betty began to read novel #3.
bob was just a guy, a lot like other guys.
he had a friend named jeff, who was also just a guy, like a lot of other guys.
jeff lived with his girl friend, named adelaide, who had a big ass and kind of a nasty disposition.
jeff was out of work and adelaide was getting tired of supporting him, and let jeff know it.
jeff had a little mustache, which he spent four minutes each morning trimming.
jeff had met bob in high school, where they became friends because they both liked werewolf movies, the lower budget the better.
as time went on, bob lost his interest in werewolf movies and became addicted to porn, but he and jeff remained friends.
neither bob nor jeff had much success with girls, although jeff had a little more than bob, but they both liked beer.
they bought cheap brands of beer, and agreed that people who drank imported or designer beer were stuckup assholes who didn’t know shit. about beer or anything else.
when they got out of high school, bob got a job at eddie’s pizza and jeff got a job at subway’s.
when jeff lost his job at subway’s he continued to be supported by adelaide, who had always made more money than jeff in her job as a life coach.
adelaide had had weight and skin problems through junior high and high school and had never been very popular.
adelaide had had a friend named bonnie in high school, who also had skin problems but was anorexic.
bonnie moved to another state when the two girls were sixteen, and they never saw each other again, but kept in touch by texting.
adelaide began studying very hard to get into college and she and bonnie lost contact after a while.
bonnie fell in with a bad crowd, and dropped out of school.
bonnie met a guy named doug, who was a total loser.
doug liked violent porn and cheap gory horror movies and video footage of car crashes and other gruesome occurrences.
but doug had a soft spot for animals, and would take in stray dogs and cats, although his stepmother gave him a lot of grief about it.
doug’s stepmother was named jennie may and she was only two years older than doug. but when jennie may’s girl friends began ragging on her and suggesting that she was fucking doug, she did not see the humor and would get really mad.
one of jenny may’s girl friends was named marcia. marcia weighed two hundred and fifty pounds and had studied to be a hairdresser but she was kind of clumsy and not very good at it. eventually she got a job in a barber shop - an old fashioned place in the crummiest part of the old downtown that actually called itself a “barber shop”.
jenny may and the other members of the gang gave marcia a lot of shit about working in a “barber shop”.
marcia had a younger brother named roger who never addressed her as anything but “fatso” and dreamed of being a rap star and/or a porn star.
marcia’s and roger’s mother was named noreen and she was a devout christian who read the bible every day and went to bible study groups.
noreen also liked to bake cookies, and everybody who tasted them agreed that her peanut butter chocolate chip cookies were the best they ever ate.
noreen had a younger brother named oscar who had disappeared when he was sixteen.
when marcia and roger weren’t fighting, they enjoyed speculating on oscar’s fate, with marcia opining that he had fallen into the clutches of a hannibal lecter/john wayne gacy type who had slowly tortured him to death, and roger leaning toward a scenario in which oscar joined a pack of wolves or feral dogs and ran with them and became only half human.
it hurt noreen that marcia and roger would find humor in such imaginings, but she had learned from experience that she had little influence on her two monstrous offspring, and she would try to ignore them as she read her bible.
noreen also had an older brother named tom, and tom had a friend named jack.
so much for this, thought betty. she flipped through the 1500 pages, and the whole book seemed to be in the same vein…
the young woman behind the counter called to betty that her sandwich was ready.
