Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (8 page)

THE OTHER DAY THERE WAS A SUITCASE SITTING in the center of the
freeway, and cars were swerving every which way to avoid hitting it,
not that hitting it would have been so bad. In fact, I wish someone
had. It was just a framed canvas bag that might have gotten caught
in your car grill for a bit but not done much permanent damage or
anything. Still, though, people were giving it a wide margin. Traffic
careened around it, people were late for things, and days were rearranged. All because of a suitcase sitting there.

Christ, will somebody move that thing? I thought as I angled
around it. I would have done it myself, but I had my child there to
think about.

In fact it was her big day at performance camp at the Art Station in
Stone Mountain, and when we finally arrived there, it was amid a lastminute panic to rewrite the play's script, because another parent had
complained about the play's content, in particular the part of the "vestal
girls," which was the little-girl equivalent to the vestal virgins of Roman
mythology. The rankled parent had complained the part indoctrinated
the young girls who played it into "militant lesbianism."

Personally, I think a vestal virgin is a much better role model for a
little girl than the parade of infamous mini-crack whores invading the
media these days; not that I have anything against mini-crack whores.
I don't wanna judge. I know they must have mothers themselves,
probably, and maybe those mothers burst with pride when their girls get out of a limo, for example, and angle those naked crotches so well
for the photographers, or when their daughters' pupils are dilated so
prettily in their mug shots. I just personally hope my girl grows up to
aspire for more. But who am I? I'm just a parent actually there to see
her child perform in the play, rather than a parent who was not planning to show up but nonetheless fired off an e-mail that had everyone
engaged in the turmoil of rewriting the script.

"The vestal virgins were actually priestesses," I suggested, drawing
from the memory of my own grade-school mythology classes, which,
amazingly, did not steer me down the road to adolescent sodomy,
eventual weapon-toting lesbianism, back-alley abortions, or death
and the ultimate destruction of Earth. I did go through a bit of a
pyromaniac phase, though, but maybe that's because matchbooks and
cigarettes were kept in a candy bowl on our coffee table. I remember
I was in a Christmas recital then, too, and my father missed every
rehearsal, which was fine with me. I didn't want him embarrassing
me by showing up all five-o'clock-shadowed and boozy-breathed, but
when it came time for the actual performance, he was there in the
audience, pointing his lit cigarette at me with pride. I do remember
that. I absolutely remember that.

"In fact," I continued, "the vestal virgins were the only female
priests in Roman mythology. So let's change the name of the part." So
this change, among others, was agreed upon. The part of the chorus
that included, "Do we get married? No!" was subtracted, because God
forbid a little girl grow up to be independent and empowered outside
of wedlock.

No one thought twice before making the decision to rewrite the
script, because any decision otherwise would have excluded the girl from
participating, and in the face of decisions like this, it's always better to be
kind than to be right. That is why I'm so impressed with the camp staff.
This is "drama" camp, after all, and I can hardly think of a better way to
equip your child to embark on life's journey than to bestow her with the
flexibility to navigate the dramatic and circumvent the obstinate.

The girl was elated and the play went under way, with the new lines
all the more hilarious for being mangled in their delivery. Afterward the
ovations were made, the cake was served, the pictures were taken, and
the parents were proud. Nobody mentioned the missing parent who'd
caused the ruckus at curtain time. It was over. It was forgotten.

But on the ride home I thought about the suitcase sitting in the
center of the road again, and all the cars that were redirected around it
as it sat undisturbed, and how people can be like that sometimes, sitting undisturbed in the middle of everything, admonishing the chaos
around them while obtuse to being the cause of it. I used to be the
kind of person who would get out and move it, but now I just go
around because I have this kid here to think about.

So as I drove I considered that Christmas recital when I was seven,
when my jobless dad found the time to brush his teeth and tuck in his
shirt long enough to sit in the audience and listen to me sing about
the Virgin Mary and other militant lesbians. His proud face is what
I was thinking about when we came across the suitcase again. It had
been knocked to the side of the road, but other than that it was still
sitting there, having gone nowhere.

I DON'T REMEMBER MUCH ABOUT MY first-grade teacher except that she
had a sweaty neck, yelled a lot, and used to throw chalk at us.

The year before, as a kindergartner, I could hear her screaming at
her class all the way from across the blacktop, and I'd marvel at how
loud the lady with the damp yellow bob could holler. The next year,
when I walked into class on my first day of first grade and realized she
would be my teacher, I tried not to grimace. I tried mightily to keep
a straight face as I slouched toward my seat, but my countenance was
as transparent as the promise of a politician. It wasn't long before my
snarky towhead became the primary target for flying chalk.

Milly is in first grade now, and yesterday she brought home her
weekly behavior report. It's usually a glowing testimony to her future
as a national ambassador or something, or at least that's what I think,
inasmuch as a series of smiley faces could be interpreted as testimony.
Yesterday, though, I learned there was actually a repertoire of faces used
to rate a child's behavior in first grade, among them straight faces.

"What's with all these straight faces on your behavior report?"
I asked. All of a sudden my daughter's face, which is itself usually
smiley, stopped to stare at me with eyes as large as lunar surfaces, her
lip quivering, her lashes suddenly balancing two perfect teardrops like
large liquid diamonds. This, folks, is my daughter's guilty face.

Her explanation, punctuated by precision-timed mini-sobs, basically laid the blame on a collection of culprits that included, but was not
limited to, everyone else in the world, including Spider-Man.

I knew she was waffling, but really, I thought to myself, they're
just straight faces. It's not like they're frowny faces; God forbid she
ever got a frowny face. If she ever brought home a frowny face, I
might as well learn iPhoto right now so I could airbrush the prison
tats out of our future family photographs. Then, in the middle of my
own inner waffling, I heard her mention something about pushing a
classmate by the "owl-pellet table."

An owl pellet is a dry wad of indigestible animal parts that has
been regurgitated out the gizzard of an owl, and they're full of little
bones and teeth and beaks and feathers and other awesome things kids
love. Seriously, nothing is cooler to a first-grader than a big chunk of
dried-out bird vomit, which might explain the eagerness with which
the class gathered around the table, and might explain why my child
pushed another child, and might explain why I thought for a few
nanoseconds that kids will be kids and let's all go on with our straightfaced little lives as though nothing happened.

But I remembered an incident on a train when I lived in Zurich
back when I was in my twenties and never thought I'd have kids at all,
let alone care about straight faces. There were only four of us in the
train, including a mother with her three-year-old and a green-haired
heroin addict covered in so many piercings it looked like his lips alone
had been impaled by the contents of an entire toolbox. I sat behind the
mother and kept peeking with trepidation at the drug addict behind me
so I could make sure to duck in case he had a mind to unzip his pants
and urinate.

But it was the three-year-old who was the hoodlum. The little
monster kept head-butting me from over his mother's shoulder. At
first I said nothing, because surely she would do something to control him, but instead she simply cooed at him with soothing German
murmurings that had all the effect of a gnat's attempt to stop a Mack
truck. Then, get this, the boy spit on me. It was a sizeable loogie that
landed right at the corner of my mouth.

Of course I had to say something, so I did, expecting the mother
to at least throw the troll out the train window in admonishment or
something. But surprisingly, she simply looked at me with the eyes of
a vapid raccoon and said, "I don't believe in conventional discipline."

I was agog. What else could I be? Then the train stopped, and
the heroin addict rose from his seat to leave, but before departing he
stopped to stand beside us. I cowered, until thankfully his glare settled
on the mother in front of me, and then-I swear this is true-he spit
in her face.

"My parents," he growled as he turned to leave, "didn't believe in
conventional discipline either."

So yesterday I made sure my daughter apologized to those she
wronged. She continued to work the quiver-lipped and moony-eyed
angle, hoping to turn me to her side, but in response-just as it was
that time on the train all those years ago-I remained surprisingly resolute, considering the fact that it was all I could do to keep a straight
face.

MILLY HAS A PURPLE BUNNY SHE BOUGHT from the Cathedral of St.
Philip Thrift with her cupcake money. This bunny, she exclaims, has
the ability to bestow super powers on people. Here is the process: She
asks you to hold the bunny, which you will do because it's impossible
not to, and she says, "Now you have your super power," and then she
takes the bunny back.

"What is my super power?" you ask.

"You can run really fast," she'll say, or "You can fly," or "You
can jump really high." My own personal super power that the bunny
bestowed on me is the ability of super strength, "like you can lift the
whole world," Milly says, but sometimes that power doesn't sound as
fun as flying or jumping really high.

"I don't feel really strong yet," I complain, but Milly tells me the
power will come when I need it.

I could have used it the other day, I tell you. The two of us plus
the purple bunny were in Washington, D.C., walking along the massive courtyard that connects all the Smithsonian museums, taking pictures of each other that optimized the images of monuments in the
background. I took one of her that made it look like the Washington
Monument was sprouting right from the top of her head, and she
took one of me that made it look like our nation's Capitol was perched
in the palm of my hand, which could serve as testimony to my super
strength if I ever need testimony of that. It was about five hundred
degrees Fahrenheit outside, and if my super strength had kicked in right then, I would have used it to spin the giant Calder sculpture in
front of the National Art Museum so fast it would have served as a fan
to cool off the entire world.