Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (4 page)

The only thing I had to play them on was my sister's plastic
Imperial Party-Time turntable complete with adhesive rainbow. The
speaker consisted of one silver-dollar-size area near the needle arm
with thirteen perforations-thirteen, which is sort of the symbol for Satan, kinda-through which the music would waft with as much
clarity as a corrupted radio signal. The volume knob was numbered
to 13 (there it is again!), which was where I'd crank it and commence
convulsing to the music. One time my mother returned from the airport to find that I had placed the turntable against our open window
so the music could blare into our front yard, where my seven-year-old
ass could be found before a thickening crowd, flailing to the beat.

She tried yelling at me to turn off the stupid goddamn music and
get my stupid goddamn puckered poohole off the lawn and stop hopping around like a goddamn retard. When that didn't work, she could
hardly move on to her natural next step, which would have been to hit
me in the head with her shoe, because there were neighbors present and
what would they think. So she walked right past me and into the house
and unplugged the turntable, which caused me to simply stop and drop
to the ground as though my puppet strings had been cut.

"She's being influenced by Satan!" a neighbor yelled.

Later my mother asked me what it was I loved so much about
the music, but I was only seven and I couldn't explain how every
chord seemed to reach inside me and inhabit my veins and awaken
my limbs. I could not explain that to her; all I could do was want to
explain it to her so bad that it must have measured heavily on my face,
because the next thing she did was turn the music back on. At that I
jumped up and shook my body while she shook her head as she made
her way to the window and closed it to protect my ears from the noise
outside.

EVEN THOUGH I'M FAIRLY CERTAIN THAT MY FRIEND Lary is homicidal,
I bet one of the reasons I keep liking him so much is that he sort of
looks like Led Zeppelin's lead singer, Robert Plant. In fact, I think
the first argument I ever had with Lary was about the Zeppelin song
"Stairway to Heaven." It had been out for over two decades, and during that time I'd gone through seven stages of loving it and hating it
and then back again, and Lary happened upon me during stage six,
which was the strongest of the hate stages.

"Are you insane?" Lary hollered. "How could you hate Led
Zeppelin?"

At that, of course, I had to refrain myself from impaling his curly
blond brain on a rusty crowbar. Instead I exhaled and said with commendable evenness, "I did not say I hate Led Zeppelin, you total tampon. I said I hate `Stairway to Heaven.' It's just a bunch of pretty
words stuck together to get you to open up and let stuff in."

Lary countered with a passionate pro-"Stairway" argument, and
normally I would have been surprised, because until then I thought
Lary was only passionate about things like amateur taxidermy and
objects that could detonate, but I was too busy reeling from having
been accused of hating Led Zeppelin, when the truth is I had been a
Zeppelinophile since I was seven. I used to lay my ear on the actual
speaker of the plastic Imperial Party-Time turntable in an attempt to
mainline the music straight into my brain-that's how much I loved
Led Zeppelin. In fact, I did not just love Led Zeppelin; Led Zeppelin was my first love. Then when I heard "Stairway to Heaven," I loved
it so much I begged my mother to pull over and stop the car because
I craved a complete absence of any other stimuli that could compete
with the sound of it on the radio.

I would call this stage one.

Then I took to singing all the words like I knew what they meant.
I would interrupt my friends during our daily acts of pyromania to
discuss the lyrics. "There's a songbird, see? And he sings in a tree by
the brook," I'd pontificate. "And it makes me wonder." I would call
this stage two.

Then seven years later I hated and feared the song because people
were saying it contained hidden satanic chants, and at that time I
didn't want to further tempt Lucifer, seeing as how I was certain he'd
already possessed me after I accidentally read The Exorcist, which was
sitting on my mother's nightstand. I would call this stage three.

Then I loved it again and ruined my turntable trying to play it
backward so I could hear the satanic chants everybody was bloviating
about in middle school. "I can hear it!" I squealed. But in the end you
hear what you want to hear, and like any misanthropic preteen proud
of her carefully cultivated sense of antisocialism, I wanted to fit in. "I
can hear it!" I would call this stage four.

Then there was a long period where I simply detested the song
with the force of fifty erupting volcanoes. It turned out that, after
repeated inspection, the words meant nothing after all. The piper
will lead us to reason if we all call the tune? "What the fuck does
that mean?" I griped, inhaling my fourth Marlboro of the morning. Evidently Robert Plant took a hefty tab of acid and ejected a farraginous pool of verbal vomit set to a smoking guitar crescendo, and everybody just foamed at the mouth and fell over each other in admiration
over it. And what the hell is a hedgerow? This I would call stage five.

Then seven years later I didn't just hate the song, I was pissed at
it. Not only did it disillusion me, it insulted me and made me loathe
my impressionable younger self. I bought all those pretty words, didn't
I? I swallowed it all, didn't I? The bait and the boat in one big gulp.
Does the "dear lady" hear the wind blow? Does she know her "stairway lies on the whispering wind"? God, what bigger bag of bunk was
there than these words? They were just there to serve as a wedge to get
me to open up and let stuff in. Never again. Never. I would call this
stage six.

Now my own daughter, Milly, will turn seven in a few years. She
is the happiest accident I ever encountered. The most unexpected gift
I would ever receive-testimony that alcohol mixed with indiscriminant sex has its benefits. Sometimes she sings along to songs on our
CD player with such an absolute lack of insecurity that it reminds me
there was once a time when I loved the sound of something so much
I used to sit with my face fused to the speaker of a plastic turntable.
So I love the song again, and the unrelenting crescendo of its melody,
and sometimes I simply let it play over and over as I lie listening with
my arms outstretched. The words are still bunk, but sometimes words
aren't the point. Sometimes words are just there to serve as a wedge so
you'll open up and let stuff in. And this is what I would call reaching
the top of the stairway to seven.

I HAVE RATIONALIZED THAT IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE that I work for
an airline even though I am terrified to fly. For one, I'm certainly not
the only flight attendant up there faking like everything is fine as we
pass out Cokes three miles high in the sky. I, however, dropped the
act around my coworkers after I figured out I couldn't get fired for my
fears as long as I was fairly reliable about showing up to face them.
Because of this honesty, other crew members are happy to let me sit
in one of the jump seats that ensures my back is to the cabin so the
passengers can't see the panic in my face as the plane ascends.

Still though, it makes perfect sense to me that I became a flight
attendant. After all, I inherited wanderlust from my father, an inebriated trailer salesman who roamed the country trying to hawk his
wares during his intermittent periods of employment. In between
those periods he would describe his travels to me in such loving detail
I'd dream of a livelihood that included travel as well.

Then, when I was sixteen, I fell madly in love with the bag boy
at our local grocery store, who returned my affections up until the
precise moment they interfered with his plans to live across the globe
on an exotic beach under a lean-to and surf for the rest of his life. He
made good on his plans, for a few years at least, leaving me behind
like a little cloud of spent exhaust, with my heart as tattered as a war
flag after battle. I never really recovered from being considered too
unworldly to accompany him, and I think in that moment was born
my mission to become the kind of girl he'd consider worthy. I spent years lost in daydreams about running into him during my world travels, the most popular being when I'd encounter him in some strange,
far-off country, where I'd intervene just as the polizei were about to
drag him to the hoosegow because of a misunderstanding that only I
could correct because by then, of course, I'd be multilingual.

So I grew up to become an arguable facsimile of that fantasy
image. And now I am a world traveler and a qualified language interpreter as well, embarking on my adventures by aircraft rather than by
trailer.

Those glorious Silver Streaks my father sold were famously fashioned by aeronautical engineers after an airplane fuselage, after all, and
an L-1011 is hardly more than a big, huge creaky Winnebago with
wings. Also, at the moment my father died he was living across the
street from the Los Angeles airport, with countless aircraft humming
overhead in the thin air. At that precise moment, I happened to be in
a small private aircraft humming overhead in the thin air as well.

Since that moment I've been terrified to fly.

But I do it anyway. And not just because I don't want to get fired.
It's only fitting that I spend so much time on airplanes, and inside
trailers too, because what is life if not a litany of attempts to relive our
loves, correct our failings, and forge family out of thin air?

These days my family now includes Milly, not to mention my
three closest friends, Grant, Daniel, and Lary, who have stepped in as
surrogates for the small family I miss or I've lost altogether.

Grant is from Florida, even though that's hard for me to believe.
I lived in Florida myself once, when I used to set fire to underbrush in all the undeveloped lots on our block, and when, at eleven, I reached
the pinnacle of my pack-a-day cigarette habit and then forayed into
marijuana use. Those were some good times, which causes me to
think that Florida is full of a certain type of people, cigarette- and
pot-huffing amateur arsonist type of people, and Grant is nothing like
that. For one, Grant is way too fastidious. The Florida guys I knew
were barefoot surfer boys. Grant, on the other hand, has sixty-seven
pairs of shoes, and if he could, he'd wear each pair every day in an endless shoe-parade succession. There is just too much city in him for me
to believe he's from Florida.

Daniel is from a tiny town in Texas located a frog-spit distance
from the Mexican border. And even though Daniel wears designer
sandals, there is still a certain sweetness to his countenance that makes
it believable that his father is an avocado farmer and his mother a
Wal-Mart greeter who sends him things like "The Famous LimitedEdition WilliRaye `Boy Bunny with Backpack' Figurine!" When I
look at Daniel, even though he now lives in a beautifully preserved
mid-century modern split-level ranch with bamboo flooring and a
built-in espresso maker, I can still see him sitting under the pomegranate tree in his aunt's backyard as a boy, barefoot in overalls next to
his brother, feasting on fresh fruit while the big metal head of an oil
drill seesaws in the background.