Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (7 page)

One October my mother cut the bottoms out of the little butterfly footies at the end of our little butterfly tights so our lanky legs
could poke through and, hopefully, stretch out another year. Maybe
it was the toes to the tights that poked out at about our knee levels,
or the damn worn-out wings that were just about nothing but bare
wire, but whatever it was she just stopped and seemed to understand
it was time to get us new costumes. My sister and I could hardly
believe our fortune. My mother stood by, bemusedly hoovering her
hundredth Salem menthol, as my sister and I hooted all the way to
the five-and-dime. We hooted all through the process of picking out
the completely flammable, choke-hazard heavy death suits that would
serve as our costumes that year, then hooted out the door on our way
to gather our annual pillow sack of cancer-inducing, dye-laden sugar
bombs. We were so happy we could hardly breathe.

As I bounded away, though, I remember stealing one single
glance back at my mother. There she was, framed by our doorway, her
head surrounded by a halo of smoke, her hand unsteady as she held
the menthol to her lips. I know now what she was thinking. She was
wondering when it was, exactly, that her little baby butterflies had
gone and migrated away. She was thinking maybe she should sit out
on the porch and wait for them to return. Yes, she'll strain her eyes
and pretty soon there they'll be, fluttering home.

I RECENTLY SAW A BIG TRASH PILE on the side of the road and immediately thought of Daniel. It was no ordinary trash pile. Somebody's
grandmother must have died or something, as no person with a passable knowledge of what's really valuable would have tossed half this
crap onto the sidewalk. For one, there was a poodle-shaped toiletpaper cozy that was hand-knitted from pumpkin-colored yarn, and
that is pricelessness right there, I'm telling you. There were also two
fondue forks with Bakelit handles (broken, but still), a Pyrex candy
dish, and almost an entire set of '70s ceramic dinnerware decorated
with cute maroon mushrooms.

I would have jumped into it, but the pile was already in the
process of being converged upon by a passel of culture vultures, and
besides, I am simply not that brave. Once I was driving Daniel and
his boyfriend, Mitch, along with our friend Gary around in my car,
searching for junk piles. They found one all right, jumped out before I
finished braking, and immediately started loading boxes of that musty
stuff into the trunk of my car.

"What a haul! This is great!" they flittered excitedly.

"What the hell are you putting in my car?" I shrieked. "What is
that, maggots? Are you putting maggots in my car?"

Sure enough, they were walking toward the trunk of my car with a
pail of rotted old potholders teeming with maggots. "But these potholders are hand-hooked. C'mon," they insisted. I practically had to slam
the trunk shut on their eager little fingers to keep them from pitching the whole mess past me regardless of my protests. The experience would
have traumatized me for life if not for the fact that later that same day
they spotted a yard sale in Cabbagetown that garnered me an original
framed rendering by Jeff McNelly, the late triple Pulitzer-winning cartoonist. I spent five bucks on it and put it on eBay that night. Seven
days later, the winning bid was so big I used it to pay for my ticket on a
fourteen-day Hawaiian cruise. I am not kidding.

I still drive by that house sometimes, the one belonging to the man
who hosted the yard sale. He'd dragged a load of old boxes out from the
basement that had been abandoned there by the woman who owned
the house before him, and he himself had owned the place for seven
years. He was talking on his cell phone to his friend, complaining about
the crappy turnout, when I handed him the ten-dollar bill for my two
items. The other item was a vintage beer sign, the eBay resale of which
just about covered my bar bill on the cruise ship.

Today, whenever I pass his house, I always whisper my thanks.
I'd almost feel guilty if not for the fact that I myself have passed things
up for trash in the past only to learn later they were valuable beyond
measure. My mother once had an entire living room suite of vintage
Lane furniture she bought brand-new in the early '60s, back when
Lane favored a trim, teak, Danish-inspired design. I sold the entire
suite for twenty-five bucks behind her back. Don't get me wrong, it
was for sale anyway. My mother had advertised it in the paper, only
she was asking way too much for it, I thought. So one day when she
wasn't home, I answered the door and allowed someone to load it up
for a fraction of its worth.

God, do I regret that today. I remember that furniture moving
with us from address to address in the house-hopping days of my
youth, back when my parents were habitually outrunning the rent,
each other, their own demons, or all three. The furniture stayed in
pretty good shape, too, considering the abuse I personally put it
through. There was an end table in particular, with clapboard cabinet
doors, which I'd often crawl into and close up behind me. Sometimes
I'd remain curled up in there for long periods, smelling the lasting
fragrance of fine wood, eavesdropping.

It was there I was hiding when I heard my mother fall down
the stairs, followed loudly by my angry father, who, it turns out, had
pushed her. I forget what they were arguing about, but it sure was a
roof-rattler. He wasn't done when she was finished falling, either. Not
by a long shot. It was probably the longest period I ever spent curled
up inside the end table. I wouldn't come out even after my mother finished crying, either, because I could feel the anger still there, weighting the air like dismal humidity. Finally my mother spoke, and I was
surprised at how strong she sounded after having just fallen down the
stairs and all. "If you ever, ever, goddamn lay a goddamn hand on
me again," she said evenly, "I will throw you out like the goddamn
trash."

It was then that they heard me whimpering inside the end table.
They opened the door and tried to coax me out, but I wouldn't come
out for a long while. Life wasn't exactly a bubblegum factory for us all
after that, but my father never did lay another goddamn hand on my
mother again.

WE WERE WARNED BEFORE WE TOOK OFF from Atlanta about the state
of the New Orleans Airport, told to "prepare ourselves," as the entire
B concourse had been converted into a rudimentary morgue. On the
way there, a Federal Air Marshall further expounded that morgue might
not be the right word. "Dumping ground is more like it," he said, as
bodies had been simply shunted in that area, some still slumped in the
airport wheelchairs that had been commandeered as provisional gurneys to get them there. Once we landed, it would be six hours before
our people would be ready to leave. "You can wait here," he told me.
"You don't need to go out there. The place is contaminated."

But upon arrival, I was the first one off the plane. I've always been
that way. Even against my better judgment, I seldom pass up a chance
to ogle catastrophe, dead bodies included. My own father's funeral
was open-casket, and my mother graciously gave us, her teenage kids,
the option of not viewing him in that state. "You can wait here," she
said. I was the only one of my siblings who went in. I stood with him
a long while, wondering if I could run my fingers through his hair.
Finally I did. It was his hair all right, and I was surprised that his hair
was there but he was not. In the end I wish I hadn't seen him like that;
I wish my last memory of him could have been the last time I saw
him alive, when he was making cocktail sauce, adding the horseradish
very gingerly. "You just need the tiniest bit," he said. "The tiniest bit
is enough. It flavors everything else."

He was from Birmingham, and he used to talk about New Orleans like it was some kind of Emerald City, an enchanted wonderland. Even during his surprise last days, he used to constantly recount
how he once saw Louis Armstrong at Preservation Hall. "You walk
down the street," he used to say, "and you hear music coming out of
every doorway. I heard that trumpet and walked inside, and there he
was." It was like my father lived on that memory, kept it protected like
a treasured talisman, and pulled it out often to ward off the harshness
of a world that would relegate a man who loves music and the magic
of New Orleans to an efficiency apartment and a job at a used car lot
adjacent to LAX.

So when I was sixteen, I went to New Orleans and decided to
stay a good while, moving in with my hotel's maid when I ran out of
money. Her name was Shirley and she had an Afro like a perfect daffodil. One night I took her to Gunga Din's on Bourbon Street to watch
the mangy drag queens insult the audience. That one tiny bit that
I did-"taking her out on the town," as she called it-was enough
to brightly color the rest of our relationship. After that she refused
to charge me rent anymore. "You keep your money," she insisted,
and I am still astounded by her kindness. On another day we walked
through the French Quarter and stopped to listen to a child play the
violin on the street corner. A crowd formed, and an elderly man asked
Shirley to dance. He spun her through the street in beautiful, pitchperfect ballroom maneuvers, his posture so erect and his face so proud,
his steps so achingly graceful. In light of Hurricane Katrina, it is an
almost unbearable memory.

That day the New Orleans airport was a lot like the city itself:
dead but not dead, animated by oddities that should not be there, like
the National Guardsman who pulled the Jetway to our plane, and
the tented "hospital" on the tarmac where actual surgeries were performed, and the Red Cross workers, and the makeshift morgue. Most
people had a gun or a badge or both, and those who didn't, the minority, were evacuees. They wandered aimlessly in clothes that were not
theirs and, oddly, almost all of them were wearing brand-new baseball
caps bearing industry logos.

I did not make it to the morgue because a truck had pulled up a
few hours beforehand with a litter of sixteen puppies, which were each
almost immediately adopted by disaster workers, who then walked
them on improvised leashes throughout the atrium. It was probably
almost the only thing that could have brought light into the eyes of
these bereft people, and in the end that was worth seeing more than
a makeshift morgue.

In all, it made me wonder about the world, the sorrow and loss,
how lasting that is, how thick and insurmountable it seems, and then
I saw puppies. And then I remembered how an elderly gentleman
once danced in the street with a kind-hearted cleaning lady-held her
in his arms like the perfect daffodil that she was-and I remembered
the beauty of that, the aching grace of that, and suddenly I realized the
tiniest bit is enough. The tiniest bit flavors the rest.