Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (32 page)

It occurred to me right then that it's probably possible for people
to go through life and never have a home, even though they may
spend every second surrounded by walls. In the end it's not until they
start collecting things they really value, and keeping them someplace
safe, that their home starts to take shape. And now Lary is sharing his
home with his new love. He'll deny it, but all addicts lie.

GRANT AND DANIEL AND I TRY TO PROVOKE Lary with torments that
he might be dating his own daughter, seeing as how he's prone to all
those prolonged fits of forgetfulness. He accomplishes the most complicated feats during these fogs, too, like erecting that entire network
of scaffolding in his kitchen. He had no idea how it came to be. He
just claims to have awakened to find it like that, as if arranged there by
a playful poltergeist. So fathering a child would have been effortless in
comparison, because the early'80s, what with the easy proliferation of
LSD and other hallucinogens, was probably just one big long stupor
for Lary.

But it's been a while since Lary woke up to find himself underneath teetering industrial trace material. These days it's all been
replaced by those thongs and other curious feminine amenities, such
as the set of amputated cat testicles she keeps with her in a jar of formaldehyde (when we heard about that, we were doubly certain those
two were related), but no matter the nature of the stuff strewn about
his place, Lary's response to it is still the same. "Where did this crap
come from?" he complains. "None of it's mine."

"What're you bitchin' about?" Grant asks him. For one, Grant
points out, Lary's got a hot young girlfriend these days, and some
pay a huge cost to have one of those, whereas the cost to Lary has
been relatively little. It's not like she demands constant body rubs
and gourmet meals coupled with a new car every month. Amazingly,
all she seems to require is a place to put her underwear. You know, other than the plants. Occasionally she'll ask Lary to marry her, but
he suffers no real punishment when he counters that with an offer to
adopt her instead, and she actually laughed when he responded to her
request for a baby with, "Sure, it would make a great parting gift."
All that plus she's covered in tattoos and keeps her cat's neutered nuts
in a jar!

"Christ, Lary," says Grant, "she's the ideal woman."

It's the crap, though, that is always the cost. If you ask me, I'm
amazed people think they can get through a relationship without
encountering any of the other person's crap at some level. And I'm not
just talking about tangible stuff, like Kotex and cat balls, but every
single cruddy nugget of emotional torture you had to encounter in
your life in order to claw yourself to the relatively safe level of livability
you've managed to reach so far. The crap is there, admit it, and trying
to keep it hidden just makes it all the more ugly once it inevitably
rears itself.

Take that time in college when I dated that Bible-thumping rich
boy, who dumped me like a load of toxic waste-took back his Bible
and everything-leaving my barely saved soul sitting there on the
cusp of relapse back into Satan's cesspool. Until then I was thinking,
Great! This guy's a Jesus freak, so by nature he's supposed to be forgiving and not all that bothered by the fact that, until I met him, I'd been
pursuing the reputation of a four-star slut. I thought I could wrap all
my lovely crap up in a box, slap a bow on it, and hand it to him like
a damn door prize. I was even kind of proud of the fact that it was
bound to be such a big box, too, for such a young person.

But it turns out the last thing he wanted was to become co-owner
of all my crap, emotional or otherwise. I could have kept it all hidden,
but if I did I'd probably be living in Colorado right now, the wife of an
overly religious car salesman. So you see, keeping it hidden just makes
it all the more ugly. That's why it's best to just get it out there, all your
lovely crap. Fling it about like confetti. Hang it from the branches of
potted plants if you have to.

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FOR THE FIRST TIME IN MY LIFE, I CAN SAY GRANT is literally full of
crap and Lary literally is not. But before I go any further, I'd just like
to note that I am as confused as anyone as to why my friends feel the
need to update me on their regularity, Daniel included. He just called
me all googly about the lovely light-headedness he felt all day after
giving himself a coffee enema.

"Promise me you'll try this," he insisted. I promised him that the
very last thing I'll ever do with a pot of decent Costa Rican is shoot
it up my ass, but Daniel was too busy chasing butterflies by then, or
whatever other beautiful pursuits the clarity of consciousness is supposed to reveal to you as part of the benefits of flooding your butt
with caffeine.

This has been going on since I met them. It's one of the things
they all have in common, this fascination with flushing their systems.
"John Wayne died with forty pounds of crap in his colon," Daniel
says. "Did you know that's true?" I do not know if that's true, but I
do know that Daniel has told me this tidbit roughly twenty-six times
over the course of our friendship as though it were the first time I've
ever heard it, and about a million other times as part of what he considers a normal conversation.

"John Wayne was literally full of shit," Daniel says.

Grant is no better. Soon after I met him nine years ago, he became
kind of addicted to colonics. I don't remember if he was gay by then
or not, but if he wasn't, I guess this habit might have served as a sort of surrogate for his future leanings. Anyway, it all sounded suspicious
to me, as the place he went to have them administered wasn't even a
clinic. "Don't you need like a license or something to shove tubes up
people's asses?" I asked, but Grant did not know and did not care.
He was too busy feeling the effects of having been flushed. Colonics, in case you don't know, cost more than a full body massage. In
Grant's case, as with any addiction, it got a little ugly. Pretty soon he
was getting them done by some guy in a van, practically. He might as
well have been hosing himself out at the do-it-yourself car wash on
DeKalb Avenue.

Believe it or not, Lary is into that stuff, too. Barring all the bourbon, acid, mail-order amphetamines, and painkillers pirated from
a willing cancer-stricken friend, Lary can be downright health conscious when it comes to putting things in his body. Whenever I go
to his place to mooch food under the guise of tending to his (still
missing) cat, the closest I can find to junk food is a bag of pistachios.
So when he announced he was about to, at the insistence of his new
girlfriend, undergo his first colonic, I was a little surprised he'd never
had one, as there are few firsts left for Lary.

"You won't believe the stuff that comes out of you!" Grant
squealed. "You're literally gonna see crayons you ate as a kid."

"Oh, my God," I said, "you see it?"

"All that stuff that's been stuck in you your whole life, you literally see it flow by in the tube."

Lary was excited, wondering if there'd be toy soldiers, heirloom
jewelry, or perhaps even his missing cat. "Think of the mysteries that can be solved," he chimed, as though Jimmy Hoffa were up in there
somewhere.

Weeks earlier, there'd been another somewhat mystery, when
Grant had awakened a few days after a minor car accident to find
that he couldn't move or breathe, not literally, but close enough. So,
of course, the first thing Grant did was call Lary, and, of course, the
first thing Lary did was drive right over, pick Grant up, and take him
to a yard sale.

"Did you check out the clothes rack?" Grant mewled from the
periphery, as Lary had propped him against the tire well of his truck to
ensure he got a good view. To Lary's credit, though, Grant had insisted
he was fine as long as he remained motionless while leaning just so.
"That way I can almost breathe. I'll be fine."

"He's not fine!" shrieked Mary Jane, a nurse who is also Lary's
perfectly lovely ex-girlfriend. They had called her when it seemed that
paralysis had started to set in. "He could have a lacerated liver or a
collapsed lung! You need to get him to the emergency room right
away!"

It turns out that the car accident had broken a few of Grant's ribs,
which resulted in so much swelling that it caused an obstruction in
his intestines. In short, Grant was suffering from a bionic case of killer
constipation, literally. Under Lary's coaching ("Cry like a baby!"),
Grant was able to procure some respectably potent painkillers. "I love
yer ass," he's been saying to me lately, all painless and happy to be past
the crap in his life, literally and otherwise. He thwacks me on the rear,
"I literally love yer ass."

I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT SAYS ABOUT A CHRISTMAS tree if a damn cat
can knock it down, but surely that can't be a good sign. Maybe I
shouldn't have my tree on top of a table, but my window is five feet
off the floor and it's the only way I can think of to make the tree look
proportional from the street. So I put it on the table and figured,
since it's fake and full of electrical wires, maybe my cats would leave it
alone. But my new cat, Petal, must be half raccoon; she even looks a
little raccoon-ish, and I, well, I wouldn't have picked her out if I'd had
a choice. Petal picked me; she kept showing up at my door to remind
me I was hers, that she'd picked me and there was not a lot I could do
about it because I was hers and that's just the way it is. So here I have
this half-raccoon cat who will climb anything, which is why I keep
finding the tree on my bed when I get home.

Not that she drags it there. My bed is next to the table where
I keep the tree, so all Petal has to do is knock the tree over and my
bed catches it. My Christmas tree has bounced on my bed more than
I have, which is saying something, so for this reason Milly is only
allowed to put "soft ornaments" on it. Even I didn't know what the
hell I meant by that, but remarkably Milly had no problem figuring
out that plenty of soft things serve quite nicely as ornaments-finger
puppets, pot holders, cookies, and old prescription-medicine canisters
to name a few. I must admit it all looks kind of pretty. To be truthful,
though, Milly could hang ornaments she made out of her own earwax
and I'd still gurgle with pride like the pathetic hen that I am. "See the angel Milly made for the tree?" I boasted to Grant and Keiger. "Is that
not amazing?"