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It was the first summer after my mother and father finally succeeded in ruining their marriage. I must have been eleven or twelve at the time. My mother had already gotten a head start in the race to become our favorite parent. As the non-custodial parent, she got my brother and me for the weekends, when going to amusement parks and eating in fast food restaurants took priority over homework and chores. Being very shallow people, these gestures went a long way to win our hearts.
Every Monday my brother and I were easily singled out as children of newly divorced parents. Like all the other kids in our situation, Rob and I would begin our weeks, marked with the faded rubber “Admit” stamps on the backs of our hands from all the amusement parks we visited. It was the familiar, shameful stigma of freshly divorced children.
Rob and I used to share knowing looks with all the other blue, red, and green handed children who walked the school hallways every Monday, like branded cattle in a county fair. It was painfully clear that we all had parents who were desperately trying to replace family harmony with bumper cars, county fairs, and tractor pulls.
Dad, eager to leave his own colored brands on his children, took a couple weeks off of work so he could take us camping in the deeply wooded foothills of Pennsylvania. Being young and not having yet experienced the joys of sleeping on rocks and tree roots, I was thrilled at the notion of going on a family camping adventure. Although my idea of “roughing it” meant trying to live without cable T.V. for a few hours, I sensed that I was about to attain a nirvana-like state of happiness by eating roots and bulbs in the forest with my animal friends.
Over the previous two years, my family had stockpiled a great wealth of camping supplies. We were beginning to look like one of those backward militia groups that tend to develop in areas where chromosomal abnormalities run rampant. If things continued as they were, it would only have been a matter of time before we would have begun exacting our revenge on society for all the injustices we had to suffer. For example, if some snooty waiter kicked us out of his restaurant just because we took off our pants during the main course, we would know it was time to start the revolution.
We packed enough camping gear to hole ourselves up in the wilderness for the rest of our lives. This seemed pretty excessive, especially considering the fact that our camping skills were only keen enough to allow us to live for a day or two in the woods before we would end up dead from starvation, exposure, or some sort of accident involving dehydrated fruit. Any prolonged camping trip would, no doubt, lead to a park ranger making a grisly discovery in the woods.
The advantages to my father’s trip into the wilderness were twofold. Not only would it give him the opportunity to kick his ex-wife’s ass in the “favorite parent” debacle, it would also enable him to check on a rental property that he owned in the isolated backwoods of Pennsylvania.
Dad had rented the house to a band of former cave dwellers who were smart enough to know that he lived too far away and was too busy with his failing marriage to demand lawn work, maintenance, or other basic forms of human behavior from them.
Newly divorced, Dad was eager to launch a surprise attack on his tenants. He was convinced that the only way to see what was going on in the house was to secretly observe them in their natural habitat the way Jane Goodall first observed her gorillas. God only knew what horrors would be revealed to us as we observed the living habits of the Pennsylvanian Red-Necked Hill Warbler.
So off we went to meet our destiny; off to find the mud and mosquito paradise that had provided shelter to newly divorced white people for so many generations before us. The road was our path to freedom, independence, and all the other ideals that our forefathers had died to protect (Well, to be honest, our forefathers never died for anything except booze, fatty foods, and swarthy women).
After a few hours on the sweltering freeway, packed tightly into the family station wagon like too many guppies in a jelly jar, I had a realization:I hated my brother. I really, really hated my brother.
It was something that I had always suspected but, being compressed into such a tight space with him for hours on end, I became keenly aware of the awesome intensity of my hatred for him.
Rob devoted most of his time to spitting cheese crackers at me and flicking my ear lobes at random intervals like a demon in one of the darker circles of hell. Conversation in the car became reduced to a debate about who punched who first, all of which was moderated by a stream of empty threats that my father hurled at us over his shoulder from the steering wheel.
By our third hour on the road, my father’s vision of family bliss started to boil over and give off a fowl odor. It was beginning to look like the Manson Family had better values than we did. It was a dismal situation. We were basically living out a scene from “The Grapes of Wrath” except, of course, our situation was infinitely more futile.
This trip was nothing like the outings we went on with Mom. I found myself missing the days spent with her, going to amusement parks and ordering greasy food from pimply teenagers in paper hats. Those were the elements that led to happy recreational moments in American history.
The road stretched for miles and miles in front of us like an asphalt trail of tears. Over time, our relentless bickering slowly reduced itself to a drone of indecipherable whining. The monotony continued to grind on until God, in all his wisdom, decided to intervene: Out of the blue, a deer ran in front of our car, the look of death flashing in its eyes as my father slammed down on the brakes, too late to avoid a collision.
The expression of sheer terror on the doomed animal’s face was mirrored in my father’s expression as, for a few seconds, they both saw their lives being changed forever. At the very moment the deer’s life passed before its eyes, visions of body shops and raised insurance premiums flashed before my father’s eyes. For the deer, this was pretty much where the story ended. For us, it was just the beginning.
The horrible collision of flesh and metal shook us with the kind of solidness that startles a person awake at night. It was pretty traumatic. When Dad promised to give us an experience with nature, we had no idea that this would involve actually ramming our station wagon into it at seventy miles an hour.
The deer became partially lodged into the grill of our car like an extremely expensive -and rather macabre- souvenir. This wasn’t the kind of memento we wanted to bring home from our vacation. Judging from our previous trips, it seemed that we only liked souvenirs if they were made out of colorful plastic and had clever sayings like “Greetings from Miami, Florida!” emblazoned across them. Hunks of driftwood with plastic birds glued to them and tissue box holders made out of seashells also occupied a special place in our hearts. Smashed wildlife, on the other hand, seemed a bit tacky to us. It didn’t have a clock embedded into its side, fake palm trees inserted into various parts of its anatomy, or anything else that would appeal to our Midwestern knickknack aesthetic.
Rob and I breathed a sigh of relief when Dad pulled over to the side of the road. Up to that moment, we were sure he was going to leave our newly acquired hood ornament on the car for the remainder of the trip as a warning to other wildlife that might be tempted to cross our path.
Dad got out to inspect the damage. The dead deer stared blankly at him from the radiator, a geyser of antifreeze shooting high into the air from under its body. Acting as if he was accustomed to encountering wildlife embedded into the grill of his car, Dad pried the dead animal free from the crinkled metal and gingerly placed it in the back seat, where it promptly began oozing bodily fluids onto all our camping supplies in an act of post-mortem revenge.
With the three of us pressed into the front seat and the deer busy relieving itself in the back, we continued down the road like a tribe of modern hunters, returning from a kill. The car limped and lurched along the freeway, accompanied by a cacophony of scraping metal and hissing steam. The smell of friction and hot antifreeze mingled charmingly with the smell of fresh death in the back seat as the windshield wipers sloshed green coolant out of our view. We looked like the head float in an Appalachian street parade.
Dad fired up the heater to keep the engine cool. Since we couldn’t open the windows without getting burned with boiling antifreeze, we were forced to drive our mobile sauna down the road at twenty miles an hour, sweating like porno stars every inch of the way.
Still optimistic, we thought we could get to a service station before the car reached a point of collapse. Unfortunately, our luck was only slightly better than that of our deer friend. A mile down the road, the car started squealing like a wounded pig as, one by one, all the lights on the dashboard began to ignite. The festive red “service engine soon”, “oil”, and “temp” lights lit up like Christmas on the Las Vegas strip. It was quite a stirring site, really. My brother and I responded to this new development with yet another tidal wave of enthusiastic whining.
Dad set off on foot to the next exit, instructing my brother and me to remain in the car so we could protect our precious cargo. Yes, it was our job to defend our vehicle from the assortment of deviants and communists who obviously longed to have a dead animal of their own to cart around in the summer heat. Looking back, I suspect that Dad’s real motivation for leaving us behind had nothing to do with the safety of our belongings. More than likely, he was just trying to get the hell away from us before he was overcome with the urge to hack us into little pieces with his Coleman collapsible camping shovel.
An ordinary man with a broken-down car would have called for a tow truck. As a battery of psychological tests would one day prove, however, my father was no ordinary man. Always the innovator, he opted to call the people who were renting the house from him, confident that they had nothing better to do than to tow us to a service station.
Dad was actually correct in his hunch; the hill people did want to tow us to a service station. As it turned out, there was very little to do in that part of the country so things like watching television, setting fires, and towing cars tended to instill the inhabitants with a near-orgasmic sense of pleasure.
Waiting for help to arrive, my brother continued to amuse himself by once again spitting chewed cheese crackers at me while my father gently caressed the dented front end of our car like an amputee mulling over the loss of a limb. Always a good sport, I passed the time by emitting the kind of tortured whining sounds that are usually reserved for severe burn victims. I was even annoying myself at that point.
Two agonizing hours later, Billy The Muscular Hill Boy showed up with a truck and a rope to save us from ourselves. If we had just taken the time to hang ourselves with that fucking rope this tale would have reached a quick, satisfying ending. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out that smoothly.
To our relief, Billy looked like the kind of person who actually lives underneath cars; the greasy black smears on his face, hands, and coveralls looking very much at home on his body. At no other point in history did poor hygiene bring such a profound feeling of relief to a group of people.
Billy did the obligatory male ritual of opening our hood and frowning at the engine as if the proper combination of facial contortions would bring it back to life. He furrowed his brow, turned the corners of his mouth, and even squinted a bit but, somehow, all this effort failed to produce life from our wounded vehicle.
While he was lashing our station wagon to the back fender of his truck, Billy told my father that he had a friend who owned a garage in the area. Dad offered to give him our deer in exchange for temporary housing.
Like a jeweler making a critical appraisal, Billy opened the door and looked in at our unhappy animal friend. “You got yourselves a deal!” he said, looking as if he had just pulled a fast one over on us.
As you can see, the days of roadside bartering were still alive and well in America at that time. I began to think that Billy would have been willing to let us beat him to death and take his truck if we offered him a deer and a raccoon.
We towed the car to a garage that looked as if it had been abandoned some time around the end of World War Two. Billy’s friend, Raleigh, came slinking out of the black abyss of grease and outdated auto parts like a spider with a juicy new fly trapped in its web.
Raliegh looked like a deflated version of Billy. Weighing in at ninety pounds, he didn’t look like an actual person as much as he looked like the wrapper someone had just peeled off of a person. He flashed his broken, rotting teeth at our desperation as we approached.
“How much do you think it will cost to get this thing fixed?” my father asked like a doomed man asking a doctor how many months he had to live.
“How much you got?” Raliegh replied with a perverted, backwoods laugh.
Judging by the giddy, conspiratorial looks he shot to Billy, Raliegh was a man who was about to get very rich off of some extremely stupid suburbanites. To put it mildly, he had just won the backwoods lottery and we were the jackpot.
Raleigh was definitely going to charge us a couple of arms and legs for whatever repairs he did (he was from the Jeffrey Dahmer school of auto mechanics). Once again, my father’s paycheck was in the hands of a man who never owned a bar of soap in his entire life. It was a bad, bad feeling to have to depend on someone like Raliegh. We were quickly learning that the worst thing about dealing with morons is being outsmarted by them.
We unloaded the deer and sped away in Billy’s truck, wondering if we were ever going to see our station wagon again. It wouldn’t be long, however, before our thoughts would turn to more pressing matters. When your house is on fire you don’t need to be organizing the closets, you know what I mean?
Billy took us to the house that would be our home for the duration of our automotive depantsing. It was the first time Dad had seen the place since he rented it to the hill people. He was having a difficult time restraining himself from letting out a pained wail when he saw the massive pile of garbage that stretched from room to room like an avenging blob in a B grade horror flick.
Billy cleared a patch of garbage off the linoleum floor, announcing that it was going to be our sleeping quarters for the duration of our stay. The floor wasn’t going to be as comfortable as rocks and roots but it seemed like it would be tolerable for a few days. I imagined that we would eventually get used to waking up with those linoleum flower patterns imprinted on the sides of our heads. People can get used to anything.
Once we were settled in, Billy introduced us to one of the people who shared the house with him. Aunt Ida was an extremely large woman who did her part to reduce my father’s rental home into a giant storage bin for fast food wrappers and dirty laundry.
Ida was the kind of woman who was mostly preoccupied with finding places to sit. She would have been perfectly happy in a death camp or in an asylum as long as there were a couple of chairs that could support her massive frame.
You would think this lifestyle choice would be very limiting but Ida somehow managed to pack an impressive sixteen hours of television into her day. It is entirely possible that her daughter was conceived during the great power outage of ‘67, when televisions all over Appalachia went black for an entire afternoon. Normally when society is shaken by that kind of crisis, the population is forced to choose between looting stores and engaging in depraved sexual acts. Since nobody actually owned anything of value in the backwoods, however, sexual intercourse became the only form of amusement available to Ida and the husband she had at the time. This is how Carrey, the other inhabitant in my father’s rental house, was conceived.
Unfortunately, Carrey was out visiting her father in another county when we arrived so there wasn’t anyone around for me to hang out with during our stay. This left me with nothing to do unless I wanted to squeeze onto the poor, sagging couch with Ida to watch the “Price is Right”, “Happy Days”, and “Alice.” In that sad little house, it was actually easier to resist temptation than it was to find it.
A few days into our stay, it was becoming obvious that we were trapped in a bizarre Appalachian sensory deprivation experiment. In a brave attempt to accommodate his guests, Billy offered to take us hunting. This didn’t interest me at all. After experiencing the thrill of killing animals with a Chevy station wagon, hunting with a puny little shotgun seemed somewhat anti-climactic to me. Besides, having already seen the anal rape scene in “Deliverance,” I was a little worried about being alone in the woods with a shotgun-toting mountain boy.
Rob and my father, however, decided that blowing holes into America’s wildlife was just the thing they needed to pump a little excitement into our floundering vacation. They seemed to be completely unaware of the danger of being forced into backwoods bitchhood by our muscle-bound host. I told them to be sure Billy didn’t pack any nightgowns or lipstick with his hunting supplies but they told me I was being silly. It occurred to me that they would feel differently about my paranoia when Billy started waving his rifle around and calling them “Mary” and “Staci.”
My brother and father piled into Billy’s pick-up truck and shrank into the horizon, a Bob Seeger song blaring at them from a crusty old 8-track player. Was I ever going to see them alive again?
I spent the following couple of minutes practicing the horrified faces and pained vocalizations I was going to make if the police asked me to identify their remains. Eventually I settled for a pale, wide-eyed stare, accompanied by a mournful “Dear God! Nooooooo!!” It seemed like I could pull this off with sincerity if I rehearsed it enough times in private.
With Rob and Dad out risking rape and murder in the woods, there was very little for me to do around the house. I tried to keep myself amused by beating my head against a wall and singing the Brady Bunch theme song over and over again but it got boring after a couple of hours. All my worries dissipated, however, when Carrey returned from her visit with her father.
Carrey was an extremely cute girl. I couldn’t believe that any orifice on Ida’s massive body could possibly have produced anything that adorable. I mean, forget about making a silk purse from a sow’s ear, this was more like making a Ferrari from a huge bloated, T.V.-watching pig-demon.
Carrey looked at me with all the enthusiasm of a castaway who spots a rescue ship on the horizon. I was probably the first non-relative male she had seen in months. It was a good thing my brother was out killing animals in the woods or she would have chosen him over me. Suddenly, I was beginning to hope that Billy was out in the woods, digging shallow graves for my brother and father because, frankly, I didn’t need the competition.
Carrey walked right up to me and introduced herself, shaking my hand with a desperate, hungry grip. Even though I knew that my only likable attribute was having a different last name than her, I felt a sense of accomplishment at having won her attention.
In an instant, the family vacation started to show some real promise. The thought of being alone with a cute girl was a dream come true. I mean, sure, Aunt Ida was home, but her supervision was limited to a twenty-foot radius around the television viewing area. Neglect never felt more rewarding.
Carrey asked me if I wanted to go for a walk. Of course, she could have asked me if I wanted to be clubbed in the head with a log and I would have agreed. I was willing to go to great lengths to please her at that moment. Ecstatic, the two of us walked together through the woods, holding hands and making a pathetic, pre-teen attempt at conversation. “So... Do you like...music and stuff?”“Yeah”“Me too!”
Carrey smelled so nice. You know that new car smell? Carrey had that new girl smell, like she just came from the factory and hadn’t had a lot of guys riding her yet. Mmmmmmm...
After an hour or so of awkward conversation, Carrey let me put my tongue in her mouth. I had no idea what I was doing. Using a bit of guesswork, I allowed my tongue to flop around inside her mouth like an amphibious invader in a warm, mysterious cavern. Thrilled with this newfound intimacy, my heart started to jump around in my chest like a drunk in the back of a riot wagon. This was more fun than digging a latrine in the woods, and nearly half as sweaty.
Before I met my little backwoods angel the most intimate experience I had had with a female was when Marcie Barnhart hit me with one of those plastic T-ball bats during gym class. “Wait until Marcie Barnhart hears about this,” I thought to myself with a triumphant, internal laugh.
This trip was turning into the best vacation I had ever been on in my entire life. I didn’t want it to end. For the first time, I realized how fortunate I was to come from a broken home. Hell, no two-parent household could possibly guarantee this kind of negligent supervision. If Mom were on this vacation I would have been off shucking corn somewhere instead of licking my new friend in the woods.
When Carrey and I returned to the house, there was a lot of excitement awaiting us. Billy, Rob, and Dad had returned from their hunting trip and were anxious to share the good news with me. While I was out exploring Carrey’s dental work, Raliegh called to announce that he had managed to repair the car.
“We’re going home,” Dad beamed, “Isn’t it wonderful?”
I felt the bitterness burn in my stomach as I thought about how fucking ironic my life had become. I had just spent the previous three days wishing I could go home. Now I finally got my wish and I felt worse than ever. My grief was quickly erased, however, when Dad said:
“I’m glad we’re leaving. I didn’t want my sons to spend any time with Carrey kid. He’s just so feminine, he could pass for a girl.”
“Live and learn,” that’s what I always say.
