Houses are meant to be seen, but not trailers. They’re backstage stuff. No one wanted to be reminded of them, so they were kept as far out of sight as possible next to factories and dumps. Or, better yet, not allowed at all by city ordinance. As the only child of a 1950s traveling floor show magician known as the “Master of Deception,” my home was a 1949 Travelo house trailer. I grew up in Fowler, Ashland, Hugoton, Medicine Lodge, and Kiowa one week, and Turpin, Dodge City, Stafford, Pond Creek, Wellington, and Helena the next. Then off to Anthony, Cheney, Augusta, Moline, Newton, and Pratt, then on to Pretty Prairie, Sedan, Independence, Eureka, Cedarvale, and Neodesha, where we might layover in a trailer park and I might even find a school to attend for a few days. It was the life I was used to and it was paradise.

Since novelty entertainment was supposed to be about money, my mother at least wanted something to show for her hardship on the road. What she wanted was a house, but the average cost of one in the early 1950s was around $17,000. There was no way my father could come up with a fraction of that for his lovely assistant to live decently, since pulling cards and picking pockets for laughs was not where the money was. If he enjoyed status at a banker’s convention with his “suave good humor” and “clever tricks,” when it came to a loan, he was a leper. So in Cimarron or Memphis or Sioux City, he sat in our trailer and carefully studied Hubbard Cobb’s Your Dream Home: How to Build It for Less than $3,500 (1950) until the drop-leaf table was covered with papers and calculations, columns of numbers, product brochures, and pictures my mother cut from magazines. He studied Cobb’s drab gray volume with its side indents like a dictionary, marking topics like “Getting Started,” “Foundations,” and “Framing.” He wedged so many cutouts and notes between the pages that the book’s binding began to fall apart. I didn’t dare touch it, not so much for fear of dropping it and losing all the place markers, but because it represented the end of life as I knew it.

My father bought a plot of land for practically nothing in an alfalfa field outside of Minneapolis and actually built a house on it for less than $3,500. He pulled cards from the air one at a time until he saved enough to buy a pallet of concrete blocks, then more cards to get a few bags of cement. Piece by piece, he amassed enough material to construct a basement and cover it with a floor.

Each step in the house’s construction was separated by intervals so long I almost felt safe that this whole unsettling project would never be completed. Meanwhile, I relished my days playing with kids in a trailer park until the first signs of a house’s skeleton were visible. When I walked through its open two-by-four frame, grasshoppers from the field landed on the wall studs, and the coo of mourning doves passed through nonexistent walls. I sensed the outline of a hallway and rooms, and one of them, I was told, would be mine.

He studied the Cobb book and implemented what he read, helped by diagrams from other sources and many trips to the lumberyard and hardware store. He cut boards with a handsaw (no electricity), the cuts deviating as much as a good quarter inch or more from the pencil mark. All this revealed a side to him I’d never seen before. His impeccable clothes became snagged and dirty. There was sawdust in his wavy hair. His fingers were wrapped in Band-Aids (removed at show time for painful and sometimes bloody card-producing). I could be with him in ways I never could when he was on stage or driving or sitting in the trailer practicing sleight of hand. I helped lift two-by-fours into place and hand up nails or a tape measure. Without my knowing it, I assisted in constructing, one nail and board at a time, what would become for me a house of horror.

A gabled, tarpaper box took shape in the middle of the field, an image as surreal as a newsstand on a desert. From the trailer park I could see it in the far distance up on a hill beyond the swamps. The house was considered complete when we could actually lock the doors, even though the windowpanes were not in the frames yet. It looked normal enough, but on closer inspection everything about it was off. The floors weren’t level, the beams weren’t vertical, the joints misfit, and half the nails were pounded over sideways. It shook when the wind blew and made whistling noises through all the cracks.

The great schism finally occurred when we pulled our trailer up to the house where there was no road leading to it, only tire tracks that had worn a path. Many of my mother’s clothes went directly inside and were hung from nails pounded in the wall studs.

I never got used to the strangeness of living in the house my father labored so hard to build. In the trailer I could stand in one place and reach almost everything I needed. Now everything was beyond reach. I had to walk across a room or down a hall. My bedroom had more square feet than our entire trailer and filled me with such agoraphobic dread that every night I clutched my stuffed Scottie, Sox, and struggled to fall asleep to the monotony of tires humming over the pavement of a distant highway. Under the floor beneath my bed, instead of wheels, there was that most dreaded of places—the basement, where intruders waited to get me.

To a traveling entertainer, having a house was more prestigious than a pinky ring or even dirt on their car, which meant they were on the road and therefore busy. He took pride in inviting other traveling performers to drop in any time and stay the night to save a hotel bill. At our wind-shaken, water-stained estate, we hosted Rocky Mountain Mary (“Singer and Yodeler”), George Bink (“Comedy Juggler”), Jeanne James (“Exciting Acrobatic and Violin Stylist”), Betty and Her Playmates (“cute and clever canines putting on the dog”), and of course the Prince of Pantomime and ventriloquist Grover Ruwe. If Teddy Qualls (“Mr. Rhythm,” who was black) came by, we didn’t have to worry about the racial judgments of neighbors, because we didn’t have any. But it was also a chance to hear my father talk, something he seldom did before. As long as I behaved myself, I could stay up and listen to everything they said whether I understood what they were saying or not. I greatly preferred that to being alone in my new bedroom where above me, instead of a trailer ceiling under an open sky, there was an attic where loud thumps awakened me at intervals, and under me were heating ducts that knocked like someone was trapped inside.

END

By John-Ivan Palmer

From: United States

Website: http://John-IvanPalmer.com