Raised By White Trash

By Steve Berger

Steven Berger proves that the real life stories are the best! In this wildly witty collection of essays he recalls his white trash family only one generation with indoor plumbing, the church lady he stabs and recounts the long distance road trip that could still be smelled for over a decade. Berger also fondly relives the stories of attempted Bubbacide (killing of his brother, Bubba), his foray into being the superstar of family weddings and a very passionate account of the sex goddess in cut-off jeans that taught him how to kiss.
Raised By White Trash is sometimes dark, sometimes outrageous but always funny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Berger
• Release date: Jun 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452496498

Steve Berger

Berger was born in rural Missouri, took a look around and spent the next 18 years trying to get the Hell out of there! His major writing influences include Mark Twain, TV shows from the 70's and 80's and bawdy bathroom limericks.

Book preview

Introduction

There are a lot of possible scenarios that occur that will cause people to decide to write about themselves. I imagine one would be a realization that your accomplishments may be of interest to posterity and, perhaps, there is some clarity that only you could lend.

Another reason someone may be motivated to auto biograph is the insistence of their peers to do so. A third and possibly the least noble of possible motivations is when a future author is taking a long look at himself in the mirror and says to his reflection I'm so damned interesting it's time to tell the world. After all, how could anyone out there not want to know about me?

As family legend has it I learned to read by sitting in the laps of my mother and grandmother as they read aloud passages from soft core housewife porn and Readers Digest Condensed Classics pointing at the words as they read. If what they were reading became too scary, or too sultry, they just skipped those parts. It was these gaps in the stories that forced me to learn to what the letters meant. Spurred on by the pictures of muscle-chested shirtless men kissing scantily clad women on the book covers I eventually deciphered words like lusty, heaving and throbbing. I eventually learned over thirty different words that referred to human sexual organs but, because they were veiled terms like man root and love cleft had no idea they actually meant sexual organs for at least another six years. The confusion created by euphemistic intercourse still pops into my head from time to time. Usually at the grocery store when someone is reaching for a carrot.

Learning to read at an early age also meant learning to write at an early age and there are several examples of my first attempts at short stories moldering away in a basement in Missouri. I took a look at some of them and I have to admit most of it is uninspired, pandering and contains poor suspension of disbelief. Only a story about a rascally letter R sneaking into other words to change their meaning held any real promise. In retrospect the letter story was so close to an episode of Sesame Street it is quite possibly the youngest attempt at plagiarism attempted in modern times.

In eighth grade I was once again bitten by the writing bug and approached a teacher for a suggestion for a book about becoming an author. I didn’t really want a book about writing. I was thinking I’d get some adoration and praise for making such an intellectual decision for my career. I was expecting him to leap at the opportunity to help out a future author, to praise me for my initiative and to parade me around in front of the other students so they could take note and point out that I was an example future greatness making his humble beginnings right here among them. Instead, to my surprise he said What will you write about? You haven't done anything. You don't have any experiences. He said it with a sideways smirk I’ve seen used by abusive White Trash men on anyone who wants to try to better themselves. I was hurt and a little embarrassed and let the subject end there.

Several weeks, or possibly months, later a drinking buddy of my stepfathers asked me the question adults ask kids when they don’t know what to say. What are you going to be when you grow up? I told him that I didn't know yet. My sister Becky, seeing an opportunity to embarrass me, because she’s a bitch that way, chimed in that I was going to write stories. My stepdad gave me the same sideways smirk the teacher had and said, What are you going to write about you haven't even done anything? I don't know now why it felt different being said by him than it did coming from a teacher but this time it didn’t hurt my feelings.

Maybe it was the fact that he was sitting outside in a lawn chair with his only other friend in the world, both laid off from a mill in Kansas City where their job was to load bags of flour on to trucks. Maybe it was the black and white can of generic beer in one hand and the styrofoam cup half full of tobacco spit in the other. Coming from a teacher the words were depressing but coming from him they motivated me. I couldn’t let him be right and I couldn’t let myself become him. Screw Him, I thought, not for the first time and probably not even for the first time that day. He’s just White Trash what does he know anyway?

I was starting to discover that it was his habit to keep anyone from reaching too far in life as a way to keep them from falling too far. He was, in his own way, trying to protect me from acting above my raising. It was nearly considered a sin to think you were better than your family and your community.

Newly energized by the fear of becoming a version of my stepfather, his friends or any of my uncles I started my first diary. Because only girls kept diaries I kept my writing hidden and even enjoyed the idea that I, a boy, was keeping a diary. Kiss my ass society! I'll do what I want.

In high school my diaries were changed to journals and despite the more masculine and professional title they had very little direction. Some entries were hateful descriptions of people at school. Some were entries like went to band practice. A few were simple outlines of bad stories. Now my journals are called blogs and are the same format with more words.

The dream to be a writer never really died but looking at what was on the paper it was becoming obvious that I really did need to live a little bit first. The excuse that I needed experience became a good reason put my first novel on the back burner. My first idea was to have as many different adventures as I could before I turned thirty five then get serious about writing. At seventeen, thirty five seemed ancient. Hell it was my mothers age and she was already old. Thirty five came and went because forty seemed like a better age to really start. It even had a zero at the end making it a round number. So now, on my forty third birthday, I’m really serious. I gathered all of my notes, diaries, journals and blogs and looked in the mirror to say to my reflection, I’m so damned interesting it’s time to tell the world.

###

The Escapist

I was born in a distinctive but rather smallish town in rural Missouri. It’s distinctions include being nearly dead center of the United States, several flavors of water (all disgusting) seep forth from natural springs and the entire town was built in a three mile wide sink hole in the hundreds of miles of otherwise flat planes. The population was white or slightly off, white or just slightly off. Few people ever moved there and few people ever moved away.

I don't know when our first memories start or how far back we can accurately recall events but the memory I call my earliest is of me as a tiny child in diapers pushing my way through the ripped mesh of a screened front door to gain my freedom and running down the sidewalk. Still vivid in my mind is the sound of my little bare feet slapping concrete. My running was awkward and was really a combination of falling forward and using my feet keep my face off the sidewalk.

The Sun was brighter that day and the breezes came at my back seeming to help my escape. I took a moment to stop and look around. I looked back and saw that the small yard of our apartment had shrunk away away behind me. Wow I thought,look how far I am!

I shouldn’t have paused to admire my progress. A shadow fell across me and I looked up into the face of a very large man. I turned to run but he caught me from behind under both arms and lifted me up and held me in front of him away from his body. He couldn’t hold me close because my feet were still intent on running and hadn’t gotten the news that we were now moving in the opposite direction of freedom. Resistance was now futile.

A few moments later the strange man, probably a neighbor, delivered me unto my nineteen year old, pregnant mother who hadn't yet realized I was missing. If I were to guess at my actions that day I would say that even at two years old I had the premonition that things weren't going to go well for me in my current situation and I was trying to make my escape. This was the day I started to crave freedom. I would also guess this was the incident that caused my ongoing distrust of strange men large enough to pick me up.

After that my early childhood became a cat and mouse game between me and the adults. Or maybe more specifically a mouse and trap game since it was really just a series of failed escape attempts. Once I ran through the swinging door of the butcher shop at the A&P past bloody chunks of various animals. Another time a confused medical assistant learned the hard way to lock the back door and not to turn her back on young kids in the Dr's office no matter how sick they look. My most successful attempt was achieved by hiding in the circular rack of very plain house dresses marked down to fifty percent off at JC Penney’s. It was several announcements on the public address system and at least an hour before I was discovered and taken back into custody.

After the incident at Penney’s my mother had to be more vigilant about not letting me out of her sight. To make sure I got some exercise and a break from breathing her second hand cigarette smoke and, so that she got some time to herself to watch her daytime soap operas in peace, she came up with the idea of chaining me to the big walnut tree in the front yard. It was a pretty good idea. There was already an thick dog chain that was probably left by the previous tenants. The chain was long enough to give me plenty of room to run around without getting into the street and the hook fit perfectly in the the middle of the back of my toddler overalls. There were plenty of walnuts laying around on the ground to play with and, if I got thirsty, there was always the big yellow half-chewed plastic bowl full of rainwater that had been left by the previous prisoner.

Nearly every one we knew lived within walking distance of us and we often had various friends and relatives drop in unannounced throughout the day. So it was not unusual when my aunt Margie stopped in on her way home from the grocery store and saw me in the front yard straining against my chain. My hands, feet and knees were stained black from walnut rinds and it is possible that I was barking. For some reason my aunt found this upsetting.

I know my family and Margie was upset because of what the neighbors would think about one of her relatives tied up like an animal than because of any long term personal issues I may be developing. She burst in the front door on my mother and said, I can't believe you have him tied out front like a dog what's wrong with you? Of course I'm repeating this second hand since she had unhooked the chain on her way in and I was already gone. The neighbor girl had left her tricycle out and commandeered it was already down the street and through a back alley. The stolen wheels helped me make pretty good time and I was five blocks away by the time they found me.

The corporal punishment of choice among the poor in the rural US at the time was a switching. Traditionally, to worsen the sting, the one being punished would be made to choose his own switch from the surrounding flora. Since I was so young I didn't have to find and cut my own switch this time but my mother found a handy willow branch for the walk home. Willow is the worse. The branches are flexible enough to get a whipping action with the right wrist motion. Every few steps on the walk home I'd get a swat across the back of my legs and I would cry whether it hurt or not. Step, step,, swat cry. I clearly remember the little dance I did every time the swat came and I also remember thinking how unfair it was that we couldn't take the same back alley shortcut home as I did to get where they finally found me.

After the tricycle escape either my mother got better at keeping me locked up or I simply gave up trying either way I don't remember any more escape attempts.

###

Raised by White Trash

For a while I held the title of The running away kid but after I quit trying to escape the adults, in whispers, referred to me as a strange child. One of the reason, I was told, was that when I was a baby I was very somber but didn't cry. Sometimes would just stare right through people. I was also told I learned to speak very early and, according to my grandmother, I had real good English and always used words like I was grown up. My grandmother was very proud of me since good English was something she had yet to hear coming out of the mouths of her own children. The other women of my family were also proud of my progress but it made the men of the family think I was possessed by some devil.

Once I started school I gave off the impression that I thought I was smarter than everyone around me. I will admit that hearing this recounted to me bothered me a little bit. It was never my intention to make anyone around me feel dumb. Of course, I really DID think I was smarter than everyone else.

My alleged strangeness was probably a very natural response to what was going on in my family in my earliest years. Against all family and local tradition I was born in wedlock when my mother was seventeen years old. As the oldest I should have been the reason for the marriage but the wedding was due to a pregnancy that didn’t carry to term. My paternal grandmother never believed my mother was ever really pregnant and felt she had used her teenage feminine charms to trap my father into marriage.

This particular grandmother, Ida, was strange in that she was was very fond of purposely having children out of wedlock. Believing that once a woman marries a man she’s trapped and limited her options. But that's not even on the top ten list of why she herself was so strange. For one thing she never cut her hair. I don't mean that as in she rarely cut her hair or it is a long time between haircuts I mean that never, in past sixty years, has a hair left her head, in part or in whole by force. As a result by the time I was born her hair was about five or six feet long. That is about nineteen inches longer than she was tall. If you walked through her house you would sometimes snag one of those super long hairs on your ankle. For some reason finding a six foot long gray hair with three foot split ends on your body is more disconcerting than finding a short curly one.

It was many years before I actually met Ida in person but I would see her around town with a few of her female relatives. I was never really sure if they were cousins, sisters or nieces but they were obviously related. They all had very large asses wrapped in long skirts of denim or gingham. To make the look sexier they wore tennis shoes. Like my grandmother none of these other women cut their hair either. It didn’t just hang loose, though, it was braided in a long flat braid that was then wrapped around the top of their heads in a bowl shape. Their heads looked like an arts and craft project. I would often picture these hair baskets filled with various tropical fruits or maybe some Christmas ornaments during the holidays just to make them more festive

All of Ida’s children had moved out of the house by the time I was born and since she hadn't been married to any of their fathers there was no husband to bother her at home either. Her house was her castle but and, though she was queen, she was not alone. She had a pet. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say she had a familiar On a perch in her living room next to an ancient plaid couch was an African Grey parrot. At some point in the early nineteen fifties a newspaper was set on the floor to catch bird droppings and bits of seed and hasn’t been changed since. The resulting pile of exotic bird crap has built up to create a wide gray and white stalagmite that, in the right light, could be mistaken for a bit of modern art. By nineteen seventy it was high enough and solid enough to support an ashtray and a small cold beverage.

Artistic talent aside the bird had few other redeeming qualities other than the loyalty to Ida. Much like Ida. If you entered the house you risked being bitten by either of them. Both could speak English but preferred to scream in some unintelligible language that always sounded like cursing.

While Ida always had her gray hair braided the parrot went the opposite route and spend its time chewing bald spots all over its body. This was part of a nervous condition. I don’t know if Ida made the bird the nasty and disagreeable beast it was or if they were just soul mates.

It is fair to say that my mother and her mother-in-law did not get along very well. Besides telling everyone she came in contact with that my mother had trapped her son into marriage with a fake pregnancy Ida also never acknowledged that my brother and I were my father’s offspring. This was a tough denial to make since the men in my family all look like slightly different version of the exact same person.

To make things worse Ida recommended that my father, though he was married, play the field and see other women. Which he did.

This backwoods soap opera reached a high point one night when my mother had run out of both money and groceries but hadn't run out of mouths to feed. Because it was a small town and people love gossip she knew where my father was, what he was doing and who he was doing it to. I was left in the care of a neighbor and my pregnant mother drove the two miles across town to one of the many mobile home parks to try to squeeze some cash out of my father.

Normally my mother was a very shy girl. I know that's a strange thing to say about a pregnant eighteen year old, since getting pregnant at any age requires you to be good with people, or at least one person. According to her version of the story she drove over to the trailer park, pushed her stomach out so she would look even more obviously with child and banged on the thin aluminum door that tornadoes find so attractive. She admits that she knew that my father was with another woman and she even expected that other woman to answer the door. She didn't expect the other woman to also be very obviously pregnant.

He had been drinking. In rural areas all over the country the most exciting and most terrible of stories tend to start out with the words he, she, we or they had been drinking. Mom demanded money to feed his children and he gave her ten dollars. After she left I guess an argument ensued with the happy couple left behind in the trailer. The reason, it seems, was that both women knew about the other but neither of them knew the other was pregnant.

Drinking and driving is bad. Drinking and driving a motorcycle is worse and drinking and driving a motorcycle while trying to outrun a pregnant girlfriend pissed off about your pregnant wife can prove fatal. And for my father, it did. His body and wrecked motorcycle were found by my mother as she was returning home from buying groceries. How she found him first when he was being followed by the girlfriend never quite made sense to me but that's how the story goes.

I can’t imagine how stressful it is to deal with the death of a spouse, even and estranged one, but it can get worse. Because there was no beneficiary listed on my father’s military life insurance paperwork the funeral home insisted that his wife and his mother had to jointly plan his funeral. This was done so the funeral home could make sure they got paid regardless of who was the listed benefactor. This meant Ida and my mother had to plan this funeral together.

Luckily, or ironically, the women were able to rely on my uncle Dan for help. Dan was my fathers brother and his wife was my mothers sister. He went with the grieving widow and his grieving mother and sat between these two women that deeply hated each other and planned a funeral for his brother.

So the women wouldn't have to talk to each other directly the funeral director would ask a question like how is blue for the casket liner? Dan would turn to his mother and say is that ok with you, Mom? and then he would turn to my mother and ask, is that ok with you? He looked like a man translating for two people who already spoke the same language.

A few months after my father died my mother's father died. This all happened when I was just two years old but a death combined with family discontent has a way of affecting everyone involved. For a few years the adults were distant. Distant from me and from each other to avoid facing the pain of loss.

The distance created the feeling that I was being raised by people that didn’t know me or that had found me somewhere and felt obligated to feed me. As I grew up I found a story about a girl in India raised by wolves and another about a boy abandoned in a forest and had fruit thrown to him by monkeys. I searched everywhere for more stories of kids raised by another species and slowly became sure that the same had happened to me. Except I wasn’t being raised by animals. I was being raised by White Trash.

###

The Steps

It’s not something most people take the time to consider but the word father,and who you refer to as your Father, should be a pretty straight forward concept and easily defined. That’s in theory anyway. In the rural White Trash towns across the country it’s a little more complicated. For example in Missouri the legal definition of the word father means the man married to a child’s mother at the time of his or her birth. It’s a roundabout way of saying that your wife’s kid is your legal responsibility no matter who the sperm donor was.

At face value it sounds barbaric but in the pre-DNA test times it was a way to keep men from avoiding child support and parental responsibilities just by claiming his wife’s spawn was not his spawn and that she had been out spawning without him. I have my doubts that this created any true feelings of responsibility for the technical fathers but at least the children of cheating moms had some financial support promised to them once a month.

When you’re a child it just doesn’t occur to you to question your own parentage. Mom is mom and Dad is dad . Between worrying about what time Scooby Doo comes on and whether or not you’ll be able to beat your siblings to the toy surprise in the bottom of the cereal box there’s really no room for thinking about who begat who.

As a matter of fact the topic of who begat me didn’t come up until I was around eight or nine years old after an evening of, what seemed like random, driving around town with my mother, brother and sister. Eventually we found what mom was hunting for an I was sent to get my dad from the bar in the Veterans of Foreign Wars building. I got out of the car and, as I was walking away, I was told to go inside and let my father know it was time to come home. Then she drove off.

It was a dirty trick on my mother's part now that I look back. He would be forced to come home once I was there since I was now in his care and probably shouldn’t be in a bar. Both because I wasn’t old enough and I wasn’t a veteran of any war, foreign or otherwise. It was also a testament to her superb parenting skills that she abandoned her oldest child at a bar in the first place to be driven home by someone in an unknown state of intoxication.

It never occurred to me to call child protective services because, at the time, I didn’t see it as reckless or endangering. It felt more like an important mission with the bonus of getting to go someplace my younger brother and sister weren‘t allowed.

I marched to the front door of the place and found it locked.. A little shot of fear went through me since I could see the tail lights of our station wagon already shrinking into the night. I knocked on the door as hard as I could trying to keep from panicking. No answer. I knocked again this time adding a little kick in case my fists weren’t making enough noise. A few moments later a little sliding door higher up the door than I could immediately see slid opened. For a split second blue light, smoke and country music poured out of the rectangle opening like a doorway to another world. I moment later a face appeared and blocked the light and sound. This was just like The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and her friends were trying to get into see the Wizard. This was so cool.

The eyes on the face looked side to side a few times and eventually down to meet mine. I came to get Jim, I told the face. I was proud of myself remembering to say his name instead of just saying my dad since dad could be anyone.

No Jim here, said the voice.

But his truck is here! my voice cracked a little and I pointed at one of the four vehicles parked in the lot. But I didn’t cry. The face considered this a moment. Not knowing your fathers name was ok but not knowing his truck was bordering on sacrilege.

The face retreated and the door cracked open enough for me to to be seen from the inside. JD, is this your boy? said the face that now had a body.

Yeah, that’s my stepson, Said one of the only four customers in the entire bar.

Nothing was quite registering but I saw my dad and I remembered my mission. I was allowed in and I ran up to the bar and said, a little smugly, Mom says it’s time to come home. The other three people at the bar shrunk away a little and hid their faces in their drinks.

He took a long drag on his cigarette. He was an expert at smoking and could communicate through his exhales. This exhale was in the tone of resignation. Ok, tell her I’ll finish this beer and be right home, he said this with little puffs of smoke escaping with each syllable.

She’s gone already. I’m supposed to ride with you. I don’t remember exactly the manner in which I said it. Excited I got to stay? Smarmy because I knew he didn’t have a choice? Probably smarmy.

He knew he was trapped and I knew he wasn’t going to waste a beer so I crawled up on the barstool. He ordered me a Sprite with a cherry in it for me to drink and I waited for him to finish his beer.

Who’s JD? I asked him. Mimicking the hunched over bar pose he and the other men had and trying to look like a grown up.

That’s what my friends call me. It’s my initials

He had friends?

He was always so boring at home this made me think maybe he had a secret identity that was actually exciting. Like Batman. Or maybe it made me hope he had a secret identity so that he had an actual identity of some sort.

I wanted to ask him what a stepson was but I didn’t want to sound like some dumb kid. After all I was practically a grown up now. The bartender must have thought so or else how could I have gotten in the bar? I thought about it, though, sitting there at the bar staring off vaguely like the other drunks. The word Step was like stairs and since I was the oldest I was like the top stair. That must be it. Like the oldest kid is the ‘step’ because it’s higher up. It made perfect sense. So after successfully stabbing the maraschino cherry in the bottom of the glass I asked for quarters for the juke box and didn’t really think about what it meant to be a stepson for a several more years.

###

School Days

I still remember my first day of organized education. I remember putting on the brand new jeans bought just for the occasion. Blue jeans were not yet pre-washed, pre-stressed or made with the idea that the person purchasing them may want to be comfortable while wearing them. For weeks, and sometimes months, the new denim had all the form fitting flexibility of aluminum siding. A pants leg might bend a little when you took a step but would soon snap back into its original perfect tube shape with an audible pop.

Walking was difficult but not impossible. The same couldn’t be said for sitting down. Your options were to risk leg cramps trying to force a horizontal crease at the back of your legs or to just accept the fact that you were going to sit there with your knees sticking out in front of you like a cheap plastic baby doll. The kind sold in pharmacies or in grocery stores on the same aisle as the light bulbs.

For a good hour or so, that first morning, I stood on the edge of the bathtub and admired myself in the bathroom mirror. Turning my head from side to side so I could admire my hair that slicked down with some form of hair grease and parted on the side. From the neck up I looked like a Republican. From the waist down I looked like a blue version of the tin man from the Wizard of Oz. From the waist up I sported a brand new white tee shirt and looked like a farmer or maybe a plumber on his first day at a new job.

For my first day of school my mother drove me in our forest green station wagon with the faux wood paneling on the side. In order to make the occasion that much more special I got to sit up front (something kids can't do now due to airbags and the belief that children aren't easily replaced).

The outside of the school was the mandatory maroon brick required on all government buildings but it had been freshly painted with large squares of bright red, blue and yellow. The yard in front of the school had just been cut for the first time since the beginning of the previous summer. The long cut grasses hadn’t been raked up but were, instead, just left in random clumps like a scarecrow murder scene.

What I remember most clearly that day was the look of excited anticipation on my mothers face as she got rid of me for the day. She didn’t have a job at that time so it was obvious to me she was going to start having a secret exciting life with my younger brother and sister now that I was out of the way. My siblings and I all knew that, if we left the room, that was when the party started.

Seeing that momentary look of hope, that micro-second of relieved anticipation that flitted across my mothers face made me think of the bad guy that finally has our hero trapped. This made me suspicious. Maybe I should rethink this school thing. Maybe this wasn’t going to be as fun as I was lead to believe by the adults. Adults were known to be tricky. Maybe preschool was like going to the babysitter or worse, the dentist. Maybe the whole concept of school was a plot to get me out of the house so they could have fun at home without me. My mood shifted severely and a pinpoint of fear stabbed at the back of my head. But I didn’t cry.

I wasn’t about to let her see me cry.

The glass doors at the front of the school were big and too heavy for me to open on my own. Weren’t doors like this supposed to open by themselves like they did at the grocery store? This place was cheap, I thought to myself. Once inside the door construction paper signs screaming, Welcome, and Preschoolers right this way, led us to my new classroom.