White Trash Nostalgia

She smiled at me, a sweet gape of undisguised teenage lust.

The scene popped out of the dark vats of curdling syrup which are my memories. Was there a cause, a catalyst? Well...I've been listening to a lot of metal lately. Maybe revisiting my white trash roots allowed this tiny flicker of joy to surface.

Because it was indeed a very white trash scene. County fair in a small town in Western New York; me with my long metal/grunge hair, accompanied by a young couple originally from Florida who lived in a trailer that stank of cat piss.

He was ratlike, with deteriorating teeth; his wife was morbidly obese but would probably have been revolting at any weight. I didn't exactly enjoy hanging out with them, but he sold weed and I was pretty lonely...it was a Midnight Cowboy sort of relationship, but I was only slightly Buckish while he was very Ratso.

It was a summer between college semesters, and I was working at a local factory- that's where we met. He wasn't quite college material, not even by the standards of the state school which I attended. He'd definitely have struggled in my high school, though his drug connections and natural class clown skills would have allowed him some social flexibility. Like Ratso, his forte was street smarts, but as a fawning weasel of the scene; the kind who knows how to quickly find what he needs, and disappear just as quickly when trouble arises. The kind of guy that everyone seems to know and nobody cares to spend much time with. His best feature was his goofiness; he could be funny at times, especially after a few hits from the bong, and especially if you were on the trailer park wavelength to begin with.

If I sound snobbish, let me admit that I'm well aware of my own white trashiness. At the time, I would have considered the association as more or less amused slumming...now, with more than a decade of self-examination behind me, I realize that we weren't all that far apart in any real measure. My hometown was white trash, my parents were white trash (at best, once-removed), and all through my life at least half of my friends were white trash. When I was young I was more inclined to dismiss the cumulative effect this had on who I was, with a small insistent fear that I was repressing the truth- that it was all of who I was.

Now I'm a little too tired, and a little too old, and a little too perceptive to deny anything. We are what we choose to be, and what we choose to be is usually heavily influenced by who we are anyway. It's not a paradox...or if it is, then paradoxes are the closest thing we have to truth. I'm a white trash kid with a good vocabulary. My apparent snobbishness derives mainly from a difficulty in fully identifying with either the trailer park folks that I come from or the more genteel bourgeoisie that once beckoned.

But that summer was one of those times when I felt like I had the best of both worlds. I was attending college, with collegiate illusions of a bright and promising future among the upwardly mobile. Still, I could allow myself to revel in the small town life. I could work at the factory and drink cheap beer and smoke weed and not worry for a second that this would be all my life would offer.

So, on one humid August day, when the county fair rolled into town as it always did, I was happy to attend. Ride the shitty rides, eat the greasy crap. Beer spilling from a discarded paper cup onto the packed dry dirt and creeping crabgrass of the fairgrounds.

And winding my way through the crowd, I just happened to lock eyes- very briefly- with a dirty, cute, unquestionably white trash girl. She smiled at me, a sweet gape of undisguised teenage lust. I suddenly saw myself in her eyes, a decent-looking guy made dangerously attractive with his long dark heavy metal hair and nose ring.

It was a great feeling. For a split second, I was somebody's wet dream. It hadn't happened much before, and it hasn't happened much since. I was always too self-conscious of my physical faults to believe that anyone could want me...so much so that, even on the few occasions when I actually had a sex life, I suspected that my female partners were generously making allowances for my other qualities (whatever they were). And even when I couldn't deny that there was desire on their parts, it was rarely as naked and obvious and pure as the look in this fair-goer's eyes.

There are plenty of people to whom it happens all the time, I'm sure. They would read this and say "What's the big deal?" or maybe "What a superficial, foolish thing to elevate in one's memory." But there are many others to whom it maybe never happens, and only they can understand how important it was to have felt that way, even for a second. Foolish or not.

If this was a macho sort of tale, I'd finish by recounting how I took her back to my place and fucked her silly before kicking her out like the teenage trash she was. If it was a more working-class romantic story, I would have wooed her and found that we shared the same white trash dreams and despairs, got her pregnant and settled down for a life of factory work and mild domestic abuse. If it was a socially poignant tale, I would have had a brief relationship with her that detailed my own foolish conceits and personal failings, leaving her and I to realize the bitter truths of the world as she returned to hers, and me to mine.

But it's the tale of an awkward and overly self-conscious guy. In this tale, neither of us even stopped walking after we saw each other. She disappeared into the crowd, and gradually my ego calmed down to its usual fitfully inadequate level.

But whoever she was or is, I'd like to think that every once in a while she gets a tiny boost from an almost lost memory...that she thinks of a hot anonymous metalhead dude that smiled at her, one balmy afternoon back in the early 90's.