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.