Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster) (9 page)

ANCHOR:
My God.

FINANCIAL CORRESPONDENT:
I know, right?

ANCHOR:
Do you think this attack could be related to this breaking story we have been following?

FINANCIAL CORRESPONDENT:
Bob, it's too soon to speculate, but, yes.

MAGIC
EIGHT BALL:
Fascinating.

ANCHOR:
We're going now to Rex Farmtrout, standing by in front of the White House. Rex, it is now our understanding that the United States has been attacked by missiles.

WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT:
Oh my God. Are you talking about nuclear missiles?

ANCHOR:
At this point, Rex, based on what we know, I don't see how we can rule that possibility out.

WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT:
Oh my God.

ANCHOR:
Yes. Can you tell us what the situation is there in Washington?

WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT:
It's very tense, Bob. I need to find a bathroom.

ANCHOR:
Keep us posted, Rex. If you're just joining us, the United States has reportedly been attacked by nuclear missiles. We certainly don't want to speculate, but the death toll could be in the millions, if not higher. Joining me now in the studio to provide some perspective on all this is Hodge Broner, who hosts the reality TV survival series
Naked and Completely Nude
. Hodge, based on your experience as a host, how horrible is this post-apocalyptic nightmare going to be for the American public?

REALITY TV HOST:
Bob, it's too soon to speculate, but if Americans aren't fully prepared to shoot and eat their neighbors, they have as much chance of survival as a moth in a bug zapper.

ANCHOR:
Thank you, Hodge Broner. To recap what we know at this hour: Billions of Americans are feared dead following a reported nuclear missile attack. Joining us next will be the cast of
Duck Dynasty
, who will talk about how to shoot your neighbors, and celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, with some thoughts on how to prepare them. But first, this message.

BUMPER MUSIC:
Dum dum dum dum.

SPOKESPERSON:
Wilford Brimley here again, with an important question for you seniors. Have you seen my teeth?

REMOTE CONTROL:
CLICK
.

* * *

* * *

Basically there are two kinds of houses:

• New houses
  , which are crap, because they don't build them the way they used to anymore.
  
• Old houses
  , which
  used
  to be good, because they were built back when they built them the way they used to, but which today, as a result of being old, are crap.
  

So whichever kind of house you own, it's going to be some variety of crap, which means sooner or later everything in it will break. Dealing with broken things is the essence of home ownership, and it's exhausting. This is why all civilizations eventually end up in ruins. At some point the ancient Romans got sick and tired of keeping Rome fixed up, so they became lax, and then the Vandals come in and started vandalizing, and then the Goths showed up wearing heavy eye makeup and listening to The Cure, and that was the end of the Roman Empire.

Decay, leading to ruination, is the inevitable fate of every human structure, including your house. Your job, as a homeowner, is to stall the process as long as you can, knowing you will ultimately fail. I am here to help you.

I'm very familiar with house decay. I own an old house, defined as “a house that is nearly as old as I am.” It was built back when electricity had just been invented by the Wright Brothers, so the original wiring was primitive. Over the years additional sets of wires were installed by various owners to accommodate the newer, faster kinds of electricity, as well as later technological advances such as the telephone, intercom, cable TV, Internet, Wii, doorbell, etc. As a result, our house is now infested by a vast swarming mass of wires, thousands of miles of them, all of them currently obsolete. I would not be surprised to discover that we have telegraph wires leading to the attic, where the skeleton of a long-deceased Western Union operator is hunched over a telegraph key, waiting for word on the
Titanic
. (I don't know, because I'm afraid to go into the attic.)

Our plumbing is also old, and—as is the case in many older homes—possessed by demons. They live in the toilets. Sometimes I hear them moaning at night, when the house is quiet except for the sound of rats in the attic, gnawing on the bones of the Western Union operator.

Every week or so—more often during hurricane season
*
—something in our house breaks—lights go out, the phone stops working, an appliance malfunctions, a toilet starts shrieking ancient Aramaic curses, etc. My wife reports these problems to me, because we are a modern enlightened couple who have divided up our household responsibilities equally along non-gender-stereotypical lines:

• My wife's responsibilities:
  Cleanliness, food, décor, clothing, medical care, houseguests, parties, holidays, relatives and all other activities involving human interaction, such as talking.
  
• My responsibilities:
  Things that break, lizards.
  

We have millions of lizards in South Florida, which is basically a giant tropical Reptile Sex Party. The little buggers are everywhere, including inside our house, where they stand around in a cocksure manner, sometimes upside down on the ceiling, making suggestive lizard motions designed to attract mates. I have repeatedly assured my wife that the lizards are harmless and not interested in us, because they know they cannot have sex with us unless everyone involved is really hammered. But she hates them anyway. She's afraid they will run across her face while she's sleeping. Seriously, she fears this; she has told me so more than once. Here is a verbatim exchange we had, which I am not making up:

ME:
Why would a lizard run across your face?

MY WIFE
(
not trying to make a joke
): To get to the other side.

So anyway, when my wife sees a lizard inside our house, she exits the room while demanding that I get rid of the lizard immediately. Which I do, using a simple yet effective seven-step procedure.

HOW TO GET RID OF A HOUSEHOLD LIZARD

1. Get a Tupperware container. I have achieved excellent results with Tupperware's Wonderlier® model storage bowl in the 8
   ³
   /
   ₄
   -cup size, but you should use whatever is most comfortable for you.
   
2. Holding the container with the open side down, slowly approach the lizard in a non-threatening manner.
   
3. “I certainly am not any kind of threat!” is something you might remark aloud at this point.
   
4. When you are within arm's length of the lizard, swiftly bang the Tupperware container down over the spot where the lizard was.
   
5. I say “was,” because by then the lizard—which did not get where it is today by having pathetic reflexes like yours—has already skittered off and is now hiding under a heavy piece of furniture, laughing and exchanging high fives (or, depending on how many digits a lizard has, high fours) with other lizards, followed by sex.
   
6. Declare something like “Gotcha!” or “Well, I certainly captured THAT lizard!” while holding your hand over the opening of the container and striding swiftly yet manfully toward the front door.
   
7. Open the door and make a dramatic flinging motion with the container. Then close the door loudly, but not before anywhere from six to fourteen new lizards have skittered into the house.
   

Using this procedure, I have successfully pretended to get rid of literally hundreds of household lizards, as well as several household frogs and one household snake. Yes, it's a lot of work, but it's my job. If I don't pretend to do it, nobody will.

The Pretend Method is also effective for dealing with certain other household problems. Let's say that late one night your wife wakes you up and tells you she heard a noise. This is of course your responsibility, because lizards might be involved. Here's what you do: Get out of bed, get a baseball bat (if you don't have one, use a Tupperware container) and stride manfully out of the bedroom. Walk loudly around the house at random for several minutes, then return to the bedroom and tell your wife you didn't see anything. You should tell her this even if you saw a man in the living room wearing a hockey mask and trying to start a chainsaw. There's probably a perfectly innocent explanation. “Don't go looking for trouble” should be your homeowner motto.

Unfortunately, the Pretend Method does not work when something in the house is actually, physically broken. When my wife reports this kind of problem to me, I can't fake fixing it. I have no choice, as a man, but to take meaningful action in the form of picking up the phone and trying to get another, manlier, man, with a truck, to come to our house and fix it.

This is the part of home ownership I hate most. Because here's what happens
every single time
:

The guy with the truck shows up and spends maybe ten minutes poking around. Then he comes looking for me in my office, where I'm sitting in front of a computer, working on a professional writing project. The problem here is that to the untrained eye, professional writing can be easily mistaken for farting around randomly on the Internet.

For example, in writing this essay on home ownership, I needed, for obvious reasons, to find the name of a rock band that was popular with Goths. So I Googled “Goth band names,” studied the results for a while and finally decided to go with “The Cure.” That was the only band I'd actually heard of, although there were some other good ones, such as “Alien Sex Fiend,” “Throbbing Gristle” and “Virgin Prunes.”

In the course of this research I found out that there are several sub-genres of Goth music, including one called—I swear—“Gothabilly,” which was pioneered by a band called “The Cramps,” whose lead singer went by the name “Lux Interior.” According to Wikipedia, “Interior was known for a frenetic and provocative stage show that included high heels, near-nudity and sexually suggestive movements. His specialty was the microphone blow job, where he could get the entire head of an SM-58 microphone into his mouth.” I did a Google image search and found a photo of Mr. Interior performing this maneuver, and I have to say it's pretty impressive.

The point is, I spent a solid forty-five minutes researching the Goth band question for legitimate professional writer purposes. But if you were to walk up behind me while I was doing this research and look at my computer screen, your reaction would be to think, quote: “He's not working! He's looking at a photo of a man who is wearing only a thong and has inserted an entire microphone into his mouth!”

This is the problem I face every time a guy with a truck comes to fix something. He sees my computer screen and right away I can tell he thinks I'm some kind of pervert who, instead of doing real work requiring a truck, sits around looking at perverted things on the Internet. So we've gotten off on the wrong foot, and it only gets worse, because the reason he has come looking for me,
always
, is to ask me a question about my house that I cannot answer. The conversation goes like this:

TRUCK GUY
(
glancing at my screen, which is showing, for legitimate research reasons, a video of
a waterskiing pig
)
:
Excuse me.

ME
(
hastily closing the browser window, thereby revealing an underlying browser window, which, unfortunately, is showing, again for legitimate research reasons, a video of a Japanese game
show in which shouting naked men are sliding down a ramp into a vat of mud
)
:
Yes?

TRUCK GUY:
Can you tell me where your demodulation juncture is?

ME
(
hastily closing the second browser window, thereby revealing an underlying newspaper website with the headline “Woman Arrested for Engaging in ‘Intimate Act' with Lawn Chairs”
)
:
My what?

TRUCK GUY:
Your demodulation juncture. It's usually where your main perihelion node connects with your Boolean overpass valve.

ME
(
leaning awkwardly sideways in an unsuccessful attempt to block my computer screen
)
:
I'm sorry, I don't know where that is.

TRUCK GUY:
Huh. (
Pause.
) OK. (
Glances at screen again.
) Sorry to bother you.

ME:
No problem.

When I say “No problem,” what I mean is: “HOW THE HELL SHOULD
I
KNOW WHERE THESE THINGS ARE?
YOU'RE
THE GUY WITH THE TRUCK! I'M AN ENGLISH MAJOR, FOR GOD'S SAKE!”

Anyway, what happens next is, the guy goes away for a while. But I know he's going to come back, and I know exactly why:
He's going to want to show me something.

“Got a minute?” he'll say. “I want to show you something.”

I already know it's going to be something that I do not care about, and do not understand, and never would be
able
to understand even if I cared about it, which I do not, because ALL I WANT HIM TO DO IS FIX IT. But Truck Guy always feels the need to make me look at whatever it is, because he wants to make sure I understand that (a) while I'm sitting around looking at naked Japanese men, he's out there dealing with real problems, and (b) fixing these problems will cost me $862.47, or maybe $513.58, or maybe even $1,534.90, depending on what the Random Bill Generator app on his phone comes up with.

So I don't want to go look at whatever Truck Guy wants to show me, but I go anyway, because I don't want him to think I am even less manly than he clearly already thinks I am. I get up and trudge behind him to some obscure part of the house that I have never been to, where he points to some horrendous snarl of wires or dripping pipe or rusted mechanical thing encrusted with lizard poop.

“You see this?” says Truck Guy, pointing to the thing.

“Yes,” I say.

“This shouldn't look like this,” says Truck Guy.

“Huh,” I say.

“Whoever did this, did it wrong,” says Truck Guy.

“WELL, I BET WHOEVER DID IT CAME HERE IN A TRUCK AND CHARGED $487.21” is what I want to say, but what I actually say, again, is “Huh.”

“I'm gonna have to replace this,” says Truck Guy.

“OK,” I say.

“And then I'm going to have to install a three-quarters rematriculation grommet to offset the plenary compunction mandible.”

“OK,” I say.

“And then I'm going to make you wear a Hello Kitty costume and watch while I have my way with your wife,” says Truck Guy, not in reality but in my mind, because at this point I am feeling like a less masculine version of Richard Simmons.

At this point you're thinking, “Dave, if you feel so inadequate, why don't you buy some tools, do some reading and learn a few basic do-it-yourself skills?”

Good question! By which I mean: You idiot. Because as a veteran homeowner, I have
plenty
of experience with do-it-yourself projects. When I was younger and stupider, I spent
years
doing things myself. I owned a wide array of power tools, including a very manly one called a “radial arm saw,” which was capable of dismembering a water buffalo. I read home handyperson magazines and tackled many ambitious do-it-yourself projects. I built shelves; I installed paneling; I screened in a porch; I even made a desk. At first my projects did not work out so well, but over time, as I gained experience, they continued to come out horribly wrong. People never said: “Is this a new desk?” They said: “What the hell HAPPENED here?”

Because the truth is that no matter what the handyperson magazines say, it takes a certain talent to be a successful do-it-yourselfer, and I do not have that talent. Many people do not. In fact
most
people do not. My authority for that statement is the late Johnny Carson. Back in the 1980s, when I was getting started in my writing career, I wrote a humor book about do-it-yourself home repair, and by a semi-miraculous stroke of luck I wound up promoting it on the
Tonight Show
. I was on for seven minutes at the end of the show, and it went pretty well, because I was being interviewed by Johnny Carson, who could make any guest appear spontaneously funny, including Hitler. When we were done and the band was playing, Carson lit a cigarette, then leaned toward me, and this is what he said, in our only off-air communication: “I used to try to do do-it-yourself projects. (
Pause.
) You can't do shit yourself.”