Shadia Alem Short Story: White Trash

American Dream White Trash Winter by Reinfried Marass

A few weeks ago I received a short story from Shadia Alem based on a photograph by Reinfried Marass.  She asked me to post it but said it might need some editing as English is not her native language.  However, after reading over it several times I decided to post it as is for everyone to enjoy.  Perhaps there are a few minor changes that could have been made but the story is so beautiful I wanted to leave it untouched. 

For those who don’t know, Shadia is a wonderful artist from Saudi Arabia and Reinfried is an amazing photographer from Austria.  Both are well known, highly successful artists and if you don’t know them, you live under a rock!  It is a true honor to receive a story from Shadia and I am deeply grateful for her gift.  Here is the story exactly as I received in via email with Reinfried’s photo.  Enjoy!

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The Story of Reinfreid Marass’s

White Trash

“ our soul is bowed down to the dust: our belly cleaveth unto the earth.”

He, The Master Researcher, was humming, while studying the white coffin where She Cadillac S. De Ville is dwelling in safety slumber, he was drawn to this sleeping old beauty.

-” A garden gnome, this what you become. An ornamentation is not what you envisioned yourself to be, ever, but here you are forgotten cold wrecked .. what a destiny!”

 - “click , click”

The Master stole a look at the dim interior, not a single movement met his curiosity, the clicking failed to stir a lock or a gear or even a wild snake nestling in the wet mossy hood, the clicking went insistently around the gorgeous sealed  in white body, examining and  itching notes of its deep sleep and history since 1960.

-“ O dear C. S.De Ville, my information tells me that you are hiding layers and layers of warm dreams and richness, i was there ..… oh, if only I could be the one to break through your hibernation, and coax your motor to burring life..” The Master went soothing while shooting, his whole body erected thrilled with this rare white garden-found.

The Master lost track of time, to be suddenly startled by that inner ticking, he hurried wiped and stared inside the coldness of the dark coffin, where a faint movement disturbed  the morbid mossy stillness  .

The old beauty wearily yawned:

-” what a persisting warm clicking, so alien to my death… why would you care to wake me?!! If one die, shall he live again !? “

she exhaled a feeble breath, its warmth ran into her empty dry body, a shattered light crept foggily inside :

 -” what is this emptiness, The sun seemed not summit me by day, nor the moon by night. ” What is this deep sleep that fell upon me ?”

 His faint voice echoed in her loneliness  “- i help you remember, the when and where you came from, the era, the mind which created you, the dream mongers…” 

she quivered and lifted her eyes unto the shattered  horizon on the map created by cracks and rust, shadows of  memories fall upon her foggy wind shield, silent was broken by his movement outside her closed frame .. she eased up, and  looked around, NOTHING but glimpses of old faded past, which she tried to trace :

she flipped into the sepia images, eaten by the sweat of human faces, night clubs, dancing girls, champagne, and daydreams of the beauty queen wearing Liberty crown on the land of many chances, creations, inventions and cars …. 

an image of herself, the glorious white Cadillac De Ville Sedan, four doors hard top 1960, the dream of all dreamers, the whole era was ready to spring to life;

-” Once upon a time a hero Cadillac on stage, to impress the world of performances..!”

an applause raised from far away stage, double headlights flashed as the Cadillacdescended through the clouds, long, sleek and intact, her toothy grille swimming in LED lights of The false Dream, she sank in the vivid memory of that light, recalling lines of the play:

- ” But ’til they tell us we’re gone ,

i ‘m gonna buy you a girl “

- ” I don’t know why i went dead , it’s not fun anymore ”

- ” I’m seventeen , and I’m new here today

The village i came from seems so far away

All of the girls know much more what to say

But i know i have a heart like sea

A million dreams are in me “

-” The heat is on in Saigon

The girls are hotter ‘n’ hell”

-” Is there a war going on?

Don’t ask , I ain’t gonna tell ”

Is she recalling the roar of Jonathan Pryce’s Miss Saigon, or Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, all the same, in this tunnel of oblivious young victims of war, ambition, love and the flaw of the American foreign political policies, stories were resurrecting with the same old struggles, tragedies  and  longing for change, pursuing a vision of some Empire of Liberty, which evaporated into nothingness.

All started to revive here, a child’s cry clearly rang in her ear, and the tears  of a Vietnamese mother rolled hot on her frozen checks, while  leaving the child at a departure gate, at Tan Son Nhut’s Air Base, to board a plane, headed for the United States, where her father, an ex-GI, would be in a position to provide a much better life for the child!”

-”The bread of sorrows.!” a dusty roar brought alive her own majestic rich history, the Cadillac herself is the ultimate symbol of That Dream, the reward for those travelers towards luxurious existence .

A humming tune cut through 2,448 miles on Route 66, to follow her here, in her seclusion, carrying the heavy kicks of the emigrants West:

” If you ever plan to motor west,

Travel my way, take the highway that’s best.

get your kicks on route sixty- six .

It winds from Chicago to LA,

More than two thousand miles all the way .
Now you go through Saint Looey

Joplin, Missouri ,

Oklahoma City looks mighty pretty.

You’ll see ,Amarillo,

Gallup, New Mexico,

Flagstaff Arizona.

Don’t forget Winona,

Kingman,Barstow ,San Bernandino.

won’t you, get hip to this timely tip :

When you make that California trip

Get your kicks on toute sixty- six”!

 -” was this song by Bobby Troup,Nat King Cole or the Rolling Stones? never mind!”, her memory faded, what left is the sad smile, which deepened the lines on her wrecked face. She sighed with despair:

-”I was the strive implied under the glittering, blinding those who came chasing a richer existence.. i am the other face of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, with hopes and pains ready to spring to life…”

-” the human dream, is by no mean a “Requiem for a Dream” like Hubert Selby Jr calls it, which “you have to be asleep to believe it.” , but rather a dream you have to be fully alert and creative in order to bring it to bloom. ” The Master ‘s comment startled her, as she had forgotten his presence lost in her memory .

“click click ” his challenging dedication reaching right to the skeleton of her memoirs.

“Look, on your gradually revealed face I can also trace the story of  Ree Dolly, of Daniel Woodrell 2006 Winter’s Bones!”

For the first time she stole a look at him, and something like a fuel ran in her pipes, she recognized the unexpected connection, she and The Master researcher, definitely share the same year of birth, yet he will survive with that resurrecting curiosity of an eternal photographer creator. She felt cold and rusty, and didn’t bother asking who and why , surrendering to the clicks and shuffles, sure he was the one to bring her back to her past golden glory and give her eternity .. she addressed him with respect :

-” Winter’s Bones! yes you can call me winter bones, or White Trash, or Meth, or.. whatsoever. I lost it all; wealth and beauty are buried deep under this coating cold, what a heart could do with a falling body?? What a heart is for when it dares not dream of a full force engine?? A non-dreaming heart is nothing but a nest of cold.”

he continued :” Ree’s heart grow equally cold, chopping her father’s hand raised in frozen wilderness, the hand which, once upon a time, wiped her tears and changed her dippers !”

he carried on ” the chopped hand was needed as a prove of the perishing father cooker of meth..” The Master went silent watching her reaction, then surprised her asking:

- “ a cruelty ha?”

She didn’t show any reaction, he continued: “  no, no no, Meth or snow. The hand shot out of the cold death, to hail or, maybe, warn off, those dreamers who will follow on his heels to the same destructive short cuts. Ree by doing so was Liberating not only herself but the following generations of the dept, piled by those beginners on the road to the ultimate dream, the dream of quick richness. Jessup,who climbed his way by mean of Meth cooking, ended up mummified in such white freezing dream, just like you dear C.S de Ville!”

She felt the sting of his challenge, yet calmly said ” Of ashes or trashes the Phoenix emerges never to die again, thus is the rotten smell of my leather… “

The Master nodded: ” exactly, and this same smell is still reflecting the death of Miller’s salesman, or Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, satirizing the materialism in the chase for the American Dream, enhancing optimism in its counterpart: spiritualism. -  I can,my dear, follow Steinbeck’s men & mice picking  Grapes of Wrath, the generation emerging of the Great Depression or the 1929 collapse of all, when like in the dramatic mythology, sever natural forces interfered testing the believers in the land of opportunities, a land dried with some deep anger or thirst, without natural anchors to keep the soil in place, turning to dust millions of acres of farmland in Texas, Oklahoma, Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas, Black Rollers of land and man blown  away eastward and southward in large dark dust storms, driving dreams to be dumped right into the Atlantic  Ocean.”

She closed her eyes and recited ” The false god, Baal, is asleep. We need to awake out of our sleep and implore the true God ” I Kings 18:27.

The Master continued: “All such human stories of that era  tested the new consumer culture, tested the Empire or Liberty’s four dreams identified by Ownby (1999): the “Dream of Abundance,” offering a cornucopia of material goods to all Americans, making them proud to be the richest society on earth. Then the “Dream of a Democracy of Goods,” whereby everyone had access to the same products regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, or class, thereby challenging the aristocratic norms of the rest of the world whereby only the rich or well-connected are granted access to luxury. And finally the “Dream of Freedom of Choice,” and the “Dream of Novelty.”

The Master stopped talking , silence and darkness fell upon them, he cut it at last ” Now I have to go practice my dream as a sniper of sleeping beauty. And, you, no worry, one day soon, someone might come asking for the original, that’s you, and tow you out of this role as a garden gnome, back to the modern roads .i grant you a renovation ,maybe ” he smiled teasing, then added ” meanwhile host what you like; moss, snakes or snow flacks, baby animals, or lovers! but keep your memoirs fresh and be certain: no beauty is allowed to die in forgetfulness..”

She implored him to stop for a moment in order to absorb what they shared in those hours, with confidant he stood to wipe his lenses, and knew he had it all in there, in one encyclopedic shot, he could clearly envisioned that shot, and carefully red dotted it and dated it:

( the product of the human imagination. From 1929 The Black Thursday of the stock market crash, to the 2011 Edition of the Plymouth Whitemarsh Marching Colonials’ show.)

she hailed him goodbye ” this is my final line before i go to my sweet sleep ( work and  fight for what you believe in, show love to persons and the things you care about, that is the vital worthy dream of life. “

by:Shadia Alem

1feb 2012 

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