To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him

by Gwendolyn Zepeda

  So I went to a couple of comic book web sites to do some research. I found out that Mary Jane, Spiderman’s wife, had grown up in a dysfunctional family. Before she hooked up with Spidey, she had all the classic man-needing issues suffered by women with low self-esteem.

  So now I don’t feel like making fun of her anymore.

  I need to take a nap. I stayed up pretty late last night, thinking about Spiderman and important stuff like that.

  Everything else is the same. Nothing new.

  Write me back, okay?

  Recreation, Part I

  I didn’t like camping, but I’d go along anyway to prove my love and devotion to my family.

  I think trailer trash people like camping because it gives them a chance to escape from their trailers for a while and be a little freer out in the wild. While I certainly could have appreciated that motivation, I was too distracted by the bug infested showers and fish-smelling dumpsters to discover it at that time.

  During our long drives to the campsites, we’d pass towns even smaller and duller than the one that contained our own sky-blue trailer. Although I hated our small town, I would look out the window and imagine what life would be like if we moved farther out in the Middle of Nowhere.

  I would fantasize that I was an important part of the alternate small town community. I would run a shop that sold exciting new things to the bored housewives. Things to enliven their lives. I would make our trailer into a retroswanky palace and hosted soirees that had all the neighbors hoping for invitations. “There’s Gwen. Hi, Gwen!” people would say as I walked down the street.

  Something was wrong with our particular small town, I realized. Somehow, it kept me from doing anything at all.

  Recreation, Part II

  I liked to go to the karaoke bars because, before I became trailer trash, I used to sing. I sang Broadway musicals in a little performing arts troupe, songs of my own composition in a crappy little rock band, and whole Catholic masses at the neighborhood church. I even studied opera for a while. The only thing I’d never really sung was country.

  Once we drove by a ratty little bar, or “watering hole,” as it proclaimed itself to be, and I noted a sign that said “KARAOKE HERE: MON, WED, FRI”. I begged my husband to take me there. Eventually, he did. We went to celebrate our anniversary.

  There were about 500 songs on the KJ’s list, and most of them were country. I managed to find “Bewitched,” an old standard I knew pretty well. But I was too nervous to sign up to sing. Bothered and bewildered, my husband drove us home.

  Although I had been on stage many, many times in my youth and had always loved the attention and the applause, something had changed. I didn’t have my old confidence anymore. My voice was out of shape, for one thing. But, also, I wondered what people would think. “Who the hell is this frumpy chick, and why do we wanna hear her sing?”

  The other trailer trash women, frumpy or not, seemed to have no such hesitation. They fell into three main types: those who sang in Baptist choirs and were proud to show off their God-given talent, those who obviously practiced for hours each day until their voices were indistinguishable from Patsy Cline’s, and those who were too drunk to care what they sounded like. Most of them took advantage of the KJ’s $5 recording service and went home with taped memorials of their successes.

  We went back to the bar on subsequent occasions. Eventually, an amaretto sour gave me the courage to choke out song. The KJ whispered basic vocalization techniques with his hand over his microphone. “Breath! Sing Louder!” Shamefully, I imagined what any of my old voice coaches would have said if they’d seen.

  All the way home I sang the song as I should have, anger and determination giving me back my voice. “Okay, that’s enough,” my husband finally said.

  The next time we went, it was my twenty-six or twenty-seventh birthday. We’d dropped our three kids off at my mother-in-law’s for the evening and I was ready to make the most of it. After two amaretto sours, I slammed the big book open to my dream karaoke song, “Last Dance,” by Her Disco Highness, Donna Summers.

  “I don’t think these people are gonna wanna hear that,” my husband said.

  “I don’t care,” I replied. I put my name on the list and, before I had time to chicken out, it was my turn.

  I got up on stage and told myself that this was my last chance. Last dance, last chance for love. I sang my freaking heart out. Everyone in the bar hooted, whistled, and danced. I nailed the high note so beautifully, the KJ played it back on his recorder for everyone to hear again.

  Strangers congratulated and complimented me as I made my way back to my husband’s pool table. Then a little man in a big black cowboy hat got up and belted out something by the Village People. Then someone else sang something by the Bee Gees. We all danced together. I had shown them the magic of disco. For one night, I had touched their lives.

  I glowed with pride all the way through the next pool game and then through our meal at the International House of Pancakes.

  Throughout the years that followed, I reminisced about that night and looked forward to the next time that I’d have that much fun.

  Day-to-Day

  All the feminist literature I’d read in college had warned against the entrapment of housewifery. Nonetheless, I’d decided to stay home with the kids until they were old enough to go to school. I’d had bad experiences at daycare centers when I was a child, and I wanted my kids to have better childhoods than mine. The women who’d written the feminist books didn’t understand my culture. I was nineteen years old. I knew what I was doing.

  Housework was heinous and I did as little of it as I could get away with. My kids were fabulous and I did as much as I could to show them my love. Boredom was inevitable and

  I fought it with everything at my disposal. Here is what I did over the next few years:

  • Gardened.

  • Sewed.

  • Dropped out of college.

  • Crocheted doilies.

  • Baked bread.

  • Developed weird little obsessions.

  • Made piñatas for my kids’ birthdays.

  • Taught the kids to dance to Mexican music, just in case we ever went back to my hometown and danced like I used to before I got married.

  • Fought with my husband until I cried.

  • Drove the kids to soccer practice.

  • Took the kids to the library.

  • Held my kids in my arms until they fell asleep, and then I cried.

  • Gathered pecans, shelled them, and made pecan pies.

  • Spread newspapers all over the dining room table and taught the kids to paint.

  • Visited my mother-in-law.

  • Yelled at my kids and spanked them. Then I cried.

  • Killed ants and roaches.

  • Fed stray cats.

  • Taught myself to use my husband’s computer.

  • Taught my kids to make prank calls.

  • Told my husband I had to go to the drugstore to buy feminine hygiene products, then I drove around the edges of town, listening to the radio and crying.

  • Watched TV. Trailer trash people watch a lot of TV.

  Recreation, Part III

  Late at night, on my husband’s computer, I discovered the miracle of the Internet.

  The Internet was a way to reach out to people who were far away. People who couldn’t see you. People who could only judge you by your words.

  Weirdly, people seemed to like my words sometimes. My words could somehow make them pay attention.

  I got a thrill out of typing words that people liked to read—out of fooling people into believing that I was someone worth listening to.

  I typed words late at night. I slept late in the morning. This wasn’t behavior becoming of a trailer trash housewife. But, come on, even trailer trash housewives need to have some fun.

  The Fights

  What’s a trailer trash marriage without fighting? All blue-collar couples fight. Yo
u learn that from TV.

  Here are the rules for fighting on TV:

  1. Snide remarks mask true love.

  2. Issues are resolved within 24 minutes.

  3. The winner is the one who makes the audience laugh the most.

  Here are the rules for fighting in real life:

  1. The rules of logic don’t apply.

  2. The winner is the one who controls the money.

  3. The cops can’t do anything until you actually get hit.

  Have fun, lovebirds!

  Lessons Learned

  All my weird little obsessions with catalogs and crossword puzzles and q-tips and the like became one big obsession with putting my writing and my drawings on the Internet and gathering all the applause I could. I got writing jobs. I made friends. I saved money from my jobs and traveled to meet those friends. I talked to those friends on the phone late at night, when everyone else was asleep. As you can imagine, that didn’t leave me as much time to garden, sew or bake pies. Or to cook or clean.

  Suddenly, I wasn’t a trailer trash housewife at all. I had deserted my post. The center could not hold. The space-time continuum was disrupted. All hell broke loose.

  So, I left. And nothing has been the same since.

  One important thing I learned from my experience is that, if the world were suddenly to become a sea of multicolored trailers tethered to cement, buoyed on beer cans and proudly flying American flags assembled in Taiwan, then I would be able to survive.

  The most important thing I learned was that, no matter what happens, I’m going to survive, anyway.

  Fiction Is Good Because It Lets You Pretend You’ re Lying

  Crazy Tony

  Tina found out her cousin was out of jail when she heard him call her name. Coming out of Happy Land with her grandmother’s Coke and sunflower seeds in a brown paper bag, she’s careful to keep her face turned from the drunks who habitually stand in front of the little store. Although they’re mostly harmless, neighborhood boys ranging in age from seventeen to forty-three, it’s best not to attract their attention, ever.

  “Hey, Tina!”

  She turns with a wince.

  There among the literal usual suspects—Crazy Tony, fat Beto, one-armed Jaime, glue-sniffing George, prematurely graying Lalo—is her cousin Rudy. His eyes are already dilated. From what, Tina doesn’t know. His constant leer twists his face, and his sharp elbows and fingers jut in all directions as he stares at her with his mouth open, spit ejecting itself from his lips. Tina thinks of a dog she saw the day before that seemed to smile as it ate dirty diapers from a dumpster.

  “Hey,” she says in greeting, wondering how he got out of jail and back to the neighborhood without her grandmother knowing about it ahead of time.

  “Hey, Tina . . . Crazy Tony here wants to ask you a question!”

  Surprised, Tina and the others turn to Crazy Tony, who seems most surprised of all. His face, which always twitches and jerks on its own, twitches faster than usual and turns red.

  “Wha-wha-what, man? I didn’t—I . . .”

  “That’s all right, man. You tell her later, when y’all two are alone!”

  Rudy laughs like a jackal.

  Great, Tina thinks, just what I need: another pervert after me. She turns her face to the street and follows it home.

  There are a lot of people in the neighborhood who get called crazy. Crazy Victor, Crazy Lupe, Crazy Susie on Kane Street. Some of them really are mentally ill, but some aren’t. Crazy Victor’s just mentally retarded and he holds his hands weird when he walks. Crazy Lupe’s speech is slurred, so you can’t tell if he’s saying crazy things or just regular stuff. People say he got hit by a train one night while running from the cops, and it scrambled his brains.

  Tina used to lie about Crazy Susie being her mom. She would tell people her mother was dead. Everyone pretended to believe it, for her sake. As if Crazy Susie had just happened to pick Tina’s front yard to yell from for no reason at all. As if Tina’s grandmother was just too charitable to call the cops unless Susie got really violent, waving a tree branch and screaming.

  “Get away from me! I’m not gonna let you rape me again, you dirty motherfuckers!”

  Normally, though, Susie just walks the neighborhood streets and around downtown, hauling a little bag of clothes and staring at people. Sometime she gets hungry enough to go back to Tina’s tan brick house and accept a bean taco or boloney sandwich from Tina’s grandmother, who used to be her mother-in-law.

  Tina sleeps over with friends a lot. One night, during a game of Truth or Dare, she found out that her friends and everybody else had known about Crazy Susie being her mom all along. At first she’d been embarrassed, but now it’s just one less thing to worry about.

  Mrs. Hernández, in the big orange house down the street, had given birth to five boys. With that many, it wasn’t surprising that two of them would turn out to be crazy. People say that Crazy Danny, her youngest, would take puppies up the Dow School fire slide and do nasty things to them. He went to jail when he was eighteen. Tina doesn’t know why.

  His brother, Crazy Tony, seems normal, except for his face. His eyes blink a lot and the corner of his mouth jerks up sometimes, as if he’s trying to stop thinking about something funny but gross. If it weren’t for that, he’d almost be good-looking, like his older brothers. He doesn’t have a job. But, then, Tina’s cousin Rudy doesn’t either, and they dropped out of school the same year.

  Tony doesn’t talk a lot. He walks the streets all day in his camouflage jacket, or else he drinks beer with the guys in front of Happy Land. People say he freaks out sometimes. Tina’s never seen it.

  Tina feels bad for Mrs. Hernández. She knows what a pain in the butt it can be to have crazy people in your family. But at the same time, she sometimes thinks that having drunks and drug addicts is just as bad.

  Sometimes hanging out with the drunks and the drug addicts in front of the red store gets kind of old, even for Tony. He crushes his Bud can. “Later, man,” and “Tell Manuel I said what’s up,” they say as he walks away, through the vacant lot, towards Washington Avenue.

  Really, it’s almost time to go home, but he wants to walk for a while, first. He crosses over to the Salvation Army and heads west.

  Rudy’s back. Not like you could miss it, with the way he talks so loud and puts his hand on everybody’s shoulder all the time. Asking people if they’re fags. Bragging about some chick he claims to have screwed the week before.

  Tony wonders if his brother knows that Rudy’s out and what he’ll do when he finds out. Rudy was working for Manuel when he got busted. Manuel had been ready to get rid of him, anyway, because Rudy was a big mouth and a thief. Then, he didn’t have to worry about it anymore because Rudy got himself caught way out in Magnolia trying to cut deals with some guys nobody ever heard of. He knew better than to say Manuel’s name to the cops, though. Manuel doesn’t play that.

  Tony walks almost all the way to Studewood, past all the car lots and hubcap lots and the tombstone place. He stops outside the gate of the big cemetery so he can look at the trees.

  When Tony gets home, his mom is talking on the phone and watching the news from her place on the living room couch.

  “Here’s Tony. He looks hungry. I got them some ham to make sandwiches,” she says, gesturing towards the kitchen with her cigarette.

  Tony steps between the table holding his mom’s ashtray, Coke and phone and the table holding her cigarettes, lighter and newspapers to give her a kiss on the cheek. She takes it with a drag on her Winston Light. He steps over her phone cord and lamp cord on his way to the kitchen.

  “Manuel should be home soon,” he hears her tell her friend. “Oh, my God—they did shoot him—you were right,

  Chela!”

  She’s talking about someone who got shot on the news—not someone real. Tony sits at the little yellow kitchen table with his sandwich and the last can of Coke.

  “Oh, here comes Manuel down the street.”r />
  Tony chews the bread and pushes crumbs around he paper plate.

  “Here he comes up the steps.”

  Tony watches a squirrel through the kitchen window.

  “He just came through the door.”

  Tony takes the last drink of his Coke.

  “He gave me a hundred dollars grocery money and two cartons of cigarettes. He’s such a good boy.”

  Tony very quietly burps.

  Manuel walks into the kitchen. His black hair, wiry but all pushed into the same direction, almost scrapes the light bulb hanging from the wires in the middle of the ceiling.

  “Hey, man,” he says.

  Tony nods.

  “You know Rudy’s back?” “Yeah,” says Tony.

  Manuel nods. He takes his cigarettes from the pocket of his black Members Only jacket and waves them at Tony, who waves no, thanks.

  He smokes his cigarette. He looks out the window, at the picture of the Aztec princess on his mother’s wall calendar and then at nothing at all. Tony picks the food from his teeth and wipes it on a paper towel.

  Manuel stubs out his cigarette in the big conch-shaped ashtray that serves as the table’s centerpiece.

  “You wanna go see if mom needs anything from the store before MASH comes on?”

  Tony nods.

  “You need anything? You need any money?”

  Tony shakes his head. “Nah, man, thanks.”

  “All right, man. I gotta take off. Take it easy, all right?”

  “All right, man. Take it easy,” says Tony.

  He watches the clean-cut back of his brother’s neck and then the shininess of his shoes as Manuel goes back out the door, back to work.

  Tina unties the green and red flowered sheet stapled above her window, blocking the view from the street. Then she turns on her radio. It sits on the nightstand with the lamp and the Barbie whose hair has been permanent-marker-ed sultry black. She adjusts the tuning knob, careful not to disturb the masking tape holding the radio’s batteries in. She’s able to bring in a popular dance song; strong enough on its own that she can let go of thee radio and take a tentative step back, like a mother watching her toddler stand on his own.