. Get Mum off my back. What difference could a bloody week make, anyway?

  She emptied her bag onto the registration desk, allowing Lily to brown-bag several bubble packs of laxatives, a vaporizer, an Altoids tin of Ecstasy, and a rainbow assortment of pills even she didn’t recognize.

  Must have been a party pack B-Bo slipped on her when the cops came.

  Lily handed Poppy a nicely folded set of striped pink flannel pajamas. “You’ll be toasty in these.”

  “You joking, doll? Who made these? The Queen Mum? I can’t wear something freak-girl like these. What if my fans see me? Do you know who I am? Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  Poppy’s eyes brightened.

  “You’re a dyke. A fucked-up English one, from the sound of you.”

  4. Dating Little Debbie

  Lily Rockworthy raked back the long velvet curtains in the living room and studied the snow as it wrapped its plump, cold arms around the farmhouse. Several women had not yet checked in. Weather was causing some of the delays, but Lily knew that her guests were dragging their feet; insisting that they were not addicts; begging their families to let them detox on their own terms.

  Few came to Sugarbush willingly. Most tried every trick in the book to persuade their loved ones that they absolutely did not need an intervention.

  Lily ought to know. She’d be forty years sober come Christmas. Before that she’d spent a decade
on Broadway slinging bourbon and breaking hearts. She still had the long, shapely legs of a Rockette. (And a library of little black books full of the phone numbers of women who adored her — drunk or sober.)

  Yawning, Lily let the curtains fall into place. She called her partner, Babe Swenderson, to the front office. She was too tired to handle more intakes. Babe would be their chief therapist. Best if she met them up front, while they were putting their worst feet forward.

  Babe strolled into the office and stashed a bottle of filtered water and a bag of organic rice crackers under the registration desk. She’d just finished braiding her flaxen hair, which was graying at the temples. She’d spent the day trying to get her head in place to begin a new group.

  They came every thirty days, each group crazier than the last. Sometimes Babe missed the good-old days when dykes were dykes and they either drank too much beer or bourbon or couldn’t leave the weed alone.

  Nowadays lesbians (dykes? queers? chick-lickers?) came in all sizes and flavors. Their problems were likewise assorted and complex. It was crazy out there with drugs like synthetic marijuana and heroin and meth being manufactured and sold in Walmart bathrooms for less than a cartoon of Marlboros.

  “Who’s left?” Babe queried Lily as she glanced at the nearly blank registration book.

  Lily peered over her turquoise half-glasses at the roster. “Most. I’ve only checked in Nan Goldberg, the broker; Poppy, the British rock star; and that foul-mouthed handsome thing that built the Big Pink Pussy.”

  Babe raised her eyebrows. “Dylan Redford?”

  Lily nodded.

  Babe had toured Dylan’s pussy — professionally speaking, that is — she’d never met the woman in person. She’d toured the art installation during its road show in Boston. “I hear she’s as wild as they come.”

  “Well, she didn’t arrive sane or sober.” Lily chuckled at the memory of how enthusiastically Dylan had trounced upstairs. She wondered if the young thing realized yet where she’d landed. Not the leather room at San Francisco Sal’s, like she’d hoped, no doubt.

  Lily was still meditating on her new group of clients when the farmhouse door blew open. Snow swirled into the foyer. A large black woman stumbled in, dumping her luggage and her hat, a red felt affair with white ostrich feathers, onto the polished wooden floor.

  Lily smiled. “Wee Gee! Wee Gee Judd, you old dyke!”

  “Who you calling old, girl?” Wee Gee laughed so loud the house shook. She clasped first Lily then Babe in her ample arms.

  “Fall off the wagon?” Lily asked.

  “Hell no!” boomed Wee Gee. “Damned wagon fell on me.”

  Babe chortled. While she hated to see clients return, if she had to see a repeat, Wee Gee Judd was among her favorites. “What’s the problem, honey?”

  Wee Gee sighed heavily as she slapped the keys to her Caddie SUV onto the desk and signed herself in — for the third time in a decade.

  “Got booze licked. Not playing the ponies no more, either.”

  Babe shook her head. Cure one addiction; watch another pop up. Like Whac-a-Mole. Impossible to win, but they’d all die trying. “What’s the problem now, dear?”

  Wee Gee cupped her ample ass with both hands. “Got a new girlfriend: Little Debbie. Gained fifty pounds this fall. Blood sugar higher than my IQ. Doc says I need to get this weight thing under control or face sugar shock. Think you skinny white gals can help?”

  Lily held open an extra-large baggie with Wee Gee Judd’s name stenciled on it. “Third time’s a charm. Hand over all you’re holding to us and the good Goddess.”

  After signing in, and handing over all the candy she had in her purse, including her Tic Tacs, Wee Gee reached over the counter to squeeze Babe’s pecs. “Damn, honey, you’ve gone all Arnold S.”

  “Pumping iron.”

  Wee Gee glanced over at Lily. “Still pumpin’ you, too?”

  “Nightly, with glee,” said Lily.

  The women were yucking it up about the good-old days, specifically the early 1970s, when the farmhouse door blew open and a duo frosted with snow and ice tripped into the lobby like a pair of gangly snow women. The two young women, mirror images of each other, traipsed into the foyer. Over six feet tall, they shook snow from their closely cropped, blonde heads as one of them lumbered toward the desk. The other moped behind, cradling a red snowboard flat against her chest. Their bleached-blonde hair glistened with gel and snowflakes.

  “We’re here,” the front girl sighed sourly as she ran a tanned hand across her buzz cut.

  “So you are,” remarked Babe as she slid the register across the desk. “And who might you be?”

  The girl sighed deeply, the way a teenager does when addressed by her mother. “Dirk McGraw.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “That’s my sister, Thumper. Flunked our drug tests. U.S. Olympic snowboarding team. Gold medalists. Need to be clean by January. Anything else you need to know, ma’am?”

  Babe eyed the girls as they shed their matching black down jackets. Sinewy muscles rippled through their black Levi’s and T-shirts. The girls were buff, with butts as muscular as a cowboy’s and jaws as square as Brad Pitt’s.

  God didn’t make young women that buff. Not even lesbians.

  Babe entered “Steroid addiction” on their treatment cards and handed them a pair of striped pink cotton pajamas.

  The McGraw twins snatched the striped pink PJs and stared at each other like they’d just loped into an episode of The Twilight Zone.

  5. Bunny Yum-Yum

  Dirk McGraw and her twin sister Thumper were bumping up the stairs to their bedroom, dragging their Olympic snowboards, when a ruckus in the lobby caused them to halt at the landing at the top of the stairs.

  A tall woman with ass-length, honey-blonde hair had entered the lobby and was barking orders at an entourage of men who toted her Gucci leather luggage. Her dog, a white Westie, was barking, adding to the commotion.

  “Justin!” the woman chastised the man who held the door open for her. “Icky snow on my feet. My Manolo Blahniks. Oh my God! These shoes are a work of art! Do somethinggg!”

  Justin whipped off his tie and bent to buff the purple shoes whose straps wound around the woman’s shapely calves like vines.

  Inspecting her shoes, the woman made a clucking sound before kicking Justin out of the way and calling another man, Colt, to her rescue. Before long, both men were bowed at the woman’s feet frantically attempting to scrape off the icy sludge.

  “Welcome, honey,” Lily called to the woman, who was busy shedding her white finger mink wrap and fluffing her yellow hair in the hallway mirror simultaneously. “Register here.”

  The woman frowned as she smoothed her red, silk cocktail dress over her long frame and checked her diamond earrings in the lobby mirror. The earrings sparkled like glass walnuts. Not paste. The real thing.

  “Justin, be a doll. Register me.” The woman waved one hand. “Colt, darling, find my black cashmere pashmina. It’s chilly in this old barn. Brrr! Sending me to the mountains of Vermont this time of year. Really, what was Daddy dearest thinking?”

  The woman pulled her Westie out of his plaid traveling bag and kissed him full on his little wet nose. “Mommy loves Mr. Yummy. Does Mr. Yummy love mommy? Does Mr. Yummy love his mommy?” She rubbed noses with the terrier.

  Justin took the register and signed in Ms. Bunny Van Randolph.

  “Of the Van Randolphs, Senator Van Randolph, from the Cape,” he whispered discreetly to Lily. “Ms. Bunny needs special attention. The senator requests you spare no cost where his daughter is concerned. Are those your bellboys?” He gestured up the stairs, toward the McGraw twins.

  “You, fellows, come here!” Justin snapped his fingers, beckoning the twins toward Bunny Van Randolph’s monstrous pile of white leather luggage.

  Dirk McGraw bounded eagerly down the stairs.

  Justin snapped his fingers as Dirk approached. “More trunks en route, Ms. Van Randolph’s evening wardrobe. Her lugga
ge limo slid off the road. A large hairy creature has it cornered in an icy meadow three miles down.”

  “Moose,” Babe offered quietly.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Our pet moose, Winkle.”

  “Pet?” the man looked incredulous. “What’s wrong with hamsters or a nice little pussycat?”

  Babe hooked her thumb toward Lily. “The old gal prefers moose.”

  Lily nodded. “Rather found of penguins, also, but it’s too warm to keep them up here. I’ve tried.”

  Dirk McGraw spoke. “Which suite is Ms. Van Randolph’s?” The well-muscled snowboarder glanced over her shoulder at the socialite, who was busy admiring her svelte profile in the mirror.

  From a distance, Bunny looked thirty-five, tops. In reality, she was forty-five and freaked about her collapsing looks. Thus far she’d held on to her looks with the help of cosmetic surgery and a generous supply of Botox shots and anti-anxiety pills. (Her last two girlfriends had conveniently been physicians.)

  Twenty years of amphetamines chased with downers had left Bunny with a tick in her right eye. She’d managed to work it into her repertoire as a flirtatious wink, but lately it was worsening. When someone or something excited her, her wink went wild. Her father, up for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, wanted her off the pills before the family hit the campaign trail. These days, having a gender-fluid family member was a political plus, but not if that family member kept showing up on YouTube muff-diving international women of ill repute.

  The senator was hoping to rehab his daughter’s image, if not her, so she looked more like a “family” kind of lesbian. A nice family-oriented lesbian who drives an SUV and adopts biracial children. Family lesbians tested very well in the polls.

  Unfortunately Senator Van Randolph’s daughter had recently been showing up in social media under #twinkletwat, and that handle did not test well in mid-America.

  Recognizing a prime #twinkletwat when she saw one, Dirk pushed up the sleeves of her Olympic T-shirt and eagerly introduced herself to Bunny.