Marooned

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Hole up

My realtor sent me a note the other day confirming my worst fears...

"Checking in! So we're not having a whole lot of luck with the house. We've tried pushing buyers and other agents to it but no one is biting."

I felt lousy, but not too lousy. Most of the signs with houses for sale in my neighborhood up at the beginning of summer were still up. There were even a couple of new ones. The guy across the road who'd moved in early last fall, a "For Sale by Owner" tag had sprouted like a toadstool in his front yard one morning after a hard rain.

I have no idea why everyone is trying to get out of here.

That will be something to figure out since it's apparent I'm not going anywhere anytime soon.

In addition to my house being kind of a dog, the realtor I signed with has decided to change companies. This is a pretty regular thing, not just with her, but with other realtors, too. At least, it seems that way to me. 

Meanwhile, my ex is getting closer to leaving Charleston. Originally, she planned to move by September, but now that's looking like October or November; after she and her fiance get a water line dug for their new place on his farm.

My youngest, as cheery a kid as I've ever met, can hardly wait. He's hoping for a tree house and space to roam. There is some of that here, but I'm not certain I have the necessary skills required to assemble a tree house that wouldn't end up maiming half the neighborhood kids.

Maybe I'll give that a shot, too.

The upshot of the realtor changing companies is that my house will be re-listed as first day. I guess that will mean my house will move to the top of the pile for people looking for a place to buy.

I'm not sure if that will do much.

She asked me about lowering the price, too, but I declined. That's really only feasible if she decides to waive her fees and commissions, the government gets OK about me not paying taxes and I embrace living in my car for a couple of months until I have enough for whatever deposits I have to make.

I'm not looking to get rich selling this place --that would be a nice surprise --I'm just looking to get out with some dignity.  

It's been a hard year, so far. It was a bitter winter, a tough spring and not a particularly good summer. I fear the season ahead will be more of the same.

So, we'll re-list and I'll keep following along with my gardening calendar. I'll put a little money aside for minor upgrades here and there to do as the work outside begins to slow. I'll buy firewood in case this winter is as cold as last year's and look through seed catalogs with thoughts of how I might do the whole damned green thumb thing better.


I can hold the line. I can be patient. It's easy when you don't have much of an alternative.

A hive for the buzzing bees

The wasps came down on top of my head, jabbing and digging into my flesh. I screamed and flailed like a budget table hamster at the pet store getting thrown in with the ball python. I slapped at my scalp, scooped up I don't know how many of the buzzing, flying needle bandits and cast them out like the little, black devils they were.

From the side of the house, to the front door, to the kitchen table all the way in the middle of the house, I screamed obscenities that would have added up to a sizable car payment if I kept a swear jar.

I do not keep a swear jar. That's just fucking ridiculous.

Sweating, head throbbing, both of the boys stared at me. The eldest laughed.

"What happened?"

"Fucking hornets, fucking wasps, God damned bees. I'll kill them. They are going to die." The top of my head throbbed. It hurt to blink. The words poured out of my mouth effortlessly.

The youngest gaped at me, eyes wide, jaw hanging slightly open. Me, swearing openly, is not a new thing. Me, holding my head and pledging murder while I uttered every conceivable oath, however, was new and it was scary because I seemed to mean it.

I ran my hand through my hair, felt for the wound and there was a lump. Looking in the mirror, between the shafts of thinning hair, I saw the wound. No blood. It just hurt.

"Oh, I'm going to kill them. I'm going to kill them."

But not that day. Outside a gentle rain was falling. You can's spray a nest while it's raining. Don't ask me why? I'm sure it has to do with environmental concerns, the groundwater maybe, worries of killing the squirrels or something. I don't know, but that nest was safe.

The funny thing was is I'd seen the nest before --or so I'd been told.

"Sure, you told me not to worry about it," my girlfriend said.

I probably did.

Generally speaking, I'm a peaceful guy. When my girlfriend and I first started dating, I was reading a lot of Buddhist literature and one of the writers talked about avoiding unnecessary violence to other living things --even to things that annoyed you like insects.

Once, while sitting together, she'd spotted a spider, shrieked and pointed at it then demanded I get rid of it.

She'd meant kill it. Instead, I'd scooped it up in a napkin and taken it outside. She looked at me as if I'd lost my mind.

"Why did you do that?"

I explained and she wasn't impressed. I'd betrayed an important part of the social contract between men and women who are dating: I was supposed to kill things like spiders, just kill them; if necessary, with fire.

I still harbor a mostly live and let live sort of attitude.

A nest outside, if I'd seen it and not known for sure what kind of bees lived within, would I have said, "Oh, don't worry about it? They won't bother you if you don't bother them?"

Yeah, I would have done that.

Stupid hippie.

So, the unprovoked, Pearl Harbor-style attack on my head was my fault. I should have known better. I should have listened to early reconnaissance. I should have increased patrols in the Pacific or maybe, just maybe, I should have taken the nuclear option early, protected my own person by eliminating the threat beforehand.

I was lucky that the things just got me and not anyone else.

It took days to get the job done. First, it had to stop raining and the nest had to dry out. Second, I had to have the required $4.65 needed to buy a big, black can of bug spray --the more ecologically destructive the better.

As it happened, the wasps got an extra couple of days while I waited for a check to clear. I was broke. So, I spent at least three days just wishing and hating, which was sort of therapeutic.

Finally, when I had the money (or close enough as far as the grocery store was concerned), I stood from a safe distance and hosed the bleached paper orb down. Winged, black figures fell from the nest and plummeted silently to the ground and whatever heavenly reward is reserved for such ugly, hateful things.

I imagine they get to go to hell.

Summer Bummer

It's been largely quiet the past couple of weeks. The blogging has slacked off because my radio show launched and not much has happened since the one car slowed down to look at the sign in my front yard a few weeks back.

I'm starting to think I just got in too late. I waited too long and most of the people who were going to buy this summer have already started the tedious, yet soul-crushing process of dealing with the banks.

Still, I hear the Chinese are buying up property in the U.S. Maybe I can talk my realtor into sending some brochures to Beijing. They could put an embassy here or maybe a prison work camp. Whatever works. I'm sure the county commission would be happy to have them. 

I also got my lawnmower back, but I'm sick of yard work. I'm sick of it and would be happy to pave the whole damned thing and turn the backyard into a trailer park, if I just had the money.

Money is the new, old worry. My mortgage went up in July. This happens, apparently. Taxes go up. The value of property goes up, which means taxes go up some more. Then there's insurance which probably goes up with the increase in value, inflation or just because Jesus said so.

I have no idea what the reason is. I got a note about it a couple of months ago, warning me it was coming, explaining in detail why this was happening and how I could avert it by simply giving them the money up front.

I didn't study the reasons, I just looked at the number and said, "Fuck, like I need this."

When they raised the monthly two years ago, I had the money. I paid it and that felt good. This time around, there is no extra money. I stay in a perpetual state of tension. There's barely enough just to get by, let alone take a handful of well-earned days to just relax.



I can hardly stand to look at all the pictures of people on vacation this summer. You see them on Facebook. Old friends who are in France and not for the first time, guys I knew in college taking their kids to Italy and vague acquaintances headed like lemmings to the ocean.


Envy is unbecoming in someone who has been so very much blessed, who has been given so many wonderful things, and I am so grateful for what I have, but I am envious and it makes my heart bitter.

Just not bitter enough to start going to Tea Party rallies. Those fools are crazy.

So, the new normal is to pay $60 more a month, raising my mortgage it to $750 a month, which well-meaning friends tell me is the going rate for a decent two-bedroom apartment in Charleston --at least in the parts where you don't have to worry too much about getting stuck in the ribs with a sharpened screwdriver.

That's what they tell me. For what I have, I'm getting a bargain they say.

"Plus you've got all that land."


They're probably right. This is what everybody wants. This is paradise.

Sounds of silence

I got the mower back just before the 4th. The hardware store fixed the carburetor and then went ahead and was good enough to do a full tune-up, sharpen the blade and polish the thing for another 30 bucks.

I didn't argue, but I didn't order it, either.

I spent most of the holiday mowing the lawn, listening to old Beatles records on my iPod and waiting for the knee-high grass to choke the mower to a stop, but it didn't happen. I got through in just five hours, which was about normal, even when the grass isn't deep and full of terrors.

I hadn't ordered the tune up or the sharpened blade for 30 bucks, but I had sure as hell needed it. 

I was glad to get it done. For the last couple of weeks, I'd been trimming bushes, picking up debris and cutting back the honeysuckle vine strangling some as yet to be identified fruit tree out back (It looks kind of like an Asian pear, but I refuse to actually eat one).

The mowing was a relief. Without it, I doubt anyone would have even given the place even a second look --not that people are showing up much. I'm still hoping for the woman in that beater Honda to come back, possibly with her meth-making, hillbilly boyfriend or collection of dangerous pitbulls.

I'm not picky, but nobody has come by.

After the mowing, the showering and conscious re-hydrating, we cooked out on the patio. I'm getting better at grilling. The chicken turned out a little dry, but not charred like last month's steaks.

My girlfriend and I, we sat in chairs, read for a while and just soaked in the quiet.

That's something Cavendar Drive has going for it: quiet.

It's not a perfect quiet. There are always the birds, the frogs and the crickets. Sometimes there are other things I'm not well-versed enough to identify --probably velociraptors, mutant rabbits, maybe unicorns or werewolf Republicans. In the distance, you can hear the road. Every now and again, a plane flies too low on its way to the airport. In the summer, we have mowers chewing yards, chainsaws whining as they slice through dead wood. In the fall, it's the far away report of hunting rifles echoing from high up in the hills somewhere.

That sound in particular reminds me of home. It reminds me of damp, misty autumn in Pearisburg, Virginia and being told to go outside because I'd become a pain-in-the-ass some Saturday morning.

I was regularly a pain-in-the-ass.

As I boy, I remembered wondering about who was up in those hills and what they were hunting. Either way or on either side, I was glad I wasn't up there. In the same way that they say golf is a good walk spoiled, hunting has never appealed to me either.

The quiet here was something I had to get used to. Before moving to Pinch, I'd grown accustom to city noise --or Charleston's version of it, which is not like the noise of an actual city (We're more of a good sized town). I'd gotten used to hearing the neighbor's television or the stray argument. I'd been painfully aware of the disturbances in my own home --did I snore too loud? If I could hear them, could they hear me?

I haven't had to worry about noise out in the semi-country. I close the door, close the window and the inside of the house is as quiet as a tomb. I can play my stereo as loud as I want and nobody is going to care --of course, I just have the iPod and a dinky MP3 player docking station. I don't even have a record player.

There's something to be said for peace and quiet. 

Sometimes I wonder how I'll adapt to living in the city again, if I'll miss all this bucolic bliss and rural peace and quiet --and then I remember the damned lawn.

updates

When I first started talking about selling the place, the realtor asked me if I'd done any updates? Had I painted, pulled up carpet or replaced anything? Had I extracted the aging, battle-tested appliances and plugged in newer, shinier models like the ones usually found in the pages of a Sears Catalog?

No.

I hadn't done a damned thing. Oh sure, there'd  been vague plans --after I won the lottery, got a book deal, was involved in a class action lawsuit against a soft drink bottler. Sure, then maybe I'd have got a nice, polished steel refrigerator with a built-in ice cream maker and mixed drink blender.

Back when I was looking into selling the place, I'd researched updates, but the numbers didn't work out for most of them --like replacing appliances. Everything I read said you'd maybe get back 3/4 what you paid out for a new stove or dishwasher.

Spending money to lose money, and I can't afford to lose anything, but after talking it over with the realtor, I did agree to pull up the vintage 1970 orange marmalade-colored shag carpet. Removing something that I didn't have to replace seemed well within my skill set.

Basically. Well, not really. I had no idea what I was doing. Comfortably, I can change my oil and change a tire --which aren't things you typically need to do to a house, but I looked it up online and watched the video twice. Then I went out, bought a crowbar, and tried to watch "Bates Motel" on Netflix as I followed the directions of the video I'd seen.

It was a lot harder than I thought. With pliers in hand and Norman Bates (played by the kid from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory") gingerly edging toward madness, I yanked and tugged and worked up a dirty sweat before eventually coming to the realization that maybe I'd missed something.

The video I'd watched hadn't really pointed out removing the baseboards, just the trim. The carpet was tacked very neatly, and very tightly, under the baseboards. In fact, the method the carpet installer from the age of disco had used varied considerably from the way I'd been shown on Youtube.

Anyway, I got through a couple of episodes of the adventures of Norman Bates and I don't know how many plot points involving drug farms and sex slaves before I worked out what I had to do on my own.

Getting up close and personal with something that had been walked on and God knows what else for a couple of decades was enlightening. The carpet stank. It reeked and I was a little offended. I vacuumed a couple of times a week and I'd bought a carpet cleaner over a year ago, which was used regularly. All the work, all the dog hair I'd pulled up, none of that mattered.

But I rolled the thing up, lugged it out the front door, had a beer, and watched more Netflix before calling it quits around midnight.

I woke up with a terrible headache the next day. I felt terrible: dizzy and weak. I went back to bed, but couldn't sleep. Lying on my back, I couldn't breathe. On my stomach, my head throbbed. My heart sounded weird and loud in my ears, felt like it was going to pop out of my chest. All I could do was shiver and sweat beneath a cocoon of blankets and quilts.

I felt like death.

I gobbled aspirin like breath mints, sipped water and spent the day delirious and terrified until my fever broke in the middle of the afternoon. I drifted in and out of a restless sleep and finally fell well enough to get up after dark.


It days for me to shake it completely off and for a little while I tried to blame the sudden illness on the flu or a bug, but then no one around me got sick --it was just me. I'd gotten a big, fat dose of mold or bacteria or something else trapped for 40 years.


Luckily, cleaning out the fridge turned out to be a lot easier.

Dog days

There hasn't been much of a change in the last few days: Nobody has stopped by. I haven't heard anything from the realtor, either, which is fine. I'm still cleaning up and throwing things out. With the mower out of commission, the yard doesn't look all that great either.

Everybody has been very encouraging.

"My parents have had their house up since April. They've only had like two people come look at it."

"It took two years for us to sell our house."

"I just gave up. I think I'll probably die there."

The competition around Pinch is fierce. I counted no less than a dozen signs advertising different houses for sale by different realtors. One or two people have forgone professional help and have slapped up a $2 "House for Sale" sign they got from the hardware store.

I don't know how many people have quietly listed their places on Craigslist, through the trading paper or have posted Polaroids in gas station restrooms with phone numbers --it could be twice that many.

I keep telling myself it's too early to get discouraged, it's too soon to feel rejected. I have to be patient. I am patient. It's one of the few virtues I think I have --I know how to wait.

I have to wonder why everyone is leaving town, though.

As far as places go, Pinch is quiet, though I think it's like a lot of small towns --graying and thinning out. When I first took my kid to cub scouts, the thing that really stood out were the number of older parents who'd brought kids to the meeting. There were an awful lot of 6 and 7-year-olds living with their grandparents or their great-aunt because their Mom and Dad were doing three or four years for running a meth lab.

A couple of blocks over, there's a retired truck driver trying to raise a grandson. I met him a few weeks after I moved into the house --a nice enough fella, who drove around in a big truck and every once in a while went out to ride motorcycles with his nephew.

He was somewhere around 70-years-old and living alone when he got a call in the middle of the night from the sheriff.

"Donnie, you've got to come right now."

His son, he told me, was sitting in the back of one cruiser. His grandson, Terry, was in the next one.

"He told me I had to take him home right then," Donnie said.

"He was so little," the old man whispered, still horrified that his grandson had been placed in the back of locked police car.

And so Donnie took Terry home, as old as he was, and as inexperienced as he was with raising children.

"I spent my whole life working," he told me. "I didn't think I could handle this."

So, he reached out to a woman named Martha he'd met at church, an old widow who needed help with the mortgage and was struggling in her later years. She took them in, gave the boy a room and had been like a grandmother to him.

They'd constructed a family of a sort.

"No sex," Donnie told me one weekend, after he'd accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior --a last minute conversion if ever I heard one.

"We tried, you know?" He told me, while we watched a fishing show, one rainy afternoon in his living room. The boys were in the back playing a video game. "I couldn't satisfy her and she couldn't satisfy me." He shrugged. "Nothing we could do. I ain't what she wants and she ain't what I want, but that's alright. We do alright. We ain't in love, but we make this work."

Martha just shrugged and smiled her big, artificial smile.

"Don't mind him," she said. "He's been like that since he got baptized."

They lived together. She had her room and he slept in a recliner in the living room, probably.

I saw them more when I first moved there and less since. A little over a year ago, I met Donnie's son and then Terry's mom.

They arrived separately and did not travel together, as far as I could tell.

They seemed like nice people, asked me if their son had been any trouble and said I should call if ever Terry was a bother. I could call Martha. She'd send somebody down.

I lied and said he was never trouble, but I meant it when I told them, "He's welcome here."


I can't remember the last time I saw any of them --since last Fall maybe, at least Christmas. I haven't seen Donnie's truck and there have been none of Martha's grand kids walking around looking for Terry, who sometimes wanders off when he takes a notion to.

Maybe they moved on, too. 

List Serve

I'm making a list of things to tell the new owner --when there is a new owner. The closest I've seen to even vague interest in the house is a lady in a beat up Honda who slowed as she passed my driveway.

Odds are, she wasn't interested. I just wrote something she didn't like about one of her favorite bands on "Mountain Stage" and just wants to hit me with a tire iron.

Maybe, if she comes back I can get her to take a look around. She might be in the market for a three bedroom rural charmer with an ample yard and plenty of storage. If nothing else, there is plenty of space to hide bodies.

Anyway, things to remember tell the future owner of Casa del Bill:

1-Buy a riding lawn mower. Don't be stupid. You'd rather do other things than push a mower.

2-Pile Hardware on the West Side is your friend. When your lawnmower, weed eater, chainsaw, tiller or other unsurprisingly dangerous power tool you have runs into trouble, go see them. However, expect it to take weeks to get it back, cost more than you want it to, and figure at least one of the two guys working the counter is going to jerk you around a little just because he's bored.

It's OK. You'd do the same thing if you worked the small engine repair counter of a hardware store and they can fix almost anything.

3-Eat and drink at the Pit Stop at your own risk. The food makes nursing home food seem exciting and exotic. The dining room is noisy and has all the charm of a rented storage unit, which it more than slightly resembles because of the lack of windows, but it does have the novelty of being a used car lot by day and a bar by night.

It may be the first of its kind and will probably be featured in a tourism department "best of WV" list eventually.

I'm pretty sure tourism departments are staffed by career alcoholics.

4-The old lady at the hardware store in town will not begrudge you a piece of candy if you buy something, though she will look at you weird if you show up wearing comic book characters on your shirt --especially if you're older than about 12.

5-Support the local fire department. Buy your Christmas tree at the lot across from the fire house. It supports the local department and puts you on a friendly basis with the guys who will save your stuff if it catches fire.


6-Smith's Food Fair in Big Chimney isn't a grocery store so much as a post-modern art installation. You're not expected to actually eat anything you buy from Smith's, just pay for it.


7-The old guy who cuts hair in Big Chimney does a decent job and works cheap, but seems to know a little too much about "Swamp People." I imagine being a barber in a small town means you have blocks of time that go unfilled. Apparently, those blocks of time coincide with shows about folk who hunt alligators for a living and go "Yee-haw" from every now and again.

8-The beer selection at the gas station is disappointing, but sort of insulting, as if they want to appeal to some secret set of hipsters. PBR in bottles? Why, lord, why?

The whiskey selection isn't much better and everyone stares at you if you spend more than thirty seconds looking at the stuff on the shelves. Buy your hooch in Charleston. 

9-Don't bother calling the Division of Highways to complain about road maintenance or snow removal. They aren't coming, and don't care that you need to get to work, church or to the hospital. In winter, Cavender Road is so far down the list of priorities that state road crews will be making snow angels in the parking lot at the capitol before they'll bring a truck out.

Just invest in four-wheel drive, good snow tires and just as importantly, a decent pair of boots.

Sometimes it's not worth white knuckling it up the hill. Better to park the car across the street from the gas station and just walk home.

10-When your car invariably ends up in a ditch toward the bottom of the hill, call Chambers Towing. 304-965-5634. They'll get it out and the driver will tell you about the going rate for heroin (turns out to be about 6 to 8 bucks per serving --cheaper than two PBRs tall boys at The Empty Glass) and other unsavory things that maybe an elementary school kid standing nearby shouldn't hear.

Still, Chambers is the only towing company that will come out your way when the roads are dodgy, but you better have cash.

The going rate to get a car out of a ditch is $100. Negotiating seems foolish.

11- In October, for the trick-or-treaters, put the bucket of candy down by the mailbox. Nobody is hiking the driveway. This also includes Jehovah Witnesses and most door-to-door salesmen.

Also, there will not be a lot of trick-or-treaters. All the kids go to the neighborhoods where the houses are closer together. Never buy more than a bag of candy and only buy candy you'll eat.

12- Speaking of driveways, invest in some ice melt and a good shovel.

13-Go ahead and put the garbage company's number in your phone. You'll be calling it every single time you put a broken chair or worn out bookshelf on the day they say they pick up such things, because they won't.  Expect to see your lifeless, gray Christmas tree sitting by the side of the road until around April.

14-It will be a fight to get the DMV to admit that Pinch exists. I'm still not sure what the zip code is and I've tried several, but the DMV still won't send me my registration in the mail.

15- Stock up on fire wood and buy the store brand fire starters at Kroger's in the summer. They're cheaper in the summer and you only need half a stick to start a good fire.

16-Choose AT&T over Sprint, unless you like going room to room trying to get a signal to text your girlfriend.

17-Neither the Chinese place or Mexican restaurant at the shopping center in Elkview aren't that great, but the library is really nice. Also, the local Kroger's regularly puts fruits and vegetables on sale and marks down mushrooms and eggplant.

I don't think the locals like them.

I mention this because the South Charleston location does the same thing with cheese.

18-The neighborhood dogs are friendly and will come into the yard for you to scratch behind their ears and beg for food. The girls on horses, however, will not and seem to think of anyone standing in their front yard is a potential serial killer and not some idiot suburbanite who thinks horses are kind of cool because he doesn't seem one every day.

19- The cop two doors down will let you get by with speeding through town if he recognizes your car, as long as you're not completely tearing ass. However, he lets his lawn turn into a jungle and could care less about the bare-chested kids zipping up and down the road on their motorbikes and ATVs.

20- Pinch is only about eight minutes from the Capitol Flea Market, which would be a lot cooler if it wasn't infested with professional junk dealers trying to pawn off their overstocks of Avon, Home Interior and counterfeit Pokemon cards.

Never buy garden tools or a lawn mower there.

Sisyphus

There's nothing like spending four hours in the sun mowing the back yard with a push mower to help you reevaluate some of your life decisions.
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When I bought the place, I remember telling one of the realtors that I'd just use a push mower. I didn't need an expensive riding lawn mower. It was good exercise, I told him. I worked in an office and the fresh air would be good for me.

He looked at me like I was the biggest idiot he'd seen all day. Given that he works in real estate, I think I accomplished something.

If there is one thing I consistently bitch about it is the yard. It's just too much work and makes me resent the neighbors, who all have riding lawn tractors --some with XM radio and bluetooth capability, I'm sure. If they don't, they can afford to pay truckloads of scruffy, tattooed guys to show up in a pick up truck dragging a trailer loaded with those cool, speed mowers that wipe out an acre in about twenty minutes.

I just have me and the push mower my sister gave me two summers ago. I can't even reliably get my teenage kid to help. He'd rather sit in his room, play video games and post disturbing things on Facebook.

I'd rather do that, too, but the yard has got to get done. Otherwise, I'd never see the deer coming. 

The next owner will be wiser than me or more well-heeled and can afford the tools needed to make this place something special.

I think sometimes about where I will go next.

Back at the first of the year, I spoke with someone about getting a raise. With the Affordable Care Act, I was finally going to have to take the company insurance. I needed it. I hadn't had insurance since the divorce and had been skating on my typically excellent health, but I figured all streaks come to an end eventually.

The state is full up of people with bad health, bad habits and dim prospects. 

The bite for the new, mandated (but still sort of crappy) insurance was about $180, which sounds like a bargain if you can afford that --and I probably could, if I didn't also have a car, or if stopped buying groceries regularly.

I tried to explain the predicament I was in and thought my work should speak for itself.

He said, no. 

A couple of months later, I posted on Facebook about my plans to put the house on the market, I was asked about that. Of late, it seems like there have been a lot of comings and goings --mostly goings. He wanted to know if I was looking at leaving.

I said I wasn't, but that I couldn't afford to keep the house much longer. He asked me, "Well, don't you have a girlfriend? Couldn't she move in with you?"

I barely had an answer for that one, except no. It seemed baffling that he would think that was a suggestion he could make: I can't pay you any more. Why don't you get a roommate?


The other day, some friends visited from Louisville. They left last year for better opportunities, more money --seemed very happy with the Bluegrass State -- and asked why I hadn't joined them already?

The house, I told them, the house. 


This isn't to say that I will leave West Virginia. My radio show debuts next month and even if I think the pay sucks, I still like my job at the newspaper.

There are other reasons more complicated and I think of them while I push the mower back and forth --but maybe not for a while.

As the sun was drooping over the horizon and I was finishing the back half of the lot, the oil cap on the mower inexplicably came off like a champagne cork. Oil, like thin, store-bought gravy spilled out all over the mower. The motor came to a stop and has not started again.

Christmas with the Fuhrer

We had to clear mom's house out over the weekend --by we, I mean my sisters did it. All I did was show up like a looter and carry off a few pieces of furniture. None of it was absolutely necessary and under the circumstances, with me trying to get rid of things, probably a little counterproductive.

And expensive. With gas, tolls and driving my car back and forth, renting the 14 foot Uhaul truck ran around $300, which is a lot.

There was a snag with the pickup. Instead of getting it in Virginia, I had to get it just over the border in Princeton, about 30 miles from the house where I grew up, at a little place that specialized in hunting gear,  paramilitary fashions, doomsday prepping and taxidermy.

It was a weird enough place: a stuffed river otter sat in the middle of the store and the back wall was lined with rebel flag belt buckles.

I'd been here before. Ten or fifteen years ago, it was the snack bar to a go-cart track. The church I attended back made a trip to it and we all drove around in circles until our faces were rubbed raw and sore. The ghost of that track still remained, though choked now with high grass and weeds and locked behind a chain link fence.

"The owner shut it down when he bought the place nine years ago," the lady at the counter told me.

It seemed to me that there was some great and ugly truth in that place. I didn't stick around to take a second look.

I got to the house just before lunch and with some help loaded up the things I'd asked to take. My sister also convinced me to take an oak book shelf.

"Mom paid $300 for it," she said.

I think she just wanted to make sure that not every nice thing ended up getting sold off for pennies and I like books. She might have thought I'd put books on it.

It was odd to see people pick over my mother's things, odder still to see some asshole in shorts and black socks with a matching black pistol clipped to his straining waistband.

Who takes a handgun to a yard sale?

As the bargain hunters pilfered through my mom's stuff, the neighbors across the street were out mowing their lawns. One guy at the larger of the two houses had his iPod on and was belting out the chorus to some song as he rounded the corner on his riding mower. To the right and across the road, a young, severe-looking man worked a push mower.

I sort of sympathized with him. Pushing a mower can get to be real work, but then he took his grimy shirt off. Black tattoos covered his pale arms and torso, the most prominent of which was a thick, black swastika just under his ribcage.

Other tattoos seemed to support the general theme of a deep, abiding (and exclusive) love for white people.

"Holy shit," I said dragging a washing machine to the truck. "Are you fucking kidding me?"

I hadn't seen that kind of shit even on the grounds of the National Alliance --of course, that had been in the winter. You'd expect that even the Nazis know to keep their shirts on in the snow --well, I don't know that for sure.

Anyway, knowing that the Third Reich was living next door to where I grew up made me feel less bad about my Mom living in a nursing home.

A little later, my kid sister told me the buyer came by earlier, said she loved the place.

"It feels like home," the woman told her.

My sister was in tears. I wasn't far behind. My feelings were complicated. I'd never wanted to remain here, never wanted to settle in Pearisburg, but I had a lot of memories of waking up in this house. I remembered the old paint on the walls and what the place smelled like during the holidays.

I almost lost it completely looking out the window of my old bedroom.

I spent too much time opening drawers and closets. I have no idea what I was looking for. I lingered over my mother's insane collection of Christmas crap for probably 20 minutes. For years, mom collected little Santa Clause decorations. She must have had close to a thousand jolly, little fat men. It had taken her decades to amass them and now they were all up for sale in bulk.

I recoiled at the cost, at the hours of her life she'd traded for the money to buy these things and now they were going for very little. It seemed a terrible trade.

My girlfriend said, "Did she enjoy looking for them? Did she like putting them out?"

Of course, she did. Mom loved those things, delighted in them.

"Then it's OK," she said. "It was what she wanted."


On the way back, we stopped in to visit my mom. It had been a couple of months since I'd been down and I felt horrible that first time I'd come to visit in weeks was to come take her stuff.

I wear my guilt like a cheap tattoo.

Mom was nicer about my absence than I deserved, but she didn't like that I couldn't stay for long. I didn't like that I couldn't stay very long, but I had obligations and responsibilities, among them a marooned 19-year-old who got off work at 7.

Buses don't run back and forth through Pinch on the weekends.



I took the furniture back to my house, managed to get it put away and resolved to throw out things that would be replaced by the new stuff. The things I've put up -- my mother's table and chairs, the corner cabinets and her silverware -- have added a little maternal warmth to the kitchen.

It feels like part of her is here, but the house doesn't feel like home, not to me.

I hope it will for somebody else.

The Fifth Column

The deer have been a problem on Cavender Drive from the beginning. They will always be a problem until homeowners are allowed to include mines in their landscaping plans.

Of course, I didn’t always think so. The summer I moved here, I thought it was something magnificent to watch five or six of them graze in the yard across the road, watch them pull apples off the tree and go about their peaceful deer existence.

It was like something out of an old Disney film.

 

I stopped thinking so after I put in a garden.

The garden was my first real attempt to make a go at living here. As a boy, I remembered how my father had raised a garden. We’d had about half an acre and he’d converted maybe a quarter of that into mostly vegetables I didn’t much like, including zucchini, spaghetti squash, yellow squash, butternut squash, acorn squash and probably some other squash I’ve probably blocked out.

He also grew white corn –and hot peppers, which I once convinced my younger sister were carrots and then got her to eat one.

I figure if my father beat me, I probably deserved it.

As a child, I frequently deserved whatever violence was done to me. So much so that once, at a funeral for the father for one of my oldest friends, a cousin of the friend greeted me and said, "Don't I owe you an ass whooping?"

I shrugged and then said, "Probably."

I got off with a handshake.

Anyway, a garden was a way to mark the land, to tattoo it, to call it my own. I got myself a seed catalog, ordered my planned crops, which included, oddly enough, a couple varieties of squash –my 10-year-old self would have been appalled.

Winter fizzled out early and I got seeds in the ground early and everything was great. I had spinach and lettuce. I had beets, which I’d never really eaten before. By May, my tomatoes and peppers were thriving and then the deer showed up.

The antlered marauders wiped out my peppers and put a hurt on my tomatoes.

They did not, however, touch the zucchini squash or the pumpkins (which is another kind of squash).

I tried keeping them out. I put up fencing. They knocked it down. I hung tin cans on a string along the fence, put marbles in the cans to rattle when they tripped over it in hopes of frightening the deer off. They thought it was dinner music. I peed near the edge of the garden, thinking the smell might ward them off. They left mounds of deer poop in return.

In fact, the only reason my garden survived is because I put in a couple of ghost pepper plants, which the deer happily munched on, until they got hold of a single, ripe pepper.

I found that pepper a few feet from the garden, a discernible bite missing from it.

I laughed like a mad man.

The deer stayed gone the rest of the season, my tomatoes rallied and I did ok with the crops that survived.

I battled them again last year. Again, they did in the peppers, wiped out my eggplant and I never saw a single fava bean.

I didn't grow more ghost peppers. Other than as a biological weapon, they don't really have much of a use. You can't make salsa with them, take the stuff to parties, unless the point is a suicide pact.

This year, I’m using a spray that smells like a rancid baby diaper and probably tastes like a taco made from pickled human flesh. I’m also putting up new netting and may dig a trench around the tomatoes and fill it with sharpened spikes.

It seems like a lot of trouble to do all this, particularly since growing a garden seems counterproductive to my stated goal. It suggests an interest in staying and I argued about just that thing over the winter: Why grow anything if you’re not sure that you’ll be there to harvest it?

I guess because I don’t know.

There’s no telling how fast anything sells.

My Mom had a stroke a year and a half ago which left her with her mind, but wrecked her body. She can’t walk, can’t dress herself and has to rely on others for very basic needs.

Among other things, the stroke made her trade in her solidly middle-class four bedroom, two-bath house with a smallish kitchen, but a nice dining room for a double occupancy dorm room with a dementia patient for a roommate.

I need to add that I think she gets decent care. Also her friends come to visit her often at the nursing home. My sisters get their at least a couple of times a month and I visit maybe once every other month now.

Still, in order for her to continue to receive care there through Medicaid or Medicare or whatever, my sisters had to put Mom’s house up for sale. They had to just get it on the market, if only to show they were acting in good faith, but everyone was worried that the house wouldn’t sell. The house is old and it needed some work.

Expectations were low, but they put it on the market on a Tuesday and had an offer by Friday. That was last month. Closing is a week from now.  

It’s a good house in a nice neighborhood. I never knew how great it was until I lived in half the rat holes and dives I’ve lived in over the last 20 years. It was a palace compared to that trailer with the cardboard walls that shook and shuddered whenever a heavy truck went past the lot. It was a mansion next to the swampy, wasp-infested apartment I lived in with the gun-happy, junky neighbors next door.

I’ve lived in plenty of shitty places and next to even shittier people.

The house in Pinch isn’t so bad. I just can't afford it and just don't want to be there anymore. The people are friendly. Everybody waves, but they also leave you be. There's also a sheriff's deputy a couple of doors down. The police cruiser probably wards off meth addicts like a bulb of garlic keeps the vampires at bay and is helpful with pesky door-to-door salesmen.

Still, the old guy who had the house before me had it on the market for over two years before he discounted the price and people weren’t banging down the door to get in here even then. I'm hoping that's just the housing bubble collapse and the general stream of people leaving West Virginia, which would seem to me to make home buying more of a buyer's market than a seller's market locally.

But... we weren't fracking in West Virginia as much three years ago as we are now. Coal money is declining, butcertainly, any second now, this whole creative economy stuff I've been hearing about for the last 15 years is just about ready to catch on. Some hot shot video game designer is just dying to come live out in Pinch, telecommute to Istanbul or wherever quality first-person-shooters are made, and do battle in their off-time with the local deer population.

Maybe there will be four or five of them and there will be a bidding war. 

My dreams are made of this.

In the meantime, I've got reality. There isn’t a lot of wiggle room with my price, but I think the house is worth what I’m asking even if it takes a little while to get it. I’d rather whoever buys the place think it’s worth at least that, too.

So, if I have to wait a while, this isn’t a bad place to wait and if I have to wait, I’m prepared to battle the deer for a little while longer. At least, I’ll have plenty of squash to eat, and if I'm lucky, a few tomatoes.

Castaways

When I first got the house, I bought the old furniture of a co-worker with a couple of hundred bucks after she'd decided to leave the well-paying world of rural journalism for the drudgery of a Masters program in Seattle.

Not much had made the move from Charleston to Pinch and even after I bought the loveseat and chairs, the place seemed kind of empty. There was a lot of space to fill.

A few months later, I came into a little bit of money --not a lot of money --but a little. It was enough to pay my taxes, put three tires and new brakes on my recently purchased car, go on one truly epic grocery store spree (It was the only time in my life when I loaded a grocery cart and didn't think about whether I had enough in my account to cover it. We ate like princes --for a couple of days) and it bought some furniture.

It paid for a new mattress and box springs, a big heavy desk where I thought I'd finish one of my novels and an old couch I got from Habitat for Humanity.

I used the mattress and box springs every day, but nobody much liked the couch. It sat in the den, near the fireplace. Only the dogs liked to sit on it and then one of them took it in her head to occasionally water it, perhaps thinking it might grow into a sectional, and nobody wanted to sit on it.

The desk I filled with unimportant papers, various power cords to things I probably don't still own and other crap I couldn't figure out what else to do. A friend gave me a desktop computer, after I complained that I couldn't do much with this wonky, buggy laptop I'm writing on right now.

I plugged the desktop in, loaded it up with software and made a conscious effort not to hook it up to the internet: no distractions. It was simply going to be something I wrote on.

I turned it on two or three times and then buried the thing under Christmas stockings, record albums and a signed sketch by Jaime Hernandez.

As soon as I decided to put the house up on the market, I started thinking about what sort of place I'd likely find myself living in next.

Smaller.

The house is basically three bedrooms, two baths, a decent sized living room, a fairly spacious eat-in kitchen and a back room with the fireplace that's almost 1/3 the size of the rest of the place.

In another life, I imagined that room could have been used for entertaining. I might have put in a bar, a liquor cabinet and a table for poker games or other more nerdly pursuits. I might have picked up a pinball machine and got a jukebox.

I certainly thought about that.

Two doors lead from the room to the yard on one side and a covered patio on the other.

I talked about having friends up for cookouts a hundred times, but that never happened. I never invited anyone over. I can't say why.

Anyway, the next space I'll likely be in will probably be much smaller. Basic economics suggest that's likely. There won't be room for a funny smelling couch that nobody wants to sit on or a desk nobody ever writes on.

With a little help and quite a bit of swearing, I got those bulky, clunky and heavy things down the hill to the curb. The hardest part wasn't moving them it turned out, but the parting with them.

I am ever worrying about money, and I paid good money for those things, money I could have spent on things I needed more or things I might have used better. I considered how much money I'd blown trying to make this place fit me.

So much money wasted...

I've learned. My next place won't be like that.

Signing on the dotted line

The realtors came by Friday --Amber and Charessa --kind of a tag team effort.

I was still dragging stuff and shoving it out of sight when they pulled up: a piece of outdoor carpet from the porch, a length of water hose that had sat out on the patio since that last time I'd watered the pumpkin patch in October.

A minor selling point. Pumpkins grow like crazy here. Whoever buys this place, if they plant pumpkins and wait out in that pumpkin patch, I feel they have a pretty good chance of meeting The Great Pumpkin, who brings presents to all the good boys and girls.

I tried last year, but I'm sort of an asshole. He passes us by. Sally is still pissed.

Anyway, I probably should have put that up sooner.

"It looks nice," Charessa said. "You've got some flowers and some nice color."

Amber smiled brightly.

I nodded, tried to say something about the roses without mentioning the thorn I'd driven through my knuckle while trimming them back a few days before. I'd had to cut it out of my hand with a Gerber multi-tool that I'd bought myself because I like to believe I have the capacity for self-reliance and a 40 dollar pair of pliers you're supposed to carry everywhere with you is a symbol of that self-reliance.

Of course, I don't carry them everywhere. They look preposterous hanging on my belt, like a bat utility belt starter kit. Carrying them in my pocket is cumbersome and uncomfortable. They tend to drag shorts down and I can't imagine why I'd want them with a pair of swimming trunks.

So, my self-reliance is stored in a drawer, along with the clippers I use to trim my little dog's nails.

Charessa ambled around the property looking for good angles of the house to shoot with her camera. Amber walked me through the contract.

Amber was who sold me the house in the first place. I went with who I knew. She'd seemed honest back when my ed and I had looked at houses to buy, had told us which ones wouldn't qualify for the kind of loan we could get. She'd been positive and friendly and I've been stressed about selling the place for weeks.

It was pretty painless. We went through a little paperwork. I checked little boxes, which was wrong, and then went back and initialed my name next to different statements and declarations concerning my knowledge of the house. I knew about as much as I knew when I got the place --except of course, I'd thought the property was smaller when I bought it.

My next door neighbor explained that much to me about two months into the mowing season during my first Spring.

"Do you know where the property line is?" She asked and I'd pointed to one place.

She'd shaken her head and pointed quite a ways down further and up.

I recall my actual words.

"Oh, shit."

I only have a push mower. 

The upside was that the blueberry bushes were mine --and the birds'.

Amber got me through the paper work, explained that the contract was for six months, told me about how some people try to cheat the realtor out of their commission toward the end of the contract by getting buyers to wait a few weeks after the contract ended.

There was some sort of a clause in the contract that prevented that, not that I was interested in cheating her out of her rate. My goal is only to get out of the house, pay whatever fees and taxes associated with that and move on to some other place that suits me better, costs me less money and time, and doesn't have any personal baggage.

I agreed to list it at $109,000, which basically does just that.

Anyway, we all hoped I'd be out before six months.

Taking Ownership

I used to think that my father told me, "The things you own, end up owning you."

He didn't, actually. It's a line from "Fight Club," but my dad says things like that and it's been a thought in my head for ages.

Over the last couple of days, I've been doing a lot of cleaning and grooming --my realtors who may be reading could very well be shaking their head. I'm not the neatest guy anybody has met. I don't think of how I live as dirty, but I do gravitate toward cluttered.

I have a lot of books. Most of them will never get read because I am a devoted patron of my public library and usually lug about 25 pounds of books home every other week or so.

There have never been more than four coffee drinkers in this house at any one time. Yet, I have over a dozen coffee mugs. I also have a wide variety of kitchen gadgets. The good ones, like my Kitchenaid mixer, I use at least once a month. The crappy ones, like an Oster food chopper, I haven't used since George Bush was president --and like W., the only thing it regularly accomplished was making an impossible mess.

I keep clothes I can't wear any more and probably wouldn't wear if I could and somehow, some way. I have CDs from college, back when my musical leanings were even more suspect than they are now.

I have tax documents that go back 15 years and, inexplicably, fast food receipts from four years ago. How or why I kept them, I don't know.

The yard wasn't so great either. The previous owner installed several really cute garden beds and put in a couple of posts to hang flags --he also put a big wooden cross six feet from the front door. You could probably display a banner to let the King know the knights of the round table were welcome to stop by --maybe-- but it looked like a big cross to me; not quite big enough to crucify a full-grown man, but certainly a dwarf or elf.

I'd never liked the thing, but in three years I'd also done nothing about it.

I'd also done next to nothing to maintain the flower beds. Oh sure, I talked a nice game when it came to my vegetable garden out back, but I'd let the tiger lilies and the rag weed battle it out on their own in the front. If the rose bush wanted to make a play for the driveway --I could care less.

But now that I wanted to sell the place, it was brought to my attention that I needed to care. I needed to care that I was quietly becoming a hoarder and that my yard was becoming a jungle fun land and future nesting ground for snakes and prehistoric reptiles.

"Babe," my girlfriend said. "You have to show people the possibility. It doesn't have to be perfect..."

But it needed to be better than it was. I had to give them a reason to want to live here.

In the first week, I removed six leaf bags of yard waste. The week after that, I did six more. The week after that, I felt guilty about the amount of extra trash I was leaving for the waste management company and tossed four bags, plus a couple of boxes full of stuff from the house into a dumpster --plus I left two bags for the truck.

This week, I left out eight bags.

They took two.

Bastards.

Over the last couple of days, I've washed floors, scrubbed counters and thrown away all kinds of things I didn't even really remember I had. I've stumbled across papers and memories, some of them unpleasant --there's nothing like re-reading a letter written nervously from jail or finding that last birthday card your grandma sent you when her handwriting looked so weak or half a dozen other things that we keep that we never mean to, but don't discard because it means having to look at them one more time.

Some of them had owned me, but they were all just the ghosts of ghosts; not even proper haunts, but what was left over when the spirit had moved on --practically nothing.

I threw it all out and then told the realtor I was ready to put the house on the market.

How I got here

In order to go forward, I have to repeat a story I've retold to the point where it feels like a worn-out joke.

I never wanted the house. Seriously.

I tell people this and nobody believes me.

"But you've got all that space," the say. "And it's out of town. And you own it..."

Mostly, these are people I know who rent, who like me have rented for years and years. Buying a home is one of the great jewels in American accomplishment,

But I never wanted that --at least, I didn't really want this house.

I bought the house in 2011. It was a long and grueling process. My wife at the time had been very keen on us having a place. There were reasons for that. She wanted roots. She wanted space to do art. She wanted some place kind of away from so many people. She wanted security and ownership and being part of a permanent community.

I didn't disagree with any of that. To rent is to lose money. I'm not stupid, but she was thinking farther out in the country. I was thinking conveniently located on the bus line with easy access to stuff like groceries, booze and food delivered by people who have already calculated the tip.

We looked at a couple of places. The one she wanted was way, way out in the sticks, where the nearest neighbors were cows and horses. It was 16 acres up a narrow, winding road and located across from a little, white church that gave me the creeps.

She loved the place, but the bank wouldn't finance it. The land was fine, but the house had a laundry list of things that needed to be fixed --I think in the bank's view, it would have been better just to scrape the building from the earth and erect a tent.

She was heartbroken --me, not so much.

The next couple of places we looked at were either just as bad or didn't fit what we thought we wanted and needed. One of them, near the highway, smelled like a funeral home and felt spooky, but mostly, they just didn't fit.

The last two places were similar -three bedrooms, a couple of bathrooms with big yards and lots of storage. The place I preferred was in Cross Lanes, on one side of the county, but very near shopping and traffic. There was a bar a quarter mile down the road. The local casino wasn't far either.

The bus line, which has been helpful in the past, was just a few blocks away.

The one she thought she could live with was on the other side of the county in a place called Pinch, an unincorporated town with not much more than a gas station, a pizza place and a hardware store.

I went along with it because the house hunt had been incredibly stressful. I just wanted it finished. I was tired of looking, tired of talking about it and tired of the relentless tension --and it didn't seem like such a bad place. We talked over what we'd do if we got it, how we'd divide the space up between the two of us.

I wanted a place to write. She wanted a place to do art, write, sew, whatever. She wanted the little wood shop for that, while I thought the tiny little pantry in the back of the house with plain walls and no windows would be a good place to finish my book.  

I was going to grow a garden. There were (are) fruit trees. The yard seemed big enough for kids to play in. It had a nice sized kitchen and a fire place.

It was the middle-class American dream.

After more hurdles and hassles with getting financed (that's another post), we got the place at the sweltering end of June. We weren't even unpacked when the marriage came to an abrupt, but quiet, anticlimactic end.

About a month later, she moved out --moved out to the place with 16 acres, out in the sticks that made me so uneasy. The owner contacted her out of the blue about renting it to her with the vague idea of maybe selling the property to her later.

That was a strange bit of serendipity, an omen, maybe. She got the place she wanted and I got the house neither of us wanted in Pinch. 

In the spring, I planted a garden. I bought some furniture, made apple butter from my own homegrown apples, made as much noise as I wanted, and have been totally unconcerned about what the neighbors think of me --clearly: I don't have a working dryer and my underwear gets hung up in the backyard (For those of you into that kind of thing, I'll post a schedule).

I've mowed the lawn a million times and enjoyed a certain amount of serenity, reading books near the front window overlooking my front yard, but there's been very little contentment. I do not sleep easily and the place wears me out, if only because the fit has been so uneasy. 

I have written almost nothing worthwhile since I've been there. My other blog mostly dried up and my novels have turned into wastelands where I simply re-write the same eight pages over and over different ways.

Living there has become a kind of paralysis creatively; in my personal life; professionally --just about in every way I can think of.

It's not just the time and the oh-so-precious writer crap, but there's the money. While I got a pretty good deal on my mortgage (thanks to the housing bubble collapse and the attempts to resuscitate the market), it's still a bit more than I can pay. There isn't much left over, less now that I have health insurance again, less now with the cost of everything else steadily going up except my wages, which have barely changed in almost a decade. 


I've been thinking about putting the house up for sale almost from the time it became mine officially, when the deed was officially signed over. It's just taken me this long to do anything about it.