When my parents lose their restaurant, the bank takes everything except the motorhome and our station wag on. We live in the motorhome in parking lots, and we live outside the houses of my parents’ friends in Pacific Beach until the neighbors call the police. For months we live in a parking lot on an island in the middle of the bay surrounded by grassy parks and a resort gone to seed. The island is connected on either side to the mainland by the great arcing causeway of commuter bridges that link Pacific Beach to Point Loma, Ocean Beach, and the Sports Arena. In the center, on the island, where the two bridges meet, we park the motorhome in a lot with a patchy crabgrass park and rusty barbeque rings and a rocky shore and beyond that the bay, which is a nice thing to wake up to and see—the pink light of dawn on the baywaters or the big coastal sunsets with the dusky colors of amaranth and yellow carnation, of cherry fruit punch so red you can taste it. So red you want to stab a straw into the skyline and drink it.
For a while we live at Campland, a trailerpark down by the bay. In the early 1980s it is a rough place where cars are stolen in the middle of the day, trailers are looted while the families are off at school and work, and the windows of doublewides shot out. It is also beautiful, and that is what I remember.
Campland sat (and still sits, though it is no longer rough) on the shore of a saltwater marsh in Mission Bay. It is bordered by Rose Creek, a golf course, and the sports fields of the high school I would end up at a decade later. The marsh is lovely with its ripe, dark, comforting muddy salt smell and the tiny, colorful crabs massing on the barnacled pilings and sunning themselves on the wet rocks. I remember the sand pipers stepping cautious through the shallows looking for fish and I remember the silence of the marsh—a pure, breathless, crystalline silence where each sound is clear and distinct and rendered in hard edges as if cut from stone.
Later, when Campland gets too violent for us, we move to the Santa Fe Trailerpark in Rose Canyon next to the freeway. I remember the musky, sharp smell of maple leaves in the fall and the creaking of the tree branches in the wind. The easy days sitting in the back of the motorhome watching Mister Rogers’ Neighbor hood on PBS with the big curved glass windows behind and above me, the overcast skies gray and featureless. In these memories it is always autumn, somewhere in the days or weeks before Halloween, and there is a sweet joy in knowing the holidays are coming soon, waiting triumphant and expectant for you like grandparents who love you more than anything, waiting courageously in the near future. It’s the joy of Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve with its wonderful pile up of orange construction paper jack o’ lanterns taped to the windows with toothy smiles, stuffing and gravy steaming on your plate as you reach for a crescent roll in a basket that feels miles away from where you sit, the shimmering tinsel like a waterfall, the wonderous thrill of expecting Santa Claus, red and green and blue string lights from Mervyn’s fading gently before rising to a glow again, the Charlie Brown Christmas special with its soft, snowy jazz drums as the characters ice skate, and you’re staying up later than you ever have on the last day of the year, then the countdown to midnight.
My strongest memory of living at the freeway trailerpark is of being very hungry at night, my father off working to start a new business (the windows of the motorhome black, depthless, an inky void as I climb down from my carpeted bedroom loft above the cab), then opening the fridge to find it completely empty except for a single slice of American cheese sitting alone on the bare white racks. I remember the light of the refrigerator—clean, white, clear, blinding, as if staring into the cabin of some futuristic spacecraft.
Many years later, sitting on a beautiful, uncomfortable, gold-thread couch at a party in Topanga Canyon, I talk with or rather am talked at by a Frenchman my age, a friend (I assume) of the famous folksinger who owns the opulent, gaudy mansion where I’m staying for the weekend. I am in the middle of a book tour. The Frenchman doesn’t know this, and I have no plans to tell him. (One of the quickest ways to bring out the most obnoxious and awkward tendencies in people is to say you write books. Mention you’re on a book tour and you’re doomed.)
The Frenchman has a bag of cocaine the size of a smashed plum. Every few minutes he leans over the glass coffee-table at our knees and snorts a line, scowls, rubbing the bridge of his nose, then continues to talk. He wears a ratty fishermen’s sweater in gray wool like the famous photo of Hemingway and his brown hair is carefully untidy.
“Americains,” he says. “Your cheese it is sheet.” I tell the Frenchman he is not wrong. American cheese truly is shit, but (I make sure to point out) American cheese is not my cheese. My new friend, who isn’t my friend at all (or perhaps anyone else’s here because he won’t leave my side), cuts me off midsentence to tell me how the only thing worse than American cheese is American bread.
I agree with him, disavowing American bread. Though I am not entirely sure which bread he is refer ring to. I imagine Wonder Bread, white bread.
The truth is for a very long time American cheese was my cheese and Wonder Bread was the finest thing in the motorhome’s pantry.
That night in the motorhome with the lovely slice of cheese in the fridge I feel nothing bad. It doesn’t scare or disappoint me. I peel the plastic off the slice and eat it then go back to whatever I was doing before.
My perception of the economic state of my family is saved or perhaps shielded by my parents. I am unaware that we are profoundly, desperately poor. My parents do not let on or complain about money in my presence, which is to say life in the various trailerparks we stay at is sweet, quiet, and safe. I move about my world joyfully, half in a dream, half grounded by the fantastic and alluring world around me. The marsh birds. The crumbling ruins of parking lots. The bayshore. The Mexican families fishing from the rocks under the bridge on the island. The Ford Rancheros and El Caminos without wheels up on cinderblocks or under blue tarps and the Buicks and T-Birds with blown-out front windshields or hanging bumpers parked next to doublewides and decommissioned school buses, their windows taped up with newspapers. The men in the trailerparks where we live are shirtless with tattoos on their shoulders and scraggly mullets or rat tails. The women sit in pairs on trailer steps smoking cigarettes and drinking sodas or beer and staring at me as I walk past in the dusk. The kids my age are just like any kids anywhere and we care about nothing but playing. Or rather I care about nothing. Whether the parents of the children I play with buffer them from the harsher realities of living very poor in America I cannot say. I did not have the perspective then and now all is lost to time, unreachable.
My parents’ finances crash to wild depths and rise victoriously then fall again, and this is how we live for years.
American cheese is a constant and loyal companion. Melted over eggs on English muffins. With Buddig turkey slices and mayo on pita bread. Eternally grilled on sourdough. A slice of cheese smeared with peanut butter then folded like a taco. Smeared with mayo then folded like a taco. Smeared with strawberry jam then folded like a taco.
The cheese taco in all its incarnations is not a good thing in retrospect, but at the time, at that very particular moment of childhood, the fact remains that I don’t know what “good” is and haven’t yet questioned good in contrast to bad, so perhaps that in itself makes it good. Perhaps it’s good enough to believe that something is good. If you believe a thing to be what it is most definitely not, does that in turn make it what you want it to be, in essence making it what it is not? Is a thing’s worth determined by accepted standards of quality and popular taste or is it determined by love? Someone’s favorite film is still their favorite film regardless of whether someone else might consider it to be shit. A second and differing opinion does not stop the film from being someone’s (anyone’s) favorite. Even if it were only one person’s favorite film, it is because of this a “favorite film,” irrespective of criticism, and by way of that it is a thing of value.
The American cheese taco in all its varieties, styles, and permutations—with peanut butter, with mayo, with jam—it exists. This is an irrefutable fact, and most (if not all) things that exist have someone or many someones who sincerely love them in a very fundamental, crucial, integral way. To which we may conclude, the American cheese taco is loved.
I think of this often—how heartbreakingly shitty life can be but the fact that things are loved can make it feel less so. Not loving things, per se, because that’s different, but knowing that people love things, knowing that people care about even the smallest, stupidest things enough to love them can give you hope in humanity. Because maybe if people love something they can’t be so bad. Maybe if they feel and know love they can change, they can redeem themselves. If you can feel love for something as gross, base, and undesirable as a folded slice of American cheese made into a taco with peanut butter, maybe you can learn to love your neighbor and the Earth enough to take a position of stewardship, to save and not ravage, to remedy and not destroy. That I hate so many people and love so few is a thing I’m at odds with, a problem I want desperately to fix. Will I? Probably not. I’m prone to being gloomy, judgmental, and pessimistic, and try as I might, I cannot change that. Still, this much I know: it is better to be surprised by your unexpected victories than disappointed by the losses you neglected to predict.
Humanity is a monster that will eat you alive. It is a pestilence sweeping across the landscape. But people? People can be alright. Loving even the smallest number of people is a reason to stick around, a reason to get out of bed in the morning. Trying to love people while holding onto hope is a daily war where the enemy is so much stronger than you. The enemy has tanks and bombs. They have napalm they’ll drop on you, and you’ve got Nerf guns and wooden swords. It’s disheartening even on the best days. So you look for reasons, for evidence as to why you should keep trying. Is the fact that people love the American cheese taco evidence of humanity’s potential for goodness? Is it a reason to believe in something better? Today it is. In this moment it is.
