Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (5 page)

Lary is a complete social leper. He's supposed to be from upstate
New York, though he keeps any evidence that he was sired from
human loins as secret as possible. We didn't even know what he did for
a living until recently, when we all were at the coffeehouse and heard him refer to someone as his boss. Grant and I looked at each other
like we just heard Lary confess to a penchant for cross-dressing. Lary's
boss? Up to then we never thought of Lary as having a boss. We always
figured people just paid Lary to stick around or stay away, depending
on their tolerance for a guy who likes to throw heavy equipment at
police cars from the top of Philips Arena. He actually did that while
on the clock once, but even then I never thought of Lary as having an
actual boss. I swear I thought he just showed up with a tool belt and
put his palm out like everyone else at the end of the day.

We infuriate each other, but we're family now. We are the water as
well as the fish. No matter how many times we try to extract the hook,
we will always get thrown back in. After all, we are in this adventure
together, be it by wheels or by that big Winnebago in the sky.

MY FRIEND DANIEL SAID HE CAN'T WAIT TO SEE how I'm going to dig
my ass out from under this here third trailer I just bought. And he said
it laughing, like he has any business being judgmental.

"Look who's talking," I sulked, reminding him that I don't have
to take this from a guy who is so addicted to the home-shopping network he still has a year's supply of Lauren Hutton's tanning towelettes
crowding his bathroom cabinets. "At least it's just my cabinet that is
crowded," he said. "Where the hell are you gonna fit another old aluminum travel trailer? Your driveway is already full of old trailers. Your
ass is now officially buried in trailers."

He's right. I will have to dig my way out of this, literally. Because
digging, as it turns out, is the only way I can think to access my backyard with a trailer, as the easement alley that runs behind my yard has
been closed up for years, fenced in by my neighbors on either side. So
the only way I can tow a trailer through there is if I dig up a fence or
two, and chop down a few young trees while I'm at it.

My other good friend Lary has already thrown up his hands, and
he never throws up his hands. Normally he'd consider this a challenge,
but the second I ruled out tearing down half my house, or those of
my neighbors on either side-on top of vetoing a construction crane,
when construction cranes are the subject of his wet dreams lately-he
huffed out of here like an underbilled actress.

"Come back," I begged. "Look, here's some rusty barbed wire
you can cut through."

But he was already gone. There was not enough destruction in
the offing to entice him to stay. As he backed away, he barely missed
the canned-ham camper I'd just picked up in Blue Ridge. "This place
is like a damn trailer park," he bitched through his car window.

Ha! Like that's a bad thing. My dad often brought home demo
models that were nicer than whatever hovel we were calling home that
year. Once we lived two blocks from the beach in a clapboard cabin
that had a toilet in the middle of the living room. Not a bathroom,
mind you, but a single toilet, elevated even, as though on a throne,
which I assume facilitated the flushing. It was not a very efficient use
of space.

I now find it curious that we never actually lived in my father's
trailers. Instead, they were a lovely reprieve from our actual home, and
my sisters and I regularly found solace in them, where the deluxe rooftop air conditioner kept everything as cool as a mountain meadow.
There, all the spaces and compartments were situated with perfect
efficiency. Today's new homes are practically the size of monastery
compounds, or at least airplane hangars. The humans inside wallow
in the solitude this space affords them from each other, partaking fully
in the distance-emotional and actual-that money can buy. When
I think back to my father's trailers, especially now that I'm a parent
myself, I realize there's a lot of comfort with the knowledge thatwith a few tunings-an entire family could be happily accommodated
in a thirteen-foot trailer. Everything you needed was there. Space was
real space.

I recently moved into the tiny-ass house that I just bought, and I thought my daughter, Milly, and I would be on top of each other. But
we're not. We're just close. That's how it is with the trailers, too. Just
by virtue of their construction, by virtue of their efficient use of space,
they bring the people who own them closer to things. Anything that
does that is worth having.

"What about the last disaster?" Daniel reminded me. "Remember the `free' trailer?"

Lord, he would have to bring that up. It's an incident I will never
ever live down. Our good friend Grant will make sure of that. He will
be five feet away from me for the rest of my life, ready with the evidence of my idiocy so he can slap me over the head with it the second
I start to regain my confidence in humanity.

"`Free!"' is all he'll have to say. "`Free Delivery!"'

As if Grant himself were so impervious to scams on Craigslist. I
remember he once used my buddy pass to fly to Jacksonville to buy a
1985 Volvo ("The two-door kind, just like I had in college!") from a
young woman who said she had to sell it quick because she was starting
an internship at a fashion magazine in New York the next month. He
said he felt something, some slight poke in the gut the second he pushed
the Send button on his PayPal account, but he brushed it off. The girl
had all the components Grant looks for in a seller: rushed, naive, and
nice. Grant gets most of his cars from people like this, then Grantwho is not rushed, not naive, and certainly not nice-relists the same
car on the same site and sells it for twice what he paid.

But this time Grant got hosed. He stood curbside at the airport
as she pulled up in the car as promised, only that was about the only thing that went as promised. The Volvo was a rolling wad of rust and
Bondo because the girl, it turned out, had not used an actual photo of
the actual car in her ad, but that of one taken twenty years ago. Then
when she-all five feet, two inches and 300 pounds of her-opened
the door and got out, Grant saw that the driver's side seat sat lopsided
in the frame. But the car was his now and there wasn't much for him
to do but get in and point it home for the six-hour drive.

"I'm sitting in a rusty shit pit," he wailed to me over the phone
as he rumbled onto the interstate. "Gravel from the road is flying up
through the holes in the floorboard. It's stinging my ankles! I'll never
make it home. I think I smell carbon monoxide." I was laughing so
hard I could barely hear him.

He made it home, and I still consider him the Craigslist master,
though. He was the first person I called when I spotted the vintage
1964 Streamline trailer ("No rust! Well-preserved!") online for only
$2,700. I jumped on it like a blue jay on a ladybug, just plucked it up
and marveled at myself for being the first to stake my claim on such a
find. "Bitch, look at this," I taunted Grant, attaching the photo of the
trailer. "It's mine, mine, mine!"

"Girl, what the hell are you thinking?" he answered. "Where are
you going to put a twenty-four-foot trailer?" This from a guy who
once bought an entire truckload of old egg beaters to use as garden art.
"Your ass is already buried in trailers."

"You're just jealous, you crusty bag of barnacles," I insisted, even
though he was right. This was my third trailer, and since my backyard
couldn't be accessed by trailer without demolishing the laundry room off the side of my house, they'd all have to sit in a circle out front like
a little trailer park. I don't consider that a bad thing, but my neighbors
might take issue.

"This one is a 1964 Streamliner in perfect condition, sorta, with
working taillights and everything," I gloated. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime
special opportunity because the guy is delivering it to me from Dayton for free."

"Ain't nobody doing nothing for free," Grant warned me. "Free
ain't free."

So I called my sister Kim, an attorney, who happens to live in
Dayton. I sent her as an emissary to pay the man his deposit. It
probably took her two minutes to assess the situation. "It's a scam," she
called to tell me with
finality. She was leaving
the locked lot where the
trailer was parked. The "seller"
had no key to the lot, but he did have a "purchase agreement," which,
once signed, essentially entitled him to take a $1,000 deposit-in
cash-on the trailer without stipulating any realistic obligation to
deliver it.

When Kim pointed that out to him, he took very florid offense
to her implication, but still refused to correct it. Further, he refused
to produce a driver's license to show he'd be capable of transporting
a 3,400-pound trailer 1,000 miles, or any identification at all that proved he was a legal party to the sale of the trailer. "So you saved
yourself a thousand bucks," she said. "No charge for the attorney's
fee," she laughed. "It's free."

Now Daniel is trying to talk me out of buying yet another trailer
by suggesting there exists in my history a succession of mishaps such as
this. "And what about the other trailer that you trashed?" he asked.

"That trailer was trashed when I bought it," I replied.

In fact, I saved that trailer like a neglected pet and found it a
good home. It was a dilapidated 1974 Serro Scotty camper that happened to be too big for my trailer hitch-which I discovered when
I looked into my rearview and saw that it had popped off the back
of my bumper and was free-rolling into oncoming traffic. When
I caught sight of that trailer rolling unattached along the highway
about to cause a pileup that could depopulate half a high school, my
heart stopped.

Thank God the trailer swerved into an irrigation ditch before it
hit anything. I had to borrow Lary's truck to pull it out. Unfortunately
the truck also came with Lary, and the ordeal cost me the entire supply
of generic Peruvian Xanax I keep on hand for just such Lary-related
bartering purposes. Predicaments like this make me wish my trailersalesman dad had tutored me better before he up and died when I
was young. It's true he'd stopped selling hitch trailers and had moved
onto motor homes by the time I was nine, but he could have imparted
plenty of wisdom in that time nonetheless. My mother taught me
lots of stuff I remember perfectly well at that young age, like how to
haggle the price down on a set of TV trays at the swap meet.

"Tell her you only have twenty-five cents," she'd instruct me.
"Say you want to buy them for your mom for her birthday." If I mentioned that her birthday wasn't for nine months, she'd remind me that
it doesn't hurt to be prepared.

And she's right. Preparation does not hurt. I thought I was prepared with my tow hook on the back of my PT Cruiser, a car that
Grant says proves I have lesbian taste even though I am not a lesbian
nor have I ever tasted one. Well, it turns out that you can't tow a trailer
that weighs more than your car, which, looking back, makes a lot of
sense. But at the time all I saw was a 1974 Serro Scotty and all I could
think of was how Disney World was opened only three years before
this camper was built. My family, back when it was whole and we
lived in Florida and both my parents were alive and employed at the
same time, used to take a trailer like this one to a campground nearby
called the Cozy Palms Trailer Court. There my parents would sleep
inside while my two sisters and I would bundle in the same double
sleeping bag under the night sky on the grass outside the door.

It wasn't the official Disney campsite, just one of those bargain
ones owned by a chain-smoking retired forklift operator who kept his
horny dog tied to a post by the check-in window. To my sisters and
me, though, it was the Taj Mahal of trailer parks. We'd lie awake under
the moon in a three-way spoon, counting stars and listening to the
uncharacteristically subdued murmurings of our parents through the
aluminum screen door. It's one of the few snapshots of immeasurable
happiness from my past, and life is nothing if not a succession of stupid
attempts to re-create those. Hence the trailers, trashed and otherwise.