Dave Barry's Homes and Other Black Holes (14 page)

Sooner or later, if you continue to engage in savvy sales techniques such as these, a buyer will become interested enough to make an offer on your house. The important thing, during these negotiations, is to
remain calm
. Do
not
become emotionally involved. Remember that even though you and the buyers are on “opposite sides of the fence,” the odds are that they are just regular everyday human beings like yourself, the only difference being that they’re trying to screw you out of all your worldly goods. So while on the one hand you want to be reasonable, in the sense of frowning thoughtfully at the buyers’ opening offer, you also want to be firm, in the sense of hurling it
disdainfully to the floor and inviting friends and neighbors to help you spit on it.

Price is not the key issue in these negotiations. As I noted in an earlier chapter, the price you will ultimately settle on is the same one everybody always settles on, namely about five percent less than what you originally asked. Both sides know this, deep in their souls, but nobody really wants to just come out and admit it, for fear of appearing to be a wimp. So what you’ll do—everybody does this—is get into serious, heavy-duty negotiations over which side gets to keep various home accessories such as:

• Ugly light fixtures
  

• Dingy draperies, and above all
  

• Minor grease-encrusted kitchen appliances that nobody really wants
  

These are the areas in which you want to be as petty as is humanly possible, in an effort to establish that you are a Tough Customer Who Will Not Be Taken Advantage Of. You want to stride in a forceful manner
around your family room, cigar in hand, shouting instructions to your broker, such as:

“All right, they can have the Veg-O-Matic, but the sons of bitches are not gonna get the optional grape-peeling attachment!”

And:

“They want the ice cube trays?! Over MY DEAD BODY!!”

Using this aggressive approach, you should be able to retain possession of many of your prized home accessories, which will fetch you a handsome $1.85 when you hold your garage sale.

You’ll experience a feeling of almost unbelievable elation, even better than the way you felt the time Geraldo Rivera opened Al Capone’s vault on national TV and it was empty. This feeling will last for as long as
seven tenths of a second, at which point you’ll remember the clause in the sale agreement, put there by some writhing little insect of a lawyer, that states:

So for the two months, or whatever, between the time you sign the contract and the time you actually close the deal, you’ll experience a condition that famed psychologist Sigmund Freud identified as Agreement of Sale Paranoia. You’ll be afraid to use the heating or air-conditioning systems; afraid to use the water faucets, turn on lights, or close doors firmly; afraid even to speak too loudly, for fear that you might set off some kind of sympathetic vibration that will cause the whole house to fall down. In short, you will become a crazy person. “YOU FOOL!” you’ll shriek, leaping out from behind your hedge and tackling the UPS man just as he’s about to ring your doorbell. “Are you trying to KILL US ALL?”

This is a natural reaction, but the truth is, you probably have nothing to worry about. The odds are that nothing bad will happen, and when you finally get to the Ritual
Closing Ceremony, when you realize that the whole thing is going to work out after all, you’ll experience a feeling of relief, a feeling that will grow stronger and stronger until, moments before the sale is legally finalized, you are knocked to the floor by the shock wave from the gas main exploding directly under your house.

But you’re not going to let a little thing like the total destruction of your house, seconds before you were about to sell it, get you down. No, you are made of sterner stuff than that: you are a Homeowner. You’re not a particularly
bright
one, given the fact that you bought this book, but nevertheless you are going to pick up the pieces of your life, as soon as they come down out of the sky, and get on with your life. Because you know that you’ll have plenty more homes to own before you finally shuffle off what we in the real estate profession call “this mortal coil” and go up to that Great Subdivision in the Sky. I’m willing to bet there will be nothing in your price range.

Available now in bookstores everywhere!

DAVE BARRY’S COMPLETE
GUIDE TO GUYS

by Dave Barry

Published in hardcover by Random House

Turn the page for a sneak preview
from Barry’s outrageous new book …

This is a book about guys. It’s
not
a book about men. There are already way too many books about men. Most of these books fall into one of two categories:

• Anti-Men Books
  declaring that men are oppressive, self-centered, testosterone-crazed scum who can’t even commit themselves to an entire TV show, let alone a monogamous relationship; plus they tend to think that they’re the only major gender capable of running large corporations and governmental institutions, despite the fact that the vast majority of them have never figured out how to do a load of laundry without having the underwear come out purple.
  

• Pro-Men Books
  declaring that men are, deep down inside, vibrant earthy spiritual beings who are capable of great sensitivity if they get back in touch with their inner selves via introspection and hugging and chanting and pounding on drums even though they may have no musical talent, let alone a bass player.
  

Don’t get me wrong: These books are fine in their place, which is garage sales. The problem with them, in my opinion, is that they take men far too seriously. “Men” itself is a serious word, not to mention “manhood”
and “manly.” Such words make being male sound like a very important activity, as opposed to what it primarily consists of, namely, possessing a set of minor and frequently unreliable organs.

But men tend to attach great significance to Manhood. This results in certain characteristically masculine, by which I mean stupid, behavioral patterns that can produce unfortunate results such as violent crime, war, spitting, and ice hockey. These things have given males a bad name.
¹
And the “Men’s Movement,” which is supposed to bring out the more positive aspects of Manliness, seems to be densely populated with loons and goobers.

So I’m saying that there’s a third way to look at males: not as aggressive macho dominators; not as sensitive, liberated hugging drummers; but as
guys
.

And what, exactly, do I mean by “guys”? I don’t know. I haven’t thought that much about it. One of the major characteristics of guyhood is that we guys don’t spend a lot of time pondering our deep, innermost feelings. There is a serious question in my mind about whether guys actually
have
deep innermost feelings, unless you count, for example, loyalty to the Detroit Tigers, or fear of bridal showers.

But although I can’t define exactly what it means to be a guy, I can describe certain guy characteristics, such as:

By “neat,” I mean “mechanical and unnecessarily complex.” I’ll give you an example. Right now I’m typing these words on an
extremely
powerful computer. It’s the latest in a line of maybe ten computers I’ve owned, each one more powerful than the last. My computer is chock-full of RAM and ROM and bytes and megahertzes and various other items that enable a computer to kick data-processing butt. It is probably capable of supervising the entire U.S. air-defense apparatus while simultaneously
processing the tax return of every resident of Ohio. I use it mainly to write a newspaper column. This is an activity wherein I sit and stare at the screen for maybe ten minutes, then, using only my forefingers, slowly type something like:

Henry Kissinger looks like a big wart
.

I stare at this for another ten minutes, have an inspiration, then amplify the original thought as follows:

Henry Kissinger looks like a big fat wart
.

Then I stare at that for another ten minutes, pondering whether I should try to work in the concept of “hairy.”

This is absurdly simple work for my computer. It sits there, humming impatiently, bored to death, passing the time between keystrokes via brain-teaser activities such as developing a Unified Field Theory of the universe and translating the complete works of Shakespeare into rap.
²

In other words, this computer is absurdly overqualified to work for me, and yet soon, I guarantee, I will buy an
even more powerful
one. I won’t be able to stop myself. I’ll claim
³
that I need the new computer, but the truth is that I just
want
it. If there’s a reason why I can’t buy a computer for myself—say I’ve had my current one for less than a week—I’ll try to talk my wife, Beth, an editor who can use the same computer for
years
, into getting a new one.

“Why?” she’ll say. “Mine works fine.”

Beth doesn’t care about RAM or ROM.

Probably the ultimate example of the fundamental guy drive to have neat stuff is the Space Shuttle. Granted, the guys in charge of this program
claim
it has a Higher Scientific Purpose, namely to see how humans function in space. But of course we have known for years how humans function in space: They float around and say things like: “Looks real good, Houston!”

No, the real reason for the existence of the Space Shuttle is that it is one humongous and spectacularly gizmo-intensive item of hardware. Guys can tinker with it practically forever, and occasionally even get it to work,
and use it to place
other
complex mechanical items into orbit, where they almost immediately break, which provides a great excuse to send the Space Shuttle up
again
. It’s Guy Heaven.

Other results of the guy need to have stuff are Star Wars, the recreational boating industry, monorails, nuclear weapons, and wristwatches that indicate the phase of the moon. I am not saying that women have not been involved in the development or use of this stuff. I’m saying that, without guys, this stuff probably would not exist; just as, without women, virtually every piece of furniture in the world would still be in its original position. Guys do not have a basic need to rearrange furniture. Whereas my wife, Beth, who happens to be a woman and who, as noted, would cheerfully use the same computer for fifty-three years, rearranges our furniture on almost a weekly basis, sometimes in the dead of night. She’ll be sound asleep in bed, and suddenly, at 2 a.m., she’ll be awakened by the urgent thought:
The blue-green sofa needs to go perpendicular to the wall instead of parallel, and it needs to go there RIGHT NOW
. So she’ll get up and move it, which of course necessitates moving other furniture, and soon she has rearranged our entire living room, shifting great big heavy pieces that ordinarily would require several burly men to lift, because there are few forces in Nature more powerful than a woman who needs to rearrange furniture. It would not surprise me to wake up one morning and find that we lived in an entirely different house.

(I realize that I’m making gender-based generalizations here, but my feeling is that if God did not want us to make gender-based generalizations, She would not have given us genders.)

Not long ago I was sitting in my office at the
Miami Herald’s
Sunday magazine,
Tropic
, reading my fan mail
⁴
,
when I heard several of my guy co-workers in the hallway talking about how fast they could run the forty-yard dash. These are guys in their thirties and forties who work in journalism, where the most demanding physical requirement is the ability to digest vending-machine food. In other words, these guys have absolutely no need to run the forty-yard dash.

But one of them, Mike Wilson, was writing a story about a star high-school football player who could run it in 4.38 seconds. Now if Mike had written a story about, say, a star high-school poet, none of my guy co-workers would have suddenly decided to find out how well they could write sonnets. But when Mike turned in his story, they became
deeply
concerned about how fast they could run the forty-yard dash. They were so concerned that the magazine’s editor, Tom Shroder, decided that they should get a stopwatch and go out to a nearby park and find out. Which they did, a bunch of guys taking off their shoes and running around barefoot in a public park on company time.

This is what I heard them talking about, out in the hall. I heard Tom, who was thirty-eight years old, saying that his time in the forty had been 5.75 seconds. And I thought to myself: “This is ridiculous. These are middle-aged guys, supposedly adults, and they’re out there
bragging
about their performance in this stupid, juvenile footrace.” Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Hey!” I shouted. “
I
could beat 5.75 seconds.”

So we went out to the park and measured off forty yards, and the guys told me that I had three chances to make my best time. On the first try my time was 5.78 seconds, just three-hundredths of a second slower than Tom’s, even though, at forty-five, I was seven years older than he. So I just
knew
I’d beat him on the second attempt if I ran really, really hard, which I did for a solid ten yards, at which point my left hamstring muscle, which had not yet shifted into Sprint Mode from Mail-Reading Mode, went, and I quote, “pop.”