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

that's a handy talent.

    I wasn't always so appreciative.
    Years ago Eddie met Kim in Zurich and claimed her with a fierce,
cavemanlike determination. At the time, my mother hated him and I
did my best to do the same, though unlike my mother I was fortunate
enough to outlive my own orneriness.
    In Zurich, Eddie fit in like a gorilla at a wedding reception; a
walking wad of Y chromosomes in dingo boots and tooled leather
among a society of indifferent pussies living rich off a national commitment to staying uninvolved in anything but currency. When I met
him, all I saw was a big drunk scarred from too many bar fights and
bush wranglings. When Kim met Eddie, though, she saw something
much different. In fact, maybe when he claimed her like an alpha
male in a pride of lions, it was not out of determination but desperation, as lifelines are funny things, often coming unexpectedly to those
whose lives they are saving. Eddie married Kim five years later and,
having been redeemed himself, now makes a living redeeming others
by counseling the drug-afflicted in Dayton.
    But here he is in Atlanta, scraping and hammering and basically
building a home where there hardly was one before. All of this because
it turns out I am the reluctant owner of a slum that has been sucking the life out of my eye sockets lately. The tenants moved out with
no notice after somehow transforming my formerly passable rental property into a roach-infested shotgun shack with moldy walls, rotted
flooring, and carpet that looked like it was recovered from the dump
after someone used it to wrap roadkill scraped up from the freeway.
Looking at the house made me want to simply fall over backward and
bawl, as all I saw was something beaten and scarred beyond redemption. It all seemed so insurmountable, and my mounting debt made
me feel like I'd just been crapped through the ass of life. If I were a
house, I thought when I saw it, this would be me.

    But Eddie saw something different. Of course, all my local friends
are far too fed up with me, or just too generally useless, to help me
renovate a whole house (Keiger, for one, showed up in a tangerinecolored cashmere sweater, gingerly sipping a cup of artisan coffee). So
I could be trapped into thinking it's fairly pathetic I had to import a
family member from Dayton to help me out, but I know I'm actually lucky. From the start Eddie was unfazed. "Piece of cake," he said,
looking around at the roach droppings and rot, scraping his nose with
a paper towel. "This is nothing," he smiled, prying open a pail of plaster with his knife. And with that, Eddie, no longer beaten and scarred,
set about redeeming the unredeemable.

    UNLIKE THE USUAL GAGGLE OF PUSSIES who comprise my close
friends-all of whom scattered like fruit bats at the first sign I might
need help fixing my new slum-I also have friends who are actual
contractors. Take the very reliable Art, for example. If I need something done to a house, I usually call him and he is very reliable about
coming over and telling me what is necessary for me to do it correctly. Then I'll inform him that I have, maybe, five dollars set aside
to accomplish it all, at which point he very reliably falls over in a fit of
gibbering laughter, pats me on the back, and wishes me luck.
    Thus, armed with the knowledge Art has imparted, I'll invariably set about slopping together a big, splinter-ridden Band-Aid of
an attempt to follow his instructions, which in this case entailed the
enlistment of my brother-in-law Eddie to come here and hammer on
my rental house until it sort-of-kinda-quasi resembled, if you drank a
six-pack and squinted your eyes, a house again.
    Take the kitchen counter. The former tenants must have used it
to perform alien autopsies or something, because I have never seen
anything so destroyed. It was cheap to begin with, just compressed
sawdust cemented between two thin layers of laminate the color of
dental cavities. Then somehow