Snapshots from the Trailer Park

The trailer park I grew up in is called Driftwood Circle. It has one paved road that circled around with another paved road cross-sectioning it. It is located on top of a wooded hill that slopes not too steeply down into a cove of Lake Lanier. The trailer park and cove are adjacent to Bald Ridge Marina. A fence, a gate, and a guard separate the two. We lived right on top of that not too steep hill which was the back end of the trailer park. Our trailer was later made into a house. The trailer part was still inside though. It made up the kitchen, a bathroom, and a back room where my stepfather smoked Winstons and drank Budweiser; when he was not working at the welding company he’d worked years before he and I melded paths and has ever since.

My mother worked in banks and businesses-something to do with accounting (and here I am doing something of accounting). I’ve never known what exactly it is she does (or what I do). I still don’t, despite the fact that I hold her dearest above all.

My younger brother was at the age I’ll forever view him as, even though he’s man enough to have gone to jail for defending a lady’s honor. Even though I’ve drank with him in bars and he’s carried my wasted ass home. As a black belt to the umpteenth degree he’s been able, and proven so, to beat that same ass, wasted or not, since he was twelve. That is the age he will remain to me; just this little wholesome kid who loved more than anything to simply just play and run wild with imagination.

We were too many years apart in age to have been the best friends brothers can sometimes be. So when I was merely young he was really young. I do not know what he recalls of our time in the trailer park. He was still really young when we moved out, thank God.

It was not horrible. It was not ideal.

In Sioux Falls, out here in the middle-west, there’s plenty of down time, a lot o’ time to think. Many serial killers come from the deserts and prairies.

My bicycle suffered a flat when I left from work, which turned a twenty-plus minute ride into an hour and a half walk. I pushed it along a paved trail. To my left a slow river makes it way south. The Big Sioux, it’s called, thought it is really just a glorified creek that runs shit water from pastures and well fertilized farms to whatever hick rubes live downstream.

On my right is a golf course. It’s late in the day so it is abandoned, and I am alone on trail without, even, fellow bikers or joggers. October’s crisp chill is on us, but it is not too cold. Yet, everyone acts like it is. I’m not sure why that is. In a few weeks winter will come. Then everyone will act like it isn’t cold at all, and they’ll say that South Dakota hasn’t seen a real winter in years. I know that last’s was not as rough as my first here. Certainly there will be more talk of Global Warming, Gas Prices, Desperate Housewives, and Lost. My friend’s a geneticist. He’s saying that due to pretend cold and lack of honest winter the trees are creeping into the plains. This spells certain doom for prairie dogs, bunnies, and bison; and all those who’ve grown attached to their views having gone unobstructed.

My thoughts moved on as me and my bicycle strolled along side by side. I fantasized some about my future. Where am I going to live in the next year? Back in Georgia? Out in Minneapolis? Will I remain here? I hope not. God, not here. Anywhere but here. I thought about what it will feel like to finish my book, which seems, now, to be an inevitability like a harvest, or an opening night. I wonder if I’ll still like it or once gone from me will I wonder why I bothered to have inside at all, and in the first place? Plenty o’ time for thinking and strolling.

I got my first bike living in that trailer park, got it from Wal-Mart or Kmart, I believe. I walked with it then too. It was on my mama’s advice; to walk it, get used to it. I taught myself to swim when I was three but had not sat on my own bicycle until I was twelve. Before the trailer park me and mama moved around too much to acquire many possessions, and in the early years of Driftwood Circle we were better than many in our neighborhood but not better off. The walking then and the walking now have me recalling what little and all that I can.

There was an old, old couple that lived two trailers down. They had a three legged bitch that was very friendly. The old couple, however, hated each other. Me and a visiting cousin, when we were little, used to crawl under their porch and through some shoddy cement work that was the trailer’s “foundation”. We’d listen to them cuss one another. “I want some pussy, goddamnit!” he’d holler. “Well go down to the marina and have some nigger pussy, cuz you won’t have it from me, by God.” She said. “I don’t want nigger pussy. I want your pussy, goddamnit!” He said. My cousin and I would just lie and listen. One time she pushed him off their stoop. He laid there on his driveway unconscious. We didn’t know what to do, so we left him there with that hateful woman inside and his three legged bitch licking his face.

If there were no family over then the only children to play with that were my age were girls. There were two boys in the neighborhood. One was a couple years older than me, the other was a few more. The latter’s name was Donnie, the former was Jason. Both were friends to me, both were bullies. Donnie showed me his porn stash. Later he broke into my house while my parents were away and put a butterfly knife to me to scare me until I bawled for him to quit. Then we went fishing.

One of the girls was named Alyssa. Her and her older sister would play in the lake and on our dock; my family shared it with our neighbor Lawrence. He was a bachelor and wore Speedos. He had a small bar built into his mobile home. At the lake I could see Alyssa’s and her sister’s nipples through their bathing suits.

Another old couple known as The Wheelers (their last names) kept a nice lawn and a neat home. The park housed a mix of old “decent” retirees and poor white trash whose decency was sporadic at best. As the old folks died off they were replaced by the trash. One time me and the two sisters were walking down to the dock to swim. After a while I was jaded by the nipples. Though I was male I was still a child and mostly just wanted to play and swim. Besides, their little undeveloped breasts were nothing compared to what Donnie had shown to me from his stash. I suppose this was not the case with old man Wheeler. His wife was not present with him on their porch as she usually was. So he told all of us that he liked our little bathing suits we had on. Then he told all of us that he liked what was in them better, and he chuckled. We looked at each other and ran. We jumped into the lake and stayed in the water up to our necks. By the next time we swam the girls had new bathing suits that no vision or wish could penetrate. Just as well.

Jason and I went hunting with our air rifles that looked like M-16s. We also used to play Red Dawn with them. He told me to grab a can that was discarded in the woods and prop it up for target practice. When I crossed in front of him to retrieve it he shot me at point blank range in the back. He laughed and ran off leaving me to cry and sulk in the woods alone. Later he returned and apologized. We played Red Dawn with some kids from the rich neighborhood down the road from our trailer park.

It was by a big kid, who was all bully and no friend, from the rich-kid-neighborhood that gave me the nickname, Taco, because I looked Mexican.

For a week, one summer, me and Alyssa were boyfriend and girlfriend. We held hands for two days straight.

We got a big blow-up alligator for the lake. We named it Zed, after Bobcat Goldwaith’s character in One Crazy Summer, I believe.

We got Nintendo. It was over. I got fat. Then I was called Taco for the amount of which I was presumed able to eat.

I found a cave in the woods. I played there a lot. I couldn’t keep it a secret for very long, so I told Alyssa and her sister. Eventually Jason found out, but he never acted up there. He played the same as any of us.

I was there when Alyssa’s sister had her first period. I was there when Alyssa got hers. I was there, among the many nights, when Jason was beaten by his stepfather. I was having dinner at their home. I don’t remember what transpired but that my memory skips to his mother talking very kindly to me, keeping my attention. I looked behind me, out to their porch, through a sliding glass door. His stepfather had him by the throat and held him half a foot off the ground.

This may not be the same memory but I recall a time when we were in a tent on his lawn. It was nighttime. He was crying and talking about hate. I said nothing. I let him borrow my Optimus Prime. He never gave it back.

Long before that, but not before Donnie and his stash, I was rummaging through our house with a trailer inside looking for my socks that would complete my Little League uniform. My babysitter helped. I played for the Cumming Cubs. I was short stop, and every boy’s father said I was a natural at short stop. The babysitter stopped helping me look. She lay on my parents’ bed and asked me if I knew how to play chicken. She was sixteen; I was in the third grade. I played in our game that night obsessed by this new smell on my hands. My game, however, did not suffer as I never really had to think much about what I was doing, anyway. I was a natural.

Many stories, and many movies, and many songs inspire us to search for that moment when innocence is lost. Pick a memory, any memory.

I was there when Alyssa’s older sister lost her virginity. Not there there. It was lost to one of the bullies that called me Taco, to one of the bullies she used to tell, quit calling me Taco. Alyssa, herself, made a vow to God. I always hoped I’d run into that babysitter again.

These are just a few of many, and even what is displayed herein is incomplete. Alyssa’s older sister married that bully. I wish them well. Alyssa, herself, kept her vow and married out of high school. I wish her well.

Jason grew up to be physically beautiful. I have seen him as an adult and it is amazing. He is truly just beautiful to gaze upon. He has, as of last news, three children with three separate mothers (all equally gorgeous). He neglects them all. He has abandoned them. There is a long scar down his back from where he was stabbed by a ne’er-do-well in the, likewise, company he keeps. Jason was a major player in the “why I am who I am” game. I wish him well.

I have no news of Donnie or the babysitter who both let me know that I am to be a heterosexual, who both taught me what it means to be a man and a child, but did not make me one or the other. They taught me, as well, to masturbate. You bet I wish them well.

The old folks whom I’ve recalled are all dead and in such a state, for good or ill, that all my well wishing would only fall impotent and short of reach. But still.

Now I walk my bicycle with a small creak in my knees that was not there when I first held my bicycle to stroll along, and I give this shit-I’m-thinking-about to the shit of the river that flows southward beside me. And to the shit of the internet that, like the river, flows from us to trickle onward and away to those unsuspecting rubes that happen upon it downstream. And as much as I would piss in that stream I would fashion an origami boat with all hope and wonder for all the unknown that is onward and away from me. Be well.