Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (3 page)

“Hey,” I tried, “baby?”

“Whatever,” she said.

Wow. I realized I was being a complete asshole. We were having a great time when we were all together, but when we weren’t, I was in my own little world.

One autumn day not long after that, I found myself golfing with Lee Abbott. It sounds pretentious—golfing with the great author!—but students could make tee times at the OSU championship courses, whereas faculty had to be members. Lee would have golfed with Idi Amin if it meant getting a tee time.

It was a nautical kind of day, around forty degrees, the wind gusting the flag sticks close to parallel with the ground, the rain right on the border of hail, but neither of us would admit that it was a stupid day to be anywhere but a bar. We both struck sufficiently good drives down a long par four, and as we sloshed down the fairway, he lit philosophically one of his Red 100s.

“Matt, my boy,” he said, “you have dragged this woman of yours all over creation, have you not?”

We hadn’t even been talking about Jenae, but I told him that he was pretty much right, so long as the distance between Boston and Columbus could be construed as “creation.”

“I am not,” he said, tapping ashes, “interested in frivolity, dilly-dallying, or shilly-shallying.”

We stopped at his ball, nicely laid up just shy of a sand trap. He pulled out El Conquistador, his trusty lob wedge.

“When are you going to do right by that woman?” he asked, flicking his cigarette to the turf. “Time to propose or get off the pot, am I right?”

He didn’t need to look me in the eye for me to know it wasn’t an idle question. He chipped his ball right up to the flagstick.

Jenae and I had been living together for three years by then. We were dog-parents together. We knew how to fold each other’s laundry. We’d go on “condom raids” with her friends at the local gay bars and to poetry readings in brewpubs with mine. We’d order nachos and a burger and split them as though it were second nature. We knew what kind of beer to order if the other was in the bathroom. I had thought it beside the point to have some ceremony and get a new set of titles. Being boyfriend/girlfriend seemed to have it all over husband/wife. As Billy Bragg says, doesn’t marriage just prove that our parents were right? Isn’t it the first step in getting divorced?

But we were in love—really, truly, deeply—and I wanted to marry that girl. Lee knew that. My mom knew that. And my grandma, who grew up on a farm and knew what it meant to have to walk a field of beans just like Jenae did, positively adored her. I hadn’t looked forward to getting married in the abstract, but all the particulars told me to do otherwise. And Bruce and Emma, Bryan and Sarah—all my favorite people were married, I realized. I wanted us to be them. I wanted us
all
to get married.

TO AUGMENT MY
grad student stipend of four dollars a semester, I work at a Salt Lake City restaurant called, of all things, The New Yorker, and between shifts and school I cruise around Sugarhouse, one of two viable neighborhoods for liberal types who want to live in Utah but pretend they’re still in America. I’m on my hazard-orange Vespa-ish scooter, wearing waiter’s clothes, carrying a messenger bag loaded with flyers, a notebook, and—honest to God—
Moby Dick.

I believe in accidents. Generally not the kind that will lay me out on the pavement, but rather the kind where I’ll turn a corner Jenae and I have turned a thousand times in her VW, and because I’m not in the Bug but on the vehicular equivalent of a T-ball stand, and therefore extra-careful about entering the flow of traffic, I might just see something I wouldn’t have seen before. A lime-green-jacketed realtor digging a hole for a new post, an appraiser down the street tape-measuring the yard, or the type of little red and white sign you buy at a hardware store to put on the dashboard of your life-size Camaro lawn ornament.

One blistering afternoon I notice a small, mustachioed man watering the lawn in the middle of the day—in the middle of a drought—in the middle of a desert! He seems more like a capricious landlord or sociopathic golf course groundskeeper than a homeowner. From what I can see, there’s no furniture inside and nothing on the walls. Only a ladder in the kitchen and a bucket of paint on the countertop.

It’s a house we’ve seen before. The cream-colored masonry caught my eye; it reminded me of the kind of brick they built everything with in Milwaukee, my more-or-less hometown. It’s got double-hung windows with huge stone casements and a big, fenced-in backyard with a haggard rose bush in the front, big as a small tree. The street name, Franklin, feels as full of promise as the Constitution itself.

It’s on the corner of the street Jenae and I have come to call our favorite in Sugarhouse: 800 East, a quiet, straight haven of pavement between two of the busiest roads in Salt Lake. Wide enough for parking on both sides, but narrow enough so that only ten-speeds or Big Wheels drag race here. It’s one of the few neighborhoods in all of Salt Lake where the streets have not just numbers and letters but names, like Browning and Emerson—poets and writers, no less. The homes are set back a fair bit from the road, but not so far that you can’t hear your neighbor when he
Hulloes!
to you in the morning. Any hour of the day you’ll find strollers, joggers, bikers, dog walkers, unicyclists, roller skaters, speed walkers, kite flyers, bums, drunks, missionaries, cops, robbers, cowboys, Indians . . . every day, the hoi polloi on parade under a thatchwork canopy of oaks older than all of us put together.

Although 8th
East, as it’s called, is not exactly on my way to or from anything, I had forced myself to take it as often as possible, having quickly learned that real estate, even in a supposed buyer’s market, can come and go in a day without so much fanfare as a
SOLD
sticker.

A few days later, when I see the red and white For Sale sign in the window of that house on 8th, I can’t help but feel like Ahab. Not the peg-legged one who nailed a gold doubloon to the mast, all cocksure and blustery, but the one who must have about choked on his hardtack every time some bloody fool atop the mizzenmast shouted,
Thar she blows!
only to have spotted another right or blue or goddamned Greenland whale and not the mighty sperm that was his Moby Dick.

But there it is, finally, on this scorching day in July: a sign—a
sign!
—in the window. This must be the place.

I park my scooter, drop my helmet on the seat, and run up to the door. I call the number on my cell phone as I peer inside. The phone rings and rings, and it begins to sound more like the distant alarm I’m feeling. The house, from what I can see, is disgusting. If this is going to be The House, I think, it’s going to start out like Cinderella’s story wherein we will be forced to spend a lot of painful time on our hands and knees at the behest of a cruel stepmother, waiting for something magical to happen with wands, a squash, geriatric fairies, and rodents.

A man’s small, pinched voice comes through the line, and it is not, I realize, my fairy godmother. I tell him who I am, why I’m calling, where I’m calling from.

He sounds as if he’s ready to be highly annoyed with me, as if he were expecting a federal agent or property appraiser. When he understands that I might give him money rather than pinch it, he chippers up.

“I can be there in half an hour. Half an hour. I’ll hurry hurry. Just down here in Murray, you know. Be there right quick. We’ll show you the place, we will all right. Name’s Stanley, by the way,” he says. “Stanley. See you soon.”

I scoot to a convenience store, buy a Coke, and zip back to the house, hoping the glare of the window was playing tricks on my eyes. I look inside again and think about calling my landlord to see about extending our lease. Thank God my grandmother isn’t around to see this. The apparent condition of the house seethes from between the bricks. If it were a person, I would recommend, if not dramatic surgery, a generously cut caftan and a personal trainer or two. A burka perhaps.

I call Jenae at work, who’s guarded but optimistic, and then Sully, our last-chance realtor. In his jaded, realtor way, Sully is piqued. He knows from experience that we have been nearing the Fuck It stage of home buying. It is preceded by the Just Looking stage, the Very Interested stage, the We Love It We’ll Take It stage, the What Do You Mean Our Offer Fell Through? stage, then the Well This Is the One We Really Liked Anyway stage, followed by the It’s Already Under Contract? stage, and finally, of course, the Fuck It stage, when exasperation courts thirty-year (or, hell, even adjustable-rate) mortgages with all the grace and romance involved in asking your cellmate if he’ll rub lotion on your back.

“So,” Sully says, “you found another one. Super!” He seems campily amused by the fact that every house I have found has fallen through. As if he has been blameless by finding and showing us house after house that we hate. “And you said it’s listed through who?”

I tell him it’s for sale by owner, and Sully laughs.

“What?” I say. I am not amused. My grandmother is three months dead, and my mother has been a listing wreck, sick with grief. I am working two jobs, we are still broke, about to become homeless, and it is over a hundred freaking degrees for the eighth day in a row. People have shot strangers for less.

“What, Sully?” I say.

“Nothing,” Sully says. I can hear him leaning back like an executive, even though he is a waiter with me at the restaurant more often than he is a businessman. Mostly he’s a really good guy, but now is not the time. “Just gotta love the Fisbos,” he says.

“The whats?”

“The Fisbos. For Sale by Owners. They’re all just—well, you’ll see.”

I sit on the porch, smoke a cigarette, and wonder what in God’s name I am waiting for, momentarily confusing Fisbo with Furby, that undead, self-animated stuffed thing with a beak, when a white Dodge Diplomat with imitation wood paneling and Idaho plates pulls up. It is the kind of car driven by, I imagine, someone who has a cellar full of Spam, Fanta, guns, and ammunition. Maybe even a cache of armor-piercing rounds for the big day when the feds try their Ruby Ridge routine again. The car’s license plate appears to be attached to the rear bumper with a coat hanger. A man wearing a white T-shirt and jean shorts gets out. His shorts are so short that one pocket hangs below the ragged hem, and I worry for a moment that it’s not his pocket.

“You must be Stanley,” I say.

I stand up somewhat awkwardly, realizing I’m on his porch, greeting the owner of the house as if he were me, someone I have been waiting for so I can sell him this damned house. He walks directly toward me at near-ramming speed, then stops abruptly, squares up, and shakes my hand. His fingers are callused and meaty, like thick-skinned sausages, and to him my unmanly hand probably feels like a warm, soggy croissant.

“Hi,” he says. “How are ya?”

I say okay.

“Well,” he says, taking the key from his floppy pocket, “let’s get you on the grand tour.”

As soon as he opens the door, the smell hits me—something between a derelict litter box, muddy diapers, and a basement backed up with wastewater—and my eyes begin to tear as I crane my head around for one last breath.

“Lady used to live here,” Stanley says, happy as a man without a nose, “she had a cat or two.”

It reeks like a state fair Porta Potty during a heat spell and a sanitation strike. I check to see if my nose is bleeding. Stanley, I’m thinking, must have smelling salts nestled into his little mustache.

Stanley reminds me of the superintendent of the apartment building where I lived in Boston. His name was also Stanley. Stanley the super single-handedly taught me everything I needed to know about that peculiar Massachusetts accent. Whenever you greet someone, whether you know him or not, like or hate him, you say, all as one word, “Hihowahya.” At first I thought it was, perhaps, a traditional Penobscot Indian salutation, a terse but well-meant expression of welcome to weary travelers. But no. It’s the classic New England question-that-is-not-a-question.

I keep my mouth shut for pretty much the whole tour and try to breathe through my T-shirt when Stanley isn’t looking. I needn’t let the smell distract me from the fact that I don’t know a thing about what to look for in a house. Hell, my wife and I have bought cars because of their cup holders, the synecdochic equivalent of buying a house because it has a nice mailbox. Which this one does not. It has a rusted metal thing screwed into the mortar by the front door. In a previous life it may have been a cracker tin.

Stanley is a sharp judge of character. At the same time, I am not very hard to read. A crazy-haired, scooter-riding, table-waiting kid who apparently has some kind of delivery to make. Not an obvious choice for anything but debt and regret. So while I look around and nod and struggle with the might of olfaction, Stanley tells me the story of his house the way he might to someone with a hearing aid or conspicuous frontal lobe damage.

“Last lady, she was just a renter. Rent the place for ten years or so. Never caused any trouble. One kid, ugly but quiet. No complaints. Had the HUD people come out, do a little insulation stuff, you know, to keep the bills down, but she was a good woman. Paid the rent on time.”

He turns toward me, but he doesn’t like to stand face-to-face. I notice that as I pivot toward him, he pivots away, as though it’s important to him that we are constantly looking not at each other but in the same direction.

“Neighbors’ll tell you she sold the crack cocaine—the windows was all shut up with foil and cardboard. But don’t you listen to that horse hockey.”

I’m not sure what that means or why he’s telling me. He is a strange man.

“Lady liked her privacy is all. Her kid used to bury his dolls in the yard. Not much to say about that.”

We’re standing in the foyer. The walls are white. A shiny, hard, automotive white that would cover up nearly any kind of bad news from the past. For a while, anyway. The ceilings are high, and that’s an unmitigated plus, but the floors—they’re covered by carpets that look and smell like the oily, seepy mud revealed at low tide in industrial ports. At any time I imagine we could come across hypodermic needles, charred spoons, crack vials, spare tires, once-troublesome union organizers.