Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (25 page)

The last job Daniel had, a six-year stint as an instructor at the same
privately owned mental-health facility for emotionally damaged children where Grant used to work, made certain to dump his ass within
days of his becoming eligible for said pot-of-gold benefits package, if I
recall. So now Daniel is looking to be a cog in the quagmire, just one
gerbil among thousands on a big wheel where the bigwigs are too busy
making money to discriminate when one of them is getting close to
crossing over into the tenured territory of the "benefits-worthy." But
there's a cost. There really is.

"Hollis, I don't have a choice. I've worked all my life, and look
at me," he splays his arms toward me across the table. "My hands are
empty."

I wish I could answer that, but the truth is I'm hardly in a position to talk. For years I've been balancing on the line that is supposed
to separate the sanctuary of a corporate job from the uncertain abyss
of entrepreneurism. It looks mighty similar on both sides of the fence,
so if you have to jump, you might as well do so on the side that lets
you dictate your own time. My brother is now an entrepreneur, which
I have no idea what that means in his case, except to say that when
he's a hundred years old and empty-handed, at least his hands will be
empty because he'd personally used up what could have been in them,
rather than having tossed it all fresh and lovely at the feet of a corporation in exchange for the nebulous promise of future security.

I look at Daniel's hands, which literally are the hands of an artist,
and I'm pained and selfish in my regret that they'll be doing anything
other than creating more beautiful pieces like those of his that hang in
local art galleries-warm and lovely work with an amazing depth that
took years and years to perfect. Daniel's hands are still on the table,
outstretched, so I put mine in his and squeeze. "Your hands," I say,
"are not empty."

I SUPPOSE IT'S SAYING SOMETHING THAT GRANT did not die, though
technically it could still happen. It's true that he presently seems to be
up and walking around in a kind of quasi-state of okay-ness, but he
could still have one of those freak neck fractures or something, like in
the urban myth when that guy walked around seemingly fine after a
fender bender, then six days later someone slapped him on the back
hello and he dropped down dead on the spot. So I have been slapping
Grant on the back plenty since his car accident last week, but so far
nothing.

"Ouch," he'd say. "Stop that."

"You pussy," I taunted him.

He did complain about a general stiffness, though, which I guess
is to be expected after you've called all your friends to tell them you
went through the windshield of your car; Not that Grant went through
the windshield of his car, it's just that he called and told everybody he
did. "And my car is totaled," he groaned over the phone.

This, of course, I had to see. He'd wrecked it right at the corner
of North Highland and Greenwood Avenues, one of the most visible
intersections in the world. Nine years ago, I got blotto drunk at that
intersection while waiting for the Olympic torch relay to finally go by,
and to this day I still encounter people who recognize me as the fool
who thought it would be fun to crawl on the hood of the lead car as
it tried to inch its way through the crowd. In my mind I lay there all
sexy, like Michelle Pfeiffer on the piano in The Fabulous Baker Boys, but in reality, as it has been recounted to me over the years, I was
simply sprawled awkwardly on the grill like a dead moose. So I find it
fitting that Grant suffered public humiliation in the same place.

Even before the car wreck, it was becoming a consensus that this
particular car brought out the bad in Grant. He has owned about
nineteen cars since I met him, some for even less than the mere six
weeks he'd had this one, but none of them caused him to careen down
side streets like a crazed Iraqi tank like this one did. It was a white,
turbo-charged 1986 convertible Chrysler Le Baron, with leather interior the color of ox blood and a body so metal-heavy you could melt
it down to make a collection of oil barges. He christened it "Joan Collins," and in six weeks he'd been ticketed twice, and that's not even
counting the time we were pulled over on our way to sneak into the
Inman Park Parade last month. That officer, who we believe was the
notorious six-foot-four transsexual police woman of the Old Fourth
Ward, simply listened to his pleadings ("Seriously, I used to be a deacon"), gave him a look that could have curdled the earth's core, and let
us go on our way. It might have mattered that Grant was not speeding
in that particular instance, or even driving, but rather he was perched
with his ass on the back headrest as he bellowed through a bullhorn,
"Lies, lies, it's all lies!"

Later, after Grant told me of the accident and its aftermath, I
had the choice of first going to see him or see the wreckage of Joan
Collins, so of course I chose the latter. He'd made the accident sound
like a scene straight out of Hollywood Babylon, with blood and twisted
shrapnel mixed with bits of Jayne Mansfield's brains splattered on the asphalt along with a little dead Chihuahua and an empty-yet-perfectlyintact whiskey bottle. Who could resist that? Yet when I arrived there
was barely any evidence of a disaster. The crowd had dispersed, and
Joan Collins had been pushed to a metered parking space and looked
to have suffered a couple of drastic collapses of the steering wheel and
bumper variety. Oh, and there was a crack in her windshield. "Bitch,"
I yelled at Grant as I approached him soon afterward, "when you tell
me you totaled your car and went through the windshield, I wanna
see some carnage! Look at you, you do not even have any blood in
your hair!" Then I slapped him on the back.

He was recuperating not in a hospital but on the patio of The
Local, where he actually expected to bartend that night. "He looks
terrible," I told Keiger. And he did. Car crashes take a lot out of you,
even if you don't leave any of your brains or blood behind. Plus Grant
kept clutching his big barrel chest, which had been what slammed
against Joan's steering wheel and caused it to collapse. Lary had been
duly alerted and was on the way with a supply of pirated painkillers,
but in the meantime Grant looked like a wreck himself, so I slapped
him on the back again.

"Ouch, stop that."

"You pussy," I said again, and we laughed a little, me and Grant,
with my hand on his back and his hand on his chest. Seeing us like
that, you would have thought I was looking down at Grant's big head
right then and being damn happy he didn't have blood in his hair.
You would have sworn I was thanking sweet Jesus that he had walked
away, however stiffly, from the wreckage of Joan Collins.

DANIEL, WHO IS NORMALLY NOBLE, COULDN'T STOP laughing when I
told him I actually attend all the requisite seminars at the Department
of Labor in order to receive my weekly unemployment checks. "Isn't
that the rule?" I asked.

"You loser," Daniel laughed, "you're supposed to charm your way
past that."

Me? Charm? My first day there I got in a fight with the security
guard, but who can blame me? He makes you stand in line when there
is no line. In fact, there is no reason for him to be there at all, as everyone there is as docile as diseased livestock. It's not like there's actual
money back there in those cubicles we can steal, though there are
staplers and stuff. I could actually use another stapler. But as it was, I
was just using one of the computers in the big bank of computers they
have there for us to use, or so one would think.

"Young lady, you can't use that computer," the security guard told
me, and whenever people tell me I can't do something I usually take it as
a polite suggestion, because in my book polite suggestions can be politely
declined. "Thank you, officer," I said, "but I don't need your help, because
as you can see I am perfectly capable of using this computer."

"No, you need to stand in line. All those people are before you,"
he said, pointing to an area that was, as far as I could tell, completely
empty, as were all the other computers.

"What people?" I asked, looking around. The place is bigger than
an airplane hangar.

"Those people," he said, and he waved his arm to indicate that,
in the distance, there were some tiny antlike people barely perceptible
on the earth's curve, people who not only were nowhere near us but
were not even in line. They were milling around in a whole other part
of the horizon in a different time zone.

"You're kidding," I said, and he gave me the look that security
guards have to remind people they've got a gun and they're not afraid
to invent reasons to use it, which made me pause.

Because right then I was reminded of a guy I met on the island
in Greece way back when being jobless was a joke and no big deal.
I'd been hanging there for weeks, funding my beer intake by beating
people at pool at a place called Zanzibar, where the owner, a meanhearted round man named Marco, charged backpackers one dollar to
take a cold shower from an open hose located a few feet from the cafe
tables.

It was a big perk, I tell you, but I couldn't stay there forever. Soon
I had to begin the journey home to try for that job as a Xerox copy
salesperson (or whatever) that my comparative literature professor
told me my degree in writing would get me. Actual writing itself only
got me to Greece, where I frolicked with naked Danish backpackers
in that shower every day, and I was practically certain there were rules
that said you couldn't earn a living doing that. Or I had at least been
told there were rules that said that.

The man who owned Zanzibar also had the taxi syndicate under
his thumb, so it was necessary to go through him to pre-order a taxi
to get you to the port early enough to catch the ferry that morning, as the bus wouldn't arrive in time, he said. That was the rule. Everybody
did it. "Otherwise, you'll have to spend the night at the port," Marco
said.

But the morning I was to leave, my pre-dawn, pre-ordered, prepaid, pre-save-my-ass taxi didn't arrive, so I pounded on Marco's door
until he called me a "fat brown-cow bitch" and chased me off his
property waving a rotten melon. There was nothing for me to do but
catch the bus to the port anyway, since I couldn't stay in the village
another night, not with Marco and his melon after me. I was worried
about how I was going to fend for myself alone overnight at a Greek
dock until the bus pulled into the port and there was the ferry sitting
there as patiently as a big basset hound, not scheduled to leave for a
few hours yet. I couldn't believe my luck until the immigration officer
told me the ferry is always scheduled to leave after the bus arrives.

"But Marco told me the rule was to get a taxi," I said.

"Marco," the official laughed, "he invented that rule to make a
living."

Now here I was years later looking at this security officer at the
unemployment office doing the same thing, inventing rules to make
a living. He can't have people using computers willy-nilly, looking up
vocations, getting jobs and stuff, now can he? If everyone got jobs,
what would happen to his? "Those are the rules," he repeated. So I
left. I can invent rules, I thought. I can. For one, that rule about it
not being possible to earn a living while frolicking with naked Danish
backpackers or any other way I want? My first rule is that that rule is
crap.