When I was in eighth grade, my dad finally broke free from the safety of the KOAs and decided that we were experienced enough to try a real campsite, one with dirt. He had heard of a great spot in the White Mountains, near a lake. He aired out the trailer in the carport, and the next week we were on our way.
When we got there, Dad found a great spot right by the lake and parked the trailer.
“It smells like doody here,” my youngest sister said.
“It does not,” my mother snapped. “That’s the way lakes smell.”
We popped the trailer up and brought in our pillows and sleeping bags from the car. As soon as my mom brought over the last bag of food, the sky broke open, and it started to rain.
Then it started to pour.
And then it started to hail.
“It’ll stop soon,” my dad said.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” my other sister said quietly.
We all looked at each other. The toilet was in the trailer, yes, but its location was not in what you would call a discreet spot. It was, in fact, under the cushion that acted as a bench on one side of the table, which also turned into a bed at night.
“Now?” my mother said. “You have to go now?”
My sister nodded. My mother took the groceries off the tabletop, my father dismantled it, and the cushion was lifted.
“Go ahead,” my mother said, motioning.
“Make them go outside,” my sister insisted.
“I’m totally not going outside,” I said irritably. “Forget you! For sure! Dream on!”
“Everybody out,” my father demanded, and we stood in the downpour to give my sister some privacy.
“This is getting ridiculous!” my mother said after ten minutes, as she knocked on the door, her cigarette wet and broken in half. “All right already!”
My sister opened the door and returned to her spot on one of the beds, where she wasn’t doing anything but reading People magazine.
After standing in four inches of water and mud, our shoes were soaked through, and my mom wouldn’t let us in the trailer until we took them off.
“From now on,” she said, pointing a finger at all of us, “if you have to go to the bathroom, hold up a towel around you!”
My father gathered up all of our wet shoes from outside and took our small hibachi out under a tree. After lighting a fire and watching it carefully, he placed our sneakers on the grill until he was satisfied they were dry. He was getting ready to bring the shoes back into the trailer when he realized the soles had melted so thoroughly that they had become one with the hibachi. He entered the trailer with the sentence, “I hope you guys brought a lot of socks.”
For the next six days, we were confined to the trailer while the rain continued to pour down around us in sheets, all of us shoeless except for my sister. She read her People magazine over and over while my remaining sister and I fought. My father stared out the window looking at the rain, and my mother lay on the bed with her hand over her head.
It was on that sixth day that my mother begged my father to get us out of there. “I can’t stand it anymore!” she pleaded. “I took the last of the Tylenol this morning!”
My father explained that we were in the mountains, on an inclined dirt road that had by now seen a foot of rain. It was impossible, he said from behind the held-up towel; it would be too dangerous.
“Then you just go see how the roads are,” she said adamantly. “I’m also out of cigarettes, you know!”
My father got the keys to the Country Squire and headed out. “Get the kids a board game before I kill us all!” she shouted as he pulled away.
“And this week’s People!” my sister yelled.
He returned twenty minutes later, empty-handed and frustrated. The road was too muddy, he said. We’d just have to wait it out.
Later that night, as I was sleeping on the toilet bed, my head over the bowl, I was awakened by a jostle. As I sat up, I felt the trailer move slightly, then move again. Another, more violent, jolt was the one that woke the rest of my family.
“What is it?” my sister yelled.
“It smells like doody!” my other sister cried.
Another bump. I started to get really scared. Oh my god, it’s Bigfoot, I thought, sucking myself into a white, blinding panic. “It is so totally Bigfoot!”
We heard movement around the trailer. To the right. To the left. In front. In back.
“Dad?” my youngest sister asked. “Is a bear going to eat us?”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it’s a bear!” my mother yelled. “It’s a bear! Run!”
“We don’t have any shoes!” my youngest sister screamed.
“It’s Sasquatch!” I heard myself yell. “It’s the yeti! Talk to it softly, and we’ll be okay!”
“Whoever has my People magazine,” my other sister said sharply, “I did not give you my permission to read it!”
My father, in the midst of the chaos, had made it to the trailer door and was peeking out the window. We didn’t notice as he opened the door and stood there, watching.
Cows. Lots and lots of cows. A herd of them surrounded the trailer as they moved through the campsite and on to the other side of the lake, bumping into our trailer as they clumsily made their way along. We, apparently, had camped in their pasture. It did smell like doody.
My dad paid a guy with a Chevy truck thirty bucks and the People magazine to tow us out the next morning to the main road and to give my mom a cigarette.
We all had nightmares for weeks.
The next year, when he cranked up the trailer, my mom came out of the house, shot him a look, then lay down on her bed with her hand on her head.
He sold it the following week.
A Morsel from
the Garden of Eden
The basket had been passed, and there was no way out of it.
It was my turn.
Ever since my grandfather, Pop Pop, had gotten sick, my mother, two sisters, and an uncle all had our turns. We worked in shifts, and duty generally called us in once a week.
I never knew what my assignment with Pop Pop was until I got to his and Nana’s house. It was like flipping a coin, though usually it consisted of one of three things: taking Pop Pop to the bank, to the bakery, or, the most feared of all the duties, to the grocery store.
Pop Pop had been on medication to relieve some of the pain that the cancer had caused, which worked really well; in fact it worked so well that I briefly thought of “borrowing” some. In turn, this mother of all painkillers had made him slightly dizzy and more forgetful than usual, so his nurses assured us that it was in his best interest not to drive. Actually, they assured us that it was in the general population of Phoenix’s best interest that he not so much as commandeer a shopping cart on anything that could even slightly be considered pavement.
So here and there, whenever he expressed a need to go somewhere, he would make Nana call one of us up and arrange to take him to his destination. He usually expressed his need by yelling that he had become “a caged animal” and that he felt he was an “inmate in his own home.” This, coupled with the fact that he’d insisted for fifty years that Nana never needed to learn how to drive, is how we began taking turns, although he did begin spreading the rumor that he was going to get himself an electric wheelchair so he could take himself to Safeway—which was three miles away and a quick hop over an interstate from his house.
It was revealed that Pop Pop was ignoring his nurses’ advice and had been driving himself around the neighborhood to run his errands. We discovered this when my younger sister went to visit and saw that one of the posts supporting the green carport was now standing at a sixty-degree angle, in addition to the suspicion that one side of his car had been visibly sideswiped by something big and wooden and green. When confronted with the evidence, Pop Pop insisted with a huge grin that he was simply “reparking” his car and hadn’t even driven out into the street, although Nana stood behind him and continually rolle
d her eyes.
In any case, taking Pop Pop to the grocery store was always the least desirable turn, especially since that’s where his area of expertise bloomed. He had been a grocer since the days of the Depression, and felt that he had learned a couple of things in his time, which he wanted to pass on to the next generation of grocers. This included sometimes verbally assaulting butchers, cashiers, bakers, and general managers, though he usually left the bag boys alone. Everyone in every store knew him by his name and knew him on sight—evident by the way they suddenly disappeared upon catching a glimpse of him shuffling down the aisles.
When I got to my grandparents’ house on the day of my turn, Pop Pop already had his coupons and his strategy laid out. We were going, undoubtedly, to the grocery store.
As he gathered his store advertisements and got his cane, he looked at me and disgustedly shook his head.
“You know, Laur,” he said, grimacing, “I’ve been praying to God for three days for something to feed the birds, and not one time this week have I found anything on the day-old racks. What am I going to do? What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Don’t you bring any old bread home, Nick!” my Nana shouted from the kitchen. “I just got rid of all the goddamned ants in the backyard from the last moldy loaf you spread around out there.”
“Ah, Christ,” Pop Pop said to me, shaking his head again, “I am a caged animal. A goddamned caged animal in my own house.”
I decided not to say anything.
“I hope we find some old bread,” he continued as I held his cane and helped him into the car. “Sometimes they throw the old bread away.”
Oh, no. I was having no part of this. No sir.
“You can forget it, Pop, I’m not getting in the Dumpster,” I said firmly. “I don’t care if the voice of the Lord was commanding me from a fiery Hefty bag, it’s not going to happen.”
Pop Pop looked at me in complete disgust. “You don’t have to get in,” he asserted. “Most of the time you don’t have to dig that much; they put the bread right on top.”
I hoped that I was doing a poor job at evaluating the situation as I drove him to Safeway and followed his directions to pull into the loading docks behind the store, where a Boar’s Head truck was already parked and being unloaded.
“There’s the Dumpster,” Pop Pop said, pointing. “Just stop right here.”
I stopped the car and didn’t even have time to turn off the engine when I heard Pop Pop gasp. I looked up. I couldn’t believe what I saw.
It was Pop Pop’s Holy Grail.
His pot of gold.
A morsel from the Garden of Eden.
It was a shopping cart, directly in front of us as if God had placed it there himself, nearly toppling over with bakery goods.
I will swear on anything that the eighty-two-year-old man in the seat next to me, who was using a cane merely nine minutes before, got out of that car and ran to the cart.
He dragged it back to the car, flung open the back door, and began shoveling the equivalent of a Hostess warehouse into my backseat.
There were brownies and cheesecakes and jelly rolls. There were loaves of bread and poppy-seed rolls and hot dog buns. There were Oreo layer cakes and lemon loaves and something that had peanut butter in it.
“I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it,” Pop Pop kept saying. “Most of this stuff is only one day past code! One day!”
I wouldn’t have believed it either if I hadn’t seen it firsthand. After eighty-two years, he had finally done it.
Pop Pop had won the lottery.
The backseat was nearly full when I heard a loud beeping sound, and Pop Pop began screaming.
“Oh my God! Laurie! The Boar’s Head truck! The Boar’s Head truck!”
And then I saw it; the big red-and-black truck with the pig’s head on the side was backing up quickly, and was in danger of very quickly driving over my car.
What else could I do? I hit the gas. I had to. If I get in one more car accident, my insurance gets revoked. I had only driven a couple of feet, only enough to escape danger. But I guess a couple of feet was all it took to drag my grandfather—who despite the mortal severity of the situation could not interrupt his heist for two to three seconds—almost to the ground.
I gasped when I saw him get knocked over by the car, but he got right back up and tossed another cheesecake into the backseat.
“Are you all right?” I screamed at him.
“I can’t stop, gotta keep loading,” he assured me. “Gotta keep loading!”
My mom was going to kill me when I told her that I had run Pop Pop over with the car. It would prove how irresponsible I was. I couldn’t even take an old man to Safeway without hurting him and giving him road rash.
Finally, when the entire backseat was so full that it was filled up nearly to the roof, Pop Pop got back in the car with a look of a man twenty years younger.
“See?” he affirmed. “I told you! I told you! I prayed to God for bread, and he answered my prayers!”
“But I ran you over and almost killed you because of the bread,” I replied.
“Eh,” he sighed, “what the hell’s a little dirt?”
I nodded. “Yeah,” I agreed, “but you better start praying again, and you better pray harder this time. Because when Nana sees what’s in the backseat, she’s going to kick your ass.”
He just looked at me and laughed.
The Useless Black Bra
and the Stinkin’-Drunk
Twelve-Step Program
Joel and I had driven down Eighty-sixth Street five times in succession. We were looking for Jeff and Jamie, our friends who we were supposed to follow and pick up after the Tally Ho, our favorite bar, had closed.
They had left ten minutes before us, since both had decided to walk the half-mile back to Jeff’s house because they were so smashed that there was no way that either one of them could find the street, let alone drive their cars.
Now they were nowhere in sight.
Jamie had quit drinking a year ago to avoid all of the extremely embarrassing things she had done in public when her alter personality, Otis Campbell, took over. Tonight, Otis was back with a vengeance, his presence evident after she drank her first five beers. Before she had even set foot in the Tally Ho, her eyes had rolled back in her head, and she had already fallen out of her shoes a couple of times. We saw her grasping for the jukebox for stability as she swayed back and forth, trying hard to focus on something, plugging in quarters to play her favorite Gin Blossoms song, “Hey Jealousy.”
As she hummed along, she explained to Joel that she had a Psychic Pregnancy lighter. If it lit, she was pregnant. If it only sparked, she wasn’t. She flicked the lighter, and it sparked.
“My boyfriend doesn’t think he’s fertile,” she slurred, her eyes crossing. “But I tell him, ‘Shooting blanks makes just as much noise, baby.’ ”
Even I gasped.
But now, at 1:30 A.M., we couldn’t find her or Jeff.
“At what point do we abandon the search and go home to finish getting drunk?” Joel wanted to know, since he had become quite tired of the whole escapade.
In a matter of three minutes, however, Joel was going to understand that a drunk girl is never a pretty girl, even if her condition begs for the click of a camera. It was definitely worth his wait.
There is a series of steps that a drinker takes to reach the pedestal of Stinkin’ Drunk, a chronological collection of actions that take place in order to fully guarantee that they will achieve the Full Fun Potential of the night.
Fun-and-Frolic Jamie has graduated from this school with honors.
THE STINKIN’-DRUNK TWELVE-STEP PROGRAM
Step One: The Call of the Drink
It beckons to you, you simply answer it. It sounds like a good idea, it feels right, but you decide you will not go too far.
Step Two: Economics
If funds are low, and you don’t have an entire paycheck to blow, you must decide wh
ether to do the Poor Man’s Drunk (i.e., drinking on a completely empty stomach) or if there is some possibility that you can con others into providing for you.
Step Three: The Suitable Drinking Partner
Finding the appropriate person may sometimes prove a little difficult, but a sensible choice has no substitute. You must be careful not to choose a beginner, because you will inevitably end up taking care of them and wiping up body fluids, but you also must be careful not to choose someone who will be functioning well enough when you pass out to stick hot dogs down your pants or cement your eyes shut with toothpaste.
Step Four: The Clink of the Ice, the Crack of the Tab
The first sip that holds beautiful promises, the initial lick of the lips that christens the inebriation that lies patiently ahead. The drinker begins to feel at ease, shedding the sober skin in thicker flakes after each and every drink.
(The next eight steps can follow in rapid succession or may occur simultaneously.)
Step Five: Sad Reminiscing
“I don’t care if I saw him naked on the couch with that girl who works at Dairy Queen, I know he really loved me. Why did he leave me? Why? Can anyone tell me why?” The most worthless step of the entire twelve. It usually concerns relationships and can lead to potentially hazardous DWIs—Dialing While Intoxicated—which entails calling everyone you ever dated, since you are convinced that it is a completely excellent idea.
Step Six: Wanting to Get Naked and Asking Strangers to Do the Same
Usually done after the DWI has already taken place, and the drinker has been rejected again.
Step Seven: Math
You start figuring out how many hours it will be until you have to be fully functioning again. “I can sleep fifteen more minutes if I skip a shower,” “I’ll wear what I’m wearing now and won’t have to waste time looking for something clean.”