Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (33 page)

"It's a wad of dental floss," Grant observed. He was not amazed
at all.

"It's not even knotted," Keiger added, though he was a tiny tad
amazed.

"This is art!" I told them. "I swear to Jesus God, the wonder
of authentic, God-given genius is totally wasted on you bunch of
booger-eating plebians. Why do I even bother?" I would have continued, throwing in how Grant's idea of passable party fare is pig's feet
and Cheetos, while Keiger's own Christmas tree is little more than an
ailing spider plant festooned with two anemic strands of tinsel, but
just then my tree got knocked down again and I had to rush to make
sure my new cat wasn't trapped or, worse, electrocuted.

"You need to kill that cat," Grant said, but I know he only says
stuff like this to dissuade me from ever asking him to pet-sit for me
again. He still claims to be traumatized from the last time eight years
ago, when he cat-sat for me and the late Lucy, my treasured toothless
old alley-cat rescue, tried to sleep on his head. Normally I would have
said it served him right for having such a huge head, but Lucy slept
on my own head every night and it didn't occur to me until then that
anyone would mind having a soft, furry purring thing keeping their
head warm all night. I tell you, it was downright nice having Lucy
on my head unless I had to move or something, in which case she'd
dig her claws into my skull, but other than that all I had to do was
stay perfectly still and she'd lie there on my forehead as peacefully as a toothless, tuna-smelling toupee, hardly interrupting my oxygen supply at all.

"I mean it," Grant insisted, "kill that cat."

"I can't kill Petal," I said. It's true. Petal picked me as her owner,
plain and simple.

Keiger was silent. Concerning my two cats, Keiger is unashamedly biased with his affections, bestowing most of them on Tinkerbell, my sixteen-year-old midget Persian who, until recently, had a
skin condition that made her hair fall out in clumps. But since meeting Keiger, her hair puffed all up again, so Keiger nicknamed her T.
Diddy." I have never seen a cat so in love as Tinkerbell is with Keiger.
She quakes with joy every time he comes over, wraps herself around
his neck, nibbles his ears and kisses his eyelids. It's a wonder to behold.
After Keiger and I broke up, Tinkerbell practically lay around bawling
with her paws outstretched. Not even Petal could pull her out of her
malaise. Finally there was nothing for me to do but to drive back to
Keiger's and show up on his doorstep again, this time to remind him
that he was mine, that I'd picked him, and he was mine and there
was not a lot he could do about it. I love him and that's just the way
it is. He didn't seem all that convinced at first, so I wrapped myself
around his neck, all soft and purring, and he wisely stayed perfectly
still, knowing, I'm sure, that if he tried to move I'd have dug my claws
into his skull.

IT'S KIND OF HARD TO CONVINCE PEOPLE you're part of a power couple
when your boyfriend is elbow deep into a toilet every morning. "You
own this place," I tell Keiger. "Isn't there someone you can pay to
clean the toilets?"

Keiger snaps off his rubber gloves. "I'm part-owner," he corrects
me.

"Ain't no other owner here cleaning the toilets," I say.

We're at The Local the morning after what appears to have been
an incredibly busy night, and the place smells like an ashtray eaten
by somebody with bionic halitosis. Debris is everywhere, including
the butts of about eight million cigarettes, a truckload of french fries
bonded to the floor under a crust of dried beer, and, oddly, one brightly
colored Christmas tree skirt. No underwear, though. Not this time.
By five o'clock, this entire place will be remarkably clean-not eatoff-the-floor clean, but clean-enough-to-want-to-come-back clean-a
transformation that always amazes me. No matter how trashed The
Local gets the night before-and believe me, I've seen it so bad they
should have marked off the area with crime-scene tape-it's always
ready for business the next day.

Keiger himself cleans the toilets every morning because, he says,
it's the worst job in the place and he would not ask it of his employees.
As his girlfriend, currently, I consider it my duty to serve as a distraction by demanding he blow off work and come get coffee with me and
Grant, but he rarely falls for it. I, though, have fallen for him. I must say I do like a laboring man. A suit-and-tie guy with a cell phone fused
to his fist does nothing for me except exacerbate my TMJ with yawns.
But put that same guy in leather gloves and goggles and have him sand
down a door or something, and I'll be stuck to him like putty. Still,
though, there are certain standards to consider. We are now, after all,
a power couple.

"This is not how a power couple behaves," I complained to Lary
later. Lary had no idea what a power couple was, and neither did I
until someone told me that we could probably expect access to all
the roped-off areas at society events and such, since Keiger is a successful business owner and I was voted "best columnist" in the city.
This came about because the small paper I wrote for was bought by a
much bigger paper, which means I'm now a columnist for a major-city
newspaper, and even though I don't yet have the major-city salary to
match, I figure I have certain responsibilities. For example, if Keiger
ever succumbs to my begging and hires me to bartend, then I plan to
wash my work apron at least once a month, as opposed to my former
regimen with the airlines, which was never. Keiger suggests I also put
some effort into actually working, as opposed to all the effort I put
into avoiding it, but I don't want to go changing now that I'm all successful and shit.

"Power couple, my ass," Lary griped. "I will make certain that
doesn't happen." He blathered about how he was gonna have to stage
another drastic interruptive measure like he and Grant did two years
ago when they held the "Hollis Gillespie Heifer Intervention Convention" after I gained thirty pounds. Daniel mixed the mimosas, and all of them instructed our friends to bring Krispy Kremes, fried chicken,
chocolate-covered butter sticks, and any other fat-laden chow they
could think of to help me celebrate my last communal wallow in slop
before my mandatory starvation period set in. Everybody also came
equipped with diet books. Lary brought a pair of pliers ("in case I
need to wire your damn jaw shut") and a Web site address from which
I could supposedly buy Internet amphetamines. Attendees placed bets
on how long it would take me to lose the weight. It took me sixteen
months.

"Whew," Grant said. "I was starting to worry you turned into a
cow and were gonna stay that way."

Grant is starting his new diet, which consists solely of cayenne
pepper, lemon juice, and mid-grade maple syrup. It's supposed to make
him euphoric by the third day and hallucinate by the seventh, not to
mention twenty pounds lighter. As the subject of a lot of my columns,
he wants to ensure he strikes a respectable presence. "I'm having crazy
dreams," he reported of the diet's effects. "Last night I dreamt neon
blue rats were attacking our arms. Then my teeth fell out like piano
keys, and then The Local fell a-fucking-part. The whole place just
disintegrated and we couldn't do anything to keep it together."

"I'm not too worried about The Local," I said, and I didn't have to
tell him why. It's because Keiger is running The Local, and he is really
good at keeping things from falling apart, me included. In fact, being
held together by Keiger is one of my favorite ways to spend the day.

"C'mon!" I keep coaxing Keiger. "It's a great afternoon! Let's get
out. We should make an appearance. We're a power couple now."

"Power couple, my ass," he says, handing me a toilet brush,
which, as always, I ignore. Like I said, I can't go changing now that
I'm all successful and shit.

It's funny the things that end your life. For me it happened when I accidentally almost ran down a crack addict in my neighborhood. "Bleachyhaired honky bitch!" he yelled at me as he shuffled out of my way. That
encounter inspired a passage in my newspaper column, which in turn
inspired a book about me and my friends, and now my life is over-or
at least my life as it was is over. This is even more even ful than the time
Lary was selling autographed pictures of Jesus on eBay, because now he's
autographing pictures of himself, and it's almost like he doesn't know the
difference.

"You've created a monster, " says Grant, calling me from The Local
where Lary was holding an impromptu signing of the book that features him like the rock star he always thought he was. He captions his signature
with, "The clown carries a gun. "

For the past few years, my column had been running every week in
Creative Loafing, Atlanta's major weekly. Every week I pressed Send and
forgot about it. Somewhere in the back of my head I knew it was out
there published for everyone to read, but my standard of living stayed the
same. I paddled along at the same panic level as ever, it just didn't dawn
on me that an under-swell was brewing. Amazingly, my editor Suzanne
published the stuffI wrote, even that legendary "Lary likes to masturbate
by slamming his dick with the Bible" column.

And then Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch came out, and an Entertainment Weekly writer showered it with accolades while pointing out,
among other things, that Id made my living as a flight attendant even
though I was terrified to fly. After that my cover was completely blown.
There was no going back.

THANK GOD GRANT'S BROTHER MIKE DIDN'T DIE, that's all I have to
say. Grant himself didn't seem all that alarmed by the message from
his mother, which he received once we landed in Los Angeles, and
which, Grant said, basically imparted the news that Mike had died,
but the message alarmed the holy hell out of me.

I should have remembered it was relayed to me through Grant,
who himself is given to exaggeration, which, on top of his own
mother's flair for the dramatic, meant Mike was probably home nursing a hangnail, but still. Mike is our business manager-mine and
Grant's-having guided us through the tricky waters of Hollywood to
our film deal, which is no small feat considering Grant and I are each
as Hollywood-savvy as baboons. Plus, I am secretly in love with Mike,
Mike being the non-gay quasi-equivalent to Grant, minus the huge
freckly head and bad eyesight, so you can't be joking around with me
about that.

"Christ," I shrieked, "what the hell do you mean Mike died? You
can't say that! What happened?"

I refused to unlock Grant's side of the rental car until he gave
me an explanation, but that was no threat since we'd gotten another
PT Cruiser, and this one, I swear to God, was the bright yellow of a
bad urine specimen. Grant had already refused to set foot in it. It was
bad enough, he said, that he had to drive to the airport in Atlanta
with me that morning in my own Cruiser, which he ridicules, but
now he is expected to drive through West Hollywood with me in this piss-colored car? "I don't think so," he said, shaking his head with the
phone still against his ear.