Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (6 page)

When our similarities grow too obvious, we revert back to our archetypal roles of patriarch and prodigal son. Ostensibly, whatever we are talking about is a test. The question might be, How’s your class going? Your short game doing any better? or How’s the car running? But the real underlying question is always, You still can’t take care of yourself, can you, Matt? You still have that weak follow-through, don’t you? Still just a profligate little punk, aren’t you? How much do you need? Just tell me. Give me a number.

There was a lot we weren’t talking about.

Throughout Gram’s descent into Alzheimer’s, Grandpa was characteristically stoic. He never cried or showed any remorse or weakness—nothing really except a mild irritation at the brutish inevitability that comes with such a disease. To an outsider it would have looked cruel, but doubtless he would have acted the same if the illness were his own. As a physician, he was foremost a scientist whose job was to locate weakness and eliminate it, or acquiesce. With Alzheimer’s the whole brain is the weakness, and that is pretty much that.

Beyond stern dismay, there was one moment, only a few seconds after Gram exhaled her last breath, when Grandpa kneeled at her side. He took both her hands in his and bowed his head and touched his cheek with her fingertips. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Christ, Jean, I’m so sorry.”

I thought he was apologizing for his distance and his insensitivity, or maybe for her long suffering through the disease and the arthritis, but my mom shook her head at Grandpa and took Gram’s hands away from him. There seemed to be something my mom didn’t want my grandmother to give him, even in death.

The next day, my mom and I drove to the Larsen Brothers Funeral Home, just up National Avenue from her flower shop. “Now that Gram can’t be hurt anymore,” she began, “you might as well know.”

I was driving her Korean SUV and couldn’t get the seat far enough back.

“Does this thing even work?” I said, jerking on the lever. “Know about what?”

Mom was holding Gram’s heart-shaped gold locket in her hands like a rosary.

“Well,” Mom said, “the one I expect will be the biggest trouble is named Ruth.”

I pulled into the funeral home’s parking lot, which it shared with Hardware Hank next door. “What do you mean, the one? What trouble?”

My entire life I had seen my grandfather as a reticent, stern work- and golf-aholic who knew the difference between having nothing and something to say. Suddenly it appeared that he had wanted to be somewhere he wasn’t, with people who weren’t us.

“Women,” my mom said. “Trouble with women.”

He drained his first bloody mary before the waiter had a chance to leave. He twirled his finger in the air to order another round. Not a popular gesture in Utah.

“So,” he said, “what’s this about wanting to buy a house? Your mother said you guys were thinking pretty seriously about it. How are your finances?”

I was not sure where he was headed, but if it was where I thought, I was sure I didn’t want him buying a house for us.

“This thing got any hooch in it?” he said. He tilted his glass back and tried to shake more vodka from the ice. Our food had arrived but our second drink had not.

“It’s Utah,” I said. “Can’t serve any drink with more than one ounce of alcohol in it.” I had to explain the blue laws several times a day at the restaurant. It was not a topic I enjoyed, in conversation or in fact.

“One
ounce?
” he said. “That’s barely enough to get the glass wet. No wonder you’re so quiet.”

I moved the gummy eggs around my plate and began to tell him euphemistically about our finances, but before I could finish he pushed himself back from the table and loosened his belt.

“I’ve been thinking,” he said. He dropped his napkin on the rest of his eggs and shoved the plate out of his way, toward me, which nearly sent my plate into my lap.

“You’re having a hard time with this loan, I gather,” he said. He brushed a bit of egg from the lapel of his leather blazer.

“Yeah,” I said.

Because he was bringing up the subject, it would be his idea to help, and that meant I wouldn’t have anything to feel bad about. My mom and my grandma had told me all my life this one simple truth: it has to be his idea. You can have anything you want as long as he thinks it’s his idea.

“There’s all this talk of the low rates,” I said, trying to sound savvy and calm. “And it’s supposed to be such a buyer’s market, but if people like me and Jenae can’t get a loan, then who can?”

“That’s right,” he said, not like a cheer but a confirmation of a small bit of logic. He likes it when I try to talk business. He knows I’m not good at it. It’s something he can count on. “The banks sure do like to give money to people who don’t need it, like me,” he said. “Which has got me thinking.”

He tugged at the waistband of his corduroys.

He seemed excited about what he was going to say. It was probably the only thing he could be sure Gram would have wanted him to do and the only meaningful way he could salve whatever guilt or remorse he felt.

“Why don’t I get the loan for you?”

It wasn’t what I thought he was going to say. It was better. Less pathetic than his buying the thing outright; far more desirable than anything we’d be able to do on our own. And we’d be indebted to him for his credit, for a change, and not just his money.

“I’ll talk to my accountant,” he said, his favorite phrase in the English language. “Miss Ricketts is back in Peoria, so it might take a day or two. Meanwhile, I’ve gotta hit the little radiologists’ room.”

WITH GRANDPA ON BOARD,
things were looking up, but thus far in our house-hunting endeavors we had succeeded at nothing. We still had no loan and no home picked out for sure. We had nothing but the shaky promise of my grandfather and the tacit employ of a pseudo-realtor—Sully. Realtor by day, waiter with me at The New Yorker by night, standup Mormon comedian in suburban, nonalcoholic strip-mall nightclubs on the weekends. You know, the usual.

Sully had shown us a ton of houses, but we hated every single one. We said we preferred older houses close to downtown; he showed us mock Tudors in developments adjacent to smorgasbord restaurants. We wanted something with hardwood floors and old double-hung windows; he showed us planned communities with streets named after obscure but famously violent Latter-Day Saints.

A native of Virginia and a father of three, Saul, or Sully as he likes to be called, is a six-foot-three Teutonic blond who would look as convincing in drag as he would in an SS uniform. It’s a little odd, I suppose, for a licensed realtor to be a waiter as well, but until recently, when his wife opened a fancy shoe boutique in downtown Sugarhouse, he struggled to support his family on his lottery-like realty salary.

On any given excursion with Sully, whether it’s to the stockroom to get more linens for a banquet of pharmaceutical reps or to the Marmalade Hill area in his thirdhand, perfunctory white Lexus to check out a promising new listing, we cover all the bases. One moment we’ll be talking APRs and Greenspan’s motivation and the fickle relativity of the tax base, the next we’ll be running odds on whether our manager’s back on cocaine and anonymous men’s room sex, and then we’ll debate the logic of one-firearm-per-daughter investing, the sad state of surfing in Utah, hamster rights, and everything on down that line—all in accents ranging from Gandhi to William Wallace to Hank Hill to Michael Jackson. To know Sully is to love Sully is to hate Sully. He’s pleasantly schizophrenic, and talking to him is like trying to catch a Super Ball in a hall of mirrors.

Before we went with Sully, we thought that realtors could be people too, and had been working with one who was a graduate of the program I was in at school. Her name was Fiona, and she divided her time among realty, skiing, and writing.

“Shop around, you know,” she said. “Take it easy, see what feels right, you know. Give me a call when you want to get together on something.”

Cool, we thought.

We had been house shopping for only a couple of weeks when we found one we liked more than we imagined possible. Everything was right about it. Good street, good street name: Denver. The incidental city of my birth. Last name of modern-day bard and world-champion drinker-and-driver John Denver. The address was a palindrome. It was near a junk store, a coffee shop, a taqueria, a Vietnamese grocery/nail salon/jewelry store, and a great big park. Close enough to green space to keep the spaniel happy, close enough to downtown to keep our street cred.

That Sunday we hurried through an open house and found it nice enough. It needed some paint, the floors were a little scuffed, and it backed up to some kind of medical surplus warehouse, but what the hell. It was The House, we decided. We hadn’t made any official arrangement with Fiona and didn’t actually have her number, so it was by chance that we ran into her at a party that night.

“Guess what!” we said. “We found the one!” We were going to blow our lifetime allotment of exclamation marks on this deal, we knew, but it was going to be worth it!

We told her where it was and what it was like as she nodded. She began to move from mellow attention to a kind of bemused concern. She said she thought she knew the house we were talking about. She’d give us a holler soon and we’d figure things out.

The next day, she called with what she described as “funny news.”

“As it turns out,” Fiona said, “I
had
seen that house on Denver.” She paused here, trying to figure out how funny the next bit would be to us. “A couple who’s in the program with you at the U actually just had me write up an offer on it.”

Realtors are apparently exempted from the normal space-time continuum. Time, as they experience it, is at once slower and faster—the way the world spins at over a thousand miles an hour but looks still and placid from far enough away. They understand in ways that most buyers and sellers never will that a house for sale is a trifling thing. As monumental as tuna salad, say, if not for all the paperwork.

We
liked
Fiona. We liked the couple in question. We all were English-major types at the university, and there weren’t many to spare on that side of the Rockies. But it would be a while before we would be liking any of them in an active, let’s-go-for-twist-cones! kind of way.

We needed to start over.

In realty, some agents are the typical coffee-addled, business-card-palming, bright-pennies-in-their-loafers folks. A few are more like anti-agents. Unrealtors. Dealing with them is like trying to get a lifelong beach bum to embrace the subtle but sexless joys of patent law or philately. Their appeal, apparently, is that they are so not going to pressure you into anything. In fact, they are not so much your realtor as they are your bud.

Sully and I had been buddies at work from the day we met. But our relationship took a significant turn the day I said, “Oh, hey, you’re a realtor, right?”

Cue eyebrow. Dramatic pause.

It was a stupid question, because his business cards were everywhere in the restaurant. Taped to the employee lockers in the break room. Stuck on the hostess’s stand next to prominent reservations. Hanging from the wait station’s air conditioning ducts. The card was oriented vertically, and three-quarters of it was taken up with a head shot of Sully doing his Hey!-I’m-Sully-and-you-are? smile, but until he physically gave me one, I thought they were tickets for one of his standup gigs.

When I asked Sully the obvious question, he didn’t so much consider it as he did morph from Waiter Sully to—
shazam!
—Realtor Sully. “Why jes, capitán,” he said. “Yo soy realtor. Y tu mamá?”

Sully and I were polishing racks of wine glasses. It was nearly midnight, and I thought we were just making idle banter to get through the rest of the shift. Eight hours later, however, Sully picked me up in his Lexus and chauffeured me around to a dozen or so houses, and we made plans to do the same thing the next day. Having Sully for an agent was like being courted by Superman while he’s between archenemies, so he’s devoted his powers to helping you with more enthusiasm than you really desired.

Practically every day would be an opportunity for his domestic heroism. It wasn’t something you could predict or force; it was spontaneous. You’d be sitting around surfing the Internet for new listings and better interest rates when, out of the blue, your phone would ring. It’s Sully calling from the office, and you can tell he’s very busy because phones and faxes and alarms are ringing in the background and he’s yes-ing and no-ing some assistant. But he’s paying attention, really he is, and he was just wondering what you were doing for lunch, because if you didn’t have any plans, sugar (a Deep South, sweet-tea, slow-fan accent), he’d luuuv to take you for a quick bite and then check out (in his Tom Brokaw Great Plains anchor voice) a promising investment opportunity he found this morning, but it’s “a wee bet south”—and we’re in Scotland now, his voice draped in plaid—“though Eee know it’s farrrtharrr doun than yee want, ’tis a far bet cheepper, what d’ye say, laddee?”

He was hard to resist, unless you were actually Scottish, say, or a Southerner. Otherwise, he has a way of making you feel, well, special. Sully knows that buying a house is about as emotional and traumatic and exciting an endeavor a couple can undertake, just short of getting married and having kids. Sure, some folks would have us believe that buying a house is not that different from buying a used car or a bicycle or a box of donuts. For the rest of us—the ambulatory ones with the ability to fog mirrors—buying a house is the most daunting thing imaginable. Having a kid, well, we’re talking about a freaking miracle, not something that any mortal can truly take full responsibility for. Sure, there are the right schools and college funds and that fine art of knowing when to stop or start the corporal punishment, but the procurement of a kid is the result of—what?—fifteen to twenty seconds of, shall we say, impulsiveness. Getting married is kind of the same. Again, it’s practically a miracle if you can actually find somebody who will not only share a meal with you, but a bed and, my God, a bathroom too. A house, on the other hand, that’s nothing to be impulsive about. Houses are heavy, for one thing. And worse, they don’t say much. Not at first. Not about who they really are. There’s hardly any getting to know a house until you’re fully committed, blindfolded and swan-diving into what might be a very dry pool.