Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (30 page)

"Bitch, I've got four months left to live," he huffed, referring to
the Web site results. "I ain't spending them in a wheelchair trying to
operate the controls with my tongue. I got stuff to do."

"Well, goddamn, get the life insurance application then," I said.
"If you're gonna croak in four months, you gotta make sure I'm cared
for, not to mention your baby, which I plan to have so I can grow your
replacement. So hurry up and knock me up. Gimme some sperm. I
know you got it."

"Get it yourself," he said. "I donated twenty tubs of the stuff back
in the '80s when I was working my way through seminary school."

It did not surprise me in the
least that Grant financed Bible
college by beating off to gay
porn, but the new perspective on the cache of preserved sperm kind of threw
me. I'd always known it was out
there, but I never really thought of it as a resource until now. Wow,
perfectly good sperm, I thought. People pay a lot of money for that.

"Really?" I said tentatively, because until then I didn't think I was
serious; then my ovaries started speaking up, and I hadn't heard from
them in years. "But that's expensive. Why should I pay for it when I
know you're full of free sperm? You could do it right now. Go. Ask for
a spare cup at the coffee counter."

Grant shook his head. "You're gonna want the frozen stuff," he
argued. "Of course I could give you sperm fresh from my body right
now, but the frozen stuff is me from twenty years ago. I made a much
better specimen then."

And here I had to agree with him, not that I have ever come into
direct contact with any of Grant's sperm-though last year I did sit in
the backseat of his Honda Element, which, wrung out, could probably produce enough to populate a planet-but I have been in contact
with their result. His daughter, Mary Grace, is in her twenties and she
qualifies as a walking goddess. And she's smart, too; she moved abroad
when George W. got elected, for one. But she is a product of young
sperm from a young Grant. I don't have the same selection. My selection is limited to old sperm from a young Grant or young sperm from
an old Grant. Plus, I'm not at all convinced either wouldn't produce
the fall of society, and I'm undecided over whether that would be a
good or a bad thing.

Christ, I thought, clutching my head, there are so many decisions
that a responsible mother has to face these days. Like, if I choose the old
sperm from the young Grant, I can have it injected fairly innocuously,
whereas if I choose the young sperm from the old Grant, I know he'll
insist on implanting it using his own equipment. But then again, the
frozen sperm isn't going anywhere, seeing as how it's frozen, whereas
the fresh sperm, according to Grant, is due to go out of production
next February.

"I pick the fresh sperm," I told Grant. "On one condition: You
can't die. I'm not getting knocked up with your big-headed baby just so you can croak in three months. You at least have to be there when
I pop. Beyond that, I'll assess your usefulness on a month-to-month
basis. Deal?"

"Deal," he said.

Soon enough the day of Grant's preordained demise came, and
all I have to say is if it were my last night to live, I wouldn't spend it
behind the bar at The Local. But that's me.

"Come see me on my last night on Earth," he blared to anyone
who would listen, because Grant is nothing if not above whoring his
impending doom for a few extra nickels in the tip jar. I for one would
have spent that time curled up under my sink or something, because I
am nothing if not terrified of superstitions. In fact, I once saw a black
cat cross my path, and three days later my own cat, Jethro, died.

Not that I blame the black cat. I blame myself for being afraid of
the black cat, because the second I saw the black cat I started to fear
what the hell was gonna happen, and while I was busy being afraid,
I didn't notice my own cat missing until it was too late. So not only
did I fear the black cat, I feared the fear, and a mind-set like that stirs
up its own shit.

Anyway, Grant didn't die like he said he would. We were all waiting expectantly, but he didn't clutch his throat or get shot along with
five others by an idiot in a black trench coat, or even trip and fall and
impale his big head on a beer spigot. No. He just lived on like nothing
important had happened at all, like there was no Mexican mystic who
had ordained his death. The damn nerve of Grant, to live on without
fear. Who spends his last night on Earth working like that?

"Today I have been reborn," he said when he didn't die. "I am
risen."

I guess that's what they say about near-death experiences; they
change you. Grant says I've got nothing to fear, but he always says
that. "Don't fear the truth," he always says, but it's not as easy as that,
is it? Not only do people fear the truth, they fear the fear, and a mindset like that stirs up its own shit.

"I think you should know I decided against having your baby," I
informed him. "So I won't be growing your replacement after all."

"Your loss," he yawned.

WHEN I FIRST GAVE BIRTH, LARY PRACTICALLY BANNED me from the
cement mausoleum he calls a home, so worried he was that I'd lactate
all over his album covers or something. Not that I would ever, for a
second, as an actual mother, think to bring a baby into Lary's Cave of
Wet Concrete and Rusty Rails, but Lary was used to me as he knew
me. He was not aware of the replacement that had taken my shape
after I'd spawned. Case in point: It took him a while to notice there
was now a definite absence of alcohol in our interactions. Don't get
me wrong, alcohol is very important. If not for alcohol, I wouldn't
have had half the sex I did in my twenties, and I certainly would not
have gotten knocked up. But once you become a mother, booze loses
its usefulness because you don't want to be the mom on Cops who
greets the squad car in a bathrobe and a beer in her hand, slurring,
"Thass my baby bleedin' at the bottom of the stairs." So you replace
booze with something else, like coffee.

That's what parents do, they make replacements. I remember my
mother's old diabetic neighbor, Tilly, who lived in the trailer next door
and hung out on her patio all day to drink bourbon and air out the
stitches on her leg stumps. One time she caught me as I took out the
trash and invited me over to view her collection of crafts in her trailer,
the atmosphere of which was so heavy with booze breath it smelled
like an operating mustard-gas factory.

Her walls were lined with bookcases packed with nothing but
homemade toilet paper cozies. The cozies were the half-Barbie-doll and half-yarn-knit-hoop-skirt kind, the idea being that the skirt would
fit around an extra roll of toilet paper so it could be decoratively displayed in your bathroom. Tilly was pretty proud of her work. A tub
of bisected Barbie doll parts spilled out from under her dining table,
which itself was dotted with bourbon bottles. She wheeled over and
fumbled with one.

"Drink?" she offered, knocking the bottle over with her hand.

"Let me," I said, rising from my seat to help her.

The desire to escape was powerful-for one, it was obvious her
cats had mistaken the tub of Barbie parts for their litter box. But
Tilly needed company, and I was as good a replacement as any for the
grown daughter who'd dropped Tilly off after her surgery and hadn't
been seen since. Her name was Theresa, Tilly told me, and she was
studying at the same college I attended. The sorrow in Tilly's voice
when she spoke of her daughter was so evident that I let Tilly dote
on me until it was time to wheel her drunk ass back out to the patio.
"Take these," she said as I left, handing me an armful of cozies. "You
can never have enough."

Yes, you can never have enough toilet paper cozies, especially if
toilet paper cozies are all you have. Tilly's daughter, Theresa, by the
way, became a successful art broker and is a mother herself now. These
days I often think about Theresa and how she fares when she thinks of
her mom. Because before I became a mother myself, it was no problem to remember Tilly as she was when I left her: alone, legless, and
ignored by a daughter. Now, though ... now that memory is simply
unbearable, and it has to be replaced.

SINCE WHEN DO MATTRESSES MATTER SO MUCH? Because all of a sudden,
it seems like every single person I know has become a complete mattress
pussy. The other day, I went to The Local to yell at Keiger some more,
and somehow instead ended up asking him in a quasi-civil manner how
he's been lately. He launched into this starry-eyed soliloquy about his
brand-new king-size mattress and all the zillion-thread-count bedsheets
he'd imported from a company in Egypt that excavates them out from
under dead pharaohs or something. And I don't know about you, but
the last thing a girl wants to hear is how happy her ex-boyfriend is
sleeping all alone (hopefully) in his big, new, pussy-plush fucking super
spring that he probably paid more for than he did on all their past dates
combined. So, of course, I had to start yelling at him again.

"You could call me, you know," I heard him say as I stormed out.

Not really. I erased his number off my phone and threw his house
key in the river.

So I called Lary instead. "What the hell is it about mattresses?"
I asked him. Lary's a good person to ask. His place is little more
than a mosquito-infested concrete bunker (although he did add airconditioning recently), with corroded floors that have stuff growing through the cracks, yet right in the middle of everything, almost
like a throne, is this king-size bed with a cushy-ass mattress so thick
and pillowy it could probably absorb a fleet of crashing aircraft. He
does not even have curtains-or windows, for that matter, depending on the destructiveness of his mood-yet he invested more money purchasing that mattress than he did when he bought the entire dilapidated spider hole he calls a home.

"It's great," Lary swears. "Since I've been sleeping on that mattress, I have fewer dreams about carnage, rape, and mutilation." Right.
As if he'd ever consider fewer thoughts of rape and mutilation a positive by-product.