Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility Read Online Free PDF Page A

the truck also came with Lary, and the ordeal cost me the entire supply
of generic Peruvian Xanax I keep on hand for just such Lary-related
bartering purposes. Predicaments like this make me wish my trailersalesman dad had tutored me better before he up and died when I
was young. It's true he'd stopped selling hitch trailers and had moved
onto motor homes by the time I was nine, but he could have imparted
plenty of wisdom in that time nonetheless. My mother taught me
lots of stuff I remember perfectly well at that young age, like how to
haggle the price down on a set of TV trays at the swap meet.

    "Tell her you only have twenty-five cents," she'd instruct me.
"Say you want to buy them for your mom for her birthday." If I mentioned that her birthday wasn't for nine months, she'd remind me that
it doesn't hurt to be prepared.
    And she's right. Preparation does not hurt. I thought I was prepared with my tow hook on the back of my PT Cruiser, a car that
Grant says proves I have lesbian taste even though I am not a lesbian
nor have I ever tasted one. Well, it turns out that you can't tow a trailer
that weighs more than your car, which, looking back, makes a lot of
sense. But at the time all I saw was a 1974 Serro Scotty and all I could
think of was how Disney World was opened only three years before
this camper was built. My family, back when it was whole and we
lived in Florida and both my parents were alive and employed at the
same time, used to take a trailer like this one to a campground nearby
called the Cozy Palms Trailer Court. There my parents would sleep
inside while my two sisters and I would bundle in the same double
sleeping bag under the night sky on the grass outside the door.
    It wasn't the official Disney campsite, just one of those bargain
ones owned by a chain-smoking retired forklift operator who kept his
horny dog tied to a post by the check-in window. To my sisters and
me, though, it was the Taj Mahal of trailer parks. We'd lie awake under
the moon in a three-way spoon, counting stars and listening to the
uncharacteristically subdued murmurings of our parents through the
aluminum screen door. It's one of the few snapshots of immeasurable
happiness from my past, and life is nothing if not a succession of stupid
attempts to re-create those. Hence the trailers, trashed and otherwise.

    Soon after that my father was gone and my mother's tastes went
through a sophisticated phase, during which we lived in Switzerland
and other hoity places. But in the end she bought a trailer because it
turned out her needs were simple after all. I kind of consider that a
blessing, to live long enough to understand that the human condition
doesn't require a lot of luxury. I've traveled all over the planet myself
since then, not to the Taj Mahal exactly, but I've stayed in other places
that rival it in opulence while I was free-rolling through the world.
In the end I bought a tiny house with aluminum awnings hardly bigger than the double-wides my dad used to sell. The backyard is big,
though, and if you ask me it's begging for trailers.

    MILLY IS FIVE, AND I FIGURE SHE HAS BEEN FREELOADING long enough.
Time to put her to work. She is a natural, after all. Nobody can resist
her. When she brings her cupcakes to The Local, Keiger, the owner
and bartender, doles out dollars to all his customers and extracts promises that they will each use theirs to purchase one. And the cupcakes
aren't bad, either; they are cream-filled and fudge covered, encased in
pretty pleated foil. MILLY'S HOMEMADE DING DONGS, the sign says.
Yes, there is a sign. I made a sign. Got a problem with that? ALL PROCEEDS GO TO A FUTURE CAPITALIST'S EVIL PLAN TO RULE THE
WORLD, it informs. So far she has made seventy-five bucks.
    I was five, too, when I first went into cupcake sales. My sisters and
I would go door to door with trays of the stuff. Once a neighbor wanted
to buy our entire supply, but my little sister swatted