Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (29 page)

LARY DRAWS THE LINE AT HOMICIDE, HE SAYS. Like this is some new
development. Like until recently homicide was perfectly inside the
line but now he's on an anti-killing kick. "It's been a week," he smiles
that evil smile, "and I hardly even feel the urge."

"Don't tell me about your damn urges, you demented old dick
sack," I say. Jesus God, we've already been sitting here for the past
hour listening to Grant talk about how easy it is to suppress his own
urges-mainly his urge to eat like a normal person, as opposed to the
caterpillar he thinks he is lately, seeing as how he's on day twenty of a
new diet that consists solely of fruit, beans, and rice. All I can say is I
sure as hell hope he's wearing an adult diaper, because a diet like that
is dangerous, I tell you. It'll percolate in your guts until it blows out
the back of your ass like a shotgun blast, and that's not something I
want to see.

"I feel fabulous," Grant chirps, placing a slice of dried pineapple
on his tongue like it was a Communion wafer.

I tried his diet for one week. It was supposed to clean me out
internally, leave me all fresh and feeling energetic, when the fact is
I seriously thought I was gonna die horribly clutching my eyes like
the victim of a biblical curse. "My head is killing me," I complained
to him. "Am I supposed to feel like this? Why does this diet hurt my
head?" And where was all the energy Grant said I'd feel? I was more
energetic when my diet consisted solely of Slim Jims and chocolatecovered peanuts. Granted, I was eighteen then and could have eaten my own moped and probably felt healthier than I do now, but even
so-even today-after a week of peeled grapes and crushed peach
seeds, you'd think I'd at least get a spring in my step or something.

"Like I said, I feel fabulous," Grant repeats, smug. "I don't know
what your problem is."

That right there is what has me furious lately, because Grant and
Lary both constantly gloat over how easy it is for them to control their
urges, and we are talking normal urges, like the perfectly normal urge
to eat a bowl of brownie batter for breakfast. It's just so easy for them
to keep from doing that. Me, though, what the hell else have I got
to live for? I don't have any abnormal urges I can amp up in order to
suppress the normal ones, like I can't go copulate with twice as many
Mexican busboys like Grant does, and I can't taxidermy twenty extra
animal corpses in my basement like Lary probably does. I am, frankly,
cursed.

"You got to control the hole," Lary tsks, pointing to his mouth.

"I have way more holes than you do," I remind him.

It's true, that's the curse. Extra holes. They can't all be empty at
the same time, either. It's just not natural. It does not help, at all, to
hear that my ex-boyfriend is dating a twenty-year-old contortionist
(or whatever). For God's sake, when you break up with someone they
should at least have the decency to die quietly while reaching for your
photograph, especially after you declined Lary's heartfelt offer to have
them assassinated. I swear to God, I don't know what's wrong with the
world when a perfectly passable female like me ends up dateless for a
six-month stretch. It's not like I don't get out there. It's not like I can't be easily found, clear as day, under my desk in the dark with brownie
batter in my hair. Christ, what is wrong with people-are they blind?
Come and get me.

Because odds are I can at least snag a bad one, and it used to be
that even bad relationships were fun in their own way. I once dated
a British bartender who lived in Grand Cayman. The odds of that
lasting were about 80 points below leprechauns on the list of probabilities, but at least it got me out of the house. Way out. I can still
remember the color of the ocean as the plane made its approach: pale
blue like the knees of a child's dungarees. See what I mean; even when
things don't stick, things stick.

"You gotta be like a screen door," Grant keeps telling me. "You
gotta let things pass through you."

"Right," says Lary, who is such a cinder block nothing ever gets
through him. You'd never find him with his head in his hands because
the hole in his heart all of a sudden widened like the horizon one day.
You'd never see him doing what he can to stuff it shut again. He and
Grant both are tough as Teflon. Their hearts could deflect a shower
of old power drills, I swear. They are such sea urchins-such crusty
emotional acid vats-that I thank God for them every damn day.

"I love you guys," I mumble.

"Did you catch that?" Lary says.

"I didn't catch that," Grant says.

My words ricochet between them, not sticking. I smile, though,
because even when things don't stick, things stick.

THE BRUISES ON MY ASS ARE NOT FROM HAVING hot buffalo sex with
my ex-boyfriend Keiger, as Grant would have preferred to believe.
Not that I have ever willingly shown Grant my ass-Lord, get that out
of your head-but there's not much I can do when he keeps peeking
through the curtains while I try on all the vintage cocktail dresses he
picks out for me when we troll thrift stores.

"I hope you had some fun bruising up your ass like that," he'd
said.

"Get out!" I shrieked at him, and he did, but not before handing me something his own mother had probably worn at a pool party
when he was eight. Grant is always trying to dress me like his mother
from the '70s, though, admittedly, she is a stylish woman.

"I have a picture of me and my mother both twirling batons,
posing like this," Grant said, arching his back, kicking his leg up and
extending his arm out front with his fingers flayed. "I will treasure it
forever."

"Really?" I asked, almost actually kind of quasi-charmed at the
thought of Grant as a young boy tossing batons with his mom. "When
was the picture taken?"

"Last week," he answered, pitching me another cocktail dress.

I don't know who Grant sees when he looks at me, but these
dresses would have fit me better back before I had bruises on my ass,
back when I had an entirely different ass, one that weighed at least
fifteen pounds less than the one I have now. That ass would look awesome in these cocktail dresses, which, of course, I bought on
Grant's insistence. Now they're hanging in my closet with the rest of
the stuff I won't wear but refuse to toss, clothes that still fit the me in
my head, and as long as I don't try them on again, the me in my head
will match the me in the mirror.

But it's just a matter of time before that illusion clashes with reality. Like the other day, when I went to Barnes & Noble with my girl.
They have small chairs in the kids' section, sturdy little brightly colored
Adirondack chairs with armrests and everything. When I looked at
those chairs, it must not have occurred to me that I wasn't a child myself,
because the me in my head had no problem with directing my butt to
plunk itself right in one. The chair objected, though, and now I have
these two bruises that run like stripes on either side of my rear, marking
the spots where the sturdy little Adirondack armrests refused to allow my
ass passage to the seat beneath them. The bruises are so straight they look
like they've been drawn on by a plastic surgeon or something. "In order
for the you in your head to match the you in reality," this plastic surgeon
is saying, "you'll need to get rid of everything outside these lines."

Looking back, I suppose it was bound to happen. I mean, surely,
eventually something was gonna occur to make me start seeing myself
as I actually am, as opposed to the me I thought I was. Grant always says
the truth will set people free, "but first it will piss them off." I wouldn't
say I was pissed so much as just curious; like how long might I have
gone, I thought, not knowing that I'm not the me I used to be, and who
would it have harmed if I never came to know any differently?

Because what keeps coming up in my head, now that the me in my head no longer occupies space there, is that photograph of Grant
and his mother, the one where they're both posing with batons, their
backs arched and their arms outstretched and their fingers gracefully
flayed in front. Some people would look at that picture and probably
see a seventy-eight-year-old grandmother and her mole-flecked, bigheaded, twice-divorced, latent-gay son engaged in some tandem act
of massive denial. I can hear the judgment right now. "Who do these
two think they are? Do they not know how they look?"

But it's obvious these two don't care how they look to anybody
but themselves and each other. In their minds they are still young and
playful, and when I look at that picture, I see the majorette she used
to be, and I see the incandescent child that Grant was as well. I see the
elation on their faces, their love for each other, and the them that is in
their heads. There is no reason why this perception can't absolutely be
as valid as any other.

And when Grant kept handing me vintage little cocktail shifts
that someone a lot cuter should wear, I had to admit I liked the me
that was in Grant's head a lot better than the one I'm stuck with now.
Seriously, when the you in your head disappears, it's highly recommended to have someone you love close by to replace it. Later, as we
were driving around, he pointed out a George Bernard Shaw quote on
a sign above a toy store. "We don't stop playing because we grow old,"
it read, "we grow old because we stopped playing."

"So snap out of it," Grant said. He was right. Just because your
ass no longer fits in a child's chair doesn't mean the child in you is no
longer there.

IF GRANT'S GONNA DIE SOON LIKE HE SAYS HE IS, I hope he does it
without making a mess. I seriously hate those messy-death deaths,
though you can hardly avoid them anymore. It seems like every time
you turn around, there's people falling from above and splattering at
your feet. Or someone's getting beheaded in front of an audience of
millions, and I can't think of a more embarrassing situation, really,
than to have your head cut off in front of a camera, then to have that
videotaped for any old ass to watch again and again. Jesus God.

But back to Grant. He went onto some Mexican Web site to
take a twenty-page survey full of weird parapsychological questions,
and at the end he was asked to click a button to discover the actual
day of his death, which the Web site says will be next February, and
Grant believes the Web site. I found this out when he hesitated to go
skydiving with his friend Hector on Hector's twenty-fifth birthday
last Sunday.

"Good for you," I told Grant, because at first I thought he was
being sensible, which makes me wonder when the hell I'm ever gonna
learn. I've known this man more than a decade now; this is a person
who gave away all his possessions and moved to Mexico with nothing
but a backpack full of prescription sunglasses, only to move back six
months later because he got bored. Sense is the last thing to dictate
Grant's decisions, followed only by the fear of death. Grant couldn't
care less if he croaked this minute, I swear to God, which of course
infuriates me, as I would miss the shit out of him if he died, and I think that merits some consideration in his decisions, such as the decision not to skydive. But no.