Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (17 page)

"I'm telling you," Lary keeps insisting, "just fling a few crack
lighters around for the firemen to sift out afterward, and no one will
question a thing."

Lary has been hoping I'd burn my houses down for years now,
in one way or another, as he's feeling harried because he is usually
the second one I call during the unrelenting storm of broken crap
that is homeownership. Grant is usually
the first, because Grant has numbers to call and a passel of reliable fabrications to claim, and
before you know it the entire
citywide infrastructure is lining up to take the blame and
send trucks to make things
right.

Also, he's usually pretty
generous about imparting this
wisdom to me. But I'm not talking
to Grant these days because he banished
me to the storage closet of his gallery during the holiday art tour
at the loft complex where he lives. All I wanted to do was set up
a little stand to display a few homemade potholders and possibly
some finger paintings by my little girl. Lord Christ, what was so
bad about that? But Grant said it was his show and even if he gave
me a tiny space in his gallery, it would make everything be about
me, and the one thing that pisses the crap out of me is when Grant accuses me of being self-involved just because I want to commandeer his special event.

So it's straight to Lary this time, because for all his felonious
bloviating, Lary is really good at finding what is wrong and fixing it.
The problem is that he fancies himself a creator, not a fixer, and he
would rather burn the broken thing to the ground and build a whole
new thing. A bigger, better thing with turrets and whirligigs, preferably. I used to be like that, too, but now I like to keep the things I
have and simply fix them when they break. I never knew how to fix
things before, but I've been watching Lary fix stuff for fifteen years
and now I fancy myself somewhat handy. I even have a tool belt. We
never covered leaky underground pipes, though.

"I'm not burning the house down," I tell him.

"Then call Grant," Lary suggests. "He was just saying yesterday
how bad he felt for hurting your feelings."

I did call Grant, but he was damn discourteous for someone in
the throes of regret. "Bitch, I see that you don't want to hear what I'm
saying," he said. "I am not sorry." But I did hear what he was saying, I
just disagreed with it. So we screamed at each other for a few minutes
until things were better between us.

I still have a busted water pipe, but at least I also have these two
beloved bottom-fish who are my friends, one who didn't get burned
to the ground and replaced, and the other who is good at finding what
is wrong and fixing it.

MY PLUMBER, BEAR, SAYS I HAVE WATER ISSUES. She says this while
covered in mud she dug up from my front yard in order to access the
broken pipe that is the reason my water bill was bigger than my car
payment last month. She has the piece of pipe in her hand, with the
little pinhole in it where the rust had finally corroded through after
forty years.

"Major water issues," she reiterates.

"All that water leaked out of that tiny little pinhole?" I ask.

"That's all it takes," she says.

I would marry Bear if it didn't promise to be such a complicated
union, the biggest obstacles being that she already has a wife and I'm
not gay. So I'll have to thank her with actual payment for her services
instead. But this is not the end of my water issues. Both of my other
properties have sprung leaks as well. The house where I actually reside
is the worst all of a sudden. For some reason, whenever I run the
washing machine, the bathroom floor gets flooded.

"What the hell is happening?" I gripe.

"Issues," Bear says, shaking her head as she hands me my bill.

Milly says I have angered the water gods, but everything is an
angered god to her these days because of the Japanese anime-inspired
cartoon marathon she watched with her cousin over Thanksgiving. I
don't think I have angered any gods any more than normally lately,
but it does seem weird that these water issues have popped up at all
my addresses all at once and all of a sudden.

I'm starting to think it was easier when I didn't even have any
address at all to call my own. When I was growing up, my parents
always rented our houses, and if there was ever a water issue we would
just move. We moved four times in one year once, and it's funny, but
we always lived near water, come to think of it, on either the California or Florida coast. Now the closest ocean to me is four hours away.
The last time I drove there, I heard Shirley MacLaine on NPR talking
about her own leaky pipes, I swear this is true, and how she went to
an Indian shaman and was told that, because she had been refusing to
cry herself lately, her house had begun to cry for her.

"Jesus, what a bionic nutball," I said to myself, even though I love
Shirley MacLaine and thought she kicked ass as Aurora in Terms of
Endearment. In fact, I remember I saw that movie just as I was about
to move abroad to study in Oxford, England. I watched it with my
favorite boyfriend of all time, Jeff, who was a surfer and practically
lived in the water. At the end of the movie, I turned to see that he'd
been crying and I, like, laughed, because this was Jeff, and Jeff didn't
cry.

"Pussy," I teased him, and finally he did laugh, but weakly, because
in a few days I would leave him. I was off to commence the whole life
I had before me and move away again, this time to England, which is
surrounded by water too, only you can't really surf there like you can
in California and Florida, and you'd be surprised at how homesick an
unsurfable ocean makes you when you're used to the other kind.

Up until then I had never even owned a coat; all I had was one
pair of jeans and twenty pairs of shorts, and I rarely wore shoes. I'd fish for blowfish off the Melbourne Beach pier barefoot. I keep thinking
about that these days, about how I hardly ever wore shoes when I lived
in Florida even though the concrete they used to lay the pavement
was mixed with broken seashells. That pavement reminded me of the
Terrazzo floors my mother was so proud of in our home at the time,
which, of course, was rented. She always said that when she finally got
around to buying her own home, she would have those floors installed.
I myself never understood the appeal of Terrazzo floors because to me
they looked like they were made from melted bowling balls.

My mother never got around to owning her own home, let alone
one with her own Terrazzo floors. She died in a modest cottage surrounded by water right there next to a fishing pier in San Diego. Here
she was, a Southern gal who couldn't swim, dying by the ocean after
having raised a surfer girl who in turn would give birth to a Southern
girl. I'd laugh at the full circle except I don't have a lot of time to reflect
these days. And if I did, I wouldn't laugh at that but at how I became
a girl who went from never having a home of her own to one who had
too many, with none of them near water, yet all of them crying.

THIS
IS
MY
SECOND
TIME
TO
TOMBSTONE,
Arizona,
which
shouldn't
be a surprise, as this is a family trip, and graveyards have always been
a big draw for my family. Some of my fondest childhood reflections
were of those times when my mother packed us all into the family
Fairlane and off we headed to the local cemetery to watch the deer eat
flowers off the fresh graves. Good times.

Anyway, Tombstone bills itself as the place "too tough to die,"
and you gotta admit, for a place hardly bigger than a few city blocks
situated smack in the middle of the giant-ass dust basket of the Arizona desert, it's fairly astounding that it's still around. It's the cactus
of little towns-not the flower, mind you, because flowers die-but
the cactus. By all accounts, it should have shriveled up and croaked
long ago, but it survived on its own bloody notoriety as a roadside
attraction, of sorts, for those traveling between Tucson and Bisbee.
FAMOUS GUNFIGHT SITE OF THE O.K. CORRAL! billboards blared.
The nearby Boothill Cemetery drew attention, too. Years had to pass
for that to happen, though, as the old dead are a lot more acceptable
as a tourism curiosity then the fresh dead; For example, you can't
really charge money to see the fresh dead, that's something you just
have to luck into during your daily activities.

So the road to Tombstone stayed open, and the people here nurtured that tiny tributary with what they had: a gunfight site, a graveyard, a few former brothels turned bar-and-grills, and gift shops that
sell re-creations of authentic ad bills, such as the 1881 Boothill Cem etery advertisement that boasts, WHY WALK AROUND HALF DEAD
WHEN WE CAN BURY YOU FOR ONLY $22.00? One by one, the people
stopped by and a lot of them stayed, many of them exactly the kind of
outcast you'd expect to be attracted to a place like this-the handlebar-mustache, silver-spur-wearing saloon-keeper kind. So Tombstone
grew, but not too much, and today it's a lovely little enclave to visit.

I'm here to spend Thanksgiving at the home of my brother, Jim,
to whom I've hardly spoken in years. Kim, to whom I talk all the time,
insisted I could afford to extract myself from my landlord duties now
that I've gotten my rental property to a workable calm. I tried to get
out of it, but unsuccessfully. I'm reminded of when we were kids and
our parents used to assign a "manners monitor" to the dinner table,
someone who would remind us to keep our elbows off the table and
not chew like a chimpanzee. Kim made the best manners monitor,
so she was assigned the duty a lot. When our father died it happened
suddenly, and we were all too young to behave horribly toward each
other. Then our mother went and died a slower death just a decade
later, just as we were blossoming into maturity but still not mature
enough to keep from blaming each other for her sufferings, and that
type of pain and blame will last forever if you let it. Believe me, I was
the worst offender.

Kim kept communication open between us, intervening every
time one of us was in danger of estranging ourselves from the other
forever. In short, she is still our manners monitor. She practically had
to stick a hook in my tongue and drag me to Nicaragua to see our
sister Cheryl, who probably moved there to get away from us. But I've been back on my own twice since. It turns out I love that place and I
still love my big sister, too.