Dave Barry’s Homes and Other Black Holes: The Happy Homeowner’s Guide to Ritual Closing Ceremonies, Newton’s First Law of Furniture Buying, the Lethal Chemicals Man, and Other Perils of the American Dream

by Dave Barry

  Another way to move your pet, of course, is to take it with you in the car. The problem here is that most motels don’t allow animals. I know of one couple who once got a dog into a motel by claiming it was a Seeing Eye dog, which they established via the clever ruse of having the husband wear dark glasses, only the dog didn’t really hold up its end of the bargain. Instead of acting like a trained professional, being alert, looking out for obstacles, and so forth, it was dragging its owner along like a motorboat towing a reluctant water-skier, stopping only to sniff people’s crotches and snork up low-lying cocktail peanuts. Another problem with the Seeing Eye ruse is that it won’t work if your pet is a snake, for example, or a cat. There are no Seeing Eye cats, of course, because the sole function of cats, in the Great Chain of Life, is to cause harm to human beings. The instant a cat figured out that the blind person would follow it wherever it went, it would lead this person directly into whirling unshielded manufacturing equipment.

  I once, as a favor to my sister, transported her cat in my car about ninety miles to her new apartment. Naturally it turned out that the only place in the entire car that the cat wanted to be was directly under the brake pedal, which meant that if I needed to slow down, I had to reach down there and grab the cat without looking—an activity comparable to groping around for a moray eel in a dark underwater cave filled with barbed wire—and then I’d hurl the cat, still clinging to pieces of my flesh, into the backseat, and then I’d hit the brakes, and then the cat would scuttle back under the pedal. As you can imagine, this cat and I were the best of friends by the time we arrived at my sister’s apartment, and I only hope that I see it again someday when my hand has healed to the point where I can aim a dart gun.

  HOW TO MOVE CHILDREN

  Children are more difficult to move than pets. You can’t just put a child in a crate and stick him on an airplane. God knows I have tried.

  The important thing is preparation. Psychologists stress that you should break the news of the move to the child as soon as possible, ideally at birth. “We’re going to move!” you should shout gaily, the instant the child’s head emerges from the mother. The child will probably cry at this news, but this is normal. Most children are unhappy about moving, which is why it is so important, at each stage in the move preparation process, to sit down with them, one on one, and lie to them.

  “It’s going to be such fun!” you should tell them. “You’re going to make lots of new friends!”

  Of course this is probably not true. Probably they will wind up in a school where all the really good social cliques have already reached their full membership quotas and have long waiting lists. Probably your children will immediately be branded with lifelong unflattering nicknames such as Goat Booger. But there is no point in telling them this now.

  A SMART MOVING IDEA FOR TWO-CAR FAMILIES

  If you’re moving a long distance, you’re probably wondering what’s the best way to get both cars to your new home. One way, of course, is for the wife to drive one car and the husband to drive the other, but this can be lonely and tiring, especially if there are small children, who will of course be clawing foot-long strips of each other’s flesh off before you have pulled out of the driveway. So what modern moving professionals recommend is that you let the children drive one of the cars. This way, the adults, in Car A, can relax and talk or listen to classical music, while the children, in Car B, can amuse themselves by playing imaginative highway games such as Death Avengers of the Interstate, and you can all arrive at the motel in a good mood, ready to enjoy a relaxed and happy evening together until the police come.

  MOVING YOUR POSSESSIONS INTO YOUR NEW HOME

  If you are moving yourself, you simply wait for the most humid day in the history of the world, pull your truck up outside your new home, and start carrying your possessions inside. Every hour or so you should take a break, which will give your possessions an opportunity to scurry, giggling, back out to the truck, so that you may carry them inside again.

  If you are using professional movers, the correct procedure is as follows:

  You stand in the middle of the living room.

  Hundreds of burly, impatient, sweating moving company men come swarming at you from all directions carrying identical brown cardboard boxes, each of which has your last name written on it in a helpful manner.

  “WHERE DO YOU WANT THIS?” say the burly, impatient men, making it clear by their tone of voice that if you do not answer them within two seconds, they will sweat so hard that they warp your floor.

  You pick a room at random. “That goes in the spare bedroom,” you say. Or: “In the dining room, please.” It makes no difference. They will put it wherever they want. Sometimes, for fun, the movers will completely fill up a room, floor to ceiling, with boxes, thus creating a humongous Rubik’s Cube out of your worldly goods, so that to get to any one box, you have to move 1,357 others in exactly the right pattern. I warned you, way back at the beginning of this chapter, that it would be easier to just set fire to everything, but of course you wouldn’t listen.

  UNPACKING

  It is best not to attempt this all at once. It is best to space it out over a period of several years, so that you may savor the joy of discovering the kinds of comical items you chose to pack and, at great cost in money and effort, move to your new home. You can even make this a traditional nightly family event, with everybody gathering around a packing box and laughing festively as you unwrap 750 square feet of protective wrapping paper to discover, say, the key that operates the radiator of your former home.

  WHAT CONDITION THE PREVIOUS OWNERS WILL HAVE LEFT YOUR NEW HOME IN

  They will have left it in roughly the same condition as the Visigoths left Rome in. When you open the refrigerator, life-threatening molds will try to grasp you with their tentacles. But do not judge the previous owners too harshly; remember that when they left, they were in the same subhuman, totally amoral moving-induced state of mind that you were in when you moved out of your house without so much as a backward glance at the inch-thick layer of crud that got baked onto the sides of your former oven when the lasagna exploded.

  GETTING YOUR NEW PHONE, GAS, ELECTRICITY, APPLIANCES, CABLE TELEVISION, AND WATER HOOKED UP

  The important thing to understand is that all these things are done by the same person. Yes, homeowners: there is only one Hookup Man in the entire world, sort of like Santa Claus, and as you can imagine, he is very, very busy. This is why, when you call up the telephone company to find out when the Hookup Man will visit your house, they cannot pinpoint the exact time. “Right now,” they will say, “it looks like it will probably be an even-numbered year.” In fact most people have never seen the Hookup Man, and some say he is only a legend. But many of us believe in him, because we have seen the jolly pranks and tricks he likes to play, our favorite being the one where we have been waiting for him in our house for days, and finally we must go out for food, and the instant we are gone he comes bounding out of the bushes, where he has been hiding, and leaves a cheerful note on our door that says: “Sorry We Missed You!” Ha ha! Such a card, that Hookup Man!

  5

  Making New Enemies

  Probably the most important thing, in settling into a new home, is to establish good relationships with your neighbors. The reason for this is best summarized by the moving words of the famous English poet John Donne, who wrote:

  No man is an island unto his own personal self;

  Each man is more of a subcontinent,

  So never send to ask for whom the doorbell tolls

  Because more than likely it is your neighbor

  Come to see if you have a plumber’s snake he can borrow

  So he can attempt to unclog the hall toilet Which he suspects his son has flushed His daughter’s Rainbow Brite doll down.

  Idealistic? Sure it is, but it still has meaning today. We live in a complex, interconnected society, and sometimes we must call upon our neighbors to help us, to stand by us, to comfort us,
or at very least to try not to back their recreational vehicle into our Jacuzzi. So as soon as you get to your new home, you want to Reach Out. You want to march right next door, put on your very nicest smile, ring the doorbell, and …

  BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK

  Well! It looks as though your new neighbors have a doggy! A very alert doggy! A doggy with jaws the size of an important geological formation! In the background, you dimly perceive shapes that might be your

  “Hi!” you say. “We’re your new—”

  BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK

  “BE QUIET, LAMONT!!” say your new neighbors. It sounds like there might be several of them.

  “Anyway,” you say, “we thought we’d stop by and—”

  BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK

  “DAMMIT, LAMONT!!” say your new neighbors.

  “Well, okay!” you say. “Guess we’d better get back and—”

  BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK

  They seem like nice people.

  Now that you’ve met the neighbors, it’s time to start locating some of the “necessities of life.” If you have small children, you need to find a Pediatric Group where you can go and sit in the waiting room when your children get their ears infected, which is approximately four times per child per week.

  Notice I say “Pediatric Group,” not “Pediatrician.” There are no longer any Lone Ranger-style pediatricians, because it is considered a serious violation of modern medical ethics for a child to see the same doctor twice during the child’s lifetime. This is why you sometimes must wait so long in the waiting room: The Pediatric Group is flying in a new doctor, sometimes from as far away as Malaysia, solely to avoid having your child see a familiar face. This is also why, in selecting a new Pediatric Group, the most important factor is not the doctors, but the person who answers the phone, because you will spend a large portion of your life talking with this person:

  Choosing a pediatric group

  PHONE PERSON: Good afternoon, this is Pediatricians Backwards “R” Us; how may we help you?

  YOU: Hi, this is Mrs. Evans, and my son, Thad, has been having these kind of strange-shaped bowel movements, and last time this happened we saw Dr. Wexler, and he said if it happened again we should call and—

  PHONE PERSON: Well, of course you realize you can’t see Dr. Wexler ever again.

  YOU: Yes, of course, but I was wondering if maybe Dr. Bunderson—

  PHONE PERSON (suspiciously): How do you know Dr. Bunderson? Have you seen him before?

  YOU (quickly): No! No! Really! I just heard of him, that’s all. From a friend.

  PHONE PERSON: Well, in that case, please hold.

  *** eighteen-minute pause ***

  PHONE PERSON: Dr. Bunderson wants to know what you mean by “strange-shaped.”

  YOU: Well, kind of like M & M’s.

  PHONE PERSON: Please hold.

  *** twenty-three-minute pause ***

  PHONE PERSON: Plain or peanut?

  YOU: Plain. Shall I hold?

  PHONE PERSON: Of course.

  *** Forty-nine-minute pause ***

  PHONE PERSON: Dr. Bunderson wants you to bring Thad in and sit in the waiting room for two hours reading books with names like Billy the Bunny Bumps His Nose and listening to children shriek behind closed doors, after which Dr. Bunderson will see you for slightly under a minute and a half and prescribe a medicine that you have to administer anally when your child is sleeping and that costs as much per ounce as a round-trip Concorde ticket to Paris, France.

  YOU (gratefully): Thank you.

  Important as it is to find a Pediatric Group, it is not the most important task, because it is merely a matter of life and death, which means it pales by comparison with the task of:

  FINDING SOMEBODY TO FIX YOUR CAR

  This has become very difficult in recent years, because most gas stations have switched over to being “convenience” stores, meaning that, in addition to gas, they sell food such as bologna sandwiches created right around the time of the Big Bang. But they do not fix cars. You pull into a modern gas station with an actual car problem, and odds are that the cashier, sitting behind the bulletproof glass watching MTV, will have the police come and arrest you for blocking the access of legitimate customers wishing to purchase Slim Jims, cheap sunglasses, and Tic-Tac breath mints.

  The reason gas stations sell food, of course, is that the supermarkets are busy cashing checks. The supermarkets have to cash checks because the banks are busy mailing unsolicited credit cards to everybody in the Western Hemisphere. The result is that very few people fix cars.

  The best way to select a new mechanic is to conduct a little competence test, wherein you deliberately disconnect one spark plug wire from your car’s engine. Then you go around to various gas stations, tell the attendants that you think something is wrong with your engine, and see if they can correctly diagnose the problem.

  INCORRECT DIAGNOSIS: “So?”

  CORRECT DIAGNOSIS: “Sounds like something is wrong with your, whaddyacallit, engine.”

  If you find somebody who gives you the correct diagnosis, you should cling to him the way the remora clings to the shark. If you have a daughter, you should encourage her to marry him.

  SELECTING A SUPERMARKET

  The major things we look for in a supermarket are:

  A wide selection of browsing material at the checkout counter in the form of People magazine and tabloid-size newspapers with headlines like “BURT REYNOLDS WEDS GIANT UFO CENTIPEDE”

  A policy whereby people who get in the checkout line clutching large, time-consuming wads of food coupons are actually charged more for their groceries.

  Very strict enforcement of the ten-item limit in the express lane. Ideally, this enforcement would involve a trapdoor. (“Oh? Do I have fourteen items? I didn’t realIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEE …”)

  JOINING LOCAL CLUBS AND ORGANIZATIONS

  This is an excellent way for a newcomer like yourself to make friends with many local community leaders, all of whom will want to sell you insurance.

  GIVING MONEY TO THE LOCAL POLICE BENEVOLENT ASSOCIATION

  We always do this. Whenever they come around, we give them a generous contribution and a cheerful smile, because deep in our souls we have this nagging fear that they write your name down somewhere, and if you did not contribute, it will come back to haunt you:

  YOU: Help! Please send somebody to 465 Magnolia Street immediately!

  POLICE DISPATCHER: Would that be the residence of Stanley Johnson, the guy who stiffed the Benevolent Association for six straight years? The guy who always says he’ll send us a check “next week”?

  YOU: Yes! Please! A huge insane man is pounding on our door with an axe!

  POLICE DISPATCHER: That would be Lester Stubbins. Last year he donated, let’s see here, twenty-five dollars.

  YOU: HE’S BREAKING DOWN THE DOOR! HURRY!!

  POUCE DISPATCHER: Sure thing. Well have a unit there “next week”.

  SELECTING A SCHOOL FOR YOUR CHILD

  There are two major kinds of schools:

  Public Schools, defined as “schools where the doors have been removed from the bathroom stalls.”

  Private Schools, defined as “schools you cannot afford.”

  The key factor in selecting a school, of course, is what kind of nurse it has. Remember that the primary function of the American educational system is to provide you with a place to leave your children when you go to work; if the school
has the kind of nurse who calls you up every time some little thing goes wrong, the whole point is defeated. Also, your career could be ruined:

  SETTING: The chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court

  YOU: In conclusion, your honors, I wish to state that my client—

  CHIEF JUSTICE (interrupting): Counsel, I have a note here from the nurse at the Bob-o-Link Elementary School stating that your daughter, Jennifer, is throwing up what appears to be Yoo-Hoo brand chocolate drink.

  So you’re looking for a school with a levelheaded nurse, the kind who would not think of calling you over something as minor as vomiting, which most small children engage in purely as a recreational activity.

  Another thing: Whichever school you select, you must get your child into the “gifted” class. I imagine there was a time when the word “gifted” was used to describe only children who were above average, but since hardly any parents today will tolerate the thought that their child may be average, the term “gifted” is now applied to any student with more brain wave activity than a glazed doughnut.

  The way you get your child into the gifted class is, you go to the school personally and make it clear to the staff that you are a Concerned Parent, meaning a potentially humongous pain in the ass. You should demand to see the curriculum, so as to make sure that, at each grade level, your child will receive instruction in the subjects appropriate for a standard American education, namely: