Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (18 page)

The slate, however, is in the garage. At the time it seemed like a good idea to put it there. It wasn’t so much its weight as its expense. Don’t want somebody running off with 2,500 pounds of slate, we thought. It didn’t occur to us that it might be slightly inconvenient to get that same 2,500 pounds of rock from the garage, fifty feet across our backyard, up the back stairs, through the laundry room, and into the kitchen. The tile is packaged in what looks like pie boxes, though each box weighs 60 pounds.

Schlepping the boxes one at a time, Jenae looks prehistoric. A study of a female member of a Cro-Magnon, hunting and gathering tribe whose sad role it was to schlep.

“Need some help?” I say, trying to be chipper but not offensively so. If I am going to lose a hand tonight, I hope it will be an accident.

“How much does your vanity weigh?” Jenae says. She has just arrived from the long trek from the garage to the back door with a box of tile. “Mine’s going at about sixty pounds a pop.”

“Sounds about right,” I say.

Glaring ensues.

The guy at the flooring store told us it was important to tap each tile with the handle of a screwdriver to make sure they were internally sound. If they were, the sound would be flat and firm, like knocking on a door. If not, it would sound hollow, and the slate would be good for making little slates, but not for flooring.

Jenae takes the lead role in deciding what goes where, since she is the one who not only can but actually does care about the color scheme. Before she gets even five tiles temporarily down, it is clear why people pay good money to have professionals do this.

The guy at the flooring store told us to pick the straightest line in the room. But now that we are in the room, trying to find the straightest line is proving difficult. Hell, trying to find any straight line is difficult. The ramifications are suddenly clear. If we pick the east wall as the guide, the line of tiles will meet the sink and the cabinets at an angle of ten or fifteen degrees. Whimsical, to be sure, but not what we are going for. If we start on the west wall, we will immediately run into trouble because there is only about one visible foot of wall—the rest is all cabinets, refrigerator, and sink. More or less straight, but not enough to measure by.

Fortunately for us, before we are able to do any irrevocable damage, our friends Erik and Nicole stop by for a little chemical and nutritional support. They feed us beer and pizza while we describe our stymied progress. Erik is, as Nicole rightly boasts, nice as Jesus but probably a better carpenter, so their visit is nothing short of a godsend.

Before he finished his degree in communications and became a professional photographer, Erik was a carpenter and general contractor. He and his uncles built a “cabin” in southern Utah that has four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a gourmet kitchen, a two-car garage, and floor-to-ceiling cathedral windows that overlook the red rock buttes. The first time they had us down there, Jenae and I packed sleeping bags and inflatable mattresses. The next time we went, we brought chanterelles, brie, and a ’97 pinot.

“Yeah, screw the walls,” Erik says. “Walls are never straight. Plus, you always put shit right up against them and you never see the floor there. Why have the main line at a joint?”

I nod and try to look thoughtful.

“Pick a perspective,” he says, gesturing around the kitchen with a bottle of Red Stripe. “Like, where are you going to see the room from most often? Which view do you care about? You’re not going to worry about it when you’re in it. You don’t look at a floor when you’re standing on it. You look at it when you’re walking to- ward it.”

We pick a line from the living room and lay down a guide column of tiles that runs along the front of the sink. We build the rest of the floor around it, trying to remember which tile goes where by writing in grease pencil on their backs.

It isn’t as though Erik is saying anything mind-blowing; nonetheless, it is revelatory. It’s the kind of True Thing that you simply know from experience. I don’t doubt that the guy at the flooring store would have given us the same advice, but there wasn’t enough time to tell us everything we needed to know. After all, people do this for a living.

Knowing where you’re going and how to work with the features of the rock are of paramount importance to any good installer of slate tile. Part of the reason why slate is so cheap is because it’s only partially finished. The top of the tiles are more or less left as they came from the quarry. The sides are cut so they’re uniform, and the bottom is milled so that its surface readily takes the thinset and dries without air pockets, which would cause it to crack or fail over time. In order to successfully install a slate floor—at least according to the charmingly perfectionist definition as enforced by the ministry of aesthetics—you have to not only lay the tiles out according to (1) the main line of sight that Erik told us about, and (2) the overall impression given the slight variation in color from tile to tile, but also (3) the unique surface texture of each tile. In other words, we were trying to orient the tiles geographically, chromatically, and topographically.

While I set up the tile saw and hold what I hoped would not be the last cigarette between my pre-diamond-bladed fingertips, Jenae lays out the entire kitchen floor. She washes each tile with a wet rag so she can better see and understand whatever lessons it has to teach, gauge its ability to fit in to the greater community of tiles already down, and then, after more consideration, either place it in accordance with her higher principles or toss it outside for me to practice my cuts.

I fill a bucket with water, set up the stand, gingerly place the saw on it, and prepare to plug the menace in. I know full well that folks with less supposed education than I operate these things successfully year in and year out and wind up with just as many toes, fingers, and noses as they start with, but I am not prepared to chalk anything up to a learning experience. There is something fierce, terrible, and holy about anything that can cut through stone.

I double-, triple- and—what the hell—sextuple-check everything to make sure I am not suddenly wearing lots of dangly jewelry, ponytails, or neckties that can get caught and wound up in the saw and reel my face into the blade like an about-to-be-spiral-cut ham. I don my shop-teacher safety glasses, hold my breath, and flip the switch. With an industrial scream, gritty water sprays my face like a shot from a horror movie montage. The saw is so loud I can’t be sure that something hasn’t already been severed. I turn it off and check all my fingers to make sure it really is water that’s spraying all over. I don’t know why I am so surprised. It’s a wet saw. With that clarification made, I go about my ritual of enumeration, turn the saw back on, and proceed to transform a tile hewn from a multibillion-year-old rock into little Lincoln Logs of slate.

How like a child, how like a god.

Finally it’s time to lay some tile. I get a bag of the thinset, read the instructions, and whip up a batch to the consistency of cake frosting.

For a moment we kneel on the backerboard in prayer, the ancient tools of masons in our hands. I think about saying something to commemorate the occasion. Maybe we should write something sweet and sassy on the subfloor. After all, unless things go exponentially wrong, nobody will ever see it again. But we don’t want to jinx things, so, without fanfare, Jenae dips her trowel in the bucket, back-butters some thinset on the first tile, slaps some on the floor, trowels it as if she’s combing the wet hair of a monstrous child, and eases the tile into place.

“Good job, baby,” I say. “You just rocked.”

She looks at me and then regards the first tile suspiciously.

She lays the second tile in the same fashion, but it sits a good half inch higher than the first. There must be significantly more thinset under this one, but which amount is correct, there’s no telling.

“Maybe it’ll settle,” I say. “Let’s keep going and see what happens.”

A flat, incredulous look from Jenae.

She butters up another tile, slaps more thinset on the floor, puts the tile down, and voilà! Now we have three different tiles at three different heights.

Jenae repeats the process with two more tiles, with similar results. The difference in height is never more than three-quarters of an inch, but that will be awkward to navigate in dress shoes, if not bare feet.

With what I would call indignant fury, Jenae claws up the five tiles and turns them on their back sides like so many hopeless turtles. The tiles in question have dramatically different amounts of thinset on them. The question is clear. The answer, not so much.

We decide to use more thinset on the floor and less on the tiles. We scoop as much as we can with the trowel, use its edge to comb the thinset into neat little rows, and set each tile back into place, jiggling them a bit and applying more force than I think we should. The result, however, is good. It looks as if everything is going to be just fine.

Driving back to the house the next morning, I fully expect any number of catastrophes to have taken place. We could have gotten the thinset consistency wrong and the tiles could have been buckled like the bed of a dried-up lake. Or we could have underestimated the specific gravity that comes with a slate floor. After all, we took away maybe 50 pounds of linoleum and added 2,500 pounds of rock. If anything went wrong, it was going to be not only costly but really obstinate.

There’s something about buying a house that makes the world more permanent and worthwhile, but also more tenuous and fragile. You begin to fine-tune your sensibilities and notice more of what’s going on around you because you are now a part of it. It’s your neighborhood. Your yard. Your crack house, by damn. It’s
important.

You begin to make investments that renters and other, more transient folks don’t. You pick up trash on the way to the dog park. You keep an eye on your neighbors’ mail when they go out of town. You glare at cars driving too fast down your street—not because you have kids, but because your neighbors do, and that makes them the neighborhood’s kids too. You stand a decent chance of inheriting them versus some random adoptive family if, you know, it came to that. You begin to see that just because something is the way it is doesn’t mean it can’t change.

The thing that I thought was going to be the most difficult about laying a slate floor—cutting the tiles—was in fact the easiest. After you lay all the full-size tiles, you put the tiles that need to be cut flush with the wall, mark them with a grease pencil, fire up the saw, and like Moses you have parted this remnant of an ancient sea—albeit with more help from Black and Decker than the God of Abraham. You have to concentrate when you’re making these cuts, of course—no swatting mosquitoes, no playing with your pigtails—but so long as you take precautions, keep your shit together and out of the bucket or the path of the blade, it’s as safe as anything. Just be mindful of the fact that you’re dealing with materials that predate you by, give or take, half a billion years. Be respectful. Say please and thank you. Take nothing for granted. Remember that, as far as the rock is concerned, you don’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. You probably won’t even stick around long enough to make a very good fossil.

IT IS THE DAY
before Christmas Eve, and Gram is not here. Therefore, there will be no Christmas, my mom has decided. “We’ll just get together,” she says, “have some burgers.” No one believes her. As soon as Jenae and I touch down in Wisconsin, we begin drinking competitively. And while there is no making up for drinking competitively with Gram, there is still drinking. I am not proud. Neither am I sorry. Everywhere we go there is an empty chair. You’ve never seen so many empty chairs.

We’re in my mom and Bob’s condo in Waukesha. It is too small. We all have to sit in the same room. The basement is Bob’s “lair” and smells of Vienna Sausage and crème de menthe. It is single-digit cold outside. My mom and Bob are at work at the flower shop. Jenae and I sit with Fairway, mom’s gaseous cocker spaniel, and Grandpa, who has threatened to bring Tonya to Christmas dinner. He said this to Mom, and she told it to me. If she could have, she would have canceled Christmas altogether.

Grandpa’s prostrate treatment ran its course without any apparent hitches. At first, he was eager to tell me, his libido suffered tremendously, but—sadly—it has since rebounded and his escapades with women of varying stripes are back on. At the same time, he has since shown a new, vigorous indifference to my mom and to decorum in general. He has gone with Tonya to Las Vegas at least twice that we know of. She has quit her job as a nurse’s aide. She convinced my grandfather to buy her a car (a Mitsubishi Eclipse—surprising, considering my grandfather would never have anything to do with foreign cars, other than the one midlife-crisis Porsche). He pays her some figure per month, we know not what. Tonya’s daughter, Daphne, has meanwhile persuaded him to pay for her boob job. She also tried to talk him into buying her a new digital camera, but he told her she was pushing her luck.

So, we sit. David Leadbetter is on TV. His presence is invoked on the Golf Channel the way, say, Lincoln’s is on the History Channel. Leadbetter is a famous golf instructor. As famous as they get, anyway. He wears a golf outfit with tight red slacks, a blousy knit shirt. A Panama hat with a floral print band. An alligator belt with a western-style buckle and silver tip. He is teaching us how to get out of a sand trap.

The Christmas tree has old-fashioned lights with little vials of red and green water that look like test tubes of blood and algae. As the light heats the vial, the liquid bubbles. It makes us drink and Fairway fart. We watch Leadbetter make it look easy, getting out of a trap.

Grandpa doesn’t golf anymore, and neither do I. The last time we played together he had a transient ischemic attack, or TIA. A series of little strokes that, while not catastrophic, was not good either. I was visiting for a long weekend from Ohio, and we were playing a round at the club in Pekin. I had been playing a lot of golf then. It was the first time in my life that I felt I was getting good at something my family wanted me to be good at. I could drive well. I could get up and down in regulation. I could actually shape shots without slicing or hooking. I even broke eighty—playing with my grandfather, no less, and barely cheating.