Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (9 page)

Somebody with a BB gun went through the neighborhood and shot out fifty-six car windows, including two of Jenae’s. Then people started finding dead cats all over the neighborhood, their disemboweled corpses draped around the shrubbery like so much gory tinsel. Some said it was a case of satanic ritual killing. Others said it wouldn’t have been the first cougar to come down to the valley. And nobody knew what had become of Elizabeth Smart, the fifteen-year-old girl kidnapped from her bedroom a few blocks away, until they found her wandering around the city in a burka, quietly pleading for help behind her veil.

It is time to skedaddle.

Stanley’s house is far from perfect. It’s almost a hundred years old and looks it in most ways. The structure seems fine, but it’s going to take more than a little willpower and sandpaper to put it right. The furnace has to go, as do all the appliances, and it has more wood paneling and shag carpeting than the set of
The Partridge Family
and smells as if generations of actual fowl have lived there.

The night after I saw the house and met Stanley, I drive past the refineries, strip clubs, and quarries to teach, thinking that there is no way Jenae will go for it, but she agrees to check it out.

She goes with Sully to see the house while I am in class. It seems ridiculous to have her go without me along, but Stanley did say that that Oriental girl was about ready to put in an offer, and given our recent luck, if we don’t act fast, we might as well give up. In every way, this feels like our last chance.

I am not optimistic. I think I’ll get home from teaching and she’ll slap me for suggesting that we live in such a dump. Then I will quietly concede and we’ll simply stay put and get killed on I Street by a kid inside a garbage can, mauled by mountain lions, or abducted by psychotic fundamentalists.

When I do get back from teaching, we sit on the front porch of our apartment watching traffic fly by, cocktails between us, and talk about the house. It’s nearly nine o’clock, and it is still so hot that the sweat on our faces gleams in the last light of day. Our dog Maggie is lying on her back in the burnt grass, her legs straight up in the air.

“Was Stanley still wearing his shorts?” I ask.

Jenae takes a sip of her drink. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she says. “His shorts.”

“What did Sully say?”

“You know,” she says.

She has our fat orange and white cat, Skillet, hooked up to his small-dog harness. We named him that because, when we first got him, he liked to sleep in a frying pan. Now he’s panting as though he were in a hot one. It’s really unattractive.

“He was doing his Indian ‘And vhat do you tink?’ thing,” she says. A car zooms by as if it has been dropped from a plane. Jenae scoops Skillet into her lap and closes her eyes.

“Did he do his reach test?” I ask. This is when Sully stands next to a wall and tries to touch the ceiling, his reach having been measured at an impressive ten feet.

“Yes,” Jenae says. She smiles. “Over nine feet.”

“Well then.”

Jenae sips her drink and coughs a little. I wasn’t pouring short that night. She looks at me and takes another sip. I ask her if Stanley said anything about other prospective buyers.

“Like ‘Orientals’ with tape measures?” she says.

“She makes me nervous,” I say.

“Bigot.”

We smile without looking at each other.

It’s getting dark, but a thin crown of light remains, making the Salt Lake Valley feel like a dim, golden bowl. A pair of kids on bikes zip past. I hear them before I can see them, and then they are gone. Jenae and I hold our breath and wait for the crash, but it doesn’t come.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” she says. “Three’s a charm, right?”

“Right-o,” I say. “Let’s do it.”

Despite all the sadness and pain of the past three months, the oddities of real estate, the throes of getting a loan secured via the mysterious Miss Ricketts via my philandering grandpa via my dead beatific grandmother—despite all the houses we’ve loved and lost, even this one, which may well get snatched up by a tape-measure-wielding foreigner—it hasn’t been a bad way to spend a summer. Looking for a house as we’ve done, instead of just staying put or buying whatever we could afford, in whatever imitation suburb of whatever imitation city, not giving in, not giving up, but struggling and searching and scouring and driving and walking and biking and hiking around every damned last nook, cranny, corner, and brook of our chosen city, we found our new favorite place—sweet, sweet Sugarhouse, named for the bounty of sugarbeets it used to produce. And who knows? Maybe we’ve found ourselves at home there.

We are getting good at this by now. We write up the offer in minutes and Sully faxes it to Stanley and overnight we wait. I don’t really believe Stanley has a fax machine. I expect it to take days to hear from him because I imagine he gave us the fax number for the small-arms supplier his militia uses, but the next day when I get back from my lunch shift, there’s already a message from Sully.

“Hey guys, hey Jenae, hey Matt. Und hello little Skeeleet and Maagae. Listen, Matt, I’ve got this improv thing down in Sandy tomorrow and thought you might want to pick up my shift.” I stand in front of our answering machine, afraid to take off my waiter’s clothes. Maggie sniffs vigorously at the scents of the restaurant as Sully’s message continues. “But, you know, if you don’t want to do it, Carole’s such a shift whore I’m sure she’ll take it or farm it out to one of her minions, and oh voy! I got the paperwork back from Stanley and it all looks like we’re ready to roll, Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson. We’re movin’ on up to the east side. So I’ll get back to it here, and you can let me know about that shift—by tonight would be great. Peas and carrots. Sully out.”

I call Jenae and ceremoniously tell her I have news.

“Yeah?” she says.

“Yup,” I say.

“So that’s it?” she says.

I say I guess so. Neither of us really believes it’s true.

She gets a bottle of champagne to celebrate with, but I have to work a double, and by the time I get home from the restaurant she’s asleep on the couch.

It was the most exciting night of our lives. We were exhausted.

In most ways, buying a new bike, adopting a kitten, getting your braces taken off, or even lancing a boil is more dramatic than the actual purchase of a house. With just about anything else there is at least a palpable before and after. But with a house it’s more like: Well, here’s the house without me standing in front of it and—next slide—here’s me standing in front of the house. After all, unless you do something fairly seismic, the house and the land it’s on will be bought and sold long after you have left your paw prints all over the place.

After working a meager lunch shift I scoot over to the house, because Sully had said Stanley had some new hollow-core doors he got on sale at a surplus store that he was going to throw in for free.

I catch Stanley in the act of putting one up and try to make my case without sounding unappreciative. “You know,” I say, “there’s something about these old doors.”

Stanley looks at me and twitches his mustache. “Yeah?” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. “They’ve got—I don’t know—character.”

“Character,” I realize as it comes out of my mouth, is about as generic a term as possible for something you like but cannot name and/or afford in real estate. When I went on a postgraduation tour of Europe with my friend Flavio, I noticed we kept falling back on the term “architecture” to describe what we liked about the churches and museums. But as an adjective, “architecture,” like “character,” means something you think is ineffable is really just beyond your vocabulary.

Stanley looks at the old doors and scratches his butt. “Well,” he says, “they’re old.” He points with his thumb at the new doors. They look as if they were made of peanut brittle, then scratched by a cat to get that faux wood-grain texture. “I got these new ones here ready to go. They’re real nice. Light. Easy to close. Easy to open.”

“What can I say?” I say. “The wife likes ’em.” That such a phrase could even issue from my head shocks me. I am not a guy who blames his wife for things. I am beginning to realize, however, that this is an all-access, no-explanation-needed pass to do that which is regrettable, especially in front of other men.

“
Wimin,
” Stanley says, pursing his lips and shaking his head, as if he’d almost managed to forget about them.

The truth is I want those old doors as much as she does. I remember being a kid and living in a very prefabricated, postwar, disposable apartment building where everything was foam-core or hollow. I’d try to throw a respectable tantrum and storm off to my room and slam the door, only to have it whiff shut. I soon found I could punch through the walls even though I barely outweighed a telephone book.

Stanley and I talk about the projects he’s been working on and what he’d do, if he were me, to keep the place up, as he says: “So’s you can turn a tidy profit when your time comes.”

Now that the deal is all but done, he begins to regard me with less suspicion and more affection, but it’s manly all the while, somewhere between buddy-buddy and father-son. It’s clear that I barely understand the difference between a Phillips and a flathead screwdriver, never mind soffit versus fascia. Because I don’t know what he’s talking about, he’s having to come up with tortuous definitions of simple things, like molding (“that sort of carved, long strip of wood where the floor meets the wall”) and joists (“that piece of wood right there—the one my hand is on”).

“You remind me of my boy, Stanley Jr.,” he says, giving up. “He just don’t have a mind for work. Doesn’t know one end of a hammer from the other ’less I hit him with it.” He sighs affectionately.

“My boy, you know, he’s into the physics. I just can’t keep my mind around it to follow more than two or three words into anything he’s saying. But I guess somebody else does, because he’s going to England, you know, in Europe, for an internship this summer.”

He shakes his head and stares at his tennis shoes for a second. He pronounces England like
Ingleland.

I tell him that he must be very proud.

“I am,” he says. “They’re paying his way! Can you believe that? And do you know what he’s going for? To study—get this—glass.”

“Glass?” I say. I think Stanley has already equated the fact that I teach at a college with the fact that his son is in college and concluded that we must know each other. There can’t be that many of us.

He wipes the sweat from his mustache with his hand and then wipes that on the pocket that hangs below the shaggy hem of his short shorts. “Glass,” he says.

Before I know it an hour has come and gone, and he has told me all about the small but prestigious private college in Iowa his boy goes to, how he got into the sciences and was always lapping his classmates when it came to doing those equations and so forth, and before anybody knew which way was up, his professors were asking him to teach their classes. And now some “lady perfesser” from Ingleland wants him to come over to help them work on glass. As if everybody doesn’t know what glass is already.

Sully begins to get really busy right after Stanley accepts our offer. Some new development is expanding south of the city, and the lots alone are going for a quarter of a million dollars. Through one of his improv/missionary connections, Sully is among the few realtors who gets to sell the properties. Within a week he has four offers pending. Granted, his take is only around two percent, because of the way the developers wrote it up, but we’re talking two percent of million-dollar homes. That’s like twenty grand apiece. Suddenly he isn’t working at the restaurant and it has become impossible to reach anything but his voice mail.

The inspection comes and goes without event, but we don’t know what the bottom line is until days later, when Sully brings the big binder to the restaurant for me. I leaf through it without finding a complete sentence in the lot. It’s a plastic-covered thesaurus of lawyer gibberish. The comments range from “issues of aesthetics in most rooms,” “furnace signs of age,” and “might not be or seem not to be sufficient,” to “shed rust in backyard” and “finding rust compromising.”

“What the hell are we supposed to do with this?” I ask him. The inspection cost three hundred dollars. Far as I can tell, the inspector put equal emphasis on the framing and the feline miasma seeping from the carpet.

Sully smiles and fake-punches me in the arm. “Ees bueno, my freend. Ees all very, how do dju say, goot.” He scoops a handful of anise mints from the hostess’s desk.

We don’t know what we are doing, buying this house, and are depending on a little expertise somewhere along the way. “Sully, it doesn’t say a goddamned thing that makes sense.”

Sully bobbles his head back and forth as he stabilizes his personae. “Okay,” he says, “all right.”

“Did you read it?”

“Hey, all right,” he says. “I looked at it.” He unwraps and then rewraps a mint. “I mean, I’ll look at it.”

When he calls a couple of days later, without elaboration, I get really upset. We are supposed to close on the house in a few days, and Sully is going to be in San Diego on vacation.

“Sully,” I say, “I’m not sure what your job is right now, but Jenae and I don’t feel like you’re exactly being all you can be.” I can’t believe myself. I am becoming that guy. “I’m a freaking English teacher, Sully, and all I can make out of this report is that this guy is basically throwing around cold, wet pasta at us. It doesn’t mean anything to me, and it’s not supposed to. Is that what we paid him for, to tell us nothing in as offensive yet meaningless a way as possible? If you want to help us out, read the report tonight and figure out what the hell it says and if we’re supposed to do something about anything or not.”

The next day, Sully makes a list of things for Stanley to do before closing and faxes it to him and copies it to Jenae and me. They are all of the things that have concerned us but we don’t know anything about. Things like “bathroom GFCI outlet ground not verified.” We don’t know if this requires pushing a button or hiring an electrician to rewire the house.