Growing Up White Trash

I am White Trash.

People think I'm kidding until I serve up a few unsavory facts from my past. The motorcycle gang down the street. The tree stump painted red. My mother and father who knew each other as children. (Hey, it was Texas, and that's all I'm gonna say about it.)So I'm on familiar territory in the Great Recession Smackdown. Some days I feel like I'm coming home.

Two years ago a friend of mine, who works on Capitol Hill, predicted the end of life as we've known it. At the time I thought she was indulging in some of that Washington hyperbole. Too-shay.

With unemployment at 8.5 percent and climbing, home equity tanking and retirement accounts a shadow of their former selves, I say: Greetings, Nouveau Poor! Welcome to my world. Current middle-class trappings to the contrary, I am now and forever White Trash.

Language has become so politicized. I fear my ethnic group will be the next epithet. Or worse, infantilized as the W-T word. (Decorum-challenged? Uh, no thanks.)

I'm sure you've heard the euphemism Trailer Trash. Nice try at neutralizing the race angle, but Trailer Trash doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?

Besides, I grew up not in a trailer but in a cheap suburban rental house despite my father's high salary. (Let's just say he had a passion for saving.)

If you have to be White Trash, I recommend the intellectual branch. Nobody could touch us! On our imitation wood-grain coffee table was the latest issue of Scientific American and on the kitchen table was fried chicken and the communal damp dishrag. Even a "napkin" of a paper towel torn in half was too fancy for us.

"We're raising our children on poker and Mad magazine," my mother said one day as she tossed her toothpick into the ante pool.

On hot, humid afternoons we became White Nomads. My mother took us kids to air-conditioned stores where we'd wander for hours among plastic fruit, cellophane packages of rickrack and heavily-textured paintings of matadors.

In a childhood like mine, there were, of course, moments of pathos. I found out the hard way that you can't just save your allowance, buy a catcher's mitt and start playing softball. My parents would have to arrange things first, and helicopter parents they were not.

Back then the White Trash national anthem was "Hang On Sloopy" by The McCoys. This valentine to a girl who lives in "a very bad part of town" has much in common with the fairy tale "Cinderella," itself the mother lode of all White Trash rescue fantasies.

These days I prefer Richard Thompson's "Beeswing," in which the narrator can't forget his free-spirited lover: "I heard she even married once / a man named Romany Brown / but even a gypsy caravan / was too much settling down."

White Trash women may be marginalized in the real world, but in music, novels and film they enjoy a proud history. A defiant Norma Rae, played by Sally Field, stood on a factory table and inspired her co-workers to organize. Margaret Mitchell's Belle Watling, a "lady of the night" imbued with an inborn gentility and warmth matched only by the saintly Melanie, blazed quite the trail for 1866. Belle was an entrepreneur, a philanthropist and no doubt a terrific roll in the hay.

As for Woody Allen's mythical Whore of Mensa, she lives! She might be the one ringing you up at the flea market or schmoozing you in the art gallery. For White Trash women, money is irrelevant. If they manage to find money, they'll soon lose it. White Trash is all about bad habits and bad attitudes.

Prosperous women engage in enormous amounts of listening, nodding, smiling and suppressing because they want to keep their good fortune flowing. White Trash women have no such carrot. They know only the stick, and that's why they're so adept at running away. Perhaps that's how the mobile-home stereotype got started. But I digress...

From afar, White Trash women observe the polished, manicured world of respectable society. And of course they want in. But then again, they don't.

They don't want to interface or network, especially if that will infringe on their right to tell off a boss, a "credit specialist" or a Home Owners Association. They don't want to organize bake-sales or beg for donations. And they sure don't want careers that wring from them every drop of creative juice and then wipe the floor with what's left of their souls.

If I ever land in jail - and you never know, since jail is quite the Trash magnet - my background will serve me well. I've learned how to be happy with nothing more than the fact that I was not being beaten or starved. How many debutantes can say that?

I'm built for hard times like these. The kindest folks I ever met worked at an auto salvage yard. Any day now I may be approaching them about a job.

To those I've offended by using the term White Trash, I apologize. To those I've offended by being White Trash, I apologize.

Now, where did I put my laundromat quarters?