Electrocution and Lost Cats

Our Winnebago limped its way into San Diego a month after we left New Jersey. By then, I'd had enough of trailer trash living.  There were plenty of reasons why:

            1. Near-death mishaps like the one at Hoover Dam.

            2. The motor home breaking down every other day in the American Southwest at the hottest time of the year.

            3. A bathroom no bigger than the trunk of a compact car.

            4. My family at far closer proximity than anyone really needed.

In San Diego I discovered two more reasons:

5. I was not allowed to have a pet.

6. The camper, along with its many other engineering failures, had become electrified.

Well. That didn’t take long.

It shouldn't have been a surprise that we couldn’t have pets in the motor home. Before we left New Jersey, Ted the Light Bulb Salesman (before his promotion to Ted the Drug Dealer) insisted that we give away Lassie, a giant collie we’d had for as long as I could remember.

Ted the Light Bulb Salesman: “The camper is too small to have that dog in it. It weighs eighty pounds!”

Layne the Favorite (not for the first time): “She’s a she, not an it.” Lassie was his dog, which he reminded me at every opportunity.

Me: “I weigh eighty pounds.”

Mom: “SSSSStace. Hush. We know.”

Great. So it was me or the dog. I couldn’t wait to see how this turned out.

Ted the Marijuana Farmer

When I was fifteen, Ted the Drug Dealer took a weekend off, drove his cab to Kentucky, killed a dog with a machete, and brought home four hundred pounds of marijuana.

The rumor was that police departments in Central and Western Kentucky, as part of their war on drugs, had confiscated whole marijuana fields. This was big news to Ted the Drug Dealer and his Council of Advisors, a small group of fellows who met regularly at our house.

The group only convened at night, around our kitchen table. There was Tiny, a heroin addict who weighed nearly six hundred pounds. Ted the Drug Dealer supplied him with methadone for heroin withdrawal. He also supplied him with heroin for heroin withdrawal; Tiny was a waddling contradiction. It was a good thing we didn’t still live in the Winnebago; Tiny would not have fit through the door. He did not sit on our kitchen chairs, choosing to lean against the wall instead.

Also on the Council was Louie the Cokehead, a real-estate agent who was a year away from being convicted of embezzling his clients’ escrow funds and down-payments to support his ever-growing habit.

Rounding out the foursome was Marty the Stoner, a college boy from the University of Miami that Ted the Drug Dealer had picked up from the airport once in his cab. Even though Marty the Stoner was twenty years younger, he and Ted had hit it off big.

My mother offered to cook for them, but they always declined.

Left for Dead

The summer of 1979 was a disaster.

Our above-ground swimming pool had been demolished to make way for the parking lot my mother needed for her beauty salon. She was ending her relationship with Bernie the Disco Prince (who we liked because he stayed entirely out of our way) and she was being sued by Bill the Stoner because she ran him over with her car the year before. Ted the Lightbulb Salesman was sniffing around to replace Bernie the Disco Prince in my mother’s affections. There was something about him that made me fear for my future.

The impending lawsuit caused my mother to blurt things out at odd moments like a first-year law student with Tourette’s syndrome:

Mom: "Pre-trial motion? How about my car running his ass over? There’s your pre-trial motion!"

Mom: “They can cram their deposition up their ass. What’s a deposition?”

Mom: “I’m all the goddamn witness they need. Witness list. My tuchus has a witness list!”

Mom: “Discovery? What's to discover? A druggie who can’t pedal fast enough?”

The Crown Prince

It was a grand strategy that was doomed to fail. Like Hannibal crossing elephants over the Alps or Philip II’s Spanish Armada--it really should have worked.

In every house there is a favorite child, often the firstborn, who gets the best stuff first: toys, privileges, cars. He or she sits at the right hand of their parents. It is a tradition dating back to the Old Testament, when God’s chosen people lived in the desert, herded goats, and spoke to Him as if He was just some Guy you hung around with, right up until He commanded you to kill your own son or build an ark so He could wipe out all life on earth, including all but two of your favorite goats.

I was not the favorite. Layne the Favorite got all the perks in our house. It stood to reason that if I stuck close to him, some of that largesse would find its way to me, like trickle-down economics.

In my defense, I conceived of this plan when I was five. 

Arsenic and Old Ladies

It was after a year of living in California that my mother decided doctors were going to kill us all. As with most of our travels as trailer trash I was just along for the ride, but I’m pretty sure that like Snow White, it all started with a poisoned piece of fruit.

The women in my family all lived into their nineties, and some of them went up over a hundred. They lasted pretty well, too: able to walk, talk, complain, harass, underappreciate, and deride the self-esteem of others right up to their last moments on earth. The men in my family all died younger than sixty, probably from being walked on, talked down to, complained about, harassed, underappreciated, and having their self-esteem derided. Or it could have been the careless disregard they had for their own safety, as when my great-uncle Mike skateboarded down the side of a mountain, flipped over the guardrail, and plummeted to his doom. Also in California. That place is a death trap.