by Kent, Julia
“He’s from Ohio,” I prattled on. What a fucking turn-on, talking about a serial killer cannibal. Maybe my dating problems weren’t about the gene pool after all.
“What’s your house like?” he asked, changing the subject and turning what had been an awkward joke into an even worse mess. My house? What house? We lived in a double-wide trailer that was older than me, with mice living under it and plumbing that was about as reliable as Lindsay Lohan on a movie set.
“You’re about to find out,” I stammered, turning onto the road that led to my trailer park. Broken down cars and spare lumber littered the lawns of an increasing number of houses as we drew closer to my home, as if the trailer park were a magnet for trash and debris.
“Whoa. Tornado?” Trevor asked as he gaped, watching the scene fly by, pointing to the piles of random crap in people’s lawns. “Lawn” was giving them too much credit, the tufts of grass poking up here and there like remnants of hair on the scalp of a long-time chemo patient. A chicken coop in one yard leaned so far to the right it looked like it was doing pilates, suspended in midair by a series of vines I would wager were poison ivy.
“Um, sorta,” I answered, my voice sing-songy and my gut tight with a groaning fear and wretched sense that This Would Not Go Well. The man I sat next to about to get one hell of an education you don’t find at an upper-crust Boston college. If he thought my flip phone was out of date, what was he going to say when I parked in front of the faded, aluminum-sided old trailer with the crooked porch, torn screen and clutter that made the television show Hoarders look like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous?
Real Life, meet Fantasy Life. Bringing home Trevor Connor from Random Acts of Crazy hadn’t even been anywhere near my actual Bucket List of life goals. I had wanted to meet him, of course, since the first time I heard his smoky voice as he seemed to sing his way into my clitoris and my heart, but inviting him to a house with yellow walls –not from paint, or some Martha Stewart magazine photo, but from decades of Mama’s chain smoking, and linoleum held together with asbestos and apple juice spills – ground in just how bad my life must look to someone from the outside.
What was Massachusetts like? I drove right past the park’s entrance and asked him that very question. Spending a little more time roaming dark country roads meant delaying the inevitable panic that was about to infuse my cells when Trevor met Mama. I could drive without thinking, the roads were imprinted in my mind, the map so embedded in me I could leave for fifty years and come back and still get around in the dark, blindfolded. Buying myself some time, I figured it couldn’t hurt to feel him out and get a sense of what his life was like, so I could compare.
And cringe. Knowledge is power, though – right? If I knew what he lived in, how he functioned, what income level is family was at, then maybe I didn’t need to worry so much. There must be poor people in Sudborough. Maybe he was one of them.
“I don’t know. It’s like lots of places, you know? We’re not rich.” He craned his neck around and spotted two guys sitting on the hood of a rusted out Cutlass, sucking off the teat of some 40s in paper bags. “Uh, not poor. Just, you know. Middle class. Everything is all New Englandy and the people are fake. Half the children are geniuses and we have to be diagnosed with ADHD and medicated to get extra time on the SATs so we can prove how perfect we are. You know.”
Heh. Around here, half the children are diagnosed with ADHD and medicated so they qualify for SSI for their family income to go up by $700 a month, thereby doubling it. Maybe we weren’t so different after all.
“Your fake sounds better than my real life,” I muttered as I recognized Old Mike, one of my mom’s exes, on that hood, standing and unbuckling his belt to take a piss. I hit the accelerator and whizzed by before he could whizz on my car.
“What do you mean?” Those eyes searched my face and I inhaled slowly, turning the car onto a small road that I knew would circle us back eventually. The early May air made the trees sway a bit, their branches dotted with the tiny, unfurling green buds that would soon become lush leaves, making this bleak road a fertile, pleasant drive and, thankfully, hiding some of the junk that dotted the front yards along the path. Trevor seemed genuinely perplexed, as if he didn’t notice how fucked up my life really was, from my junky car to my stupid ex finding us having sex at a rest area to the rotted out shells of cars along the way to my house, all clues that pointed to a grinding sort of working-class life that made me nothing like him.
“I mean that you are someone who is clearly accustomed to way more than I have,” I answered quietly, cracking my window and taking a deep breath, then tentatively, hopefully, reaching out and patting his hand. He grabbed mine and clenched it with a beseeching pressure that made my heart grow.
“What?” he asked, more naive than I’d take him for.
“Trevor, you go to Boston University, don’t you?” I remembered that from reading his bio over and over and over on his band’s website.
He nodded, his face relaxed and neutral. “Sure. Where do you go to school?”
“Uh, Convenience Store University. I’m majoring in selling gas and cigarettes.” It took so much effort to keep the bitterness out of my voice. “U.S. News and World Report ranks it, well…it’s pretty rank.”
His jaw clenched. “I’m not a snob,” he said, squeezing my hand and then patting it. “I don’t care if you didn’t go to college.”
“I did, actually,” I piped up, my voice so chipper it squeaked and offended me. Stupid people pleaser in me – I couldn’t bury it as much as I wanted. “A few classes. Local branch campus.”
He brightened. “What did you major in?”
Oh, boy. Here we go. “Anthropology was my goal.” Half the people around here had no idea what anthropology was, and the other half told me I was an idiot to major in something so useless, and why not get my CNA so I could make $10.50 an hour at the local nursing home and “do something” with my college edumacation?
“I know some anthro majors. It’s good for grad school and museum work, mostly.” He peered at me as the car hit the end of the big loop and we headed back toward my trailer. If I weren’t so afraid of the events that were about to unfold I would have hugged him in appreciation for not laughing at me, for so casually accepting my education choice as if it were normal and fine and perfectly reasonable. What a world he must live in if people knew what anthro was and respected it as a life choice. My heart ached to go there.
No more stalling; the clock read 12:13 a.m. And I was getting tired. We needed to crash somewhere, and we might as well do it where there was a bed and a roof.
He was pointedly looking at me. Oh. Yeah. An answer. “I just took the classes because they taught me a lot about why humans are as fucked up as we are.”
“I majored in political science for the same reason,” he answered. I snorted. “No – really!” he protested. “That and because my parents pressured me into it to go to law school,” he admitted.
“Are you going?”
His turn to snort. “That’s what everyone says. I got into plenty of good schools, and I’ll join the six-figure debt club soon. But…” His voice trailed off.
“But you’d rather go on tour,” I finished for him. Something in the way his eyes went wistful, how his hand curled into a fist, the way his eyes went hooded when he talked about his parents – it made me wonder how good he really had it. Whatever Sudborough was like, it clearly wasn’t what Trevor wanted. Music was it – so why didn’t he just do that?
I was about to ask when I slowed the car down, snaking my way past trailer after trailer to reach mine. Trevor frowned. “What is this place?” His face was a mask of revulsion and bemusement, a look most people couldn’t pull off. Each trailer was different from the other, but none of them was the Taj Mahal, you know? Ours was smack on the low end of the spectrum of living here, but at least we h
ad fully functioning utilities.
Well, this month, at least. Any month that came within two months of tax refund season was good for running water and heat.
The rest was a crap shoot, a game of Musical Utility Bills. Would the water be on today, or the lights – or both? You just never knew. From the way Trevor had eyed my flip phone with a look like I was pressing a fresh log of dog crap to his ear, I had a feeling that his “fake” life involved far more financial stability and luxuries compared to mine.
And I’ll bet he never, ever ate meat from a can.
I had spent so much time and energy in these short hours worrying here and there – when I wasn’t damn close to being pleasured under a pine tree in a rest area on the interstate – worrying about what Trevor would think about my house, my Mama, my life when it hit me that I had no choice but to bring him home. Scant attention, though, had I paid to what Mama might think of my bringing home a buck naked young man covered only in a Mylar blanket and a cowboy hat.
If Davey had beaten me home – and I suspected he had, the man had a cell phone for God’s sake and even if it was only a flip phone it meant that he could make a goddamn phone call – then Mama was about to encounter one of the strangest things her child had ever brought home.
Now, mind you, I’d brought plenty of crazy shit home, including twin brothers I’d won in a wet t-shirt contest. Don’t ask – it’s a long story and right now you want to read about the rest of this one. That one, I can get to it later, but I doubt it. Let’s just say law enforcement officers from three different counties were involved and when someone tells you they’re eighteen, don’t believe me. Er…them.
As I pulled into our parking spot, two dogs and a cat with three legs limped off. Trevor turned and looked at me with a tentative smile. “Home?” he asked.
“The Taj Mahal,” I said, trying to play myself off as being outside of this life, Miss Disingenuous, as if Oh, dear – what happened here? Why am I living in this? “I wasn’t kidding.”
I tried to look at it from and outsider’s eye. Around here a double wide was bigger and better than a single wide. It conferred a kind of status to you that said, yeah, I may be trailer park trash – but at least I’m double wide trailer park trash. I suspected such nuances weren’t on Trevor’s radar screen.
He gave me one of those looks that I’d read about in books but I’d never actually had someone project at me. It was a slightly sickly, polite look of extraordinary pity mingled with something else that made his eyes go from that beautiful ocean blue to a faded grayish color, reminding me of a pulsating vein under extremely thin skin.
His hand that had rested on my thigh squeezed slightly and then it moved, fingertip under my chin. Our eyes met and I wanted to close mine, to sink into this last moment when we could still live in this crazy little bubble of a few hours stolen between a hitchhiker and a crazy lady, all tumbled along like stones being polished by fate.
“I don’t judge,” he said and I laughed, ropy strands of giggles being pulled out of me like anal beads from the star stripper in a moderately hardcore club – a little bit painful but one hell of a show for the person watching.
“Trevor, everybody judges, and this,” I pointed to the house, “shit, I’m judging it.”
His shoulders slumped a little and he looked out the window again, peering around the dust spots on my windshield. I tried to take it in through his eyes. The gutter that hung off the left side of the roof, fourteen or fifteen garbage bags filled, probably, with Mama’s recycling. Every few months she convinced somebody to drive her up to Michigan and turn in the ten cent cans. It wasn’t nearly as interesting a story as the Seinfeld episode about it.
Trash, just pure trash, littered the little patches of grass around the driveway and the porch really did slump at about a twenty-five degree angle on one corner, meaning you had to kind of bend your shoulders and neck to walk in to reach the front door. For $380 a month we paid lot rent, and that included our water, sewer, and supposedly our garbage. That was about all Mama could afford, her disability check not much more than twice that.
I’d been working some kind of a job since I was nine, from a dollar an hour yard work up to turning fifteen and lying about my age to make the glorious minimum wage at a truck stop a few exits down. I lost that job when Mama couldn’t afford the gas, and luckily I turned sixteen shortly after and picked up the gas station gig I held now. When my car didn’t work, or Mama’s didn’t, or we didn’t have gas money, I could walk or hitch a ride.
It made me think that in some ways I was just like Trevor, because right now we were both hitchhiking through life and we were both stark naked. Except him? His nudity was on the outside.
I wished we could trade places.
Trevor
I knew people lived like this but I always figured it was part of an episode on one of those A& E series on cable television. Holy shit! No, really, actual shit. Animal shit from the looks of it, strewn all over the neighbors’ side yard where a chain link fence held six…seven – I lost count – dogs. Were those pitbulls and puppies in there? It made my dick shrivel up and my balls crawl into my gut.
Once again that vulnerable feeling set in, because when you’re naked and the only thing protecting you from the world is a cowboy hat and a Mylar blanket, it would be an aberration not to feel unsafe.
If this is where Darla lived, then my sense of admiration for her actually shot up. She seemed so funny and deep, with an outlook on life that just took in whatever happened and rolled with it in a way that no tight-assed woman I generally met back at home would ever act. Even the sluts, the worst of the worst, the whores’ whores at home were so controlling, using unwritten rules of life and social graces that seemed to be ingrained in us from preschool to make every interaction pre-programmed, nothing spontaneous unless it involved some sort of substance that altered your consciousness.
I didn’t need any of that here. In fact, I think that whatever I’d taken must have been out of my blood by the time we pulled into her driveway because I was stone cold sober and I had a feeling that that was the only way I was going to get through the next experience here.
I told her I wasn’t judging her – but I lied. This made me, first of all, appreciate the fuck out of the four bedroom, three bath, bonus room with a game room/bar in the basement, house where I’d grown up in Sudborough. Dad commuted all week and some Saturdays into the city and Mom had returned to work when I had hit first grade. They could be prim, and proper, and priggish, and fake, and plastic – but damn, we had way more than Darla did.
I felt bad for poking fun at her flip phone, for pointing out the rusty holes in the floorboard of her shitbox. What I was looking at, sitting right here in the comfort of her car, was like something we’d watched in an eighth grade documentary – some PBS episode about poverty in America.
She said she’d gone to college and a massive wave of protectiveness hit me, of wanting to rescue her, to take her away from all of this. And yet, here she was, my rescuer. The one who found me stumbling, high as a kite, six hundred miles from home. So who was judging whom?
And who should judge whom?
She opened her car door and then paused, shutting it again, turning to me. Her hand covered my hand, which covered her knee now, rubbing slowly, soothing us both.
“Trevor,” she said with that sweet voice that spoke of beer and roasted corn and fun in a field of wildflowers, a kicked back kind of energy that made my erection turn the Mylar blanket into a tent. Oh, God no, I thought, the last thing I can do is walk in that trailer and meet her mother with a fuckinghard-on pointing at her.
“Trevor, there’s something that you need to know about my Mama,” she started and the tone in her voice made my dick wither like a vine cut off at the root.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“She’s umm…” Darl
a sighed. “Well, she’s…” What? my mind filled in. She’s what? Drunk? Crazy? Fat? Schizophrenic? A criminal? A murderer? Really a man? “She’s…she’s, well,” Darla stumbled.
Oh, boy. Of all the things that I could say about Darla in the past couple of hours of getting to know her, fumbling for words was not one of them. Whatever she was trying to spit out, it made my body go tense, made my eyes narrow and I could feel every bone go on alert, every muscle at the ready for whatever I needed to know.
“She’s real picky about her cooking.” I didn’t expect that. “And she also talks about sweepstakes non-stop.”
“That’s it?” I said, shaking my head, palms up. When I lifted my hands up it made the Mylar blanket drop a bit and Darla’s eyes drifted down to check out the one part of me that I hadn’t managed to put in her.
“Yeah, and umm…. She’s gonna wonder why you’re naked.”
“Most people would, Darla.”
“No, actually you aren’t the first…” Darla’s voice went quiet.
“I’m not the first what?”
“You’re not the first naked man I’ve ever brought home.”
She cut the conversation short, opened her door, stepped out and slammed it shut. I followed suit, wondering what the hell that meant and we walked up rotted out, wooden boards that used to resemble steps and then entered this cave-like collapsed porch. Without any ceremony, Darla opened the front door. The scent of cigarette smoke almost knocked me backward. I’ve performed in some serious dive bars, in basements with no windows with horrible ventilation, in rooms not much bigger than my mother’s clothing closet, but this was like eating cigarette smoke with a spoon. I plugged my nose instantly by shoving the back of my tongue up against the roof of my mouth and breathed through my lips.
