Living at the Surf n Sand
a trailer-park romance - a 4-minute character study
It ain’t home until you take the wheels off.
It ain’t home until it’s up on blocks.
— The Texas Troubadours
Her name’s Lillian, but everyone calls her Lucky. She lives in the Surf n Sand Trailer Park, a low-rent oasis on a cliff above the Pacific. Her home is a 30-foot single-wide, built in 1968, with classic two-tone paint, a heart-shaped window in the door, and a bumper sticker across the butane tank that says:
If this trailer’s rockin’, don’t bother knockin’.
It isn’t fancy, as you might imagine, but the wheels are off, so I guess she plans on staying around for a while.
In her yard, you’ll find the usual accoutrements — a barbecue pit that she found for free out on the sidewalk, a camp chair with a built-in beer holder, a small revolving clothes line off to one side. And, spiked in among the succulents, a couple of elegant, pink plastic flamingos.
Lucky’s old Ford Fiesta has no tires, so it’s temporarily up on blocks. It’s been a stationary part of the Surf n Sand landscape for nearly two years.
But — don’t think the cliché is lost on Lucky. She planned and arranged everything just the way she likes it, including the huge ceramic bullfrog. “The concept of trailer-trash is so iconic,” she’ll tell you, “so blue-collar hip.”
~~~~~
Lucky had a boyfriend, Louie, for about a year, but that didn’t work out. One time, Louie went clamming down at Castle Beach and carried home a galvanized bucket full of Pismos. He left them in the bucket, soaking in sea water over night, so that they would spit out all the sand. But when Lucky went out to get the mail in the morning, she saw Louie grab one of those clams out of the bucket and just bite it’s little neck right off. She was horrified.
“Good God, Louie! That thing wasn’t even dead yet. You just killed a live animal with your teeth! What is wrong with you?!”
He grinned at her, took out his pocket knife and proceeded to scrape a few more live clams out of their shells and slurp them down. Well, that was grounds for breaking up right there, right then. She told me, “I kicked out that raggedy-ass Italian, and don’t care if I never see him again. Ick!”
So she’s been living alone for a few months now, albeit with Louie’s abandoned pet, Big Al — a 14” baby alligator. He’s no trouble, but he’s not really any company at all. Lucky brings him a spoonful of ground beef a few times a day, he bolts it down and then hisses at her. In fact, he hisses at her every time she passes by his aquarium. She’s not unsympathetic, she always tells him, “Yeah, buddy, I know just how you feel.” But he just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and she is not sure what to do with him. She needs to find an Alligator Rescue service or Reptile Foster Care….
Lucky does have a good neighbor, an aging hippie called Bill. There’s a lot of geriatric hippies in this beach town, who wandered in in the 1960s and just never left. Bill ties back his long gray hair in a bun, has a huge beard, and lets his mustache grow long to disguise the fact that he’s lost a couple of very important front teeth. His clothes always carry the scent of eau de reefer and he wears black socks with his sandals. He claims he was the road manager for The Jefferson Airplane in the 1970s, traveled all over America with them, even lived with them on Fulton Street in San Francisco for a while. He’s an interesting old guy.
Sometimes Lucky hangs out with Bill after work, to listen to the stories of his glory days. Stories about Jorma, Marty and Paul, about meeting Dylan and Baez in Big Sur, drinking Southern Comfort in Oakland with Janis. Maybe his stories are true, maybe not. Lucky’s far too young to even recognize the names of the people he talks about, but she doesn’t care. She likes the old man.
Today, Lucky is sitting in her blue chair out on the grass, reading a torn paperback, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The Eurythmics are rocking out on her vintage turntable. When she looks up, she sees a young man knocking on Bill’s door. She watches, but there is no answer. He looks around the back, he knocks again, and then he sees Lucky and walks over.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey, yourself.” He’s big, wide-shouldered, and has just the right amount of rascality in his eyes, in Lucky’s opinion.
“I’m looking for your neighbor, Bill. You know him? Seen him around?”
“Yeah. I saw him outside this morning, he was doing his exercises.”
“Exercises?”
“Yeah. Tai Chi. Says it keeps him toned and ready.” She homes in on his smile with her personal radar.
“Ready? Ready for what? The guy’s 80 years old!”
“Um-hmm, 82, he told me, but I think he’s planning on living another 20 years. He’s probably just walked down to the farmers market to get his weekly supply of kale and kombucha, other stuff like that.”
“Okay then, well… I guess I’ll come back a little later. Thank you.”
“…Or… you could just hang here, if you want. He won’t be long.”
“Well… yeah, okay. That’d be great. I’m Walter, by the way, Bill’s grandson.” He reaches out and shakes her hand.
“My name’s Lillian, but most people call me Lucky.”
“And are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Lucky?”
“Hmm. No, not always. But I do get lucky sometimes.” She gives him a friendly wink. “Come on in. We’ll have a beer.”
Walter imagined he saw, just for an instant, a subtle light in her blue eyes — and he thought, you never know…this might be one of those … times.
Jackson Dean. 2022. A catchy tune, reminiscent of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Check it out.
Photos: Bill by Tim Mossholder; Lucky by Dmitry Kropachev; Walter by Blake Wisz; Surf n Sand by HLS - all on Unsplash.com
Oh hell yeah! Love this story! I remember when we lived in Mama’s yard, here in the gulch, in our travel trailer, and my brother parked his family, next to ours… poor Mama. It was like a damned KOA camp.😂
I've heard that trailer parks and Las Vegas have the same "What happens here, stays here." theme. A low-rent trailer park oasis on a cliff above the Pacific? I bet there is a waiting list to get in. Good one, Sharron.