Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (18 page)

Jim lives near Tombstone in a town called St. David, Arizona.
He moved to the middle of the Arizona desert years ago to be near
his wife's parents, who had moved there to retire. I always thought
these desert retirement communities were weirdly like those far-off
lairs where old elephants go to die, but I might be wrong. Sick old
elephants don't play golf all day, for one, and they don't host poolhouse mixers every third Thursday, either. So, though I'm not sold
on the idea, I'm at least open to the possibility that by the time I'm a
hundred years old, the idea of a Tuesday-night doily circle might seem
enticing, especially since I hope to spend those years hopped up on
morphine.

Anyway, here we all are, together again by Kim's insistence, doing
the family thing. I usually act like it's a big bother, but now I realize
the bigger bother is keeping up the act. My brother's house is off a dirt
road next to a strange oasis of orchard trees owned by his neighbor.
Other than that there is nothing around. When he comes out to greet
us, from our vantage, with the sun setting on the empty landscape in
the distance, we are the only people on earth. Everybody hugs, and
Kim can breathe easier. She has done her job, she has kept our connections open, and love can survive like that. It really can. All it needs is
just a tiny tributary. Then, as long as you keep the road open, you can
nurture it with what you have, no matter how meager that offering
may seem. Because love ain't no flower, believe me. It's tougher than
that. Love is a cactus.

My big sister, Cheryl, has been working since she was fourteen, mostly in
service to others, including, but not limited to, various unmotivated live-in
boyfriends. Today she owns a bar in Nicaragua, having been afflicted
with both our father's wanderlust and our mother's distrust of anything
corporate. Cheryl is still making me feel guilty for stealing her bikini two
decades ago. But that was small potatoes compared to her nearly stealing
Lary, one of the few lunatics-besides Cheryl, of course-who I can't live
without.

GRANT AND NARY WEREN'T AT ALL SURPRISED to hear that Cheryl
wanted me to haul an actual iron safe to her all the way to Nicaragua.
They remember, for example, the last time she came to visit me here
in the States. She showed up with no driver's license, no credit card,
and no cash-but she had eight heavy hammocks with her, the kind
woven with wood frames and bulky macrame.

"Can I borrow some shoes?" she asked as we waited for her
hammock-laden luggage, which appeared an hour later in the offsize luggage area, "and, you know, clothes and stuff?"

Thus commenced the visit during which Cheryl moved into my
life with all her heavy baggage and, in short, shit on my head for six
solid weeks. One of the first things she did was commandeer my eBay
account. I still get e-mails from merchants thinking they're contacting
her with the latest features of the Waring Pro 1800 Watt Industrial
Deep Fryer. It now has a breakaway cord, I'm told, better to keep from
killing yourself horribly in a grease fire, and "it's on the heavy side, but
shipping to Nicaragua won't be a problem because didn't you say you
have a sister who works for an airline? All she has to do is ..." So a
safe is nothing.

Our other sister, Kim, says I just like to complain. Kim arranged
our family trip to Nicaragua, and hauled her husband's grown son
out here all the way from Geneva, Switzerland, too, because family is
important to her. She is always doing that-making sure we all keep
in touch and are abreast of each other's lives. If it were not for Kim, I'd probably be living in some kind of self-inflicted witness-protection
program, wary of retrieving my daily paper in case relatives were lurking in the bushes wanting to reattach family ties.

It's a heavy yoke to have inherited. My own mother completely cut
herself off from her own six siblings by the time I was five, and any
memories I have of them are murky and include aftershave and wingtip
shoes. She lived within ten miles of her brother during the last decade of
her life, completely unbeknownst to him. I'm not surprised they didn't
run into each other, though, seeing as how he was a respectable retired
Navy man whose wife hosted poolside appetizer soirees, and my mother
was a furloughed weapons specialist whose favorite pastime was stealing
patio furniture and digging through dead people's estates. Eventually she
became a junk purveyor and went into business with her best friend, Bill,
a homeless paranoid conspiracy theorist she met at an auction house as
they haggled over a box of broken ceramic beagles and tattered throw
pillows. Later Bill used my Social Security number to open a business
account at a San Diego bank; then he used the money he earned from
that business to move to Central America to open a bar and later a small
hotel in Nicaragua, where he promptly had a heart attack.

That is what led my sister Cheryl there, and that is where she
remains to this day, happily hosting the other expats at a corner bar
called Zoom's. I really thought I'd get away with never having to go
there, but she won't move home, so Kim arranged for this here family trip. But before we leave there is the list of provisions we must fill,
as to hear Cher say it she lives in a country where supermarkets are
stocked like looted convenience stores.

"I have so little problem saying no to the safe," I tell Kim. "I've
already got seven pounds worth of chocolate I'm lugging over there;
why don't I just put a handle on my house and heave that over while
I'm at it?"

Kim herself is a notoriously heavy packer-she has one suitcase
that is bigger than my bathroom-but she says she's working on that.
When they visited me last New Year's, they were one or two suitcases
shy of the usual barge load they bring, and I must say I was proud of
her, as my motto regarding packing for a trip is, "Put everything you
can't live without in a pile, cut it in half, then pack half of that and
you'll still have twice as much as you need."

I hate to check luggage, or luggage in general for that matter, or
just hauling heavy crap period. Maybe it has to do with all those years
working on the plane, dealing with people's panic as they insisted they
saw their bag still on the tarmac as the aircraft backed away from the
gate. I swear those attacks were more from the fear of letting go, like
they saw some of themselves left behind. Not that they were wrong,
but whatter ya gonna do? No matter how heavy your luggage is, what
could possibly be in there that can't be replaced?

"Bring the safe," Kim implores me, her love for her sisters heavy
in her voice.

"I ain't bringing no safe," I laugh.

So, NO, I DID NOT COME BEARING A SAFE. I brought something bigger
and heavier. I brought Lary. Cheryl is crazy about Lary, and Lary is
just plain crazy, so they were happy to see each other. "I'm not a safe,
but I can stand by your stuff with a stick," Lary promised her when
they hugged. Whew. She was so glad to see him I was totally off the
hook about the safe for the time being.

A few days prior Lary had been thanking God because he hadn't
done anything dangerous yet that day, which really surprised me. I
would have thought that doing something dangerous was essential for
him to start the morning.

"What the hell are you talking about?" I asked. "You love
danger."

"I know, but now I like to put it off until later in the afternoon
so I have something to look forward to," he says, smiling. And I swear,
he was looking more and more like a big blond, blue-eyed piranha fish
these days, like his teeth are just gonna take over. He is my best friend,
but still, when he smiles at me, it makes me want to look around my
seat to see where he placed the poisonous snake.

Five years ago when Cheryl had first ventured down to Nicaragua, Lary was all set to go there with me. Cheryl had called and
implored us to meet her there. "C'mon, you fly free, for chrissakes,"
she prodded. As a matter of fact, I could not, at that time, fly to Nica-
goddamn-ragua for free. I could only get as far as Costa Rica for free, where I'd have to board a dilapidated, rosary-encrusted death bus for
a day and a half to get to Nicaragua.

"Sounds fun!" Lary had said. "If anyone kidnaps us, we can
escape by weaving ropes from our own hair to pull each other out of
our spider holes."

I must admit that it had sounded fun to me, too, so I said okay.
Milly was just a baby then and thus motherhood was still too fresh to
immediately overshadow my lust for adventure or, for that matter, to
immediately resist Cheryl's historic ability
to work the guilt angle regarding that
time I stole her stupid bikini.