Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (14 page)

"There's nothing wrong with this place," I said apprehensively
to Ramiro, my long-suffering real-estate agent, "so what's wrong with
this place?"

"If you don't buy it," he sighed as he peered at the slice of skyline
view through the living-room wraparound windows, "I will."

"Let's check out the basement," I ventured cautiously. So Ramiro
opened the hatch and there it was! Right there on the dirt floor was
a stolen ATM machine! How awesome is that? The house was passable in every aspect except it happened to be a crime scene involving
a nearby bank robbery! This beats a severed head in a plastic sack
by miles! Soon the place was surrounded by police cars and Ramiro
was busy recounting his statement to a gaggle of officers with their
pens poised. "I'm sorry, Hollis," he hollered to me amid the frenzy. "I
apologize for getting you into this."

I answered him but he didn't hear me over the helicopter blades
rotating overhead.

"I said," I shouted, barely able to contain my excitement, "that
I'll take it!"

I'VE DECIDED TO MURDER A MAN NAMED TRAVIS. I hope he doesn't
take it personally. I don't even know him. It's his friends I hate. They
call me at all hours, with their unlisted phone numbers, asking if he's
around. At first I was polite. "Sorry, wrong number," I'd chirp. But
then after the fiftieth call, I decided Travis had to die.

"You haven't heard?" I gasped. "Travis, poor thing, was anally
raped by his prison inmates with a cafeteria table leg. He died the
next day."

Travis doesn't always die the same way, and sometimes he doesn't
die at all, but horrible things happen to him, over and over again. "I'm
sorry to be the first to tell you, but Travis died horribly in a grease
fire." Sometimes Travis is not all the way dead yet. "You should go
visit him in the hospital," I might advise. "Maybe he'll recognize you.
The doctor said the late-stage syphilis has only eaten half his brain."

His friends might show some polite concern, until the lurid details
emerge; then they hang up. I've decided Travis must be a crystal-meth
dealer, because why else would his pussy friends all have unlisted
numbers, and why else would they call him at all hours? "They say if
he lives," I console, "he'll have to wear a diaper and carry a doughnut
cushion for the rest of his life."

I've had this cell number for like a hundred years, so it's not that I
innocently inherited the old number of this Travis guy. No, this Travis
guy plucked my number out of the air and is giving it to people he hopes
to avoid, obviously, which is another reason he merits a painful death. "He was killed by an infected, ulcerated hemorrhoid," I might elaborate.
"It's not as uncommon as you might think. They've created a memorial
fund. For more information, go to www.travistheasstard.com."

I started to feel bad when one girl burst into tears upon hearing
the news. Of course, she could have been crying because her drug
supply just dried up, but at that point I realized that prick Travis was
blowing people off who actually gave a crap about him. "Don't feel
bad," I consoled her. "The police found a huge cache of kiddie porn
in his lean-to, so he deserved to die."

I got busted when one guy called back and got a second rendition
of Travis' death. "A man can't die twice," he hollered. Immediately I
employed one of my best methods of defense, which was to impersonate my eighty-five-year-old neighbor, Dot, who has Alzheimer's. This
impersonation entails a lot of screaming. "I said I want my milk with
my meal!" I bellowed again and again. It's a very effective ploy, and
works against telemarketers, too.

The only problem is that the ruckus sometimes summons Dot
to my door. She is a good neighbor, and when she hears screaming,
dammit, she's gonna investigate. I wish I could say the same for when
I hear screaming from her place, but the truth is I hear it so often it's
just part of the background noise now. I like Dot, though. On her
good days we joke about how we're gonna go get us some men. "I see
some across the street right now," she'll cackle, pointing at the shirtless
contractors working on a house that, until now, had been one of the
few on our street that had accompanied ours among the unrenovated.
"You go get'em," she urges. "I'm too tired."

This wasn't one of Dot's good days, though. "My husband's
dead," she sobbed, her eyes wild and searching. I nodded sympathetically. Dot's husband died more than twenty years ago. "I don't understand. I buried him twenty-five years ago, but I woke up this morning
and he was dead all over again."

I invited her to come inside, sit on my new patio, and have a cup
of tea, but she declined. "I have so many things to do," she worried.
"That man was the love of my life. How could he leave me like that?
He did it to himself, you know. He used to call me from his office
every day, but that day he didn't call me, and I knew something was
wrong. That's where they found him, in his office. He did it to himself. What will people say? I don't want people talking."

"Screw what people say, Dot," I said, walking her back to her
porch. "That should be the last thing on your list of concerns."

"He was the love of my life," she sighed, "and I thought I was
his. So many things to do, and I already did it all once. I woke up this
morning and he was dead all over again," she repeated, her eyes pleading. "I didn't know a man could die twice."

Sometimes I wonder if crazy people are crazy because they're mercilessly attuned to everything, even thoughtless phone conversations a
whole house away. In any case, that morning I got a glimpse of the inner
prison where Dot must live. Her husband's death was the most painful
thing she ever endured. She took a decade to get over it, only to succumb
to Alzheimer's and forget she got over it. I stayed there a good while that
morning, holding an old woman's hand, helping her live through the
fresh agony of losing her husband, the man who had died twice.

MY BROTHER-IN-LAW EDDIE COULDN'T POSSIBLY be mistaken for a gay
man, ever, not even if there was a dick in his mouth at the time. For
example, he's been here in Atlanta for five days now, suffering a hellacious cold, and he refuses to let me bother to buy him tissues, preferring instead to scrape his face with paper towels. "I don't need that
tissue shit," he explains. "My nose is made of rhino hide."

So you'll understand why I laughed like a stoner when he expressed
his concerns about being mistaken for a flamer when we borrowed
Grant's truck yesterday. Grant's truck, "Fish Stick," is a rusty orange
road hazard with a marionette trophy for a hood ornament, batons in
the gun rack, and a license plate that reads GAY 269. Even so, when
Eddie expressed his concern, I had to stop and catch my breath, bent
over at the waist and everything, because I haven't had such a yuck
in months. "Eddie," I finally wheezed, "the only way someone could
confuse you with a gay man is if they'd been blind since birth."

Eddie was born in South Africa to Swiss parents and had a childhood of the kind that affords him such fond memories as the time his
mother got pissed on by a puma. He looks (and dresses) like Crocodile
Dundee, talks with the accent of a British expatriate, and speaks several obscure languages of both "bush" and European varieties. He has
camped in the Serengeti, communed with elephant herds, and killed
cobras. Even today, here in Atlanta, he never carries fewer than three
knives at a time, one hardly smaller than a machete, and damn if they
don't reliably prove to be useful somehow or another. "Let me get that for you," he recently told a hardware store associate who had trouble
releasing the spout on a five-gallon bucket of anti-mildew treatment.
Out came Eddie's "small" knife, and in seconds he had that thing
deftly hacked open like a hyena carcass. Now that's a handy talent.

I wasn't always so appreciative.

Years ago Eddie met Kim in Zurich and claimed her with a fierce,
cavemanlike determination. At the time, my mother hated him and I
did my best to do the same, though unlike my mother I was fortunate
enough to outlive my own orneriness.

In Zurich, Eddie fit in like a gorilla at a wedding reception; a
walking wad of Y chromosomes in dingo boots and tooled leather
among a society of indifferent pussies living rich off a national commitment to staying uninvolved in anything but currency. When I met
him, all I saw was a big drunk scarred from too many bar fights and
bush wranglings. When Kim met Eddie, though, she saw something
much different. In fact, maybe when he claimed her like an alpha
male in a pride of lions, it was not out of determination but desperation, as lifelines are funny things, often coming unexpectedly to those
whose lives they are saving. Eddie married Kim five years later and,
having been redeemed himself, now makes a living redeeming others
by counseling the drug-afflicted in Dayton.

But here he is in Atlanta, scraping and hammering and basically
building a home where there hardly was one before. All of this because
it turns out I am the reluctant owner of a slum that has been sucking the life out of my eye sockets lately. The tenants moved out with
no notice after somehow transforming my formerly passable rental property into a roach-infested shotgun shack with moldy walls, rotted
flooring, and carpet that looked like it was recovered from the dump
after someone used it to wrap roadkill scraped up from the freeway.
Looking at the house made me want to simply fall over backward and
bawl, as all I saw was something beaten and scarred beyond redemption. It all seemed so insurmountable, and my mounting debt made
me feel like I'd just been crapped through the ass of life. If I were a
house, I thought when I saw it, this would be me.

But Eddie saw something different. Of course, all my local friends
are far too fed up with me, or just too generally useless, to help me
renovate a whole house (Keiger, for one, showed up in a tangerinecolored cashmere sweater, gingerly sipping a cup of artisan coffee). So
I could be trapped into thinking it's fairly pathetic I had to import a
family member from Dayton to help me out, but I know I'm actually lucky. From the start Eddie was unfazed. "Piece of cake," he said,
looking around at the roach droppings and rot, scraping his nose with
a paper towel. "This is nothing," he smiled, prying open a pail of plaster with his knife. And with that, Eddie, no longer beaten and scarred,
set about redeeming the unredeemable.