Trailer Trashed: My Dubious Efforts Toward Upward Mobility by Hollis Gillespie

about five hundred
degrees Fahrenheit outside, and if my super strength had kicked in right then, I would have used it to spin the giant Calder sculpture in
front of the National Art Museum so fast it would have served as a fan
to cool off the entire world.

    We were on our way to the insect zoo at the Natural History
Museum because my girl loves insects-the bigger the better-and
spiders, too. At home I'm forbidden from killing spiders, all of which she has named. She
can hold a Madagascar hissing cockroach
in her hand like it was a little pet. She'll
giggle about how all its hundred little
cockroach legs tickle, while I try to
muster the super strength to keep my
skeleton from ripping itself free from
my skin and scuttling into the corner
where it wants to cower in repulsion. But
Milly wants to be an entomologist, and when
your child, who is barely out of kindergarten, tells you she wants to be
something, especially if it's something you yourself have to look up in
the dictionary, then you better muster up some flight benefits and get
your insect-phobic ass on the ball to steer her where she needs to go.

    The insect zoo was for my sake as well as hers, because she already
knows way more about them than I do, so I was hoping I could bone
up on insect awareness while the insect-zoo "handler" deposited all
these massive specimens into my child's hand. At one point I turned
to see her holding a grasshopper bigger than a bird and more colorful
than a tropical sunset. "It's luminescent," Milly said, and I thought, Jesus God! Where did she get that word? Then I remembered I'd used it
to describe to her a large opal ring in the display window of a jewelry
store once, and damn if that grasshopper didn't look exactly like it
had been painted with about a million miniscule opal stones. I almost
wanted to touch it myself after that.

    Later, while walking back to the hotel, we stopped at the cafe in
the sculpture garden, and as I fortified myself with liquid for the trek
through desert heat, Milly passed her purple bunny around to the other
patrons, bestowing on them each their individual
super powers. She announced proudly that her
own super power was the ability to become
invisible, and to prove it she asked us to
close our eyes for a few seconds, which
we sort of did, and then when we opened
them she was gone. "Do you see me?" we
could hear her ask from behind the Lichtenstein, which prompted us to exclaim to
each other very loudly, "I hear her, but I don't
see her! How amazing!" And then she would ask
us to close our eyes again, and when we opened them, there she was
again. Amazing!

    Later, when the other people had gone and it was just me and
my girl, she looked up at me and informed me that she was going to
demonstrate her super power right there in my lap. "Close your eyes
again," she said, and I did. "Now open them," she said, and I did.
"Am I fading?" she asked. "Am I disappearing?"

    Just then-looking at her lovely face, at her eyes so large I could
see in them the life I almost had without her, how less luminescent
that life would have been, her eyes so big and beautiful and unbearable-all of a sudden I was desperate with hope that my super power
would come to me immediately. I need all the strength I can get.
Because she is right. She is disappearing. My little girl is disappearing
before my eyes.

    I REMEMBER THE PRECISE MOMENT my father's heart stopped beating.
I was in a small aircraft over Orange County, a four-seater Cessna
that was getting tossed in a storm like a bathtub toy in a Jacuzzi. My
roommate John sat next to me, a pound of cocaine between us, and
he behaved surprisingly pussy-like for a pusher. He put his head in my
lap and cried the whole way, certain we were bound to die horribly.
I was certain we would not, but I didn't like him much so I let him
cry uncorrected. When the clouds cleared, I remember looking at the
lighted landscape below and