Deep-Fried & Double-Wide

Yasuko Thanh caves to her white-trash cravings

My friend gives me a can of Spam for my birthday and tells me, “You’re soooo white trash.” Her husband plays doghouse bass in a rockabilly band; she uses the epithet as a term of endearment.

I’m not white, and I’m living off a Can Cal grant, but I do like Sloppy Joes and that bologna with the noodles and cheese pieces in it. My parents raised me on alfalfa-sprout sandwiches and homemade bread; as a kid I craved the processed and artificial good life. When I moved out at 15 and tasted my first Twinkie in a house I shared with bikers, I fell in love. Am I true white trash or just an adoptee? I don’t know.

“Just kidding,” my friend says, thinking she’s insulted me. “But, you do wear tank tops like that,” she points at the shirt through which you can see my bra. “And you eat Spam.”

“Hey, if a guy eats a processed burrito,” I ask, “does that make him Latino trash?”

She shrugs.

“What about a guy squatting in a warehouse downtown?”

“Nope.”

“But a guy living in a mobile home in Maple Ridge?”

She nods, but has no idea what I’m getting at.

Is white trash on the West Coast that guy who sits all day in a wheelie bin, lid down, popping up occasionally to say, “Spare change for white trash?” Or is it the West Van party girl who dresses like a walk-on in a Bon Jovi video when she goes to frat parties?

The Random House dictionary defines trash as “anything worthless or useless.” It makes me think of clocks that chime bird-chirps on the hour and pink plastic flamingoes. It makes me think of Jerry Springer—the guests and audience. I don’t know why anyone would call themselves white trash except with a red face or while really, really drunk.

I try to imagine the dividing line between Cosmopolitan Lower Mainland and White Trash Lower Mainland, metaphorically and geographically. My pal 12 Midnite helps me out.

“Anywhere there’s a jacked-up 4x4 or a bitchin’ Trans Am with JRFM blasting out the sunroof, you’ll know you’ve found it,” he explains. “Geographically, drive 15 miles any direction or cross any bridge east and you’re there.”

12 Midnite has been called a Lowbrow God. He runs a hot-rod shop from an East End garage and fronts bands that sing beer-soaked tales of sin. He screeched into the art scene during the ’80s with his political graffiti. Put him in a tux and he’ll probably still piss in your sink.

Some people have adopted white trash as a fashion statement, but Midnite calls hip white trash a put-on pose. “Real white trash isn’t sipping ice mochas at Starbucks. They’re at the Balmoral getting shitfaced on pissy warm draught and hooking up with Native chicks.”

Money isn’t the only dividing factor, though. “Our premier gets busted driving drunk with his mistress on Maui. That’s the top rung of our class system. Need I say more?”

I recently heard the term “white trasherati” in reference to people from low-rent backgrounds who have educated themselves beyond their lot, but still don’t feel comfortable among the intelligentsia. They have couches on their porch and bookshelves in their house; you know who I mean.

“White trash resides in the souls of those who can’t wash it off,” Midnite clarifies. “It slips out in quiet gatherings like a moist fart.”

But not everyone wants to wash it off. The success of shows like the mockumentary television series Trailer Park Boys, which highlights life between prison terms while selling siphoned gasoline, or books like Dr. Verne’s Northern White Trash Etiquette, which offers advice on how to fake a back injury or keep from getting your ass kicked at a sports bar in Wisconsin, speaks to something about us. Either we’re morons rallying against political correctness or, according to Midnite, idiots.

We’re not embracing our roots so much as laughing at our social inferiors—perhaps in a futile attempt to disinherit our low-class impulses. What separates white trash from the rest of society is not the consumer instinct, which has always been governed by what’s affordable, but the heft of the pocketbook. For every collector of Dresden timepieces, someone out there is buying a chirping clock.

So where does the hipness factor come in? It used to be that tattoos branded a person as low-rent. People from the wrong side of the tracks got tattoos. People who had done jail time got tattoos. Now they peek from beneath silk shirtsleeves in the business district.

“Hip white trash could be students, artists and musicians—anything,” says Slim Sandy. He’s a hillbilly musician of Ray Condo fame and a regular performer at Pat’s Pub on East Hastings. “I think that people are looking for authenticity. And the culture that came out of hillbilly, or ‘white trash,’ was not some high-faluting citified upper-class game, it was made by real folks for real folks.”

The original white trash, sharecroppers so called by the slaves of gentlemen, knew that algebra and good penmanship would not make them better parents or farmers. They believed education was something passed down orally while threshing hay or pickling watermelon rinds.

But the dream of living off the land and not always hand-to-mouth—which continues to be the unspoken white-trash ideal—is out of reach in a time of skyrocketing real estate. With the rest of society forward-looking, socially progressive, and upwardly mobile, white trash is a little nostalgic. It longs for the good old days when kinship and loyalty reigned.

The white trash aesthetic allows the West Coast to put its angsty alienation on the backburner; for a minute we can forget about whether Vancouver is world-class enough. It allows us to embrace the moral absolutes we never had while we try to fulfill a need for old-fashioned connection and citizenship in an increasingly global culture.

No one used to refer to him- or herself as white trash. People who drove buses or worked as clerks were middle-class, never working-class or blue-collar. Now people embrace it as a form of anti-authoritarianism—a certain freedom-loving swagger. The hippies valued free love; today, rich kids just get the words “White Trash” tattooed on their butts.

Trust Midnite to put it all in perspective. “Fuck hippies and their holier-than-God patchouli-soaked attitudes. They should all be dragged to the next Nashville Pussy show and forced to rock till they soak out their pot-addled sins. I’d throw them in the trunk of my Impala and dump them off at the nearest Circle-K and force them to scoff a couple plates of nachos and a microwaved cheese dog or two, but I don’t want to get my spare tire greasy.”

Expressions of rebellion. Whether it means wearing the uniform of the underdog or even, yes, admitting that you grew up in Surrey, people want who they are to reflect what they believe. Claiming the white-trash label is about acceptance for some, and for others it’s about giving tastemakers the finger.

“My guess,” says Midnite, “is it’s become such a social crime to be white and stupid and poor and boorish and drunken—and did I say stupid—anyway, we’ve been made to feel ashamed for being what we are for so long we’re standing up and proudly proclaiming… um… pass me a Bud Light.”

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