Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (24 page)

IT'S A GIVEN THAT GRANT IS BAD AT ABDUCTING PEOPLE. But I had
hope for Lary. You'd think Lary would be the perfect predator, but
no. In fact they have both been threatening to kidnap me for weeks
now, but when it comes to a decent intervention, I have to say they're
both about as useful as a big bag of brain tumors. It doesn't help,
either, that they each love alcohol, because everyone knows you can't
capture anything worth crap when you've been drinking.

"You asstards," I griped into Grant's voicemail. "I've been following my normal routine-I'm standing out in the open right nowand nothing! What the hell kind of incompetent, booger-eating kidnappers are you?"

"Bitch," Grant snipped when he called me back, "don't push me.
This is an emergency. Something needs to be done."

So we all met for breakfast later that morning. "Just what the hell
am I doing that's so bad, anyway?" I asked, because-and maybe this
says something-I didn't think to ask until then.

"What do you mean, what the hell are you doing?" Lary asked,
incredulous. "Hollis, it's like I don't even know you. When was the
last time you got drunk? When was the last time you flashed your tits
at a tiki bar and went home with the waiter? God, it's like you've been
replaced by a pod from Planet Pussy! Who are you?"

"It's true," Grant added gravely. "You're upholding your responsibilities and conducting yourself in a civilized manner. A lot of people
are really worried about you."

"Jesus God!" I huffed. "Have you guys ever met me? I stopped
drinking two years ago. Two years! And you just now noticed?"

Here these two reptiles claim to be my best friends, yet they had
all this time to intervene-all these chances-and didn't take a single
one. Instead they just allowed me to slip into sobriety. What's worse
is that I didn't even know my last drink was my last. I just remember
thinking I'd cut back on alcohol a bit, then that whittled down to
nothing, and now two years later I'm still thinking I'll get back around
to it one of these days, but stuff keeps coming up.

Because drinking, if you're gonna do it right, takes a lot of time
and commitment. I know because I used to be really good at it. Much
better than Grant, for example, who still conducts a neighborhood
tour of all the vomit markings he made the night he famously chased
his three-day lemon-juice "cleanse" with two pitchers of Bazooka martinis. But that was then. Now, like I said, things keep coming up, and
all of a sudden I like looking around me without booze blurring the
view.

Take the time, in this very diner, when my girl burst into an
impromptu display of interpretive dancing right along the linoleum.
It was sudden and fleeting and unplanned-and even kind of awkward, because people were eating and stuff, but thankfully no one
interrupted her, and she twirled and shimmied and waved her arms
with absolute certainty of her abilities. I remember thinking this was
the beginning of a slew of future episodes exactly like this. Really, I
thought there would be tons more chances to catch her as a threeyear-old performing with such gusto and seriousness, but years have passed and it turns out that was my only chance. That was it. Pffftt.
Gone.

Thank God I caught it. What if I'd been drinking and that
moment simply fell into the puddle of other booze-muddled memories living in the periphery of my brain? But it isn't. I captured it. I
have it now to take out and admire like a tiny trophy. And even though
that moment has come and gone, there's a constant litany of others
that prattle by so rapidly they're like pebbles in the palm of a Kung Fu
master, and I'm the apprentice charged with plucking them up before
they're whisked away. I feel like I have to be alert to keep them from
escaping. That's why I don't drink, because everyone knows you can't
capture anything worth crap when you've been drinking.

Grant eyed me keenly. "We need to take action," he said, and
Lary nodded.

"You bunch of bottom-fish," I told them, "you're too late."

WHEN I HEARD THAT DANIEL GOT A JOB CAT-SITTING, I thought, Jesus
God, don't these people check references? We're talking about a guy
who killed his last pets in cold blood. Granted, they were goldfish, but
still. He had named them Ruby and Pearl.

"Did you tell them you ruthlessly murdered your own pets?" I asked.

"That was an accident," Daniel insisted.

"How do you `accidentally' grind up your goldfish in the garbage
disposal?" I asked.

And don't even get me started about Mitch's obese cat, Jenny.
When Daniel and Mitch first made plans to move in together, Daniel
kept suggesting that Jenny could live just fine fifteen miles away in a
monthly storage compartment in Doraville. "Just leave an open bag of
food on the floor and she'll be okay," he said.

But since then Daniel has turned all cat-crazy, and now he's madly in
love with Jenny. He even sends out mass e-mails at regular intervals called
"Jenny's Quote of the Week," accompanied by jpegs of Jenny lounging in
the sea of her own feline blubber, like a furry Buddha dispensing pearls
of wisdom. "If only man can but love one another, the world will be at
peace," Jenny will say, or something of similar depth and insight. Grant
cannot wait to get Jenny's quotes; he'll walk around all morning afterward, talking in Jenny-speak. "If only man can but wipe his ass, the world
will be less shitty," or something of similar depth and insight.

"Leave Jenny alone, you crusty old claw hammer," I'll say to him.
"Man needs to but love each other, for fuck's sake!" I'll laugh. Because you have to laugh. In the ocean of crap that comes at you every day
through e-mail and other avenues, the occasional little pedantic acumen coming from a cat can't be that bad. We're all stuck here in the
same flaming ball of bitterness the world has become; we're all inundated to the point of paralysis by a daily tsunami of over-information.
Any little missive that isn't hate-filled or downright heartbreaking is a
gem, I figure, and it should be treasured.

"If Hollis can but get laid," Grant will pontificate grandly, "the
world would be at peace."

The other day at The Local, where Grant bartends, a customer
complained to Grant about jenny's Quotes. Evidently he'd somehow
gotten on Daniel's mailing list and was now the unwilling recipient of
Jenny's wisdom. The conversation matriculated and pretty soon most
of the bar was talking in jenny-speak.

"If only man can but get a goddamn beer, the world wouldn't
have to die of thirst right here in front of the bartender."

"If only man can but shut the fuck up, the bartender wouldn't
have to throw the world out on its ass."

Pretty soon everybody was celebrating another day of relative
comfort, eased into the mind-set by a rotund cat and her quote of the
week. The whole thing reminded me of a bike race I rode once when
I was in my early twenties. The course was seventy-five miles over
Mexican terrain from Tecate to Endenada, with a nine-mile mountain
smack in the middle. Everybody warned me about the incline, and I
have to admit I was in over my head. The trick, I was told, was not to
get off your bike. "Whatever you do," all my sage bike-rider friends told me, "don't get off and walk. You lose all your momentum. Stay
on your bike no matter how slow you have to pedal."

It's ironic that, by race day, all these same bike-rider friends flaked
for various reasons and I ended up doing the race alone, and when I
hit that incline, believe me, it was every molecule as miserable as they
told me it would be. I was about to get off my bike to walk, because
tons of others were doing it and I sincerely believed my tongue was
about to get caught in my spokes, when I heard another rider behind
me say, "No, you don't."

"Huh?" I grunted, hot and wretched.

"Stay on or you'll never make it," he said. "So where are you
from? I'm from El Centro ... right around the corner here there'll be
a support station, you can stop there ... I graduated from San Diego
State, and you? ... Oops, it must be the next corner, oh well, keep
pedaling ... So tell me about yourself, been riding long? ... My mistake, it must be the next corner. I swear you can stop there ... "

And on he went, this irritating voice that seemed as endless as the
hill I was climbing until, before I knew it, I was at the top and the struggle was over. And that's how I feel about Jenny's Quotes. Times are tough,
were on a hill, and we keep turning corners only to see there's more of a
hill. But one day-I swear-one day we'll turn a corner to see the hill has
crested. That's why Jenny's Quotes are important. They're not an irksome
interruption. They're not! They're little rubies and pearls, distracting us
from our own misery so we can make it to the next corner. If only these
people could grasp that. If only they could give Jenny a little appreciation. If only man can but stay on the bike, the world will be at peace.

AT FIRST I THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD THING Daniel finally got a professional haircut, because otherwise I didn't see who'd hire his skinny
ass, what with his hair looking like it's been attacked by bats. But he's
been applying at a lot of coffeehouses lately, where the employers seem
to command a shocking appearance from their workers. Christian, a
barista at a coffeehouse down the street from me, has his black hair
chopped in cantilevered layers with patches dyed alternately cloud
white or cobalt blue or both, depending on his mood, and I must say
I like looking at him.

"Muss it up a little," I tell Daniel, but he swats my hand away
from his head. We are on the patio of the new Caribou in the just-built
Target shopping center that all the in-town people were cursing until
it came time to buy a shower curtain; now nobody can live without
the place. Daniel's medication is working and his condition is stabilized to the point where he seems healthier than any of us these days,
and now he's insistent he work at a corporate coffeehouse because he
wants to be buried in "holdings," whatever those are.

"Benefits, bitch," he explains. "Health, dental, stock options.
At Starbucks, they give you a benefits package just for working part
time," he slams the tabletop for emphasis. "Part time."

Daniel has never worked a corporate job his whole life, unless
you count that short-lived gig at The Gap eight million years ago,
which coincides with the period during which they folded all their
inventory into anal triangles. Now I know why. Daniel is about as fastidious as they come, barring his hair. Keiger regularly insists that
of the two of us, Daniel is the only one he'd consider actually hiring,
which I really resent, but still I asked Keiger to make good on that.
Unfortunately I'm still heavily in debt to him for rehiring Grant after
Grant made his grand, heralded, ticker-tape exit that year and then all
of a sudden needed his job back. So Daniel's on his own except for my
help, which is dubious.

"Don't work at Starbucks," I whine. "My brother worked there
and they sucked the life out of him." It's true. My brother was placed
as a manager of a Starbucks in Compton, California, which was the
equivalent to hiring a Quaker to helm a strip club. My brother did it
for the benefits package, too, left his job parking cars in the paradise
of Lake Tahoe so he could clock in at five a.m. and be accused of
discrimination for insisting his subordinates clock in on time as well.
After years of being overlooked for obvious promotions, but hanging
on anyway, for the benefits, he was finally fired due to some offense
manufactured by those former underlings.