Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (15 page)

UNLIKE THE USUAL GAGGLE OF PUSSIES who comprise my close
friends-all of whom scattered like fruit bats at the first sign I might
need help fixing my new slum-I also have friends who are actual
contractors. Take the very reliable Art, for example. If I need something done to a house, I usually call him and he is very reliable about
coming over and telling me what is necessary for me to do it correctly. Then I'll inform him that I have, maybe, five dollars set aside
to accomplish it all, at which point he very reliably falls over in a fit of
gibbering laughter, pats me on the back, and wishes me luck.

Thus, armed with the knowledge Art has imparted, I'll invariably set about slopping together a big, splinter-ridden Band-Aid of
an attempt to follow his instructions, which in this case entailed the
enlistment of my brother-in-law Eddie to come here and hammer on
my rental house until it sort-of-kinda-quasi resembled, if you drank a
six-pack and squinted your eyes, a house again.

Take the kitchen counter. The former tenants must have used it
to perform alien autopsies or something, because I have never seen
anything so destroyed. It was cheap to begin with, just compressed
sawdust cemented between two thin layers of laminate the color of
dental cavities. Then somehow moisture had seeped under the encasement-and it must have been a lot of moisture over a long period of
time-because all around the edges the counter was bloated, cracked,
and crumbling.

"This will have to go," Art said, tapping the counter, creating a
small cloud of escaping mildew. "No shortcuts here, Hollis," he eyed
me gravely. "I mean it."

His concern is warranted because he's helped me renovate my
own home over the course of our seven-year friendship, and I estimate
probably half the work he's done was dedicated solely to the undoing
of various corners I've attempted to cut here and there, such as the
time I figured foundation concrete would make a perfectly fine floor
for my in-home office. So Art knew I was eyeing that counter as a
beast to be circumvented, wondering if it couldn't be fixed with some
superglue or a stapler. Looking back, I must say I'm a little touched
by his unrelenting crusade to make an honorable home restorer out
of me.

But I am who I am. Art finished emphasizing the importance of
accuracy in calculating the various corners of the counter, and how
they'd need to be either cut professionally by a gemologist (practically) or come factory-cut in sections sold at Home Depot-both of
which were options that would ensure the counter cost me more than
its weight in cocaine. Afterward I hopped in my car with Eddie and
proceeded straight to the Sell Out Center.

First, I love the name of this place, as I never fail to find it apt as
I approach it from across the parking lot, which is itself the size of a
sovereign country but still not big enough to dwarf the gargantuan,
seven-billboards-big sign announcing the Sell Out Center, which features the Mount Rushmore face of a'50s housewife who is apparently
orgasmic over the galaxy of salvaged furniture and appliances inside. The inventory consists of anything that could be moved or pried loose
from liquidated hotels, restaurants, industrial factories, disputed territories, religious compounds, Iraqi palaces, and any other place that up
and shut down suddenly under a shower of unrest, financial or otherwise. The couches are the kind you find in bank lobbies, each weighing as if they'd been stuffed with two or three concrete-encased mafia
hit victims. Massive fixtures, mascots, and signage hang from the ceiling on hooks like it was a butcher shop for dismembered Mardi Gras
floats. Dusty, glassed-in shelves throughout the place showcase a gritty
little population of kitschy oddities, which further gives the place a
great, science-fair feel, like any second you'll discover the fetus of a
two-faced kitten in a jar of formaldehyde.

I have never once bought anything there, and this day was no different, as everything they offer is so huge, and my need is never large
enough to fit the inventory. Today, it turned out all the store had that
could pass for a kitchen counter looked as though it came from the
cafeteria of an old prison, and not even Eddie could have hammered
that into shape. But still, I'll use any excuse to go back there. There is
just something about the place, the piled-up pieces of other people's
worlds; the fifty identical armchairs, half with ripped upholstery; the
rolls of putty-colored carpet as big as redwood trunks; the wardrobe
mirrors stacked twenty deep, some broken, possibly having already
unleashed an eternity of cursed fortune. It literally looks like a hundred little planets came crashing to a stop in that very spot. I don't
think it hurts to become comfortable in a place like that, as you never
know when it might be your world that will end up here because, like mine, the company you work for went bankrupt. If it does, then that's
all right. Let people pick it over. Let them climb the giant carcasses of
your past. You are still who you are. You do what you need to do, day
by day. You smile or you don't. You sell out or you don't.

MY FLOOR BUFFER AND I ARE IN BATTLE. Well, it's not exactly my floor
buffer. I rented it from Home Depot during a moment of characteristic indecisiveness.

"Are you completely refinishing your floors or just polishing
them?" the associate asked.

Lord, what does he mean by completely refinish? I hate to do
anything completely. The wood floors at my rental house are sixtyeight years old, and my real-estate agent Ramiro told me that if I
wanted to sell the place, I'd need to pull up the carpet and refinish the
floors. But once you pull up carpet, you're sorta committed to what's
underneath, and I'm not ready to commit to that-and I'm also not
all that committed to selling it, either-so I decided to just pull up the
carpet in the living room to see how it looked in that patch alone.

It did not look good. But what do I know about how sixty-eightyear-old wood floors are supposed to look when they've been covered with rotting carpet for decades? I keep thinking of the Ice Man
mummy they pulled out of a glacier over a decade ago that caused
such a stir. "Wonderfully preserved," everybody said, when to me it
looked like he'd been crapped out the ass of a diseased mastodon. Still
the mummy sparked a field day of speculation on how he might have
died. Did he die in battle? Was he felled by the arrow of a rival warrior? Whatever happened, it's believed he escaped the battle and died
at a distance after arranging his equipment next to him in a neat pile. "A fascinating specimen," scientists blathered, thrilled because they
had their own criteria and the mummy met it.

I was hoping maybe home buyers were like that, too. I know
most want everything to be shiny and new and smelling of putty,
and there are others that love things to be "wonderfully preserved."
My friend once bought a house where the hardwood floors had been
used as a collective toilet by all the neighborhood crack whores, yet
he bought it because it still had half a historical fireplace mantel that
remained "wonderfully preserved."

"I think I'm just going to polish the floor," I told the Home
Depot associate, who then explained the different grades of buffer
pads I had to choose from. Evidently there are as many kinds of buffer
pads as there are particles of silt that had matriculated through my old
carpet and then fused with foot sweat and spilled beer to create the
dried paste that now needed to be scraped up from the floorboards.
So I simply picked the pad that was the most sandpapery of textures
without its being actual sandpaper. Because if it were actually sandpaper, then I would be completely refinishing the floors, and I'm not
ready to commit to that.

"Make sure you have the handle locked and you brace it against
your leg before you turn it on," the Home Depot guy said, showing
me the little switch.

A floor buffer looks like one of those metal detectors that geriatrics use when they hunt for lost watches on the beach, only the
buffer is enormous and quite likely made from melted communist
statues. And it spins. To get that thing to my property, I practically had to hook it to my bumper and tow it there. Once inside the house
I plugged it in and flipped the switch. The only thing is I forgot to
lock the handle and brace it against my leg like the Home Depot guy
advised me, and all I have to say is this: If a Home Depot guy ever uses
the words "lock and brace" regarding a piece of equipment, I suggest
you take that very seriously.

The amount of destruction that buffer did with the simple flipping of a switch was awe-inspiring. The buffer drum spun with the
speed of a boat propeller, causing the whole contraption to spring
from my fingers and hit the wall with the velocity of an airplane crash.
I tried again a number of times, but no amount of bracing and locking could control it. Unfailingly, when I flipped the switch, the buffer
would fly out of my hands and then around the room, crashing into
things, including me; it was akin to getting hit by a wrecking ball. In
the end, the buffer did nothing but beat the hell out of me and everything else in the room. Finally I simply decided to escape the battle
and crawl, bleeding, to a distant corner. There I lay quietly, my equipment next to me. Maybe the discovery of my remains will cause a stir,
I thought. Maybe I will be considered a fascinating specimen.

GRANT KEEPS SAYING I HAVE LESBIAN TASTE. He feels that just because
I buy crap from IKEA and drive a PT Cruiser-in other words, just
because I have a sense of practicality-I am automatically a repressed
lesbian and I should just drop the hereto act and situate my strap-ons
right now.

"It's the truth," he insists, taking another sip from his pussy-ass
iced Americano probably made from coffee beans plucked from leopard turds off the floor of the rain forest.

"Look who's talking," I tell him. "You've only been gay for maybe
20 percent of your entire life at the most. Don't talk to me about the
truth, because the truth is you don't know shit."

But the real truth is I don't think Grant is really gay; I just think
he's really horny and other men are the only creatures on the earth
who can match his appetites. My theory is he kept it all in check for
the first forty or so years of his life so he could father a child with his
first ex-wife, who mysteriously doesn't speak to him anymore. I personally think she should foam at the mouth and fall all over herself
in gratitude for the fact that Grant stayed straight long enough to
father their wonderful kid, but I am incredibly biased seeing as how
I love Grant madly. But not the father-my-child kind of love or even
the satisfy-your-appetites-on-me kind of love, but the you're-a-stupid-
puckered-poohole kinda love, which is the best kind.

Now that we got that out of the way, it was time to get down to
the real reason I was there watching Grant gingerly slurp at his arti san coffee elixir, and that is because I need him to help me pick up
Mexicans. Because if anybody is an expert at picking up Mexicans, it's
Grant. Back when he had his Honda Element, otherwise known (by
me) as the Bionic Anal-Sex Vessel, he would troll Buford Highway
almost every night and pick up prospects like plucking berries from a
bush. He would never go into explicit details with me because there is
still that odd sort of gentleman side to him that is so maddening, but
to this day he prefers Mexicans over any other kind of 'cans. He eats
them up like popcorn shrimp.

My own appetites are embarrassingly pedestrian by comparison.
I don't need men in my life right now for anything except painting
my duplex. Hopefully a new tenant will be moving in any day, and
even though Eddie has scraped and chiseled the place into a passable
habitat, it still looks worse than that Iraqi shit pit they pulled Saddam
out of. It needs paint, putty, plaster, caulk, and a total HAZMAT hosedown. I've been working on it so hard this past week that my hands
look like I clawed my way out of a coffin.