Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (20 page)

"Christ," I exclaimed when he finally called, "see what happens
when you leave me alone?"

He almost had to employ his experimental dead-body-mulching
breakthrough to get me out of that one. But thankfully no corpses
were in need of disposal that time, as my hapless new husband was as happy to see me go as I was to touch turf on the concrete floor of the
dilapidated warehouse Lary calls home.

Amazingly Lary e-mailed me back yesterday. It turns out he's now
living on a ship somewhere off the coast of Nicaragua, which is owned
by his friend's ex-girlfriend's sister's husband and must be equipped
with some form of spacecraft satellite receptors, as now Lary keeps
sending me pictures of his finger pointing out coordinates on a map.
"This is where I am," his e-mail says, "no cars, no motorcycles, no
bicycles, just a small private island with a big crescent beach. My ass
is staying put, so don't bother looking for me. As for criteria against
which to compare yourselves, check out some of the early Japanese
sci-fi radioactive mutants."

Oh, gawd, it's happening, it's starting. Lary has sailed off into the
damn sunset and now he's gonna be one of those human barnacles
you see on islands in the Caribbean living under lean-tos made out of
bent beer cans and old umbrella handles. I knew it. We all wondered
what the hell he was doing here, anyway, in the city, when he has that
head full of wild blond straw for hair and skin as brown as a suitcase
abandoned at a bus stop.

"Get your ass back here!" I hollered at him as loud as you can
holler over e-mail.

But the answer that came was forebodingly guileless for Lary. "I
will come home," he said, "when I have a good reason."

5:)a J~~ c -tv-L ij .

MY CAT JETHRO IS MISSING AGAIN, and this time Lary cannot have
taken him because Lary is still missing, too. But that doesn't keep me
from accusing Lary of kidnapping my cat. He loves Jethro, and the
last time he threatened to kidnap him was just a few months before he
disappeared. "You think your door can keep me out?" he laughed. "I'd
have that thing unlocked before I put my car in park."

So I spent the first day Jethro was missing assuming it was all a
bad joke. "Gimme back my cat, you polluted raccoon! You're playing
with my feelings here," I cried into Lary's e-mail. Usually such flirting merits a return response within the hour, but Lary took his time
because he was at that moment soaking in a Jacuzzi of high-grade
tequila on a tiny island off the coast of Central America.

"I don't have your cat," he e-mailed me the next day. "But you
better find him because I love that cat."

Nobody argues that Jethro is a magical cat, and the fact that Lary
agrees is testimony because Lary warms to animals like a blowtorch to
a toilet brush. His last cat, Cocksucker, who was foisted on him by a
sympathetic friend who felt Lary could use a bit of warm-bloodedness
in his life, didn't even qualify for the occasional head pat. No wonder
the poor thing died mysteriously one morning after eating his fourth
can of Fancy Feast. Of course I blamed Lary.

"Listen," Lary insisted, "Cocksucker died because he was a cocksucker. He probably keeled over because his crustiness finally froze up
his heart."

Not that Lary isn't fully capable of slaughtering the innocent, but
in the case of Cocksucker, Lary might have a point. I could see how
that cat could have died out of sheer orneriness. Cocksucker really
was evil, for one, and older than magma, and Lord that cat was ugly,
too. He had eyes the color of frozen gunmetal, tobacco-colored teeth,
and a hide so wiry you could use him to wash your pots. His sole
activity seemed to be to sit by his bowl glaring and growling, and not
the normal injured-moose kind of growl you'd expect from a feline
but the kind of growl that grizzly bears make. You really started to
wonder, after a while, if he wasn't a cat at all but one of Attila's more
bloodthirsty Huns living out an eternal curse of some kind. In all, the
cat was about as approachable as a coiled cobra and it's a wonder he
lasted as long as he did.

Now that Cocksucker's gone, though, Lary keeps bugging me to
give him Jethro, my magical big, fat yellow cat, my big ball of love,
my king-size pillow covered in soft fur the color of sunlight. When
I hug him, he purrs in my ear and I'd never let him go if I could
help it. Maybe it's his gentle nature or lumbering physique or serene
green eyes, but there is something about Jethro that is incandescently
loveable. I adopted him after one glimpse at a cell phone photo, and
he was barely through my door before Keiger, who is normally as
demonstrative as a redwood, exclaimed, "Now that's a good cat." Even
Lary-Lary, who is about as loveable as a sewer rat-loves him. So
when I came home to find Jethro disappeared, I of course thought
Lary took him. But even I had to conclude after a while that it would be pretty impossible for Lary to kidnap my cat from a sailboat off the
coast of Central America.

So once that finally sank in, I flew outside and began knocking
on doors. The entire time I've lived here I've only met my neighbors on either side, but it turns out that Jethro has
been busier than me and had spent a lot of time
canvassing the neighborhood acting as ambassador on my behalf. "That's your cat? I love
that cat. He was just here," was the popular
response from neighbors who'd called after
reading my flyer. Jethro was not an indoor
cat, which is one of the reasons I moved
into the tiny house with the big backyard.

The house is blue with aluminum
awnings, and so small it reminded me of the
trailers my dad used to sell, or try to sell. If my
dad had been as good at selling trailers as he was
at talking about selling trailers with his buddies at the bar, we might
never have had Missy, the closest thing I'd ever had to my own pet
cat as a kid. My dad found the calico howling pathetically behind the
Dumpster one night as he made his way back to the car after the bar
closed. Missy spawned a half dozen kittens about five days later, and
a month or two after that my mother took off work to bring them
to my first-grade class in a cardboard box for show-and-tell. "They're
ready for adoption," she chirped. That's how I learned the definition of "adoption," which directly translated into the ripping of six little
furry hearts from my six-year-old chest.

I howled every time I came home to discover another kitten vanished. I rolled around on the floor at my mother's feet, wailing, begging her to tell me where they'd gone so I could get them back. She
simply lit another Salem menthol, turned on the television, and tried
to ignore me. I could see her cigarette shake, though, as she brought
it to her lips.

"Where the hell is my cat?" I kept hollering into Lary's voicemail.
But the exclamation had become more of a pathetic howl than a question. But sometimes howling can twang the most unexpected heart
chords.

Who knows, maybe Lary was sick of sitting around in paradise
surrounded by beauty when there was a world of ugliness waiting for
him back here in Atlanta. Maybe he'd humped one too many local
damsels and finally infuriated the machismo populace. Maybe he'd
finally formed that revolutionary army to overtake the government
and felt his duty was done-whatever it was, all I know is that after
hearing my wretched noise one too many times, Lary flew home to
launch his own determined search for Jethro.

I didn't even know Lary was back until he called me and I cried,
"Where's my cat?" and he answered, "I have him right here." He had
found Jethro down the street in a vacant lot under a bush, barely
breathing, sick from renal failure. He must have been hidden there
for days. When Lary gathered him up and brought him back to me, the most I could hope for was a goodbye before Jethro's sweet heart
stopped beating.

Lord Jesus God, I wish Jethro had it in him to howl like I do, but
instead he tried to die without saying goodbye or being a bother at all.
Still sometimes I wake up thinking I remember I did hear howling.
I wake up and I think, Was that Jethro? Sometimes I'll call Lary. "It
wasn't Jethro," he'll say, "it was just you again."

NOW THAT LARY IS FINALLY HOME FROM Nicaragua, he keeps saying the strangest things, such as, "It feels good to be human again,"
as though that's what he was before he went to Nicaragua. Though,
oddly, Cheryl says he acted human the whole time.

"I swear," she said. "He sat at the same table with my family and
didn't break a chair over anyone's head or anything."

That's pretty astounding, and the only explanation I can think
of is it sounds like Tequila Lary struck again. Tequila, after all, is the
most notorious of all behavior-altering alcohols. I consider myself an
expert on this subject, seeing as how I used to live in a trailer park two
miles north of the Tijuana border. It's noted, fairly, that in the past I've
proclaimed myself an expert on a lot of things for this same reason,
but I'm serious this time. It's the tequila, I'm telling you, and the fact
that I lived in such close proximity of the country where it's made,
that burdens me with this knowledge.

First, it was literally cheaper than water to buy your tequila supply in Mexico rather than to brave your fake ID at an American liquor
store in my neighborhood. So mix that with some audacious kids in
a Baja bug, and that right there is nothing but a big recipe for prom
vomit. I remember one football game my freshman year when I got so
drunk I had to leave the bleachers fifty times to stand in line at the toilet. The next morning I woke up with a bunch of strange hair caught
in my watchband. Soon my roommates recounted, to my horror, how
I'd steadied my progression through the bleachers by grabbing the tops of the heads of the other spectators on either side, as if they were
all just human knobs on a big balustrade.

Regardless, I made a ton of friends that night, because tequila
altered my behavior to the point where I was evidently a lot of fun
to be around. I remember thinking I better stay away from that stuff,
because I didn't want to give people the impression that's what I was
really like. To be constantly like that-all outgoing and able to charm
people out of being pissed at me for pulling out their hair with my
watchband-would be an effort beyond my ability to fathom.

When Cheryl drinks tequila, she practically shoots acid out her
eye sockets. Seriously, you do not want to be within swinging distance
of that girl after one too many shots. One night in college, after a
pitcher of margaritas, she hit me over the head with a potted palm
tree. "Did I do that to you?" she whimpered as she held my hand
while the doctor bandaged my head the next day.

"Hell yes, bitch! Lay off the tequila," I hollered. But no one could
convince her to quit until she bought her own bar and simply tired of
the stuff after watching her patrons transform into drunk, ass-itching
spider monkeys night after night. When Lary was there, amazingly, he
hardly tore the place apart at all. He simply sat on the end stool and
quietly played buffer to all the other crazies in the place. My sister,
who has known Lary for more than a decade, couldn't believe it. "Is
he all right?" she asked me.