OUR FIRST HOME (AWWWWWWW)

When we bought the house, I was a not-so-lowly-but-still-pretty-small-potatoes Senior Production Coordinator[1], making about fifty percent more. In the next couple of years I was bumped up a couple of times and making about two hundred percent more. And still, my salary was JUST KEEPING PACE with the L.A. housing market.

Patricia was getting raises, but hers was pretty much constant. Because I had started at such a low point, I could get bumped up five hundred percent, as I did at the Warner mines, and still just be making a decent living. Patricia started at a livable wage and because of her pluck[2] and intelligence. Many people I know were cashing in on their equity and trading up. Patricia and I, hemmed in though we were, and disliking what was happening in the neighborhood, kept thinking about moving, but any rational person, having just been through the Nineties, MUST have know what was going to happen – but so few did.

The reason we were able to but the house we were renting was because of the L.A. housing bubble that burst in 1996 and continued into 1997. When we first looked at the Crebs house, Patricia was pregnant with Lauren and we wanted out of the house we were currently renting. After years of apartments and nearly drove me crazy[3], we had rented a cute pink house to find it infested with cockroaches. And that was the GOOD part of the house.

Patricia had seen the ad while I was out of town and went to see the house. When she called me, I knew it was a foregone conclusion and was smart enough to know that my looking at the house was more a matter of politeness on her part. There was no way we WEREN’T moving in as soon as possible and I considered it a show of Patricia’s basic human decency that she didn’t meet me off the plane with a moving truck and a lease.

But the housing bubble HAD just burst and the man who owned the house was a Realtor and I think he was back up against the wall for cash. The house had been his mother-in-law’s and when she shuffled off this mortal coil, the realtor’s wife didn’t want to sell her childhood home, so he took it as a rental. Until he REALLY needed the cash – or so I guessed. Then his wife suggested he sell it “…to that nice young couple with the baby…”.[4]

When the lease was up and we hadn’t heard from him, I told Patricia one night:

“I think he’s going to ask us to buy the house.”

“We can’t afford it,” she said.

And she was right. We wanted our part of the pie, our piece of earth, preferably a one-quarter-acre piece with some sort of home on it. I wanted big big big. Stately Wayne Manor would not have been too big for me and I often despaired at not being born British royalty because, besides the obvious drawbacks, those people have some pretty mean cribs, even if you do have to have tourists in once in awhile. And if the tourist DO get out of hand, you have the big dudes in the bitchin’ bear-fur hats to take care of them for you. And a really cool tower to lock the dullards[5] in.

But that seemed unlikely. A condo in Agoura, CA, about forty-five minutes North of L.A. proper WITHOUT traffic seemed impossible. At that time they were running about one-hundred-thirty-thousand and the required ten-percent down payment and the 10 percent interest on the mortgage seemed SO FAR out to the reach of an under-employed writer and his legal secretary wife. I remember the two of us looking at the paper, dreaming of a 2-bedroom place where my desk wouldn’t butt up against the bed and just not seeing anyway clear to RENT one, let alone OWN.

And then the realtor/owner called me at my office.

“I need to sell the house,” he told me.

And I was expecting the next sentence to be “So you guys gotta move.”[6]

But instead he said:

“Would you guys like to buy it?”

“Sure,” I said, trying not to laugh at him.[7]”But we can’t afford it.”

“Well,” he told me, “you know with some of these new first-time buyer programs, it can make it much more attractive for you and easier.”

I didn’t say anything because I had not a clue[8] of what he was talking about.

I read the paper every day, but when it comes to articles about things like money, mortgages and things like that, my eyes glaze over. I can understand the individual words, but the put them all together and they spell “dndsafplhdgohaoga”. It’s all gobbelty-gook to me. When friends took real-estate courses and would talk[9]about interest rates, the only interest rate you could be sure was declining was my own. I knew enough to know that you looked at the price of the home and divided by ten and you’d have a rough idea of what the mortgage that you could never hope to afford would be and you’d still have to come up with a down payment that was in impossible amount to ever save.

On a side note that’s really part and parcel of this narrative: Real Estate has some kind of hypnotic power over people in California. It’s as if everyone in the state lived by the creed of Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor in the original Superman: “Son, stocks may rise and fall, utilities and transportation systems may collapse. People are no damn good, but they will always need land and they'll pay through the nose to get it! Remember, land.” Over my years there, not only the ownership of land, but the buying, selling and facilitating the buying and selling of it had cause most eyes to glint. Graduate students at the California University system took classes in it in case their careers in early post-modern pre-Columbian feminist literature fell though. Housewives dabbled in getting their real-estate license. As did retirees and former Teledyne Rocket Engineers. I think there are probably flyers for Real Estate courses posted around the JPL in Pasadena and in-between creaming their flood pants khakis over the Mars Lander, they’re trying to get a real estate license.

And I’m talking legit study here. Let’s not leave out the millions[10] who have bet the farm on infomercial real estate mavens.

And let’s not even talk about the failed show business people who dropped into the trade when they never got a chance to see their names in lights. Like lemmings they stream into the real estate trade. And the effect is about the same as even in a boom economy, it can only handle so many.

It seemed to have become an industry. Not only that, but one of the main forces in the California economy. When I was a kid it was the nice lady with the helmet hair in the polyester suit and too much perfume that helped my parents find a home. Now you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a real estate agent. And as it was Southern California, there was a 60-40 chance that the real estate agent hit was going to be a member of PETA and pissed because you were swinging a cat.

California seems to go through boom and bust periods more predictable than eclipses, so much so that you wonder if the Chumash Indians lived through the same thing.

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[1] A made-up title. And don’t ever let anyone ever tell you that EVERY title in show buisness is made up. There are writers who sit at a keyboard for days on end and writers who say, “You know what would be a good idea…?”

[2] Yes. I said “pluck” and I’m not going to apologize for the Horatio Alger language.

[3] I won’t say “drove me mad” because I’m mad, as in “angry” quite often, especially at people who live in apartments and do things like mount stereo speakers on common walls or practice karaoke at level twelve (It’s TWO higher than ten!) in the afternoon.

[4] The baby is no longer a baby and even more sadly, no one’s called us a “young couple in too, too long.

[5] And you probably get to use words like “dullard” without getting picked on.

[6] But in a much more polite fashion. He was a very nice man. May still be for all I know.

[7] Because he was a very nice man.

[8] If I were British royalty, I could spell this “clew”, which I think makes more sense, but people think it’s affected if you spell it this way and people don’t have to back out of the room to avoid incurring your wrath. I could have wrath to be incurred if I were royalty, too. There’s a wealth of things there. Wealth being one of the wealth of things.

[9] As people taking courses often do, confusing their own excitement with everyone else’s boredom.

[10] Or does it just SEEM like millions? Because it seemed I was always seated next to a table full of the yabbos in every restaurant there for a while.

ENTIRE CONTENTS COPYRIGHT 2009 BY SHAUN McLAUGHLIN