Hgll Girl: Happy-Go-Lucky Little Girl

By Jamie Piastuch

Let’s face it: Our lives are miserable, laborious and short.
—George Orwell, Animal Farm

So why not enjoy the beer.
—Jamie Piastuch

Nicole, a struggling millennial woman, is determined to follow her American dream of becoming a brewer. After too many setbacks, she questions the fairness of females seeking a male-dominated role. Then she faces terrible consequences.
After experiencing that trauma, she now fights through brewing school, employment, and a bad relationship. Pushed to the breaking point, Nicole finds out she has PTSD and needs medical help without insurance.
Despite all her troubles, she works through school and EMDR treatment and lands a position as a brewer in a tiny craft brewery in the mountains. Her new financial stability gives her purpose, beer, and the ability to build a home and enjoy the hiking life with her dogs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669868552

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Copyright © 2023 by Jamie Piastuch.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Scripture texts, prefaces, introductions, footnotes and cross references used in this work are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc., Washington, DC All Rights Reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 02/23/2023

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CONTENTS

Author’s Note

Chapter 1 Here’s to New Beginnings

Chapter 2 Game Night

Chapter 3 The Workhorse

Chapter 4 The Fight to Move Up

Chapter 5 Waiting

Chapter 6 Don’t Say It

Chapter 7 Too Corporate

Chapter 8 Beyond Forgivable

Chapter 9 The Christmas Party

Chapter 10 The Foggy Months

Chapter 11 Mental Torture

Chapter 12 Looking for Justice

Chapter 13 The Red Pill World

Chapter 14 Nobody’s Perfect

Chapter 15 Rock Bottom’s Basement

Chapter 16 Silver Linings

Chapter 17 Nothing Is Happily Ever After

Chapter 18 Boys Will Be Boys

Chapter 19 Burning Down

Chapter 20 Up from the Ashes

Chapter 21 Heroes and Villains

Just another rape story from a brewster trying

to make it in the craft beer industry.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

T HIS IS A work of non-fiction. Many might wish it wasn’t, but it is. The source of the information comes from my experiences, mainly from my journals at the time. Biblotherapy was a go-to form of therapy for my trauma. Some of the scene come straight from my recollections and some are piece together to make a more coherent scene for the readers. The comments and conversation with others is accurate it the best of my knowledge. However, with the exception of my dogs’ names, all former names, breweries, and official titles, including my name, have been changed to the privacy of the people involved. Yes that includes protecting the real identities of my rapists. It is law.

Women are not like men . . . women rarely boost of their courage.

—Henry James, A Portrait of a Lady

For all the women with a story to tell,

this is for you.

Happy-Go-Lucky Little Girl

Girls should be pretty, neat . . . silent.

—Guillermo Del Toro, Daniel Kraus, The Shape of Water

There’s a little girl dressed in a floral pink, blue, and yellow pascal dress lined with lace. She wore matching bows in her hair and shiny buckle black shoes. On one hand, she clutches a doll with the same colored hair as hers and the same floral print dress and cloth shoes. Her smile is a ray of sunshine, her pigtails two bouncy corkscrew curls matching her bouncing boundless positive energy. She is mother’s little angel and she must always look the part. She must be happy and glowing for everyone around her. If she is not happy, there is great turmoil among the adults that something is wrong. She must always smile and look nice too. Because she is Daddy’s little princess, and princesses always smile and look nice in big dresses and jewels. Everyone tells her how pretty she looks today and they are happy. Everyone must be happy.

She must be smart too and talented too. She must excel in all her school work and get good grades. She must win trophies in sports or place first in fairs or pageants. That’s when her parents brag about her grades and her talents to the other parents. This makes her special, being better than all the rest.

As she gets older, she sees that she must not only be smart and talented for her parents, but she must look pretty for the boys. One day, she will be expected to get married, if she doesn’t, there is something wrong with her. She’ll be an old maid. But the boys only talk to pretty girls at school, so now her self-image is everything. The other girls have to admire her too. That helps get the boys’ attention.

She is at the top of her class at graduation and she is full of cords and ribbons. She has all the honors and even gets to go to college. However, she will never use her degree because she will soon have to marry her long-time boyfriend, her only boyfriend ever. She must do it before people accuse her of being a tramp that cannot wear white at her own wedding. Once married, she will change her name to his name. She will change her house from her parent’s house to their own house. They will move to where he has a good job and a good neighborhood for a family. Once he starts his new job, she will have his baby and they will start a life, together.

As a mother, she will watch the kids every waking moment she has. When she has taken care of the children and tucked them to bed, then she will tend to her husband’s needs. When he goes away to work and the kids to school, she will take care of the house needs. This will be her routine every day of her life. She lives for her family.

When that time comes for the children to move out, she will finally have some time for herself and the house. She must keep up appearances. Then her husband retires and she spends all her time taking care of his needs, his medication, his routine, and his bowel movement complications until he is no longer there.

Then she will mourn and be sad and realize she has never been alone before without someone to impress or to care for in her life. She will be afraid and distraught, anxious. She may even become depressed. She does not know who she is now that she is alone. There is no one to tell her who to be.

This well-worn path of a woman’s life has become an almost standard procedure in our culture. However, there are some liberal women that choose to follow other less-traveled roads to happiness and life fulfillment. These roads are dangerous and do inevitably come with unexpected obstacles. The path less traveled is not the easiest one to take with all of its unknowns and many possibilities. Therefore, when a woman is seen deviating from the normal way, she is asked, rather forcefully, to go back to being the happy-go-lucky little girl.

Happy-Go-Lucky Little Girl

A Memoir

Jamie Piastuch

The Sandpit

It shouldn’t be, and it wouldn’t be if people did as they should, but they don’t so it ain’t.

—Tweedledee in Alice in Wonderland

An eight-foot chain-link fence and a flimsy metal sign stating Property of the City was never going to keep the neighborhood kids out of the Sandpit. This was the place tucked back into the woods we deemed ours. We never had a playground or designated safe place to run our little selves ragged. No. This was the nineties. It was the pre-tablet and helicopter-parenting generation. We ran off barefooted into the woods, knowing how to avoid the stickers and itch weeds until we found ourselves standing on a small sandy cliff staring out at an opening crater of what used to be an old coquina quarry. No trees were growing in the pit, just a few small shrubs and an outline of white rocks etched in the ground. We couldn’t tell if they were bones, shells, rocks, or fossils. We imagined they were the remains of prehistoric ocean animals that swam in this pit back when Florida was still an ocean floor.

The chain-link fence was added later in my short eight-year-old life. The city bought the property hoping to turn it into a retention pond. Meanwhile, the pit would be dug up and mined once again for its precious seabed of red-pink clay mixed with thousands of tiny broken shells. Some of it was so compacted, that it became hard as a rock; Florida’s natural building material, coquina. Now the desert we once knew becomes a chiseled-out construction site with high amounts of red, orange, and pinkish clay sprinkled with shards of shells of different sizes and conditions. This loose material was pulled away from the compacted rock that sometimes came out in pieces as large as cars. They piled them up on one side of the quarry like boulders in a stream in the mountain except without the water. Each new slab of coquina came out sharp and jagged like a rock covered in glue and rolled in broken glass.

Not that this dangerous fact ever stopped us, kids, from running all over them. What would a little skin off the feet, hands, knees, and other exposed extremities hurt at the end of the day, anyway? This was our playground, and we intended to play in it.

We never cut the fence, but we did take advantage of that opening every parent-free moment we could. There was even a worn path leading up to the break.

I distinctly remember the day we went there after a friend’s birthday party. Her mother had grown tired of the cake-filled, sugared-up kid mania in her house. Fearing for the integrity of the walls, she sent us outside like many parents who were out of patience did in that neighborhood.

Go play out in the woods.

She gave us all the birthday balloons she’d blown up that morning to take with us in the woods. She evenly divided the balloons between the girls and the boys. The birthday girl had a younger brother, and there was always a fight between them. The boys got their balloons and took off somewhere into the woods.

Now, a gang of barefoot girls, arms full of balloons, stood outside the gate of the sandpit. We carefully wiggled through the fence and ran down a sandy slope into the pit of freshly turned-over clay every shade of sunset that would undoubtedly dye our clothes by the end of it. It usually did.

We took to the pile of rocks and found a small shaded cove among the sharp edges and decided that we would nestle our balloons into this little cove like a little nest of dragon eggs. This was not an easy feat since any tiny little broken shell could pop a balloon with the tiniest of nudges in the wrong direction. We proved to be gentle dragon mommies, not popping one balloon, but managing to fit all of them in that tiny cove. Here, we would protect our babies for the day.

Honestly, I never thought we’d have to protect them from anything outside of our imaginations, but I was wrong. The boys came out of nowhere raining down on our little home cave. At first, we didn’t know their intentions. They were just boys after all. It wasn’t until they began pushing our balloon eggs into the walls and popping them, we started to understand what they were after.

What are you doing? We pushed them away from the remaining balloons, but there was a smaller backway into our cove. The first wave of boys was just a distraction while a smaller boy did a recon mission from the back where he attacked more of our babies in incubation. We chased him off only to find another front assault from the previous band of boys.

We eventually ran the attackers off from both entrances, but not without the sacrifice of all we possessed in balloon eggs. Our cave was empty except for the ragged pieces of balloons that hung from the pricks on the walls and ceiling. We tracked down the boys now trying to retreat and asked, Why did you attack our balloons?

We are playing a game, one boy said. The first team to pop the other balloons wins the game.

But we didn’t know we were playing ‘pop the balloons’ game. Can we start over? I said.

No, you have no more balloons to pop.

Can we get a chance to pop your balloons?

No, we’ve hidden our balloons and we’ve already popped yours, so we win. The game is over.

But we didn’t even know we were playing a game until it was over. That’s how you won.

So—

That’s not fair.

So . . . you lose. We win.

That’s how I learned how the game works.

CHAPTER 1

Here’s to New Beginnings

Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habit. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

—Lao Tzu

A LL RIGHT, NICOLE. Just grin and bear it.

I held a bucket of cold mountain water in my hands while standing bikini-clad and knee-deep in a frigid river.

My bucket wasn’t even a bucket. It was a waste bin I used as a laundry basket. Now, I was using it as a water bucket since it was the only thing I had in my car that could hold enough river water to dump over me. I had to make do with what I brought with me, just like I had to make do with renting a campsite without any shower area. I should have known that was why it was the least expensive campground in the area. Now I stood with a bucket in hand trying to put as much time between me and the sensation of dumping cold water over me.

Here we go. I bared down on my teeth and leaned forward so as not to splash the water on the rest of my body. It didn’t matter that it was in the middle of June. Mountain water was always freezing. I only wanted to rinse Dr. Bronner’s soap out of my hair. The rest of me would have to do with a wet rag.

I had spent most of my trip simply skipping baths and changing clothes, but I had an interview that afternoon. I didn’t want to go in smelling like a week-old camper, which I was.

A year ago, I came to the mountains of Western North Carolina for a camping trip. Now I came back looking to take up a permanent residence. I had applied for as many jobs as I could online for the last couple of months, but I didn’t receive any callbacks. I think the Florida address threw most recruiters off.

I decided to leave my secure employment in Florida, pack up any essential belongings, and camp in the mountains until I found employment or living arrangements, or both. That left me in a funny situation. Most jobs I applied for wanted to know first if I had a county residence. My old address did not count. Most places I applied for rent, wanted proof that I had a stable income. I couldn’t get one without the other. I didn’t know anyone in the area. Therefore, there was no place to temporarily crash and use an address. There was my pickle.

Somehow, I found a job that wanted my beer experience for running a beer bar in a gas station. Yes, you read that right. There are beer bars in gas stations in Western North Carolina. The manager agreed to write a letter to my potential landlord that I would be guaranteed an income if I could find a place to live. My suffering in the cold river did not go without reward.

A realtor set me up in a tiny studio apartment built on the side of a house. The landlords didn’t even live in the state. I never met them. I rushed from my campsite to a showing of the apartment, and the realtor never showed up. Instead, I called him and he showed me where to find the key, which was hidden out in the open. This must be how they do things in North Carolina.

I walked in the front door and saw a long hallway going all the way back to a window sharing a wall with the original house. Everything was some shade of off-white. At the door, the kitchen was to my left. I walked forward a few paces, and there to my left was the living room and bedroom in one with sliding glass doors leading to a small balcony. I stepped forward a few more paces and there was a small bathroom to my left and a walk-in closet to my right. The back window shined sunlight right in front of me. That was it. That was the whole place.

It might not seem much to someone living in a family-sized house or even a decent-sized apartment, but this was perfect for me. I had wanted a studio like this since I was in college. I didn’t own much in the way of stuff, and I could only afford a small place anyway. It was only fifteen minutes from work and ten minutes from downtown. There, I had to meet the realtor in his office to sign a contract. Nobody does anything over the internet out here. It’s first with a phone call, then in person, and always pay with a paper check.

I would find my way to his office later that week, but first I had to set up a new bank account since mine didn’t exist outside the state of Florida. That was difficult since I didn’t have a residence, but I needed a valid checking account to sign a lease and pay a deposit. There was a lot of proof-of-residency juggling going on that first week.

I was in the middle of performing this circus act while running paperwork errands in my soon-to-be new town when my sister informed me by text that she wasn’t keeping my dogs.

My dogs?

Last year, during a trip to our grandparents, I spotted two black puppies hidden under the remains of a broken pool table in the yard. My niece immediately fell in love with them, and my nephew had wanted a dog ever since his original best friend, a dog, had died. So my sister and I went to the pet store for a crate, collars, dog shampoo, puppy chow, and chew toys. I took the puppies home in my car. They stayed in my backyard, so my sister’s children, who lived across the street, could visit them whenever they wanted. In a year, the pups had grown up into full-sized dogs, and the children had grown out of them. Now they were my dogs, and I had just agreed to a lease with a no-pet policy.

Things have changed, I told the realtor sitting in the chair across his desk. I had just agreed to rent this place yesterday and now I’m changing my mind. I felt rather irresponsible.

Oh, what’s the matter? He asked folding his hands on the desk. I doubt he wanted to hear that I’m backing out now.

I have dogs. They have to live with me, or my sister is going to give them away, I explained. Here’s the catcher. No place I looked at so far was willing to accept pets.

And this was such a perfect place, I sighed.

Well, the landlords said they don’t mind you having one or two small pets in the house as long as you don’t have a menagerie. I could tell he was already stretching the truth. They might allow one cat, but two dogs? We can write up a pet deposit for two small dogs. That won’t be a problem. How big are your dogs?

Fifty pounds each, I said.

Those are not small dogs.

I shook my head. I know, but I have no choice.

I’ll ask the owners and see what we can do.

Later that day, he gave me the good news. The landlords agreed to a pet deposit, and I could sign a year’s lease.

Yes! I finally had a job and residence in the state I wanted to live in. This was just the first step. I left Florida with a three-year plan and every step to get there.

First year: Set up residency in NC and work two jobs for an entire year to save up for tuition, which would be in-state tuition with one year of residency.

Second-year: Work one part-time job and go to Blue Ridge College full-time for a brewing degree.

Third-year: Finish brewing degree, get an internship, and become a brewer at one of the many local breweries in Asheville.

Happily ever after: Celebrate a life working in the craft beer industry instead of dead-end crap jobs, build myself a tiny house in the mountains, and enjoy the beautiful mountains with my pups.

How could I go wrong? I was in the Blue Ridge Mountains! This place was paradise. During my two-week camping trip last year, I drove around the entire Eastern United States and the most beautiful place was Western North Carolina. I favored Asheville for the beer scene. I was a beer consultant in a liquor store back home and I could never make enough money to afford my place. Beer City, North Carolina, was the best place to look for work. I even found a community college that offered a two-year degree in brewing. I would start my new career there and bartend my way through college before getting a real job and finally a real life.

This was my pipe dream. I finally stepped into my new little studio with the key in hand, and my first shift starts tomorrow morning. I had nothing with me but a bag of clothes and my camping gear. I threw my sleeping pad on the carpet floor and then rolled my sleeping bag out on top of it. I set my cooler down and popped a beer out of it for a celebration drink. I had made it. I had my apartment as tiny as it was. I had a job already as dismal as the pay was. I had a roof over my head and not just a tent. I even had a place to shower.

Speaking of which, I needed another bath before work tomorrow. I hadn’t had one since the river, and it had been almost a week. I turned to a curtain-less shower to test for running water. I had running water, but no heat.

Let’s add that to the list of things to set up this week, along with internet, garbage, driver’s license, shower curtain, etc. The list was growing even longer as I looked around the empty place. I also needed to get my stuff up from Florida as well as the dogs.

One step at a time, Nicole. First step: another cold bath.

I sat in my car in the parking lot fifteen minutes before my interview just to