Yards of Trailer Park

The yard of my house wasn’t like the other kids' yards. The other kids had yards that gazed upon a cul de sac or maybe a quiet tree lined street with a faux deer in the yard or a wagon wheel or both. Mine looked out on Jack’s Gunshop with a large parking lot, a sign that proclaimed buy, sell, trade here with a picture of some Steelhead fish frolicking in Lake Michigan ready for the catch. There was a picture of a Glock handgun that said Glock Perfection with a G spiral and a tiny R next to a picture of some bears with water splashing all over.  Along the side of the store was a huge metal hook that my brother and I swung on like Tarzan until the day I saw a deer hanging from it dripping blood and was haunted with Bambi screams and couldn’t even look at it anymore because it smelled like rusty death and big brown eyes looking into me. 

It was on a day like any other day that I decided I was going to walk through the gunshop parking lot, past the Glock Perfection sign, across the highway, through the field and to the trailer park.  I was sure I was from that trailer park and it made me think like I was Fievel the little mouse somewhere out there going to my homeland. The trailer park had a pool, and bocci ball and tennis and swings with a park and only elderly people lived there which was amazing since they always seemed to have Little Debbie Snack Cakes. 

I was around 7 and had my doll named Susie when finally, it was my big chance. My mom who I called Cathy went to mow the lawn which was loud and smelled like toxic farts. I knew I could get to the trailer park.  I watched her as she plowed back and forth and I calmly grabbed Susie the doll and an onion from the garden just in case of hunger and walked through the parking lot across the very busy highway that was in front of the store.  No problem since I was very good at Frogger. Once across I was met with a field.  The field had bugs so that wasn’t going to work so I went onto the street called Salt Creek and there was the trailer park glistening and ready for me to enter. The trailer park was utopia with speed bumps and I was  walking in when Cathy came up screaming and panting for breath and yelling how I crossed the highway and I was like it’s no big deal, I’ve got this onion and I got in huge trouble and put on lockdown. No more walking out of the yard for me. 

I decided I would make a friend who lived in the trailer park since I just knew I belonged there and had lived there in my past life. This is how I met Danyel in Girl Scouts when I was 10. She was the only kid living in the old person trailer park and I thought you sure are lucky.  Danyel was blonde haired and looked like Miss Piggy but skinny with the gene to be fat like it was just waiting inside to burst. I called her Dana Banana and she liked to read VC Andrews so I knew we could be best friends forever. Her mom was a Karen who worked at the waste treatment plant and would tell us she worked in shit and would always complain to the manager about the lettuce, that she never even ate, when we went to Mcdonalds or Burger King. Danyel’s dad was of unknown origin and I couldn’t picture any human wanting to do anything with her mom since she was so scary.  

At Danyel’s trailer I got to touch the velvet erotic Elvis painting her mom had on the wall, drink unlimited orange soda,  play Uno all day and talk about VC Andrews and Flowers in the Attic and how orange soda could for sure hide arsenic.  We both definitely decided that arsenic was the way to go if you had to kill someone but we definitely wouldn’t do that unless we had to.  We would go into the pool and swim around with the elderly and do water aerobics which old people seemed to enjoy. I would pretend to be Jessica Tandy and think about the movie Cocoon the whole time. I didn’t understand shuffle board but we would get out there and shuffle some stuff around and then go play tennis which was just us hitting balls really hard while we wore tennis skirts which was the main part of tennis that I liked. After that we would go to the park part which would sometimes have random other kids.   

As we got older we would hang out with teen kids at the park and they would smoke cigs and make out in the sewer pipe.  I would sit there and read Ira Levin until Danyel was done doing that since the teen boys looked like rejects off the back of a Metallica jacket and smelled like sewage so I wasn’t particularly interested.  When we got into middle school Danyel’s older sister came out as a gay and Danyel’s Karen mom yelled even more everyday and there would be lots of fighting and screaming and the Elvis painting would shake its hips but not in a good way. 

After that time Danyel got popular because she was cute and blonde and funny and likeable  and I became best friends with books and video games so I didn’t get to go to the trailer park anymore. Although I still had Cathy drive me through it while I listened to Richard Marx’s Wherever You Are I am Right There Waiting for You song and day dreamed about living in a trailer park with my crush Kevin from The Wonder Years. After high school I moved to Hawaii and lost track of Danyel and her sister and her Karen mom.  

At 25 I came back to the midwest deer in the yard, wagon wheel town and I thought I am an adult now and free to be me and go to the trailer park anytime I want.  So off I went this time listening to Rob Zombie and thinking yeah I am more human than a human too, Rob Zombie, when I found myself outside of Danyel’s trailer without even meaning to. So I got out and knocked and out came Danyel looking like a tired Troll doll. I said, “Hey.”  

And she said, “Hey, I heard you were in Hawaii.” And some stuff about how she was going to IUN college and then, “Want an orange soda?” 

I said, “Well I hope it doesn’t have arsenic in it.” 

And she rolled her eyes and I went on in. As we sat in the kitchen drinking our orange sodas, I was wondering where Michelle, her sister was since she had always seemed to be around.  We used to call Michelle Massive since she was always massively spying on us and our conversations about arsenic and other stuff like that.  And then Danyel goes, “Massive killed herself” like she heard my question and the air stopped and we just sat there.  And Danyel said she had hung herself in the bathroom so their mom would find her which I thought well that was a bathroom message to a shit worker if I ever heard one. And all of the sudden, it didn’t feel so fun to be in the trailer park anymore and it was like those dead deer from the swinging hook were staring at me.  And Danyel was talking about moving out and going to teach sign language once she finished at IUN and I had to get out of there so I said something about having to go work at my parents gunshop and fumbled on out  and never went back to that trailer park again.