Gloria
By Elizabeth Westmark



The Field Monitor.

I spot a woman in bikini bottoms through the open carport. An oversized t-shirt almost covers loose rolls of belly fat oozing over the sides of the small fabric. Her dark brown hair is done up in large curlers, and a cigarette wiggles from a corner of her mouth as she calls out to us. “Come on back!” she says, blowing smoke onto her freshly laundered clothes as she hangs them on the backyard line. “I’ll be done in a minute.”

Checking the mail box to be sure we are at the right address, Buck and I pull into the narrow concrete driveway. The house is one of those 1950s south Florida style cinderblock boxes, differentiated from its neighbors only by color, awning style, or a pink flamingo stuck in the thick Bermuda grass.

“Oh, boy,” I mutter. “We’ve got ourselves another goody.” Buck sighs, then chuckles. “Well, let’s go meet Gloria,” he says.

We stand around getting acquainted for a few minutes while she unselfconsciously finishes hanging her laundry. Raised a prim and proper repressed Protestant, I would have kept my undies in the basket, covered them with a towel, then rewashed and hung them to dry later, in privacy. But Gloria was working on her tan, washing her lingerie, and curling her hair, all at the same time; getting ready for a night on the town at the Belle Glade Elks Club. A couple of strangers coming through were not about to throw her off stride.

“Come on in and meet my girls!” Gloria said, breezing past us through the back screen door, the galley kitchen and into her living room. On the sofa sit two of the ugliest Pomeranians I have ever seen, beady black eyes bugged out, drool matting the corners of their mouths, speaking to each other in sharp, guttural yips. There is no other place to sit, so we stand making small talk. Buck and I furtively exchange looks, both of us doing the mental calculus involved in figuring out: “Do we really want to leave our machines here?”

Gloria tells us about her boyfriend, a Seminole Indian fellow. The relationship sounds pretty stormy. He travels a lot, so she hangs out with her buddies at the Elks Club. Something in the way she talks, so much, so fast, makes me think she is trying to make herself and us feel more comfortable. It is clear we are from a different neck of the woods. But my divining rod is wiggling like a dowser’s stick. An unspoken signal passes between Buck and me. We make a deal with Gloria, and spend the afternoon setting up machines and going over procedures.

I write Gloria a check for the first month’s service and hand it to her. Before I can dodge or feint, she launches herself at me in a full body hug, a cloud of nicotine, cocoa butter, hair spray, and Tabu perfume reaching me a millisecond before she does. Buck gets it next. Gloria is now officially a Field Monitor for Aladdin Communications.

To seal the deal, she invites us down the hall of her home to a small bedroom which she has converted into a cocktail lounge replica, complete with bean bag chairs, a stereo with big speakers, lava lights and a bamboo bar, stools and all. The wall in back of the bar have floor to ceiling shelves crammed with liquor miniatures. We are stunned.

Gloria slaps the bar top. “What’ll it be?” Saying no is for sure not an option here, and we didn’t want to, anyway. We drink a couple of miniatures with Gloria, then hit the road to start the 600 mile drive back home to Pensacola.

The Business.

In 1984, Buck and I were newly married and living on Pensacola Beach. By 1986, we had moved to a house in the north part of the county, on a nice chunk of land with a fish pond. Buck was public affairsdirector for a major corporation, but on weekends, holidays, and every night, he worked with me on our little business, Aladdin Communications. Aladdin was a television news clipping service. We monitored all of the local television news broadcasts in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and parts of Georgia until the happy day came when we sold the company to some nice fellas from New York City.

Our clients were corporations, politicians and advertising agencies who wanted to have transcript and film of anything said about them or their interests on local television stations. Aladdin was a low-tech search engine for local TV news at a time when the Internet was in its infancy and search engines were primitive. Our clients provided us with search parameters. We looked at every single local television newscast from videotape, took notes on the contents, and provided our clients with a half-inch or three-quarter-inch tape containing their clips, along with a printed log detailing the broadcast date, station, reporter’s name, length of the clip and names of any on-camera speakers.

We ran Aladdin from our home. Each day, a gaggle of employees showed up to “watch TV” all day from a series of work stations set up in a downstairs room. Our garage became the editing room.

My “office” was a desk in the kitchen. I started each day long before light, brewing coffee while I searched tapes from the previous night’s local broadcast and answering phone calls from clients who knew my early-bird habits and were hot to get us on the case of some story they needed to document. By the time we sold Aladdin, that house in the country had six phone lines and an incoming 800 number.

It was the mid-1980s. Streaming video did not exist. Recording news broadcasts had to happen the old-fashioned way, using clunky, heavy videocassette recorders. They were placed in various locations to capture a maximum number of local stations with a minimum number of field monitors.

Prattville, Alabama, for example, could receive all of the Mobile stations as well as all of the Birmingham stations. Naples, Florida could receive Tampa and St. Petersburg, as well as Ft. Myers. Buck says I have a gift for finding eccentric people who were willing to let us put as many as six VCRs into their home, where they would videotape news broadcasts, and then ship tapes back to us in Pensacola every day – all in exchange for us paying any costs, plus their cable bill and a small fee.

Retrieval.

Gloria worked for us for more than a year with no incident, but I know something has shifted in her carefully constructed balance when she calls me in the wee hours one morning. She is distraught, convinced that our VCRs are emitting a toxic substance into the air and causing her to break out in hives. We talk for quite awhile, mostly about boyfriends past and present. I listen carefully, encouraging her to talk, thinking I might dissuade her from this nutty notion. But when she tells me she has “taken a cutting” from one of the machines to a lab for analysis, well...let’s just say Buck and I are on the road the next day, headed for Belle Glade to pick up what is left of our machines.

Belle Glade is a town with little to recommend it except for the television cable system, which picks up all of the Miami and West Palm Beach stations. Belle Glade grows more than fifty percent of the sugar cane grown in the United States. It’s located on the southeastern shore of Lake Okeechobee, and is in the same county, but a universe away from the super rich City of Palm Beach. For a time it led the nation with the highest HIV/AIDS infection rates, and had one of the country’s highest rates of violent crime. It’s also known as “ Muck City.” That fecund black soil is so loaded with pesticides and pathogens that “muck poisoning” rash is a common ailment.

Gloria is happy to see us (more hugs) and relieved for us to take the evil machines away. As we are leaving, she says, “Wait a minute, I have some snacks for you.” She goes into her small kitchen and emerges with a take-along feast of plastic containers loaded with cold cuts, potato salad, cheese cut into little cubes, French bread, crackers, olives, grapes, and a paper sack full of miniature bottles of scotch, vodka, bourbon, Grand Marnier and Amaretto.

We drive away from the little tract house in silence. The back seat is loaded with the largesse from Gloria’s pantry. Neither of us knows how to explain the lumps in our throats.

Later, we sit on the bed of our Holiday Inn room and make a supper buffet of Gloria’s gifts. Mellow from the miniatures, we hum "Gloria," an old tune the late Laura Branigan took to the top of the charts.

“And you really don’t remember, was it something that he said?

Are the voices in your head calling, Gloria?”

Whoo, boy, Gloria. I have voices in my head, too. Some of them are my best friends.

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