Wow, No Thank You.

by Samantha Irby

  There was a crawl space under that frightening-ass house, too. A perfect forever home for your local killer clown! I had to go to church all the time because we literally lived across the street from it, and one Halloween, instead of letting us take to the streets to partake in the devil’s holiday, the church threw an “autumn party” at which we sat very chastely, dressed up as good boys and girls, listening to the Christian version of “Monster Mash” and eating sugar-free candy. Someone had snuck in a VHS tape of Silent Night, Deadly Night, and when the septuagenarian chaperone fell asleep, we crowded around the TV and I got to see my very first soft-core boobs. Then I watched in horror as they were impaled by a murderous Santa Claus. (What kind of psycho would do that to boobs?!) I walked home later that night with my heart hammering in my prepubescent chest toward the darkened shed no one really knew what to do with and the crawl space no normal person would have a real use for, then went upstairs and slept fully clothed with all the lights on, breaking at least two of the Top Five Black Mom Rules.

  I remember being a teenager in the summers, and absolutely roasting in the third-floor walk-up Section 8 apartment we moved to when my gram decided to buy a condo because not taking care of that scary old house had grown too expensive. I filled old Snapple bottles halfway with tap water and crammed them into the freezer, pulling them out a couple hours later to drip melting ice on my forehead and tongue, trying to convince myself I felt less hot even as my flesh bubbled away from my bones like pieces of fried bologna in a hot pan. I had no idea what a window-unit air conditioner even was, let alone that there was an alternate universe in which I could not spend every July morning afraid to eat breakfast on the cracked vinyl of our kitchen chairs for fear of ripping the heat-fused tender skin off the backs of my thighs when I got up. I would watch Cubs games on WGN and suck on Fla-Vor-Ice popsicles that I was too impatient to let get fully cold, counting the days until I could go back to my school lunch and air-conditioned classroom.

  does the air conditioner have to be cleaned, and if so, who does that

  do people clean their roofs or does the rain just take care of it

  is a storm window just the regular window or is it some special kind of extra window

  what is that steam coming out of the side of the house that smells like laundry detergent

  do you actually have to clean out cupboards or is that just a thing that happens in magazines

  who washes walls

  how organized is the deck supposed to be

  is it better to flush, or just toss that runny leftover pasta from three nights ago

  am I supposed to do something with the heat thing (??) when it’s not winter

  no really what is a crawl space for and do I have to go in it

  is one fire extinguisher enough for a whole house or is there like a square-footage requirement

  what is a grounded outlet

  must I really learn things about grass

  I lived in a high-rise dormitory for one year after I got out of high school, and maybe that experience was useful for learning about how to deal with unrepentantly loud neighbors you’re not in charge of, which seems to be a running theme of adulthood. The geeky senior in the double room next door to ours was basically a hall monitor in pajama pants, and not an actual authority figure to whom we paid even a scrap of respect, so. I learned nothing about running a grown-up home, especially since there were no courses offered titled Intro to Property Taxes or Wait, How Do I Fix This Mailbox? in Northern Illinois University’s catalog.

  After I expelled myself from college, I was homeless for a hot minute and lived out of my car, which meant that the only home maintenance I needed to stay on top of was remembering that if the gas needle dropped to half a tank, that meant that at any moment my car would grind to a halt in the middle of the street and I’d be forced to lug a red plastic jug to the nearest Citgo. I eventually moved into my friend Jon’s childhood bedroom in his stepdad Mel’s house while Jon was away at college, like a good kid, and it was the first and only time I have ever lived in a rich person’s Really Nice House. In rich people’s houses, you know that things will absolutely be taken care of. Work has been and will be done. But it’s done by a contractor who doesn’t really talk to you and seemingly shows up whenever he feels like it. At the end of it all—voilà!—there’s a second bedroom and the banisters and chandeliers have all been replaced!

  Jon had his own wing that I was allowed to take over, a bedroom suite with a full bathroom (and a kitchen!!) above the garage, connected to the building that housed Mel’s graphic design and photography studio. This meant that I spent a lot of my time there listening to Jon’s old A Tribe Called Quest mixtapes and imagining how different my life would have been if I’d grown up with my own bathroom. I don’t think it occurred to me in high school, when I was smoking bowls and playing Aphex Twin in that very room, what a coup it was that this kid had his own separate outside entrance. In high school! Seriously, what is a curfew when you have a key to your own door? I am still the exact same person I was in 1995, so I’m sure I was mystified by how close his bed was to the ice cream in his very own personal kitchen. But wow. What a fucking flex. Anyway, I got to live in one room of a multimillion-dollar house with Italian marble bathroom floors I was afraid to breathe on, a stainless steel Viking hood and range I knew I was too broke to even glance at, and bottles of expensive sparkling water in the refrigerator at all times because these fancy motherfuckers couldn’t even hydrate regular.

  if I want a new banister, do I just google “new banister person”

  why does the dishwasher sound like that

  which neighbor is responsible for the fence neither side asked to be installed

  I would love to install a dimmer switch but I also love not being electrocuted

  what is a property tax

  a lawnmower costs HOW MUCH

  how did the neighbor decide exactly on which invisible line between our homes his snow blower was going to stop? Like, would it kill him to help me out with a few inches of clear sidewalk

  the faucet can just drip forever, right

  wait, what is this sticky …? Never mind

  should I set traps for these mice or just burn the fucking house down

  I have lived with exactly ONE handy person. And I don’t mean handy by trade. I mean my old roommate, a regular woman with a job at a bank who knew how to use a stud finder and also how to put up shelves. It’s pretty amazing to be around the kind of person who envisions a thing they want, and then goes to Menards and figures out how to make it real. I’m the type of person who thinks, “Wow, that table would be gorgeous in a deep teal,” and then walks past it every single day for the rest of my life without once considering going to the hardware store and getting sandpaper and a drop cloth. I would love to replace my kitchen cabinets, but how am I supposed to get the old ones down? And, even if I developed some herculean old-man strength and ripped them clean off the wall, what am I supposed to do with them? How do you throw cabinets away? Who do you get to put up the new ones?!

  My roommate taught me things I still might not know about if she hadn’t been there to drag me kicking and screaming into rote domesticity:

  what air plants are

  that teriyaki chicken wings at the hot bar in Whole Foods are incredible

  that it’s good to leave boxes of Kleenex out

  that switching out the knobs on an IKEA dresser from the bumped-and-bruised section for prettier ones is a real thing

  that you can place a rectangular piece of finished wood on top of your radiator to make it a shelf

  that vacuum cleaners have bags that you have to throw away

  that I needed to learn to use a goddamn hex key

  that you should occasionally run some white vinegar through a hot cycle in a top-loading washing machine

  that it’s legal to put up a new toilet paper holder in a rented apartment

  In my twenties I would dog-sit a lot, because living with
roommates is emotionally exhausting when you’re the kind of person who never stops worrying that someone might be mad at you for a thing you hadn’t even realized you’d done. Plus my job at the animal hospital meant I had unfettered access to the kind of people who lived in mansions and didn’t even blink at paying seventy-five dollars a night for me to eat their cheese and introduce their dogs to Law & Order reruns, especially because those people believed that my proximity to veterinarians made me some kind of pet expert. At the very least, they could sleep tight in Tuscany knowing that I wasn’t going to spoon-feed onions and raisins to their borzois. The best part of that job, other than knowing that finally no one was around to judge my consumption of peanut butter straight from the jar, was getting to live in the kind of house I’d otherwise never have access to.

  I had never had an alarm system (I accidentally set off several, and definitely almost got arrested when more than one dog was like, “Bitch, I don’t know her,” when the cops arrived to shut it off. Gee, thanks a lot, Lucy.) or taken a bath in a jacuzzi tub or seen recessed lighting in someone’s home. I thought dimmer switches were the height of elegance! I used to sit for this family that had speakers built into the ceiling of every room. There was a central command system with all these knobs and buttons and lights, and if you knew what you were doing, you could set it up so that whatever CD you put on would be playing in every room of the house. And when I tell you that my mind was b l o w n, I’m telling you that I ran from room to room up and down the stairs, mouth agape, as Dave Matthews warbled “Warehouse” in the bathroom and the den and the library. AT THE SAME TIME. I never wanted to own a place like that of my own, because, holy shit, it just seemed like so much work. How much money were they spending on light bulbs? When your house has seven faucets, how do you make sure that none of them is leaky? How many hours must you set aside specifically for dusting? How do you keep everything in order? The sheer enormity of keeping a house the size of my grammar school heated and clean would make bile creep up the back of my throat. I am not cut out for that life. Imagine me with an alcove.

  I lived in my last apartment in Chicago for six years or something like that, not long enough to become a legend (“don’t go near apartment 309, that weird cat lady who gets all those quarts of soup delivered will cast a spell on you!”), but definitely long enough that every other apartment got rehabbed as people cycled through over the years, and I had no idea that mine was the only one left with crumbling asbestos windows and a neon-pink bathtub.

  The seal at the base of the toilet wore out, and occasionally when I flushed, dingy water seeped out the bottom, just slowly enough that I wouldn’t notice until the next time I went in there and nearly broke my teeth on the sink from slipping around in my own waste. The ceiling in that place fell in, twice, because homeboy upstairs was growing hydroponic weed and his hoses got backed up or some nonsense (what am I, a farmer?), and the leaky water built up and came crashing down on all my fucking books and electrocuted my television. The utensil drawer stopped sliding all the way out. The overhead light wouldn’t work unless the ceiling fan was also on, but in the winter that’s annoying, especially in the daytime before the orchestra inside the radiator banged and clanged to life. My door would bang and whistle if whoever last smoked a cigarette out the hallway window forgot to shut it after they’d finished. The freezer just up and quit, on a regular-ass Tuesday. All these problems were solved with e-mails to a faceless gentleman named Joe whom I never met, a man who started his day after I left for work and would always have the problem “solved” before I got back. I would leave my crib at 7 a.m., e-mail Joe from the train, and by the time I got home twelve hours later, there would be a new fridge installed. Or the toilet seat would be replaced. The ceiling would be back in one piece. The utensil drawer would move like greased lightning. I never had to pretend to have an opinion about fixtures or discern the infinitesimal difference between two shades of blue paint. I would go do my job, and Joe would make sure that the walls matched whatever shade of industrial eggshell was in everyone else’s tiny, sad apartment by the time I got back. This is how life is supposed to be lived.

  do postal workers just want money at Christmas or do they need a gift from the heart

  what happens if I never ever ever launder this rug

  am I too old to tape posters on the wall

  that cherry tomato that rolled under the unreachable corner cabinet: what’s gonna happen to it

  where is the circuit breaker and why didn’t I think to look for it before plugging in the window unit and a hair dryer in the same outlet

  how old do I have to be before I get to literally yell “get off my lawn” at the children trampling my goddamned grass

  can “drafty” be an aesthetic

  is the UPS man judging me

  LMAO, I’m not ~pruning a tree~

  why is so much furniture made solely for decoration

  do I have to wash this mop, and if so, where

  how long before someone calls the police on me thinking I’m breaking into my own damn house

  I got my lady a biweekly cleaning service last Christmas (in case you don’t feel like googling “how can I be romantic”). I can feel your judgment, like, “OH, OKAY, MONEYBAGS,” but even if I had to go clean someone else’s house to pay someone else to come clean my own, I would do that, because is there anything more horrifying than having to confront your own dirt or acknowledge the things you’ve resigned to remain in a state of “kind of dirty”? Like, how clean can that tight spot behind the toilet actually get? Can I really be expected to regularly dust the top edge of every picture frame? I’m afraid if I inch the refrigerator to the right just enough to force a mop between it and the cabinet it’s stuck to, a creature is going to jump out and bite me. Am I the one who should be trusted to get the grates clean, and more important, does it matter if they aren’t? Even if I bleach that plastic mat we leave the winter boots on, some moron is going to sneeze some deadly strain of influenza directly into my mouth the next time I go outside, so what difference does it actually make?

  Have you ever purchased blinds before? I mean, have you ever sat in the place where you live while a person with a Trapper Keeper full of faux bois blind samples comes to your home and presents the options for you as if you have any idea at all what the fuck he is talking about? It’s magical! Yesterday, a gentleman named Jeff came into this house, whose gutter debris I am actively ignoring, in a truck with his phone number printed on it, and slowly and methodically hung blinds that he’d cut specifically for windows he’d precisely measured. If I could bottle and sell the feeling I had watching him complete this task I knew I wasn’t cut out to perform no matter how many times incredulous home improvement experts had scoffed in my face while shouting, “Just go to Lowe’s,” I would have Bezos money.

  is it ever worth it to try to fix something in my home myself like what is really going to happen I should just hire a guy right

  who the fuck do these squirrels think they are?

  if this table is not real wood, do I actually have to polish it

  I thought HVAC was a slang term for a badass, like HBIC

  take the shower head off? With what?!

  is a linen closet supposed to be organized in some other fashion than “rifled through”

  at what point do you just throw away the stove

  what’s really going to happen to that bacon grease I poured down the drain

  what is “insulation”—or wait, is it called “installation”

  Listen, I don’t know how to live in this house I live in with my lady and her kids now, and I know that. I mean, I knew when I arrived with a car packed full of books I’m never going to read and placed open bags of cat litter spilling all over it in the driveway—whose cracks I wasn’t aware until two weeks ago that I am now expected to monitor and fill and pave over—that I wasn’t cut out for living in more than four hundred and fifty square feet of space. I’m reminded of it every time I go visit a f
riend who’s, oh, you know, just doing a DIY remodel of the guest bathroom. LOL, WHAT. How did you learn to make a wall? We learned colors and shapes at the same time in elementary school! When between Elmer’s Glue and yesterday did you figure out how to do a baseboard? (I’m still over here hoping beyond hope that no one will notice that I don’t actually wash those.) Life was so much simpler when I could look at all my possessions at the same time from my bed, when my kitchen touched both my bedroom and the closet, and I didn’t have to worry about a beeping noise coming from the basement after I’d already climbed all the way to the top of the second-floor staircase to go to bed. I like it when the wiring is someone else’s problem, when I can submit a maintenance request through the management company’s website and come home at the end of the workday to a faucet that doesn’t drip anymore. I don’t have “Turn the Broom Closet into a Home Office in Seven Easy Steps” money just lying around! And even if I did, who is going to tell me which pliers to get? When am I going to have time to learn how to use a level or pour my own concrete? Girl, I am not Bob Vila. I don’t know shit about crown molding. And I’m not building a temperature-controlled cellar for this cheap-ass Costco wine.

  we almost got a fucking dog

  Helen died and immediately began haunting me from cat hell.

  So I don’t know what I actually believe about ghosts. Basically, I believe in them when it works in my favor, and the thought of them doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable. For example, if I feel an odd breeze in a windowless place and can’t immediately locate a silent fan or heating vent, I am willing to believe that maybe a ghost is blowing on me. If I’m home alone and feel a little prickle on my scalp and can determine that there aren’t any bugs crawling on me … Okay, sure! Maybe there is a benevolent spirit floating around reading that Atlantic article I’m pretending to understand over my shoulder! But if you were to suggest that my dead mother might be looming, invisible, overhead, disgustedly judging what I eat and choose to masturbate to, then I would confidently inform you that Ghost Dad isn’t a real movie and that most of the clips with “mature” tags on Pornhub that I have bookmarked on my phone are very tastefully shot.