Friends

Simple things become important to children when they learn about the lives of their classmates. And when a child realizes that he is profoundly different, profoundly deficient in terms of these simple yet important things, he becomes self-conscious, angry, and pitiful. At 12 years old, I measured the quality of my life against that of my peers’ at every opportunity. Theirs were similar and normal and charmed, while mine seemed stale and infected and freakish. They lived in homes that were firmly affixed to the earth on large concrete slabs. My home, affixed to a strong enough truck, could be removed from the earth and parked in a different town within an hour, leaving only a pale rectangle of un-sunned desert dirt. Also of concern was Kelli’s growing collection of brass figurines shaped like animals copulating. These faunae seemed to sprout up magically from every surface in our home—embalmed, holy turtles and bears in love, reclaiming their place on earth. I feared rejection from the charmed children in my class if they ever found out about this and other aspects my life. I feared them, and wanted to be them. This simultaneous fear and adoration drew me into solitude as I avoided the kids in my neighborhood, seeing too much of my own desperate condition in them, and longing only to escape to a life more closely resembling suburbia.

I’ve heard it said that children can be so cruel. From my perspective, however, it is the parents of privileged children who are the truly cruel ones. I was 12 years old the first time I was invited to stay the night at a friend’s house. And although I realize now that Danny England’s parents were not wealthy, their home had a foundation, and in my mind there must also have been a giant tree rooted into their living room floor that grew cash and cookies instead of leaves. This invitation marked my first opportunity to climb the social ranks of the 6th grade, and my nerves began to unravel the moment I climbed into the Englands’ shiny white Suburban after school. Danny got to listen to whatever he wanted in the CD player on the ride home, and he chose MC Hammer’s latest single Can’t Touch This. The song was to be played, on a loop, at a tooth-vibrating volume for the duration of the 25-minute drive North to their home in the conifer spotted hills above the lake. The drive took us down Isabella Boulevard, through the town’s only stoplight at Main Street, past Von’s supermarket, and finally, just before ascending the dam, past the entrance to the Kern Valley Trailer Community. Danny’s bouncy conversation with his mom and the thumping rap lyrics provided a muffled soundtrack to my thoughts as I gazed out the back window of the SUV. I watched the tumbleweeds blow through the dusty gravel streets of my neighborhood, imagining a time 20 minutes later when the school bus I usually rode home would come to a lurching stop before its hydraulic doors hissed opened to let out my raggedy classmates. I imagined them all returning to their dust-covered, aluminum-enclosed lives while I lived just one night of privilege. The optimism rushed to my head like an intoxicating injection as I folded the song lyrics into my thoughts—You can’t touch this, you can’t touch this, you can’t touch this…

When I entered their sturdy home, though, that rush of optimism gave yield to a self-conscious comedown. I stood in the entry of their clean, white house and immediately noticed the dirt clumps on my sneakers and permanent gunk under my fingernails. From what seemed like twenty feet above me, Danny’s father extended his hand. I glanced again at my fingernails then stared up at him, sinking into my sneakers for a moment before reaching out my sooty hand in return.

“Nice to meet you, son,” said the giant clean man. “What’s your favorite subject in school?”
“Art class,” I offered. “But I also like English.”
“Art’s not a subject, son,” he chuckled, confirming my fear that I’d given the wrong answer.

Danny had many possessions that kids like me could never think of owning—video games, a waterbed, a dirt bike, an electric toothbrush. I recall taking my things from my backpack and placing them next to his on the bathroom counter. All of my items lined up beside Danny’s, I reflected upon my position in the world. I was an old gray toothbrush with frayed, weedy bristles like miniature dandelions—thick stalks at the base and fluffy cotton at the extremes. The world stood towering over me on its electric base station, a Sonicare skyscraper thrusting toward space. I was a bar of soap and film canister of hair gel stolen from Kelli. The world was minty neon-green floss, fragrant liquid soap, aerosol hairspray, and Egyptian cotton. Countless evidences of privilege and preparation were stacked one upon the other, a stairway to a future fortune that I was sure I would never know.

“No more ice cream, Kevin,” said Danny’s mom after dinner. “You eat as though you’ve never eaten ice cream before and never may again.” For all I knew I hadn’t and wouldn’t.

I felt the eyes of the entire family as I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and placed the spoon on the table. Staring down into the bowl, my eyes projected a series of cinematic dissolves onto the surface of the sugary soup. My inadequate toiletries, primate table manners, and hunger for more dessert replayed in front of me like a bad dream I used to have in which I forgot to wear my pants to school. I felt the embarrassment and nausea expanding between my ribs. I felt as though I were being charged with the grave offence of ice cream eating. Of bar soap using. Of foundationless home dwelling. I sat, on trial, and felt the sting of a deep-cutting, numbing shame. I knew that I was different.

After dinner, Danny and I stayed up late playing Nintendo and listening to Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer. We talked about Billy Reynolds, a boy in our class who was rumored to be 16 but too dumb to pass the 6th grade. Danny assured me that Jessica Mills, a pretty girl in my art class who painted still-life baskets of neon fruit and dreamy pastel landscapes, had a crush on me. We watched MTV and practiced the break-dance moves we learned from C&C Music Factory while chewing our way through a bag of gumballs and drinking a case of Pepsi. I remember thinking that the sleepover was the best night of my life, and that things might be turning up.

The next morning, after I packed my backpack, Danny and I headed down the hallway toward the inside entrance of the garage. As we passed through the hallway, I counted four doors. I imagined that each of them had some kind of circus or racecar collection on the other side, and that if my friendship with Danny had another sleepover in its future, I might get the chance to find out for sure. Just before we passed the last door on the right, Danny’s mom rushed out into the hallway carrying a white leather purse and wearing what seemed like brand new clothing. She cradled the car keys in a loose fist at her side, jangling them up and down against her palm and back to rest again on the undersides of her long painted fingers.

“Good morning, boys,” she said.
“Good morning, Donna.” Awkward silence grew from my casual use of her first name.
“Mrs. England, Kevin.” Wrong answer again. “Did you boys have fun last nigh—“
“Yes! We stayed up so late!” I was thrilled to answer first.
“Yes, I noticed,” she said, looking only at Danny, never at me.

As the Suburban cruised down the highway descending the dam, I imagined myself in a gaudy, white boat like the ones I saw on Miami Vice that were big enough to house maids’ quarters and small pools. The ride was undiscernibly smooth, unlike the clanky, bouncy trips on this same road in my dad’s gray 1960 Ford. I peered down onto my neighborhood from above, imagining a time when I would only be passing by and not returning. I had begun my ascent through the ranks of the 6th grade; this felt like a perfect morning.

Danny and his mother rode in silence. The cheery mom and kid I remembered from the previous day were not in the car with me, but I persisted with my positive thinking. I whispered to Danny with just a trace of doubt, “Everything’s okay, right?”
Danny said nothing, and stared into the distance. I glanced into the front of the car to see Danny’s mom looking at him in the mirror. Her mouth was firm and the wrinkles around her scarlet lipstick quivered with tension. Her eyes darted from the road to the mirror and back three times before I turned to look closer at Danny’s expression. His distant gaze had fallen to a flat stare fixed on the back of the driver’s seat, his eyes were glazed and his mouth tight. When recounting this story several years later, I would describe myself as completely oblivious, but in this moment I remained drunk on optimism despite my growing gut-instinct that I’d done something wrong.
Danny’s mom finally broke the silence. “Are all trailer children so poorly mannered?”
The words broke from glass and scattered about the floorboard at my feet, gumballs sent flying from a fallen candy jar.

On the Wednesday of that week, Danny and I would meet in our school cafeteria at lunch. He would tell me how his mother, the morning after our sleepover, apprehended him on the way to the bathroom wrecked from a sleepless night. She heard me using swear words, he would report. What’s worse, he would say, was that she felt I didn’t bathe a single time that week. “Well, had you?” he would ask. He would then tell me, I think feigning disappointment, how she no longer approved of our friendship.
Danny’s mom stopped the Suburban at the entrance of the trailer park to let me out. I did not attempt to say goodbye, or to thank Danny or his mother as I got out of the car. I wanted to cry, but I did not. I wanted to tell her how hard I had tried, but I did not. I wanted to kneel at the driver’s side door of the Suburban and beg for another chance to be normal and similar and charmed, but I did not. Instead, I propped myself up at the side of the road as the great white boat sailed its way down the boulevard without me. And I hated Danny’s mother. I hated her, in fact, with a focus and clarity that might lead some children to open fire in a high school cafeteria.

I spent the rest of that year despising the privileged around me. Watching their parents pick them up in cars made from silver and upholstered in exotic fur, I imagined them all going home to feast on countless bowls of ice cream before brushing their teeth with toothbrushes from space. I began to hate them all with that same clear focus I employed in hating Danny’s mother, and luckily for them, I dropped out of high school at age fifteen.

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"Friends" is part of the larger essay Trailer Child.