AFTER The Big Change

We hardly had a spike in showings after the change in companies.

And now the clock was really ticking. It was the middle of September. Where our initial questions had covered if we would have enough time to get our stuff together and let the kids finish school if we sold the house. Now we were looking at the calendar and thinking:

1) Would we EVER get outta there?

2) Would we have to move the kids out of their school and into a new one at some really shitty time? Like, March.

I’d done it that way. My parents moved in November of seventh grade and again November of eighth grade. If you would really like to screw your kid up, do this to them. I won’t go into details about my childhood out of a Pete Hamil novel, but let’s say that I would have been a mess without moving. The moving made it a really prosaic mess and sent me into a period of isolation where I totally shut down and lived in books.[1]

My kids[2] were popular and well liked. They had friends and their interests were wide. They read, sure. But my daughter was into fashion and art and the boy was into everything that crossed his path. He could, and did, work up excitement about anything[3].

I wanted it to stay that way. Having been moved around a lot when I was a kid[4] I knew that it was a pain in the ass. Sure it wouldn’t kill you, could make you stronger and you might even get something out of it[5], but why risk it? Take then out at a decent time and if that time isn’t September, it’s January. Otherwise, we weren’t going anywhere.

Patricia and I were pretty solid on this point. The kids had had a shitty enough time what with no camp that summer and the screws coming down on our financial status and my frequent suicide attempts. They didn’t need any more stress.

And, truth to tell, while Patricia and I were freaking out about not selling, they were pretty damn happy to be staying with their friends and familiar surroundings. I was dreading anymore games of “figure out how to get out of the driveway on time” and, since I was working less and less and still trying to get projects going, there was less for me to do. The trip to get the kids was turning into time to knock off a magazine or two – but we had to cancel the subscriptions. Or read a library book. I was really putting the best face on it, but it was a nightmare. I was already depressed. Now the anxiety attacks started.

Yeah. For real.

I was driving down Van Owen having just come from the library and was on my daily round of picking up from school and bus when I suddenly realized that there was no way I’d ever make it through all that traffic. I was coming up on Topanga Canyon, right behind the mall and near the building that had been vacant since Sizzler moved out. And I was sweating and almost hyperventilating.

Of course, I knew that it was REDICULOUS. I’d driven this way hundreds of times since the kids had started school and maybe even THOUSANDS of times since I’d lived in Los Angeles. And sure it had changed and sure there were more cars on the road. But it wasn’t as if it had suddenly turned into a chase scene from “Fast and Furious[6]”.

What it was, I’m convinced, was the crushing realization that we weren’t getting anywhere. Work had dried up for the time being, I had fewer distractions and nothing else to really concentrate on than stuff that wasn’t happening. House not selling. Projects not moving forward. Still going to the schools. Nothing was getting any better.

And to top it off, the book from the library sucked, too.

The fact that I was checking the websites every day and didn’t see any change, even after a month, didn’t help me, either.

But I was seeing changes in other things.

Like, all the other houses around us were selling.

Not the one RIGHT NEXT DOOR. That and the house for rent on the other side were pains in the ass. You’d think that after they saw our house NOT selling for months and months someone wouldn’t put a MORE EXPENSIVE house on the market, but no. The one for rent, well, rentals were up in L.A. With it becoming too dicey to buy a house, it was looking better for both sides to rent it.

And don’t think we hadn’t thought about it.

But the other houses that had been for sale around us – about six in all --- they were all turning up as sold. Looking through the numbers[7], it looked like there had been a spike in home sales in June. I knew this because I saw on a Los Angeles realtor’s site:

“Spike in Home Sales in June!”

You know, about the time Ingo had been ignoring us because he was making his jump to the new firm.

So I talked it over with Patricia and called Ingo again. He was starting to get defensive.

“I don’t do the websites!”

“Yeah, I know, but shouldn’t it be taken care of by now? If we’re having trouble selling the house, shouldn’t we make sure everything’s…”?

So you can probably see the way this was going. At one point Ingo, clearly getting frustrated, said something to the effect of:

“I don’t spend all my time on the internet like you do.”

Which was clearly meant as an insult, and if I didn’t work on a computer I might take it that way, but at least I know and KNEW how to take care of my own shit. At this point there were three different prices floating out there for the house and two different realtors linking to the sites and I didn’t see how any of that could contribute to getting the house sold.

And you just add that on to the fact that nothing else was happening. Life wasn’t good.

Then Ingo put me on with the manager of his office.

Well, when you talk to the MANAGER then you KNOW it’s serious.

[1] Which, from time to time, sounds pretty damn good.

[2] So far…

[3] Though his abiding passion remained B-Movie cowboys from the forties and Doctor Who. Yeah. You have to be that age to be able to hold those thoughts simultaneously.

[4] Okay, I’ll go a little more into detail. Here’s what happened between my tenth and my fourteenth birthdays: We moved (stayed in the same school), sold our summer home, my oldest brother was murdered, moved (changed schools), moved (changed schools). Nice, huh?

[5] Perhaps the time in isolation could be channeled into developing writing skills.

[6] Though I’d SEEN that on the roads. Just not this one.

[7] Because you can find a lot of that on that Internet thingie.

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