White Trash Princess

I guess a lot of people don't even realize that you can live in a motel, but I know first hand that you can. The summer when I turned five, my family went on “vacation” to Virginia. A vacation for us was for my parents, good old John and Lou, to pile all of us kids into the 1968 Chevy Bel-Aire and drive for days and days while my dad would try to sell portable signs. They were the ones that said “open” on one side and “closed” on the other side. Or they would be the little interchangeable letters that went on the signs with the tracks to hold the letters on. Sometimes he would sell a lot of them, and sometimes we were lucky enough for him to trade a sign for a night in a motel. So this fabulous summer we went to Virginia. I remember it took forever to get there, but once we were there, we got to go to the beach and I loved it. It was so beautiful and I loved to make sand castles and pick up shells. I especially loved the motel where we stayed. This motel had a coke machine, and a snack machine that had real chips in it, and OMG it had a swimming pool! It was the classiest place I had ever seen in my five years on this earth. I never wanted to leave. I got to swim all day with my twin sister, Reenie, and the big kids, Judy, Jerry, and Babs. That was such a fantastic summer! The most amazing part was that we got to live in that motel for about three months. We swam every day that it wasn't raining. Come to think of it, it was the last time that I had a tan! You see, Daddy had picked up another hitch hiker that summer, because the Lord spoke to him and told him to. This particular person was a very tall black man with a blonde afro wig who liked to wear dresses and high heels. He was the most fetching black woman I had ever seen, at least up until then. As it happened, he stole all of Mama's and Daddy's money and even emptied my pink piggy bank and left in the middle of the night. We didn't have enough money to move out of the motel for a while. I had prayed that we could stay. It was magical. All of this is to say that the reason I know that it is possible to live in a motel is because I did when I was little. The sad part though, for me and for my school kids, is that you have to move around a lot when you live like that. The reason that my day sucked today was that some of my school kids are very angry. I guess they never had a magical transvestite to answer their prayers.