I have lived in a trailer court or two

and the last time, the most recent, I was living in a rust red single wide, a total shithole, floors caving in, stains all over the ceiling, a weird, elusive smell, the works. Down the way lived Jesus, or so I pretended. Maybe six or eight trailers down, Fucking Jesus H. Christ.

Or he was some dude who looked like him, with the beard and the hair and even the sandals. He was all about peace and love, I pretended. I didn't know anything about him, so had to pretend a great deal.

He drove a Toyota Corolla, like me. We were brothers, Jesus H. Christ and me. Car brothers.

He would come and go, doing his daily shit, and I would peer at him through the dirty curtains as he did it. His piece-of-shit Toyota coughing and smoking and back-firing as he went on his way to heal the sick, make the blind see, free the demon-haunted brains.

No one ever gave a shit, but, then, I didn't tell them. I didn't tell them "That's Fucking Christ Jesus Himself, right there in that rusty Toyota!"

I would watch him come back, watch him get out of his car with a case of beer and a carton of smokes, and I'd pretend he was exhausted from helping the Lost Children of Nobody, from his missions, and that he was going back into his beat-up aluminum rectangle of a home to fucking relax in that 'hurry-up-and-die' working poor way.

Also, I pretended he knew I was watching him. He was my Fucking Lord And Savior after all, so how the hell could he not? He knew I had my nose in the dusty curtains, knew that I was looking to him for guidance, for example, for meaning, for life, truth, god, the American Fucking Way.

Sometimes I wouldn't see him for a while. I'd look and nothing. His car just sitting there for hours was all I'd see. I'd grow bored, turn on the tv, grow bored again, and turn it off. Sometimes I wouldn't see him for hours and hours and I'd become lonely and sad, desperate, lost like a Lost Child of Nobody.

I would begin cheating on Jesus, begin looking out different windows in different directions, pretending the woman who had just come out of the shower with the towel on her head was Allah or the fat shirtless guy was Buddha or the old man Albert Einstein. I pretended the guy who was always fixing his boat was fucking Odin, the One-Eyed God of the frozen north from whence my people came in great wooden ships to terrorize and teach and steal and build.

It was like this the whole time I lived there in the trailer court, me peering out the damn windows, day after day, seeing everything or nothing, pretending what was necessary to give it context because it had none.

Then one day, a Wednesday, I realized I was losing my fucking mind. I located my car keys, got in my own rusty Toyota, and got the holy fucking hell out of there. As I drove through the trailer court, faster and faster, I could feel dozens upon dozens of eyes on me, crawling like ants, eyes which did more than look, eyes which told stories at me, yelled stories at me, pleading, with question marks ending every sentence. Stories which made no sense. Stories which were crazy. Stories like this one.

And as I turned onto the main road, I found myself driving the fastest of all, well over the legal limit, my tiny Toyota motor screaming. In the rearview mirror I watched the trailer court diminish, growing smaller and smaller, until even the dim light it produced was nothing at all.