Stories I'd Tell in Bars

by Jen Lancaster

  Tuesdays are the best.

  Now, a caveat about hate-watching – it’s a misnomer. Having affection for the show you hate-watch is key. I don’t want to spend time consuming anything I don’t like because life’s too short. Fletch and I never critique Chicago Fire because it’s bad; parts are exceptional. Instead, we’re more like Statler and Waldorf on the balcony at the Muppet Show, shouting constructive criticism where the program should be better, i.e. the episode where Severide blithely rifled through a suspected drug house without ever acknowledging his was an illegal search. We’d both turned into Arrested Development’s Lucille Bluth that night, shouting, “Get a warrant!” between bites of fried pickles.

  We’d missed having something to mock, so we hoped Tiny House Hunters might take Chicago Fire’s place during hiatus. Luckily, the two episodes I’d already seen were an anomaly, as everything that came after was prime material.

  I suddenly understood Facebook’s collective scorn when we saw the episode where two assholes decided to abandon their sprawling suburban property for a tiny home on in a secluded mountain range… with their pack of huge mutts.

  “They’re basically buying a dog house,” Fletch said, gesturing towards the screen with a French fry. “If we turn sixty and decide, “Hey, let’s live in a dog house!” Then we’ve made a lifetime of bad decisions.”

  “At least they didn’t pawn off their pets at a shelter,” I replied. While I reviled the tiny home buyers, their pups did seem to be delighted with the new digs. “I feel like the dogs are happy living so close with their pack.”

  He said, “These morons have a dorm fridge and a single pantry shelf! You know much food they can store? Two days’ worth. The first blizzard is gonna hit and they’ll be stranded up there and their precious dogs are going to eat the owners’ faces. Mark my words.”

  He was probably not wrong.

  I fully embraced the hate after an episode where two smug hipsters blathered on about how wasteful living in anything but a tiny house is.

  “They are the worst,” I said.

  “America’s still the Land of the Free, which means if I want to heat and cool a superfluous guest room, that is my business,” Fletch said.

  That set of hipsters was not actually the worst. Instead, we passed the crown to the two who decided to live in a camper. Not a tiny, mobile house, but an actual old-school, toilet-in-the-shower, see-you-on-the-open-road, hundred-and-forty-square-foot camper.

  “Do you get the feeling that the girlfriend in this scenario isn’t going to stick around for long? The guy seemed way more into everything than she did,” Fletch said.

  “She kept gritting her teeth. She’s going to meet an investment banker with a Manhattan townhouse and a summer house in the Hamptons and she’ll leave his sorry ass so fast,” I replied once I swallowed the Kalamata olive from my Greek salad. “How do the toilet/shower combos work in those little campers, exactly? The ‘wet baths?’ Wouldn’t the seat always be damp? How do you keep the toilet paper dry when the whole room’s a shower?”

  Fletch bit into his Vinnie Burgerino [double beef, mozzarella, and giardiniera, delish!] and shrugged.

  I added, “At least they have an actual toilet. Remember the people last week with the dry-flushing? Ugh.”

  The dry-flush model is even more disturbing than the wet bath or the composting toilet, another popular choice in tiny homes. Composting systems entail eliminating in a hole and then covering the contents with wood chips, which aids in the process of biodegrading. With dry flushing, there’s not even any wood buffer between you and your business. Instead, waste is encapsulated in a plastic bag and then it just sits there in the cartridge, mere inches below the seat, each deposit steadfastly awaiting your return – much like a faithful hunting dog – before you finally dig in and collect everything, reunited once more before bidding the whole lot a proper goodbye.

  As for me, once I’m done going… well, I want it gone, not someday, but right this damn minute. I’m talking Viking funeral here, one flush and it’s off to Valhalla. I don’t want my own personal refuse hanging around like some regrettable Spring Break hook-up who can’t take a hint.

  And there I was, thinking sharing a sink was bad.

  With each progressive episode, we marveled over the potential buyers’ expectations. We contemplated creating a drinking game for every time someone complained about the lack of closet space, but quickly realized our livers couldn’t process that much alcohol. “The whole thing is a closet!” we’d holler. We loved all the ridiculous objections, too, such as, “Where shall I keep my antique samovar collection?” “Bitch, please,” we’d say. “You have room for two juice glasses and a spork.”

  One night while Fletch was out of town, I discovered a cache of episodes on Netflix from a previous season. I grabbed a bowl of popcorn and settled in. I planned on watching each chronologically, until I stumbled across this gem of an episode description:

  Family of Six Goes Tiny

  “This is going to be good,” I thought. I considered waiting for Fletch to come home so we could watch together, but the potential siren song of stupid was too great.

  The family decided they needed to abandon their comfortable, gracious twenty-five-hundred-square-foot home in lieu of a tiny house. They were aiming for one hundred square feet of space per person. The family hoped to grow closer in the experience and wanted to decrease their footprint.

  I abhorred them with both passion and immediacy.

  Here’s the thing – I care about the melting ice caps. I do. I want to protect the environment as much as the next person. It’s my moral imperative as a human being to monitor my own consumption, to conserve, to be mindful. The thing is? By opting to be childfree, I’m responsible for zero population growth. My biological line ends here.

  I’m it.

  I’m the only branch on a tree that dies with me.

  Yes, while I do have a superfluous guest room, I’ve never bought a disposable diaper. I don’t load up landfills with broken plastic toys and abandoned athletic gear after my fickle progeny decided lacrosse is for losers. Pre-packaged Lunchables, bottle liners, Gogurts? Never put any of those in my shopping cart. I’m not spending all day, every day for an entire decade in a giant SUV, as I ferry little people to soccer practice or ballet recitals or math tutors. There are many days where I don’t even use the car, and when I do, it’s just to zip the three miles to the gym or grocery store. I can go six weeks without refilling my gas tank. Also, my house stays parked in the same place so I’ll never burn precious fossil fuel to move it when I feel wanderlust. In actual numbers, my not having a child saves more than nine thousand metric tons of carbon. That’s why I’m very unhappy when people like the smug bastards in this episode feel compelled to lecture me about my ecological obligations.

  Motherfuckers have four kids.

  While enthusiastic procreation is absolutely their right, if each of them has four kids, and then they have four kids, and so on and so on like that campy old shampoo commercial, the family tree expands out to infinity, which will result in a metric shit-ton of beings eventually consuming resources like so many locusts. So kindly get off my jock if I don’t choose to share a sink with my spouse.

  As I watched, I noticed that the four children were profoundly less enthusiastic than their folks about the prospect of living in a tiny house. They each wore the same shell-shocked expression that I’d donned when the certified Sub-Zero repairman handed me his estimate.

  Those poor things.

  I got the feeling that it’s them who are obligated to be the grown-ups in their family. Even the Realtor in the episode was, like, “You’re not seriously doing this, right?”

  The parents toured a handful of properties, each worse than the one before, not just in terms of size, but also regarding condition. One of them didn’t even have a bathroom, only an outhouse.

  Which means no sink what-so-goddamned-ever.

  In two out of the three homes, the four c
hildren would have to share a bedroom with their parents.

  Share a bedroom with their parents.

  I’m sorry, did we lose a war or something?

  On the bright side, whatever money they’d save on mortgage payments could go directly to the therapists tasked with fixing the kids after hearing their folks celebrate their love on the futon across from them.

  Listen, lots of kids grow up angry or resentful with their family for something. It’s my opinion that while this is inevitable, it’s the parents’ job not to throw gas on the fire. And making your offspring share a bedroom with you is a spark and a puddle of Kerosene.

  At least each of the houses under consideration were terrestrial-based, and not on wheels, which meant they’d have their own yard. That was something, at least.

  While I still quietly appreciate a home with mobility, inevitably the other Tiny House buyers end up parking on a family member’s lawn. Across the country, thousands of unwitting brothers and sisters are sipping their gins-and-tonic through clenched teeth at their tennis clubs, wondering if they’re ever, ever going to get their idiot siblings off their grass.

  My guess is no.

  The fourteen-year-old seemed to be taking the downsizing the hardest. I hope that when she pleads her case to become an emancipated minor, she’ll use the footage from this episode.

  [I kid you not, my mind is still reeling at the idea of six people and one sink. I swear to you, I’d rather be two girls and one cup than six people and one sink.]

  Each show ends with a jump forward in time so we can see the family adjusting to life in their tiny house. Author Chuck Wendig predicts that every tiny house purchase conducted by couples will eventually end in murder-suicide, but our outlook is slightly less grim. Fletch and I envision more of a divorce scenario or the purchase of a second tiny house, which will live next to the original on some long-suffering sister’s lanai.

  For the family of six, they all came across as happy in the last scene of the episode and the parents did a fine job of maximizing every inch of space.

  Truth? I was impressed.

  This family was able to eke three bedrooms from a house that had only one, without adding any square footage. I’m sure plenty of folks in big cities live in more confined quarters, without benefit of backyard. While this isn’t my choice, I can see how it works for them.

  Of course, the cynic in me wonders if the kids are truly content, or if they’re just resigned. I’m curious if the oldest girl keeps a calendar in her corner of the bedroom that she shares with her sister, up there under the eaves where standing is an impossibility, if she quietly marks off each square until freedom, waiting for the day that she won’t have to wait in a line six-deep to wash her paws.

  To her, I say that when she grows up, she’s allowed to inhabit the world in any manner she’d like, spread out as much as she wants. I hope she has fifty sinks to herself, if that’s her jam. If she’d rather live like free-range cattle, as opposed to a veal calf, it’s all up to her. In fact, she can have as many superfluous guest rooms as she might fancy. When this girl yearns for a big swimming pool and a rolling green lawn, then go for it, with budget and imagination as her only limitations. The one piece of advice I’d offer is that she locks the fence that goes around her yard. Because I guarantee someone in that family will try to park a tiny house out there.

  When Fletch texted to say that he’d landed and would Uber home from the airport, I placed an order from Seamless. Then I tidied up because nothing says “Welcome Home!” like a hot meal and clean house.

  I didn’t touch his bathroom, though.

  Because his sink was his problem.

  FLETCH’S LAST WORD:

  Two things:

  1) I only skimmed through this, but the point is people need space. Notice most people moving into tiny houses are either single, newly paired with their significant others, or hermits.

  2) My father joined the Army Air Corps in 1944 after working as a coal miner. He flew over thirty missions in a B-17 over Nazi-occupied Europe, and lost two crew members on their last run. Then he came home and went back to work in the coal mine, and lived in a house with no indoor plumbing when he married my mother who gave birth to my eldest sister. He did not do that so idiots could live in a closet and shit in a bag.

  Ten

  The Champagne Of Sports

  “I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.”

  - Winston Churchill

  I’m a Miller High Life kind of gal.

  I love fruity tropical drinks while on vacation. However, when I’m home, there’s nothing better on a hot summer day than to float around the pool with my Kindle in its protective plastic coating, slowly sipping a red Solo cup full of the Champagne of Beer.

  Because I’m a philistine, I’m not above adding ice, either.

  High Life’s the official beverage of Poolyball, a game that Fletch and I created. This sport’s the bastard lovechild of volleyball and water polo, but there’s so much more to it.

  To backtrack, a couple of years ago, I sent Fletch to Target to buy Fourth of July supplies. We weren’t having our usual party because our dogs had fallen out and we weren’t yet sure how to manage them around company. Because I knew we’d be alone, I’d asked Fletch to buy something “fun.” I figured he’d pick up a big float or a couple of squirt guns.

  When he returned home, I was outside watering flowers. He announced, “I bought something fun!” and before I could turn around, he pelted me in the kidney with a freaking cannonball. Said cannonball then bounced into my prize Peace Rose bush and bent a cane.

  “What the hell was that?” I shouted.

  “I bought you a dodge ball!” he replied. “You wanted something fun, I bought something fun.”

  “A ruptured spleen is not fun. A dodge ball is especially not fun,” I groused, trying to mend the crooked stalk.

  Fletch just stood there, grinning like a loon, bouncing his stupid rubber instrument of torture.

  “P.S.?” I added. “I still have nightmares about junior high dodge ball.” Dodge ball was the third amigo in the unholy trinity of what was wrong with seventh grade, which also included getting my period while wearing white pants and being hassled by the mean ninth grade girls who threw tampons at me, after having had my period in white pants.

  [Did I make the situation better for myself by retorting to said ninth graders that they lacked creativity, as this exact thing had happened to Carrie in Stephen King’s novel of the same name? Did I improve the situation when I then feigned surprise at their ability to read at all?]

  [Oh, I think you can do the math, gentle reader, perhaps ascertaining that I wasn’t always a “victim” so much as someone who “didn’t know when to shut the fuck up” and, on occasion, in fact “asked for it.”]

  Still, dodge ball took the whole shame crown and scepter back in 1979, as it was multifaceted in all the ways in which it mortified. First, there was the humiliation of getting picked last for a team. Every. Damn. Time. Then, there was the degradation of being hit square in the tinted glasses, especially painful when the blows came from one’s own team. (There was nothing friendly about that fire.) The topping on the whole shit sandwich was having to get bare-ass naked in an open shower bay with twelve out of twenty-four girls who openly loathed me for making my team lose. Let me just say this – Heidi Klum, who I imagine looks fantastic in her birthday suit – might have left that locker room in tears, too.

  Good times.

  Fletch promised, “You’ll see, this is gonna be great.”

  I said, “I doubt that,” and returned to my roses.

  By mid-afternoon on a quiet Fourth, Fletch was restless. He wasn’t satisfied at the prospect of floating and reading and sipping. He grabbed the dodge ball and began tossing it into the air.

  “You wanna play?” he asked.

  “Play what?” I replied. “I can’t throw or catch and I can only kick with one leg.” I was still in physical the
rapy for my Achilles at the time. “What does that leave us?”

  “Maybe you can kind of swat at the ball in the pool?”

  “I guess?”

  “Lemme crank the tunes and we can figure out something.”

  He’d recently seen an episode of Mockpocalypse about ‘70s Yacht Rock, so he put together a playlist heavy on Boz Scaggs, Steely Dan, Pablo Cruise, the Eagles, and all things Michael McDonald.

  Turns out, music is key for Poolyball.

  We’ve since determined that you must listen to Yacht Rock for Poolyball. Yacht Rock is a big, fat audible Quaalude, washed down with a glass of sangria, laced with trace amounts of cocaine. Yacht Rock is a summer breeze blowing through your mustache and up your bell-bottoms. Yacht Rock smells like Coppertone and piña coladas and Sex Panther.

  Yacht Rock is the boss.

  SiriusXM agrees; they even have their own channel from Memorial Day to Labor Day now. And don’t get all bullshitty, trying to substitute Ski Lodge Rock, because half the fun of Poolyball is the Yacht Rock discussion, marveling over exactly how many songs included pan flute solos back then.

  Fletch and I began to toss the ball back and forth and I was shocked to realize that I could not only kind of catch, but also sort of throw. My time in the gym had afforded me enough body awareness so that I was no longer completely uncoordinated. I was a partial Poindexter at best. Had someone been picking teams for gym class, I’d have been selected in the bottom third. Yassss!

  The beauty of Poolyball is you don’t have to throw or catch. Instead, you can bat, you can bear-paw, you can stick your foot out of the water and kick, you can head-butt all Mel Gibson-style in Lethal Weapon. Whichever way you choose to propel the ball from one end of the court to the other is A-okay.