I Live in a Trailer Now

I live in a trailer now. it’s not a mobile home, but a genuine 1961 Detroiter that’s in a mobile home park on PCH, just across from the beach. It’s a friggin' dump -- not the park, just the trailer, with leaky plumbing and old dog smells in the frayed carpet that my dogs are only too willing to add to when I am not there or asleep. You have no idea how much fun it is to step in dog pee on your way to take one of your own in the middle of the night. You stop and stand there, feeling the cold liquid under your foot, or warm, which is actually more yucky, feeling your anger building inside you, and wishing that whichever one of them did this would just explode. Of course I don’t know which one did it, so I yell and scream at both of them. They stand there with that hang-dog look on their faces (aptly named) and take my abuse regardless of which one is the culprit. I think they have a deal -- no one tells, spread the anger around so I can’t really hone in on the guilty one. Just once I’d like one of them to crack and give a wink and a head bob toward the other one. “He did it,” Sadie would say, or “She’s the one you want, not me,” from Murphy. Alas, they stick together. Goddamn pack mentality.

So I live here, middle aged divorced man with two dogs. I walk them to the dog area twice a day, with my Tilley hat on my head, and my fanny pack stuffed with plastic bags from Ralph’s. This hat is a self-proclaimed legend, supposed to protect my head and attract women. I don’t know. It’s mad of off white canvas and it’s sort of a limp thing, like it just came back from a solo trip around the world on a sailboat. The hat, I mean. The idea of being alone on a small boat on a raging sea gives me hives. But I wear the hat. I think I’m cool, but then I catch a reflection of myself in the window of a Camaro, and I don’t know who the hell that fat guy is wearing my hat.

I say hello to the few neighbors I see TJ, a former WW II fighter and test pilot, who I think has diabetes, with a horrible skin all red and flaky, so he walks around in a sarong-like beach towel with a once gaudy pattern that has faded to indistinctity. I guess he wears it ‘cause it doesn’t rub on his legs as much as pants. I’ve never asked. I just make small talk like we’re standing in a sauna, and not on the street. He was a important man once, a man of courage and vitality. Now he is guardian of the dumpster, making sure we all obey the rules about what we can and cannot deposit there. His wife, Susie, likes to talk. She is small and very frail, and I always notice her skin. It’s almost transparent, and very delicate, so she bruises and cuts easily. She’s has white hair that must have once been WASP blond, and a wonderful smile that tells you that she was quite a babe -- and when we talk, she always touches me on the arm. I bet when she was young, that was her best flirt, one that melted the heart of a handsome flyboy or two. It still is, and for a moment as she touches this younger man, with his two dogs, standing there in the street, she feels young again. And if I let myself, I think that I too am young again, and this cute young thing has oh so casually laid her fingers lightly on my arm, and stolen, among other body parts, my heart.

When they go out, she drives and TJ steers. I shit you not. The other day I saw them trying to turn the car around. He would turn the wheel to full lock left, then she would back up, then he would turn the wheel back to the right, and then she’d go forward, and he’d turn the wheel once again to the left, and so on till they finally made the U and off they’d go. Tag team driving. If ever we are leaving the park at the same time, I wait and give them a big head start.

Her cat has run away, she tells me, and I am appropriately sympathetic with the required furrowed brow and the tsk, tsk’s that we use to show someone we care even if we don’t. I don’t. Actually, I do care. I’m glad that fucking cat has run away. Once it knew that my dogs were tethered to me and that I wouldn’t let go, it knew it could just sit there, and calmly stare at them while they went bat shit trying to pull my arm off and barking loud enough to get other neighbors to complain to the management.

See, even though I live in a hovel, the hovel is on a Wheat Thin of land that I rent from Tahitian Terrace, a “senior” mobile home community. Remember that. We are a mobile home community. Next door is a trailer park, Palisades Bowl. ( I wonder how many times a month someone turns in there looking for a bowling alley.) The Bowl has many trailers like mine, all bunched in close to each other, just yards from the beach but down in a bowl (hence the name) so they can’t see the ocean. But they also have trailer trash which makes it a very interesting place, methinks. All we have here is old people, and I fear I am living in the right place. Old. We never see ourselves as old. Old only happens to other people. Like death -- we don’t really see that one coming either.

Oh good, it’s raining now. Rain on an old trailer is a good thing, unless it leaks, which thankfully it does not. I can hear the rain much better than when I lived in a house, a thousand years ago. I like the sounds of weather. I listen to the rain and surf and the wheezy blowing of air from a heater with emphysema. A symphony of white noise, that can lull me to sleep or keep me awake and dreaming of long ago rainy nights, warm fires, caviar and champagne on a white sheepskin rug. Soft skin, hot on the fire side and cool on the other, laughing as she spills caviar on her lap and I volunteer to go get it. Does she ever think of those times? Does she ever think of me at all. I would like to know, but cannot bring myself to ask.

Back to the trailer. Lest you think I am deprived, I also have an ocean view to die for, 170 degrees from Malibu on the North, to that canyon hillside on the South that prevents me from seeing downtown. So now you get the idea. I live in a dump in a fancy, upscale park, with a beach I am looking at right now except that it’s dark and I can’t see it. I can hear it though. Gentle waves mingling with the not so gentle sounds of PCH traffic. Waves and traffic seem to make sounds in the same frequency range, so what I hear is a kind of continuous hiss like the tv makes when it’s not on a working channel, with an occasional peak when a large wave breaks. I tell visitors that it’s all surf sounds and I can’t even hear PCH. They buy it. Then some asshole on Harley with straight pipes roars by and my lie is revealed. So, now you know why I bought the trailer. I’m getting a new one soon, an 1100 square foot rolling condo, that they truck right in, in two sections, scotch tape together, and then put up on jacks. The wheels and axles are exiled to live troll-like under the floor, waiting for the day when I’m gone, and a new buyer looks at my old place, and decides it’s time to roll mine out and bring in a new one.

It dawns on me that the new trailer, in this park, could be the last place I’ll call home, along with a bunch of really old folks, many of whom have come here to wait for death to blow in off the Pacific. And it does. Every couple of months, the ambulance comes to get someone, and then we hear that another trailer is for sale. I bought mine from a woman who hadn’t died, but had just lived past her expiration date, so her children found her an assisted living place and sold me her trailer. “Assisted living?” Right. We used to call that an old folks home. Same thing, same outcome.

But isn’t assisted living what we all need and want? Someone to help us get through the day, listen to us, love us, and hold us at night? Like TJ and the radiant Susie, living catless here by the ocean, with only each other now, trying to hold on to their memories that slip slide away like so much beach sand through their fingers, as they drive off into the sunset, four hands on the wheel.

(I wrote this a couple of years ago. I'm living in the new trailer now, but nothing else has changed all that much, except that Murphy died, and has been replaced by Bandit. I just thought I'd catch you up.)