When I was a kid, my mom took us TP’ing every fall. Like the pheromones of a lion during mating season, when autumn’s cool breeze tickled my nose, my veins filled with the titillation of the vandal. In our home, there were no family game nights, no TGIF, and no bedtime stories, only tales of mischief and running when a porch light came on. My mom was the fun mom. She let me drive her car to buy her smokes at 14 and have skip days from school, which included reading tons of Goosebumps books, watching soap operas, and getting a Happy Meal from McDonald’s with those changeable toys where the Chicken McNuggets turn into a dinosaur! Anyway, Family Night at the McCree household would always begin with a trip to Dairy Queen. I’d always get a chocolate shake, my mom, dad, and brother a peanut-buster parfait, and my sister a blizzard. We’d get the ice cream home, eat it in the living room while watching a movie, (us kids watched what mom and dad watched, which explains why I watched Poltergeist when I was 5 and was terrified to walk across the house to pee at night), and get yelled at if we got anything on my mom’s white carpet. She loved that carpet more than us kids. I know this because she said, “I love this carpet more than you kids.” She laughed in the face of DCFS threats as she wore our asses out for wearing shoes in the house. My mom spanked me once, and like a dumbo idiot, I told her “that didn’t hurt,” so she invented “The Trouble Chair,” which was basically Alcatraz for a 6-year-old and I was a repeat offender. I spray painted my face to look like The Ultimate Warrior, stole about 10 packs of Bubble Tape, a thing of cottage cheese, and a road cone from the grocery store, and kicked a kid in the balls because he said I couldn’t play his Nintendo – all of this cemented my ass in that chair for hours at a time. But, little did I know, mom was training me like Rocky in a Russian barn. Because sometimes after ice cream, she would reward me and my siblings with a TP’ing extravaganza!

When the call came down, we’d put on dark colors, double-knot our shoes and race to the car – first one there gets front seat and control of the cassette player. We’d head over to Mack’s Super Foods and get our toilet paper, excitement bubbling over like the chemicals in a trailer-park meth lab, carefully choosing our weapons of choice. I remember using my times-tables here for the first time, multiplying 12×8 on the fly, like Einstein with a hardened street mentality, my heart racing in anticipation of coordinated criminal activity, high on fun dip with my Charlotte Hornets ¾ zip Starter Jacket on and my butterfly knife in the front pocket. The Charlotte Hornets Starter Jacket was the coolest piece of clothing any kid could have in 1993. You show up to the skating rink in the black and teal and you’d be couple skating with your crush in no time while Ginuwine’s Pony set the mood for a future cafeteria romance. I envisioned my mug shot with the jacket on, being the bad boy of my school, fathers telling their daughters not to ride on my back pegs while making a name for myself in the underground. I’d watched Scarface on HBO because my brother knew how to steal cable, and once even snorted a Pixy Stick with my Super Soaker 100 pointed in the air, just like Tony Montana!

We would always get to the checkouts and make jokes with the cashier, like “oh, I ate Taco Bell, so I need all this toilet paper because I have to poop big time,” then do armpit farts. We had a 100-roll minimum because we cared, which usually left the cashier shaking their head and wondering if we actually had Crohn’s Disease or dysentery. Mom would even let us bring friends on the condition they didn’t freeze if the cops showed up. “You run! And if you get caught, don’t give names. Snitches get stitches, and nobody likes a little narc.” My mom was serious. I saw her punch a kid in the balls when he came into the house with his shoes on, and she threw a water pitcher at a high-schooler who was picking on my little sister. If you think jail scares any of us, you don’t know jack shit. I can live on butter-sugar sandwiches, no problem.

When buying toilet paper, no double rolls, their girth would get stuck in the trees, and our operation couldn’t afford to be curtailed in such luxurious fashion since we bought in bulk. This isn’t a Dillard’s bathroom. However, you couldn’t get the store-brand toilet paper because the weak construction could easily be compromised while wrapping cars and mailboxes with the care of a brain surgeon, albeit a drunk one. We always set ourselves up for success, and mom was delighted to have a good time with us, so she was quick to invest the necessary capital on the needed ply, but at the same time show us the value of a dollar. A painter needs a good brush as a meth maker needs a good trailer, but remember: perfect is the enemy of good and a good moderate Cottonelle was a great way to go. Charmin was too fancy and girthy and Scott is basically prison toilet paper, where we might end up before the night’s up.

I remember strutting through the store with armloads of toilet paper, feeling so cool because it was past my bedtime. I was a superhero, like Captain Planet, but I’d stab you and throw my empty happy meal box on your body. I felt like the Tupac of my elementary school, waving my middle finger out the window of a Mercedes and throwing up gang signs in defiance of all governing law. At school, they want you to walk on the third block of tiles from the wall in a single file and use inside voices during lunch. I wasn’t about that, and they couldn’t tell me what to do. My 3rd-grade teacher had a sign in her room that said, “what’s right isn’t always popular, and what’s popular isn’t always right,” and I took this to heart as I watched my back for the police, knowing they didn’t define my moral character. I was one of the first kids to start cussing on the playground, the Christopher Columbus of swearing and I had a butterfly knife and drank IBC Root Beer wrapped in a brown paper bag while riding my GT Performer. I smashed the glass every time.

On one particular Halloween venture, my neighbor Alan left his trailer unmanned, so we loaded up my mom’s Pontiac Grand Prix GT with as many people as we could and stormed his wheeled domicile like soldiers on the beaches of Normandy. We cranked Aerosmith over the 6x9s, with Livin’ on the Edge surging through the speakers and into our veins like the finest trailer-park crank! If you’ve ever seen the scene in Predator when Arnold Schwarzenegger and his team are in the helicopter headed to the jungle, that’s exactly what this was like. As my mom’s second-hand smoke from her Marlboro Light flowed through the car, I inhaled the potent nicotine from the fire of the cigarette with reckless abandon. My excitement could barely be contained from the buzz of polonium-210 and hydrogen cyanide, but it was time to put up or shut up as we approached our assignment. We parked about a block down and moved in silence like the Ninja Turtles toward the mobile home. In true trailer fashion, there was a weight bench, a recliner, and a filing cabinet on the front porch. I swaddled each piece of misplaced furniture with the care of the Virgin Mary wrapping Baby Jesus. Then I launched rolls into the trees as high as I could, challenging myself to get higher each time, watching the roll fly up and around a limb, then bounce back down as the strand flowed in the wind like a horse’s long, beautiful mane. I was riding a high like no other – it was well past my bedtime and my consciousness was altered to a state of entropy that couldn’t be stopped. I was a gremlin that had eaten past midnight. The thermodynamics of my body converting energy into pure heathenism. Roll after roll after roll, like a mound of coke snorted by Tony Montana, it was everywhere, I wouldn’t stop throwing until we were out, higher, harder, faster, don’t stop, keep breathing, I bent down to my knees and propelled my body in the air to get the toilet paper even higher in the tree!

Then the neighbors walk out of their trailer. My brother yelled run, but I couldn’t stop. I knew in my heart these were friends of the cause. I can’t explain how I knew, but I did. Then this dude with a mullet, a cigarette, and a tallboy Busch Ice brought a toilet out of the trailer and confirmed my optimism. He walks up to me, and in a deep southern twang with the hoarseness that only comes from smoking Kool cigs from the age of ten, he says, “use this fucker.” Turns out the neighbors were getting hammered in their trailer and wanted to help us out. They got their check a day early due to the weekend. When the next tornado comes through, I promised I’d be there for them. I asked to take a swig of beer, but my mom said not on a school night.

Trailer dwellers have more fun than us regular folks, like people who ride Harleys, or those that have spent jail time together and share hot sauce sandwiches, thinking about the good times. If your house is on wheels with an attached hitch you can leave your Christmas lights up all year, pee in the front yard without anybody giving a shit and get high-interest loans at the 24-hour title loan so you can finish your tattoo and somehow, it’s a good financial decision. It’s true freedom, not only because you can pull the thing wherever you want, but society’s heavy hand isn’t there to tell you that you need to get your G.E.D or a bed frame. As a matter of fact, you’re one slip-and-fall in the grocery store away from financial freedom. The world is yours!

Anyway, we put the shitter front and center in a stunning kaleidoscope of Cottonelle 2-ply, wrapped from tree to mailbox to porch to shitter with the precision of Michelangelo completing the scenes of Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It looked like the pearly gates of heaven with convenient toilet access. Honest to God, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done with my life.

We cruised home in the Grand Prix, windows down, telling our rebel tales with passion and conviction. I felt good, like I was eating Totino’s Pizza Rolls while riding my GT Performer with my best girl Nancy on the back pegs. I went to sleep on top of the world, my butterfly knife by my side. When I woke up, that same toilet was in my front yard, with a shitload of toilet paper in the trees. It looked like Christmas morning. So, I got my mom’s cigarette lighter, went outside, and lit the toilet paper on fire and cussed with my friends.