Dave Barry's Homes and Other Black Holes (8 page)

The way you get your child into the gifted class is, you go to the school personally and make it clear to the staff that you are a Concerned Parent, meaning a potentially humongous pain in the ass. You should demand to see the curriculum, so as to make sure that, at each grade level, your child will receive instruction in the subjects appropriate for a standard American education, namely:

Of course you need not worry too much about your child’s progress, because the school will keep you posted by means of report cards, which in most schools are now completely computerized to guard against the danger that anybody might be able to understand them. Our son’s report card looks like this:

→NOTE: Your Mileage May Vary←

When we get our son’s report card, we make a big show of examining it with concerned frowns identical to the ones we use when our mechanic shows us broken pieces of our car, but the truth is we have no idea how well our son is doing.

Believe it or not, there was once a time when parents did not enroll their children in after-school activities. In those primitive times, when children came home from school, they’d just go outside, completely on their own, and engage in what professional child psychologists call “nonstructured” behavior, also known as “playing,” which is when you

• run around shrieking and getting dirt in your hair
  

• hold elaborate funerals for stuffed animals
  

• lie on your back next to a friend and make
  burping noises until one of you laughs so hard that he pees in his pants
  

• pretend you are fighting evil aliens from the Planet Kawoomba, who can be defeated only by spit
  

And so on. Of course, today we realize that children need to have a great deal of structure in the form of leagues and uniforms and referees and team photographs and trophies and dozens of parents standing on the sidelines shrieking like mental patients. So unless you are some kind of low-life child-abusing vermin, one of the first things you’ll do when you move to your new home is enroll your children in Little League, soccer, and midget football, as well as a scouting program, not to mention gymnastics, ballet, violin, karate, computer, tennis, and helicopter-piloting lessons. You want your child’s life to become so structured that he or she is incapable of fooling around in his or her own yard without detailed instructions from a coach. (“OK, Jason! Burp! NO, dammit! Not that way!”)

Not that we have time to worry about our child’s education or after-school activities.
No, we are busy working and striving, in hopes that someday we will be able to afford something that most Americans dream of but very few ever achieve: nice furniture. We’ll cover this depressing topic in a later chapter. But first we need to look, in the next chapter, at the basic condition of our house, and see if we can’t, by means of various costly projects, make it worse.

You may have noticed that nowhere in this book do I ever talk about how to Do It Yourself. This is because I have done a great many things myself over the years, and in every case I have ultimately come to realize that I would have been better off if I had just walked around my house firing random shotgun blasts. No matter how hard I tried,
my homeowner projects always produced highly comical results, such as the enormous concrete lump in the yard of the house we owned in Pennsylvania.

I am not making this lump up. We acquired it as a result of the project when I erected a basketball post, which I needed because, as a professional writer, I often had to go outside and gain artistic inspiration by pretending I was the U.S. Olympic basketball team, challenging the Soviet team for the gold medal. The part of the Soviet team was played by my dog. You will be pleased to learn that the U.S. team always won, because (a) the Soviet team couldn’t dribble—it would just sort of nose the ball around the court—and (b) the U.S. team had this very effective play where it would yell, in a stern voice: “No! BAD dog!!” which caused the Soviet team to crouch down on the court in a guilty fashion, and the United States would cruise past for an easy layup.

Anyway, the way I erected the basketball post was, carefully following the instructions that came with it, I dug a hole three feet deep and thirty inches wide. The instructions said I was supposed to put the post in
the hole and fill it with concrete, only I had no concrete. I had never, until that moment, given much thought as to where concrete even came from. Large oceangoing freighters was my best guess.

So I looked in the yellow pages, and lo and behold, there was this place that sold concrete in special trailers that attached to your car. I called them up, and they told me each trailer held a “yard” of concrete.

“A ‘yard’?” I said.

“Yes,” they confirmed. “A yard.” Whatever the hell that meant.

Well. It turns out that they use the name “yard” because this is enough concrete to cover North America to a depth of three feet. I had a very adventurous drive home from the concrete place, propelled by a trailer that weighed far more than my actual car, a trailer with no respect whatsoever for the tradition of stopping at red lights. But finally I made it, and I positioned the trailer over my basketball hole, and I opened the little gate at the bottom, and in one second the hole was full of concrete, using maybe one trillionth of the available supply, which I needed to find a use for pronto, because
the burly men back at the concrete place had made it clear that if you bring them back a trailer full of hardened concrete, their policy is to roll it back and forth over your body.

This is when I came up with the idea of making a lump. I backed the trailer over to a section of our yard that had always looked like it could use some perking up, landscapingwise, and I created this free-form pile of concrete that is not only attractive, but also very durable. If, millions of years from now, when all other man-made structures have disappeared, intelligent life forms from other galaxies visit the planet Earth, they will find this lump, and they will wonder what kind of being created it, and for what purpose. I bet basketball will never occur to them.

And the hell of it is, the concrete lump was one of my better projects, in the sense that I also got a working basketball post out of it. Most of the other ones turned out much worse. The full impact of this was driven home to me forcibly when we decided to sell the Pennsylvania house, and we paid several thousand dollars (I am still not making
this up) to two men, both named Jonathan, to come over and eliminate all traces of all my homeowner projects—bookshelves where you could see the shapes of dead insects under the paint, paneling that looked like it had been installed by vandals, etc.—in an effort to make our home look as nice as it did before I started improving it. After the Jonathans took out all my projects, the house mostly consisted of holes, which they filled up with Spackle. When prospective buyers would ask: “What kind of construction is this house?” I would answer: “Spackle.”

Do-it-yourself concrete lump

So to get back to my original point, I am now violently opposed to doing anything myself. I think there should be a federal law requiring people who publish do-it-yourself
books to include a warning, similar to what the Surgeon General has on cigarette packs, right on the cover of the book, stating:

So now you are asking yourself: “Okay, if I’m not supposed to do anything myself, how am I supposed to get my house fixed?” The answer is: contractors. A contractor is a man with a pickup truck and a set of business cards that say something like:

No, I am of course kidding about that last line. They won’t
tell
you that they never show up; this is a secret that they are sworn to uphold during the graduation ceremony at the Contractor Academy, where each man receives his Official Contractor’s battered toolbox, which contains, not tools, but thousands and thousands of traditional handcrafted
contractor excuses for not showing up, such as:

• “I strained my back.”
  

• “My truck has a flat tire.”
  

• “My wife is having a baby.”
  

• “My uncle died.”
  

• “My wife strained her back.”
  

• “My uncle has a flat tire.”
  

• “My truck is having a baby.”
  

These time-honored excuses have been handed down through many contractor generations, dating all the way back to ancient Rome, where the original contractors built the ruins. Contrary to what historians will try to tell you, the ruins were never finished buildings: they were always ruins. The Romans kept trying to get the contractors to come back and finish them, but the contractors kept coming up with excuses, the oldest recorded one being “Quid vox probenium est” (“My wife strained her uncle”). Eventually the Romans simply had to learn to live among ruins. You, as a homeowner, will have to do the same thing.

1. The contractor comes to your house and strides around in a confidence-inducing fashion, taking measurements and writing things down on a clipboard. What he is writing down is the batting averages of the 1978 Boston Red Sox, which he will multiply by the relative humidity to come up with an “estimate,” which is legally defined as “the amount of money you will ultimately spend on phone calls in a fruitless effort to locate the contractor.” Once you have agreed to the “estimate,” the contractor will leave, telling you that he will come back and start work on “Thursday.”
   

2. Four to thirteen weeks later, the contractor shows up with two workmen selected on the basis of owning T-shirts festooned with photographs of rock bands with names like “Death Penis.” The contractor leaves the workmen behind and informs you that he will be back on “Thursday.” Then he disappears.
   

3. The workmen take all of your furniture and put it out on your patio, then they
   knock down a wall. Neither of these steps necessarily has anything to do with the job at hand. This is just basic contracting procedure. Having completed these tasks, the workmen take a well-earned “lunch break.” They will never come back again. There is nothing you can do about this. You can search all the way through the United States Constitution, and you will find a great number of statements in there about unimportant issues such as the vice president, but you will find nothing about getting workmen back to your house. What we need is a constitutional amendment. It would say: