Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (13 page)

I don’t want LaEarl to think I’m some kind of schlemiel. I don’t know why—because I am from Wisconsin? because I am the biological son of a carpenter, the adopted son of a major league ball player? because I’m a guy?—but I want this guy, my fellow man, to nod at me at the end of the day, and maybe jab me in the shoulder, and say, “Know what? You’re not like all the other limp-wrists I work for. You obviously know your way around a toolbox. Wanna go shoot some stick at the Twilite? Maybe throw a couple lines after some crappies this weekend then?”

But he won’t. He won’t, of course, because he probably doesn’t drink, because he’s probably Mormon, because LaEarl is, after all, named LaEarl, and he is of, from, in, and about Utah. He also won’t because I do not exist for him. Not on a human scale, anyway. I am a job. I am the occasion for work. I am the thing he cannot do without but would ditch first if he could. His accent is semi-rural, and I bet he had to drive for more than an hour to get to my house. Moreover, I bet he had to drive to the warehouse and deal with a bunch of other guys like him who are all trying to get to wherever the hell the job is today because the sooner they get there, the sooner they can get home and change into their leisure jumpsuits. He is every bit of sixty years old. It’s embarrassing.

“I wish I had some coffee to offer you,” I say. We have no coffeemaker, never mind coffee. “I might run to the store for some. Can I get one for you?”

“That’s all right,” he says. “I appurciate ya.”

I don’t know that I have ever been told that I, myself—and not an act I have performed or a thing I have produced—have been appreciated. But Utahans are appreciators. They
live
to appreciate people. They absolutely would kill to be able to tell you how much they appreciate you. They appreciate the heck out of ya. It makes me feel a little unclean.

“I’m a milk man myself,” LaEarl says. “The wife says it’s my only failing.”

I do not know what he means. I only pray he is not talking about breast milk.

“Yeah?” I try.

“Heck, yeah,” he says. “Got a gallon of the whole stuff in the truck. Drank half of it on the way up here. Go through two, sometimes three a day when it’s hot. Nothing like it for the joints, you know. Only downside’s the phlegm. Everything costs something, though, don’t it? Now let’s see about those windows.”

Clearly, there’s nothing for me to add here.

He marches right up to the office window, takes a pass around the painted frame with a utility knife, and zip, it’s open. He does not wait for my applause. He proceeds to open the rest before I can even unfold the little blade on my knife.

There is a metaphor in this, I know, but at the time he could have convinced me that he had super powers because he was from planet Utah and I, a degenerate coffee drinker, was not.

“Order says something about tearing out all the carpet?”

We’re now in the dining room. The room is empty and smells like the garam masala doggie bag I once forgot in the trunk of Jenae’s car for a couple of days.

I have already arranged with the carpet salesman for the installers (I imagined they would have been a team) to remove all the carpet so I wouldn’t have to. I didn’t know the first thing about how it was installed or how it was supposed to be removed or where I could take it if I could get it out of the house. But now I am alone with a sixty-year-old man who is asking me to give him an order, a command—something for him to do.

I want to tell him, Naw, LaEarl, I’ll take care of it myself. I want him to think, This guy here is a good fella. I bet he could do this whole thing by hisself if he just had the right tools.

But I know he is thinking, Please, God, let this gosh-darned gentile (all non-Mormons are gentiles in Utah—even Jews) make up his mind so I can get my job done and go eat a corn dog and slam some more milk.

I tell him he had better go ahead and tear it out.

He takes a small, candy-cane-like pry bar from his rear pocket and with one smooth stoke rips the carpet up from the corner of the dining room and yanks it clear of the wall as though he’s scalping the room.

As he pulls it away, I am amazed—not because there are indeed hardwood floors underneath the carpet, and not because the floors have stains of yellow and orange and brown, in fact all the subtle tonal variations of the urine/feces spectrum—I am amazed because I had never realized what carpet was. Just a topping.

The carpet is tacked with spiked wood strips that run along the walls, and as he yanks it up it sounds as if he is ripping flesh away from muscle. Once he gets hold of enough of it, he grips the corner of the carpet in both hands, squats down facing the wall, and springs up and spins around like a shot-putter, all in one motion. He pulls the corner up and over his head and marches the length of the room, tearing and ripping, dragging the carpet like a huge, stinky train from a most grisly wedding gown.

Before long, yards and yards of toxic carpet and disintegrating padding are draped over the porch railing like the skins of postapocalyptic beasts whose flesh reeks of naphtha and creosote. I wonder if asbestos was ever used in making carpets, because everything stinks now, and the air is chunky with particulate matter. I decide not to ask.

He is working like a machine, conserving energy by maintaining a steady pace. He doesn’t stop or rest at all, and it’s hard for me to know where I should or can be. Then he asks me if I want him to tear up all the tack strips that held the carpet down around the walls.

I wonder if he is going to be like this all day. Do you want me to take a break now? Do you want me to put the seat up before I pee? Do you want me to put the seat back down? It’s kind of hard being an overseer, turns out.

“I mean,” LaEarl says, “you might think about leaving it there. You know, just in case things don’t work out with the hardwoods and all.”

I take what he says into consideration—he means the floor is certainly hardwood but it looks like absolute shit. But the carpet strips have to come up, even if we end up putting new carpet in these rooms. We’ve got to try. Still, I want to save him some work. At the same time, I don’t want to be stuck with some huge project he’ll need to bail me out of by the end of the day.

“Maybe you can just quick show me?” I say. And I notice that I am decidedly afraid of him, so everything I say tends femininely upward, as though I were asking him if my ass looks fat in this dress.

“Sure,” he says. It comes out of his mouth like a curse. He cannot understand how I cannot understand how to pull up a freaking tack strip. In my universe, he would have just asked me where the space bar is and why it doesn’t have a label.

He takes his small pry bar in one hand and slides the blade end under the tack strip and jacks it up in one swift motion. He repeats this five times, once per foot, and in about seven seconds the tack strip is up. Some nails are left behind because the strips had obviously been no stranger to moisture, but he doesn’t fret over these. He flatters me by assuming at least this much inherent mechanical ability on my part.

“Get the picture?” he says.

“Yeah,” I say, thereby acknowledging how ridiculous it was that I had, a moment ago, prevailed on him to give me such a lesson. But of course I don’t have a pry bar and, until only a couple of minutes ago, didn’t know that tack strips existed, never mind that you could reason with them.

He silently walks into the next room to finish tearing out the old carpet.

As I’m debating how I could possibly get the necessary tools, he drags the last of the old carpet onto the porch and I sneak into the living room to see what kind of surprises lay beneath the padding. I’m expecting more stains and bodily fluid Rorschach tests, but what I find is worse than that. It looks as if the floor is made of cardboard. Four-by-six sheets of white cardboard. Everywhere across the surface, the round heads of nails shimmer as though he has dropped a ten-pound bag of dimes.

“Masonite,” LaEarl says. He is standing sympathetically behind me. He wipes his forehead with his hand, then wipes his hand on his groin. “My apologies,” he says.

“What’s Masonite?” I ask. “I’ve never worked with it.”

“That’s about to change right quick, ain’t it,” he says. “It’s thin and strong and cheap—somewhere between fiberglass, cardboard, and linoleum. Once it’s down, tends to stay that way. Great subfloor for carpet. You sure there’s hardwoods underneath?”

I am obviously unsure about a lot at the moment. I ask him if he feels like prying up a bit of Masonite, since my pry bar is on retainer at another job.

He looks at me. He squints.

Once more, with a swift, sure motion, he works the blade of the pry bar under the Masonite and then hits the end of it with his palm, jamming the blade farther beneath. I expect a grand pop and release when he pulls the pry bar up—a hundred nails will fly into the air and a four-by-six-foot section of immaculate maple will be revealed because of the protective Masonite covering! LaEarl will make a couple of calls, and before Jenae gets off work we’ll have the whole blessed Mormon Tabernacle Choir here singing a piercingly beautiful though tediously long song about how God saw our house through the trials of renters and crack cookery but lo! He hath delivered it—and these super-sexy hardwood floors!—from the hands of the wretched into the lap of the worthy!

LaEarl leaves the bar halfway jammed beneath the Masonite, stands up, and grabs the bar with two hands. He looks as if he’s getting ready to lift the house, and I wonder what all the preparation is for. He’s lifting with his back, not with his legs, and I want to tell him that he might strain something, but I’m too late.

He pulls up on the bar and instead of the whole sheet of Masonite coming up—instead of the great maple revelation I was hoping for—the Masonite simply rips around the tool, leaving a scar where the pry bar tore through. I can’t see beneath the surface. LaEarl jams the bar beneath the Masonite again, this time a couple of inches to the right of the last attempt. He pulls up with the same result: a seven-inch tear in the surface. Finally he jams the bar between the two previous tries and manages to pull up enough of the Masonite to reveal what looks more like maple syrup than maple wood. Whereas the dining room just had a bunch of paint and shit stains on it, the living room floor is covered with some kind of thick shellac like that found on tables in northern Wisconsin taverns, or those toilet seats popular in the seventies made of Lucite with collectible coins floating inside.

“That’s hardwood, all right,” LaEarl says. “Wood the hard way might be more like it.”

I nod. He’s very pleased with himself for his partial entendre. I would be too were I not sure I could feel the floor beneath my feet turning into quicksand.

“Gonna be a lot of work for somebody,” he says. He’s smiling now. He knows it’s not going to be him.

As he leaves to drag in the new carpet and padding, I am left alone in the still stifling hot room, which smells mortally bad. Masonite, about two hundred and fifty square feet of it, awaits. Masonite, I think. It sounds like an anagram for Assassinate, which is a thought, or Samsonite, which is luggage, which is what I feel like packing at the moment. Everywhere across the floor shine the heads of nails. A thousand shiny dimes. If only they were as easy to pick up. Think of all the calls for help I could make.

“You be all right for a while, LaEarl?” I ask, unwilling to look him in the face. “I’m going to run,” I say. “Away,” I leave out. I am willing myself—
forcing
myself—to finish the sentence and the sentiment. “To the store.”

With that I hop on my scooter and set out like a latter-day knight. If Cervantes could see me now, I have no doubt he would favor not Quixote with his ass, but me—a thirty-year-old man driving an orange scooter onto the vast plain of a parking lot of a gargantuan hardware store in order to get tools with which I will wage war on a floor.

I TRY TO VISUALIZE
what I’m told. Otherwise it’s just words spilling from the phone, from somebody else, from some other place.

My mom, standing outside the door of Grandpa’s condo in Waukesha. The recycling bin out for collection, blooming with Natural Light cans.

My mom knocked again. They were supposed to have dinner as usual. It was Monday. He didn’t answer the door but she still had a key, so she let herself in to wait, thinking he must have run to the store for her diet tonic.

Just in case, she checked all the desperate places—the bathtub, the basement, the back steps—but he wasn’t there. She made herself a vodka tonic and prayed silently for his safety. Then she realized: she hadn’t checked the garage.

His car was there.

His car’s there, she thought, but what’s that mean?

It’s parked on the left side, she noticed. It’s parked on the left side of the garage, not in the middle as it always was after Gram stopped driving and they went down to one vehicle—probably, Mom thought, because someone else’s car has been parked next to it. Probably because he didn’t want the neighbors to see that that someone else’s car came late and stayed too long and that he left in it.

My mother’s detective work was slow and crazy, but it was not wrong. It was her.
Tonya.
And Tonya’s blue Astrovan, with the brown passenger door from another vehicle. The same van that she used to park in the driveway when she came on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to give Grandma a shower and change her clothes and her bedding.

An eighty-two-year-old widower with double cataracts, trifocals, and, likely as not, prostate cancer. With
her.

“Guess where I am,” my grandpa said. He was on the phone. He finally called my mom on Tuesday night after letting her sit and stew for over twenty-four hours. “He sounded pissy,” she told me afterward. “Full of himself.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Dad,” she said. “Don’t even tell me.” She’d had several cocktails. It was just getting dark in Waukesha. The sun would be setting behind her own condo, and as she drank, standing up, leaning against the kitchen counter, the shadow of the sun would be filling up her backyard like an oil spill.