Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (15 page)

We’re like one of those oddly gendered couples on the Home and Garden Network. She’s the visionary gay designer with all the big ideas, and I’m the sensible, straight, but dour girl sidekick who has to make a chandelier out of gum and broken pop bottles.

After a few minutes spent standing in the doorway, staring at the mutilated floor, she turns to me and puts a hand on my arm. “We’d be no better than Stanley if we put carpet back down on this floor.” She squeezes and lets go. “We’ve got to save it, Matthew.”

When I was a kid, I used to make up little quests. I loved the idea of proving myself, my worthiness—for what, I didn’t know. I had a ten-pump pellet gun, and I would get all gussied up in camouflage, shoulder my gun, and ride off into the field behind my house. I had no idea what hunting really was, but at least I understood that it entailed shooting something. As the only son of a florist, killing things was never a family priority, so back then I would try to convince myself that if I got close enough to something and was ready, willing, and at least technically able to shoot, that would suffice.

Of course, the quest wasn’t the same then as it is now with the flooring. I know my wife and the nature of the task at hand well enough to understand that coming close and not actually hitting the target isn’t going to cut it.

It is nine o’clock on a Saturday morning, and I am sitting on a metal folding chair in a hardwood floor warehouse next to a woman whose too tight jeans, plunging neckline, and telltale scalloped lace bra hint that she’s on her way to or from a divorce. To my right is a nearsighted bald man who keeps squinting like a subterranean accountant, and to his right are three handlebar-mustached men who appear to be related by more than facial hair. We are waiting for Tony, our teacher. He will teach us how to lay hardwood floors. But there are no Styrofoam cups of coffee. No camaraderie. No donuts anywhere.

We’re all appropriately dressed in cotton duck or denim, which boasts of our readiness. I, of course, am an impostor in this crowd, but thus far nobody’s asked to see any ID. The divorcée looks more at home here than I do (she just asked one of the handlebar guys to borrow his Leatherman and proceeded to pare her nails with its knife). The class is free and there were no posted prerequisites, though I can’t help but worry that I’m going to be outed at any minute, escorted from the building, banned until I can prove I know a ball-peen from a claw hammer.

Therefore it is deeply depressing when Tony arrives. He is attired in khaki shorts, a pressed, somewhat silken golf shirt, and running shoes. We’re hoping for this to be a mistake—maybe Tony’s just a warm-up motivational speaker/comedian—but it is not. Tony is a professional. He does this for a living. He asks where the donuts are. Very funny, we tell him, Mister Professional Hardwood Floor Installer Guy. Very funny.

When I was an undergrad, the Very Reverend Father John Fitzgibbons Jr., S.J., taught a course on the American Renaissance that wended its way through Hawthorne and Cooper and ultimately found its destination in Melville, Emerson, and Thoreau. Father Fitzgibbons was a sweet, exuberant Jesuit who wore a baby-blue cardigan and a pastel-yellow knit tie rather than the cleric’s black-and-whites. Instead of the minister he was, he looked like a mix of Tom Selleck and Mister Rogers. He was from back east and attended, as Emerson did, Harvard Divinity School. Though many of our classmates “read” those great American books with beery hangovers and an appetite for nothing more than the raunchy highlights involving underage Tahitian girls, gunplay, and/or impaled whales, as the semester went on, a few of us would stay after class like closet revolutionaries and continue our heated discussions. Before long, we proposed renting a van for spring break to make the thousand-mile pilgrimage from Milwaukee to Walden Pond with the good Father Fitz at the wheel. Though eventually most of us went in favor of the cocoa butter, cheap beer, and bikinis of South Padre—or just the Polish sausages of Wauwatosa—the impression of that spring was made for me in the margins of those furious books.

In the first chapter of
Walden,
Thoreau writes with open disdain on the subject of home improvement: “The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor.” The life of a homeowner is, it seems, one of perpetual labor and strife. But he also says in the same chapter, “Economy”: “As is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.”

There is something essentially American about fixing up a house. Something perfectly democratic about doing it yourself. About not having a single damned idea whatsoever about the difference between a router and a planer but going right on and doing it anyway. Even if it means sitting in a warehouse on a Saturday morning in a ritual pageant of emasculation posing as a twelve-step program, we must edify ourselves and our homes. Thoreau, after all, didn’t just go to the woods and live deliberately in the shrubbery. He built a house.

Thoreau brags in
Walden
that he built his shanty for $28.12½. Of that he spent $4.00 on “one thousand old brick” and $3.90 on nails. He spent more on nails than he did on windows. He spent ten cents more for his roof and siding combined than he did on nails. He and Stanley have a lot in common.

In class, Tony arranges a four-by-eight sheet of plywood that will be our “floor.” As he readies his air compressor and nail guns, the handlebar mustache men needle him with tool talk.

“Those just brads you’re loading there?” The middle Handlebar is kicked back in his chair, his fat arms crossed like two hams.

Tony loads a clip of nails like somebody who’s watched far too many Clint Eastwood movies. “They’re flooring nails,” he says. He does not look at the Handlebars, but he knows they’re there. They always are, I imagine.

The class is a total blur. Tony litters the floor with planks of hickory, and because none of us except the divorcée would volunteer, he hammers and nails the boards together quicker than he can narrate. He puts a board in place, taps it with a rubber mallet, and then
thwa-cock, thwa-cock, thwa-cock,
“and that’s how you put the wood down,” he says. His young son has shown up and sits in a chair to the right of the Handlebars looking grievously bored. He’s clearly seen his father at his pedagogical best before.

Afterward, like all good “nontraditional” students, the divorcée, the accountant, and I vie for Tony’s individual consultation time. This, of course, is what we had hoped for. I sketch my pine/maple floor for Tony as he coils the compressor hose. He glances at it and squints. “Not much of an artist, are you? Or is that accurate?”

“Yeah,” I say, “I don’t know.”

“That section’s all poked out there, right in the middle of the floor?”

I nod. “I just want something to stand on that won’t make my wife hate me,” I say.

“Good call,” he says. “Then lay down your new floor on top of the old and let that tongue or whatever be. Put a threshold around it and I bet nobody’ll even notice. If you can’t fix it, frame it.”

Whether that’s a renovation truth or a cliché, I will soon find out.

In addition to whatever magic will come with laying a bunch of new floor, I also still have 750 square feet to strip, sand, and seal. The only thing I know to expect is dust. I go to the store to get the safety glasses and the face mask and gloves, and I figure I’m ready to roll. I just need the sander.

The rental department at Home Depot is not quite the gentle, welcoming place I hope for. It’s tucked away behind the Contractors’ Corner. The entrance is flanked with disturbing, improbable items with names like wet saw, rotary hammer, stump grinder—all of which, I think, would make for good stripper/drag queen names.

A man in an orange smock and a Grizzly Adams beard that begins just below his eyes asks what I want. “Glendon” is scrawled in black marker on the middle of his apron like a title or Scottish army rank. I tell him I want a drum sander. I rehearsed on the way over after having done a little research in
Home Improvement 1-2-3!
All the books I could find on the subject invoked the elementary nature of construction, as though reflooring your home or building an addition were as simple as counting a sloth’s toes.

“No,” Glendon says, “you’re wrong.” He takes a huge breath through his nose that momentarily affects local weather patterns. “Drum sander. Jiminy Christmas. You do not want a drum sander.”

I know he wants me to argue with him, to tell him that in fact I do know what I want, and it’s called a Drum Sander. Either that or he wants to call me Sally and have me tell him his turkey pot pie is ready.

“I’m pretty sure I want a drum sander?” I say. With whipped cream and a cherry, I might as well have added.

“No,” Glendon says. “No you don’t.”

He has his arms crossed high up on his chest, and when he unfurls them I flinch. He marches around me and walks back through the rental equipment. I don’t know if I’m supposed to have a license to go back there or what, but he has already clearly demonstrated that he has no problem dictating what’s good for me, so I stay put. He returns with what looks like a bright blue, cast-iron vacuum cleaner.

“Orbital sander,” he says. “Works like a hand sander, only it weighs a hundred fifty pounds. Keep you from messing up your floor.” He’s entering information into the computer, not looking at me. “You can have a drum sander if you want, but you let that puppy get away from you for one second and you’ll have a permanent wave in your floor deep as a doo-wop pompadour. That what you want?”

I tell Glendon that I’m sure the orbital sander will be fine. I resist the urge to kneel and kiss his ring finger.

At the house, with all my protective gear on, I’m as ready for an epic motorcycle trip through the Sahara as I am for a little sanding. The sander looks and feels like a cannon that’s been converted into a Hoover, but it has a handle like a pogo stick. I wonder why until I plug it in and give the trigger a squeeze. The whole contraption shimmies to life, shaking me like a scarecrow attached to one of those weight-loss belt vibrators.

I let go and step back to make sure I haven’t electrocuted anything.

This jalopy is going to shake my bones out of joint, rag-dolling me behind it as I struggle just to keep my hands on it. The way all the books talk about running a drum sander makes it sound like trying to steer a drag car from the rear bumper. This was supposed to be as complicated as walking a schipperke.

But it’s now or not-until-Grandpa-wants-to-pony-up-huge-cash time, so I squeeze the trigger and the sander powers up to its maximum orbital velocity of 3,500 rpm and I lower its big square head to the floor and then, instead of great sandy action, it just kind of shimmies there. A little to the left, a little to the right—no real drama. Lots of noise, but not much in the way of action. To get the thing to move at all I have to put my back into it and really heave. Even then it’s like motivating an overloaded, geriatric pack animal. I pull back and find that, like vacuuming, the reverse stroke is much easier. But the prospect of vacuuming with a 150-pound former howitzer is not exactly something I was bargaining for.

I let the sander power down and slide it back, hoping to see a perfectly finished section of glowing maple. What I get instead is a square of subtly scratched wood. Whatever kind of sealant they used was apparently pretty tough stuff. It’s time for a smoke break.

I sit on the stoop—on the same step I sat on when I saw the For Sale sign and waited for Stanley to show up—and I think about how every part of this whole homeowning proposition is shaping up like this floor. You think you can do anything—that you simply have to want to do something and all of a sudden you go from weekend warrior to master carpenter. You think you can fix something yourself and then, after countless hours of consulting books whose authors didn’t imagine their readers could count past three, after spending thousands of dollars on tools you’ll never successfully use even one time, after God knows how much wasted money on materials you measured once and cut twice—after all of it you still can’t do it yourself. At this point there would be nothing more painful than telling my wife, my grandfather, some contractor—myself—that I’m in over my head. That I don’t, didn’t, and won’t know how to swing a hammer and drive a nail. Vanity, arrogance, and misplaced thrift have cast me adrift in this unnavigable sea of construction.

Just then a happy little border collie trots up to my feet, its dad strolling right behind. We exchange hellos and he seems to want to keep walking, but I’m communing with his pooch.

“You buy this house?”

“Yep,” I say. He doesn’t even pretend to think I’m a contractor. “We bought this house.”

“We looked at it,” he says. He’s probably a nice guy, I remind myself. My new neighbor. “Used to be a crack house, right? Been on sale forever. Two, three years, on and off.”

I tell him I thought it just went up for sale, that it was only me and an interested . . . other person.

“This time around, maybe,” he says. “He puts it up for months at a time, nothing happens, takes it off, waits a while, puts it back up. Anyway,” he says, “good luck.” He tugs at his collie, not wanting him to get too attached.

I go back at the sander with equal parts despair and vigor. I don’t know how to process the fact that the house has sat unsold forever, but finding corroboration that the place was likely a crack house—it’s liberating. I mean, when we bought it, it certainly could have used, as the realtors say, a little TLC, but we didn’t know that it probably could have used a touch of TNT too. All of a sudden I feel that I can’t go wrong. Or wrong
er,
anyway.

I rev up the sander, wipe the sweat and tears away, and I’m off. Pushing and pulling, a step and a half forward, a step backward. I try it again. A step and a half forward, a step backward. Feels okay. Methodical and directed, loud as hell and therefore kind of quiet too, inside all that noise.