Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (3 page)

But sometimes I was unprepared anyway. It depended on what
was being yelled. Once I got yelled at for being late, which was really
unexpected because I was always late. That was just something my
family knew about me, and it had never garnered anything more than
exasperation before.

That one day I walked through the door no more tardy than
usual (which was the equivalent to complete punctuality, if you ask
me). But for reasons that I cannot explain (except to say that they had
something to do with my brother, Jim, falling out of a tree and needing to be rushed to the emergency room because he was bleeding out
of his ear), I got yelled at but fierce.

It was not like my parents were even waiting for me, either, because
they hadn't finished rushing around grabbing towels and whatnot to sop stuff up. My gray-faced brother was lying there on the hardwood floor
of the foyer, having just been carried there by the father of the friend he
was visiting when he fell out of the tree. Jim was shaking and spewing
like a busted beer keg. He must have fallen far, I thought, because he did
not look good. Then there was the blood coming from his ear, which
had everyone yelling like panicked plane-wreck survivors.

After my parents wrapped Jim's head in a bedsheet, we all piled into
my father's Corvair and sped to the hospital, with my mother holding my
brother in her lap, which looked funny because by then he was twelve and
almost as big as she was. When we pulled up to the hospital, the doctors
made everyone back away so they themselves could pull his limp body
with his bloody mummy head out of the car and carefully place it on the
gurney; then they wheeled him through the swinging doors with my dad
by his side. My mother stayed behind, standing there in the headlights of
our car, her blouse covered in blood and vomit, wringing her hands.

When she returned to us, she noticed that my little sister, Kim,
had peed in the backseat, which normally would have set my mother
off yelling like a crazed street preacher, but instead she just sank to her
knees outside the car door.

Curiously, she reached for us and gathered us to her like we were
little life preservers in a rough sea, and held us that way for a long
while, my sisters and me, even though we didn't, as a group, smell all
that good. She didn't let us go until my dad came back to tell her my
brother would be fine except now he was deaf in that one ear. "He's
the same boy," he said, hugging her, "except now if we want him to
hear us, we'll have to yell."

I DISCOVERED MEMORY THE DAY AFTER I STOLE a necklace from a
friend's house. I was five and had pocketed the necklace while our parents boozed it up in the living room. Then when my dad got drunk
enough to start insulting my mother in front of company again, it was
time to go. The next day my mother saw me wearing the necklace and
asked where I got it, and since I had not learned to spin effectual yarns
just yet, I told a very ineffectual one instead, which my mother saw
through like cellophane. Instantly she had my friend's father on the
phone to say we'd be right over to make a big display of apology.

Lord, I did not know what the big deal was with the big display
of apology. The necklace was just a charm in the shape of a small beer
barrel on a thin silver chain, and even at five I knew that if you value
something, you don't leave it sitting under the bed with cat hair clinging
to it. And what's worse is that my mother herself was a complete klepto.
She stole ashtrays from Sambo's coffeeshop all the time. We had them
all over our house, with the logo of the little Nigerian boy being chased
by a tiger. And our kitchen dish towel was actually a bath mat taken
from Holiday Inn during our sojourn when we moved from San Fernando Valley up to Monterey, California, where my mother got a position developing computer systems after my father lost his last job selling
trailers. But like all kleptos my mother kept her own credo: Only steal
stuff from places that probably won't miss them until after you're gone,
pretty much. (This is not exactly the memory I told myself never to forget, by the way; I just remember it anyway for no particular reason.)

While we were there making the big display of apology to our
neighbor, my little sister, Kim, who evidently thought she could fly,
began to remove her blue turtleneck all of a sudden. "Fly, fly, fly," she
kept saying. Turtlenecks, I suppose, are not aerodynamic. She had
almost gotten it all the way off before my mother dove over the ottoman to stop her.

"Let her fly," the man laughed.

And that is the image I told myself never to forget, that of my
mother diving over an ottoman to keep my sister from stripping, and
our nice neighbor laughing and saying to let her fly. It just so happens that seconds before my mother dove over the ottoman, I'd had
the revelation that I could make memories, and to demonstrate it to
myself I swore I'd memorize the next instant forever. It has no significance other than it happens to be the first memory I told myself to
keep after I realized I had the power to keep them. And once I discovered the power to keep memories, it was like I couldn't stop using it.

Afterward, our neighbor showed us his workshop where he carved
wooden figurines. His specialty seemed to be the little birds that pop
out of cuckoo clocks, because shelf after shelf was packed with these
little wooden birds.

"Wow," my mother exclaimed reverently, which was unusual. I'd
never seen her act reverently around anyone, but this man had been
very gracious in the face of our big display of apology, so the least
we could do was act impressed with his pieces of workmanship. My
mother picked one up and said, "I could never carve a bird."

"Sure you can," the man said. "You just take a hunk of wood,
visualize the bird in your mind, then cut away anything that isn't the
bird."

This must have been meant to be a joke, because my mother
laughed like she was watching The Carol Burnett Show. Then we went
home and I never ever, not once, saw that man again, though years
later I would find one of these birds in my mother's effects. I don't
know whether my mother had stolen it or received it as a gift,
and she wasn't around
to tell me. But I do
remember that after
the man told her how
to carve a bird, she in turn
told my father if he ever insulted
her again she'd leave him in the dust like a dead bush. They had a huge
fight after that, but she stuck her ground. Sometimes I wonder if my
mother hadn't learned to carve a bird for herself after all, visualizing
what she wanted and proceeding to cut away anything that wasn't in
that picture. Let her fly, the man had laughed. And my mother flew.

_ST~QJ_a_,? _ a___H_a `O Lh cam.
C~hJ Ld1i_~ irzL. c~sz L,u_~.sz c,~~.

WHEN I WAS SEVEN, MY OLDER BROTHER-who was not cool (he was
the opposite of cool; in fact, if coolness were a sound wave, it would
have to travel through several solar systems before it could even reach
his outermost atmosphere)-brought home a Led Zeppelin album,
which I listened to, because it's hard not to listen to a Led Zeppelin
album when it's played in your vicinity.

I don't know what possessed Jim to buy the record. He was not
into rock music. In fact, until the week prior, he had been an avid
disciple of the Jehovah's Witnesses who lived in our neighborhood.
Their coven mother had knocked on our door soon after we moved
there and must have thought she hit a trifecta, what with my brother's
youth, his impressionability, and the fact that our parents were going
through a period of leniency in regards to our influences at that time.
Our mother was in Washington designing bombs for the government.
And our dad spent all his waking hours at the Tin Lizzy, a neighborhood bar he loved because he could walk in and holler, "Who's the
head nigger in charge?" without his friend LeRoy the line cook throwing a punch, or at least not one in his direction.

Anyway, Jim was an avid Jehovah's Witness for exactly as long as
it took him to learn that this religion precluded him from ever receiving Christmas or birthday gifts, which is something my mother, who
was an atheist but not an avid one, made sure to point out to him
while she was home on one of her breaks before she had to fly back to Washington and build more bombs. So the next time the Jehovah's
Witness lady came to our door, Jim politely invited her inside and
then incited my sister Cheryl to throw one of her famous volcanic
fits-the kind where her eyes radiated lasers, her voice growled like
she had a belly full of bees, and her spine coiled up like a cobra-and
pretty soon the Jehovah's Witness lady was running from our house
screaming about how Satan lived within our walls, or whatever.

So the next thing I knew, Jim brought home that Led Zeppelin album, and all I can think of is it probably had something to
do with Satan living within our walls, because some of the boozers at my dad's bar said it was the devil's
music. Even though my dad never
listened to Led Zeppelin, he
bought my brother a different album hoping it would
influence him instead. So,
in short, there was actually
a time when, in our entire
household, there existed just two
record albums, one by Led Zeppelin
and the other by Hank Williams, and in our entire household there
existed just one person who loved them both, and that was me.