Belle Weather (4 page)

With our kitchen project slowly morphing into a kitchen/laundry room/office nook/complete landscape redesign project, long gone was the notion that we might actually come in “under budget.”

To even write those words now, and to remember uttering them aloud, is to confess to being only slightly more intelligent than sweater fuzz.

“The way things are going,” I had told hubby while looking at my Wal-Mart calculator, “it looks as if we may actually have money left over!”

Yes, there was much rejoicing in the land as we recalled all the “friends” who had said, almost eagerly, “Ha! Kitchen redo, eh? Just write down your budget and then, what? Oh, yeah. Set it on fire! You always run over, maybe double or triple. You’d do better to use that budget of yours to wipe your ass. That way you’d get at least a little use out of it.”

What would the naysayers say now? According to the calculator, we were doing just fine.

So we forgot the plumbing.

It’s overrated, really, that whole continuous flow of water coming out of the faucets thing.

Oh, and the appliances. I mean with all the demolition going on, it’s not like we were thinking clearly. The old stove and fridge had long ago been carted off to charity, which tried to cart it back but we pretended we weren’t home.

God, what is it with these charitable organizations that expect you to give away perfectly good stuff. Duh, if it worked, we wouldn’t be giving it away, now would we?

Anywho, we had no plumbing, so that was the first order of business.

Naturally, the D-Boyz had friends who knew a lot about plumbing and they would basically work for meth.

OK, that’s not true, but let’s just say that their estimate came in quite a bit lower than anyone else’s. It was like Wal-Mart. Sure, you worry if you’re getting the same quality but, ultimately, if it saves you money, you’re going to put aside that nagging notion that you just bought a calculator made by a tiny Malaysian embryo who was paid a nickel an hour, ’cause, at heart, you’re cheap.

Our plumbers consisted of a man known as Daddy Lloyd, who looked a lot like Santa and was twice as nice, his sons, and assorted sons-in-law and live-in boyfriends.

“Lloyd’s Boyz” showed up every morning in a battered bus that was so old it looked like its previous owner had been Moses.

On the first morning, Dion took me aside to explain something about Lloyd’s Boyz.

“They have their own language,” he said. “It’s hard to understand ’em so just nod your head a lot and leave ’em the hell alone. They know what they’re doing.”

At first, I was sure Dion was exaggerating. I was getting used to the occasional stretching of the truth. One short-term carpenter had claimed he’d have to knock off early on account of he had “severed a major artery in my leg,” only I found out later that he just wanted to catch Lamb of God at the House of Blues that night.

Besides, how “backward” could these fellas talk, anyway? They all lived within ten miles of my house and a Sharper Image store for heaven’s sake. It wasn’t like I was Liam Neeson trying to under stand Jodie Foster’s weird “chickapee” speeches in
Nell
. Nell had learned to talk from the trees and the birds and the bear farts in the woods around her, so naturally she was hard to understand.

Lloyd’s boyz were all big and blond and looked utterly capable as they dragged an assortment of plumbing paraphernalia from the innards of the Moses bus.

After about a week of heeding Dion’s advice, I started to think that not speaking to Lloyd’s boyz was rude and they probably thought I was Snooty Homeowner Lady. The thought of this just hurt my heart, so I decided to make nice.

“Hi there,” I said one morning to one of the boyz, who looked exactly like the Brawny towel guy.

“Heydihodimoofy!”

Alrighty then.

Over the next few weeks, like a sort of cultural anthropologist, I hid behind plywood and tried to decode their strange speech. The only word I ever recognized was a perfectly enunciated “Cocksucker!” when one of ’em hit his head on the underside of the sink.

Finally, something I understood and it had been used, I might add, in perfect context.

As the days wore on, I realized the boyz were eloquent cussers, although I was still completely unable to decipher any of their normal speech. It didn’t matter; they were plumbing geniuses and they worked, uncomplainingly, under the house and even in the Death by Basement.

This work ethic was thrilling considering that the last plumbers I’d used never showed up on time. Half the time, they couldn’t show up because one or all of them had a court date. One said I shouldn’t worry because he was going to be using the tried-and-true “toddi defense.”

“What’s that?” I’d naively asked.

“The other dude did it, get it? Toddi?”

Clever.

Another had—I swear to God—been thrown into jail after taking issue with the judge and revealing the inside of his bottom lip, which had been tattooed rather elegantly with the words “F@#$ You” in
script.
Who needs words when you can let your bottom lip do all the talking?

And even though my current plumbers had some kind of weird version of Tourette’s while working, we got along just fine.

I discovered that it’s actually not so bad to communicate via obscenities.

I’d point at a leaky faucet and say simply, “Shit.”

They’d respond with a slow whistle followed by a wholly sympathetic, “Son of a bitch!”

And then the repair would begin in earnest.

While linguistic snobs would say that cursing is the lowest form of human communication, they’d never had such excellent plumbers in their house.

Realizing that I’d forgotten to tell one of Lloyd’s boyz that I’d changed my mind about the location of the pot filler, I just pointed to the hole he’d drilled and said, “Bullshit!”

Wordlessly, he plugged up the hole and went to work on a new spot.

Lloyd, himself, never cursed. A gentle, round man with endless patience, he reminded me of Papa Smurf except for the being blue part. I could understand every word Lloyd said, so he acted as interpreter for some of my more complicated questions that couldn’t be resolved with a simple “asshole” or the like. Besides, cussing in front of Lloyd would’ve been like cussing in front of Billy Graham, which any right-thinking Southerner knows would send you straight to hell.

Occasionally Lloyd would say something in such a bizarre Carolina drawl that I had trouble making it out but, with time, I came to realize that “ottydidit” was Lloydspeak for “I’ve already completed this particular task” and “swanamonado” meant “this is something I am planning to do in the future.”

Once the kitchen was plumbed, it was time to buy new appliances.

I had my heart set on stainless steel because that’s what they always put in those poor people’s houses on
Extreme Makover: Home Edition
and, well, if it’s good enough for the man with no arms and his dwarf wife and their eighteen adopted special-needs children, it’s sure as hell good enough for me.

An acquaintance that was also going through a kitchen renovation asked how mine was proceeding and I told her I was finally at the appliance-shopping stage.

“Me, too,” she said. “I’m not going to do that stupid stainless, though. That is
so
yesterday. What are you going to pick?”

“Oh,” I said, kind of enjoying how crappy she was going to feel in a few seconds, “stupid stainless.”

“Oh.”

While she squirmed like a worm in hot ashes, I told her not to apologize anymore, that everybody’s different and that’s what makes this country truly great.

That and Ty Pennington, who is just so adorable in a vacant, puka-shell-necklace-wearing kind of way that it makes you want to cut off a few of your appendages just to meet him.

Almost.

Appliance shopping for the “stupid stainless” proved to be downright educational. I’ve always been the kind of shopper who buys the mid-priced model, and that was my strategy this time as I set out to select a new stove and refrigerator.

In the appliance store, I met my new best friend, whom I’ll call “Cutiepie,” because he was, and more importantly because he got fired later on for giving away too many great bargains and I don’t want to be sued.

My friend Amy had advised me to visit “Cutiepie” because she had basically walked out of the store with a huge stupid stainless refrigerator of her own a few weeks earlier and had ended up paying about 300 bucks.

“How is this possible?” I said, opening and closing the doors to her new fridge and marveling at the fingerprint-resistant surface.

“It just is,” she said. “Just wait and see.”

I asked for Cutiepie by name at the store and he hurried over as soon as he finished helping another couple, who were yelping and high-fiving one another. This seemed like a very good sign; most shoppers don’t get all that emotional when they buy a dishwasher.

“I heard that you, uh, really discount stuff,” I said to Cutiepie. I spoke in a hushed tone as if I were asking Paulie Walnuts to off somebody for me and bury the mutilated remains in the Pine Barrens.

“Do you know what you want yet?”

“Yep, that twenty-eight-cubic-foot over there with the French doors and the bottom freezer.”

“Whoa,” Cutiepie said. “You’re talking mucho dinero for that baby.”

“I know, but,” and I lowered my voice again, “I heard that you were really good at wheeling and dealing.”

Next thing I know, there is a nearly invisible scrape on the side of “my” refrigerator. I almost didn’t see the Swiss Army knife drop softly back into the pocket of Cutiepie’s leather jacket.

“Wow,” said Cutiepie. “Now how the hell did that happen? I’m gonna have to discount that. How does $950 sound?”

“Perfect,” I said, fondling the tempered glass vegetable bins inside my new very slightly damaged fridge.

“What kind of stove are you looking for?” Cutiepie asked.

“Dual fuel,” I said, having done a ridiculous amount of obsessive-compulsive homework on the subject. Sure, this was more top-end than mid-price, but I’d saved so much on the fridge, I was feeling kind of flush.

“Those aren’t cheap,” Cutiepie said again, sagely, but with the corners of his mouth going up a bit even as he spoke.

“I know, I know. But I have my heart set on the gas cooktop and the electric convection range. I liked the one I saw over…there!”

“You mean the one that was damaged in shipment?”

“Huh? No.”

Cutiepie rolled his big blue eyes and sighed. Play along, lady, the gesture said.

“Oh! Right! Yes, that one. That’s the one. It’s so horribly damaged, I imagine I’ll be entitled to a substantial discount.”

“You bet,” said Cutiepie, punching a bunch of numbers into a computer.

“Hey! Looks like you qualify for an instant rebate today,” he said.

I so wanted to have this man-boy’s children.

The thrills kept coming in the form of free delivery “just because.”

When the delivery truck lumbered onto my street a few weeks later, there was an “accident” with the hand truck and the delivery guy cheerfully knocked another $150 off the price of the stove.

“But I can’t even see any damage,” I protested. After all, I’m not a crook.

“Lady, there’s a dent right there.”

And there it was. About the size of my pinky toenail and it wouldn’t even show once the stove was dropped between the base cabinets.

He tossed me a basket full of stupid stainless fingerprint remover and some other freebies that Cutiepie had thought I might enjoy.

A few weeks later, after the stove at my parents’ condo up and died, I told them not to fret.

“I have a friend,” I said very mysteriously. “And he can get us a really good price on a stove. Don’t worry; just let me handle it.”

“Why are you whispering?” my mother asked. “Is this friend of yours some kind of crook or something? I don’t want a stolen stove. None of that fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck stuff. Do you know what they do to old people in jail? No? I don’t either, but I’ll bet they’ll make your father pretend to be somebody’s girlfriend and that will just kill him, if the slop they call food doesn’t get him first.”

Well. If you watch twenty episodes of
Law & Order
on cable every week, this is what happens. My friend, Tricia, actually has it worse. On a recent visit to her mother, she found the sweet ol’ thing blowing her nose into a Bounty towel, devastated that the nice doctor-lady visiting Dodge City had died from tetanus on
Gunsmoke.
And my friend Rae’s mama watches so much TV that, when the phone rings, she grabs the remote and screams “Hello! Hello! Who’s there?” into it. “Damned telemarketers,” she usually says before tossing it back to the side and resuming her weekly afternoon obsession with
Little House on the Prairie.

“That little girl is so sad being blind and all,” says Rae’s mama. “She’s got that good-looking husband and she can’t even see him. He might as well look like Osama.”

It took a little while, but I finally convinced my parents that Cutiepie was legit; he just knew that, sometimes, those nicks and dings can really save you money.

I walked into the appliance store with a bounce in my step and asked a less dreamy salesclerk if Cutiepie was working.

“Him? Heck no. He was giving the whole store away. People come in here and ask for him all the time. What? Did he sell you a front-loading washer and dryer for fifty bucks?”

“No! That’s crazy,” I said, silently pouting that I had missed out on one of his patented bargains.

“We’re still digging out from this guy’s ‘generosity,’” said the less dreamy guy, who was now starting to solidly resemble a toad.

When he asked how he could help me today, I just shrugged.

“My parents need a new kitchen stove. Electric. Nothing too fancy because they don’t like a lot of gizmos, Greatest Generation, you know. They’ll wipe down and reuse a piece of Saran Wrap until it’s the size of a disposable contact lens.”

He showed me a nice basic white stove that had a big yellow tag attached to it: “$725.00” it read.

Toad Boy insisted on reading from the owner’s manual for several minutes reciting a list of the stove’s qualities, highlighted by its ability to “cook food.”

“Oh,” I said. “You mean it’s not a time machine?”

Toad Boy wasn’t amused.

“How much?” I asked.

“The price is right there,” he said. “It’s $725.”

“Yes, I can see that, but surely there’s a little flex room. Nobody ever pays the price listed.”

“Sure they do,” he said. “This isn’t a car you can haggle over; it’s a stove and this one is $725. Plus tax. And delivery.”

“You look like a toad,” I blurted.

“What?”

“Nothing. I said, I gotta hit the road. I’ll take it.”

As he rang me up and got delivery directions, he made a pitch for buying the extended warranty for another $150.

“If something goes wrong, you’re covered,” Toad Boy said, adding in a halting telemarketer voice: “Don’t you think that $150 is a small price to pay for that kind of peace of mind?”

At this point, I felt what could only be described as a physical ache for Cutiepie.

“You mean you think that this stove is going to fall apart in a year? What kind of piece of crap is this?”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” said Toad Boy. “It’s for your protection is all. Plus, if I sell eight more of these warranties in the next three days, I’ll win a trip to the Bahamas. Uh-oh. Did I just say that out loud?”

“Yep,” I said.

“Oh.”

The last big-ticket purchase was a new hot water heater, which turned out to be another adventure.

Because of the configuration of our newly created laundry room, there was no room for one of the round, traditional water heaters, so we would have to buy the energy-efficient eco-friendly peacenik one that provides hot water on demand.

The good news was that I am very demanding when it comes to hot water and pretty much everything else. The bad news was that it was horribly expensive.

“It’ll pay for itself the first two years,” said Jim, my kitchen designer and project manager, who looks exactly like a cross between Jesus and Tom Cruise, I kid you not.

“But it’s so much,” I whined to Jim one morning as Lloyd’s boyz waited for my decision, cursing continuously.

“Is this one of those times where I just need to stand here and remind you how much I look like Jesus and Tom Cruise and you just finally give in and do what I say?”

He was awfully good at that, Jim was. He had those same piercing blue Jesus-eyes that looked just like the blind girl on
Little House,
now that I thought of it.

Finally, I called around and asked friends and family what they thought about this. Every one of them said this hot water heater was the wave of the future.

“Paul Harvey always advertises it,” said my mother.

“I thought he was dead.”

“I know,” she said, solemnly. “Everybody thinks that.”

Most people reminded me that you get a huge break on your taxes when you buy this thing. It’s like the Prius of hot water heaters. Ed Begley Jr. would try to drive it if he could.

Whatever. I’m not one of those earthy types. I think organic produce looks nasty and I like my meat to be injected with stuff that makes it pretty and shiny in the grocery store counter. I like my chickens fat and full of synthetically produced hormones instead of those pale, gimpy little free-range things that wouldn’t fill a hollow tooth.

But, even more than that, I just like never, ever running out of hot water. I’d buy this thing again even if it meant I had to shower
with
Paul Harvey every night. Dead or alive.