by James, David
“People don’t want frugality, Amanda,” Alex said when we started dating long ago. “Clients want to think they’re on board with a winner, an agent who is doing enough business to afford high car payments. They want to be impressed. They want their neighbors to be impressed. They’re not going to feel confident if you drive up in a Toyota Camry, even if it is in black.” So I gave in and traded the Camry for a tricked-out Toyota Land Cruiser—just like Alex’s. Alex had another car that he saved for special occasions: a restored 1968 Land Rover in mint green. But that was Alex.
My Land Cruiser conveyed enough success without being too pretentious, but the main message it gave was its outdoor appeal, which suggested weekends cross-country skiing or hiking in semi-rugged outbacks—a person in control of their lives and the elements. The only point I refused to change in my transition from car to SUV was my EVE WAS FRAMED bumper sticker. Despite Alex’s warning to remain politically inert, I needed to hold on to some part of my feminist side.
I drove the three miles to my listing presentation, passing the scores of construction workers and landscapers busy trying to make the ostentatious Caliente Sands development look like it had been there for years, complete with water-hogging grass lawns, partially mature trees, and a scattering of desert shrubs that made some lilting concession that we did, indeed, live in a desert. I pulled my car down to the end of the cul-de-sac and parked right in front of 2666 Boulder Drive.
I pulled up to the house, unloaded my arsenal of presentation materials and equipment, rolled the artillery up to the front door, and rang the doorbell. Perfect. I was on time to the second, I thought, checking my watch. Noon, on the dot. A second later, my cell phone beeped three times, confirming that I was exactly on time. I took a deep breath, then let it out calmly. I was ready. I was woman, hear me roar.
From somewhere deep inside the house, a voice yelled, “Come on in, the door’s open.”
I rolled Desert Storm inside the empty house, wondering where I was going to set up my killer presentation. I had made hundreds of listing presentations when I worked with Alex, but for some reason, I was really, really nervous.
I heard Mr. Sandoval, the owner/investor, rummaging in a far-off bedroom. “I’ll be right there,” the voice said.
I continued to unpack my computer, turn it on, and unload all the leave-behinds into a pile when Mr. Sandoval entered the room and stood, towering over me. I rose to my full six feet one inch and shook my client’s hand with a firm grip, pumping it like I was trying to extract water from rusty pump.
“I’m Amanda Thorne, from Apex Realty. I’ll have my presentation materials all ready in just a minute, then we can make a run-through of what I—and the substantial resources of my company (I handed him the company brochure)—can do to help sell your house.”
“Don’t bother unpacking your stuff,” he said.
My jaw dropped to the floor along with my fragile confidence. “But, Mr. Sandoval, if you just let me show you what . . .”
“You’ve got the listing,” he said, turning and heading off toward a pile of mail on the granite kitchen countertop.
I stood frozen, wondering if I had heard him correctly, suffered a stroke, and was just imagining this, or whether he was playing a joke on me.
“You’re giving me the listing . . . just like that?” I asked.
“Yeah, just give me the paperwork to sign, then you can get out of here.”
“But . . . what . . .” I stammered. “You mean you have that much confidence in my talents as a real estate . . . ?”
“Listen, Amanda, don’t get all full of yourself. I’m giving you the listing because the other agents didn’t show, or did show up and were drunk.”
“Drunk?”
Mr. Sandoval looked at me like an exasperated Peace Corps volunteer trying to explain irrigation to a technologically backward native.
“One got hit by a bus and couldn’t make it—he’s alive, but at Desert Medical Center in a body cast. The other was stinking of bourbon or whisky or something and ‘taw-gged lick dis,’” he slurred, mimicking a drunken real-estate agent. “And Mary Dodge, Her Highness, didn’t show . . . not even a phone call. So you get the listing by default.”
“Wow, well, thank you, Mr. Sandoval. I know that you won’t be disappointed in your choice of me.”
Mr. Sandoval raised his face from the pile of mail he’d been staring at. “Ms. Thorne, I didn’t exactly choose you. Like I said, you won by default. In this kind of seller’s market, I could hire a retarded baboon to sell my house and he’d probably have a contract on this fucking joint in two days with multiple offers.”
At this point, I could’ve fired back at this surly asshole, but I decided to swallow my pride, thank the prick, and get the paperwork signed and leave. After all, the house was 4,700 square feet and could be listed at $1.1 million.
“I’ll stage the house at my own expense,” I added as I was packing up.
“Good, I’m not paying for you to put furniture in this house,” Sandoval added. “As I said, an orangutan could sell this house.”
“A retarded baboon was the phrase I believe you used earlier. I just think your house needs to stand out from all the other me-too houses in this development.”
“Yeah, whatever. Just don’t try and charge me anything extra,” Sandoval grumbled. “Six percent commission is highway robbery. You’re lucky the other agents didn’t show up. I know I could get one of them to take five.”
I had finished packing and was on my way out the door when the real baboon spoke again.
“Hey, you . . . turn around.”
Wearily, I did as ordered, wondering if prostitution or working for Donald Trump was any worse.
“Did anyone ever tell you that you look like that Kathleen Turner chick?”
I sighed. “All the time . . . unfortunately.”
Mr. Sandoval was one of a breed of investors who get rich in hot markets by buying houses before they’re completed and selling them quickly while the going’s good. These investors usually wear cheap suits and sport combover hairdos, their tobacco-stained hands covered by gold rings. Their hairy chests are topped off with a gold chain or two. Mr. Sandoval fitted this description to a T—the only thing missing was the saliva-wet cigar between his lips that had been chomped on for days on end. But despite his complete offensiveness to all other carbon-based life-forms, he had one thing that I needed: a listing. The house was huge, new, modern, and was filled with over-the-top conveniences. He didn’t care what I did as long as I brought him an offer on 2666 Boulder Drive. And as an investor with multiple properties for sale, he wasn’t going to be in my hair all the time. He had too many other irons in the fire to get involved in all the petty details like flyers, ads, or what hours and days I would hold open houses. In other words, this listing would be an easy one.
Time, of course, would prove me wrong.
CHAPTER 3
What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You . . . Much
Meeting your neighbors can be an experience filled with hope and new beginnings, of endless possibilities of friendships that would form and last a lifetime. Mine was not such an experience.
The first neighbor I met was Regina Belle. Or, more correctly, Regina met me. Okay, assaulted me. I was taking some envelopes out of the mailbox when I heard the soft tones of Regina behind me.
“SO WHEN THE FUCK ARE YOU GUNNA SAY HELLO?”
I turned to see a woman of about 70, no 75, no maybe 80 . . . It was difficult to tell.
“So you’re the one who bought the house?” said the woman who was wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed, THANK GOD FOR VIAGRA. “Hi, I’m Regina, your neighbor. Regina Belle. I was wondering when you were going to fuckin’ say hello!”
I had gone out to my mailbox to pick up my first load of mail since I moved in. I was desperate to meet new friends, so I thrust my hand out eagerly. “I’m Amanda.”
“Boy are we glad to see you!” she exclaimed, wiping imaginary sweat from h
er brow. “Whew, when the neighbors saw the Sold sign out front, we almost had a party!”
I didn’t like the sound of this—as a Realtor or as a recent home buyer. Sellers love to think that if they don’t mention a problem with the house they’re selling, it will go unnoticed forever. That is, until something caves in, catches fire, or leaks. Or, in this case, the one thing that almost always happens: a nosy neighbor, eager to show the newcomer that he or she knows everything that’s going on, spills the whole story on the unsuspecting buyer. “You should’ve seen the sewage flowing out the front door . . .” is one that buyers hear all too often. Runner-up to that one in terms of scariness is: “The owner did all the remodeling himself. The framing, the stucco, the electrical, the plumbing! And imagine, he wasn’t even a licensed contractor!” Of course, the most frightening ends with something like this: “. . . and when the SWAT team finally broke down the door, one of the officers slipped on the blood inside and broke his back!”
What I was about to hear wasn’t quite as horrific as that, but it wasn’t pretty.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Leonard, the previous owner, was a crystal-meth head. Crazy as a loon near the end. His mom gave him all those beautiful antiques and he put them out on the lawn. The sprinklers just ruined everything.”
“Out on the lawn?” I asked with total disbelief.
“He moved everything from the house out onto the lawn and lived outside . . . furniture and all. He claimed that the CIA was listening to the thoughts in his head by using the house’s electrical system. That’s why he knocked all those holes in the walls . . . to pull the wiring out of the walls.”
This wasn’t the Welcome Wagon I wanted. It was more of a drive-by shooting.
“No wiring?” I pleaded.
“Oh, there’s some wiring in the house. After all, he had to have some electricity in the house. The air conditioning was running all the time. . . . Of course, he left the doors and windows open all the time,” Regina stated as if this were normal—air conditioning the yard.
“Miss Belle . . .”
“Call me Regina.”
“Regina . . .I’m sure you must be mistaken. I had the house inspected before I bought it.”
“By whom?” Regina asked.
“Lance Hogarth.”
“Ah, there’s your problem, Amanda. He was as crooked as Highway 74. You must be new here.”
“I am. Sort of.”
“He left town a few days ago. Along with several builders and contractors who, I hear, are going to be under indictment.”
“Indictment?”
“They had this big scam going on. Billing for services never performed, getting loans over the amount of the worth of the house and pocketing the difference, dumping fucked-up houses on unsuspecting buyers . . .” she said, waving her hand from my head to toe, proclaiming me rightly as the dumpee of such a house.
“I don’t know what to say.” And indeed, I didn’t. By purchasing The Curse, I wanted to prove to myself— and Alex—that I could make money on my own. I could remodel houses, flip them, and make money. I could stand tall. I was powerful. I was a force to be reckoned with.
Now I stood there as waves of humiliation washed over me, the power draining from my body as I watched helplessly. I felt like I had just purchased a parcel of Florida swampland from a guy on a New York City street corner.
“C’mon, honey, you look like you could use a drink.”
I was going to say something about the fact that it wasn’t quite 11:30 in the morning, but then I told myself that this was California. People lived differently here.
As Regina pulled me along to her front door, I had a chance to get a closer look at Regina. Her odometer definitely had some major mileage on it. She tried to cover it up with pancake makeup slathered on so thick, you felt that you could lift it off her face in one piece, starting just below the right jaw. It did the trick if you were standing thirty feet away and had cataracts that made your eyes look like they had been stuffed with cotton balls. She even plucked her eyebrows, a custom I associated with women who wove scarves into their pineapple-upside-down-cake beehive hairdos from the early sixties. Everything about Regina seemed to be of another era. Her clothes, jewelry, hairdo. Perhaps she slept in a giant Tupperware container, sealing herself inside every night, burping out the air from the present and preserving herself in a bygone era.
She broke her grip on my arm and opened the door to her house, beckoning me inside.
The interior was like Regina herself: unaltered by time, and uncorrupted by it. As my eyes scanned the sunny yellow living room, it, too, seemed stuck in time, like a car idling endlessly. Nothing from the present day seemed to have penetrated this lair, no sense that time had passed. There was no flat-screen TV, no cordless phones, not even a remote control lying around to suggest that the second millennium had come and gone.
“Sit down and I’ll make you a sidewinder,” Regina said gleefully.
I didn’t even know what a sidewinder was, but I decided it was best to be a good neighbor and take whatever was given to me.
Regina proceeded to pour a splash, a glug, and a deluge of liquor from no less than seven different bottles into a cocktail mixer, followed by a few cubes of ice, which incidentally came from an ice bucket that was filled with ice at 11:30 in the morning. I notice these things.
“Tony Curtis taught me how to make a sidewinder,” she said, agitating the shaker with such force I feared that Regina’s head would come loose and fall to the floor.
“I was an extra in Some Like It Hot and he had his eyes on my ass from day one. Well, during a break in filming, he gets me into his dressing room and asks me if I want a sidewinder. ‘A sidewinder,’ I said, ‘sure,’ thinking it was some kinda code word for his cock. Well, seeing that I wanted to get someplace in the pictures, I said, sure. For years, I’d been fucking Gable and Errol Flynn for free, but enough was enough. I figured that if I was going to pay the toll, so to speak, I was going to drive the road. So you can imagine my disappointment when Tony heads over to me holding a cocktail shaker and two glasses!”
My first reaction to Regina’s potty mouth was pure shock. Besides the T-shirt, she looked quite well-bred. This is what made her cursing so surprising at first encounter. It was like watching your water faucet gush water, then—all of a sudden—seeing a lizard crawl out from the tap. My initial shock was overwhelmed by the fact that my new neighbor had rubbed elbows with the rich and famous. Or, quite possibly, genitals.
“I hear you’re a Realtor, sweetie?” Regina asked, handing me a drink as tall as the ass on a Texas cowboy.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Right. Who isn’t in Palm Springs?” Regina chuckled. “Hey, I heard a good Realtor joke. This woman gets pulled over for speeding, see. When the cop comes up to her window to ask for identification, the woman realizes that she left her purse at home. The cop says he still needs to see some form of ID. So the woman reaches into her glove compartment and pulls out her real-estate license and shows it to the cop. He tosses it back at her, and says, “Everyone has one of those in California. I need something more specific.”
I forced out a small, but polite laugh.
“Well,” Regina continued, “it’s a lot funnier if you’re hammered.”
I guessed it was my turn now. “So, Regina, I take it you worked in Hollywood at one time?”
“The Golden Age,” she exclaimed.
“Well, that must have been exciting.”
“Oh, honey, those were the days . . . when stars were stars. Hepburn, Bacall, Davis, Grant. None of these flash in the pans like Streep or Close.”
I was about to remind Regina that, to date, Meryl Streep and Glenn Close had probably made as many pictures as some of the greats. Plus, Streep and Close were members of my personal Academy of Those Who Can Do No Wrong. They were strong women—on and off stage. They stood their ground and succeeded in a man’s world, and kept succeeding—even when they became “women of a certa
in age.” I looked up to them, and greedily devoured their antics in magazines and the newspapers. Like the time Glenn Close stood up to a bunch of evangelicals causing trouble in her daughter’s school system over tarot cards.
Regina took another ladylike sip of her drink. “So, Roberto tells me you’re a gay divorcee.”
I grinned as I caught her double entendre. This cookie may look like she lives in another era, but her gossip-loving ears were firmly rooted in the present. I had the suspicion that little went on in this town without Regina knowing about it. Or Roberto, my hairdresser.
“I assume, Regina, when you say Roberto, you mean Roberto Castro . . . the hairdresser?”
“Yes, I go to him too. Everyone does. Roberto told me you came here with your husband to sell real estate, and then it turns out he likes packin’ fudge more then pussy and you two get divorced.”
“That’s pretty much the story,” I admitted.
“Oh, honey, never tell a hairdresser anything you don’t want getting around. I know from personal experience. I once told Roberto that I had sex with my second husband dressed as a rubber nun and before you knew it, everyone in town knew about it.”
“A rubber nun?” I had to ask.
“Oh, honey,” she said, laying a hand on mine, “I’ve done much worse. Much.”
“I once had sex with my husband in a suit.”
“Amanda, you whore!” Regina said, laughing.
“Well, at the time, I thought it was pretty wild. He was smoking a cigar, and I was dressed in a corset, stiletto heels, and sheer nylons. I did feel like a whore.”
“Try dressing like Ilsa, she-wolf of the SS, and then try and tell yourself you’re not a trollop.”
“You’re kidding!”
“No, I am not,” Regina replied, then took a large gulp of her highball.
“Well, we do a lot of crazy things when we’re young,” I replied.
“Young, that was last week, honey!”