CHAPTER 2
TRAILER PARK TRASH

We used to have very strict rules at the trailer. If we were given a lollipop, we were only allowed to sit in ONE chair while we sucked it. That chair was upholstered in vinyl, making it easier for mom to clean up our sticky fingered messes. If we wanted out of the chair, the lollipop was taken away.

I think mom made up ways to keep us occupied so she didn't have to deal with us. On the days that she didn't vacuum the carpets, Jay and I were each handed an ash tray and instructed to "pick the fuzzes" up from the floor. We crawled around the trailer like little human Hoovers, picking up all the lint and fuzz we could find.

Our trailer was kinda strange. In the back where the bedrooms were, there was a second level to the trailer. Mom and dad's bedroom was "upstairs" and Jay and I shared a room below that, slightly sunken. We had little beds set into the wall on each side of the room, with shelves attached to the wall at the head of our beds, and a built in chest of drawers between them. We each had a window set into the wall. The sides of the trailer slanted a little outward, leaving this gap where my rounded bed corner met the outward bending wall. This little corner of my bed intrigued me. I could stick my hand down in it and use it to hide things. I decided that this was the place I'd hide my "boogers". Well, that was until a couple of months later when mom pulled the bed away from the wall to clean and found my little collection. She was less amused at my ingenuity than I was. I got a spanking, and learned to hide them in less conspicuous places.

I don't remember much about the day to day events at school, but I got in my first fight at this time. While waiting for the school bus in front of our trailer lot, I would spend the time sitting next to a very large clover patch looking for four leaf clovers. I didn't have many friends, we'd just moved here, so I entertained myself by finding four leaf clovers. One day a young bully from the other side of the trailer park decided that I should be deprived of my little clover patch. He pushed me over, then stomped on, and ripped out the clover patch. I jumped on him and just started hitting him with blind rage until the bus driver arrived and pulled us apart.

I should talk for a moment about discipline. If you ask anyone who was a child in the 60's if their parents hit, slapped, or whipped them, I'm sure you would get a resounding yes from over 90 percent of them. I'm not excusing any parental behavior here, just spreading the guilt around the entire generation. If we didn't receive at least one whipping a week, we were liable to get one just to ensure we didn't forget what they felt like.

I was at the age where I had to learn my multiplication tables. The only way they taught to really learn them back then was memorization and repetition. Mom would sit with me at the kitchen table with a fly swatter in her hand and quiz me. Each time I got an answer wrong -- SPLAT! -- She'd smack me with the fly swatter. I got real good at multiplication tables real quickly, because it was hard for mom to hear my answers if I was crying at the same time, and she was likely to assume the answer was wrong if she didn't hear it well.

Despite the ever present fear of corporal punishment, I always had an inquisitive mind, and I had a fascination with electricity. It was this big unknown thing that came out of the wall sockets. While in school one day I found a bobby-pin on the floor. For some reason that escapes logic, I had the overwhelming urge to spread apart the bobby-pin and stick it in the electric socket. Well, as you might guess I got the shit shocked out of me, and the teacher came over to see what was wrong. Then I remember the strangest thing happening. The class brain, who sat behind me, took a wooden pencil out of his pocket protector lined shirt pocket and used it to pry the bobby-pin from the socket. He explained to me that wood doesn't conduct electricity, and that's why HE didn't get shocked. Here was a second grader who already knew that wood is a poor conductor of electricity. I could see I had a lot to learn in life.

You'd think I would have learned my lesson from that little episode, but some time later while mom and dad were visiting a neighbor, Jay and I were alone in the trailer. Jay was trying to unplug the toaster from the wall and couldn't get the plug to come out. I went over to help, and in some perverted memory of the class nerd's actions, I grabbed a fork from the silverware tray, and used it to pry the toaster plug loose. This time, not only did I get another shock, but the electricity melted part of the fork. I couldn't just put it back in the drawer because mom would find it. It was obviously melted, so I took it outside and threw it as far as I could into the overgrown vacant lot behind our trailer. Mom eventually noticed that a fork was missing, but thankfully assumed she had been thrown it away in the garbage, accidentally, while she was scraping dishes.

At the age of eight, I started having trouble reading the blackboard from my desk. My teacher called my mom to tell her that my vision seemed to be bad, and that they had to move me up to the front of the class in order for me to read the chalkboard. Mom thought I was faking this for attention so for several days, while I was picking up fuzzes, she would stand on the far side of the trailer and hold up fingers, asking me to tell her how many I saw. I tried hard to count them, afraid I might get a whipping if didn't at least guess. I failed miserably, and she finally believed my teachers, my new thick black unbreakable plastic rimmed glasses were hideous and my classmates called me four eyes.

About this time I began having terrible stomach aches every night when I went to bed. I would cry and tell mom that my stomach hurt. When she asked me why I said I didn't know. After more than a week of this she became concerned enough to take me to the doctor. He spoke with me for a moment or two and asked me about where I slept, where the windows were, and what kind of shades covered them. My bed was right up against a window that had Venetian blinds. The kind you could see through if you tilted your head just right. I saw shadows move across my window all night long and I was afraid to go to sleep. If I watched them, I'd know when the monsters were going to come into my room. If I looked away, I worried that they might still come in my room yet now I wouldn't know it.

The doctor told my mother I was afraid of the dark. He suggested that she show me the outside of my window and explain how the breeze blowing the tree limbs casts shadows on the window, and that the tree was not a threat to me. Mom had a hard time believing this, sort of like the eye glasses thing, so instead of doing what the doctor said, she installed a little flat green night light on the other side of the room, where the only outlet was. Now, instead of staring at the shadows on the window, I stared at the night light, knowing that it was the only thing keeping the monsters out, until I fell asleep.

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