Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (16 page)

I go at the room with the roughest-grit sandpaper first, trying to grind off the paint and filth with about a sixteenth of an inch of wood to boot. I have the windows and doors open, a fan going, but even so, I feel cocooned by heat. My goggles, face mask, ear plugs, and all the trembling, bone-shaking noise from the sander make me feel oddly protected, insulated. It’s hot—really, really hot—but it’s also soothing, pacifying, to be doing something that is simultaneously so much work and so much like doing nothing.

A step and a half forward. A step backward. It’s like slow-motion fencing with a tremendously heavy foil, or performing the obscure mating ritual of an obese and mechanical race. After a few minutes I find a steady rhythm, which breaks only when I come upon a super-stubborn stain, and even then, I just alter my pattern to a step forward, a step backward, hovering for a while. From time to time I notice people passing by outside, and I sense their fear and pity, but I am impervious to it. I am in a womb of sound, sand, and heat. A step forward. A step backward. There is no progress. There is progress. There is an old floor. There is a new floor.

For the first time in a very, very long time, I feel at peace.

Time slows, liquefies, turns gelatinous. Something I can touch, poke, watch it shimmy and jiggle. A mandarin orange in a tub of Jell-O. If I take off my mask, I think, I can breathe it in. Time. Space. Wood. I am grinding the floor into air, one sixteenth of an inch at a time. There’s no reason I couldn’t do the same to the whole house—pulverize it into dust, breathe it in. Through the friction between the sandpaper and the wood, I’m literally putting the house through a phase change. Solid to gas. For that matter, I’m sweating so profusely that I feel there’s more of me seeping through my pores than is left inside. The floor, the house—it’s in every breath. A drop of perspiration falls from my nose onto the floor and disappears into the raw wood as though it were dying of thirst for my sweat. I wonder how much of me it will take.

Suddenly I am torn from my reverie. Jenae’s in the doorway, waving her hands, her mouth wide open—yelling, I presume.

I power down the sander and hear the tail end of her greeting. “Holy shit is that thing loud! I could hear it from two blocks away. It sounds like you’re putting the house through a wood chipper.”

She’s wrong, of course. Only by degree.

The day proceeds much along those lines as I work through the first layer of horror in the dining room. I feel I’ve found a new monastic life at the handle of my new blue 150-pound vibrating friend.

But when I start on the living room, everything is much different.

First of all, the ventilation is meager at best, with only two small louvered windows and no way to work the fan without pointing it at the closed end of the room—I try once and a minor dust storm ensues. The next, more serious problem happens when I hit what I think is a particularly stubborn patch of paint or stain. The dirtiest part of the dining room had orange and brown stains outlining what once must have been a very large piece of furniture, or perhaps a holding pen for pygmy elephants, yet the sander tore right through them. In the living room, the floor looks better, but goopily finished. I think I’ll be able to sand it right down, but instead it gums on the paper, balling up whatever finish is on the floor and then carving little spirals with the clots. I go through several ten-dollar sheets of sandpaper before I decide I had best suck it up and call for help.

“Linseed oil,” Glendon says, before I have even finished describing my problem. “They sealed most every floor with linseed oil before World War II. That there is some crummy stuff—”

He stops abruptly, and I am sure that my floor-sanding nirvana is at an impasse. I know he’s baiting me to beg for more help, but I’m deathly afraid that the only solution is to tear it up—that, or worse yet, he will tell me that it’s poisonous and that we can either get rid of it or snuff it out with a bulletproof layer of Masonite and a couple thousand nails.

But he is feeling generous. “Get down here fast,” he says. “I know you’re still on the clock with the sander. I’ll set you up with some stripper so you can get back to sanding by tomorrow.”

What he gives me has more skulls and crossbones on it than advertising for a pirate convention. From what I can find out, it’s more or less stabilized napalm. The warning on the label reads, essentially:
IF YOU ARE PREGNANT, OR ARE TRYING TO GET PREGNANT, OR ARE YOURSELF A RESULT OF A PREGNANCY, BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN, LIKE YOU WILL LOSE A LOT OF MONEY AND THEN DIE. IN THAT ORDER.

“So, any special instructions?” I ask.

“Seriously,” he says, “your wife pregnant?”

I tell him no.

“Good,” he says. “Take lots of breaks. Lots of fresh air. Stuff’ll mess you up.”

“But it works?” I feel like a future war criminal or a Nazi doctor, about to commit some seriously grievous acts against nature and humanity—all for the sake of keeping our living room carpet-free.

“Bet your butt it works,” he says. “Lickety-flipping-split.”

Back at the house, I get geared up once more, keenly aware that I am walking a fine line between wasting a hundred bucks a day on a sander I can’t use until the linseed oil is gone and destroying all the alveoli in my lungs and any other organic matter within a mile-wide radius. My detailed instructions from Glendon are to “slather it all over, then scrape it on up.”

I do so gingerly at first, parceling out the stripper as though it’s expensive mint jelly. I wait a couple of minutes, breathing though my mask like a twerpy Darth Vader. Then, with my little yellow plastic scraper, I go at it.

I feel a mixture of glee and horror. I have the power to save and restore things, but only if I am willing to sacrifice the environment and any present or future babies at the altar of home improvement. Then I realize it is costing me about five bucks a minute to come up with only a vaguely apt metaphor. For the rest of the afternoon I shake that napalm out faster than Westmoreland over the Batangan Peninsula.

The English word “pharmacy” comes from the Greek
pharmakon,
which means both medicine and poison. Likewise, the word “tool” is best defined as something that one uses as a tool. In other words, a hammer is not a tool if we don’t use it as such. If we use a hammer as a paperweight, it’s not a hammer. At the same time, if we use a paperweight in the shape of Liberace’s head to drive a nail into a board, well, then that’s a hammer. The more I work on this house, the more I realize that the world of home construction and renovation is chock-full of hypotheticals and syntactic subtleties. “Plumb,” “level,” and “straight,” for instance, are all abstractions that rarely, if ever, exist in practice, no matter how often evoked in a handbook or blueprint. I came into this fixer-upper thinking that there were going to be categorically good or bad decisions to make, that home improvements would be markedly just so—improvements. What I’m finding is a nebulous world where trying to improve something means implicitly bringing it to the brink of its (or my own) destruction in order to give it a new life. I suppose this is true of everything. In order to perform most kinds of surgery, for example, it’s necessary to anesthetize the patient and take him right to the door of death, press his face against it so his breath shows on the brass of the knocker, then drag him back for a few more years of shoveling snow and cheating on his taxes.

Thoreau said that we should beware of any occupation that demands a new suit and not a new wearer of clothes. What he meant, and what I’m learning, is that if you want to renovate a house—and if you want to renovate a life along with it—you’ve got to strip it bare before you build it back up. Any fool can take a sheet of linoleum or a roll of wallpaper and slap it over the existing surface, but before long the real thing is going to seethe to the surface.

I need to figure out, I realize, how to be a better man in order to make this house and our lives in it worthwhile.

While I work on the floor over the next couple of days, Jenae comes to the house straight from her job so that she can work on refinishing the kitchen cabinets. They are covered with, go figure, the same cheap wood veneer that’s covering the walls, the refrigerator, and most of the appliances. Instead of nailing down the veneer, Stanley had apparently decided to save his nails for the Masonite floor fiasco, so he sprayed glue all over the original solid wood and stuck the paneling up. What ensues is not unlike my proceedings with the Masonite. Jenae would heave at a section of cabinet paneling with a scraper and all that would break off would be the parts that didn’t have any adhesive underneath. On one cabinet, I swear I can read “Stanley” spelled out in glue and broken veneer. Occasionally I can hear her cries over my sanding.

At first I expect nothing but despair. Seeing her standing on the counter in her hiking boots, ripping at the nasty paneling with her fingernails, her hair sweaty and stuck all over her face, I think she’ll fall and break an ankle, and then we’ll be in the clear to have somebody come in, rip out the cabinets, and put up new ones, all in one day. For that, the average estimate we can find is $15,000—just to nail some boxes to the freaking wall. But she sticks with it and does the same thing I did with the Masonite and linseed oil mess. She strips what she can by hand and then napalms the hell out of it. After that, she uses a hand sander to grind down the cabinets to the real wood. She stains them so that their original grain shows through better, and then she seals them and leaves the cabinet doors off: later, she’ll sew curtains to cover the openings for a kind of café effect. I am in absolute awe.

I have never been so proud of anybody in my life.

The remainder of the floor work goes reasonably well, despite my expectations to the contrary. The sanding is slow and pensive, but as relaxing and enjoyable as anything that involves potential long-term hearing loss and nerve damage. It is as close as I’ll ever get to meditating, I think, or to ballroom dance lessons with an automaton.

The polyurethane goes down easily and dries nicely to an only slightly wonky mirror finish. The floors that began as the arena for a shit-smearing contest come out looking like a suitable dance floor for a church. And the hardwood floor that I so dreaded having to add myself on top of the pine two-by-sixes—it is so easy and fun, it barely deserves mention. Tony’s teaching served me well. The three-eighth-inch pieces of new maple snap together practically on their own. All I have to do is lay them out, fit them together, and nail them down.

Ridiculous as it sounds, Jenae was right: this house wanted to have a maple floor again. We didn’t do anything but let it. For my money, that’s what a good job is. It’s not about forcing something to go where it doesn’t belong, it’s about figuring out what goes together and then not fucking it up.

We work and work all day long on the house, and when it gets dark we light every light and keep right on working till midnight. Dust and lumber and tools and stain are tumbled in every room, but from the outside, what a sight—what our new neighbors must see. The crack house that had recently had aluminum foil over the windows is alive with the sounds of industry, the brutal poetry of machines, and from its windows pour forth a kind of light made matter, glowing particulately with sawdust, sweat, and hope.

WHEN CONSIDERING OPTIONS
for our kitchen floor, I think a nice tile or one of those cool industrial-style floors will be neat—the black-and-white floors you see in fifties-style diners. It’ll be kind of retro chic, geometrically balanced, and relatively easy to clean. And if we don’t get around to mopping every week, we can just move the dark dirt to the black squares and the light dirt to the white ones. Make a little game out of it even. Play dirt checkers, pet-hair chess. Also, I love black and white. Because I am more or less colorblind, things that have either no color or all the colors at once soothe me. I never feel quite so irritated as when people show me something that’s a blend of a couple of relatively undifferentiated colors and ask me to tell them what I see. They show me a flower the color of a serious bruise and say, What color is it? No matter what I answer—blue, purple, violet, violence—they just laugh. No! they say. It’s
indigo!
As though colors exist in a crayon box and have little cardboard fences between one another like solitary confinement cells.

Sadly, Jenae uses her executive veto on my diner floor. I think she’s just afraid that I’ll beat her at dirt checkers, but she won’t argue.

“We are not putting any more freaking vinyl in this house,” she says.

To emphasize her point, she pulls at the top layer of flooring in the corner of the kitchen. It is, I am told, a bright royal-blue-and-kelly-green plaid. Beneath it are what appear to be five or six former floors, all of which are at least as chromatically devastating.

“I don’t see any classy black-and-white floors,” I say.

“You can have your squares,” Jenae says. “You may not, however, have your vinyl.”

For the time being, I decide to forgo the battle for the war. I know, in fact, that I am going to lose, intentionally or otherwise, a series of small skirmishes before I can claim any major victories.

I don’t mean to put this in overly martial terms—though, of course, the word “martial” is an anagram of “marital”—but I am definitely getting the impression that my opinions don’t matter in the same way hers do. I am beginning to sense that when we bought the house, I got my study, the basement, and half of the garage, and she got, well, the rest, including, but not limited to, the bedroom, the bathroom, the dining room, the living room, the kitchen, the porch, the backyard, the front yard, and all of the side yard that you can see from the street. The rest of it is mine. That space behind the air conditioner—all mine.

I would never say it out loud to her, but I am beginning to feel that we are designing, remodeling, and inhabiting a scale-model dollhouse. Problem being, the scale is 1 to 1. And we are the models. The dolls.