Meme 6

I and Clay had grown older. Then the schoolyear ended. The man, Jim, at 1233 Sunset Court, owned and parked on the street a camper trailer he agreed to install along the back corner of his fenceline. He backed it with his truck between forsythia bushes, around two pines. It sat there, open, all summer.

Four clamps to be unclamped. A crank to tug and herkyjerk CCW. Two young teens had to switch shifts. All this to raise the roof—soft vinyl walls unwrinkling in the morning's steam, celluloid windows covered in unzippable mesh. The door came in two parts. Two beds hung over opposite ends to make a kind of home.

It had a Super Nintendo. It was the summer of Super Nintendo, purchased together at the reasonable price of sixteen mown lawns. Clay installed a ten-inch color television and a two-deck stereo tape recorder. It was a way to kill a dead afternoon, heeding Sahasrahla on mute with WHFS tuned on the radio. Cracker. PIL. Ned's Atomic Dustbin. Jim had run a cord umbilically to an outlet under his high white deck.

It seems proper to mention this. Jim will die within four years. He'll drink himself into the hospital. He'll go on O'Doul's. He'll go off O'Doul's. His wife will sob at the wake: "I just don't know what I'm going to do without him." Then her eyes will debag, lighten. Her hair will turn blond. She'll buy a sportscar and stop busing to the city.

Clay and Mike were highschool sophomores. They drove cars and certain points convincingly home. Why wake up your parents when you can just piss outside, under the south bed's overhang. Jim's lawn eventually stained shit yellow. Why not collapse the table and turn the two banquettes into a third bed. It was a much softer mattress. Why not just share this new bed? Everyone slept on it together. "I'm not trying to fag out on you," was the joke.

Why not show Mike that card trick over here on the southward bed? Everyone piled on. A card chosen at random went through shufflings and dealt-out permutation until being fingered, held aloft. Mike leapt from his knees and pounded his fist into the foam mattress. The trailer shuddered, the metal wall at the trailer's base rent from itself. A noise like a storm warning. Everyone froze. Everyone left the trailer. No one entered it again, save to grab the stereo, the television, the Super Nintendo.

But that was months afterward. In the evenings, the beers Jim drank with Ted on the lawn at 1235 grew from two to three to six. And then the summer ended. The trailer baked in the fall's winnowing sun, erect and wrecked, and then snows fell for months. This summer excursion under a paste of heavy snow was like a rebus no one could figure out.

In time the rifted metal was found, the trailer junked. "All that snow," Ted said. "I told Jim I'm help take that thing down. But did he listen?

"Some people have no sense."