Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility (19 page)

Yes, twenty years ago I stole
her stupid bikini and ever since
I have been paying for it out my
ass. It was the guilt from having
thieved her bikini that got me to
agree to "ship a few things" for her
that she'd left behind in the States after
moving to Central America, only to open the storage compartment to
discover it was actually a planet-load of crap I was supposed to pack
up as well as ship for her. I had to borrow a dented-ass van to haul it
all to the airport. In the end it took up an entire cargo compartment
and cost me $200-that was with the airline-employee discount.

All because of the bikini. Granted, it was a special bikini that somehow magically made us look like underwear models, but then we were
both so young and practically emaciated from our drug-addled pastimes, it was no big feat. Today neither of us could pull that thing past our own
toes, but still I'll forever be expected to repay her for that one act of indiscretion. Even Kim, the good sister-as opposed to this crazy one-even
she occasionally eyes me evenly and says, "Do this for Cher. You did steal
her bathing suit, you know." Oh, for chrissakes, she's my sister-if you
can't steal from family members, then what good are they?

So, sure, out of force of habit I said okay to Nicaragua at first,
but then I immediately backpedaled. By that time Lary had already
bought a guidebook, so in the five years since, he's been right up there
with the rest of my family, whipping the horses on the bandwagon of
guilt to bully me into going down there. "You pussy," he'd bitch. "I
bought a guidebook."

So here I am with no excuse anymore, since my airline now flies
right into Managua, which is just a whiplash of a taxi ride from Granada, where Cher lives. On top of it Kim corralled family from all over
the globe to convene there for a reunion of sorts, and it fell to me to
bring the safe. But I brought Lary instead. Lary can build her a safe,
for chrissakes.

"All I need is the bottom half of a bus and a fresh pair of pink
underpanties," Lary insists as he belts back shots of the local rotgut
Cher serves at her bar. Cher knows those are Lary's main ingredients
for building anything, so she laughs and throws her arms up to introduce us to the sun-puckered cadre of local expatriates who make up
her regular clientele. "Everybody, this is Lary and this," she hollers,
hugging me, "this is the bitch who stole my bathing suit!"

Now LARY WANTS TO BUY AN ISLAND, as if he doesn't live on one
already-just not the kind surrounded by water. It's the kind surrounded by stuff that is not at all like the stuff that makes up his
ancient home, which is almost solid concrete, with towering walls
made from blocks of the cinder and glass variety, held together by
Lary's patented amalgam of, probably, ground-up insects and old
cobwebs.

It used to stand by itself on a stretch of highway immediately
south of downtown, surrounded by nothing but city views and an
old funeral home in the distance, where the smoke from incinerated
loved ones belched forth from the chimney. "Ah, home," Lary said to
himself each morning as he rolled unconscious crack addicts off his
property-"nothing like it."

But in the years since, all the surrounding property has been parceled out and sold to developers. The funeral home was torn down
and replaced with a crappy-ass loft complex, and his city view is now
dotted with, like, neighbors and stuff, not to mention the houses they
live in; brand-new particleboard pieces of crap painted cheery colors
like "Sunkissed Peach" and "Mountain Mist." He tried to discourage
the yuppies from taking over by wandering his street out front while
waving his gun around, but all that did was discourage the real criminals, thus making the neighborhood even more appealing, so he gave
up and now there his house sits like a sore, blending in as subtly as a
cockroach in a bowl of dinner mints.

So I should have known better than to bring him to Nicaragua.
First, Nicaragua is packed with crusty expatriates and other fugitives
who do nothing, it seems, but sit in bars ruminating global conspiracy. Second, young Nicaraguan women seem to have no qualms about
having regular sex with this gaggle of outcast hermit crabs, and third,
you can buy an actual island there for just twenty-five thousand dollars. What was I thinking? This place is Lary Land! The minute we got
out of the cab they practically crowned him king.

If there is anyone who can forge a home in a massive lake at the
base of volcano in a third-world country, it's Lary. He'd have the whole
thing up and running like the Swiss Family Robinson ride at Disney World,
only real. He'd figure out how to
harness energy from the plumbing system he'll carve from the
rocks in tribute to the ancient
Roman aqueducts, then fashion automated fishing systems that
function in accordance with the lunar
cycles; then he'll pirate signals from a satellite when he wants to connect to the rest of the world, and he can do it drunk plus hopped
up on whatever discounted local narcotic the populace is derided for
exporting to inner-city American drug dealers. Already, while we were
at the shantytown of tents that make up the local mercado, Lary was
demanding I ask the hardware merchant how much it cost for a cluster of rusty elbow valves.

"Stop it! You can get that in the States," I said. "Why aren't you
over here looking at this here bloody hog head?" I swear, what was
the point of bringing him all that way if he can't inspect a bloody hog
head with me? That right there is culture, dammit, and Lary needed
to be by my side so we could ridicule it together. "Maybe you can
inject it with polypropylene and prop it on a big stick outside your
house," I suggested, but even the prospect of a homespun gargoyle
didn't drag his attention away from the rusty gadget guy.

"Ask him how much it costs for a concrete block," Lary demanded
of me.

"What?" I asked. "How the hell're you gonna drag home a con„
crete ...

Then it hit me. Oh, duh, he's not coming home at all! He wants
to stay here for the rest of his life, and who can blame him? Oh, my
God, what have I done? I brought my best friend, who happens to be
a drunk-ass, drug-grubbing misanthropic old blowfish who likes to
build castles out of paper clips and concrete (pretty much), to a far-off
land where islands are for the taking, booze is cheap, drugs are plentiful, and sex is noncommittal.

"He says concrete blocks are really expensive," I said desperately.
"Really, doncha wanna look at the bloody hog head? You can see his
brains through his eye sockets."

That distracted him, but who knows for how long. The next
day, back in Granada at my sister's bar, Lary fell into conversation
with some of the other societal outcasts, sharing with them his theory
that all things are shrinking. "Even measuring tapes, so you can't trust them, either," he insisted, all the while sucking back the locally bottled battery acid that is Nicaragua's native rum. Everybody practically
patted him on the back, as if to literally take him into their fold. I
was watching all this from outside as I caught a cab to the Managua
airport. I was leaving to go back to Atlanta, and Lary was not.

"I'm gonna hang here for a few more days," he'd said. "Don't
worry, I'll come back soon." Soon, right, I thought as the taxi drove
off and I watched Lary's figure diminish in the distance. No one
knows how the word soon translates in Lary Land.

LORD JESUS GOD, LARY'S MISSING.

Not in the official sense, but in the nobody-knows-where-he-is
sense. "Where the hell is Lary?" I screamed at Grant, who inexplicably let me drone on for ten minutes about my cell phone problems
before I realized what I was doing. "Why'd you let me go on and on
like that?" I cried.

Lary would never let me bloviate for ten minutes about a phone,
for chrissake. I couldn't get four sentences into it before he'd start
reassembling his rifle. "No, seriously, think about what I'm saying,"
I remember appealing to him over my Mama Cass theory about how
she was no less cool than Jimi Hendrix just because she died choking
on a sandwich rather than her own vomit. "We're just talking degrees
of digestion here, aren't we?" I whimpered as he ran me out the door
waving an exposed electrical wire.

Lary has the sensibilities of a hammerhead shark, which is an
essential ingredient to any group of friends; otherwise, it all just goes
to hell. Grant loves women too much to threaten me with death if I
don't deliver on entertainment, and Daniel just plain loves me too
much to shut my ass up when I become boring, but Lary ... Lary
is thoroughly unencumbered by any need to be polite. "Bitch," he'll
interrupt, "be interesting or shut up."

But Lary's not around to reboot my brain. Usually I can last pretty
long in his absence, but he's been gone for, like, ever. "Where the hell
is Lary?" I finally e-mailed my sister, and that is saying something, because Cheryl just got an e-mail address and still treats the computer as though it's a mystical fulcrum possessed by the souls of dead
relatives. True to form, though, she was high on drama and sparse on
detail. "I think Lary got kicked out of Nicaragua," she said. "I don't
know what the big deal was, the other guy didn't even die."

"Where the hell are you!" I e-mailed Lary, and that is saying
something, because Lary never bothers with e-mail. He still has an
old Mindspring account from way back when the Internet was nothing more than a morass of elbow valves populated by rats with notes
tied to their backs. "You fuckup, get the hell home right now. The
place is falling apart without you. We don't know who we are. Grant
and I have no criteria against which to compare ourselves. Without
you here to pollinate the air with your insanity molecules, we're just
bumping into each other like fatty fools. Come home. Now."

Notice how I dragged Grant into this, because if it were just me
in crisis, Lary would take his sweet time responding. In reality, Grant
is about as shook up over Lary's absence as a brick of petrified poo.
But me, I'm in serious danger. The last time Lary disappeared, it was
when he went to Germany to manage a rock band for half a year.
When he came back, I was married to a geologist and living on a culde-sac in Roswell.