Trailer Park Barbie
by Dug Lloyd
illustration by Kevin Banks
Once upon a time, just last week in fact, there lived an aging baby boomer named Barbie. She was a real doll, who had known the depths and breadths and heights first of small town America, then Hollywood U.S.A., then last and certainly least, the Royal Oaks trailer park in Chula Vista, CA.
I know what you’re thinking. “It couldn’t be my Barbie, the glamour girl with the impossible figure who inspired a generation of adolescent females to experiment with the agony and ecstasy of anorexia because they wanted to be just like her.” But it was.
She was always getting kids into trouble. Whenever a parent yelled: “Will you pick your shit up off the floor for chrissakes,” there was a good chance that the shit in question was none other than a little clone of Barbie herself.
It all started back in high school. (Doesn’t it always?) Barbie was a popular girl with lots of friends. She was a good if inconsistent student, and a woody-invoking drum majorette.
When not busy with her guidance counselor, this vivacious but troubled girl could usually be found with her boyfriend. His name was Gregory Ira Joseph but everyone called him G.I. Joe because ever since he was five years old he wore his life-like hair high and tight like a Marine, and dreamed of pacifying the shock troops of an anti-war demonstration with a billy club, while serving his country as an army M.P.
Except right before her period, everything was usually fine in that quaint small town for Barbie, until the night of the senior prom. Barbie and Joe rented a stretch limo and after the prom, had a wonderful time in the Rug Doctor parking lot. Even the limo driver had a great time. No homecoming queen ever looked better with her pretty prom dress jacked up over her ears than Barbie did that night, he said.
When G.I. Joe was down at basic training, an event was unfolding that would change their lives forever: it was then that Barbie learned she was pregnant, and as a born-again Christian, she couldn’t very well have an abortion, so she chose to have it, or should I say, them. She christened them Minnie and Daisy, but they soon earned the nicknames Betsy Wetsy and Tiny Tears.
She couldn’t bear to tell Joe of her condition, so she just took off without an explanation and disappeared without a trace into the sunny asphalt-girdled climes of Southern California.
The trip in the van was a long one. Although they were not identical twins the two girls both asked their mother exactly one million times: “When are we going to get there, Mommy?” And if not for the plastic brush on the dashboard it might well have been two million times.
Like so many blondes with more bust than common sense, Barbie ended up in the porno trade. Her days became her nights, punctuated with a too-frequent reiteration of “Oooh baby. Don’t stop. Yeah, yeah just like that.”
For a while she lost hope that she would ever get a real job in show business. An offer to co-star with Rin Tin Tin turned into just another skin flick, this time with a winsome but incredibly temperamental pit bull. Oooh baby woof woof.
One day, Barbie was waiting for her coke dealer at Winchell’s Donuts on Vine Street. Blaze would give her all the drugs she wanted for free. All she had to do was preside at a pretend porn movie starring the coke dealer and a rare albino, dwarf rhino named Max. Her job was to pretend to operate the camera.
But before Blaze showed up, a blond god named Ken Dahl appeared. He had arms like a Viking oarsmen and a waist like a little girl. Ken had been getting a lot of modeling work with a company called Mattel. He said Mattel was always looking for fresh-faced lovelies like Barbie and he could probably hook her up. But first it was three weeks at the Betty Rubble clinic to dry out from the uppers, downers, and other substances she had been using to keep her life straight.
This, she was sure, was the longed-for big break. The one she had hoped for and richly deserved. The adulation was like a drug but still the cocaine crept back into her life. The inside of her nose had to be trussed up with plastic. That kept her from having only one huge nostril with which to woof down the eight ball of coke a day she was snorting. Her skin became drawn and tight like plastic too, and her hair became dry and brittle; it was reduced to four carefully combed clumps.
But no one else seemed to notice. Ken bought her a pink Corvette, and the company got her a mansion in the Malibu Hills maintained by a lesbian flunky named Skipper, who waited on her hand and foot.
The children were sent off to a special boarding school in Geneva for the autistic and chronically comatose. Barbie sent them a case of cheese doodles every month so they wouldn’t become homesick for America.
Soon Barbie became a recluse, avoiding Malibu altogether and spending most of her time at her My Little Pony Ranch, located 20 miles south of Lake Tahoe. It was made of solid Lincoln Logs. It blanketed and protected her from the stress of her career.
But Barbie began hating being alone almost as much as she hated the flipped-out phonies of Malibu. In desperation she shoved her head into the Easy Bake Oven. The gas didn’t kill though. It was an electric range. Her face was scarred, and she needed expensive plastic surgery. As usual it was her friends Raggedy Ann and Andy, the perfect couple with the matching heart tattoos, who saved her from a face worse than debt. Her arm was separated at the shoulder when Andy pulled her out of the oven, and had to be reattached by a specialist.
The downward spiral continued as rumors circulated that her boyfriend Ken had boyfriends of his own, but Barbie never believed any of it. However, during a sweatshop swing through the factories of Korea, China, and Malaysia, reality slapped her upside the head like a baby seal. There was her Ken undressing the marketing guru for Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots, Dapper Dan, in the fountain right front of the Singapore Sling Hotel. A paparazzi snapped a photograph. There were twelve million eyewitnesses.
Ken denied everything of course, but when he got caught Jello-wrestling with a deflatable Gumby three weeks later, it was all over.
Ken’s career was ruined. He changed his name to Ernie Bach and went into the car business in Norwood, Massachusetts, far from the glamour of Hollywood.
It was all over for Barbie too. She had to sell everything she owned and she froze up inside. The former model wound up shacking up with a retired Navy cook named Maung Maung who managed the trailer park where she lived.
The high point of her life became selling dab by number, black velvet oil paintings of Elvis, pool-playing dogs, and even of herself during her glory days, at flea markets on the weekends. No one ever recognized her as the quintessential blonde, blue-eyed goddess she once had been.
Poor Barbie. All she has left are her memories.
