Unexamined Lives

[An audio version of this story (read by actress Jada McLean) can be found on Episode 5 of the Lippy Kids podcast.]

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STORY TEXT:
     Whenever people asked me what I did on my summer vacation, whether I went to art school or to Disneyland or to save children in Cambodia, I’d shrug and say our family had a ‘place’ up north. Most of the time this wasn’t enough. The kids at my high school could be ruthless. So I told them lies, saying I had a chalet on Blue Mountain and a rich summer-lover with huge boobs.

“All white people own cottages,” I’d say. “If your parents loved you, they’d buy one.”

The truth was that from June to September I lived in a trailer park with my grandpa, who had hemorrhoids. The place was a hick’s dream: there were fat men on golf carts, fat women smearing themselves with lotion, and shithead farm kids chewing tobacco at the children’s playground. It was beautiful, in a way. A living art installation peopled by poor country bumpkins and their piss-poor trailers.

As trailers go, my grandpa’s was especially terrible. Like him, things kept spewing out of its holes. An air conditioner hung out the back window, and a flickering neon Budweiser sign hung out the front. Most days he sat on his porch with a slingshot and a bowl of denture-water. He made me watch as he shot hazelnuts at squirrels.

“I need to mark my territory,” he said. “I was a wolf in a past life, you know.”

“That’s nice.” I rolled my eyes back down to my sketchbook. It was filled margin-to-margin with shell-shocked squirrels.

This was his summer home. He had a townhouse back in the city, with a nurse during the winter months, which he didn’t really need. He was retired. He got pension cheques every few weeks. For work he used to do something with tubes. I never understood his job, and he never stopped trying to explain it to me. Every story went something like this: there was a problem and he knew how to fix it but the foreman was stupid and then everything literally went to shit.

* * *

Most days I just sat in my bunk and thought about teenage things, like sex and Greek architecture. The little window at the base of my bed looked out on a pile of tires. Its hubcaps and frayed rubber did very little to arouse my aesthetic sensibilities (or anything else, for that matter), so on one particular occasion I took to spying on my grandpa through the crack in the door. To the wonder and surprise of absolutely no one, he sat in front of the TV absently consuming crackers and reruns of The Red Green Show. His usual routine. He’d chuckle and spill crumbs everywhere and spend each commercial break yelling at me to join him. At this, I usually just shut my bedroom door and snored as loud as I could.

Through the crack, I watched him. He sunk into his recliner and smiled a toothless smile. It made him look like an overgrown tortoise, so I took out my sketchbook and drew some doodles of him snapping at eucalyptus leaves. He could barely get his gums around them. Tortoise-Grandpa kept all his limbs tucked up inside his shell.

I sat back on the edge of my bed and picked at my acne. I thought about my mom, who sublet our town-house and left me out here in the boonies. “It’s important to spend time with your loved ones before they’re gone,” she said. “That’s why me and my girlfriends are going to Atlantic City.” She would probably spend the whole summer drinking and gambling and falsifying forms for unemployment benefits. Her usual routine. I would just up and leave, but I didn’t have a driver’s licence. Or friends. Nowhere to go.

“Hey, buddy.” My grandpa’s bald head popped out the side of the doorway, like a turtle emerging from its shell. I hid my sketchbook under the covers. I was surprised. He rarely left the living room, and then only to soak in his sitz bath. It was a little tub he attached to the toilet filled with warm water and Epsom salts. Because of the hemorrhoids.

“You watch The History Channel?” He grinned and wiped some spit off his hairy chin. “There’s a documentary on about ancient Aztec aliens. From space.”

“I’m sick,” I said.

“You don’t look sick.”

I knew if I sat down with him he’d start talking about his childhood, how he was the youngest of five, how his brothers and sisters were all dead now. “You and me,” he’d say, “we’re the sole survivors!” I imagined him raising his arms in triumph, waves of loose skin rippling.

“I’ve got a really bad headache,” I lied. “Ouch.” I rested the back of my hand across my forehead. For dramatic effect.

“Oh,” he said. “Want me to rub your scalp?”

“No, no,” I replied. I used my fake illness as an excuse to head to the park store. “For aspirin,” I told him. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

In reality, I bought candy and wandered around judging people. It was a laugh.

* * *

As I walked out onto the main road I passed a dead skunk. There was a kid with a plastic bag, suffocating frogs. Trailers lined the far fields, bloating in the sun like beached whales. A line of jeeps and busted-up mini-vans honked through the front gate; it was a Saturday afternoon, so everyone over twenty-one was just returning from their weekly pilgrimage to the Native American casino.

All my pencils, pastels, and candy bars hung heavy on my shoulder, so I set down my messenger bag behind a pile of rusty propane tanks. Not a terrible hidey-hole. I didn’t want any hicks staring at me as I practiced my craft. I once made the mistake of giving my grandpa a pity drawing, and he toured it around the neighbourhood as evidence of his superior bloodline. After that, all our neighbors started coming by asking me to draw things for them. Pet portraits, tattoo designs, caricatures, and so forth. I hated it. Once I said no, they usually tried to make conversation with me, which I hated even more. Everybody was always barking on about athletes and movie stars, living vicariously through their televisions. Who’s marrying who, monster trucks, Tom Brady, Wayne Gretzky, Stanley Cup. It was inane. I suppose it distracted them from their terrible lives, looking in on a different and better world they could never truly touch or understand.

From my pile, I saw one of them. Émile, who lived at the end of the lane and never wore a shirt, jumped back and forth over his campfire. His beer-belly flopped around in the summer wind, sunburned chest shining bright red. He looked ill, like a drunk starfish left out too long in the sun.

I got out my sketchbook. This is real art, I thought. I felt like Gaugin in Tahiti, painting the natives in all their savage beauty. I swapped my half-finished Mr. Big chocolate bar for a No. 2 pencil and drew long arcs, short and fast, trying to trace the mound of Émile’s stomach in movement. He crushed a beer can off his stomach and winced in pain. His wife, Crystal—cheeks flushed under the brim of a trucker-hat that read PORN ★—began to cheer. Everyone around the barbeque followed suit, raising their cans of Molson Canadian towards Émile in chant.

“Lobster! Lobster! Lobster!”

It was sad. It made me sad. Poor creatures, I thought. Like an astrologer, I could divine their earthly fates. Émile would get tired and pass out. They would drink until midnight. They would go back to their trailers and have drunk sex and wake up with hangovers. They would do it all over again the next night. The entire park seemed like an animal reserve to me, its residents all following an unconscious instinct to get trashed and shoot bottle rockets over the lake.

In a way, it was comforting. I felt like the skinny girl in a group of fat friends. It was embarrassing to even know them, but they still made me look good by comparison. They told me as much.

“You’re goin’ places, son. Talk about giv'n'r it. Make sure ya’ sign this one for me, eh? It’ll be worth a million bucks once you’re famous.”

I often wondered if they felt bad about themselves after talking to me. Realised just how much better I was than them. I assumed it was obvious. I was a talent. I had a highly refined sense of aesthetics. A gay guy had a crush on me once. They should, of course, feel terrible. But that would require a level of self-consciousness I didn’t think they had. These people would look at my art and say, “I wish I could do that” without ever even attempting it, and then go back to work in their grocery stores and lumberyards and construction sites.

They lived unexamined lives. I think Aristophanes said that. One of the Greek dudes.

* * *

When I got back to my grandpa’s trailer, I found him stumbling through the washroom door. He glared at my heavy pant-pockets, drooping from the weight of three and half Mr. Big bars. “Taking a bath,” he said. “Because of the hemorrhoids. Go away.”

“Do you need help?” I asked.

He shuffled off his pants and suspenders and kicked them at my feet.

“No.”

Tortoises can live to be over a hundred and fifty years old. Looking at his wrinkled, sagging skin… that seemed about right. I held my sketchbook in front of my face.

“I turned the hot water on,” he said. The door slammed in front of me. His voice was muffled. “Don’t use the microwave or we’ll blow a fuse.”

“Okay,” I said, wishing there was a sitz bath that could scrub the past few minutes from my mind.

I stood there in the hallway for a while. The water ran. The sun set. Out came the stars. Through the open window, the flickering blue glow of the Budweiser sign shone against my face.

* * *

Eventually I went back into the living room to survey the damage from my grandpa’s day of binging. On the coffee table sat an open TV guide. He’d circled some real stinkers, episodes of Hogan’s Heroes, Finding Bigfoot and M*A*S*H. There were a lot of exclamation points, shorthand comments. He underlined The Joys of Painting and spelled my name right beside it. The Joys of Painting. I didn’t even think he could write.

Under a box of moist towelettes there was a hemorrhoids brochure with little flecks of blood on it. “Cleaning your anal area after bowel movements is important,” it said, “as leftover fecal material is irritating to the skin…”

That’s good advice, I thought.

I took one of the towelettes and dabbed my eyes. I wiped leftover baby powder and saltine cracker crumbs off the couch. Then I cracked open two cans of Chef Boyardee mini ravioli, turned on the propane, and plopped them into a pan on the stovetop. The pantry was filled almost entirely with non-perishable food items, beans and noodles and stuff. He’d gotten them all on bulk discount at some veteran’s army surplus event. I poured some chocolate milk into a plastic wine glass and sat on the couch with my legs crossed, swirling the drink around as though I were a connoisseur. It tasted like the word ‘class.’

* * *

My grandpa came out of the bathroom a half-hour later looking all pruney and holding his sitz bath. I looked up at him from the couch, remote in-hand. He beamed at me.

“They didn’t have any aspirin,” I said. “But I’m feeling much better now.”

He grabbed the ravioli pan and shuffled over to me in his white bathrobe. He slurped the tomato sauce, and only some of it felt onto his lap. When he finally spoke, his voice was choked and high.

“You remind me of this guy on TV,” he said. “This praying-mantis guy. Looks like a stick. Real annoying, but real smart too.” He smacked the satellite receiver and through the static flipped to what he called “The Big Bang Series.”

We sat there a while. He laughed and pointed at me whenever someone on-screen did something nerdy. I smiled and wondered if I meant it. He spilled some more ravioli and I shuffled out of the way with my chocolate milk.

“Go out on the porch and grab us my hazelnuts, will you? The squirrel-shootin’ ones.”

“Okay.”

I opened the screen door and walked outside. Past the Budweiser sign. Down the steps. Across the field, I saw the fire from Émile’s party still burning in the night. He and Crystal were throwing darts at one another.

I looked up.

The night sky is so clear in the middle of nowhere, I thought. Where these people live, you can see the stars.