Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (12 page)

Lord knows I could have used a teacher like Doug when I was
in high school. If I did, maybe someone would have noticed when
I dropped out. I remember we had just moved and were set to face
yet another new school, when the administrators had bewilderingly
trusted me with my own school file to hand to my first-period teacher
to announce my arrival and commence my registration. But instead
of going to the classroom and thereby commencing another period of
painful adjustment, I simply walked straight to the parking lot, got in
my '69 VW Bug, and drove to the beach. After that I was happily lost
in a crack, since my teachers, who didn't know to expect me, could
not apprise the administrators and subsequently my mother of my
absences. It was an ideal situation, I thought, and one that lasted three
months. I would probably still be on that beach to this day if not for
Kim turning me in.

At the time I thought it was because she was jealous, as every day
when I dropped her off at school she had to go to class while I could
U-turn my way to the beach and wallow another day away. But Kim didn't hate school like me; in fact, she was almost the opposite of me
in every way. Where I was brusque, she was sweet, and while I had
the soul of a sea urchin, she had the soul of a saint. She would join
chess clubs while I befriended pyros behind the library and made fun
of chess-club joiners. In fact, I often made the difficult transition to
new schools even worse for her than they had to be, as sometimes my
spikey-souledness would direct itself at her in the hallways.

I bet I know the real reason Kim might have turned me in. High
school is hell enough when you know everyone, let alone when you
don't. When I think of those months I left my little sister to make
her way through another new school by herself-as soft-hearted
and therefore ill-equipped as she was to withstand the cruelty of her
peers-while I lived like a sand hobo, it's about all I can do to keep
from calling her to beg her forgiveness. We all have our demons to
deal with, and for all of my negative, misanthropic crustiness, I was
Kim's own personal demon. And she was grateful for my presence,
because it meant she didn't have to face those kids alone.

THE LAST TIME I WAS IN MUNICH, I REMEMBER thinking I had better ways of wasting my time besides going to a toy museum. In fact,
I seriously think I would have had more fun pushing buttons up my
nostrils, as Kim did when she was three. I remember it really well,
how my father was dashing for the car keys, bellowing about how Kim
had shoved a button up her nose and now we had to take her to the
hospital to crack open her nasal cavity and dig it out. At that point my
sister, who was brilliant even at three (other than the button shoving),
convinced my father she was just kidding and hadn't shoved anything
anywhere. Then three years later she had to get her head X-rayed on
account of how she somehow used it to pound a hole in our living
room wall (all I know is that it was hardly my fault at all), and I'm
told that the doctor clipped the film on the light tray, peered closely
at the outline of Kim's skull, and exclaimed softly, "She has a button
all up in her head." After that Kim got to stay in the hospital for a few
days, where they served her hot chocolate every time she asked for it.
So I'm not kidding when I said I'd have more fun shoving buttons up
my nostrils than visiting a toy museum in Munich.

The toy museum came up every time we flew to Munich, as inevitably there would be a crew member who had never been, and just as
inevitably they would try to enlist me, the German-interpreter flight
attendant, to come along and translate everything.

First, I have to say, I am a lousy translator. What I don't know, I
make up. Once, way back before I could say no, I got shanghaied by the crew into attending a tour of a castle outside of Frankfurt, where
I was to serve as the interpreter to the actual tour guide. At the end
of the tour, I had my fellow crew members believing that German
royalty of the Renaissance era fertilized their gardens by sticking their
actual asses out their turret windows to crap on the flower beds below.
But in my defense I'm almost positive the tour guide really said that.

The toy museum, though, I had avoided all this time and I didn't
plan on deviating. The German word for toy,
spielzeug, for example, translates literally
to play device, which is a damn boring
way to refer to something supposedly
fun, if you ask me. I envisioned the
museum with row after row of old
windup play devices encased behind
glass. All of them made from wood
probably, with placards before them that
my bad German would butcher into warped
facsimiles of their real meaning. "It says here," I would probably have
said, "that this was painted with authentic human earwax."

I bet not even one of those toys would be as fun as the mess of
electrical stuff I used to get as a kid. I remember one in particular, a
set of plug-in metal molds that came with tubes of colored goop made
from nuclear, cancer-inducing polypropylene, probably. You would
squirt the goop onto the molds, which were in the shape of flowers,
and then heat it up. The metal plates got so hot we could have used
them to cauterize freshly amputated limbs. So what if we burned our fingers-we had a lovely collection of little choke-hazard-shaped rubber flowers to show for it.

But Kim's favorite toy did not even need to be plugged in. In
fact it was a windup monkey that never left her side, with the fake fur
rubbed down to just a rough nubbiness, pretty much. When wound
up, it did the same thing, again and again, as far as I could tell. But for
some reason it did other things for my sister. Somehow it performed
all kinds of wondrous feats and mischief. Once we discovered Kim in
the bottom bunk, with her monkey next to her, hanging by its feet. "I
caught him cheating at cards," she said. Another time we found her
with her head festooned in fresh daisies, brought to her, she said, by
the windup monkey. For me, though, the monkey never cheated at
cards or picked flowers; it just did the same thing again and again.

So I have never gone to the toy museum in Munich. I don't see
the appeal of play devices behind a locked partition, things that if
you wound them up, would do the same thing over and over again.
Maybe I was worried that I'd realize that I was hardly any different,
that maybe I should be more like my little sister, who saw such wonder in simple things, and who would have loved that museum and the
treasures it held. But I had routinely been coming to Munich for over
a decade, and I knew what I liked to do. I liked to lock my door, for
one, and rest my rough nubbiness until it was time to wind myself up
again.

I'M HERE IN ENGLAND TRYING TO GET EXCITED about it being my last
time, seeing as how my job for the airlines has taken a total toilet spin. It
was a great job while it lasted, too-kept me equipped with somewhat of
a toehold in the world of reality. Or it did up until I should have known
the ride was over and made my way to an emergency exit. But it's hard
to let go of a safety net, even if that safety net is suffocating you.

So here it is, my last time, and the only feeling I have is the vague
sense that I'll miss those British prawn-flavored potato chips. That's
it. I keep looking around, expecting to be overcome with melancholy,
staving myself in case I'm suddenly fraught with despair over a future
without kidney pie and spotted dick (whatever that is), waiting for it
to hit me that this is the last time. But it doesn't.

This is a big change from my last last time in England. That was
in the '80s when I was all young, permed, and oozing sentimentality
like an untreated wound. I was a different person then, but England
was different, too. It was a hell of a lot smellier, for one, and there
were no automated teller machines that could suck money out of my
American bank account-if I'd had one with money in it. Instead I
had my mother's American Express card, which was supposed to be
used for emergencies, and I remember calling her once to say I'd used
it to buy beer during finals, and she'd said that sounded like an emergency to her.

I remember while I was at the bank to extract cash for that occasion, I somehow crossed paths with an elderly gentlewoman, who felt perfectly within her right to clout me on the head with her cane. It
confused me so much I simply gawked back at her, certain it was an
accident, but she raised her cane again and I had to tear out of there.

I still don't know what I did to raise her ire, but to this day it's a
little disquieting to recall. People really don't expect handsome society
ladies to walk into banks and start beating on people with their canes,
so unless you're the one getting beat on, it goes fairly unnoticed. I
could have called out for help, but I understood intrinsically that no
one would believe me, so I just got out of the way. Besides, abuse is
very embarrassing when you are the subject of it; that is why the truly
abused-unless they hopefully learn otherwise-rarely speak up.

On the same street as the bank there was a disheveled old maniac
who sat at her window every morning and shrieked the most creative
insults at everyone who passed underneath. Her place was across from
the bus stop, so her wrath was unavoidable. "Godless whore!" she
screamed to me and my friends. It was a great way to start the day. I
used to scream back at her until my friend Clay, another American,
clapped his hand over my mouth one day and begged me not to disrespect her.

"Jesus God," I laughed at him. "She just called you a weak-kneed
nutless wanker, and I can't talk back?"

But he pleaded with me. He explained that she was the aunt
of his landlord, and how she suffered in the concentration camps of
Austria during the Second World War, and now here she was with a
weakened mind, left to scream verbal abuses from her balcony until
the end of her days.

"Really?" I asked, getting choked up.

"No," he said. "But it could be."

I punched him. But still, after that I never yelled back at the lady.
Clay's words had resonated with me, and I came to the further conclusion that people in pain, for whatever reason, often seek to intensify it
by abusing others in hopes it will garner an agonizing retaliation.