Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (7 page)

When looking for a house, you’re not looking for mere lumber and plumbing but rather for spirit and community. You’re not looking for a location but a locus, a place that will be your center. A place from which you’ll leave every day, only to return, just before dark, brown bags of sustenance in your arms. The house we pick is the most stationary and permanent fixture of our lives, and it’s not only how others will see us in relation to it, but how we see ourselves. The house where you live literally dictates where you will sleep, where you will walk, where you will eat, where you will love, laugh, and perhaps procreate. The kind of light you see, the hearth you’ll tend, the water you will drink.

Sully, despite his Saturday-morning cartoon antics, knew. Sully also knew that providence plays a lesser role than persistence when it comes to finding The House. Because what The House is, of course, is a decision, an approximation, a negotiation, a concession even.

He tried to tell us, tried to coach us in his best Mr. Miyagi spirit. “Matthew-san, Jenae-san must focus powah.” He jerked his tie from his neck and ceremonially cinched it around my head. “No think in Batt time. Think in house time. Batt time short. House time like karate time. You know, Chuck Norris time. House time long time.”

It was June now, and we were getting a bit tense about the whole process. We were still waiting for our banker in Peoria, Miss Ricketts, to get our financing together. My grandfather kept telling me he trusted us and that we should go ahead and pick a place. We wanted to be in a house by the time our lease was up on August 1, but it was beginning to look bleak.

Early one Tuesday morning, as I waited for Sully to pick me up so we could check out some prospects closer to downtown before we both had to be at work, I was nosing around on a realty website and saw something unusual. There was no picture, but the description of the house, the location, square footage, street name—everything started gaining momentum, and when Sully showed up I said, “I think we need to see this.”

Whenever I’d show him a listing, he’d take a quick, dismissive glance, the way you might take in a dentist’s shoes, and then hand back whatever sheet I gave him and proceed to regale me with how many years that house had been on the market, how many different agents had listed it, and how many times they’d repainted the front door, trying to fool the market into thinking it was a new house. I could tell that Sully was a little hurt by my perusing the Internet, looking at the public Multiple Listing Service hoping to find something his professional, supercharged search engine couldn’t. But the fact is that realtors get new listings only once a week. Chances are, in a good, vibrant market, if a house is priced fairly and in decent shape, it’ll move. If it’s overpriced or shoddily kept up, it’ll rot. So I cruised the websites.

Sully saw right away that what I’d found wasn’t an old listing. It had a new MLS number, and in his years as a realtor he’d never seen it. He knew the street and he knew what kind of money a house on it could pull, and this one was asking about ten grand below that. That probably meant it “Needs Some TLC” (knotty pine) or it is a “Great Starter Home” (really freaking small, so you’d better love each other) or it is “Gorgeous on the Inside” (crack vial mosaics on the steps, nine-millimeter shell-casing wind chimes).

We pulled onto the street to find a quiet, tree-lined affair between a busy eight-lane artery at the far end and a calm, walkin’-my-baby-back-home avenue at the other. A little dissonance could be good, I thought. We cruised the street looking for the telltale realtor’s yardarm. There was none. Sully called the listing agent and briefly did his shop talk (I know! Wants you to drop to five percent? Why not throw in your youngest daughter. Am I right?) while I stared at the house across the street.

It wasn’t the kind of
Gone with the Wind
deal where the place is so grand you give it a name, as though it were your offspring, but still, it was something. Solid. Nice. White-painted brick with a little driveway and a garage in back. Out front was a huge pine tree, big enough to shade the whole house, including a great wooden porch that was just high enough to let you feel superior to street-level people but not ostentatiously so. Double-hung windows framed the front door on either side, and overall the house looked smallish but well balanced for its square footage compared to a lot of others we’d seen. It was the difference between dressing an adult in a well-tailored suit and shoehorning a fat grownup into a child’s clothes.

“Thar she blows, skipper,” Sully said, but like a drag queen instead of Ahab. “Wanna have a peep?”

He did this talk-show-host, fake tie-straightening thing with the air in front of his silky yellow golf shirt, and in a half-Telemundo, half–Peter Lorre voice he said, “Jou is nehver going to a belief dis, boss. Éste house, jou know? It only arrive on dee market here dis mornin. We here is dee first peoples to have see it.”

With that, he winked and rang the doorbell.

“This is all very good,” he said in his realtor-friend voice. He patted me on the shoulder and we waited for the door to open.

Inside, there was a mommy with a newbie in her arms and a full-size American poodle bounding up and down and all around as though we were made of kibble. The smell of apple cobbler wafted out and made me think of my grandma’s from-scratch cinnamon rolls.

It was an old trick, but even Sully had to admit, a nice touch. The lady put her kid in a jogging stroller, harnessed the poodle, and told us to make ourselves at home. She seemed equal parts weepy, giddy, and needy. I can only imagine all the competing emotions and hormones, what with having a baby, getting ready to move, and selling a house. Short of starting a new job on top of it all, could it get more stressful?

Patsy Cline was on the stereo, and as I looked around the cozy, crayon-yellow living room, with its everything-old-is-new-again shag carpeting and overstuffed furniture, the hardwood-floored kitchen, the small but embraceable bedroom and beyond, I thought, I’m here. I’m
home.

I called Jenae and told her to drop everything. “Get your maracas over here as soon as possible,” I said.

“Excuse me?” she said. Sully was clearly wearing off on me, and it wasn’t always thrilling for Jenae or anybody else within earshot.

While I poked around, Sully called the selling agent and tried to hype her up and get her ready for an offer. From what I could tell, these folks could easily be the five-years-older version of Jenae and me. They had funky black-and-white photos on the wall—including some semi-nude pregnancy pics I wouldn’t have displayed, never mind how artistic, but still—and lots of chunky, thrift store furniture that spoke as much of savings as it did world view. One small bedroom looked to be a kind of writing office and music studio, replete with a Gibson Les Paul leaning against a Fender Bluesman, an Underwood typewriter hulking like a godfather next to a new Mac laptop. The other little bedroom was a baby room, done in politically savvy, gender-neutral sea-foam greens and pale yellows. The kitchen was a tight but well-designed galley with nice knives, a professional mixer, and a gas stove. The basement featured a small workout space with a yoga mat and weights, and I noticed they had a bunch of backpacking and rock-climbing equipment. Outside, they had a fastidiously kept garden, fully mulched, a great little redwood deck with a pergola, and two cute suspended hammock chairs, perfect for curling up on a summer’s eve to read poesy each to each.

Sully was just getting off the phone when a couple of semi-young folks came up the driveway, trailed by a man wearing a blond blazer that matched his mustache and pompadour. A good person would have told them to just hop on in and that the owner was out for a walk. A bad person would have grabbed Sully around the waist and said something like, “Sorry, there’s been a mistake. My partner and I have decided not to sell. Good luck.” We just gave them the stink-eye and waited.

Jenae showed up, did a thirty-second tour, and said, “All right.” It had only been a week since we broke up with Fiona and lost that first house. When we told Sully it was a go, it felt like a rebound sort of move, a hopeless grab at something beyond our reach, and a test of our new relationship with Sully. He knew we were still waiting on some of the financing to go through and that we were a few weeks away from any kind of actual money, but he told us the place was ours.

“How can you be so sure?” I asked. I reminded him that we’d been burned by another house three blocks away from this one.

“Simple,” Sully said. He licked his thumb and smoothed the pleats on his khakis. Then he licked again and touched the newel post. “Dibs,” he said.

I had to work that night, so the plan was to have Jenae and Sully get everything ready while I was at the restaurant. Then, as soon as I got off, I’d go to his office, sign by all the little X’s, and we’d fax over the offer. It’d all be wrapped up by first light.

I ended up having to stay until closing time, so when I called at eleven, I thought Jenae and Sully would be playing Boggle they’d be so bored. As it turned out, they were still hard at work. While I had been dropping dishes and swearing at known violent offenders and illegal foreign nationals at the restaurant, they had heard from the seller’s realtor. By six
P.M.
she had received three offers, not including ours. So instead of playing nice, the sellers wanted a statement of preapproval for a loan, a written offer, and, unbelievably, a personal letter.

We were at Sully’s office until nearly two
A.M
. By the time we were done, choruses of angels and orchestras of virgins were singing timeless arias about what beautiful people like us could do with a little patience, faith, coconut mulch, and latex paint.

No matter how many verses we could get out of our castrati, however, my grandpa couldn’t get in touch with Miss Ricketts in the depths of her Peoria midnight.

Sully was relentless with his whole-lotta-love routine. He was sure they’d take our offer, if not adopt us. Preapproval to him meant next to nothing. “After all,” he said, “we’re not trying to close on the house tomorrow. Preapproval schmreeapproval.”

When we didn’t hear anything before I went to work at ten-thirty
A.M.
, I knew. They had accepted another offer and were busy making the pretty little coronation bouquets and nosegays and couldn’t yet bother telling us that we had lost.

Business at the restaurant was slow, and my only table was a couple of yuppie pricks wearing golf shirts from a course whose greens fees were higher than a month of my rent. They sat sprawling expansively in their booth, as though to express their masculinity, literally, in real estate.

I was bitterly refilling their Arnold Palmers when Carole, the matron of the waitstaff, touched my elbow and told me I had a call. I took it in the coat check closet.

“Hey, buddy,” Sully said. It could not be good news. He was talking like a human being.

It was neither Friend Sully nor Realtor Sully. It was Elder Saul. The Elder Saul that was presiding over the funeral of our dream.

He told me about how much the sellers loved our letter, how they struggled all morning making their decision. “But,” he said, “another buyer put up forty large in cash.”

“That’s just fucking great,” I said.

Elder Saul was silent. He didn’t handle cursing well. I looked around for something to break. There were only coat hangers, buckets of anise mints, and Carole’s face, which my profanity had drained entirely of blood.

“What you need is a cheap and easy comeback house,” he said, ignoring my murderous mood. “I know this skanky duplex over in West Valley City. We could grab some chalupas and head over there for a little picnic after your shift. What you say, chica?”

I am a bad person. I was pissed off.

Sully was already way over it. For him, there hadn’t even been an “it.”

I think he knew that this was the time when realtors write their own checks. Now that our hearts had been broken, we’d be looking for something with a roof and a door or two, nothing particular, just get it over with. Gimme shelter. That’s all.

“Or we could stay the course,” he said, shifting gears. “There’s this dapper little bungalow a hop, skip, and a dump away?”

I told him I didn’t think so.

“Come on, Matthew-san,” he tried. I’ll give him that; he tried. His Miyagi voice made me remember his tie and that apple cobbler and then I was right back in the foyer of the house I’d never live in, the ghost of my grandmother baking away for other people’s children. “Remember house time?” he said. “Chuck Norris?” he said. “Time?”

“Fuck Chuck,” I said. “I got food dying in the window. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Okey-dokey,” he said.

I felt like Oedipus, post–eye/fork incident. And yet right after I got back on the floor, my friend Susan asked if we got the house.

She is one of the five kindest people on this earth. She’s worked with at-risk teenagers and has a dog named Ezekiel. She is a poet and has crazy curly hair like mine. I wanted to make her cry.

“No,” I said. “Didn’t work out.”

“Oh, yippee!” she said. Her exclamation point felt like an ice pick. “Now’s when you find the house you were really meant to have!”

“Great,” I said. I didn’t know what she meant, but I knew it was more positive than I could handle at the moment. “Zip-a-dee-fucking-doo-dah.”

GRAM AND I WOULD
stay up long into the small hours, drinking Dewar’s and eating oyster crackers, talking about how the Hoosiers look like real contenders this year, about how overworked Mom was, about how big a jerkoff everyone named Bob was. Bob, my mom’s newest, third husband. Bob, Gram’s own husband. Bobby Knight, she said, got a bye. I thought we were mostly kidding. She was a dear heart of a woman, but she was also fiercely protective of the people she loved—pretty much just me and my mom. She always said, hoisting her Scotch high, “You are going to get what you deserve, damn it. I didn’t stay with him for all these years for nothing!”

I thought she was hilarious.