I swear, there are some serious advantages to being the daughter of an alcoholic traveling trailer salesman, and I'm not just talking about the booze factor, though that should not be minimized. My father's favorite bartender, for example, was a skinny broad named Kitty. She had a whiskey gut and wore her hair in a beehive bleached so white that I remember thinking if I ever got stranded in the middle of the ocean with her I could use her head to flag down rescue vessels.
Kitty bartended at the Tin Lizzy, and she used to educate me on the finer points of the perfect Bloody Mary while my dad drank beer all day and tried to sell trailers to her other customers. "Shut up, you worthless sack of crap," she cackled to him across the bar, cigarette dangling from her bottom lip. Kitty was the only person in the world who could call my dad a worthless sack of crap — believe me, I tried, and he beat the crap out of me. My mistake, I think, was that I wasn't handing him a beer when I said it.
Because handing my father a beer was just about the best way to divert his anger, which often erupted unexpectedly and could prove embarrassing. Since there were so many beers within handing distance there, my sisters and I were in heaven in that bar, which is where we walked after school every day so we wouldn't be unsupervised until my mother came home from the place where she worked building missiles for the U.S. government. Sometimes even Kitty herself would get plastered, and once I accidentally walked in on her in the bathroom sitting on the toilet. I was mortified, but she insisted I stay, and took that opportunity to take my hand and tell me what a great kid I was. Then, horrifically, she burst into tears right there.
"Get out," she said, and I thought she meant get out of the bathroom, so I tried to leave but she wouldn't let go of my hand. "Get out," Kitty said again. "This bar is no place for kids. It's dark and doesn't even have any windows. Promise me you'll get out." So I promised her and she seemed to feel better after that. I ended up keeping that promise, too, because we soon moved to Florida. But I still think of that moment sometimes, the incredible awkwardness of it: Kitty on the toilet with her panties around her ankles, holding my hand, begging me to leave but not letting go.
The secret ingredient to the perfect Bloody Mary, by the way, is one cube of beef bouillon per glass. One whole cube.
When we flew to Florida, it was my first time on a plane and I was sick with a bad cold. Knowing now what I know about cabin pressure, I'm surprised my little head didn't explode like a frog with a firecracker up its ass and splatter the entire cabin with snot. My mother, who was a little useless at conventional mothering, was commonly at a loss when her kids were sick. The most we could hope for was a show of odd courtesies, such as the time my sister got to choose the cartoons we could watch when she came home from the hospital after shoving a button so far up her nose it almost reached her brain, and this time, when being sick somehow afforded me special seating priority.
"Your sister's sick," my mother reminded the rest of the family. "Let her sit by the window."
The flight lasted 500 years, or at least it seemed that way. We were hoping the work my mother scored helping to design rockets for NASA would last at least a few years this time. Until then, most of our nomadic lives had been confined to the state of California, which is luckily a very large state. In my seven years we moved nine times in that state, from north to south but nowhere in between, just lots of different places jumbled at either extreme.
Before my mother landed this new contract, we had been living in a somewhat dilapidated apartment project in Costa Mesa, and before that we had lived in a minor mansion on 17 Mile Drive in Monterey; when it came to building missiles and rockets for the government, my mother's income would ebb and flow in accordance with each administration. Either there would be a huge demand for bombs and rockets or hardly any at all, with our lifestyles inevitably reflecting either extreme.
Right before we packed up to move to Florida, my father had been selling Silver Streak trailers at a big convention down at the fairgrounds. The Silver Streak brand was the "affordable option" to Air Stream, as my father put it, though we couldn't afford one ourselves other than the sample models supplied to my dad. Since my mother was between contracts at the time of the convention, she helped decorate the different types of trailers and chose the four seasons as a theme. I remember the autumn-seasoned trailer the best because she literally sprinkled the small kitchen table with dead leaves.
That same kitchen table converted into a double bed after you dismantled it, dropped it down, positioned it to fill the space between the booths flanking either side and evened it out by adding the cushions that formerly made up the backrests. In the end you had a bed that was every bit as comfortable as a bag of broken glass, but my mother seemed to think this feature was amazing. Somehow the trailer slept six, though nearly all the sleeping areas required similar convoluted conversions before you could actually sleep in them.
"Really, it's simple," my mother would chirp to any passers through. "You just pull this out, push this up and anchor it here. Isn't that amazing?" Turns out what's simple for a missile scientist isn't necessarily simple for the general public, which might be one reason the "affordable option" to Air Stream faded into oblivion, a blip in the history of trailer consumerism. But until then, my mother was trying like hell to help my father sell one.
Today, I keep remembering my mother in the trailer, marveling at its many inward conversions. We were a family of six, she joked. We could all live there. "Really, it's so simple," she'd say to customers, who scurried away from her. They could sense her longing, I realize now. If my father could just sell a trailer, maybe all of us could just stay in one place for once, and stop moving to extremes.
When our plane landed in Florida it was a few years before Don Wallace would begin his Tampa-based trailer-selling business that would eventually become the LazyDays RV SuperCenter — a big, blow-ass, 126-acre colossus that has cornered the entire RV market throughout the Southeast and probably the world — so you could say the Florida trailer market was wide open. But rather than fill the niche, my father filled a few barstools instead. Every day he would park his RV sample model outside a bar called The Casino, which was located on the waterfront in Melbourne Beach, and boast to the regulars about all its inward conversions and other capabilities. Occasionally he'd drive my sisters home after belting a few too many, swerving through the small streets, barely missing mailboxes.
In these instances I got to be his front-seat lookout. "Ride with me," he'd say, and I'd hop in the motor home like a little bobble-head doll, not even knowing where we were going, ready to warn him of upcoming police cars and pass him a packet of peanuts in case he got pulled over and had to mask his booze breath. Throughout, he'd tell me of his dreams. He was gonna be somebody. He was gonna sell more trailers than anyone. He was gonna have an RV lot with "an on-site Cracker Barrel restaurant, a 300-site RV Park, master certified RV technicians, a professional travel plaza and a 40,000-square-foot on-site Camping World for the RV and camping enthusiast" or, in short, everything Don Wallace has now, because that right there in a package was my dad's big dream, and it was only when he drove that his big dreams weren't overcome by bigger fears. If he didn't drive, then his demons caught up with him. If he didn't drive, then he would lie in bed, sometimes for days, and let his brain become his enemy.
Then one day our trailer disappeared. Literally. My dad discovered it missing after his daily beer-belting marathon at the local tavern. He called me and my sisters outside, yelled at us about how the trailer was taken "right out from under us," then asked us why the hell we didn't just lie down in front of the tires to block his evil ex-employers from repossessing it. In the end I think he went easy on us because he could tell from our faces we were as bereft as he was.
For one thing, it meant no more camping, and camping to us meant something entirely different from what it does to most people. To us, camping entailed parking ourselves at a vast concrete lot where trees and wildlife were about fiftieth on our list of priorities, way under the really important stuff, like amenities and "hookups." In fact, to us the term "hookups" had come to refer to everything, not just the plumbing and electricity, but the entire concrete wad of wonder that RV camping had become. It was actually possible, if you worked it right, to keep from laying eyes on any actual nature for the entire trip. You could just spend the day sitting next to your trailer in the concrete RV lot, swimming in the concrete RV lot pool, then playing billiards in the concrete RV lot clubhouse.
And it was my father who was in charge of all the hookups. There was a panel along the side of the trailer with big outlets behind it that he attached things to, which somehow magically enabled us to cook sausage links and flush toilets (though, thankfully, the two functions were not connected to each other). This caused my mother to actually show him affection on occasion, because in our real home, where my parents customarily fought like rival tigers, my father was not nearly as proficient as he was in the miniature-trailer version of our home. In the trailer version, everything was compartmentalized, cleaner, newer and more manageable. In the trailer version, my dad was in charge and my mother was impressed, and my sisters and I enjoyed the fantasy for as long as it lasted.
Which was not long. After our trailer was repossessed, my father never sold another one, and six years after that he was found dead and alone in his studio apartment across the street from the airport, a victim of too much booze and too many bad decisions. By that time my sisters and I were living with my mother two hours away, and trailers were about the last thing on my list of priorities.
Recently, though, I bought a 1972 Shasta camper, with the wings still intact. I love those wings on my trailer.
When I look at them, I, of course, think of my father. When I was a kid, I used to sneak out of the house in the middle of the night to run barefoot through our neighbor's front lawn. When it was warm, I'd unbutton my flannel shirt and let it flap behind me like a little cape as I ran back and forth under the Florida moonlight, my face hardly able to contain my utter joy.
Then one morning, my father awoke rheumy-eyed and shaking. "I saw you in the grass last night," he said angrily, and I immediately braced myself for the emergence of his signature temper. But instead he just stopped and stood there, and through the smoke of his cigarette I saw his face suddenly fall as if broken by the weight of all his mistakes, all the steps he took or was too timid to take, but steps that had nonetheless led him here, to this messy house, confronting an errant child he'd watched gallop barefoot under a full moon in the middle of the night. Looking back, I wish I had taken his whiskered, tortured face in my hands, but I didn't. Instead, I am left with the memory of how he stopped and shook his head, and ran his twitching fingers through his thinning hair. I remember his eyes, his booze-addled eyes, beseeching something just outside his reach.
"I saw you," he said again, softly, "and you were flying."
Read more about how Hollis scored a trailer of her own.
Hollis Gillespie, a former flight attendant, is the author of Confessions of a Recovering Slut and Other Love Stories and Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood. Her commentaries can be heard on NPR's "All Things Considered." Her column, "Moodswing," runs in Creative Loafing newspapers in Atlanta and Charlotte, and begins running in the Planet next week.
This article appears in Aug 9-15, 2006.