Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home (24 page)

Beyond the sulfur lights of the maintenance shack, the night is the color and consistency of ink. I do not know where I am going. I know only that I have got to get away, for at least a while, lest I do someone or something grievous harm. I run.

I turn left out of the parking lot and am immediately blinded as my eyes try to make the harsh adjustment from the bright lot to the unlit, now moonless predawn. It feels as though I have been cast from a ship, jettisoned into space or sea—I don’t have sufficient sensory evidence yet to tell which. To my right a horse whinnies, then another, a smaller snuffle. A colt, I think, I hope. I run, trusting the gravel shoulder to tell me when I’ve strayed from the road. The air smells green and fecund, like wet grass, sweet manure, and freshwater fish.

I run uphill in the dark, and as the light begins to change, I can tell that there are woods on either side of me, open water ahead. My lungs hurt from smoking, and my kidneys throb with pain from a lack of water and an excess of Scotch, but I have no time for apologies. If I can’t find somebody to hit me in the face so my body and mind are at least feeling the same thing, then I have got to do it myself.

I reach a crest and am going downhill fast and it’s hard on my knees and I’m trying to let the hill ease me down but there’s something brutal and honest about running fast downhill. And then I’m at the water—the bay—and I head north and run as fast as I can. I try to condense everything into a singular seed of pain and then try to run harder to blow off the husk so there is nothing left but the raw, red, meaty hurt. The light comes from my right, over the trees, and the water stays dark and tempting for a long time, almost an hour, I figure, until I have gone as far as I can and reasonably expect to return. Even I know: I have to return. There is a continental breakfast to be had, danishes and little globes of cantaloupe and cream-cheese-filled kringles and sausage and bacon. Bacon, the only true consolation the day has for the night.

I stop. In the middle of the road. Somewhere a few miles north of Sturgeon Bay. Where woods and water meet. I stagger down through the grass, across the narrow beach, and into the still water, where I stare at my reflection like a dead flower. I splash my face and shatter my image. I know if I wait, it will come together again. It might even be a face I recognize.

I don’t. I run, a little less hard, but it’s just as punishing. The day warms and the sun comes up over the trees, but I know it is still remarkably early.

And then, at the base of the hill I almost hit something in the road. A snake, and it’s bigger than I ever imagined a Wisconsin reptile could be, but there it is. Dead. I grab a stick and poke it, just to make sure.

I will it to mean something—to stand for something—but there are no more metaphors for anything, not in Wisconsin, not this early in the morning.

JUST WHEN THE HOUSE
begins to feel like a real place of our own, the washing machine learns to walk. We would start an ordinary load of clothes, and by the time it gets to the first spin cycle, the machine would be halfway across the room before I can catch up with it, its hot and cold water hoses straining to keep it from jumping down the stairs. As badly as I wish for the machine to be the problem, we know it’s bigger and badder than that. It’s the foundation.

The original structure was built in 1911, and while it was obviously solid enough to last nearly a hundred years, it’s beginning to show its age in ways that keep me up at night more than any worries did about my grandfather’s lower GI or romantic depravity. There is a crack in the foyer wall that I can fit a pencil in, and another gap between the dining room floor and wall big enough to fit a dictionary. Outside, there are growing fissures between some of the bricks, evidence of a tectonic-scale struggle on the part of the house to stay on the lot. Downstairs, however, is where things get scary.

The laundry room comes off the kitchen in what had once been an unfinished porch. We want to extend the slate floor through there, but something is obviously wrong with the room. A closer inspection below reveals a disaster on par with the rest of Stanley’s construction finery: he has used lumber apparently salvaged from a chemical fire to build the foundation for the laundry room. Two-by-four wall studs, I find out, are supposed to be spaced sixteen inches apart, with the skinny, two-inch part facing you and the wide, four-inch parts facing each other. They studs are supposed to be in a line front to back, as though they were soldiers marching forward. Stanley’s soldiers are facing the other direction—shoulder to shoulder, as it were—a bunch of seditious traitors standing before a firing squad. The problem with aligning them that way is that you can only rest a two-inch board on top to frame the wall and not the four-inch header it needs. In short, it’s bad. We have a fifty-square-foot floor, a staircase, a washer and a dryer, and two bookcases with about ten years and a thousand pounds of Martha Stewart magazines and cookbooks—all of it propped up on some charred and rotten sticks topped with quarter-inch plywood through which the dappled daylight shines.

Adding another seven or eight hundred pounds of rock on that floor isn’t something I felt super-cozy about. I call our friend Erik and bribe him with his favorite Jamaican beer to come over to take a look under the hood.

“Jesus, dude,” he says, “this is messed up.” Instinctively he covers his head. “This whole floor is being held up by what are basically furring strips. House of cards, man. How the hell did this pass inspection?”

I point to a large, three-quarter-inch piece of plywood that has been shimmed in place beside the stairs. The rise and run of the stairs are far from regulation, and as you get to the bottom, if you are not chronically stooped, you had damned well better pay attention to the header on which you are about to smack your noggin. The inspector probably never knew what he was missing.

“Weak,” Erik says.

He goes to the east wall and says it looks all right. The same with the north wall. But when he gets to the staircase, he freezes.

Erik looks at me, then back to the square post upon which the staircase sits.

“Are you messing with me?” he says. “Did you do this?”

“Do what?” I don’t even know what I am looking at. It just looks like the shabby underside of a staircase.

Erik points to the post. It is not a post. It’s three different pieces of wood. The base of it is a four-by-four, as it should be, but on top of it are two two-by-fours, sistered together and wedged between the top of the post and the bottom of the stairs.

Essentially, what you want in a beam like this is a stout, solid leg. Instead of the fully muscled leg of a power lifter, we have a horror show from the chop shop of Victor Frankenstein. The prosthetic equivalent supporting our entire laundry room floor would have looked like an intact though severely atrophied foot and calf, but then, above the knee, the thigh of two other bodies. Sutured and stapled together with the artistry of a maniacal but massively thrifty necromancer is the hamstring from one badly decayed corpse and the quadriceps from what might have been a healthy child had polio not set her musculature to waste.

“Dude,” Erik says. He is serious.

With one hand, Erik pushes up on the stairs and, with the other, wiggles the post clear out from under the tread. “Nice,” he says. “Super.”

It is going to take a lot of Red Stripe to fix this.

Erik and I walk to the lumber section of Home Depot, back by the uncouth area reserved for professionals. The rest of the place bristles with catchy signs and flashy brochures soliciting the weekender warriors’ attention.
Make over your breakfast nook into a neat nest fast! Turn that seventies shag into contemporary chic!
Their Sirens sing of speed, ease, and savings. They sell projects to the unwary with promises of simplicity and increased self-esteem.
You CAN do it!
they swear.
WE can help!
Never mind that the average shopper in a place like this is simply looking for a three-prong adapter, a squeegee, and sundry other things to cover up why he really came, which is for yet another toilet seat after that debacle last week at your Super Bowl party.

Back in the lumber section, however, things are different. The aisles are wide and completely unadorned, with no signs, promises, directions, or piped-in music. just stacks upon stacks of raw lumber. Sawdust sweeps around the floor, and lone contractors mosey along the aisles with squeaky-wheeled carts laden with wood and fasteners. The men in this section of the store wear silver tape measures on their belts, utility knives and pliers tucked in leather holsters. They swagger down the rows seeming to know precisely what they’re looking for, but they aren’t in a hurry because they’re on a dedicated run to get the stuff to finish whatever job they had just escaped, invariably a time-and-materials deal where one of the only benefits is milking the clock while shopping around for the right piece of wood, eating a Polish sausage bought from the halter-topped gal at the lunch cart by the entrance.

Erik and I are wearing shorts and flip-flops. We look as if we have just finished cutting a surf-rock album and are lost looking for some charcoal for our hibachi. Erik is professionally casual, however, whereas I am ignorantly harried. I feel that we need a license or a special dispensation from Glendon or another higher authority to be allowed in this part of the store. Erik, of course, knows better and has the walk down, regardless of his lack of a tool belt. He grabs a tape measure from a display and walks right up to a bin of a hundred twelve-foot two-by-fours.

“I thought we needed six-footers?” I say. I feel a little giddy being able to say something like that and not be talking about reasonably hard putts or semi-crippled spiders.

Erik doesn’t look at me. He takes a board from the stack, swings it out, drops one end on the ground, and holds the other close to his eye as if he is sighting a rifle or preparing to play one of those Swiss alpine horns.

“We’ll cut them in half,” he says, tossing the board on a flat metal cart. “More money for beer.”

Erik is my kind of genius. He takes another board, turns that one over. Instead of putting it in the cart, he throws it back into the bin. I am mystified.

A big dude with American flag suspenders walks by, checking us out as though wondering how gratifying it would be to chain us to a fence. Erik picks up another two-by-four, spins it in his hand while again sighting down the board, and tosses it nonchalantly on the cart. The suspendered dude walks on back toward the manufactured lattice.

“The way they store and ship lumber is more often than not on uncovered railroad cars and open-air semis,” Erik says. “All the wood on the outside is exposed for weeks or months to rain and snow and sun and so forth. It’s all been kiln-dried, but it’s still wood. The shit warps.”

He takes another piece and hands it to me. No way I’d have an eye for this, I think, imagining it to be as difficult as worrying about such nonsense as windage and elevation when aiming a rifle, but instead I hold it up and it’s clear: there is a pretty ugly bend toward the end of the board.

What was mysterious and ineffable a moment ago is suddenly obvious and all but self-explanatory. The real mystery is why this happens so often to me.

Once we’re in my basement again, I ask Erik if we hadn’t best be wearing helmets. He is poised to prop up the laundry room floor with a couple of two-by-fours so we can tear out the old beam and insert a good new one. If we are going to be buried beneath a house, I want to give my head a fighting chance at survival. I put on my climbing helmet and give Erik my beat-up bike helmet. He puts it on backward and the chin straps hang down like pigtails.

Before becoming immersed in the renovation, I thought a house was a complete structural whole—an
entity
—none of which could be compromised or altered without risking the integrity of the whole shebang. As we tear away layer after layer of what are essentially cosmetics, I find my life is working in much the same way. Jenae and I aren’t merely coexisting in the same crappy apartment anymore, we are
living
together. We’re hanging out more, talking to each other, going on hikes—even a climb or two—really
being
a couple. Now that we have something to invest in, we are constantly reinventing ourselves, our surroundings, our lives together. We aren’t sloughing off responsibility or blaming our inadequacies on our surroundings or our station in life; we are taking inventory, making plans, stripping paint, and swinging hammers. If we don’t like something, we immediately set about finding ways to revise it. One morning we think it’d be nifty to put a path from the back door to the garage, and by noon we are off in the desert mountains west of the Great Salt Lake harvesting unsuspecting rocks and piling them in the old Land Cruiser until the leaf springs about pop. It isn’t easy—none of it is—but it is good work. We have made an investment and we are going to see it through.

Still, we know we have only begun to round the learning curve. My great fear is that the real lessons will come in the shape of a catastrophe. Salt Lake City, after all, is situated on top of a fault. As a rule of thumb, you don’t get mountains without some serious seismic activity. Just the thought of a small earthquake and those palsied, weak wood beams in our basement make me, well, tremble.

“All right,” Erik says, “hello? Where’d you wander off to? Do I have to keep you on one of those toddler leashes? Christ, dude. You gotta keep your head in this.” He has finished fitting the temporary braces into place and is ready for Lord knows what kind of collaboration. “So, I think these’ll do the trick. Push.”

I stand below the staircase and push up on the ceiling as hard as I can. I am both emboldened and disturbed that I am actually able to lift the ceiling off its foundation. Erik slips a two-by-four underneath and hammers the base home. I let my arms go slack and the board he just put in place bows out dramatically. I straighten back up and realize I won’t be pinch-hitting for Atlas anytime soon.