To the Last Man I Slept with and All the Jerks Just Like Him (11 page)

Strangers congratulated and complimented me as I made my way back to my husband’s pool table. Then a little man in a big black cowboy hat got up and belted out something by the Village People. Then someone else sang something by the Bee Gees. We all danced together. I had shown them the magic of disco. For one night, I had touched their lives.

I glowed with pride all the way through the next pool game and then through our meal at the International House of Pancakes.

Throughout the years that followed, I reminisced about that night and looked forward to the next time that I’d have that much fun.

Day-to-Day

All the feminist literature I’d read in college had warned against the entrapment of housewifery. Nonetheless, I’d decided to stay home with the kids until they were old enough to go to school. I’d had bad experiences at daycare centers when I was a child, and I wanted my kids to have better childhoods than mine. The women who’d written the feminist books didn’t understand my culture. I was nineteen years old. I knew what I was doing.

Housework was heinous and I did as little of it as I could get away with. My kids were fabulous and I did as much as I could to show them my love. Boredom was inevitable and

I fought it with everything at my disposal. Here is what I did over the next few years:

•  Gardened.

•  Sewed.

•  Dropped out of college.

•  Crocheted doilies.

•  Baked bread.

•  Developed weird little obsessions.

•  Made piñatas for my kids’ birthdays.

•  Taught the kids to dance to Mexican music, just in case we ever went back to my hometown and danced like I used to before I got married.

•  Fought with my husband until I cried.

•  Drove the kids to soccer practice.

•  Took the kids to the library.

•  Held my kids in my arms until they fell asleep, and then I cried.

•  Gathered pecans, shelled them, and made pecan pies.

•  Spread newspapers all over the dining room table and taught the kids to paint.

•  Visited my mother-in-law.

•  Yelled at my kids and spanked them. Then I cried.

•  Killed ants and roaches.

•  Fed stray cats.

•  Taught myself to use my husband’s computer.

•  Taught my kids to make prank calls.

•  Told my husband I had to go to the drugstore to buy feminine hygiene products, then I drove around the edges of town, listening to the radio and crying.

•  Watched TV. Trailer trash people watch a lot of TV.

Recreation, Part III

Late at night, on my husband’s computer, I discovered the miracle of the Internet.

The Internet was a way to reach out to people who were far away. People who couldn’t see you. People who could only judge you by your words.

Weirdly, people seemed to like my words sometimes. My words could somehow make them pay attention.

I got a thrill out of typing words that people liked to read—out of fooling people into believing that I was someone worth listening to.

I typed words late at night. I slept late in the morning. This wasn’t behavior becoming of a trailer trash housewife. But, come on, even trailer trash housewives need to have some fun.

The Fights

What’s a trailer trash marriage without fighting? All blue-collar couples fight. You learn that from TV.

Here are the rules for fighting on TV:

1.  Snide remarks mask true love.

2.  Issues are resolved within 24 minutes.

3.  The winner is the one who makes the audience laugh the most.

Here are the rules for fighting in real life:

1.  The rules of logic don’t apply.

2.  The winner is the one who controls the money.

3.  The cops can’t do anything until you actually get hit.

Have fun, lovebirds!

Lessons Learned

All my weird little obsessions with catalogs and crossword puzzles and q-tips and the like became one big obsession with putting my writing and my drawings on the Internet and gathering all the applause I could. I got writing jobs. I made friends. I saved money from my jobs and traveled to meet those friends. I talked to those friends on the phone late at night, when everyone else was asleep. As you can imagine, that didn’t leave me as much time to garden, sew or bake pies. Or to cook or clean.

Suddenly, I wasn’t a trailer trash housewife at all. I had deserted my post. The center could not hold. The space-time continuum was disrupted. All hell broke loose.

So, I left. And nothing has been the same since.

One important thing I learned from my experience is that, if the world were suddenly to become a sea of multicolored trailers tethered to cement, buoyed on beer cans and proudly flying American flags assembled in Taiwan, then I would be able to survive.

The most important thing I learned was that, no matter what happens, I’m going to survive, anyway.

Fiction Is Good Because It Lets You Pretend You’ re Lying

Crazy Tony

T
ina found out her cousin was out of jail when she heard him call her name. Coming out of Happy Land with her grandmother’s Coke and sunflower seeds in a brown paper bag, she’s careful to keep her face turned from the drunks who habitually stand in front of the little store. Although they’re mostly harmless, neighborhood boys ranging in age from seventeen to forty-three, it’s best not to attract their attention, ever.

“Hey, Tina!”

She turns with a wince.

There among the literal usual suspects—Crazy Tony, fat Beto, one-armed Jaime, glue-sniffing George, prematurely graying Lalo—is her cousin Rudy. His eyes are already dilated. From what, Tina doesn’t know. His constant leer twists his face, and his sharp elbows and fingers jut in all directions as he stares at her with his mouth open, spit ejecting itself from his lips. Tina thinks of a dog she saw the day before that seemed to smile as it ate dirty diapers from a dumpster.

“Hey,” she says in greeting, wondering how he got out of jail and back to the neighborhood without her grandmother knowing about it ahead of time.

“Hey, Tina . . . Crazy Tony here wants to ask you a question!”

Surprised, Tina and the others turn to Crazy Tony, who seems most surprised of all. His face, which always twitches and jerks on its own, twitches faster than usual and turns red.

“Wha-wha-what, man? I didn’t—I . . .”

“That’s all right, man. You tell her later, when y’all two are alone!”

Rudy laughs like a jackal.

Great, Tina thinks, just what I need: another pervert after me. She turns her face to the street and follows it home.

There are a lot of people in the neighborhood who get called crazy. Crazy Victor, Crazy Lupe, Crazy Susie on Kane Street. Some of them really are mentally ill, but some aren’t. Crazy Victor’s just mentally retarded and he holds his hands weird when he walks. Crazy Lupe’s speech is slurred, so you can’t tell if he’s saying crazy things or just regular stuff. People say he got hit by a train one night while running from the cops, and it scrambled his brains.

Tina used to lie about Crazy Susie being her mom. She would tell people her mother was dead. Everyone pretended to believe it, for her sake. As if Crazy Susie had just happened to pick Tina’s front yard to yell from for no reason at all. As if Tina’s grandmother was just too charitable to call the cops unless Susie got really violent, waving a tree branch and screaming.

“Get away from me! I’m not gonna let you rape me again, you dirty motherfuckers!”

Normally, though, Susie just walks the neighborhood streets and around downtown, hauling a little bag of clothes and staring at people. Sometime she gets hungry enough to go back to Tina’s tan brick house and accept a bean taco or boloney sandwich from Tina’s grandmother, who used to be her mother-in-law.

Tina sleeps over with friends a lot. One night, during a game of Truth or Dare, she found out that her friends and everybody else had known about Crazy Susie being her mom all along. At first she’d been embarrassed, but now it’s just one less thing to worry about.

Mrs. Hernández, in the big orange house down the street, had given birth to five boys. With that many, it wasn’t surprising that two of them would turn out to be crazy. People say that Crazy Danny, her youngest, would take puppies up the Dow School fire slide and do nasty things to them. He went to jail when he was eighteen. Tina doesn’t know why.

His brother, Crazy Tony, seems normal, except for his face. His eyes blink a lot and the corner of his mouth jerks up sometimes, as if he’s trying to stop thinking about something funny but gross. If it weren’t for that, he’d almost be good-looking, like his older brothers. He doesn’t have a job. But, then, Tina’s cousin Rudy doesn’t either, and they dropped out of school the same year.

Tony doesn’t talk a lot. He walks the streets all day in his camouflage jacket, or else he drinks beer with the guys in front of Happy Land. People say he freaks out sometimes. Tina’s never seen it.

Tina feels bad for Mrs. Hernández. She knows what a pain in the butt it can be to have crazy people in your family. But at the same time, she sometimes thinks that having drunks and drug addicts is just as bad.

Sometimes hanging out with the drunks and the drug addicts in front of the red store gets kind of old, even for Tony. He crushes his Bud can. “Later, man,” and “Tell Manuel I said what’s up,” they say as he walks away, through the vacant lot, towards Washington Avenue.

Really, it’s almost time to go home, but he wants to walk for a while, first. He crosses over to the Salvation Army and heads west.

Rudy’s back. Not like you could miss it, with the way he talks so loud and puts his hand on everybody’s shoulder all the time. Asking people if they’re fags. Bragging about some chick he claims to have screwed the week before.

Tony wonders if his brother knows that Rudy’s out and what he’ll do when he finds out. Rudy was working for Manuel when he got busted. Manuel had been ready to get rid of him, anyway, because Rudy was a big mouth and a thief. Then, he didn’t have to worry about it anymore because Rudy got himself caught way out in Magnolia trying to cut deals with some guys nobody ever heard of. He knew better than to say Manuel’s name to the cops, though. Manuel doesn’t play that.