My Trailer Park Past

Northern Indiana, where I'm from, is a flat expanse of cornfields and Taco Bells. Along with pigs, chickens and cattle, Hoosiers raise llamas (some are bred for their dancing ability) and "beefalo," which are a genetic hybrid of a cow and a buffalo. Sometimes you can see beefalo semen for sale in the classifieds section of newspapers.

I grew up in Ft. Wayne, the largest city in the state next to the capital. When I was 14, in 1986, I got arrested for stealing a lawn chair from the back of a neighbor's house as part of a prank. I lived with my mother and stepdad at the time. My stepdad was an industrial-detergents salesman. My mother was an entertainment promoter. When I was 16 she worked with Miles Davis for a week. She even had him over for dinner at her apartment in Indianapolis. She says that Miles told her he'd be close to her even after he died. Nowadays psychics tell her they "see music all around" her and that a once-famous musician who has "passed over" is hovering near her.

My mom and stepdad kicked me out of the house, and I moved in with my father and his 23-year-old girlfriend in a smaller Indiana town to the northeast of Ft. Wayne called Angola (as in the Louisiana prison), which lies in the armpit between Ohio and Michigan. Dad drove a truck and did tax accounting on the side. Julie, the girlfriend, waited tables at a diner behind our trailer called A Family Affair. She had blonde hair and big tits, smoked Marlboro Light 100s, and had a Bible that she kept in a hand-woven "Bible cozy." She was always quick with a zinger about blacks or Polacks, kind of like a hot Archie Bunker. If you'd added her emotional age and her IQ, I believe you would have barely cracked triple digits. She had a five-year-old son, Johnny, from a previous...relationship. Johnny lived with her parents, her brothers and sisters, a couple of cousins and assorted nieces and nephews in a single house in another town. They kept chickens in the backyard, next to a rusted dirt bike that hadn't run since Carter was in office.

The move was a quantum leap. I went from a middle-class, prefab suburb to a primer-coated-Thunderbird-up-on-blocks-in-the-yard-style trailer park. Readers who have seen the tv show Cops will be able to conjure an accurate mental image. One night, a month or two after I'd moved into the trailer park, some buddies and I pried open a loose board on a shed behind a convenience store down the road and stole a case of Blatz beer. Even cold, drinking Blatz is an exercise in mind over hops: is it skunked or is this the way it's supposed to taste? Easy does it. Swallow. Don't exhale yet. Repeat. We drank it warm in our "clubhouse," an ancient abandoned two-story home on a deserted lane.

We got busted after a kid from our group ratted us out. He'd been arrested for doing thousands of dollars of damage to a golf-course green. How'd the cops narrow down their list of juvenile suspects? One lazy afternoon the kid had spelled out his initials in the green by tearing clumps of grass and earth out of the ground with his bare hands.

That business almost got me thrown out of the house again. I hate to think of where I'd have ended up, assuming the trajectory I was on was a downward one. Suburban ranch house to trailer park to...juvenile-detention facility? What saved my ass was some quick thinking and an impromptu prayer circle with Dad and Julie.

Dad's never been much of an intellectual, and when it comes to religion, his beliefs are usually malleable to those of the piece of ass at hand; if Julie had been a Satanist, I believe my father would have been an enthusiastic ritual sacrificer of babies. But Julie came from a proud line of uneducated fire-and-brimstone Southern Baptists. We visited her family's church once, in some dusty little Indiana town; I was so shook up after the two-hour service, I puked behind some bushes.

I came home from school one day to find the two of them deciding what to do with me. I opened up the waterworks, collapsed between them on the couch, and blah blah blah. The three of us held hands, Julie asked for God's help and began to weep, even the old man shed a few, I promised the Lord I'd be good, we held each other, they told me they loved me and that in God's love blah blah blah. I got over on them and started reporting to a probation officer once a month.

But life in Angola wasn't all fun and games. I was often a witness to its Lynchian underbelly. There was a local factory that was in the habit of mangling its workers and splashing cruel headlines across the twice-weekly Angola newspaper. It was the highest-paying factory in the area, and there was always a huge waiting list for jobs there. Everyone knew somebody who had been maimed or horribly disfigured as a result of his or her employment at the factory. I can't remember what it was, but I believe it had a nickname, something along the lines of the Widowmaker or the Maneater. I was at a party once when word went around that the factory's latest victim had just shown up, wheelchair-bound and missing a finger or two. The poor fuck held court that night with a bottle of Evan Williams and a pack of Kools?he'd hit his peak at 23.

But it was the little tragedies, the ones that you never saw in the paper, that made me so eager to leave. It was the sick day-to-day shit that revolted me, the glimpses into how dismal life can get.

A friend of mine, Steve, lived in the Buena Vista trailer park, which was two or three dirt tracks ringed by mobile homes, with a flickering fluorescent lamppost at the center of each. If the trailer park I lived in was Westchester, his was East Harlem. I remember going to his trailer once, where he lived with his mother, and seeing Steve's obese mom sitting on the couch drinking a Miller and watching Family Ties in a bra and stretch pants. In most population samples, she'd be considered a two-car garage. Here, though, she was perhaps a tad hefty. What a charmer though. I guess you have to be when you're that fat.

The trailer was a different story. I looked around a bit. A half of a potato wrapped in foil lay rotting on the thick shag carpet. Even from where I was standing, next to the door, I could smell the old dishwater in the sink. I could see a band-aid floating in the orange water along with bits of lettuce and what looked like cantaloupe rinds. Leaning towers of plastic dishware populated the sparse counterspace and poked out through the garbage in the sink. At my feet a little brown mutt gnawed away on a porkchop bone that still had some gray meat clinging to it. An enormous ceramic ashtray in the shape of a unicorn sat on the coffee table in front of Steve's mom, filled with butts. The flies landed all about, groomed themselves and inspected their forearms, rubbed their legs together, took off again. On one wall a very apprehensive-looking Jesus on a stained cross of wood seemed to be shrugging. Its eyes followed me as I shifted from foot to foot. "God bless this mess," it said, without conviction.

About four months after my move to Angola, I came home from school to find my dad sitting on the couch, cracking his knuckles and drinking a can of Milwaukee's Best: Julie and my father's blue Pontiac 6000 were gone. She'd fled to her parents' house after the last in an increasingly nasty series of fights with Dad. It was made clear to him that if he came for the car there'd be trouble. Her family kept guns. And livestock.

My mother had to convince him to call the police; because she realized when she added up these elements?physical threats, shotguns, personal-consumption farm animals, charismatic religious leanings, a high probability of inbreeding?that what you got was a class of people you were better off not fucking around with.

Sometimes I wonder what became of Julie. My father, who now lives in a high-rise in downtown Chicago, cringes when I bring up those days. But he still drinks Milwaukee's Best. Only now he pours it into a glass.