Month: April 2017

Bulky Husband Pick-up

Exit ghost...
Exit ghost…

He cheated on her prolifically.  “Basta! You’re going to live in the casita now,” she told him. She bought him the bed you see here, and he began sleeping in a shed in the backyard.

He bought himself an iPhone.

If she hoped banishing him from the bedroom would chastise him, constructively, it only served to redouble his excursions on social media.

He concocted extravagant, multi-tiered lies, telling her he was going out of town on business, calling out at work due to the “flu”, and then would spend the next two days at the Lucky 777 motel on Sepulveda Blvd, carrying on with women who travelled to LA to meet him.

A woman he once knew from the same village in Guatemala, re-met him online and started visiting from Atlanta.  She got breast implants for him.

“I think I’m love” he told me, while we stood in line at Lowes.    I was his confessor.

A couple months later,  he loaded his belongings into a truck and moved out in the middle of the afternoon with Paul Simon-esque alacrity.   This shocked everyone, including myself.

For weeks, while he and his paramour hid out with relatives and rented rooms around the Valley, she stalked him.  She called down all manner of wrath upon the puta, the hooker, the witch, for snatching him away.  Normally a reticent woman, she clutched the fence between our yards and wailed in tearful stream-of-consciousness.

When she finally caught up with them, parked outside her adult daughters house, she pinned the other woman’s car with her own.  They drove through the front yard to escape her.  A high-speed pursuit ensued across the valley, lasting over two hours and involving the family entire: she chasing them, the children chasing her in their respective cars, lest she take take vengeance with her own steering wheel.  Eventually he called the police on himself, and the five car telenovela-meets-Dukes of Hazzard chase was brought to halt in a gas station in Reseda.

He moved into a small apartment with his paramour.  His wife started going to church.

Eventually she stopped crying about him when I saw her.   We started doing yard work together, she and I, just as he and I once did, when I lived vicariously though his tales.

When last I saw him, at the gym, he told me his paramour had been t-boned on the freeway, and was bed-ridden and on painkillers. For the time being, he was taking care of her.   He was also back to doing janitorial work to pay rent, which is how he started out in LA, in an earlier century.  I didn’t ask him if he regretted his choices.

This week a FedEx van delivered “the papers”, finalizing the divorce.  The house was now hers. Yesterday, I helped her carry his old bed out on to the sidewalk for bulky item pickup. She’d kept it for three-and-a-half years.  I didn’t question why.

This Was Us

1958, when the Valley was quiet
1958, when the Valley was quiet

We built capacity because we knew what was coming, though not so white as we imagined. Now the future is here, it’s 12 lanes, and it’s not moving at all.

We were the outer limit of the metropolitan commute. Now you stop here for gas on the way to Moorpark.

As consolation, the food is a whole lot better.

People are prettier, when pretty is a professional aspiration. The rest of us are fat as f***.

Houses are unobtainably expensive.

Electronic gadgetry is cheap, ubiquitous, and wonder making in its power.

The air is cleaner.

Good manners have gone to hell.

Love of a beautiful sentence is going the way of VHS and polyester slacks.

A year of pop music is a pale facsimile of a month’s worth of output in the 1970’s.

Long form television is our Golden Age.

We are lonely in our crowds, in a way the man in the stepside pickup probably wasn’t.

We nest inside our Netflix queue and pronounce ourselves content.

We are growing childlike in our willingness to repeat propaganda.

They don't know what's coming. But neither do we.
They don’t know what’s coming. But neither do we.

Three Versions of the Life You’re Not Having in LA

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Why aren’t you living in this building? It’s only $24,000 a year, per bedroom.  You’re 26, you can afford it.  They call it adulting.

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Strong women love peeling potatoes in their under-lederhosen. Didn’t you know that?

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Your boyfriend is right around the corner, waiting to kiss you, and he’s dressed in a tailored suit.

Swedish for Argument

In the labyrinth of decisions
In the labyrinth of decisions

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When first you arrive at the new Ikea, the escalator deposits you into the food court. Like a marooned astronaut on a foreign planet, you take your tray and step directly into a line for swedish meatballs.

Being herded in this way is oddly comforting. Though neither of you want to admit it, you know what’s coming.  Might as well do it on a contented stomach.

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Ikea knows what’s coming, too. Decades of careful study of consumer behavior has shown a well gravy-ed belly is a prophylactic against impulsive argumentation. To that end, they stack chocolate bars for you by the register.  Only 99 cents! Do you feel line having chocolate right now?  Not particularly.  Reason not the need.  At these prices, it would be unsportsmanlike to say no.   There is Mirkwood to cross and the Misty Mountains beyond. You’re fortfifying yourselves. So, lets get another, while we’re at it.  And a third one for the road.

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Into the living dioramas of the showrooms we went…to an Other Life, prettier, more well-ordered than one’s own.

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You stagger through them in wonder. Wonder begets desire. Desire begets recrimination.   You stand upon shores of beckoning kingdoms, a rebuke to the squalor of your own circumstances.

Here, you are not.  This, you have not. You are wanting.

Purchasing the tableau entire is never possible. So the question becomes what half Ikea, quarter Ikea, one tenth of an Ikea tableau could you go home with and not disagree with yourself?

Buying it all is easy. Picking the right three items to agree on is where the trouble starts.

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Kitchens were a particular hazard.

You know of one marriage that nearly came to an end with a screaming match at the Emeryville Ikea, with the wife announcing she was going back to China and taking the kids, while the Kitchen Dept. assistant averted her gaze, doodled nervously on her notepad, as though that sort of thing didn’t happen once a week.  The following day you were deputized to return to the scene of the crime and pick up their order for them as they were too ashamed to show their faces.

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As is her nature, Mrs. U  touched everything, opening drawers and sniffing candles as though trying on pairs of shoes.

“Our kitchen is too small,” you announce, breaking the spell.

“These kitchens don’t have walls, making them seem larger than they are. There’s nothing wrong with the size of our kitchen. It’s more than adequate.”

Adequate was the worse possible descriptor she could have chosen in that moment.

She did it on purpose, you decide. The afternoon takes a turn, and you both know it.

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She begins marching ahead of you.   With purpose.

TO BE CONTINUED….

A Thin Line Between Jackass and Hero

What could go wrong?
What could go wrong?
Well, this...
Well, this…

The UpintheValley Theoretical School of Home Renovation operates on the following principle:  a) get a book; b) read that book; c) do what the book says.  Voila! New copper plumbing. Honey, look at all the money we saved.

In practice, there is a learning curve: a) first time wrong, b) second time better, c) third time proficient.  ABC.  Always Be Climbing the curve.

This works, more or less, with tile setting, hanging windows, sweat-fitting pipes underneath the house. Piecework…things of that nature…offer margins for error.

Felling a tree is a different animal.

If the tree is 38 inches in diameter, and your saw is 2o inches in length, your margin of error is two inches.  If the tree is 12 feet from the house, but 18 feet in height, your margin is…let’s just say in a contest between two tons of hardwood,  dropping on a hinge, and stucco… stucco doesn’t win.

The Battle Plan
The Battle Plan

So I spray painted some cut lines in the bark, measured out a fall. I made the notch cut.  I stopped several times to check the face of the notch to see it was smiling directly toward the narrow window of space between my tangerine and grapefruit trees.  As a first time tree faller, I was confident hopeful I could drop it without damage to them. If you look carefully at the upper photo, you will see a scratch work of saw lines.  In homicide investigations, these are known as hesitation wounds.

So having done my “homework”, in this case not a library book, but a cursory web search, with illustrations, how did my rented chainsaw end up stuck in a tree that was 90 percent cut through? Why was it not leaning in the direction I wanted it to go? How was it I managed to overlook the use of shims?  If I stopped right there, and called 311, how much would the City charge me to remove this public safety hazard I created with my Van Nuys Can-Do spirit?  How would I explain to my neighbor why she couldn’t park in her driveway ever again, or at least until I got things sorted?

No longer fully in control of matters, I did what jackasses have always done. I improvised.  I grabbed a crowbar, the only plausible shim I could think of, jammed it in the cut, and told Mrs. U to pull very hard on the polyurethane rope I had attached, in my now alarmingly glib pre-planning, to the upper branches.   In the event of a stiff gust of wind in the wrong direction, about as useful as dental floss. Fortune favors the brave they say, and between her pulling on the rope and me pushing on the bar we were able to rock the trunk just enough to yank the saw out.  At that point, the tree felt a little wobbly in my hands. It was definitely going down now, but about 30 degrees off line.  Away from the house, praise Jesus.

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I pushed, she pulled, and over it went, straight through the trellis over the front of the walkway, which imploded like a house of toothpicks. Not a pretty landing, but never have I been so grateful for a fix-it project.

In my head I could hear the voice of Howard Cosell exulting: Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!

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It’s a thin line between jackass and hero. If it goes your way, your wife looks at you like this. Glad I’m not living with the alternative.