Chapter 3: Americana Life Continued
After I moved into the trailer on lot #60 at Americana Mobile Home Park, in October of 1996, and started to settle in, the property began to undergo a gradual metamorphosis.
I had put a double mattress on the floor of the bedroom. This is where I had been laying, shortly after my arrival, when it kind of hit home that I had bought, basically an empty trailer.
Initially, the hidden costs of living there were eating up all but about 65 dollars a month of my income.
It was hard not to buy things like can openers, and pans to cook stuff in, when I came across them. Yard sales that I encountered on Saturday mornings took on new shades of meaning to me, as I now had a place to put anything that I might see there.
And there was the music equipment, which I accumulated one pawn shop visit at a time until I had a full-fledged 4 track cassette recording studio, that I could return to after a grueling night of pizza delivery.
John Abel, the manager of the Dominos where I worked in Mandarin, became more exacting and demanding of me, once he knew that I had a "house payment" to make each month. This is, I guess, typical of the capitalist culture that we are part of. The ink hadn't yet dried on the contract that I had signed to rent-to-own my place before John started to assert that I needed to stop showing up a few minutes late, now and then, for my shift, etc., etc....
A dresser with a mirror soon joined the mattress.
I would pull up to lot #60 sometime around 12:30 AM, after having turned my car stereo down, upon entering the park. Sitting in my driveway to listen to the last part of a song drew the ire of one of my close neighbors, who had basically come out in his pajamas to inform me that the notes that Phil Lesh was playng on his bass were coming "right through the walls" of his place.
Other than that, he said that he often could hear me playing the electric guitar, and that it had sounded good. His would be the place where the great firework debacle would take place, once the 4th of July rolled around.
This would be the neighbor to the immediate south of me, who would occasionally be seen barbecuing hot dags and hamburgers in his driveway, surrounded by a contingent of the children of Americana -the more malnourished ones, like Royce- who would be skeezing a burger or two off the guy.
In his driveway was the tell-tale pickup truck, new and shiny, and a symbol of his status as a guy who worked, and made pretty good money, but who had learned how to live slightly below his means, thus, hot dogs and hamburgers and no filet de bœuf aromas emanated from his grill.
This was business as usual in the park, where the children were quick to notice, and then pounce upon any opportunity that arose within the quarter mile oval of the park.
My neighbor was pretty secure in the fact that his wife stayed home during the day, and he had become entrenched enough in the park so that he was wired into the network of those similarly invested there.
This was a double-edged sword, the social network.
He had an alarm system installed, and had dead-bolt locks on all of his doors, and was smart enough to offer burgers off his grill to the urchins of the park, but, to not ever have let one of them inside unchaperoned, to fill a glass with water out of the sink, or something.
Getting out of my Corolla, I would walk to my front door, blinded by the light of the bare bulb hanging above it, and fending off moths as I fumbled to put the key in the lock.
This bright light made it so anyone who might think of prying the door open with a butter knife, would have to do so while lit up like a specimen on a microscopic slide. The back door was a different story, but that one had already had a deadbolt lock installed on it. I wondered why...
I would dig into whatever had been slow cooking in the crock pot the previous 10 hours, while I worked.
The crock pot had been a great investment of about 25 bucks.
It was usually a variant of what I called: "the stew of life" -a recipe which started out as being potatoes, carrots, corn, onions, cabbage, cauliflower, olive oil, salt, pepper., garlic, a splash of vinegar, and a rotation of guest vegetables, from radishes to turnips, endive to kohlrabi. The stew of life.
I could have brought pizza, wings and bread sticks home with me for free out of the Dominos, lathered in their special garlic sauce comprised of hydrogenated soybean oil and artificial color, but, no, I could afford the stew of life.
Often, when I was helping myself to the stew, anticipating the opening theme of the Letterman show coming from my 5" black and white TV, there would come a knock at my back door, and it would be Shauna.
These times, she would be drunk.
Otherwise, I would smoke a joint and watch Letterman on my 5" black and white TV.
The musical guests would close out that show, often being clipped off at the end, when time had run out...
This would give me a grain of inspiration.
I always kind of had it in the back of my mind that I would measure success by one day playing on the Letterman show.
I would put on my headphones and flip a switch and be instantly transported to an auditorium, where the drum machine and the guitar and the vocals were perfectly mixed and blended and where, if you closed your eyes, you might be on stage at the Letterman show.
At around 10:30 on a typical Saturday morning, would come the tapping at my back door that I would soon come to recognize as that of 15 year old Shauna.
I would open it to see her pretty, smiling face.
The smile said: "You know what I'm here for."
I would tell myself that, given the trouble that she had gotten herself into at the other trailer park, and her subsequent restriction to Americana, it was the much lesser of evils for her to smoke a joint with me, and then return to the large screen TV with BET on it, than what might befall her if she had to sneak through the woods to the other trailer park. I was a guardian, in that sense. A guardian with weed.
I felt like I was doing my part to keep an eye on her, in that sense.
By allowing her and her cousin Angie (age 13) to hang out at my place, keep their malt liquor cold, and to smoke their weed, I was sort of babysitting them.
Even though they were out of sight of their parents, the latter could pretty much figure out where they were. A lot of times they could verify their presence by listening for the sounds of their voices, rapping through my system.
Since my first contact with them, when the jar of coins had been stolen, relationships had improved between me and the rest of the park.
Having told the blond haired stripper that I was indeed renting to own the place helped, and kind of rooted me to the park.
This change was no doubt spearheaded by Shauna who, as the eldest Goetzinger, and de facto queen of the trailer park, was also wise enough to see the merits of my air conditioned place, where live rock music was played, and where a refrigerator could maintain the temperature of any assortment of flavored malt liquors in neon colors, and where pot could be smoked out of sight.
Soon, I would start to make sure that my refrigerator was stocked with these vital liquids, especially on the weekends.
And Shauna would gradually begin to shed the very baggy clothing that I first saw her walking around in, after I first moved in, for more form fitting things like velvet shirts with gracefully plunging necklines, and adorning herself with little pieces of jewelry around her neck and wrists.
It was as if it occasioned a change of season that was reflected in her attire, when, after I had first moved in, and had only had the slight contact with them of the jar of coins being stolen, that she would walk past my place, her face mostly hidden under a hoodie and her body draped in baggy hip hop style, and cast a wary glance at my place.
But, the wonders of a trailer with drum machines thumping and microphones set up, ready to be rapped into, where the owner of which smoked weed and drank wine, but usually had neon colored malt liquors in the refrigerator, soon worked to pique the girl's curiosity.
I didn't have enough towels nor curtains for the windows that didn't have them, after I moved in, so I bought beach towels in bright colors, and put them to the dual task of being curtains for my windows, and of being bath towels.
The psychedelic colors that had attracted me for this purpose, also happened to be depictions of certain things like cartoon characters from Disney movies that I knew nothing about.
This meant that I surely had unwittingly placed some in inexplicable locations.
Somehow Princess Jasmine, from the Aladdin movie, in my bedroom window elicited a visit from the mother of nine year old Vanessa, who had stopped at my front door one evening when I had it open, to inquire about it, and my other curtains.
These gave the trailer a very Partridge Family bus sort of vibe, especially when the lights were on inside at night.
I had already been visited by Vanessa and Britney (the coin jar heist-ess) who had let themselves in through my open front door and began to explore the place, while I was laying on my bare mattress in my room with the Jasmine curtain.
They seemed to find favorable the music equipment, the mice in the tank, but scolded me over the placement of Jasmine over the bedroom window. "He's in love with a cartoon!" exclaimed Britney.
The girls had appeared a little bit leery of me, with one of them always lingering by the open front door, as if prepared to make a dash for safety, and to get help for the other, if the need arose.
"Try not to let the mice get away," I had said, after answering the "Hello?" that they had informed me of their presence.
When I heard them encroaching upon the hallway the led to my room, having apparently been emboldened by what they had seen of my place to that point, I had to scramble to shove a few porn magazines under the mattress, before the brave and skeptical looking face of Britney (blond haired, blue eyed with the German characteristics that her last name might portend) appeared in the door.
Soon, Vanessa had joined her, though still within sight of the open front door.
"He doesn't even have a real bed!" said the former.
Vanessa was the daughter of a kind of heavy-set Latina looking woman, and her live-in boyfriend, Wayne. Wayne just might have been whomever apparently had jumped up and down on my bedroom roof, leaving the creases in the ceiling.
After I sat up and began answering their rapid-fire questions as fast as I could about every little thing in my room that, until that point, I had hardly given any thought to, and tried to explain to their satisfaction why I lived there by myself and that, no, I didn't have a girlfriend and, after being told by them that the obvious reason was that I didn't even have a TV (and so how could I vegetate with any kind of girlfriend on my couch?) and, after receiving a stern lecture about the inappropriateness of having Jasmine in that particular window, Britney was driven by some kind of innate curiosity and insight to lift up the corner of my mattress, discover, and procure one of the magazines, which caused her to draw in a breath and cast an accusing look my way; whereupon both girls made a frantic dash towards the open door.
Seeing that they hadn't been pursued, though, they soon crept their way back towards my room.
"You weren't supposed to see those!," I made sure to proclaim, given that I was pretty sure that I would be quoted as much as possible during the debriefing that these scouts would be giving to the rest of the children of Americana, as well as to the parents.
By that evening, a detailed visual of the inside of my trailer would have been drawn throughout the park, along with details about my relationship status, my pet snake, and now, I thought with some dread, my fixation with obese women.
As I stammered to 9 year old Britney and her 10 year old friend, I had gotten a whole box of such magazines, all at once, from the guy who ran the liquor store next to the Dominos that I worked out of. I had taken the whole lot of them.
The guy, who for some reason, had decided to discontinue selling porn magazines (while continuing to sell alcohol, gambling tickets, sugary candy and tobacco, along with glass pot pipes) happened to have caught me at the right time, and 25 bucks had been exchanged for the box, which had been quickly, and as covertly as possible, shoved into the trunk of my car.
About a dollar a magazine.
I would spend 15 bucks every month or so, on the latest issue of Hustler Barely Legal, and so that is probably what prompted him to offer me the thing.
If T.C. would have been manager at that time, he might have traded a couple large pies along with chicken wings for it.
It wasn't until I had gotten home and began to pull the magazines out of the box that I became aware of what a sordid variety of titles it held.
I was shocked to find gay publications. I remember blushing and looking around my trailer to make sure nobody was watching me, at the sight of magazines, such as "Adam" coming out of the closet, er, I mean box.
I suppose that was one of life's lessons presenting itself to me. Why would I blush when I was the only person there, and why would I feel like God, Whom Bette Midler informs us is "watching us, from a distance," would not only be doing that at that moment, but would be staring really hard.
I pictured all of the kids I went to high school with as suddenly having the means to Google anything, and them searching: "Where is Daniel now?" and then having their screens zoom in just as I am unpacking the previous month's edition of "Bareback" magazine.
So, I stammered my defense to Britney and Vanessa, as if the eyes and ears of the whole trailer park were tuned to me, because, in a sense they were.
"I'm throwing these ones away. I'm not gay, and I don't like obese black "Hefty Mamas" (not that I have anything against them...but...)"
And the legend grew.
Most of these, I tossed to the floor, planning upon getting rid of and, in the case of the gay ones, getting rid of far away from my own trash can. I and that is how they wound up being hastily swept under the bed at the sound of the little girls' approach.
And, then there was Britney, mouth agape as she threw an appalled expression alternately between the cover of the magazine, and my face.
I switched Jasmine to the living room (back side) and swapped
The walls were hung with my drawings and poetry, much as they are today.
Add to that an aquarium housing a live reptile, to wit an eastern chain king snake, along with a separate enclosure in which mice were bred to feed the snake, and lot #60 had suddenly become the Neverland Ranch of Americana.
Going over to Daniel's to take the mice out of the cage and play with them became a popular pass time for 9 year old Britney and her friend, Vanessa, since the early morning hours often had me opening the doors of the place to let it breath, and I might still be sleeping off the previous night's session, when, unbeknownst to me, mice were being freed from cages and made to race or do other tricks in my living room.
There was kind of an understanding in the park that trailers could be broken into and stuff stolen from, but, often it is more advantageous for that element to preserve a persons environment, rather than jeopardize having such a playground. And so, nothing came up missing (except, disconcertingly an occasional mouse) and I continued to let the kids of the park hang out on weekend days.
That was the year of the fourth of July fireworks spectacle.
And soon, the tapping at the back door at 11 AM on a typical Saturday morning commenced.
would wonder if Shauna actually had her fingers crossed that I would "decidfe" to smoke a joint with her on such occasions.
Or if she would have rightly intuited that I would have found it nearly impossible to form the word "no" through lips that were three feet from hers.
"Come in, hurry up!"
She didn't want to be caught entering the trailer of the new guy in the park with the cartoon windows who stayed up half the night playing his guitar. It could only mean that she was up to no good.
