Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (16 page)

My guy friends are all pretty useless in this regard. For example,
Keiger came over the other day to say hi, and while he was here, I
asked him to help me position something. Okay, it was a rusty burglar bar, and okay, it was pretty heavy, but you would have thought
I'd asked him to build me a bomb shelter. He spent the entire rest of
the visit brushing off his Bermuda shorts like an obsessive-compulsive
coming off medication.

I can't deal with that. I'd rather just rent men. I hear it's a fairly
easy process. You just go to the hardware-store parking lot where they hang out in the early morning, hoping to be chosen. The only problem is I thought I should have a guy with me to do the brokering, and
I thought Grant should be the guy because I've already way overtaxed
my relationship with Lary. The last time I went to Lary's, just to borrow his jigsaw and get a ten-hour tutorial on how to cut countertops,
he took his shotgun out and started to reassemble it. This is his secret
signal to let me know he needs me to get the fuck out of his house.
But I had to go alone to rent the men because after Grant's bartending
gig at The Local, a detonating grenade wouldn't wake him up.

Alone at the Men-Rental Depot, my selection process entailed
picking the man with the kindest face and then asking him to choose
his own workmate. I then took them to the duplex, told them what to
do, and they set about doing it.

When I came back in four hours, it was done. It was that simple.
I didn't have to beg, wheedle, bawl, promise marathon blowjobs, or
anything. All I did was pay them and when the work was done, they
went away. The best part is I didn't have to hear about how five years
ago they once loosened a lug nut for me and how that right there is
reason enough to forever harangue me for being a burdensome, ovarybearing albatross in their lives. This "pay/go away" process is much
better. It's like I discovered a whole new world.

"Lesbian," Grant taunts me.

"Whatever," I say. "Call me Rosie."

EDDIE RETURNED TO OHIO SOME TIME AGO. I suppose it had to happen sooner or later. But too bad he couldn't stick around for when it
came time to rent my newly spackled slum, because I was surprised at
how much I hated that process; having to break up my day to drive
there and endure the presence of people who don't have the heart to
tell you no, so they tell you anything else instead. "It's great." "I love
it." "I'll take it." Translation: "I just wanna get to my car, and you're
standing in my way."

I have absolutely no endurance for that, and I can't enlist my regular friends because they are impervious to my plight. For one, Grant
is always absent whenever actual elbow grease is in order; he simply
lifts like a fog. Lary and Daniel are more receptive to being plied for
plebe duty, but, like Grant, they are two of my old friends, which
means I've tapped that vein so many times it won't even rise anymore.
I thought about extorting help from Keiger, but he's immune to my
wiles these days. Last time he took me on a date he ditched me at a
movie theater, and not even on purpose. He just got up to use the
restroom or something and I slipped his mind.

So after one week I was ready to pussy out and stop posting it all
together, figuring it would just fill up on its own, word of mouth or
whatever, but then I saw a big crowd at Grant's door because he'd put
his modern life on sale on eBay again. Every so often Grant puts all his
modern furniture up for auction-flawless Saarinen tables, Herman
Miller chairs, atomic-age pottery, and what all, fabulous stuff-but nothing people can't find within an hour of their own home if they
looked hard enough. But still Grant had people like this couple yesterday, who flew in from Indiana to pick up some bookshelves they
could have bought blocks from their own home, probably. But they
were there less for the shelves than for the gravitational pull of Grant's
sonic energy. His ad on eBay alone is a masterpiece of humor and
mirth, promising all kinds of cosmic vibe to go along with his collection. It's all perfectly in keeping with Grant's philosophy: Energy
attracts energy.

So I figured what worked for him would work for me. "Great
house plus naked girls!" my rental postings blared. "Comes with free
margaritas!" "Keg parties okay!" "(That part about naked girls is subject to change at any time.)" Because I'm tired of placing sanitary
descriptions of my place only to get e-mails from "Tiffany," who is
transferring here from Kansas City, and would like to know if I can
pick her and her mother up at the airport to take her on a personal
tour. And I'm tired of making appointments to show the place to
prospective renters only to stand on the stoop and watch them turn
back when they see the pile of tires on the corner. They're just tires,
people! And not only that, but they've been painted pink and made
into planters; for chrissakes, have you no appreciation for art?

So I'm honest with people. It's best for everyone. That way I don't
have to waste half my day conducting needless junkets to my in-town
rental house only to meet dazed, displaced suburbanites who embarrass us both by, as in the case of one single dad, pretending to like the
place only to insist that it's his kid who has all the reservations. "I love it and I'd move here in a minute," the guy said, "but little Apple here
thinks it's too far from the wine bar."

So no "sunny, charming in-town bungalow" platitudes in my
postings anymore, because evidently that translates into way too many
possibilities for people. That kind of talk is a complete blank slate, evidently, as people actually show up expecting to see a vacation cottage
complete with serene meadow when it says right there, right next to
their damn eyeballs, that the house is six minutes from downtown.
Down-goddamn-town, so don't flip like a flapjack the second you
hear a helicopter overhead. It's probably not a SWAT team; it's probably just surveillance, which is, you know, a good thing. Probably.

They could probably use more helicopters in suburban Ridge
Springs or Spring Ridge or wherever the goddamn hell it is that apronwearing housewives are cooking up their crystal meth these days. At
least in the city you know what you're getting. I remember I lived
in the suburbs for nine regrettable months once, where I fit in like
a hobo at Sunday brunch. My neighbors practically converged with
torches to run me out of there.

It's not like I didn't try to fit in, either. I even play tennis, for
chrissakes. In fact, I'm freakishly good at tennis, as I was born with
a natural talent for thwacking the crap out of balls. So I joined my
subdivision's tennis team. They had to let me in because they had no
choice, as it's unlawful to discriminate. There was no set roster, just an
informal network of games based on invitations from other subdivisions. After a few games where I showed up in cutoffs and beheaded
a few opponents with line drives at the net, I stopped getting invited to play. "What's the matter with you pussies?" I complained to my
"teammates" at the poolside mixers. They all just gingerly plated their
finger foods and turned away. See, that's how they get around the
appearance of discrimination: They let you join, they just don't let
you play.

So I figured it simply did not make business sense to post ads
with pasteurized wording that attracted any more slumming suburbanites to the property just to have them sniff disapprovingly at the
weathered exterior and the pile of rusty discarded appliances down
the street. Lord, I thought. That's nothing. C'mon, people. "This is not
a suburban cul-de-sac," I posted. "Ineffectual yuppy suck-ups please
don't respond." "NO POD PEOPLE!"

But I think I overdid it, because Lord did that last part piss off
some people. Who would have thought it was possible to offend pod
people? I mean, I thought that was the main benefit of being a big
vapid bucket of nothingness, because what better way to avoid hurt
feelings than by having no feelings at all? And besides, when I blared
"NO POD PEOPLE" in the heading of my Craigslist posting, I wasn't
announcing my desire to exclude a particular group from responding
to my ad for a house for rent; I was actually touting the neighborhood
the house was in. It's a "cool, integrated neighborhood," I yodeled,
"with lots of young artist types. The opposite of yuppie jog-stroller hell
misery. The opposite of a pasteurized latte-sucking flavorless black-hole
neighborhood populated by pod people."

See? No pod people, as in yippee, there's no pod people. Not no
pod people, as in pod people need not apply. But then some asstard e-mailed me promising to flag my ad as discriminatory, thereby making me answerable to the fair-housing law, and if I don't clean up, I'll
be liable for blahbity blahbity fucking blah.

Well, pod people, come and get me then. I'd be happy to let one
of those cow-eyed pod suburbotrons rent my house if they wanted to.
Seriously, have at it. Who's to say whether the total absence of pod
people might be a quality that actually appeals to the odd pod person?
At least they'll stand out from the crowd, and if their neighbors don't
like them, they'll look them right in the eye and say so. There's something to be said about that. They won't ask them to join a damn club
and then turn their back on them. They won't include you to exclude
you. It might do the odd pod person good to break free of the frozen
pond and come on over to where neighbors open their front doors
and let their roiling underbellies right on out into the daylight. They
can teach us how to appear not to discriminate, and we'll teach them
how to make a pink planter out of an abandoned tire. There you have
it: perfect harmony-for nine months, tops, before the villagers start
to gather their torches.

LARY IS AT A LOSS AS TO WHY I'D TURN DOWN his offer to burn down
my house. He thinks it would be the answer to all my problems. "And
this is the perfect season for arson, too," he insists. "Homeless people
all over the place are lighting fires to keep warm; no one would even
question it. You can blame it on a crackhead. A homeless crackhead.
They're great scapegoats. How could you pass this up?"

"You worthless sack of maggots," I fume. "I cannot burn down
my house and blame it on a crackhead."

First, I finally found a decent tenant to live in the house Lary
wants to torch. Second, thanks to Eddie, it's not even the house
itself that is giving me problems, but the water pipe in front of
the house, somewhere under the sidewalk, that is busted. My
water bill last month was almost as much as my mortgage. I called
the city water department to report the leak, but the woman on
the other end said the leak was on my property, which I doubted
because, unless I own the sidewalk, I don't see how it could be on
my property.

So I called back first thing the next morning and got another
water-department lady who told me it said right there on her computer screen that I was told there was a leak on my property. I took
issue with that, too, because of all the people telling anyone anything,
I was the only one who actually laid personal eyes on the leak, with
my property way over there, and the leak way over here, and again,
unless I own the sidewalk it was not on my property.