Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility by Hollis Gillespie

Author:Hollis Gillespie [Gillespie, Hollis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographies & Memoirs, Professionals & Academics, Journalists, Humor & Entertainment, Humor, Essays, Satire
Amazon: B001EQ5Y8W
Publisher: skirt!
Published: 2008-07-24T07:00:00+00:00

The house is blue with aluminum awnings, and so small it reminded me of the trailers my dad used to sell, or try to sell. If my dad had been as good at selling trailers as he was at talking about selling trailers with his buddies at the bar, we might never have had Missy, the closest thing I'd ever had to my own pet cat as a kid. My dad found the calico howling pathetically behind the Dumpster one night as he made his way back to the car after the bar closed. Missy spawned a half dozen kittens about five days later, and a month or two after that my mother took off work to bring them to my first-grade class in a cardboard box for show-and-tell. "They're ready for adoption," she chirped. That's how I learned the definition of "adoption," which directly translated into the ripping of six little furry hearts from my six-year-old chest.

I howled every time I came home to discover another kitten vanished. I rolled around on the floor at my mother's feet, wailing, begging her to tell me where they'd gone so I could get them back. She simply lit another Salem menthol, turned on the television, and tried to ignore me. I could see her cigarette shake, though, as she brought it to her lips.

"Where the hell is my cat?" I kept hollering into Lary's voicemail. But the exclamation had become more of a pathetic howl than a question. But sometimes howling can twang the most unexpected heart chords.

Who knows, maybe Lary was sick of sitting around in paradise surrounded by beauty when there was a world of ugliness waiting for him back here in Atlanta. Maybe he'd humped one too many local damsels and finally infuriated the machismo populace. Maybe he'd finally formed that revolutionary army to overtake the government and felt his duty was done-whatever it was, all I know is that after hearing my wretched noise one too many times, Lary flew home to launch his own determined search for Jethro.

I didn't even know Lary was back until he called me and I cried, "Where's my cat?" and he answered, "I have him right here." He had found Jethro down the street in a vacant lot under a bush, barely breathing, sick from renal failure. He must have been hidden there for days. When Lary gathered him up and brought him back to me, the most I could hope for was a goodbye before Jethro's sweet heart stopped beating.

Lord Jesus God, I wish Jethro had it in him to howl like I do, but instead he tried to die without saying goodbye or being a bother at all. Still sometimes I wake up thinking I remember I did hear howling. I wake up and I think, Was that Jethro? Sometimes I'll call Lary. "It wasn't Jethro," he'll say, "it was just you again."

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