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

background noise now. I like Dot, though. On her
good days we joke about how we're gonna go get us some men. "I see
some across the street right now," she'll cackle, pointing at the shirtless
contractors working on a house that, until now, had been one of the
few on our street that had accompanied ours among the unrenovated.
"You go get'em," she urges. "I'm too tired."

    This wasn't one of Dot's good days, though. "My husband's
dead," she sobbed, her eyes wild and searching. I nodded sympathetically. Dot's husband died more than twenty years ago. "I don't understand. I buried him twenty-five years ago, but I woke up this morning
and he was dead all over again."
    I invited her to come inside, sit on my new patio, and have a cup
of tea, but she declined. "I have so many things to do," she worried.
"That man was the love of my life. How could he leave me like that?
He did it to himself, you know. He used to call me from his office
every day, but that day he didn't call me, and I knew something was
wrong. That's where they found him, in his office. He did it to himself. What will people say? I don't want people talking."
    "Screw what people say, Dot," I said, walking her back to her
porch. "That should be the last thing on your list of concerns."
    "He was the love of my life," she sighed, "and I thought I was
his. So many things to do, and I already did it all once. I woke up this
morning and he was dead all over again," she repeated, her eyes pleading. "I didn't know a man could die twice."
    Sometimes I wonder if crazy people are crazy because they're mercilessly attuned to everything, even thoughtless phone conversations a
whole house away. In any case, that morning I got a glimpse of the inner
prison where Dot must live. Her husband's death was the most painful
thing she ever endured. She took a decade to get over it, only to succumb
to Alzheimer's and forget she got over it. I stayed there a good while that
morning, holding an old woman's hand, helping her live through the
fresh agony of losing her husband, the man who had died twice.

    MY BROTHER-IN-LAW EDDIE COULDN'T POSSIBLY be mistaken for a gay
man, ever, not even if there was a dick in his mouth at the time. For
example, he's been here in Atlanta for five days now, suffering a hellacious cold, and he refuses to let me bother to buy him tissues, preferring instead to scrape his face with paper towels. "I don't need that
tissue shit," he explains. "My nose is made of rhino hide."
    So you'll understand why I laughed like a stoner when he expressed
his concerns about being mistaken for a flamer when we borrowed
Grant's truck yesterday. Grant's truck, "Fish Stick," is a rusty orange
road hazard with a marionette trophy for a hood ornament, batons in
the gun rack, and a license plate that reads GAY 269. Even so, when
Eddie expressed his concern, I had to stop and catch my breath, bent
over at the waist and everything, because I haven't had such a yuck
in months. "Eddie," I finally wheezed, "the only way someone could
confuse you with a gay man is if they'd been blind since birth."
    Eddie was born in South Africa to Swiss parents and had a childhood of the kind that affords him such fond memories as the time his
mother got pissed on by a puma. He looks (and dresses) like Crocodile
Dundee, talks with the accent of a British expatriate, and speaks several obscure languages of both "bush" and European varieties. He has
camped in the Serengeti, communed with elephant herds, and killed
cobras. Even today, here in Atlanta, he never carries fewer than three
knives at a time, one hardly smaller than a machete, and damn if they
don't reliably prove to be useful somehow or another. "Let me get that for you," he recently told a hardware store associate who had trouble
releasing the spout on a five-gallon bucket of anti-mildew treatment.
Out came Eddie's "small" knife, and in seconds he had that thing
deftly hacked open like a hyena carcass. Now