‘Knock, knock! It’s Unreality, Motherfucker.”

White Trash Holocaust

By BILLIAM

It wasn’t until Myra belched, blowing knockoff Jack Daniels smell into his face, that Trent had a moment of clarity.

The 23 year old stared up at his wife as if it were for the first time, as she grunted and tossed her dyed blonde hair around her moonlike head. Her breasts, swinging like nylon stockings with volleyballs in them sagged, swayed, bounced and slapped against his face.

And throughout it all the constant, crushing pressure he felt against his pelvis grew stronger and stronger, his wife’s cigarette ravaged rasping breaths increasing in tempo and pitch until she would press her thighs together and croak out a deep, throaty groan.

She reached out for the night table to steady herself and inadvertently squeezed a babybottle, which sprayed lukewarm, clotted milk across his chest.

Trent was going to be sick.

And where the hell was he?

The light coming through the windows of his trailer was a sickly sulfur yellow. Beyond his wife’s chugging moans, he could hear the other sounds from the Whispering Glenn court. His neighbor’s mangy greyhound gagged wetly on a chicken bone dug out of Trent’s garbage. A 1980 camero rolled slowly through the court, its bass tuned perfectly to the resonating frequency of the paneling, which screeched metallically. Mrs. Brown stumbled over an aluminum picket fence and yelped out a racial slur as she fell headlong into her pink screen door.

Two children were – giggling – just outside his window.

He turned his head, tickling his nose on a tuft of hair his wife pulled from his head in a pang of ecstasy and saw the Brown boy and girl standing in his window, bright red Kool-Aide rings around their mouths, Andy Brown with greasy, mussed hair wearing his open-mouthed look of perpetual confusion.

His wife, her eyes still closed, pursed her lips together and puffed air threw them, trumpeting like an elephant.

Sally Brown giggled again. He noticed the two children were shirtless.

Trent saw a soggy Cheerio drool out of Andy’s open mouth.

That finished it. He was done. He wasn’t worried about the erection – no – he’d gone soft two positions ago. It was time to give up.

He shoved Myra to the floor and wrapped the bedsheet around his waist as he rooted through newspaper ad inserts, remote controls and empty Wendy’s bags for his pair of jeans. He shoved a bowl out of the way and a particulate pillow of fruit flies rose into in his face, a few he nearly inhaled.

Myra lay on the floor on her back like a roach before cramming a wet hand between her shanks and continuing on her own.

Finding only part of a pantleg inside a bowl of canned chili, Trent scooped up his jeans and turned on his heel toward the door, still gripping the bedsheet tight and secure around his waist.

Myra was scrambling toward him on all fours like a crocodile, clearing the room with an alarming speed.

“Come on, come on, come on. It’s time for you get yours. Come to mommy.”

Instead, Trent deked around Myra’s clinging hands and – in one fluid motion – grabbed a half-empty bottle of beer from behind the entertainment stand. He stomped off to the shower looking completely shell shocked. The door slammed shut behind him .

Tweaked into a sudden rage, his wife scrambled for some parting blow.

“Well, uh, you can just GO FUCK YOURSELF!” she yelled before she paused, realized her joke and started chuckling like a timber saw.

His wife’s laughter, like splintered wood paneling, was drowned out as he closed the door to the trailer’s bathroom. It was a room so tiny the sink ran up against the toilet and you had to sit diagonally on it to #2. Unless you were Myra’s brother, of course. Trent walked in on Dale with his feet propped on the sink once.

Trent let the sheet fall around his feet on the bathroom’s lumpy and black-grouted tile. As he stood up he caught his face in the mirror. He was wearing that constant bewildered expression he had ever since Myra called him with a lot of “there’s something I think you should know…”

There was always just a few centimeters of a filmy gray water in the shower that refused to go down the drain no matter how many bottles of pipe cleaner Trent fed it. A compacted and ratty ball of hair packed in the drain like some masticized tumor just took everything Trent threw at it and spit it back, sludge squeezing out of the drain like rust-brown toothpaste.

The water gagged in the showerhead and coughed foam on his face before kicking on. The hot water was out, but he ground his teeth together, ignored the slimy water backing up around his ankles and pressed on with his shower.

He was a junior in college when he dropped out, working toward an Engineering degree but with heavy extra curricular involvement in a number of literature and community theater productions. From there, a masters, then moving on then moving out into a pasture of pretty professionally profound young graduate students who would line up to fuck him in his studio apartment for a little less effort than a few glasses of wine and reading a passage from Henry Miller.

That was, until he decided to visit some friends from his old high school for some beers one night a few years ago.

They met up at Chad’s house to drink the rest of his parent’s fridge before heading out. It was a three-story condo built on a cul-de-sac on a hill overlooking Trent’s hometown of Smithsburg, Ohio. The four of them sat on his back porch, identical to every other one on MillChase Road and looked down on the town.

“Shittsburgh,” someone muttered.

They sat in a ring around the patio’s picnic table, which had the kind of glass that looks like wrinkled clothes. Chad, who inherited the house from his dead mother, looked around nervously at what had become an untidy patio. The lime-green and white striped umbrella was propped in the corner inconveniently collecting water under the clogged gutters.

Chad, with dark blue bags under his eyes , looked nervously around the patio. He cocked his ear toward the house, narrowing his stained-glass red eyes to listen carefully for any noises. His friends were too busy making fun of certain members of their high school graduating class to pay attention, so they didn’t see Chad suck in a deep breath to kill any noise that might distort anything he heard in the house.

Chad’s eyes opened, he smiled too wide at a story of some buck-toothed feeb from their high school who sold his camero to buy baby formula and drank his beer in two swigs.

It had been a rubber-kneed drive to The Toad’s nightclub bthat night; the bar which was made from Smithburg’s collective social backwash. Trent’s future next trailer neighbor came through the door way to the place wrapped around the shoulder of some pear-shaped man in a Brown’s jersey. The limp man’s head was bobbing and swaying following some nonexistent point of reference between The Greasy Spoon diner and King Komotions used car dealership. The drunk was pouring out his heart in messy chunks of smooshed together words.

“That’s fughed. It’s fughed. I’m notgonnatake it more. I’mnotgunnha take it anymuhr. I cdan’t taghit anymuh.”

Trent, riding the warm fuzzy fireworks from the previous few forties patted the limp guy’s shoulder sympathetically and turned to his pear-shaped friend.

“Relax, bud. Hey, he SAID he can’t take it anymore!”

The drunk attempted an about face on his stretch-armstrong like legs and started fumumbling how “bad” he would kill Trent.

The walked through the chinked and dented door to the bar.

Trent’s babysitter from eight years ago kneeled next to the cigarette vending machine and retched into the disposal tray, her fumbling hand was at least two feet off the trail of the Virginia Slims.

An uneventful night. The Area 51 machine ate their change and only flashed the Winners Don’t’ Do Drugs screen every time Aaron slammed his palm on the P1 button. Josh, his fists finally leaving their home in his jeans took 5 dollars out of them, downloaded some screeching thrash metal song and queued it six times after the “Boot, Scoot and Chug” linedance.

They snickered. They reported their progress to one another when no one else in the bar was listening.

Several college students, just waging their passive aggressive war on their hometown. Meaningless monumental victories. They patted themselves on the back like this for hours, following their jokes up with drink after drink after drink.

Trent was watching himself from across the room acting like this. He watched himself watching some girl in an airbrushed tanktop that said “Princess” across the tits play pool against some man who looked like he had to be stuffed into his skin. Sporky wirey hair tangled out of his forearms as he ran his fists up and down his pool cue broadcasting in broad clear signals to the girl “HEY! HEEEEEY! HEEEEEY! HEY? HEEEEEEY!! HEY!? HEY! HEYHEYHEYHEYHEY HEY! HEY?! HEY! HELLO? HI! HEY! FERTILE? HI! HEY!”?

The entire time the stuffed man was doing this he was sending her Rolling Rocks like bright green signal flares.

It was the beefy guy’s turn to shoot. He gripped his fists around the cue firmly, cocked his head from side to side and puffed out his chest in his secondskin Big Johnson T-shirt. He disguised a belch by pretending to blow an exasperated sigh through his lips.

Trent could have strangled him if he thought his hands could’ve fit around his ropey neck.

The beefy guy aimed carefully and deftly knocked the cueball right out of the table. He walked stiffly over to it and tossed it nonchalantly to the girl in the tanktop.

When she lined up to take the shot, he moved in for his power play. From the Smithsburg guide to picking up chicks at bars, he chose #35 “Pretending to help a girl line up her pool shot while using the opportunity to mash your beer-disgruntled genitals against her hips.”