Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (21 page)

But just because countertops are focal selling points of a house, they don’t necessarily equal a do-it-yourself project. After all, we’re talking about beaucoup de work here. And if you mess this up, well, your wife will ever be reminded of the pathetic little bedwetter she married instead of the Harley-throttling stud she should have, because the evidence is right there in the middle of your kitchen. It’s the first thing guests see in the room; it’s where you put down your car keys and your grocery bags; it’s where you chop your broccoli and pour your wine and scramble your eggs; and when you have a party, it’s where everyone puts down their Harvey Wallbangers and absent-mindedly caresses the smooth, hard, cold surface. Nowhere else does your house get such concentrated tactile attention. It had damned well better be good.

We were hoping to do as much work on the house ourselves as possible, but there was some stuff we couldn’t or wouldn’t do. To help assuage my self-imposed guilt, I convinced myself that the best countertops are solid stone or manufactured materials. That is, they’re one big freaking piece fabricated in a quarry in Brazil or a factory in Taipei. Where’s a workingman supposed to fit himself in?

Countertops are like poetry according to Yeats: if you can see evidence of the work, all the stitching and unstitching is for naught. A countertop shouldn’t look like it was the first one you made and installed. There’s no room for a learning curve here. Countertops are supposed to appear as though they were created just for your kitchen—as though no other place in the world could possibly have the same one. Countertops must not, however, show any evidence of manufacture. A countertop must simply
be.
If a craftsman wants attention, he can build the cabinets that stand above. He can router the maple doors or craft glass panes with images of dainty fairies whispering each to each, but the countertop itself will never garner any accolades for your labors. Unless you’re Steve.

Driving down to meet Steve in his house in Orem, Utah, we had no idea what to expect. All we knew of Steve was that Jenae’s friend’s husband, Mattson, knew him growing up. Shortly after Steve had built his first countertop—his own—he did Mattson’s mom’s. Mattson thought he had probably done a couple more. It felt as if we were investing in some sketchy venture that might involve ritual scarification. He lived in Orem, after all. If Provo is the Vatican City of the Mormon culture, then Orem would be whatever Italian city lies outside those holy gates. Except that city is probably something lovely and, at the very least, Italian. This city is Orem. Like Oreo but with an
m,
and not so sweet or racially diverse as the cookie. All I wanted to know about Orem I learned from their billboards for “Hot LDS Singles,” a Mormon movie called
The Singles Ward
about cheery but awkward virgins, and a Mr. Mac suit store that outfits “more missionaries than anyone!” It’s also the city that Gary Gilmore made infamous via a double murder—the story behind Norman Mailer’s book
The Executioner’s Song.
That
they don’t have on a billboard.

Inside Steve’s house we found our Orem doppelgänger. The outside looked as boxy and modest as a cigar cutter’s hut, but inside everything was bright and warm, light and cool, with muted colors and clever antiques. It was like going from some drab abscess of a night into a cheery pottery gallery with mulled cider and fresh sugar cookies. It didn’t hurt that his wife had in fact just made mulled cider and sugar cookies. They had refinished hardwood floors, earthy tile in their kitchen, colors that reminded me of a child’s sock drawer, and salvaged, galvanized grain bins serving as coffee tables, replete with tumbled-glass bottles that looked as though they’d delivered a hundred desert-island epistles each.

Also, they had no TV. It made the room oddly, though comfortably, square. Whereas in most American homes, including ours, living rooms are three-walled theaters with all attention drawn toward the pretty blue talking box, Steve’s felt like a place where, at any minute, we could have one of those “conversations.” But as tends to come with the TV-free of our breed, I also sensed a slight air of superiority. Not in a pompous, lording way. Not even in an aggro Kill Your Television bumper sticker way. It was an understated, modest superiority. His home lacked what anchored every room in the house I grew up in. In my mom’s condo, for example, there’s nary a spot where you can escape the stare of a TV—not even the bathroom. If all her TVs were cameras, it’d be supermax-prison secure. Steve’s house was little, quaint, cheery, homey, and unplugged.

Steve, I was learning, is the kind of guy who wears the same Carhartt pants, threadbare T-shirt, and hiking boots everywhere he goes. That singular an identity, that comfortable a home, all that confident simplicity . . . I didn’t merely look up to him; I wanted to
be
him. At the very least, I wanted him to make our countertop.

Every decision he had made in his life seemed to have a deliberate, thoughtful, independent feel to it. The countertop in his house was the only one we had to see, though I doubt we actually had to see it. It was Steve we wanted. Hiring Steve was the opposite of picking up some subcontractor/hooker from Home Depot. It was an antidote to the thugs who wore their tool belts like varsity jackets and stuffed logs of soppressata down their pants. It was as though he was a friend of ours. Or someone we wished was our friend. Someone who undoubtedly was good at playing chess, identifying and naming conifers, making unusual but irresistible shish kebobs. Never mind that the countertop in his house looked like hardened chocolate pudding. Never mind that his rates were the same as a licensed concrete countertop company in Ogden. Never mind that Steve had probably been to one of Mattson’s disturbing parties, which purportedly feature naked people somehow sliming around inside a forty-gallon drum with the aid of a huge sheet of Mylar and five or six quarts of Wesson oil. Never mind all of that. Steve was, at least for the time being, who we wanted.

A bonus to the whole proposal was that Steve was something of a dilettante himself. While he never actually said how many countertops he’d made, he kept mentioning the same two over and over again: his, the first, and Mattson’s mom’s, the second. In some obvious ways that made him a liability, but in others it made him an asset. For one thing, we were paying by the square foot, not by the hour.

The best part for me was that he was going to let me help him. I don’t know if “let me” is exactly the way to put it. After all, the existing countertop was a hundred-pound pain in the ass, the approximate size and portability of an L from the
HOLLYWOOD
sign. I’m sure he could have managed it on his own, but I don’t think he would have liked it.

My biological father, on the other hand—a carpenter in Alaska—once told someone he charged twenty-five dollars an hour to do a job alone, fifty if the homeowner wanted to watch. And if the guy wanted to help, the rate was one hundred bucks an hour.

From the beginning, Jenae and I wanted unique stuff, but I wanted unique-on-the-cheap and she wanted, well, boutique-unique. The kitchen, in particular, had at one time included plans for a ten-thousand-dollar commercial Wolf range that could roast a flock of Cornish hens, an eight-thousand-dollar, artificially intelligent Sub-Zero refrigerator, a fifty-dollar-per-square-foot hand-harvested Indian slate floor, a Creamsicle-colored Italian marble countertop, two five-hundred-dollar steampunk ceiling fans, and three-hundred-dollar-apiece schoolhouse pendant lights that we would fit with hand-blown lightbulbs made by (based on the price) Edison himself. By and large, the issue of financing the dream kitchen made my case the more viable one, but hers remained the compass for our design.

While the compromises we made in scratch-and-dent appliances and cheap-but-still-exotic slate floors were invisible to everyone but us, the countertop could not look as if we got a deal on it. To a certain way of thinking, it would be like asking your dearly beloved to marry you and then putting a ring on her finger crafted out of a Hamm’s beer can pop-top by some dude hawking his stuff outside a Stuckey’s truck stop. But, of course, that’s not quite right. Fixing up a house is not like proposing marriage or getting married, both of which are ceremonies, not actual relationships. If it didn’t work out, shitty ring/countertop or not, we’d still be married. We were just running the risk of letting everybody know that the most conspicuous and arguably the most important ornament of our devotion to each other and our mutual institution—literally, figuratively, a rock—was a piece of shit. It’d take a lot of
Power of Positive Thinking
tapes to get us through that kind of fuckup. It wasn’t exactly a foregone conclusion. You try explaining to your grandfather/benefactor why he should front a bunch of cash to an otherwise unemployed “artisan concrete worker.”

“Concrete?” my grandfather said. “In your what? I hope you know what the hell you’re talking about because I, for one, do not.”

Predictably, I was of little help. I thought I might have been, because I had once spent a summer month working with my biological father in Alaska when he invited me up to get to know me. We laid concrete foundations for Coast Guard housing, and I thought that might translate into an impressive skill set as far as Steve was concerned, but that concrete and this concrete were two altogether different critters. In Alaska we were mostly gatekeepers, building plywood forms for somebody else to put the concrete in. And then, after it dried, we’d strip the plywood, set it up again fifty feet away, and repeat, ad nauseam.

What Steve did, however, was a minor work of art, albeit of the domestic cement variety. The second he showed up I knew I would be of little help. I knew it from the way he looked me square in the forehead like a boxer or a serial killer. I knew it from the fact that his tools were inherited, all older than both of us combined. I knew it too when he walked into my house for the first time and ten minutes later walked out with my big old L-shaped countertop all by himself.

My help consisted of making coffee (for myself—he was from Utah, after all) and keeping the radio tuned to the appropriate public radio station.

As a culture, we don’t usually associate cement work with art, but maybe we should reconsider. Once our old countertop was removed, we were left with cabinets without lids. About twenty square feet of topless boxes. A kitchen without a countertop is like a garage without a driveway or a chair without legs. The space is essentially the same, but it’s rendered useless. Without the countertop, the place looked plain wrong. Some things are better left unexperienced. To see a job in the middle of completion is like channel surfing and getting accidentally stuck on the Surgery Channel.

Steve saw not simply what was, but rather what could be. He imagined the final product and constructed the form that would render it possible. In effect, through three-quarter-inch plywood, angle iron, and custom-cut steel, Steve created a negative from which he could pour a positive. He took the negative space around what his imagination drew and used it to make the concrete manifest. It was a revelation.

The end result was glorious, concrete-y perfection. It was solid, smooth, and cool, and depending on the light, looked either like a rich, rare brown granite or like highly burnished English leather. Also like firmly set chocolate pudding, as feared, but not in ways Jenae and I regretted. Nobody had seen anything like it. It was the best thing we did for the house. It was cheap, beautiful, and unique, and neither my bride nor I had to lift a finger.

In a couple of months, Steve and his wife and their newborn were going to move down to central Utah, where his father-in-law had some fifty acres of land, to see if they could live off the grid and raise produce and chickens and such all by themselves. Like Thoreau, apparently, Steve didn’t want to make countertop art for the sake of turning it and thereby himself into an industry. He did it because it was something he wanted to do for himself and maybe for a few other people, so he would know what it takes to do it right.

The compulsion to repeat gratifying acts is so hard-wired in our brains that to find someone who is willing to give up something like this is truly befuddling. Then again, we’re not talking about paper airplanes or peach cobbler. The fabrication of a concrete countertop is far from a Sunday-afternoon project, nor is it one a person undertakes so that he can kill a little time. It’s as heavy duty as a project can get without involving front-end loaders or backhoes. If nothing else, a smart guy like Steve would have to know it’s only a matter of time before one of those damned things would end up on his foot.

PREDICTABLY, A MONTH
after Grandpa had moved in with my mom and Bob, I flew back to Wisconsin to help move him back out and into a new apartment. We decided to make it a “fun” trip for my mom and drive up together to Door County, Wisconsin’s modest answer to Cape Cod. She hadn’t had anything that resembled a break other than Grandpa’s brief stay in the nursing home, and it had been a long and devastating year for all of us, but foremost for her. After we moved him into his place in downtown Waukesha—about two miles from my mom’s condo—Mom and I couldn’t wait to head up north, do a little golfing, and enjoy a few moments away from anyone named Bob.

We did not get our wish.

Despite the fact that Grandpa was as sick of Mom as he was of Bob, he felt left out and lonely as soon as he closed the door of his new apartment, and he said he was afraid he would go running to Tonya if left to his own devices for a whole weekend. So we were stuck. If we said no, we’d basically be begging him to get back with Tonya.

“I’ll buy us all a nice dinner,” he said.

Theoretically, change was possible.

We weren’t ten miles north of Milwaukee when Grandpa’s cell phone rang. No one has his number except my mom and Tonya. He’s as good with his cell phone as a lobster with a hand grenade. It takes what seems like minutes for him to get it out of his coat pocket, and by then it stops ringing.