Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (21 page)

"Are you feeding him tequila?" I asked. "Because you gotta stop
doing that. Tequila Lary creeps us out. He's all polite and asks how
you are and acts interested in the answer."

But she didn't stop. She kept him plied and then got him to help
her cocktail waitresses move her furniture and fix the saloon doors
that lead to the leaky toilet. "I love Tequila Lary," she proclaimed.

"No, what you want is Jager Lary," I insisted. "Jager Lary would
have stolen you some new furniture, impregnated your waitresses, and
installed a camera in your toilet. That's the Lary I know and love," I
said. But she was too busy admiring his work to fear the complete
breakdown in civil order that I predicted would occur if Lary continued to be polite and considerate.

Which he will do-because he brought boxes of tequila back
fresh from the duty-free counter at the airport. "Did you know they
make a tequila liqueur now? [sip, sip] It's my new medicine. [sip, sip]
I missed you, by the way. How was your holiday?" he asked. The scary
part is that he actually sounded interested.

De_a_~ cJLrrr~

I'VE BEEN WEIGHING THE COST OF HOMICIDE lately, wondering if it
might be worth it in the long run. Of course I dream all the time
about killing my overexcited sister Cheryl-who has appeared from
Nicaragua to squat in my life again. But the dreams aren't that satisfying. For one, there's all that remorse. "Dang, why did I do that?" I
remember thinking in my dream, my dead sister at my feet. "I stained
my favorite shirt, and now I have to dispose of the body."

Lary has often offered me his cleanup
services in this regard. After a lifetime
of pensive research, foolproof
body disposal is supposedly
something he's finally figured
out, and he's eager to put his
theory to work. For example,
he likes to remind me that he's
the one to call if I ever wake up with
a dead hooker in my hotel room.

"Why the hell would there be a dead hooker in my hotel room?"
I ask.

"You never know," he says, his teeth gleaming.

At first I thought the probability was pretty slim, but then I realized you don't have to actually hire a hooker to have her end up dead in
your hotel room. Who knows, she could have knocked on your door
after huffing too much glue and died right there by the luggage stand with you as the hapless bystander. It's possible. I've known plenty of
hookers in my day, and not all of them limited to the crack whores
who used to populate my neighborhood. Some of them worked at the
same steakhouse with my sister back in San Diego, and that restaurant
was located in the lobby of an actual hotel, which made it pretty convenient. None of them ended up dead, though, that I know of.

I worked there myself one summer. Cheryl and I said we were
twenty and twenty-two, respectively, when really I was seventeen and
she was nineteen. Until then I'd made money sewing the uniforms
for the girls, which was a cake job if there ever was one, because the
skirt portion took so little material I could make them out of cut-up
pillowcases if I wanted. It was the aprons that were difficult. They had
to be exactly ten inches in length with a dozen pockets and a Velcro
waistband, all tailored with pleats, yet lie flat enough so as not to tilt
them as they teetered on their come-fuck-me pumps and wagged their
asses in the faces of the patronage, 90 percent of which were airline
pilots and rich criminals.

It was the dinner shift that was notorious for its line of call girls
working the tables, so it's not surprising that many of the dinner girls got
caught "working the box," as Cheryl put it. There'd been an actual raid a
few years prior, and many were prosecuted to little avail, so by the time
I'd started there the girls had figured out how to get creative with their
payment demands. One waitress worked the box for rent checks and
others for car payments, and all of them had eyes as dead as nail heads.

My sister worked the lunch shift rather than the box, but she
still made so much money it should have been outlawed for a girl her age, what with her penchant for unemployed boyfriends, to have so
much cash on hand. I worked the breakfast shift, a time of day usually shunned by the playboys known to frequent the place, so most of
my customers were clueless hotel guests who'd wandered in expecting
regular coffee-shop fare. The restaurant was void of even a single ray
of natural light, so I spent most of my shifts trying to read the newspaper with the pin lamp the bartender kept by the cash register.

The place had gold-and-red brocade wallpaper, booths upholstered in red vinyl, and menus that were made-I swear this is trueof actual red meat. Every morning the cook covered serving platters
with decorative lettuce and laid slabs of raw steak on top, and it was
our job to carry these to the tables and point to each piece like a prize
on a game show. "And here you have your aged, Angus-farmed filet
mignon . . ." When I left at noon, blinded by sunlight but relieved
to be free, I'd run to my car with my arms outstretched. After a few
months I tried to get fired by revealing my real age to the owner, a
Sasquatch of a man in a red satin shirt unbuttoned to his nipples. I
thought for sure he'd fire me, as I was too young to serve alcohol, and
even in the morning there were a lot of boozers in there. But he just
shrugged and told me to be sure to pick out all the red cabbage from
his salad before serving it to him.

So before long I started picking up a lunch shift here and there,
started making real money, started getting used to it, started thinking
maybe I didn't need to go to college after all. Then one day a customer
asked me if I wanted my rent paid, and my sister intervened. "Watch
it, that's my little sister," she told the guy. After that she implored me to leave the job and never come back. She must have known that if I
kept this up, I'd be in trouble. If I kept this up-with the darkness,
smoke, and gold brocade-in no time at all I'd have eyes as dead as
nail heads.

CHERYL FLEW HOME TO VISIT Kim, even though she doesn't consider
anywhere in America home anymore. And from there she called me,
of course, when she needed help shipping her new moose head back
to Central America. "I tell you, in the long run it's cheaper to just pay
the imported prices and just buy the stuff down there," I told her,
"because no matter how cheap it is here, the shipping costs are going
to kill you."

"But they don't have moose in Nicaragua," Cheryl whined.

"They don't have moose in Dayton goddamn Ohio, either," I
reminded her, as Dayton is where Kim lives and where Cheryl is staying. "Why the hell do you want a moose head?"

"Because it's a mechanical talking moose head," she hollered.
"It'll be great! C'mon, Hollis. It only weighs sixty pounds."

"Jesus, Cher, just move home, for God's sake," I said. "It costs a
hell of a lot less to ship moose heads domestically."

"I told you they don't have moose heads in Nicaragua," she said.
And it took me a second before I realized that, by hearing me tell her
to move home, Cher thought I'd told her to return to Granada, as
that's where she now considered home. I was stunned.

"I mean here home," I said.

The United States was her home-wasn't it? Cheryl didn't seem
concerned about that; she was instead describing the many attributes
of a robot moose head and how it would increase the patronage at her
bar.

It has been five years since Cheryl moved to Nicaragua, where she
lives with her new husband, Wayne. They met in a bar in Las Vegas,
where she worked as a casino cocktail waitress and he worked "in
distribution," whatever that means. When Cheryl first introduced me
to Wayne, he had a hairdo that was popular among many second-rate
stage magicians at the time-a blond mullet that cascaded down his
back and could touch the belt looped through the waist of his acidwashed denim parachute pants. By the time they married, the mullet
was gone, thankfully.

"A moose head can't be that hard to ship to Nicaragua," Cheryl
insisted, and I realized she has a history of insisting things are easy
when they're not. She drove her truck to Nicaragua, for example. Just
pointed it south and hit the gas until she arrived. It was easy, she
insists, though I know it couldn't have been.

"C'mon," she continued, "sixty pounds can't be that heavy."

"Believe me," I said, "that head is heavier than you think it is."

Even squirrel heads are heavier than you think they are. I know
this because just yesterday I stepped on a squirrel brain that my new
cat, Petal, left for me on my bedroom rug. I would have been disgusted, but my disgust was outweighed by admiration for Petal, who
had somehow extracted the brain completely intact from the squirrel's
head, which itself I'd found a few days
prior, also neatly sitting on the
'70s-era rug I keep at the base of
my bed. I love this rug. I've sold
things on eBay before, things that were featured in photographs near this rug, only to be inundated
with requests to buy the rug and not the item. Petal, a feline Hannibal
Lector we acquired to replace the gentle Jethro, must know this is my
favorite, as she constantly leaves me these little presents-a squirrel
head here, a dead bird there, a lizard torso-right where she knows
I'll find them. I can't freak out or anything, as I know they're left with
love; to a cat a squirrel brain is a delicacy.

My sister feels the same way about fish cheeks. I discovered this
one night in Nicaragua, when she made me order the local seafood.
"Eat the cheeks! Eat the cheeks!" she adamantly insisted.

"Are you talking about the gills?" I asked, because who would eat
fish gills? That's like eating nostrils. The fish came fried and sitting
upright on a colorful ceramic plate, and it was the ugliest fish I had
ever seen. I think it even had teeth and hair.

"Taste it," Cher growled when she saw me hesitate. She was almost
using her scary voice. So I poked at the fish and took a tiny taste. After
all, I guess I owed her one.

Years earlier while I was living with our mother in Switzerland,
Cheryl was shacking up with her third progressively worse boyfriend
(as far as our mother was concerned). Our mother refused to support
Cheryl financially if Cheryl was supporting someone else financially,
and Cheryl always seemed to be supporting someone else financially.
She was, after all, my mother's daughter.