Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (28 page)

"You douche!" I hollered. "You're nothing without me, got that?
Nothing!" Lary, dangling, just laughed, and I could hear the highuppityness in his voice as he told me to fuck off.

I would have called Daniel, but he is the one who drove me to
the airport to begin with, and you don't want to double-impose on
people. He'd left a message earlier, to say his mother had called to tell
him his father was in the garden shooting armadillos. I really wanted
to hear about all the dead armadillos, too, like, can you keep their
shells to make lampshades or something, and why does his dad have
to shoot them? Can't he just shoo them? But asking a person to make
more than one airport run a week is crossing the line. Thank God for
Daniel, though.

"I'd be nothing without you," I tell him.

Next I would have called my boyfriend. But I am putting a lot
of effort into appearing needless now that I'm unemployed and I
don't want to scare Keiger off. The result of that effort is dubious
considering the last time I saw him was weeks ago when I had him
over for homemade lasagna, which admittedly was a mistake. First
of all, Keiger is a really good cook himself. He can make excellent
Thai Panang curry with nothing for utensils except an empty tuna
can, a crack lighter, and a fondue fork, practically. So I don't know
what I was thinking with the lasagna offering except to say that I usually make fabulous lasagna. But my original recipe calls for all
kinds of expensive ingredients you get at Whole Foods, like red peppers roasted over a fire of burning gold bullion, sausage made from
cows raised on caviar, and cheese aged in bank vaults surrounded by
diamonds. In all, one panload of this stuff costs more than a dinner in
Paris, plane ticket and all.

Anyway, lately, what with the airline I work for being bankrupt
and all, I've been experiencing what I like to call "income limbo," and
I can't afford Whole Foods anymore unless it's to go there and troll
for food samples, so I've been selecting all my food from the aisle of
discounted canned products at Family Dollar. I thought I was being
quite resourceful, but in truth I guess my improvised lasagna came out
tasting like a plate of solid waste.

That was a few weeks ago, and I know it was bad lasagna, but I
didn't think it was disastrous, relationship-wrecking bad. I mean, c'mon.
I've known this guy for a long time; he's seen the worst of me, hasn't he?
Let's not forget this man has seen me, you know, naked and stuff.

Believe me, when you're naked, there are all kinds of opportunities for unflattering angles. There is just nothing to hide behind.
Nothing, and I kind of hate that. Damn, I keep kicking myself, I
should not have made the lasagna. Or maybe I should not have let
him see me naked. Or maybe it was something else. There must be a
million things wrong with me, a trillion. In fact, I am probably just a
walking waxball of wrongness, the biggest bottom-fish in the trough.
Why else would someone you love leave quietly one night and never
call you again? Not a single word. Nada. Nothing.

LARY'S FORMER FAVORITE PASTIME WAS TAKING ACID and climbing scaffolding-not separately, but both together-and notice I said former. This is a
guy who called me from jail because he threw a metal wrench at a police
car from the top of the old Omni Stadium in Atlanta-and he hit the
police car! From a block away! All the cops had to do to bust him was
simply follow the gazes of admiration coming from the bystanders below.

"I should have thought a little further ahead on that one," he
admits. In the end it worked out, though, because while in jail he met
a guy who was in for gunrunning, and struck up a friendship that
lasted an entire decade before that man disappeared, leaving nothing
behind but an old convertible Fiat with the engine running and a tattered Hawaiian shirt in the backseat, or so Lary says.

But let me dispel any notion that I always come to Lary's rescue.
That time in jail? He was just calling me to brag, not to make his bail.
And the time that Tijuana hooker led him by the hand down a dark alleyway? I was more worried about her (if it was a her) than him. In fact, Lary
has never needed any of us for anything except possible fodder for amusement. But make no mistake-the day will come when he needs us.

In the meantime, I'm questioning his usefulness. "Goddammit, what the hell good is Lary these days?" I gripe to Grant. "Seriously, don't you think it's time we break into his house again? He's
got something in there that's keeping him occupied. We need to see
what it is. What if he really did take up taxidermy again like he keeps
threatening? We need to check out his basement. He probably has a population of dead hobos down there, all splayed out and polyure-
thaned like those poor Chinese corpses in the Bodies exhibit downtown.... Oh, my Jesus God! That's gotta be it!" I continued excitedly.
"We hardly ever see Lary since that exhibit came to town."

In fact, there used to be a funeral home next to Lary's house until
the funeral home got torn down to make room for a cookie-cutter loft
complex. I always thought Lary maintained an odd friendship with that
undertaker. One night, an agitated mourner set fire to a corpse as it
lay in the coffin, and Lary and the undertaker hooted about it afterward like two neighborhood hens gossiping over the fence. I tell you, it
would not surprise me at all if Lary had picked up a few insider secrets
and started an amateur undertaking trade all on his own.

When I suggested breaking into Lary's house again to unearth
his secret, Grant's interest was piqued. The last time we broke into
Lary's place, it was because we had to save him from his alleged meth
addiction. We didn't find any meth, or any drugs of any kind-that
we recognized, anyway-and we certainly didn't find Lary strung out
on the floor, but what we did find was his place in a very orderly
condition, which confirmed our suspicions that Lary was on some
new drug. We don't know what it is-yet-but we'll find it. We will
rescue Lary whether he needs it or not. That's what friends are for.

"I think I saw some embalming fluid in the back of his truck the
other day," Grant surmised.

"We can be in and out in minutes," I said.

"It's for his own good," Grant rationalized, grabbing his keys.

"Of course," I agreed, "his own good."

GRANT AND I STILL HAVE YET TO BREAK INTO Lary's house, for which
I blame Grant, who actually called Lary and told him to expect us.
"Jesus God, Lary can't be expecting us!" I shrieked. "Last weekend he
just bought his third gun from some guy in a Waffle House parking
lot."

"Hollis," Grant said, "that is exactly why I called him."

After some thought I realized Grant is probably right. Lary is a
lot less dangerous when he's expecting you. Take Y2K for example.
Remember Y2K? Lary was the only person I know who didn't cop to
the least bit of freak in anticipation of Y2K. Even I bought into it a
bit by hiding an industrial-size can of yams on the bottom shelf of the
baker's rack in my kitchen. I know that doesn't sound like a lot, but I
am notoriously lazy in the face of any approaching Armageddon, plus
I felt like I was a hundred months pregnant at the time.

Anyway, I called Lary on Y2K eve to tell him to expect me in case
the world came to an end, because the truth is there's no better preparation for disaster than to be on the list of Lary's friends. He lives in a
stone compound, for chrissakes. The only way Grant and I can break
in is if we use my key, which Lary gave me ten years ago because of all
my failed attempts to break in. In all, those attempts resulted in a halfdozen shattered windows and a minor shower of gunfire (the gunfire,
he says, was just because he wasn't expecting me). This is why Grant
has the foresight to call Lary in advance whenever we have a hankering
to break into his house these days.

"We're coming over, don't stand in our way," I informed Lary,
sounding very resolute.

"Nobody's stopping you," Lary shrugged.

He was, after all, sitting right next to me at the Majestic Diner.
Grant and I had persuaded him to come meet us by swearing the owner
had recently added Wild Turkey to the breakfast menu. We might have
been able to pull off the Wild Turkey thing if the actual owner didn't
happen to walk in while we were there, which killed my plans to stock
some used bottles behind the register. But luckily, Lary didn't detonate
like I thought he would; he just sat down and ordered some coffee.

"I keep all my drugs in the pressure cooker," he added. "Help
yourself."

Damn him. It's just like Lary to suck all the fun out of an intervention by being open and honest and refusing to skulk around. It
takes the excitement out of confiscating all his heroin or huffing glue
or whatever the hell his new drug is these days. We're all curious about
that; what Lary is consuming lately, or vice versa. He's always telling stories about experimenting with weird-ass prescription crap he
brought back from Central America, stuff like Ritalin, antipsychotics,
and asthma medication. This is a far cry from the drugs of back in the
day when vintage addicts all popped cool-sounding drugs like "bennies" and "black beauties." Lary, for example, will hork anything from
Peruvian Xanax to opiated chewing tobacco from Sweden, which
he says you can buy at the Nicaraguan duty-free. This comprises his
"stash," he says, which he keeps in his pressure cooker, which itself is
kept on the dresser next to his bed.

"I don't even know where I got it," Lary says of his pressure
cooker, which he's never actually used to cook anything, and I say this
knowing certain drugs do take some cooking. "It just showed up one
day.

This is no surprise. Lary regularly awakens to find himself surrounded by strange objects, and I'm not just talking about the fake
boobs as big as orbiting moons on his second-to-last girlfriend. He
woke up once to find a truck on his roof, for example. Things disappear, as well. His cat Mona has been missing for a year and a half.

"So what are you saying? Some fairy came in the night while you
were sleeping and left you a pressure cooker to keep all your drugs
in?" I asked.

He practiced his poker face.

"There's no drugs in your pressure cooker!" I shouted at Lary.
"You are a big fat lying sack of maggots! All addicts are liars!"

"Well," he said, taking a gingerly sip of his coffee, "I must not be
an addict then."

eq-iL _o L_ LA-.-- c hH-, ,