The trailer court I grew up in was called Grandview Mobile Home Estates. If you take out the words "mobile" and "home", it sounds very lofty and fancified. Well, it wasn't. I grew up witnessing its residents drunk, high, half-naked, fighting and making out. But enough about my parents.
I'M JOKING!
My trailer court had a big park in it, with lots of grass, and there were lilac bushes completely surrounding it. It made for a great place to play "naked truth or dare", which my cousin Jennifer and I played with some other kids when were were little. To our credit, we were only 4 or 5 so we had no idea that naked was bad. Until Aunt Judy caught us, that is. Then we knew.
But I digress.
There was one other trailer court on my school bus route and it was called Hiatt's Hideaway. Of course when I was little I never knew the name. We just called it "that junkyard place." You see, the trailer court wasn't actually visible from the highway, all you could see was the junkyard, which was filled with nothing but old, broken-down, rusted cars and trucks. On my 2nd day of Kindergarten, my bus stopped at this destination and I watched in wide-eyed amazement as kids came running out of the junkyard and scrambling up the hill to the bus. I actually thought they lived in the cars, it wasn't until high school that I found out there was a trailer court back there. Then we took to calling it "that crappy trailer court behind the junkyard." This is where Artie-Fartie lived, by the way.
Now, you have to be a scrapper when you live in a trailer court, because there's always someone who wants to fight you. Besides trash talking, sleeping with your buddy's wife and cracking open a Pabst Blue Ribbon for breakfast, fighting is a form of entertainment for White Trash. These kids from the junkyard though, they were SCARY. I pictured them fistfighting during breakfast over who got the last of the milk, with the loser being reduced to pouring water over their generic cornflakes. Or beer. To quote Little Orphan Annie, it's a hard-knock life.
So it turned out that the kids from Grandview and the kids from Hiatt's Hideaway would regularly compete for who had the "best" trailer court.
Us: "Ha! We have a park!"
Them: "HA! We have a junkyard!"
Score one point for Hiatt's Hideaway. An automobile filled junkyard definitely trumped a park for sheer entertainment value.
Us: "Our trailer court has trees and grass!"
They conferred amongst themselves and eventually responded with: "Well, f*ck you!"
Score one point for Grandview Mobile Home Estates. F*ck you is not a valid argument.
And on it would go.
Of course, that's not fighting, that's just trash talking. Fighting is when Mike Walton finally decides he's tired of you embarassing him by calling him "John-Boy" and humming the tune to "The Waltons" at the bus stop and tries to fight you.
He loses.
After his crushing defeat, which culminates in you punching him in the gut ("you gotta hit 'em in the breadbasket, kid. Takes all their wind away." my dad used to tell me) and then kicking him when he's down (don't leave 'em angry kid, leave 'em beat"), Mike decides that every day after school he's going to try to beat you up. He talks tough about it on the school bus every afternoon, but once off the bus he either:
1. Gets beat up by a girl. Again.
2. Tries to hit you and then run home.
When Mike pulls #2, you chase him home. Sometimes you catch him and sometimes he makes it home unscathed. Eventually his 18-year-old cow-of-a-sister who has disgusting tattooed bosoms that sag to her knees sans bra starts walking him to and from the bus stop every day. She had to know she was a loser when all of us started making fun of her, along with making fun of Mike Walton. And of course we were savvy enough to know that she couldn't lay a finger on us, since we were minors.
When I decided to write about this, I did a google search and found this:
Ok, that's more like it. Now it's a tie.
