Trailerpark Read Online Free PDF

Marcelle saw a bit of cheek, blond hair and eye looking through the inch. She shoved against the door with the flat of one hand, pushing it back against the face behind it, and stepped up the cinderblocks and in, where she discovered the owner of the cheek, blond hair and eye—Bruce Severance, the college kid who lived in number 3, between LaRoche and Doreen.
    â€œHold it a minute, man,” he said uselessly, rubbing his nose from the blow it had received from the door and stepping back into the room to make space for the large, gray-haired woman. The room, though dark from the venetian blinds being drawn, was filled with at least two other people than Bruce and Marcelle, batches of oddly arranged furniture, and what looked like merchandise counters from a department store.
    â€œDon’t you have any lights in here, for Christ’s sake?” Marcelle demanded. She stood inside the room in front of the open door, blinking as she tried to accustom herself to the gloom and see who else was there. “Why are all the blinds drawn? What the hell you doing here, Severance?” Then she smelled it. “Grass? You smoking your goddamned hippy pot in here with Flora?”
    â€œHey, man, it’s cool.”
    â€œDon’t ‘man’ me. And it isn’t cool. You know I don’t let nothing illegal go on here. Something illegal goes on and I happen to find out about it, I call in the goddamned cops. Let them sort out the problems. I don’t need problems, I got enough of them already to keep me busy.”
    â€œThat’s right, baby, you don’t want no more problems,” came a soft voice from a particularly dark corner.
    â€œTerry! What the hell you doing here?” She could make out a lumpy shape next to him on what appeared to be a mattress on the floor. “Is that Flora over there?” Marcelle asked, her voice suddenly a bit shaky. Things were changing a little too fast for her to keep track of. You don’t mind the long-haired hippy kid smoking a little grass and maybe yakking stupidly the way they do when they’re stoned with probably the only person in the trailerpark who didn’t need to get stoned herself in order to understand him. You don’t really mind that. A kid like Bruce Severance, you knew he smoked marijuana, but it was harmless, because he did it for ideological reasons, the same reasons behind his diet, pure vegetarianism, and his exercise, T’ai Chi, and his way of getting a little rest, transcendental meditation—he did all these things not because they were fun but because he believed they were good for him, and good for you, too, if only you were able to come up with the wisdom, self-discipline and money so that you, too, could smoke marijuana instead of drink beer and rye whiskey, eat organic vegetables instead of supermarket junk, study and practice exotic, ancient Oriental forms of exercise instead of sit around at night watching TV, learn how to spend a half-hour in the morning and a half-hour in the evening meditating instead of sleeping to the last minute before you have to get up and make breakfast for yourself and the kid and rush off to work and in the evening drag yourself home just in time to make supper for the kid—if you could accomplish these things, you would be like Bruce Severance, a much improved person. That was one of his favorite phrases, “much improved person,” and he believed that it ought to be a universal goal and that only ignorance (fostered by the military-industrial complex), sheer laziness, and/or purely malicious ideological opposition (that is to say, a “fascist mentality”) kept the people he lived among from participating with him in his several rites. So, unless you happened to share his ideology, you could easily view his several rites as harmless, mainly because you could also trust the good sense of the poor people he lived among, and also their self-discipline and the