Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (4 page)

“Anyway, before that,” Stanley continues, “the wife and I lived in it up until we had kids, and before that, my mother and dad lived in it, and before that, my grandparents. They built it their own selves in 1911. Been in the family the whole time,” he says distractedly, perhaps thinking of where to put one more room deodorizer.

I get the feeling he goes through this spiel on a fairly regular basis, which is odd because I could have sworn he just put it up for sale. I might be getting to the point in the tour when the majority of prospective buyers succumb to nasal attrition.

He nods through a doorway to the living room. It has the same septic aura about it, but I keep telling myself that they’re both big rooms with tall, nine- or ten-foot ceilings. The one has a large, south-facing picture window, the other has one too, as well as a curving bay window on the east, through which you can see at least the idea of mountains.

As Stanley tries to tell me about how he was tired of having to keep up two properties and whatnot, I am trying to tell myself: Look at the light. Look at the windows. Look at the ceilings. Look at all the
room.
But all I can see or hear or think is the smell. To make matters worse, Renuzit Super Odor Killers sit in the corners of both rooms, adding an imitation-berry tinge to the stench. I expect to turn a corner and find a commode filled with week-old Thai food, rotting fruit, and bad clams.

By turning myself toward the kitchen, I square-dance Stanley out of the living room and away from the heart-of-darkness carpet. There is, however, little in the way of consolation to be found. The kitchen smells like rubber cement and burning fiberglass, and wood veneer covers the cabinets, the drawers, the walls—I’m sure the avocado refrigerator is next. There is a ladder against the wall, and it’s just a matter of time before he gets around to paneling the ceiling.

An apartment Jenae and I briefly considered living in back in Ohio also had wall-to-wall carpet/litter box. When the landlord showed us around, doing the and-this-is-the-bathroom routine, he said, “And the cabinets are all knotty pine—if you’re into that kind of thing.” At the time, I didn’t know if that was supposed to be funny or architecturally relevant. Then we saw it. What he meant wasn’t just that a couple of cabinets were made of that cheap, unfinished, sadly shellacked wood full of eye-like knots ogling you from above. No, the whole kitchen was rendered in knotty pine. Knotty pine basin for the sink. Knotty pine pantry. Knotty pine faux shutters. Knotty pine breakfast nook. Knotty pine napkin cozy. Knotty pine pine-knot knobs for the knotty pine drawers.

But Stanley’s house is a whole other level. At least that knotty pine in Ohio was actual wood. This paneling is a badly focused photograph of knotty pine printed on some plastic/cardboard abomination made from recycled Trapper Keepers and tampons.

Stanley is saying something about the work he is doing in the kitchen. On the yellow plastic counter sits a can of high-gloss white paint, a coffee can of rusty bolts and screws, and a few strips of used imitation wood molding.

“I know it doesn’t look that great on the surface,” Stanley says, my sudden confidant, “but that’s what the women are good at—the little touches.” He pronounces “women” as though it had two
i
’s in it: wimin. I know it’s wrong, but I kind of like it.

“How long you plan on being here?”

The question catches me off-guard. “Probably five years,” I guess. I haven’t thought about it. I don’t know if there’s a right answer or not. I can’t imagine anybody would refuse to sell a house to someone because he didn’t think the buyers were going to be in it for the long haul, but anything seems possible with Stanley.

“See, then,” Stanley says, “this here is perfect.” His eyes narrow and he leans forward conspiratorially. He twitches his little dust-broom mustache, and I’m afraid it’s time for the secret Masonic handshake and Lord knows what else. “Lemme show you something,” he says.

On the yellow plastic kitchen counter, under the rusty can of screws, is a stack of photocopies. They are, Stanley tells me, appraisals and listings of neighboring houses. “Lookit,” he says, “they put this house over on Browning at one-eighty-nine!” He backhands the paper as if it has told him a real boy-and-howdy of a joke. “This one on Emerson, one-seventy-five! And look here, they’re the same as this house. Two bedrooms—okay, so this one on Browning has got three—and one bath—well, the Browning place has another half bath downstairs—but it’s just a shitter on the main drain. I can add a half bath in a jiffy if it’s important to you, but I’m telling you, in the basement they’re no good for any real work a toilet needs to do. Gotta get whatever you put in it back up to street level. Anyway, beyond that, those properties are exactly like this one.”

Even on the poor photocopies I can see that the other houses are far better tended—like bonsai trees managed by a fleet of the emperor’s gardeners compared to the haggard shrub of this house. But somehow Stanley has got me hooked. Hooked but hopeless. I feel I’m doing an advanced math problem, where
x
is the house now and the solution is a complete renovation, with shiny floors, cheerily painted walls, and a kitchen that could never be confused with the current one—but I have no idea how to solve for
y.
My homeowning ignorance at this point could not possibly be overstated, being, as it is, worse than my math metaphors.

The state of the house and the urgency of the market have paralyzed me. I’ll mention this place to Jenae because, of course, we’ve had our eye on it, but she won’t have to go inside. She’ll be able to smell it from the curb—
cat piss! crack cocaine!
—and she’ll kick me out of the car and say something timeless like, “I don’t even know who you are anymore,” and that will be that. You simply cannot profoundly disagree about the single biggest investment of your life. Certainly not violently disagree, which is what I’m afraid is in store.

Jenae has worked as, for, and with artists and designers. Her taste is as eclectic as it is impeccable, and her opinions are resolute in proportion to their individuality. You don’t get to be the first woman to go to graduate school from practically your whole college by simpering and acquiescing. She likes what she likes and she is who she is. She’s got Annie Hall’s spunk and singularity, Katharine Hepburn’s grit, grace, and determination, and, if pushed, Annie Oakley’s quick draw and deadeye. She is not a person who does what you expect. And while I so love that about her, it also scares me. About this house, I don’t rightly know what she’ll think.

“I know it seems unbelievable,” Stanley says, “but this house is worth a lot more money than I’m asking for. And until I get what I know is fair, I’ll keep doing things myself that’ll make it look better to the womenfolk. The way I see it, you buy it like it is, you get to finish up things the way you want, let the wife feel like she’s in on it.”

The air seems a little less putrid for a moment and I’m able to consider what he’s saying, condescension aside. There is a kind of truth to it, I know. I just don’t know what kind of truth, or whether it will have any purchase with Jenae.

“Look, I’ll show you. You’ll see for yourself. I redone all the plumbing, all the ’lectrical, even put a new roof on—new sheathing and all.” He pauses to scratch his overly exposed, tapiocaed thigh. “Everything like that I done right. Pulled out all the old knob-and-tube wiring. Not just at the outlets, neither. All the way down the walls. Big pain in the keister, but I done it right.”

The precious little I know about homeownership, picked up from friends and family, is that the things he just mentioned are the reasons people take out third mortgages and hire contractors who more or less end up moving in and selling the house themselves after they’ve bankrupted the owners.

I glance outside at Stanley’s Diplomat. It has the same paneling as the cabinets. How can I not trust this man? Of what guile, what subterfuge, could a man like this be capable?

There is something about Stanley that reminds me, inexplicably, of Henry David Thoreau. They both fancy themselves intrepid homesteaders and handymen, and both are liable to be a little more than tedious when the tax man comes around. Accordingly, they thrive on being cheap, penny-pinching pariahs.

When Thoreau finished college (he didn’t do particularly well), he dawdled around before settling into business with his father. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau’s friend, neighbor, and part-time caterer while at his pond estate, wrote of this time: “His father was a manufacturer of lead pencils, and Henry applied himself for a time to this craft, believing he could make a better pencil than was then in use. After completing his experiments, he exhibited his work to chemists and artists in Boston, and having obtained their certificates to its excellence and to its quality with the best London manufacture, he returned home contented. His friends congratulated him that he had now opened his way to fortune. But he replied that he should never make another pencil. ‘Why should I? I would not do again what I have done once.’”

Undistinguished academically, marginally employable, no trade under his belt, Thoreau seeks his father’s wing only to essentially say: You’ve been doing this all your life, Dad, and you’re a chump. I may not know a thing about writing instruments, but I do know a bad pencil when I see one, and that there is a bad pencil you’re making. I’m going to make a better one.

And he does.

And then he quits.

Not because he couldn’t have made a mint from it. Not because he didn’t know its value. His whole goal was to prove he could achieve a higher standard by sheer will alone, and then, to prove how high and mighty his standard was, flush it.

If Thoreau were alive today, he might have pulled up to the house as Stanley did, driving a twenty-five-year-old station wagon. For all the trumpery and fanfare surrounding
Walden,
at the core of self-reliance and transcendentalism—and Thoreau himself—is ostentatious thrift and self-fashioned pride. Nothing makes him so proud as the fact that he has to work for only six weeks in order to butter his parsnips for the whole year.

Stanley leads me downstairs, and he’s back to telling me about the work he’s done, talking fast as a pencil sharpener. He’s pointing to overhead pipes and wires and fuses and breakers, telling me about voltages and amperages and gallons per flush and the like. It all sounds right, and I can’t imagine Stanley having the pistachios to flat out lie about that kind of stuff, but still. I have no real idea what he’s talking about.

The dominant feature of the basement is a twin furnace that sits like a medium-size town’s incinerator right in the middle of the floor. Ducts big as water slides go up in every direction and extend down from the ceiling every few feet, so you have to bend over and scoot around them. It looks like a small-time but earnest oil refinery. The ceiling itself is about six feet high—I notice that if I force myself to stand up straight and walk between ducts I can barely clear the beams. Stanley, a good foot shorter than me, walks around like Yoda in his swamp, not even ducking for the ducts as he points out his masterly plumbing and electrical work.

This is, in fact, one nasty-ass house, but I know that Stanley has a point and a purpose. Houses in urban markets get bought. It might take a few months, maybe a year, but they get bought. Who cares if a thousand people hate the house? Only one of them has to buy it.

Stanley, who has never paid a mortgage on this house and already has another, new one, is indifferent. He has a kind of placid arrogance about him, despite his unpolished sales patter and conspicuously blemished house. It’s like the little card that comes with leather wallets: any imperfections in the material are guarantees of its authenticity. He didn’t let it get to him that his house was as grungy as a thrift store dumpster—if it smelled or looked any better, it would show the world he cared more about its superficial life and not, say, the intrinsic beauty of a well-hung line of 15-amp electrical conduit.

On our way back to the kitchen, I notice that the trim around one window frame is pulling away from the plaster. When I tap it, a four-foot section of it peels right off and clatters to the floor. Stanley frowns, picks up the trim, and leans it up against the ladder.

“Glue ain’t set is all,” he says, irritated that I would trust him so little as to require evidence of his handiwork. “You don’t gotta believe me, but everything’ll be tip-top—whenever you want to move in. And you got to know, this house is worth a whole sight more than I’m asking.”

“You think?” I say. I don’t doubt him. But I feel he needs me to.

“I could easily get this house appraised higher—put in new carpet, lay another sheet of linoleum in the kitchen, put on some fancy new drawer pulls, all that garbage—but I just ain’t interested. It’d raise the taxes, you know.” Stanley winks conspiratorially at me, as if only he and I and his militia buddies know what property taxes are really for. “This lack of so-called taste—consider it my gift to you.”

I know I am ignorant and a pushover, but I also know that something small and seed-like is hatching. There is no doubt as to why he is selling this house. A pair of corks and a tube of caulk couldn’t keep the smell from you. The carpeted floors have a spongy, swamp-like feel underfoot. The kitchen looks to have been staged to induce Martha Stewart’s hari-kari. The basement’s low ducts and leviathan furnace are clearly capable of consuming the house, if not in flames, at least in gas bills. Time and money unfurl before the state of this place toward the vanishing point.

But if not to reinvent a space, to take what’s present and see what’s possible, to scour the sores and blights and paint the beauty and make it bloom—that’s imagination, I’m thinking. Isn’t that what we humans are here for, at least conceptually?

I have probably read too much transcendental literature for my own good, yet Stanley’s warped but seductive logic has also begun to have its thrifty way with me. Then again, there might be something toxic and possibly narcotic still festering in the drywall or carpet.