Dina & Darlene
Dina & Darlene’s parents’ trailer is hillside and glistening. A long, rolling, pebble-lined driveway makes it easier to hear when people have arrived unannounced. Children don’t make the trek up for candy on Halloween, even Dina & Darlene’s friends, the road so steep. Small blue and red packages fill a skull on Dina & Darlene’s front porch. From afar it’s expensive candy, but once you get close enough you realize it’s leftover Smarties and Dumdums from last year because that’s the suck candy, Darlene says, because it sucks ass.
This morning’s snow doesn’t stay, and even though they live at the top of a hill, their father built a fence around the yard, the pretty side towards their trailer and the ugly side towards the neighbors. Their father, scratching his neck beard and spilling coffee from a broken coffee cup, watches the snow flit around the fence, whispers “I’m glad I waterproofed the cocksucker when I did,” so pleased he is with his own handiwork.
The fence was a fun job, or so their dad called it, and Dina & Darlene knew it was a fun job by how much doing the job was going to suck ass, so it was a suck job as they called it. But the fun jobs paid cash money, and they have been able to sock away enough for magazines with River Phoenix on the cover, and trips to the city for fan club meetings, and an airplane ticket to Los Angeles for November 1st, 1993—tomorrow morning, bright and early.
Through the clock radio the Monster Mash plays. “One more day,” Dina says, and River Phoenix will fall in love with us.” The one fun job their father never could do is fix the bulge in the wall of their room, water gathering behind paint and stretching, sagging, which they covered with a large poster of River leaning over the back of a chair, half of a smile, eyes of knowing, which they bought at K-Mart. Every inch of every wall covered with River Phoenix, even the light switch plate which protruded out his mouth, his head pitted and fastened around the toggle. Thousands of pairs of River Phoenix eyes watching as a hex at all times.
Today, the fun job is shelves in the bathroom. Here is Dina with a hammer in one hand, here is Darlene with nails in her mouth. They are queens of home repair. Queens of cash money suck jobs.