Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home

by Matthew Batt

  Stanley doesn’t make a big deal out of any of our requests and promises he’ll have them all fixed up, but it is embarrassing and exposes our real, raw ignorance. What’s the risk of an improperly grounded outlet or a poorly sistered stud? We don’t know and nobody is telling us anything other than “Don’t worry.” But all we hear is the last word. Worry worry worry.

  When the day of the closing arrives, we find Stanley already at the title company with his youngest son, Stanley III, who looks like a smaller version of himself, right down to the short-short jean shorts.

  Like the inspector and the realtor, the title or “abstract” company did something inexplicable that costs a lot of money. The place smells, feels, and looks like an orthodontist’s office and features inspirational photos of birds of prey on the walls, with semi-socialist words below them like “teamwork” and “dedication.”

  A tall blond woman wearing a tight, low-cut tank top minces her way into the reception area, flips her hair over her shoulders like a pole dancer, and smiles at Stanley and Stanley III. “Gentlemen,” she says.

  “Ma’am,” Stanley says. Stanley III puts his hands in his lap.

  She places a basket of individually wrapped cookies and chips on the glass table.

  “Please do help yourself,” she says, as though there’s another way they are usually dispensed.

  She takes Stanley and his son into an adjoining room to have a seller’s chat, and Jenae and I try not to get stuck to the vinyl couch. It doesn’t feel like the big day it is supposed to be. In fact, it feels like things can go south at a moment’s notice and we’ll be living out of Jenae’s Beetle instead of moving into a home of our own.

  “Chips Ahoy?” Jenae offers. “For that special occasion?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  The abstract woman comes to get us and brings with her a spiky-haired man in a cardigan, braces, and a Bluetooth headset who is, from what I can gather, talking to his orthodontist. He waves to us but stares into that alternate dimension where people look while they’re on the phone.

  “He’s your Sully for the day,” the woman says.

  Stanley nods toward the snack basket. “Those really free?”

  “Only today,” she says. She spreads her fingers across the glass table as if she has just painted her nails and is either really proud of them or afraid of smearing the wet polish. They are, all ten of them, little American flags. “Ready set go?”

  “Heck yes,” Stanley says. Stanley III is staring at the woman’s cleavage.

  Jenae and I nod meekly.

  Our substitute Sully is still on the phone. We look at him for direction.

  “Oh, hey, yeah,” he says. “Go get ’em.” He gives us a big thumbs-up.

  2

  Execute ye judgment and righteousness,

  and deliver the spoiled out of the hand

  of the oppressor, and do no wrong . . .

  If ye will not hear these words, I swear

  by myself, saith the Lord, that this house

  shall become a desolation.

  —JEREMIAH 22

  Gathering Jacks

  WE ARE ON 13th East, northbound, stuck in traffic on a Sunday, not quite arguing about where we are going to eat. One of us is talking about how fat we are. How fat we have become. It could have been either of us. It isn’t really true.

  My grandma has been dead for four months. Cases of cheap domestic beer and vials of Viagra now litter my grandfather’s condo. When he isn’t with Ruth in Indianapolis, he’s with Tonya in Hales Corners, on the rough south side of Milwaukee. He has just sort of bought us a house, though, and that is supposed to make it all better. It wasn’t the first house we really wanted. It wasn’t even the second house we really wanted. It was the first house we didn’t really want but thought we could get. It feels a little like a loss, and we have a hell of a lot of work to do that is well beyond our ken.

  The sun is brutalizing us in Jenae’s VW. There is a lot of traffic for a Sunday morning, when, because everyone is in church, only tumbleweeds and apostates freely roam the streets. We drive to our new house and go right on by. In a clear plastic cup the keys sit, like all the leftover ones from the junk drawer we lack the confidence to throw away, fearing they are the only way to open something unremembered and locked.

  We are having the low-blood-sugar conversation we tend to have on Sunday mornings. The not pretty talk tinged with mild hangovers and the concussive August sun. Food is all anybody ever wanted. Food and shelter. But we are fat, somebody is saying. And we have a house we don’t particularly know what to do with. We certainly don’t want to go inside it again without a plan and some masks.

  In the lane next to ours is a guy on a Kawasaki Ninja, his left turn signal pulsing almost in time with the throbbing in my temples. He has tattoos up and down both his arms, but I can only see the right one, close to us, which seems to be decorated with a tribal design. In front of the Ninja guy is a minivan, and he keeps craning his neck, trying to see around it, though there’s nothing to see, just the empty light-rail tracks and a red traffic signal.

  I am rapt by the Ninja guy’s tattoos. But the problem with tattoos is that they’re on somebody’s body, at which one is generally not met with equanimity for staring. Even beautiful people tend to discourage onlookers from staring at their forearms or chests or what have you for more than a glance. But try not looking at someone’s tattoo. You can’t do it. You can’t not look. And then you feel—even if you don’t like what you see—a bit jealous. I could get a tattoo, you think. But I probably won’t, you admit. Or you’ll get, as I did one lame spring break, a little star on your ankle, at which the tattoo artist, Lou, in my case, will scoff at you and say, “Shit, I’ll have you in and out of here like a wedding dick on a honeymoon,” and it all will have been somehow worthwhile. A mistake, to be sure, but one with a story and at least a hint of decisiveness. Usually, after all, we don’t get to choose our scars.

  Most of us—like my wife and I—can’t even decide where we want to have one stupid meal on one stupid Sunday morning. Breakfast food? Brunch food? Should we pick someplace popular like Ruth’s, where the waitlist is long enough so that by the time we’d be seated we could have breakfast or lunch? Or should we slum it at the International House of Pancakes with all the letter-jacket jocks and their freshly deflowered girlfriends wearing awkward prescription glasses because their eyes are too puffy to get their contacts in? There’s always the Training Table, which was locally famous for having, instead of table service, phones at each table—a concept popular with, well, no one, but they make up for it in bacon. Or if you’re in the mood to hang out with the polygamists who can’t resist bringing all the kids and wives for the onion rings and fry sauce (a local abomination of roughly equal parts ketchup and mayonnaise), then Hires Big H drive-in is definitely the place.

  Good or bad, even this guy on the Ninja has made some decisions, and his body is the proof. I wonder what I would look like with a bunch of tattoos, snaking up and down my arms like the result of a bad breakup or a threat made good. His look something like lightning, something like smoke.

  Jenae and I are silent. Nevertheless, we have settled on lunch at B & D Burgers by campus. I never suggest it; she never asks for it. It’s an understood default. If you’ve got the stomach, they’ve got the zucchini fries, and it’s guaranteed to be Mormon-free on a Sunday morning because the most people they can seat at any table is four, and, well, it’s Sunday. The place is just the other side of 5th South, and we are practically there.

  Salt Lake Sundays, when you’re not a Mormon, make you feel a bit like a refugee. You sort of wander around, not really having a handle on the language or the customs, but knowing enough to recognize the signs you should stay away from. Places that say “Visitors Welcome” but don’t say when. Places that say “A Family Favorite” but have baroque-framed pictures of horrifying presidents in the window. Places that say “A Utah Original.” Places where the parking lot look
s like a conversion-van dealership.

  The rest of the week you can pretend you live somewhere else. Stay close to the English department. Watch cable TV. Read the New York Times—especially the Dining and Wine section, which in local papers would be Buffet and Pop. Shop at adult bookstores. Drink imported (meaning regular-strength) beer. Smoke. For what it’s worth, all you have to do to make yourself anathema in Utah is drink coffee. Hell, regular Coke would pretty much do. All are strictly verboten in the Mormon Church.

  I always work at the restaurant on Saturday nights, and after toiling for eight or ten nonstop hours at culinary hostage negotiations, I’m always amped up until two or three in the morning. By the time I get home I need a drink and some time and space to just sit and watch Austin City Limits or Antiques Roadshow. Without gin and PBS, I’m not sure anybody would survive working in a restaurant and waking up in Salt Lake City.

  After lunch, rather than CD or shoe shopping, we plan on hitting the renovation stores for ideas. Instead of going to places where we would need to remind aggressively indifferent teenagers that they were at work, we go to where adults skilled in trades would dare us to do the same. Appliance stores. Carpet stores. Hardware stores. Stores that sell the stuff with which you make other stores. Stores that are so big they have different climate zones. Stores that have more raw than finished material being trucked around by kamikaze forklift operators. It’s not every store where you can get killed if the merchandise falls on you.

  In light of the “aesthetic issues” the inspector has pointed out (as though they aren’t as apparent as sunlight in a mineshaft), we have decided to basically gut the house. We are throwing out the old carpet/litter box. The avocado stove and refrigerator. The asbestos-flavored, paisley-patterned linoleum. The imitation knotty pine glued-on veneer cabinet doors. The imitation knotty pine glued-on veneer walls. The margarine-colored, faux brass-accented plastic countertop. The marigold-painted tinfoil shed out back. The rusted-through water heater featuring an exposed flame. The small oil refinery they once called a furnace that takes up the entire basement. That’s for starters. We don’t know where—if—it will end.

  I like to think of myself as something of an expert consumer. That is, when I set out to buy something, I try to do as my grandma taught me: buy the best once. Of course, I know as she did that there is rarely a product that is hands down the best for everyone, everywhere. But I can usually figure out what that means for me.

  Not so with the house. Not in Salt Lake anyway. Other cities might have services to help consumers, but in Salt Lake everybody gets the skinny at church. There are no other options. You can’t just pick up Consumer Reports to figure out what the best HVAC people are in your area. What you can tell is who advertises the most, who drives the most conspicuous vans, and who has the most of what they call “Big Sales Events” but appear to be their perpetual jacked-up-then-superficially-slashed prices. But you also quickly realize that no matter who you eventually contract to do the work or deliver the goods, there is a whole netherworld of subcontractors and sub-subcontractors that drive the pedophile-ready, ratty-but-anonymous white IRA vans with the tinted windows and stickers hailing long-dead stock-car martyrs.

  We soon find ourselves adrift in a shopping world where it is virtually impossible to tell what you are going to get from whom. But that doesn’t stop us from shopping around and making arbitrary decisions based not on research and analysis but rather on fatigue and heat exhaustion.

  We have a month left on our lease. We figure that will be plenty of time. Still waiting for the light to turn green, Jenae makes a partial list. All we need to do in a month is:

  Pack

  2. Change locks

  Replace some carpet

  Tear up the rest

  Replace meth-stained light fixtures

  Replace cabinets

  Replace sink (just the kitchen one—

  the bathroom one is all right)

  Replace appliances

  Do something about the countertop

  Replace furnace

  Replace water heater

  Tear down shed

  Replace garage door

  Dig out old “garden”

  (stumps and dirt piled against garage door)

  Replace windows

  Replace kitchen floor

  Sand the hardwoods

  Worry about laundry room

  Paint

  and, of course,

  We have roughly thirty days to take care of that list before our lease is up. And shop for all of the above. And work full time. And we don’t even know what to do about lunch.

  I still can’t make out the tattoos on the guy on the motorcycle, so I nose an inch closer to the car in front of us. The guy keeps twisting his throttle, flexing and tensing his forearm. The minivan in front of him blocks his view and he seems eager to get around it.

  The light finally changes and they get the green arrow to turn left, and he twists his throttle and kicks his bike into gear while we wait for our own light to go straight. Everybody in the two turning lanes eases forward, and suddenly both lanes light up with brake lights and the guy on the bike nearly goes over his handlebars he stops so fast. He settles back down and it isn’t clear what’s going on because the drivers can see that they have the green arrow. And then I hear what I could swear is a doorbell, and Jenae says something, and I haven’t had any coffee yet and I just want to be out of the car so I can eat my freaking hamburger and zucchini fries and maybe a butterscotch shake and gird up and go to the goddamned Home Depot.

  And then I see it: the Trax light-rail train. The left-turning car is flying through the intersection without any apparent intent or ability to stop. “Oh my God,” Jenae says, and the minivan in front of the motorcycle keeps turning left downhill, kind of gunning it but not nearly fast enough—it’s turning—turning away from the train coming from uphill and to our right and the train is finally braking but that obviously isn’t going to work in time, sparks or not, and in a second nothing is going to matter at all. The train rings its cheery bell again but it’s far too late for anybody to do anything.

  Jenae throws her face into her hands as though we are the ones about to be hit.

  Two years ago, I saw an accident that involved a couple of fairly slow-moving cars. It was a head-on collision, but the turning car wasn’t even moving five miles an hour and the driver of the oncoming car was able to slam on his brakes so that the impact was abrupt but minimal. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

  The glass from the headlights exploded into the air, and for just a second, though I was passing in the curb lane traveling at thirty miles an hour, everything was perfectly still. There was no other traffic, no sound. It was as if time had been momentarily gathered in the space of that collision, like a pair of jacks in a fist, and nothing moved. The air spun slowly with the finest particles of glass blown from the pulverized headlights. The cars bowed into each other, head to head, their rear tires lifted slightly off the ground, the only things spinning.

  And then the jacks dropped, and then came the concussion of metal and air bags and the horns and the screeching. But for a single moment it was sublime. It was terrible. It was beautiful. I didn’t want to be in awe, but I was.

  The train, however, strikes the minivan between the passenger side front and rear doors and pushes it from the middle of the intersection fifty feet downhill. The train has this rectangular metal front bumper about the size of a filing cabinet, and it rams the van precisely in the middle of the door so that it can’t slide off or around but instead stays mounted right there on the front of that train like its own hood ornament.

  They finally stop, the car sloughs off the bumper, and then nothing happens. Because of the glare, I can’t see the conductor or any of the passengers, but I don’t think any of them would have been hurt—it was a nice, gradual stop for them. I imagine some of them must have seen the van, especially the conductor, perched atop five hundred tons of metal and
flesh as it approached what was essentially a family packaged in a bento box.

  The tattooed guy drops his motorcycle, throws his helmet to the ground, and runs to the scene. Jenae smothers her face in her hands as though it’s on fire. People in the cars around us are getting out, peering over their roofs like prairie dogs, dialing their cell phones. I am frozen. I don’t have a phone with me. I don’t know any emergency techniques other than the Heimlich, and it is clear that more than that is going to be necessary. The motorcycle helmet spins, empty, on the pavement.

  Now the driver jumps out of the minivan. She faces the back door and, for an instant, does nothing; she seems to be waiting for her understanding to catch up with her body.

  And then I realize that I just can’t hear her. She is doing something. She is screaming. She begins to tear at her long hair, jumping up and down, stamping the road as if to shake it back in time. “My babies,” she screams. That’s what she’s saying. “My babies. My babies.”

  I steer around the clotted traffic and drive onto campus and stop the car. I pull Jenae from where she has slumped against the dashboard and hold her until we hear the ambulance.

  I had no idea how spoiled I was, no idea I still have so much to lose. I had no idea that I could lose that which I didn’t even yet have.

  I need to get my shit together, I realize. We aren’t going to get another chance.

  The Mandoor

  JENAE’S DAD, LEE, and his wife, Diane, have come out to Utah for an agriculture convention. They are busy with meetings and sightseeing, but they make it a point to take us out to dinner and, of course, want to see the house.

  Lee is a third-generation Republican River valley farmer in south-central Nebraska. The first time I visited their home, Lee was out by the Quonset with Jenae’s two younger brothers, John and Tyler. They were changing the transmission on an Oldsmobile and each had his own pair of pliers. They seemed painfully inconvenienced to have to put them down in order to crush my little croissant of a hand. Afterward, the brothers said nothing, picked up their pliers, and went back to their work. Before disappearing under the hood, Lee took me in for a few more seconds from behind his large tinted glasses.