Thanksgiving Trailer Trash Treasures

It’s been 8 years since I’ve seen my family from my mom’s side. The trailer trash side. I managed to escape 8 Thanksgivings with audacity and luck but this year they got me by guilt. Grandpa Rolly was on his last mile, and he wanted to witness one last shitshow before he kicked the bucket for good.

They all lived in the same trailer park area and everyday with them there’s some sort of hard to believe fuckery happening. I’m not saying I’m better than them, I’m just saying that each and every one of them is missing a couple of bolts in their own unique way. I’m sure they inspired the Trailer Park Boys tv series but the writers had to dilute the truth because it would have been just too much of a stretch and no one would have believed people like that actually exist.

We have grandpa Rolly, a crippled alcoholic who has been collecting junkyard scraps since childhood and who crap his pants on the regular. My grandma Rita who always smokes weed to hate us all less. Uncle Clopin, who smoked so much cigarettes and crack that he’s got a hole in his throat. But he still smokes and exhales from the hole as a party trick. His wife, Celine, who tries so hard to be cool she once smoked sage thinking it was weed. Her kids, Muayrie (spelled like this) and Duanny (spelled like this), two little hyperactive bums who used to steal and smoke everyone’s cigarettes. Aunt Didi, who lacked air at birth and understands nothing in life but manages to make everyone uncomfortable with wise harsh truths. And my mom. Somehow she’s still looking good after years of cocaine abuse, but what she has in tits she lacks in brains. She has no manners, no sense of boundaries, gets verbally and physically violent when drunk and is generally unpleasant to be around most of the time.

And me. At 34 I managed to get out of the trailer park life to live in a studio apartment and become a writer. I’m an alcoholic like my grandfather and a drug addict like, well mostly the rest of the family. But this year I won’t engage in any fucked-up scheme they got going on.

So here I am, December 24^th about to knock on grandpa Rolly and grandma Rita’s trailer door, squeezed into a sequined brown dress like a shiny sausage because I’m bloated from my daily alcohol use. It’s not even 5 PM and I can smell the weed and maybe even some chemicals. As I wait for someone to open the door, I see clouds coming from the side of the trailer so I approach with care, and who do we have here…It’s little Duanny, all grown up and covered in neck tattoos, smoking crack from a glass pipe while grandma Rita smokes her joint while telling him he’s the least annoying of the family members because he’s too dumb to actually talk. ‘’Hello fuckers’’ I greet them. Grandma Rita scans me from head to toe: ‘’Someone’s been having Christmas feat every day I see’’. I can’t even reply. I turn my back and instead of knocking on the door I just decide to enter.

What I see there is something I wish my brain will classify as trauma and hide it deep in the corners of my mind. Grandpa Rolly is standing up in an adult diaper screaming at no one that eating 28 deviled eggs is normal for an old man. Aunt Didi is trying to wash grandpa’s stained-shit pants with a bunch of Kleenex right on the dinner table. Uncle Clopin is sitting on the rocking chair in the corner, sucking on a long-ass native American pipe and blows weed smoke from his throat hole. As I look for Aunt Celine, I see her trying to bake cookies in the microwave while holding a cigarette in one hand an holding a bottle of pills on the other. I wonder what those are. No. Stay clean, girl, stay clean tonight. As for Muayrie, no signs of her. Yet. She’s a grown up now. Maybe we’ll get along and have a decent sober conversation at some point. My mom is still not there but she’s so dumb it wouldn’t surprise me she would be spending Thanksgiving with another family entirely without realizing it the whole time.

I scream ‘’OH HEY HI FAM!’’ in what I hope is an enthusiastic tone. Everyone looks at me and go back to what they were doing, at the exception of grandpa Rolly who comes to give me a hug in his adult diaper. Sweet old Rolly. He asks me if I want a shooter of gin and I can’t say no. As I walk by the kitchen area, and remember that this is a trailer, I come across Muayrie coming out of the bathroom with a 50-something 6’3 tall black mustachioed man in a white camisole. She says hi and introduce me to Mario, a pheasant breeder apparently. What were they doing in the bathroom together, I don’t know, but still she’s not that little cigarette-stealing, hyperactive twat that she once was. So I drink a shot of gin with grandpa Rolly and he seems in a good mood despite shitting his pants and knowing he’s going to die soon.

‘’OH HEY YOU LITTLE SHITS!’’ Grandma Rita came back from outside after smoking her joint, she’s got something to say. She continues screaming ‘’WE DON’T HAVE A TABLE BIG ENOUGH FOR ALL YOU GLUTTONS SO EAT WHAT YOU WANT WHEN YOU WANT. LET’S PLAY STEAL MY SECRET!’’ Steal my secret is a family game which sole purpose is to humiliate oneself the most while stealing each other’s presents. The goal of the game is that every time you steal a gift, you have to disclose a personal secret of yours which is proportional to the gift. And the juicier and more embarrassing the secret, the bigger gift you can steal. As you can see it doesn’t make sense, just like the rest of this family.

The only part I like about Thanksgiving with my family is to discover how each gift is more absurd than the next. We have a limit of 10$ because we’re all below poverty so it happens that the gift were hand-made like a doll made from popsicle stick or straight up recuperated from the actual Thanksgiving dinner. This year I brought a mouthwash and a toothbrush because God knows they all need it. So here we are, all sitting disparately from one end of the trailer to the next. Grandpa Rolly and Grandma Rita on the sofa, Uncle Clopin on the rocking chair, Celine and Didi at the kitchen table, plus Duanny sitting there on one ass cheek, and Muayrie and Mario down there on the bed in the bedroom, sucking each other’s fingers. And me. Standing up and not sitting anywhere.

Each of is clenched to our gift, and we decided that Grandpa Rolly is going to be the first stealing a gift because he is the one who’s gonna die sonner. And he was excluded from buying a gift also because he was going to die soon and should keep his money and treat himself to, like, a bunch of Kit Kat bars. As for his secret, he admitted that sometimes when he goes on a trailer park walk he peeps into other trailers windows. Medium secret, so he picks my medium-sized gift. The look of utter disappointment in his face when he unwraps my gift makes me almost forget he’s still in a diaper. My turn. I’m visually making a tour of the gifts to pick the smallest, and here it is, rolled into one of Aunt Didi’s hand. I tell them my little secret: last month I was so drunk and couldn’t wait to come home to pee so I pissed between two cars on the street. Probably everyone in this family has already done it. I unwrap the gift and surprise, it is a little yellow feathered bird on a stick. Could’ve been worse. Now it’s Didi’s turn. I’m excited because I know she always wants the biggest present so her secret must be pretty big. She jumps over Clopin and says without hesitation ‘’ONE TIME I MASTURBATED THINKING ABOUT MOM’’. Which is, you deducted, grandma Rita. No gift could have been big enough for that kind of revelation. As we all stood there in utter shock and disgust, she ferociously unwraps the gift only to find out that it’s just an old used curtain pole. Which is not a bad idea considering they all have bedsheets for curtains around here.

The game is interrupted by Duanny, who stands up suddenly and starts pacing in the middle of the trailer, sweating. He goes in the direction of the window above the sofa, climbs on grandma Rita to look besides the curtain. Well, bedsheet. ‘’Is everything alright sweetie?’’ Asked her mother Celine, two cigarettes in one hand. Duanny looks nervous and shakes his head from left to right. ‘’Nah nah, they won’t find me here, everything’s good’’. Of course he’s being paranoid, he smoked goddamn crack right before Christmas dinner with his family. The game resumes. It’s Uncle Clopin’s turn. He goes towards Celine, his wife, and grabs a medium-sized gift. He confess to us that during high school, he gave a hand job to the family dog once. Just once out of pure curiosity, he precised. The gift is a pack of cigars. We all know it was arranged and that cheepskate Celine didn’t want to spend even one dime on any of us so she told her husband to pick her gift. It’s now Celine’s turn. Celine stands up drunkenly and whips Mario’s gift from his hands and it’s a small-to-medium one. Surprise, it was an assortment of pheasant spices, which truly is a blend of any other spices with a pheasant sticker on it. She tried to pretend she forgot about the secret portion of the game but everyone goes crazy and pressures her into admitting something. She reluctantly tell us that she burst Muayrie’s cat eye with a rake while raking leaves when she was 5 years old. The next gift is from Muayrie to Mario, and he just grabs the gift nonchalantly. He proceeds to unwrap it only to discover a pack of cigarettes and a pack of mints, which is, in my opinion, the best gift so far. Since my mom was supposed to be already here, there’s Duonny left with his own gift. He opens it in front of everyone and it’s a bunch of uncooked cookies from the batch that Celine put in the microwave earlier. That was also his secret.

So far this Thanksgiving dinner is going really good, I figured. Embarrassing, but no cops yet so it’s a victory. Until there’s a knock on the door. Aunt Rita stands up to open and it is, in fact, two cops, one holding each one of my mom’s arms and she is wasted, dishevelled and her makeup all melted down her face. She looks like a wildcat tore her outfit to shreds. My grandma asked was going on and the cops told us that my mom drunkenly went to her ex boyfriend’s girlfriend trailer and tried to cut her hair with shears. Apparently, she was chasing her ex’s new boyfriend across the trailers outside screaming ‘’WHEN YOU WIILL LOOK LIKE A LITTLE BOY NO ONE WILL FUCK YOU!’’. We were all glad that my mom was safe and that this little incident was only why she was late. The cops told us to keep her in check, and as soon as grandma Rita closed the door, my mom took out a little vial of coke and did a line on her hand. We were not surprised at all and since she has been relatively well-behaved except for the shears incident, no one said anything.

That’s when she picked up a little round present from her coat pocket. At least she didn’t forget about the traditional family game. It was destined for Duanny, and when he unwrapped it, he looked like he was stroked by an eureka moment. The gift was an apple, and Duanny’s secret was that he would ultimately use this apple to make a crack pipe.

So far the evening has been great but we’re just getting started.