Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (27 page)

But all I got was a festering little splooge of silt, which did little
to inspire my imagination. Maybe my little sister with the toy monkey
that picked her daisies and cheated at cards, maybe she would have
seen the king with his crown and triton, and the rest of the royalty ruling over a divided class of plebes and merchants. But not me. Thank
gawd my mother flushed it before it could solidify and terrorize the
town.

You'd think I'd learn my lesson after that, but I am a volcanic
sucker when it comes to advertising. Later, as a dumb teenager, I succumbed to a flyer I found at the liquor store next to the bar where
my father spent his days, and I sent away for a picture that promised,
for 50 cents, the pornographic depiction of a "nude naked" woman
having sex with a turtle. All I can say in my defense was that there
were no offers of other pornographic pictures, because if there were
other options-like for pictures of nude naked women having sex with nude naked men-then maybe I would have picked those. But
my only choice was girl-on-turtle, so I had to go with that.

I filled out the flyer, taped two quarters to it, and mailed it off.
Believe it or not, I actually received a picture in the mail. It was of a
jowly, rheumy-eyed bag lady lying on a sidewalk with a turtle on her
stomach. She wasn't naked, and the turtle was plastic. But by that time
the nude-naked people had my two quarters and what was I supposed
to do? I had to take my lumps and toss the photo.

I found it a year later tucked into the stack of jack-off mags my
brother kept stuffed under his desk. Looking back, it was quite a
vanilla variety of porn, and all the girls had those '70s super muffs
that require a machete to clear a path. I thoroughly examined each
photo, and in the end I could not imagine how this ratty pack of
grainy, angle-challenged amateur shots could excite anyone, but it was
not my imagination that mattered in this regard.

You see, in my own room, I had my own stack of magazines
packed with pictures of toothy teen idols. I played sappy ballads and
envisioned the exchange of tender affections. I enacted courtships,
betrayals, and passionate reconciliations. I fainted into imaginary
arms. Over and over, I was completely entranced by the packaging.

Normally this memory would unleash an assload of smarmy selfloathing, but I'm weary lately, weighted with the realization that you
do what you can with the ingredients you get. You add water. You
hope something will grow. You wait and anticipate and pine. In the
end, you either get magic or you get another puddle of sewer sludge.

It all depends on your imagination.

I REALLY DIDN'T FEEL LIKE GETTING NAKED IN FRONT of Grant, especially if it was just for the sake of garnering some sympathy. "I swear,
I'm covered in bruises," I told him. "Just trust me."

"Like hell, you pussy-ass bitch," he bitched at me. He was still
mad at me for making him worry last week, when I fell twenty feet
off a ladder and landed on my face. I should have called someone to
help me, he insisted.

"Like you pussies are ever any help," I tried to laugh, but all of
a sudden I felt like crying. I didn't even cry when I had the accident,
but now I just wanted to sit down and jibber. And it was not the
pain-I can handle pain-it was that Grant was right, I should have
called someone. I should have called Keiger, but I am terrified to
need him these days, even though I know he loves me. Sure it's a
tolerate-her-like-a-hemorrhoid kinda love, but I know love when I
see it.

And that's saying something considering that, at fourteen, I read
a truckload of my mother's epic romance novels. I would seriously
recommend against that. Epic romances are really just she-porn,
in which the heroine gets gang-raped, thrown in jail, and dragged
behind a horse, all by the guy she loves, who couldn't help himself on
account of how he had been driven wild with an accidental glimpse of
the small of her back.

Somehow, though, epic romance writers make it all seem so desirable to a fourteen-year-old whose hormone-addled romance lobe is still forming. The first one I read involved an incandescently beautiful peasant girl as the object of desire for two rival monarchs whose crotches
explode every time they gaze upon her visage. These men show their
passion by torturing and degrading her for four hundred pages, but in
the end all her suffering pays off when she gets to ride off and live horribly ever after with the man who treated her the crappiest.

In short, those books fucked me up. I seriously spent decades, it
seemed like, just lying in languid silhouette of the setting sun in hopes
someone would want to long for me. That was a major waste of time.
All I ended up with was a boyfriend who broke up with me by pushing
me out of his car. Granted, it was a VW, and granted, it was parked at
the time, and granted, I was clinging to him like a lovesick jellyfish and
there really was no other way to get my bawling, begging ass out the
door, but still. He moved to Australia, like, the next day, so frantic he
was to escape the tendrils of my epic-romance-tainted expectations.

I have since become a jaded, misanthropic, smirk-prone hermit
crab, which I swear to God (probably) is a more realistic stance to take
when tackling life. I don't really have any expectations. Take the last time
Keiger took me on a date. Fifteen minutes after the movie started, he got
up to get more popcorn and, uh, never came back. It didn't help, I guess,
that I have a habit of yelling at the movie screen. This is especially true
when it's playing a romantic comedy. "Ha! Like that's ever gonna happen!" or "Oh, I am so sure!" and such. You can't always get away with
that at a movie theater, and the ushers are not always polite when they
ask you to leave, either. Anyway, at least Keiger doesn't drag me behind a
horse. That's pretty much my criteria for boyfriends these days.

Last week I finally gave in and agreed to read Milly "Rumpelstiltskin," that miserable fairy tale in which the miller's daughter is
imprisoned by a prince and forced to spin straw into gold "if she valued her life." But I read it only on the condition Milly study the postscript I always include at the end of these awful yarns. "If you're ever
trapped in a castle, are you gonna sit there and cry?" I implored. "No.
You're not. You're gonna keep your wits and find a way out, right?" I
pointed to one of the illustrations. "Look, here, see the creepy little
Rumpelstiltskin walking through the door? The door is open, and
what is she doing? She's just sitting there. What are you gonna do?
You're gonna kick the creepy little man in the crotch and run past
him, right? You're gonna escape, right? And what's the worst mistake
she made? She married the prince, the same selfish pig who put her in
the dungeon in the first place. Don't ever, ever do that!"

For chrissakes, I won't even go into Rapunzel. What a simpering idiot she is, sitting at the top of a turret looking forlornly into
the horizon for someone to save her. "You're gonna cut off your own
damn hair and climb your own damn self down, right?" I tell my girl.
Her response, usually, is to roll her eyes like they're loose in her skull.

She's right; I can be high up there with my indignation over the
prince-coming-to-get-me concept, then something happens like the
day Milly decided she wanted to open a lemonade stand. Her sign
itself was awesomely flawed. LEMOADE, it read in raspberry candy
stripe, with crude little lemon-slice finials dancing in the borders. She
hung it across our door and opened up shop, with an upended laundry
basket serving as the counter space for her wares. She had arrayed a few stools out front as well, in a nice welcoming pattern, fully expecting to be flocked with customers, which was optimistic considering
we lived on the first floor of an old factory with meager walk-by traffic
at the time. Regardless, Milly's face was bursting with such eagerness
and joy, it practically paralyzed me with anxiety.

You do not know the meaning of angst until your child is on
the verge of facing certain disappointment, when the openness with
which she welcomes the world is in danger of being slapped away like
naughty fingers off a cake plate. You would do anything, I tell you, to
stave that off, to create a pocket of air so her trust can survive a little
longer in a world normally polluted with snarkiness and guile.

"Keiger, help," I whispered into my cell phone. "Milly opened
a lemonade stand in our hallway. Can you please come and be her
customer?"

He was there in exactly five minutes, just in time to banish any
uncertainty that might have crept into Milly's eyes.

"Boy, I sure am thirsty," he bellowed as he came down the hall.

At that Milly perked up like a kitten at the sound of a can opener.
A flurry of other customers came as well, neighbors and other people
Keiger had prompted. They sat, asked for refills, and commended her
product. I was so relieved. I know the day will come when the world
doesn't answer my daughter the way she hopes, and like any parent, I live
in dread of the powerlessness I'm bound to feel before her disappointment. But not today. Today my friends rescued me from that. Today my
daughter's pride in herself is so pure and beautiful, it's enough to make
me sit here and cry like a pussy-ass princess trapped in a castle.

JV E ~ ~vzf.6z ~zc f cl1L,.

JESUS GOD, IF I NEED ANY MORE EVIDENCE-at all-that I am wasting my life, all I have to do is look around at the bunch of bottomfish I have for friends. Grant, for one, won't even pick me up at the
airport when I ask him. No, he was busy hanging a chandelier above
his dining room table. Strike that; he was not even the one hanging
the chandelier. He got our neighbor Chris, a lighting designer-not
a handyman or a custodian, but a famous designer-artist with a gallery and everything-to hang it, and it wasn't even one of Chris's own
creations. It was just some retro-metal number Grant bought retail.
So getting this man to install it was like asking Picasso to paint the
bathroom, if you ask me, and certainly no goddamn excuse to leave
me stranded at the airport.

"I'm his hand-me-this bitch, bitch," Grant bitched back at me.

"Shut up and get your worthless pansy ass to the airport and pick
me up!" I shrieked, but by that time Chris was already standing on
Grant's table, which, knowing Grant, was probably the whole point.
"Stop pretending you have a life without me," I said into the empty
line. "You'd be nothing without me, you hear that?"

Next I called Lary, which of course was a whole other mindfuck
in futility. He was working. Again. Lary. "Oh, my God! I can't believe
you're working again," I wailed. He works all the time now, thus seriously endangering his carefully cultivated image as a burdensome sack
of maggots. "You're not supposed to have responsibilities, you retard,"
I reminded him. "You're supposed to slide through life by master minding crimes and stuff? Now come get me anyway! They won't miss
you for the next hour or so." Lary makes his living rigging things, and
unfortunately he was, right then, dangling from a carabiner way high
up above stuff and couldn't comfortably extricate himself.