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

  I recall the time my wife, Beth, finally got fed up with the brown sofa we had for many years, which looked like a buffalo that had staggered into our living room and died from a horrible skin disease. So she decided, the hell with our son’s college education, she was going to get a new sectional sofa. She took many measurements, then she went to many, many furniture stores, then she ordered the sofa, then we waited through several presidential administrations for it to arrive. And finally it did, and it was exactly what she had ordered, and so naturally it made her almost physically ill to look at it. I told her it looked fine to me, but it was no use. When she was looking at this sofa, she was looking at Jabba the Hutt. She would lie awake in bed at night, thinking about this thing squatting out there in her living room, and it was only a matter of time before she went insane and attacked it with a steak knife. So I was very relieved when she decided to sell it through a classified ad, which was a pretty interesting experience in itself because of the call she got from the sex maniac. This is the truth. First he asked her a bunch of questions about the sofa, which he seemed sincerely interested in, and then, lowering his voice about two octaves, he said:

  “Are you wearing loafers?”

  Beth failed to notice anything particularly unusual about this, which shows how crazed a person can become when she is desperate to get rid of a sectional sofa.

  “Yes,” she said. “Now, the sofa—”

  “Are they brown?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “But about the—”

  “Do they smell bad?” he asked.

  At this point Beth, even in her furniture-induced derangement, realized that this person was not a Hot Prospect, and she got off the phone. Eventually she sold the sofa, so it wasn’t such a bad experience after all, though it probably would have been easier and more relaxing if we had just gone out into the backyard and set fire to a small pile of hundred-dollar bills.

  Of course there is a way to obtain nice furniture without the frustration and high cost of buying it new, provided you are willing to put in a few hours of honest “elbow grease” and possibly suffer permanent disfigurement. I am referring, of course, to the time-honored Thrifty Homeowner art of …

  REFINISHING FURNITURE

  No doubt you have at one time or another visited the home of people who have a number of nice older wooden pieces, and you have said something complimentary, and your hosts said something like: “Oh, thank you, we bought them all for a total of $147.50 at garage sales and refinished them ourselves in the garage and now they are worth, we conservatively estimate, nine million dollars.” They are lying, of course. They stole all this stuff from the Museum of Nice Old Wood Furniture. Nevertheless, it is inevitable that at some point you will get the notion that you can have nice furniture via the refinishing method, so you might as well know the correct procedure:

  You go to a garage sale and you find a bureau covered with hideously ugly orange paint.

  You call your spouse over, and you say, in a quiet voice so the garage sale person can’t overhear you: “Look at this! You know what this is, under this paint? This is (CHOOSE ONE):

  …solid oak!”

  …solid bird’s-eye maple!”

  …solid walnut!”

  …solid oaken maple eye of walnut!” (It makes no difference what fine hardwood you claim the bureau is made of, because it will forever remain an elusive dream that you never actually lay eyes on, similar to the Lost Dutchman’s Mine.)

  Your spouse, shocked, whispers: “Whoever would be so foolish as to cover up such beautiful wood with paint!? With a minimum of effort, this could be a lovely piece!”

  Feeling like thieves in the night, you pay twenty-five dollars for the bureau and scuttle off with it. You do not hear the cynical laughter of the former owner.

  You go to the hardware store and purchase some steel wool and some refinishing product with a name like “Can o’ Poison” that has skeleton heads all over it and a prominent Consumer Advisory like this:

  WARNING—DO NOT LET THIS PRODUCT COME IN CONTACT WITH YOUR SKIN. DO NOT BREATHE THE FUMES. DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN AFTER USING THIS PRODUCT. DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT. DO NOT EVEN READ THIS WARNING.

  You go home, put on some rubber gloves, and start scrubbing the paint with the toxic substance. It is hard work. It is dirty work. The gloves dissolve quickly, and it is clear that large patches of your skin will have to be surgically replaced. But it’s all worth it, because after just a few hours you have scraped away a small patch of that hideous orange paint, and underneath it you find … a layer of hideous green paint!

  You repeat this process for two, maybe even three more layers of paint, and finally the truth dawns on you: This is not really a bureau. This is an enormous, bureau-shaped wad of paint.

  You decide to hold a garage sale.

  INTERIOR DESIGN HINTS FROM TOP “PROS”

  To make a dark room look brighter, try turning on the electrical lights.

  A small carpet stain where the cat vomited in 1979 can be made to “disappear” when company comes by having a predetermined family member stand on it and refuse to move.

  Squares of corkboard stuck on the wall will often turn an “ordinary” room into a room that smells like corkboard.

  If you’re planning to paint a room, remember that “oil-based” paint is the kind that is supposed to come off with paint thinner, but does not; whereas “latex” is the kind that is supposed to come off with simple soap and water, but does not.

  8

  Good Housekeeping, or

  Learning to Live with Filth

  Hardly a week goes by when you don’t read a newspaper article like this:

  LOS REDUNDOS, N.M.—Astronomers at the Institute for Wearing White Laboratory Coats here announced today that they have discovered a humongous dust cloud 237 skillion light-years from the earth. “This,” the scientists stated in unison, “could very well be the largest dust cloud we have discovered since the one we discovered last week, and we believe that it may provide us with valuable insights into the mystery of how we can obtain additional federal grants.”

  What scientists are learning, through these dramatic breakthrough discoveries, is something that many of us have suspected for a long time, namely that the universe is made up almost entirely of dirt. More and more, scientists are suspecting that the Big Bang was in fact the explosion of a small but very densely packed vacuum cleaner bag.

  So we must accept the fact that we live in a universe swarming with particles of filth that are ceaselessly trying to get into our homes and inflict themselves upon us, similar to insurance salespersons, but in some cases even more distasteful. Hard to believe? I thought so, too, until a short while back, when the people who publish the Allergy Relief Newsletter were thoughtful enough to send me, at their own expense, a piece of junk mail stating that my entire household was teeming with tiny dirt creatures named “dust mites,” which sound like harmless and friendly commercially licensed characters such as might have their own Saturday morning cartoon show sponsored by the sugar industry, until you look at the photograph showing a dust mite enlarged several thousand times, and it looks exactly like the kind of hostile giant mutant insect that was always destroying Tokyo in those movies that the Japanese used to make before they figured out how to do cars. According to the folks at the Allergy Relief Newsletter, these dust mites are swarming everywhere, including inside your nose, millions of them per nostril. And although they are, fortunately, a peaceful species, not generally known to attack humans except during mating season, we need to be aware of them, because they serve as a constant nasal reminder of our central point, which, as best we can remember, is: There is a lot of dirt around.

  What this means is that you, as a homeowner, have to make a decision: Are you going to let the dirt overcome you, so that you live your life encrusted by a permanent layer of greasy yellowish filth, so that you are no better than slugs writhing in their own putrid slime? Or are you going to make the commitment, in t
ime, in effort, to fighting back—to really trying to keep your new home neat and tidy?

  I have tried it both ways, and trust me, the writhing slug approach is better. You don’t think important people, such as members of the U.S. Supreme Court, waste time cleaning, do you? Of course not! Their homes are filthy. They are filthy. That’s why they wear those robes: they have whole tribes of dust mites under there. Because they have learned, like so many other people, that if you really, seriously try to keep your house clean, you gradually turn into one of those TV commercial housewives who are always frowning with grave concern at their bathroom bowls and having conversations like this with their friends:

  FIRST HOUSEWIFE: Whatever is the matter, Sue?

  SECOND HOUSEWIFE: Oh, Betty, I am so very upset because Waxy Yellow Buildup has caused my kitchen floor to look like some kind of gigantic nasal discharge!

  FIRST HOUSEWIFE: Lordy yes, it does.

  SECOND HOUSEWIFE: And Bob is bringing home the archbishop tonight!! Whatever shall I do?!

  FIRST HOUSEWIFE: If it was me, I would take a major credit card and fly to the Caribbean island of Antigua and drink for days with strange men.

  SECOND HOUSEWIFE: That is what I was thinking.

  So we see that it can lead to bad things, this obsession some people have with house-cleaning. What you want to do, in your household, is adopt the cleaning system my wife and I use, which is based on the old philosophical question: “If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody is there to hear it, does it make any sound?” (The answer, by the way, is yes; the tree goes: “Moo.”) Our theory is, if there is nobody besides ourselves around to see the dirt, then the dirt isn’t really there. So Rule Number One of successful house-cleaning is:

  ***>Never Let Anybody into Your House<***

  Not even your mother. Especially not your mother. I cannot overemphasize the importance of this rule. Even if you know some really nice people who have had you over to their house thirty-seven times for dinner, you must not weaken and invite them to your house. You must give them plausible excuses, such as: “We sincerely intend to have you folks over one of these days, but right now we’re all in a dither because our housekeeper has been killed by radon gas.”

  Rule Number Two of successful house-cleaning, of course, is:

  ***> Never Have Children of Any Kind <***

  Each of us, as a human being, has an important choice to make: We can either experience the trials, the joys, the tragedies, and the triumphs of that most sacred of human institutions, parenthood; or we can have a house where we do not regularly find gerbil poop in our sofa. But we cannot have both of these things. Because small children have no concept whatsoever of cleanliness. A small child’s concept of housekeeping is to lick spilled pudding off the living room carpet. And it does not get better as they get older. For example, my son, now age seven, is in the phase where he likes to play with educational “construction” toys, designed by escaped Nazis, that consist of 363,000,000,000,000 tiny plastic pieces in a box. The way you play with these toys is, you strew the pieces all over the living room floor, and then you go outside to play. And when your mother yells: “Robert! Come in here and pick up your construction set!” you yell back: “I’m still using them!” And then late that night, you lie awake in bed, waiting for the moment when your father, heading for the kitchen to get a glass of orange juice, wanders out into the darkened living room and steps, barefooted, on the plastic pieces, which is the cue for him to perform the comically entertaining Midnight Dance of the Bozo Father, a rapid series of hopping, skating movements across the floor accompanied by whimpering, followed by very bad words. This is a good time for you to look like you are Sound Asleep.

  Also your children will gradually cause your brain to become damaged in such a way that you deliberately engage in acts of antihousekeeping. For example, I once, at my son’s insistence, spent perfectly good U.S. dollars at Toys Backwards “R” Us for a can of something called “Slime,” which I naturally assumed was a toy but which in fact turned out to be exactly what its name suggests, namely, slime. Of course my son got it all over everything, and of course it wouldn’t come off. My point being that, here we are living in a house that already seems to have a lifetime inexhaustible supply of natural dirt, and yet for some boneheaded parental reason I felt the need to go out and purchase more dirt.

  An even worse example was the time my wife went out and bought mice. Of course the pet store people did not tell her they were mice. They are much too smart for that. They told her she was buying “gerbils,” which, according to the instruction manual they also sold her, are a kind of “small desert animal found in Asia and Africa.” But what they clearly are, when you look at them, is mice. I bet the folks over in Asia and Africa are tickled pink that we’re willing to purchase their surplus vermin. They’re probably wondering what kind of handsome price they might be able to get over here for their head lice.

  I want to stress that my wife did not purchase merely the mice. No sir, because your mice also need food, and medical supplies, and of course exercise equipment, because God forbid that they should become out of shape! They might get sick! You probably do not appreciate the extreme irony dripping from my word processor here, because chances are you were not in bed with me the night my wife came racing in and announced that there was mouse poop among the cereal boxes, and consequently we had to make an urgent call to the Lethal Chemicals Man. We live in South Florida, and like everybody else down here, we pay a man to come around regularly and spray the interior of our house with massive quantities of chemicals of the type that, if they were accidentally sprayed on our house by a major corporation, we would sue it for $350 million.

  We do this to keep nature from coming inside. There is a tremendous amount of nature down here in South Florida, and despite our efforts to control it by covering it up as much as possible with condominiums, it is still a constant threat. I am not talking about the warm, furry kind of nature with big brown eyes that gets featured in animated motion pictures, scampering around collecting nuts for the winter and talking in high, squeaky voices. That is not what we have down here. Down here we have toads that can kill a person. I am serious. This is one of the first possibilities the police consider when they arrive at a murder scene.

  FIRST POLICEMAN: This looks like the work of toads.

  SECOND POLICEMAN: Why do you say that?

  FIRST POLICEMAN: The victim’s fly is missing!

  SECOND POLICEMAN: Ha ha!

  But it is no laughing matter, the nature problem down here. Even as I write these words, there is a spider right outside my house that could serve, all by itself, as our NATO forces. This spider has erected a web that covers most of our property and contains wrapped-up food bundles the size of missing neighborhood dogs.

  So anyway, I find it highly ironic that we are paying the Lethal Chemicals Man to place deadly violent traps all around the Rice Krispies in hopes of sending one set of rodents to the Great Piece of Cheese in the Sky, while at the same time we are spending otherwise useful money on another set of rodents, so they can have toys and Ferris wheels and God knows what else. Technically we are doing this for Educational Purposes, because Robert is eager to learn the Secrets of the Animal Kingdom, but these rodents don’t know any secrets of the animal kingdom. All they know how to do is gnaw cardboard toilet paper tubes, which my son saves for them—heaven forbid I should throw one out—into 650,000 tiny pieces, which they then push out of their cage onto the floor. They do this very industriously, pretending they are engaging in the kind of serious life-or-death tasks that animals engage in on TV nature specials, but in fact they do it solely because they know it really frosts my shorts.

  “Look,” they say to each other, in Rodent. “He’s cleaning it up again! Ha ha! This is a LOT more fun than Africa and Asia!”

  They’ll change that tune when we get the Educational Cat.

  Which reminds us of another important housekeeping rule …

  ***> Never Have a
Dog <***

  Let’s not beat around the bush here: dogs are morons. Don’t get me wrong: I like dogs. We have always had dogs, and they have faithfully performed many valuable services for us, such as:

  Peeing on everything.

  When we’re driving in our car, alerting us that we have passed another dog by barking real loud in our ears for the next 114 miles.

  Trying to kill the Avon lady.

  But despite their instinctive skills in these areas, dogs generally rank, on the Animal Kingdom IQ Scale, somewhere down in the Paramecium range, and they above all do not grasp the concept of housekeeping. Show me a household with a dog in it, and I will show you a household with numerous low-altitude wall stains where the dog, rounding a corner at several hundred miles per hour in an effort to get to the front door and welcome the master home by knocking the master down, whammed into the wall and left a brownish smear of whatever repulsive substance it was rolling in earlier that day.

  Discipline will not prevent this kind of thing. You can sit a dog down and explain to it very carefully that you just purchased a new oriental rug, and you don’t want the dog to go anywhere near it. You can point to the rug and go “NO!” a dozen times, and the dog will look at you with an extremely alert and intelligent expression, similar to the way Lassie always looked when she was piloting a helicopter somewhere to rescue her young cretin master Jeff, who had fallen into the quicksand again. Then your dog will go outside and sprint around in concentric circles until it has found a rancid, maggot-festooned sector of deceased raccoon. It will race back to your house with this prize as though the fate of the Free World depended on it, deposit it on your rug, and wander off to take a well-earned nap.