It's Not Tundra

A Comic Book I'm working on...

2011-08-05T18:10:00.001-07:00

http://www.mi2n.com/press.php3?press_nb=144690

Video...

2011-07-23T18:06:00.001-07:00

Check out Bullpen Comics

http://youtu.be/j_ZbS7tO__M

2011-07-23T18:04:00.000-07:00

Help your local producer

2011-05-09T12:59:00.001-07:00

If you have Netflix, please put my new movie Gene-Fusion in your queue. Sure it'll be available 5.10.11 on iTunes, Time Warner on-demand, Playstation Network, XBox live, in stores, on Amazon, at Blockbuster and just about every other way, but just because of that, and because I produced Batman Beyond, Justice League and God Knows what else, and just because the director, Francois Brisson has done hundreds of episodes of international television hits and because it's been invited to a film festival -- Netflix...they want proof.
Thanks.

Been Away...

2011-04-25T11:09:00.000-07:00

Trying to think about how to best continue this, since I'm pretty much out of moving stories. I put a bunch together in book form and was told by an agent that it seemed I was "trying to hard to be funny" which, after several successful night at a couple of large comedy clubs lead me to believe that this agent is "trying to hard to be smart".

So I guess for the next bit, I'll be indulging in a little stream of consciousness chafe trying to get to the wheat (is that trying too hard?)

Too many projects going on. The movie version of Cheapjack Shakespeare is limping to a start date, my new play "Internal Continuity" will be staged this fall. "Bullpen Comics" is getting some attention and may have a second life.

But there is a lot of waiting around.

Also, I think I have a sugar hangover from Easter. Too much candy. That's what agnostics do. That and wonder a lot. I mean, what if he was only NEARLY dead...?

Also, tired of "Zombie Jesus" jokes. Yes. We get it. He's like a zombie. Ha. Ha.

free comics and soon...

2011-03-03T12:38:00.000-08:00

...to become a motion picture...

New Episode -- What I do back east

2011-01-15T14:26:00.000-08:00

Still Busy...

2011-01-07T18:32:00.000-08:00

http://cheapjackshakespeare.com/THE_BULLPEN.html

CHEAPJACK SHAKESPEARE: THE NON-MUSICAL Breaks Records Opening Weekend 2010/09/11

2010-09-11T23:02:00.000-07:00

CHEAPJACK SHAKESPEARE: THE NON-MUSICAL Breaks Records Opening Weekend 2010/09/11

Cheapjack Shakespeare FEED THE ACTORS.mp4

2010-08-28T17:05:00.000-07:00

Feed The Actors

2010-08-20T17:34:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/user/CheapjackShakespeare

Now That I'm Here --- What am I doing...

2010-07-25T08:39:00.000-07:00

Well, for starters...

http://www.youtube.com/user/CheapjackShakespeare

An Argument for Creationism or No Paucity of Douchebags

2010-06-26T10:48:00.000-07:00

I have to tell you that it's not paradise here. We have morons here, too. It's just that there aren't as many of them but those that we have are trying harder to be more annoying. There's also, I suppose, a certain freedom in knowing that you are blazing a new trail of douchebaggery, going where no asshat has gone before.

I'm riding my bike home from the gym and I turn down a quiet street so that I can ride though the park. The school on the street, a church school, is letting out for the end of the year.

If you look back at the stuff I've written, I should have learned by now that people can be especially dopey around schools. It should be no surprise. But every time I've gone by there and it was any kind of school event, it's a madhouse. 1/4 the madhouse as in Tarzana, but there are fewer folks around.

So I'm tooling down the road on my bike. And here comes a woman holding hands with her son.

Awwwww.

Walking down the middle of the street.

And by "middle of the street" I mean, middle of the traffic lane. You know. Where the cars go. Because it's a street. The kind that cars drive on.

And it's not like we're in the boonies. This is a populated suburb of over 100,000 people. And the streets are paved and there are sidewalks. The kind people walk on.

And the mother sees me coming on my bike, trying to get around a minivan and not go into the lane of oncoming traffic.

You know. Following the rules of the road.

And she does nothing. Except keep walking.

So I have to swerve into the other lane. Or, you know, run over the woman and her kid, and I say:

"Walking down the middle of the street with a kid is not a good idea."

And she says:

"I'm putting my kid in my car. LOSER!"

Yes. A church school. Apparently First Church of Satan.

Darwin was wrong. There is no way a single being isn't watching over the lives of people like that. Especially after I saw her loading her kid into the minivan on the street side.

Because, you know, it would be too much trouble to actually walk around. Or cross at a walk. Or even cross not at a walk but close to your car.

COPYRIGHT 2010 by Shaun McLaughlin

MODERN AIRPLANE ETIQUETTE FROM YOUR PROTOCAL PAL

2010-06-10T15:21:00.000-07:00

Some thoughts after flying across the country to move. You try to teach your kids good manners,but sadly, the rest of the world doesn't want to help...

The behavior on commercial flights has changed since my father insisted on a coat and tie to fly coach. It is not well known that Lindbergh flew his legendary trans Atlantic flight togged up in white tie and tails. Memoirs of barnstorming pilots would include passages about flying biplanes in top hat with his platinum tipped walking stick doubling as an especially dashing aileron control.

Sad to say, these standards no longer apply even to first class cabins, let alone steerage. Please allow me to offer a few humble suggestions to make air travel a more pleasant experience.

Do not berate TSA employees for their lack of speed. Most of them are honest, caring, hardworking people dedicated to ensuring our safety. The rest are mildly retarded and may cry if confronted. Such behavior will result in a cavity search and proper standards of deportment have not yet been established for these situations.

It is no longer amusing to moo in either the security or the boarding line even if one does feel like cattle on the way to the abattoir. Bovines are not provided with individual boarding passes on their final journey and this is an important distinction.

While it may be individually agreeable to sing along with the music on your I-pod, it is not recommended in confined quarters. This is especially true when listening to Frank Zappa or Pavarotti’s recording of “Un ballo in maschera".

Comparing the flight to a roller coaster ride, raising one’s hand in the air while screaming “Wheee” and young ladies lifting their tube tops to expose their breasts to imagined cameras is acceptable only at take off and landing.

Making witty references to any of the “Airport” movies is completely unacceptable. They are not very well remembered and were never very entertaining to anyone except your grandmother who was never more than fifteen miles away from Watertown. You may compare a flight to the first (and only the first) “Airplane” movie, but you risk dating yourself terribly.

It is never acceptable to attempt to hook up a camp shower in the rest room unless one is on an international flight of ten or more hours. If this is the case, it is always wise to offer the flight crew a turn in lieu of gratuity.

Speaking of tips, most airlines frown upon them. But word to the wise: Personal financial remuneration will guarantee you one of the “good” breathing masks in case of cabin depressurization.

It is not necessary or even wise to replace the provided seat belt buckle with a designer buckle. You will survive a flight with a less than fashionable buckle. Trust me.

Please be aware that many flights no longer offer meals as part of the ticket price. This is a blessing to the palette but perversely and conversely a curse to the olfactory as many have taken to bringing not only sack lunches, but take out food on the flight. You Protocol Pal has been on flights where the ambiance closely resembled a McDonald’s occupied by Hezbollah guerillas who have vowed never to bathe until the state of Israel is removed from the face of the Earth. Their prospects for success are not good. Neither are your prospects for breathing.

No hard and fast rules have been codified for what kinds of take out are appropriate on passenger jets. Common sense dictates that a vindaloo spicy enough to water the eyes of the first three rows is probably not a wise choice. Watching a family of six share use chopsticks to share two orders of pad Thai noodles at thirty-eight thousand feet once amused protocol Pal. The ensuing floorshow would have been memorable even without the grocery gymnastics that resulted from a pocket of hot air over Butte, Montana. I suggest you stick with sandwiches. Perhaps a tasty cucumber on wheat? Airlines still serve a passable tea and this may add a much-needed feeling of elegance to an experience rightly compared to a Stalinist-era troop train.

If you choose to bring take out food on board, please remember that your bag of seasoned fries is subject to the same security regulations as anything else. Any fry more than two inches long will be seized. A fry cooked so long it has hardened is not only a sign of the deterioration of even our most base work ethic, is also classified as a type three projectile. Air Marshals have been known to draw their weapons if one of these is found aboard a passenger jet.

It comes as a surprise to many that even with the airlines no longer serving food, there is no place to plug in a hot plate on many airliners.

Applying make up in your seat is excusable. Applying hair dye is not.

It is not wise to share straws, eyeglasses or bodily fluids (even those in closed, federally approved medical transport containers) with the person in the next seat.

Smoking is banned on most flights. Campfires are banned on all flights.

Simply because you are in the air does not put you in international airspace. This means that gambling, ponzi schemes, human trafficking and unlicensed cosmetic surgery are strictly off limits.

Flight attendants, occasionally surly after a long flight on a 777 full of drunken Australians returning from a Cambodian sex tour, are a highly professional lot. Referring to them as “Babe”, “Sweetheart”, or “Your most gracious majesty, protector of the realm, guardian of the gates of Hades and future bride of Satan” is unwarranted. It is also no longer in good taste to eye their secondary sex characteristics and leer “My, you’re a meaty one, aren’t you?” especially since many are now male.

All airlines regulations revolving around use of cell phones, approved or unapproved electronic devices, and the tyranny of the seat belt sign are for your own good. You may feel king of the hill, belle of the ball, monkey who figured out the femur could be used as a weapon at the base of the monolith in “2001” by flaunting these regulations but your eventual death will only strengthen the gene pool. Please feel free to indulge yourself.

Your entire sense of self depends on how quickly you can get your mobile phone turned on and how many calls you can make on the tarmac. Do not let the other, less important passengers dissuade you from speaking as loud as you damn well please with their glances of disgust or outright stares of derision. You are the true master of the universe.

When deplaning, instead of thinking Emily Post, one should reference Charles Darwin. It is a primordial necessity to be the first off the aircraft. As demonstrated in Dr. Gilbert Favor’s 1975 paper “Trans World Airlines and the Stampede Principle of Survival” the person who deplanes the earliest secures favor with the most eligible, genetically superior members of the opposite sex and that the typical rites of procreation will often be disregarded, especially during spring break.

COPYRIGHT 2010 by Shaun McLaughlin

A DIFFERENT KIND OF NEWS

2010-06-02T12:11:00.000-07:00

Here's the kind of story you just don't see on the news around here...

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/06/porn-actor-goes-on-rampage-at-video-production-office-1-dead-2-wounded.html

Of course, most stories here do begin with "The Buffalo Bills today..."

You're a Hottie...

2010-05-19T12:30:00.000-07:00

People are surprised at the woman who greeted President Obama with "You're a hottie with a tight little body," when he went to lunch at Duff's in Buffalo last week.

Me, I'm just happy she didn't greet him with "Gee, you're a good-looking colored guy."

Free Venison

2010-04-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

Free Venison

This is apparently the guy that goes with my "My Deer" post.

Is That Me?

2010-04-24T17:32:00.000-07:00

I've turned into one of those neighbors my mother would hate. I don't play loud music or get into fights with my family (well, I do, but I try to hiss my anger between my teeth instead of yell). I don't have a barking dog or a big 8 bore hobby car that I rev late at night and drive people crazy because I am insecure of my penis size and need to compensate by making lots of noise.

But I do clean.

I cut my lawn. I trim. I edge. I use a leaf blower. These were things that, in California, we'd hire people to do but here I/we do 'em (I get the kids out there). Part of it was that in CA they were cheaper and we didn't have that much to do. Here we got screwed by the first company we hired (they just stopped showing up after cashing the cheque) and the other companies --- well, let's just say that there's one called "White Collar Landscaping" and I think they're more white collar criminals. Perhaps the people who did the lawn in CA were illegals (I never asked) but these guys --- then they show up I make the kids come inside. I think they're people that a carny wouldn't take.

Today was garage day. Schlep everything out of the garage. Use the blower and then use the pressure washer. Re-organize for the summer. Get the kids to clean out their outside toybox (come on...you're 14...do you REALLY want the Mr. Potato Head sprinkler?) Put stuff back in.

This was prompted because yesterday Patricia and I got our snow tires off and our regular tires on and we needed a place to store them. Something ELSE we didn't have to do in SoCal.

Yes. I can hear my mother now.

"You know what you are? You're a neat freak!"

Well. Not really.

Truth is that I like doing stuff like this because between making the comic (www.cheapjackshakespeare.com) writing a new cartoon movie, teaching my classes at Buff State, editing some projects and working on two other scripts...I like having a couple of hours a week when I'm NOT staring at a glowing rectangle.

And then I can come inside and stare at the glowing rectangle while writing about it.

Update!

2010-04-23T10:38:00.001-07:00

A little on what I've been writing about here and a lot on what I'm doing in the next few months.

http://wnymedia.net/weck1230/2010/04/god-morning-buffalo-thursday-april-22/

OH! Tannenbaum!!!

2010-03-27T07:03:00.000-07:00

Holy Christ! See my March 19th post but I just saw ANOTHER Chistmas tree out at the curb. It's almost April.

But, truth to tell, the real thing is that I'm just jealous because it was still so green! Maybe it was one of those "Lost" time shift things? Maybe it was really a Dharma Christmas Tree from 1974?

In California, that sucker would have been burning by now.

Working Out

2010-03-24T11:49:00.000-07:00

I worked out at World Gym in Woodland Hills, CA for years until the Spinning Class -- which seemed like it was run by Moonies -- drove me away. It wasn't the spinning, it was that the class' music was so loud and they shouted so much that it seemed more like some kind of indoctrination than cardiovascular exercise.

There were a lot of people who trained with partners, but at World Gym in Williamsville, I've noticed the partner phenom has become more of a pack mentality. It's not just 2 people working out together to egg each other on, there are groups of 3, 4 and 5 working out together and egging each other on. At what point does it stop being a training partnership and become a training cult?

I'm not too worried. I've also noticed that the bigger the group, the bigger the waistlines. Perhaps they're not egging each other on. Maybe it more of a support group. "Yeah, we can be fat and workout, too! We can have our cake and eat it, too! And eat it. And eat it. And then bench press 20 pounds and feel good about ourselves!!

Seen At Wegmans...

2010-03-20T14:31:00.000-07:00

seen at the grocery store: Three fat guys, each buying a six pack of hard lemonaide/sweet vodka drink, a bag of chips and a pack of cookies. All laughing. Could only guess they were talking about why they were still single.

A discovery!

2010-03-19T17:44:00.001-07:00

I just found out another way this area differs from L.A. Coming home from the gym this AM I saw two Christmas trees by the curb, waiting to be taken away. One was a lovely crisp brown and the other was a fresh, lush green.

So Christmas lasts longer in WNY.

What's been taking my time...

2010-03-11T07:15:00.000-08:00

If you like what I've been doing here, you can check out my new work of fiction:

http://www.amazon.com/Cheapjack-Shakespeare-Chapter-1-ebook/dp/B003AZY5ZS/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=digital-text&qid=1268320497&sr=8-2-spell

SHOVEL BUYING

2010-02-20T18:55:00.000-08:00

While most Targets are SORT OF laid out the same, Targets in California don’t sell a LOT of snow shovels, so I had to go looking. When I saw what I thought were them down an aisle, I walked down there and went past a woman with a baby in a shopping basket. As I walked by I thought:

“Hm. That looks like Stephanie and Fiona. But they live in Amherst so it can’t be…”

And then I stopped.

Oh. Yeah. Reality check.

This was going to take awhile. Right. We had moved. Check.

Luckily, Stephanie, who we had seen just a few weeks before when we were looking for a rental, was just as surprised to see us. We chatted for a bit and then chose our snow weapons.

They had a snow shovel with a cooked handle that they called “ergonomic”. Now I’ve looked it up since and I guess it means that it’s easier to shovel because it has a crooked handle. It’s also designed as a “pusher”[1], but I’d been taken in by that before. Still, it looked like the best bargain and we got two of those and one smaller, regular type shovel for Connor.

A quick pass by the fifty percent off Christmas decorations…

…well, it wasn’t really a quick pass. I missed my decorations and wouldn’t have minded more.

And we headed back.

The kids, having never seen snow, didn’t really know what to do. I, having not shoveled since I learned to shave[2], was more than a little rusty. And I’d never done a driveway this big. The snow was shallow enough that you could push it most of the way and I started them at one end of the driveway and I started at the other. A couple of times I saw them pulling a Laurel and Hardy and one dumping snow directly in the other’s path. Connor had an overabundance of ambition and he’d toss snow over his shoulder, shoveling madly away and totally unaware that he was throwing more snow in his own path. The sun was shining and they were actually laughing.

I wanted them to have a good time. I didn’t want chores to be like the labors of Hercules[3] or like a prison sentence. If it wasn’t fun, I at least didn’t want it to be onerous or to have them forced into it because I might have a heart attack. No, better to hold that for things like dating and driving. I also didn’t want to criticize too much or make them think I didn’t appreciate what they were doing.

And the comedy was a little too good.

That is, until I went to try to give them some pointers and Connor threw snow on me. Twice.

I did a Moe Howard slow burn, but didn’t explode.

The best part about shoveling snow is the coming inside again. Resting in front of a warm, roaring fire and having some hot cocoa.

But we didn’t have any of that.

We hadn’t gone to the grocery store yet.

So that was the next trip.

[1] On a side note, they also sell a shovel that looks suspiciously like a “barn shovel” but I take it that it’s designed to have a smaller blade to lessen the chance that you’ll hurt yourself by lifting too much snow. This mean that it was likely designed by people who have never seen snow, or they would know that it comes in different weights at different times and different temperatures. They would also know that no one like a wimpy shovel. And that their was designed for shoveling shit.

[2] My back.

[3] And I really want a good shit shoveling reference in here to tie things together.

My Deer

2010-01-25T17:10:00.000-08:00

Saturday morning I got up, put on my snappy all-cotton genuine Japanese kimono and walked downstairs. I turned at the bottom of the stairs, heading for the kitchen and then stopped, thought for a second and walked back to the front door.

Did I really see what I thought I saw?

Why, yes. I did see what I thought I saw.

There was a dead deer on my front lawn.

Now that was something I never saw in L.A. Dead cats once in awhile, yes, usually with their innards chewed out by a coyote who went only for the tasty parts. Perhaps by a raccoon. I'm not Daniel frikkin' Boone.

But not a deer.

You'd see them sometimes in the Hollywood Hills, very occasionally. A few times I'd seen them at the corner of Coldwater and Mulhullond and they WERE near Dead Man's Curve, but the deer were alive. Once during a heavy rain I'd seen a family of deer on the 405. Well, actually I'd seen them on the side of the 405. Traffic moves slow but still not slow enough for deer.

But even those deer were alive.

But this one on my front lawn was dead. I could tell it was dead because it wasn't moving. And its eyes were open.

One of the most surprising things about having a dead deer on your front lawn is how fake it looks. It looks like a prop. It looks like a fiberglass shell covered with hair or maybe a really good airbrushing.

There are deer all around here. Deer and turkeys. I think they work together but I have no proof of it. I've seen them in the neighborhood and was almost hit by one right before Christmas. He was walking in the road late at night when I was driving. He walked toward me. I stopped. We looked at each other and he decided to let me go.

But he was alive.

This one was dead.

I didn't know what you did when you found a dead large animal on your lawn. I asked Patricia and she hadn't seen it, but she went to the front and looked at it. I asked Connor and he hadn't seen it but he went to the front and pronounced it gross.

But it was still there.

I was kind of hoping it was sleeping. But I looked again and it was actually slit open and it's guts were visible.

I called the police. Oh, yes. They knew about it. The deer had been impaled on a fence and as long as it was left

Huh?

It was on the list but the guy who picked up the dead deer hadn't called in yet.

Okay.

Patricia called the neighbors until she found out that the guy behind us had gotten up in the morning to let his dog out and had seen the deer impaled (a new favorite word of mine) on the back fence. The less-than-three-foot-tall back fence. He called animal control and they'd come out and determined that the deer had some how torn an Achilles tendon and had been impaled (see! again) itself trying to get over the fence -- perhaps to a sports physician. He said that they also determined that the deer had bled out and when I looked out the back, indeed there was a huge amount of blood in the snow and a fence post covered in red.

So there it was. A dead deer on the lawn. Um-hum.

He sat there all day and the next morning we called again. We were on the list. They guy who was going to pick it up was a private contractor and he called in every day and then he had 24 hours to pick up the dead animal. It would be picked up by Monday at 11 AM.

Instead it was gone by 6 on Sunday evening.

But it did leave me with a thought:

Someone woke up one morning and thought: "Hey! You know what? Picking up animal corpses. That's a business to get into!"

THE DRIVEWAY

2010-01-03T17:19:00.000-08:00

IN HONOR OF THE FIRST BIG SNOW IN THE 367 DAYS WE'VE LIVED HERE...

THE DRIVEWAY!!!!!![1]

“Oh, how can you handle shoveling all that snow!” people would say. The cold was the first thing people commented on, the snow was the second.

And it’s true. You did have to move it out of the driveway and the sidewalk. God knows that I was yelled at often enough to get off my ass and go shovel the driveway. My father would get pissed off occasionally at my lack of concern for snow removal and would bestir himself to do it. My mother would then go into something resembling a religious fervor[2] and scream:

“Your father’s going to have a heart attack! Your father’s going to have a heart attack!”

And the implication certainly was “Because of you”.

And I would drag myself outside. Begrudgingly. [3]

We had a large collection of snow-removing implements in my childhood. My father, far from a handy man and who I don’t think I ever saw swing a hammer, seemed incapable of parting with a tool, especially a yard tool. They had only bought a house after I was born, but I’m fairly certain some of the tools came from a previous house – if not a previous century.

There were snow shovels with aluminum blades; an ice scraper that looked like it may have gone with Shakelton to the Antarctic. It had a long wooden handle and a short blade and could be used to either scrape the ice off the sidewalk or chip away at it if it got that thick[4]. There were two shovels with green blades and long wooden handles. The blades were shaped something like the plow on a snowplow and I remember the old man coming home with them, thrilled at his purchase.

They were for pushing, see? You didn’t have to pick the snow up and throw it. You could PUSH it to the side of the driveway[5]. Much easier.

No. It’s not. It’s never MUCH easier. It might be a BIT easier. But people who sell things like this never take into account that you have to put the snow SOMEWHERE. Driveways with a house on one side and a hedge on the other provided very little room for PUSHING and beyond a certain point you had to heft and tote. And while I don’t mind the snow terribly much, the occasional blizzard that’s given us a reputation does produce a lot of it and it becomes a real problem to dispose of the snow.[6]

My dad was the kind of guy who would get excited about a new snow shovel – even if the rake in the garage only had four tines and was made by a blacksmith on a forge. A driveway or sidewalk wasn’t cleared until it looked like June. He would want the snow shoveled, the ice scraped and then a liberal application of a broom to remove all traces of snow. When I started writing this I was thinking about the different kinds of shovels we had and had to research on the Internet. It turns out that one of the old shovels was what’s called a “barn shovel”. It had deep blade with a sharp edge and was apparently designed for shoveling shit. Now my dad was better at shoveling shit than most, but in a purely metaphorical way and as a guy who traveled to New York City to buy his suits at Brooks Brothers[7], I have no clue how this came into his possession.

Our first day back in WNY, we took a quick jog to Target to pick up some necessities. And by “necessities”, I mean “everything”. After all, what we still owned was on a truck somewhere between Los Angeles and Amherst, NY and all we had with us was what was in the suitcases. That meant nothing to cook on and not much to sleep on. So a trip to Target was kind of like the Starret family going into town in “Shane”…you had to pick up necessities.

And, of course, we needed snow shovels.

What I didn’t know is that there were huge advances in show shovel technology since my boyhood.

[1] Insert dramatic music sting. DA-DA-DUMMMMMMMMM!

[2] It sounded like want I imagine the girls who set off the Salem Witch Trials sounded like.

[3] And occasionally only after evaluating the plusses and minuses of being an orphan.

[4] More on this piece of fun in a moment.

[5] I will point out that my father only owned a house with a driveway wider than one car for one year and it was in a part of New York that didn’t get much snow and was in a particularly dry year.

[6] Perhaps you can push it, but not without the air of a motor vehicle.

[7] Before they expanded.

THE EARLY SHOWINGS - THE SICK AT HOME PART

2009-12-21T15:49:00.000-08:00

The next three days made me re-think my opposition to euthanasia as I lay, alternately on the couch, the bed or the floor[1] while my temperature went up to around a hundred-three at least once and was surely over normal most of the time. And every morning I’d wonder if Ingo was going to call and interrupt my fevered delirium and what I would do about it, surely too weak to drive myself anywhere. Would he just bring them into the house and tell them to ignore the sweaty, smelly two hundred pound guy on the couch and try to picture it with their Alsatian hound there instead? For two weeks I didn’t really have the energy to change the channel, let alone get the house ready to show. I have never been that sick before in my life.[2] One day, about a week in, I struggled to the bathroom[3] for a, thankfully, normal moment and in washing my hands I looked into the mirror and experience one of those Universal Horror Movie What Have I Become moments where a different, pale, gaunt, unshaven, sunken-eyed monster looked back at me.

But I was lucky. There were no phone calls.

Hold on there, bubbalouie. Lucky? Weren’t we trying to sell this thing? We were ending the first month not only without offers, but also without anyone looking at it.

The guy who called and offered the five hundred was starting to look good.

After two weeks, Ingo called for another showing. I was able to get out of the house and go to a bookstore. It felt good. And who knew? This might be the one.

Well. It wasn’t. Not even a nibble.

I dragged myself out of a sick bed for THAT?[4]

[1] When I was too tired to make it from the former to the latter.

[2] But I did drop a lot of weight.

[3] Remember: One bathroom. A father with severe intestinal distress and a pubescent girl. It’s a measure of her love for me that she never once complained.

[4] Yes. Yes I did.

THE EARLY SHOWINGS - THE AT THE HOSPITAL PART

2009-12-14T13:26:00.000-08:00

They rolled me out the door and into the ambulance. CLANG! CLANG! CLANG![1] And we were off to the hospital.

Which luckily was right around the corner.

Except…

There had been a fire in downtown L.A. that day and the emergency room around the corner was full.

Here’s the deal: There have been a couple of scandals in L.A. emergency rooms. Little things like, oh, people DYING while waiting to be taken to see a doctor. Partly this is because emergency rooms have been closing, leaving the remaining emergency rooms to take care of the overflow. A lot of this is uninsured people looking for basic care or letting things go until they HAVE to go to an emergency room.[2] And people keep coming to Los Angeles, compounding the problem.

Luckily, when they wheel you in on a stretcher bleeding from places you’re not supposed to bleed, you tend to get attention. That and we were carrying my wife’s insurance.

But the face remains that there was an emergency room less than a mile away and they had to cart my sorry ass[3] two and a half miles away.

But it did give me time to catch up with my buddy while he checked my vitals.

We got there and they unloaded me. Patricia walked up. Bob greeted her with a big:

“Hello!”

“Why, hello, Bob!”

“Does he look pale to you?”

It’s nice to have people talk about you like you’re dying. Which, by the way, was how I felt. I couldn’t stop the bleeding, nor could I stop anything else, so there was little for me to do but like there uncomfortably while people talked around me.

And, by the way, hope that Ingo didn’t suddenly call and have someone really hot to see the house. I doubted it would be in shape to show.

The upshot of this little visit was a few pills, a few IV bags and a really intrusive exam with something called a proctoscope[4] was that I had a stomach flu. A particularly virulent one that had caused such violent --- um --- evacuation – that I had ruptured something that would heal on it’s own.

Once again, it was a good sign that it wasn’t black blood.

Hoo. Ray.

While we were waiting, we had another example of multicultural L.A.

I think multiculturalism is a good and healthy thing, but let’s not let that get in the way of having a little fun, eh?

The heavily accented Asian doctor was consulting with the heavily accented Latinos in the cubicle next to us and it went something like this. Apparently the Patient didn’t speak much English and it was being translated by someone we’ll call the Patient by Proxy.

DOCTOR: So you have a condition called a fatty liver. And you’re very lucky that we discovered this.

PATIENT BY PROXY: (translates and then…) What does she do, doctor?

DOCTOR: well, overeating causes this. So she needs to lose weight, which would be good for her health anyway.

PATIENT BY PROXY: (translates and then…) She loves sweets.

PATIENT: (HEAVY ACCENT) I like desert!

DOCTOR: Well, you should make some changes in your diet. More fruits and vegetables. A vegetarian diet really is the best.

PATIENT BY PROXY: (translates)

PATIENT: (Spanish I couldn’t keep up with).

PATIENT BY PROXY: So no meat?

DOCTOR: No. No meat or very little meat.

PATIENT: (Obviously wary) Ooooooooh.

DOCTOR: And you have to watch the kinds of carbohydrates you eat, too. More fruits and vegetables.

PATIENT BY PROXY: (Translates)

PATIENT: (Spanish)

PATIENT BY PROXY: What about bread?

DOCTOR: Very little bread.

PATIENT BY PROXY: She loves tortas.

DOCTOR: No tortas.

PATIENT: No tortas? (A scream of pain[5])

The same doctor told me to take kaopectate and to drink a lot of Gatorade or PowerAde because they had electrolytes[6]. He also said that I’d been through two-to-three days of it, so the worst was over.

He was wrong.

[1] As W.C. Fields would say.

[2] And I’m not stepping in the health care debate pile of dog shit, thank you. Just reporting the facts.

[3] Pun intended.

[4] Which necessitated the doctor to proactively put on an Andromeda Strain suit – which really doesn’t inspire confidence in your future.

[5] I’ve read of Laurence Olivier’s scream in “Oedipus”. At the moment the King tears his eyes out, Olivier let loose a rending scream which people who heard it claim that they can still hear. I think it was like this.

[6] “It’s what plants crave” for those of you who also love “Idiocracy”.

The Early Showings -- The Off To the Hospital Part

2009-11-30T10:43:00.000-08:00

It was around eleven in the morning. The kids were at school. Patricia was at work and…

…Dare I say it…?

I had fallen. And I couldn’t get up.

And without one of those alarm things, too.

It’s not very funny when you’re inside of it. When you’re hot and uncomfortable, there’s a grabbing feeling inside your stomach and it won’t let go. Add to that the room spinning and not enough strength in your arms to push yourself to even a sitting position and there’s not only no one there to help you, but there won’t be anyone for hours.

I managed to turn myself around and crawl out of the bathroom enough to reach my cell phone[1], like someone suffering from poison gas in an old Republic serial. I called Patricia at her office and told her she needed to come home.

And then I noticed the blood[2].

I’m not going to tell you WHERE the blood was coming from. And there wasn’t a lot of it. But, as a general rule, when blood is coming from any part of my body that blood shouldn’t be coming from[3], I panic. I called Patricia back and told her that I was calling an ambulance.

It’s not easy to call the ambulance, beyond dialing 9-1-1. But there’s an emasculating feeling to doing it that you can really only do when you’re bleeding. It would have been better, in a way, if I were bleeding from a gunshot – but maybe not.

I managed to unlock the door and get to the couch while waiting. Some firemen showed up first[4] and they took my blood pressure and made sure I didn’t die before the paramedics showed up.

As if it wasn’t embarrassing enough to have to call the paramedics because you had blood coming from your ass, the next thing I heard was…

“I couldn’t believe it when I heard your name…”

And I look up[5].

It’s someone who used to work for me.

At least it was someone I liked.

So I had to suck it up and tell him my symptoms.

“At least it’s red blood,” he said. “When it’s black it can be a problem.

Well, that was good to know[6].

[1] Which I put on a linen counter so it would be nearby if it rang and I was pooping. I do this because I’m in show business and sometimes cliché’s are cliché’s because they’re true.

[2] Please notice how I built up to this and then dropped it into the story. On the other hand, it wasn’t very fucking entertaining at the moment.

[3] And that’s about all of ‘em.

[4] Interestingly, one was one of the men who had been there the night Ruth died.

[5] Which was about all the energy I could muster.

[6] But if it’s black, can you even identify it as blood?

SHOWINGS -- THE PASSING OUT PART

2009-11-23T12:22:00.000-08:00

About a week later we had another showing. Ingo was really excited about this. It was a guy we’ll call “Mr. Fifteen Percent” who was looking for a house for his ex-wife and child. Ingo was unsure about the details, but this seemed the perfect house. They were divorcing and they wanted to stay near the school down the block. Only two people were PERFECT[1] for this tiny house. And a little kid ---- how much time would they spend in the one bathroom! Hell, there would hardly be any pile up at all[2]! He seemed REALLY interested, but…

“He said it was priced fifteen percent too high for the current market.”

Fifteen percent? Where do you come up with a number like that in conversation? Ten percent, twenty, sure. But fifteen? Does your coach tell you to give a hundred and ten percent or a hundred and fifteen[3]?

“Should we talk about it?”

“Not yet. It’s too early,” Ingo said. “We’ll let him think on it. But I really think he was ready to write and offer for five-fifty.”

And because he was an experiences realtor who had come highly recommended to us, I took the tieless wonder’s word for it. But it seemed like if the guy was ready to write and offer…

Patricia and I talked about it that night. She said, and I readily agreed with her that she didn’t want to go below six hundred thousand. The house had been up over seven hundred thousand at one point and, as stated, Ruth’s house hadn’t been touched and went for five-ninety. We at least had a spiffy new kitchen floor and fresh paint throughout. Surely that was worth Ten G’s?

Ah, little did we know.

For the first two weeks, there was a stream of people coming through the house. We anxiously awaited heard from Ingo after each. Would THIS be the one? It was kind of like being the ugly girl at the dance and as each guy comes up, you wonder if this pimply faced yabbo was going to be THE one who would ask you do dance. Then you’d fall in love, get his fraternity pin, go to the cotillion and get married and live happily ever after.

In other words, it was a fairy tale.

All we heard was that people thought it might be priced too high, wanted to look at other things but everyone LOVED the backyard[4].

And the offers not only didn’t flood in, but the pond was turning stagnant and covering with scum.

Easter came toward the middle of April. And so did the most violent bout of flu this side of a Joseph Conrad novel.

Easter Saturday was okay. I walked down to the used DVD store to see what was in stock. It was warm and the sun was bright. I actually enjoyed it, which I usually don’t do[5]. My stomach was gurgling a bit, but it settled down after lunch.

Easter Sunday dawned and I was feeling a little worse, but not awful. I’ve felt must poorer than that. I sat out in front and talked to the neighbors from two doors down who we knew, but weren’t terribly friendly with. But they were nice and they were interested in what we might be selling the house for.

That night, though…

I’ve been sick before. I’ve had the stomach flu two or three times and back in my drinking days, throwing up meant I’d had a peachy Saturday.

But this…

This was the first time I was sick enough to wake up so I could throw up. AND have diarrhea at the same time.

Still, this wasn’t unheard of. It had happened before.

But it didn’t stop.

Won’t go into a LOT of detail, but it seemed endless.

And then one time I went to the toilet[6] and when I was finished[7], I fell to the ground.

And then I couldn’t get up.

[1] His word and emphasis.

[2] A problem we were running into as puberty reared it’s ugly, hormoned head and hair care and curlers and flat irons become more and more of an issue.

[3] Maybe that WAS Vince Lombardi’s secret. He asked for the extra five?

[4] Which would have been great if we were selling a campground.

[5] Being a troll.

[6] And at least the vomiting had ended.

[7] Thankfully.

Showings -- The Early, Optimistic Days...

2009-11-18T11:47:00.000-08:00

So we asked Ingo to give us at least forty-five minutes notice before someone came over. That way we could keep the house in a decent state of readiness and could do a quick vacuum/Fabreeze spray and not get surprised in my underwear.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people do things last minute. When I was doing a little acting, I almost never got a call to go to a casting session a day or two in advance. It was always a ten AM call to be across town at eleven. Occasionally they’d call the day before[1]. I mean didn’t they KNOW they were going to have to cast something at least a week in advance? Did they get to the office that morning and have three phone calls:

“We need a cop, a mechanic and a Pope and we need it cast before noon!”

But everyone seems to do things at the last minute and operate at a def con 9 level of panic on a regular basis. It may keep the growth hormone running, keep wait down and make sure your adrenal glands never get too bored, but it sure is a pain in the ass.

Stage one of the sale is a “realtor’s open house” which, to no one’s surprise, is when one realtor invites a bunch of other realtor’s over to look at a house that the first realtor has put up for sale. Which I GUESS sort of makes sense. It would seem to me that you’d be more interested in showing the house to people who might BUY it, but showing it to the people who might help people who might buy it find it…

It just seems like Americans are intent on adding layers on layers, like winter clothing from an L.L. Bean catalogue instead of just getting things done.

But I cleared out. It was the first week in March and the kids were in school and Patricia was at her office so I just had to make myself scarce.

Ingo showed up with his signs and gave me a long speech about all the things he’d done to get ready for this[2] and how we had a spiffy ad running that weekend in the paper. He put a sign out in front of the house and I drove away, happy in the thought that my long California nightmare was about to end.

Understand: We didn’t have a firm idea of where we were going. We just knew we were going. When my kids would ask where we were going, I’d tell them:

“It’s an adventure!”

And I’d whistle the Indiana Jones theme.

Eventually, they started answering the same way. On some level, that made me think maybe I was a bad parent on the level of the Irish Travelers who went from town to town conning people.

But, you know, I was open to a career change.

Ingo informed that he thought the showing to the realtors went well.

“But it’s not like two years ago,” he said in a phrase that I was to come to know too well. “Then you would have come home and there would have been two guys having a fist fight on the front lawn to buy the house.”

Well, that was a nice picture. And why wasn’t it happening?

“So did they like it?”

“The number one top thing they said was that they LOVED the backyard!” He said.

Well, that was great, but do backyards really sell houses?

“Well, there was a lot of talk about there being only one bathroom. But it is what it is[3], isn’t it? You’re not going to add another bathroom.

Well, not after it had gone on sale, no. Then there’d be a lot of dust and stuff around. Bad for showings.

There were quite a few showings the first week. Ingo had told us that he wasn’t going to do a lock box – one of those little contraptions that go on the front of the house that realtor’s can magically access so they can come see the house. Ingo didn’t like doing them at all and certainly in the price range of the house we were selling because you never knew who might be coming through.

This seemed like a really good thing to me. If I didn’t like drop overs, I sure didn’t want people tromping through my house and Ingo told us he was afraid of realtors who didn’t call ahead and just showed up with clients. Ingo, clearly, had our best interests at heart. But there was the fact that we’d cleared so much stuff out of the house that it was unlikely there was anything there that someone would steal that I would actually care about them stealing. They could have the thirty-two inch TV that we were so thrilled about owning when we bought it and watched Nirvana on MTV. Digital was coming and that thing would be worth shit then.

He’d call, usually giving me plenty of warning and I’d clear out. Then he’s call back with the results, usually that evening. It worked pretty well. There were people showing up almost every day.

One evening he called and said he’d gotten a phone call on the house.

I was excited. We were only a week in. Would we be able to stretch escrow so that the kids could finish school in the summer? Would there be more to pack?

In an amused voice, Ingo said:

“He said he’d seen the house on realtor.com and would offer five-hundred K, sight unseen.”

I thought about it for a moment.

“Should we talk about it?” I said.

He laughed.

“It’s not serious until they put it in writing!” He said in the same tone my older brothers used to tell me that Superman wasn’t real. “Anybody can call and say anything. That’s why no offer’s real until it’s put in writing. I told him that I’d offer him twenty k for his car right now if that’s the way he wanted to do business.[4]”

“But should we talk about the price?”

“Too early for that.”

And that was that.

In literature, this is called “foreshadowing”.

[1] Often while I was in another country. No lie.

[2] Which, it turned out, was what anyone who ever thought about selling anything would have done.

[3] As President Reagan would say: “There you go again.”

[4] And if you want to know what the sound of a hundred K going away sounds likes --- that’s it.

The $3500 RABBIT - CONCLUSION

2009-11-08T09:17:00.000-08:00

For a creature that naturally gets by in the wild, everything you read on rabbit pet blogs (and yes, there are a ton of them) point out what a fragile creature a bunny is. They can’t stand direct sunlight, they can’t stand extreme variances in temperature, and a sudden shock can kill them. It was like keeping my grandmother as a pet.[1] So you had to be careful, especially with stories flying around of prize-winning super-champion dogs dying in cargo holds because they froze to death or someone didn’t get them water or they got their rhinestone collar mysteriously magnetized to the propeller or something.

So you have to choose carefully. You have to ask them what experience they have in transporting rabbits – no matter how embarrassing it is.[2]

I finally settled on the company that said they had just transported a rabbit to Germany from Los Angeles for a family where the father had been transferred by the army.

Well, not only did they fly rabbits, but they flew them for the United States Armed Forces! The First Airborne Lepus Brigade! That was for me!

How much?

Well, let’s not get into dollars. I mean, really. What price can you put on a family pet[3]? Lauren had thought briefly of getting another bunny that she could cuddle, but she really couldn’t give Gravy up. She’d tear up at the thought[4]. Plus, the bunny had had a good life in the classroom, but after a year he accepted us as his – yes – family. If you take a pet, you have a responsibility for it’s well-being. Even if it was a fat lazy rabbit that was ungrateful and…

But I digress…

In order to transport him we needed to provide and FAA approved pet carrier[5], water, food, bedding and a certificate of health.

Yeah. A certificate of health. I guess to insure that if he sneezed he didn’t infect any other pets or if he got loose he wasn’t rabid and didn’t attack anyone. You know that the incidence of rabbit attacks is on the rise. Need to look out for that.

So we made the arrangements. Patricia took him to the vet for a check up. I think Gravy was grateful to come home with all his pieces – or at least all he had left the house with that day, anyway.

He was good to go.

As were we.

December 30th the man came to the empty house to pick up Gravy. He was in his carrier, his water bottle zip locked to the cage opening of the carrier. His food was packed away in ziplock bags and he had treats. The pet carrier was stuffed with two towels[6]. Gravy doesn’t really like his carrier. It was a gift from a friend and it was originally purchased to transport his two cats to the vet. There was a lot of room in there. But it wasn’t his home. His home was his cage or the living room floor and being put in the carrier, to him, meant his cage was going to be cleaned and he’d have to spend a lot of time pooping it up again.

Gravy also hadn’t been acting himself. Rabbits are not the brightest creatures[7] but he knew something was going on. You had to know, even if you were a rabbit, when a bunch of strangers came in and took all the furniture. I thought he’d go crazy with happiness when he saw all the room he had to run around in. I know Connor did. No one to yell at him to be careful not to bump into anything.

But Gravy didn’t like it. He didn’t want to come out of his cage. I tried to explain to him that he should grab the exercise while he could, but he wasn’t listening.

So when the man from the pet movers came, we were prepared to have to grab him out of the cage and put him in the carrier.

We opened the cage.

He peeked out.

He saw the towels.

He was in the carrier before we knew what happened. Ready to go. He got in and started pushing the towels around to get them just so.

We closed the door. The man took Gravy down the walk. And he was gone.

[1] But without the drinking.

[2] And it is.

[3] Other than, you know, the title of this chapter.

[4] And maybe a little guilt.

[5] Which was not the one Patricia bought that matched the harness and leash, but a large plastic carrier with a cage door and food and water dishes.

[6] And there are few things a rabbit likes more than towels. They can chew them, throw them, dig in them. After you’ve been spayed, I suppose this is about as good as it gets.

[7] Yeah. Send me letters telling me how smart your pet rabbit is. Then get on to fetch in less than a year of training. Go ahead. Impress me.

The $3500 Rabbit - Part II

2009-11-01T13:09:00.000-08:00

Gravy was a part of the family. A fat lazy part of the family who would cuddle up next to you, would assassinate me if it meant more time with my wife and was a total whore for a piece of banana, but a part of the family[1]. After re-reading that description, he actually sounds like my brother.

And you can’t leave a part of the family behind.

No matter what Connor thought.

“If we give Gravy away,” he said, “We could get another bunny. Or a dog. If we got a bunny and it was young, it might let us hold it.”

“YEAH!” Lauren said.

I confess, that I started this in a playful manner saying, “You know, if we gave Gravy away…” never dreaming that they’d bite.

See, the BIG problem with Gravy was the holding, lap-sitting issue.

He’d come up next to you. He’d snuggle himself up close. He’d nudge you. But he did not like to be picked up and he didn’t like to sit on anyone’s lap.

To be sure, part of this is God’s fault, because he made rabbits prey and therefore chances are when you start to pick them up, every instinct inside of them says:

“I’m being eaten! Feets, do your stuff!”

If you have them from when they’re kittens[2] you can mostly get them used to handling. Right now we’ve had Gravy for almost three years and he’ll submit to a lap sit for maybe two minutes and if Lauren picks him up, you can see him silently suffering the indignity for the kid who brought him home. He doesn’t like it, but he’s grateful to her.[3]

So the problem, as soon as we put the house up for sale, became: What to do with Gravy?

He won’t let us hold him on a consistent enough basis that we would be comfortable carrying him through security to get him on the plane and rabbits, in struggling to get away, have been known to break their backs. And that’s what you want for you kids:

“We’re moving away from the only house you’ve ever known, pulling you away from your friends and your school and your church and your Godparents, and we killed your pet getting on the airplane. Shall we just skip the interim and go right from the airplane to the mental hospital?”

Patricia came home from the pet store one day with something she thought was darling. A rabbit carrier with a matching leash and harness.

“See. It matches!” she said triumphantly.

“He’s a rabbit,” I said. “We’re not even sure he can see color.”

“But we can get him through security with this. We can carry him on the plane with that,” she said, pointing at each of the items.

Well, it was a good idea.

It’s just that Gravy didn’t agree.

The harness fit around him like a vest, with Velcro and snaps for extra security. Rabbits are a bit like cats and can slip into small areas so when you snap ‘em in, you’d better snap ‘em in good. How they can have this kind of cartilaginous skeleton and still break their own back trying to escape, I don’t know. Ask Jack Hanna. I only own the damn thing. At least a rabbit doesn’t try to claw your eyes out or pee in your bra cups like a cat.[4]

We put him in his harness to get him used to it. For this to work[5], he’d have to not only get used to it, but tolerate it as we’d have to get him in his harness, put him in the carrier[6], get to the airport (which we, as yet, were not clear on how we were going to do) and then hook the leash up, get him and the carrier[7] through security[8]. The easy part would be the flight as it’s not like he was a terribly active animal. If he didn’t freak in the plane, he’d likely sleep only waking to get pet and, sadly, probably have some baby talk from Patricia. And then as soon as we got there, first thing we’d have to do would be get a new cage for him since his old one would be in transit on a moving truck.

So when we let him out that night, we put him in the harness. He hopped around a couple of minutes and then looked at me with an expression that is the soul of disgruntled.

Every time we tried it after that he would struggle to get away and chew at the harness.

I didn’t think he was liking it.

There had to be an easier way to transport one’s pet.

I took to the Internet.

There are, indeed, firms that specialize in moving animals. Mostly dogs and cats. Many had drop down menus listing the animals they moved. There were dogs and cats. Fish and gerbils. Hamsters, snakes, iguanas, various reptiles. But no rabbits. Not even “rodentia”.

So I had to email them to see if they moved rabbits. Then I had to find out how and if they had experience.

[1] None of these qualities, historically, would have disqualified him from being born a McLaughlin.

[2] Which is what Wikipedia says is the proper phrase and not “widdle bunny wabbit” – and I’m not saying who in the house said this, but I sleep with her.

[3] And she’ll probably give him a piece of banana. To be fair, he does buss her whenever she asks for a kiss.

[4] Not my bra cup, anyway.

[5] And believe me, I know explaining this sounds kinda like the lamest James Bond plot ever.

[6] That matched the harness. Very important. Please remember.

[7] Which would likely have some kind of – um – detritus of the poo variety as you could hardly expect the rabbit to hold it cross-country.

[8] Wonder how they would handle the poo on X-Ray?

The $3500 RABBIT - PART ONE

2009-10-25T16:31:00.001-07:00

Lauren was in Seventh Grade when we moved. Middle school starts in sixth grade in Los Angeles. So Fifth grade was her last year in elementary last year at the Magnet School she’d started in second grade and it was the year she met her first true love.

His name was Gravy[1].

Gravy was a bunny.

The fifth grade classes all had pets. Lauren’s class pet was a little bunny named Gravy because he was gray over white. It was a color thing. Gravy had a brother who was brown over white and he was called Caramel. He had another brother named Harvey that had nothing to do with color, but was, of course, the character in the Marcy Chase play and movie adapted from it.[2]

Each weekend and on holidays, one of the children in the class would get to tote Gravy, cage and all, home. The rest of the time he stayed in the classroom, in the cage and, I guess, learned fractions.

Early on, we were plagued with requests to let Gravy come home on the weekends and holidays. We acquiesced, though we were told that rabbits were smelly and chewed on everything and pooped everywhere.

Such was not the case with Gravy, something I attributed to the excellence of Lauren’s fifth grade teacher who must have been an inspiration to the little fellow. He was neat as a pin, only pooped once and would occasionally nip at the carpet, but for the most part[3] quiet and non-smelly. He’d watch me do yoga. He’d grunt. Sometimes he’d grind his teeth[4] and he was, really, pretty fun.

Oh. And whatever feelings Lauren felt for him, he felt for Patricia. He doped out the house pretty quick and he would put his head down for me[5] he’d like getting pet by Lauren and Connor, but for Patricia he had a love like for no other. He would literally dance around her feet, jump and prance and just generally make a fool out of himself much the same as I had when I first met her[6].

He was in love.

And who could resist his face?

Somewhere along March, Lauren let us know that SOMEONE was going to bring Gravy home --- TO KEEP.

FOREVER!

LIKE A PET!

Patricia and I discussed it. You know a pet is a lot of responsibility, but you never really know how much until you don’t have one and then seriously contemplate getting one. Patricia and I had both had dogs growing up, but that was growing up and you knew Mom and, very occasionally, Dad would be there to pick up the slack. Now we were adults and we would be the slack picker-uppers.

Being a slack piker-upper is not an attractive proposition.

Also, we vacationed once in a while and had no family around – one of the reasons we didn’t have a dog yet.

And speaking of dogs, we’d always wanted one of those. In fact, when I’d gone back to working at home, Patricia had given me a Dagwood Bumsted-like list of jobs to do around the house[7] and top of the list was “Prepare house for a possible pet”.

I knew what “pet” meant. Neither of us were fond of cats, snakes, iguanas, she was okay with birds and fish were just plain boring. By “pet” she meant “dog” and I had done what I could about the fencing and figuring out where to put a kennel if we wanted one outside[8].

But we had never considered a rodent of the leporidae family[9].

But Gravy grew on us and when Lauren called, excitedly, from the office one day to say “Mrs. Metson says I can take Gravy home if it’s okay with you!”[10] We all knew Gravy was coming to live with us.

He became king of the living room. And he knew it. A large part of family life revolved around letting Gravy out to play every night. We’d close the doors and watch him to make sure he didn’t get at any electrical cords[11]. He would kick his heels up and tear around, kind of like a cat with the tears.

Then we had him fixed.

It’s recommended for rabbits if you’re not going to breed them.[12] It lengthens their life.

That doesn’t mean they like it.

When we brought him home from the vet, Gravy sat in the cage and stared at me for a full twenty-four hours. I swear. He blamed me for what had happened to him.[13]

He was much less active after that. As I would be, I suppose.

But he still ran to Patricia and danced around her legs.

And she loved him.

Honestly. I liked the rabbit and it made me want to throw up.

“Are you my little buuuuuunnnnnn---eeeeeeeeee.” She’d say.

I’d have to leave the room[14].

Lauren adored the bunny. Connor liked him too. He’d come out and hop around. He’d lay himself out at the door or in front of the coffee table and relax. If he wanted attention, he’d come up and nudge you with his nose. You’d be surprised how hard a little animal can nudge. The first couple were nice and mellow Californian “Hey! Hi! I’m your pet! How about a little scratch, please?” But if you didn’t get right to them he was like a nut in the subway shoving you until you paid attention. “Listen, human scum. I don’t like our relationship any better than you do. I didn’t ASK to be born at this point on the food chain. You COULD make my life a LITTLE less miserable if you scratched that point between my ears that makes me grind my teeth in joy. You know. If you aren’t TOO busy ruining the planet. Thank you.”

So funny I was going to put so much time and effort into bringing him with us, huh?

[1] No Wavy, but it’s sort of a litmus if people make the wavy comment or the food related comment.

[2] And God help me that I know the rabbit’s family tree.

[3] And I was usually home with him.

[4] Which is the bunny version of purring.

[5] A sign of bunny subservience, i.e., I was the head bunny.

[6] Sans the dancing. I did prance a bit, though.

[7] “Couldn’t you put them on little slips of paper? In a jar? Like in ‘Blondie’?” I asked. She just shoved the pad at me without a hint of a smile

[8] Though I am a proponent of house pets, largely because of the phrase “house pets” and anything that’s kept outside most of the time is “livestock”.

[9] Not that I knew his surname.

[10] And what school lets a kid call from the office like that? Over something like that.

[11] Rabbits can chew on them and fricassee themselves. I don’t think there are any rabbit suicide prevention hotlines, so they just go on with the self-immolation.

[12] And I loved reading the phrase “if you are going to breed your rabbit”, knowing that breeding was something they did really well on their own.

[13] And I wasn’t even the one who’d taken him TO the vet! My crime was picking him up and having some sliced apple for him when he came home.

[14] And it was only 1000 square feet, so where was I going?

A "Lesson Learned" Interlude

2009-10-18T13:25:00.000-07:00

If we’d had a stand-up guy like Tripper from the start, not only would we have been out of there much sooner, the family would have been under a lot less stress for a prolonged period of time, the kids would have started school at the beginning of the year, we would have had a decent amount of time to look for a home, we would have been able to drive across the country…

AND we probably would have done all that with a hundred thousand dollars more in our pocket.

Seriously.

The first week the house was up someone offered a five hundred and Ingo laughed it off. The house was RIDICULOUSLY over priced for seven months. I have a part of that. Patricia has a part of that. The SoCal real estate market has a huge part of that.

But no one owns a bigger piece of that than that piece of feces Ingo.[1]

To begin:

We’re not freakin’ Realtors. It’s not out job, our career, our expertise to know how to price and get houses sold.

Now, more than a year later and able to watch “House Hunters” and “Property Ladder” without hyperventilating, I know that if a house doesn’t sell in a month, at the outside two, you have to do something with the price. If your traffic drops, you have to do something with the price. If you really want to move, you have to do something with the price.

I had asked him, Mr. Realtor Ingo:

“Is it time to look at the price?”

“Oh, not yet.”

Yeah. Right. And he did this to make money.

I said it before. I’ll say it again.[2] We got away okay.

I mean we made a profit and that’s good.

But we went through hell. Patricia tells everyone that it was the worst year of our marriage and I’ll agree with that to the extent that I won’t even attempt to make a joke about it.

Proof positive of what a fuck-up Ingo was is that Tripper was able to do in less than thirty days what Ingo couldn’t do in seven months.

And it’s not his fault. It’s mine for putting up with it. For not educating myself more on the home sales process and for thinking he knew something I didn’t when it came to selling houses [3].

Lesson learned.

Money gone.

Me Pissed off.

Stop writing like Tonto now. Me part Algonquin. Offend self.

[1] And I say that with all sincerity.

[2] I say it every night when I’m going to sleep in the hopes I won’t wake up and want to kill someone.

[3] Because, you know, it was what he did.

The Characters So Far...

2009-10-16T09:04:00.000-07:00

Patricia: My lovely, talented, indulgent and patient wife.

Lauren: My 12 year old daughter (now 13) who, like, isn't a valley girl, okay? (Yes, they talk that way). Lived in the same house her entire life. Saw snow once. Drove away from it.

Connor: My 9 year old (now 10) son. His heros are Dr. Who and Roy Rogers. Could I be any more proud?

Ingo Inept: Our first realtor who gave us advice on how to set up the house, how to take pictures, what needed to go and how to price it. He was almost always wrong. My best guess is that he cost us a whole pile o' money.

Tripper: Our California Preppy second realtor who took over selling the house, dropped the price and got it sold in less that 30 days. We consider him a genius.

St. Joseph: A statue buried in the front yard after 30 days on the market. Didn't do squat.

Mr. Fifteen Percent: A recently divorced man who wanted to buy the house for his ex-wife and their daughter. Came through the house four different times at four different prices. Each time he said that the price needed to be fifteen percent lower than it was.

Gravy: A really lazy pet rabbit.

Me: A freelance television producer with a lot of credits and too much time on my hands while all this nonsense was going on.

Home Inspection -- The Final

2009-10-11T12:14:00.000-07:00

“Well, she’s worried about this beam…”, Tripper said, continuing on about the apparent danger in the garage.

“Stuff’s been up there since before the Martin Luther King Day Earthquake, Tripper,” I said. “The only time I went up there was to pull a door down to see if I could fit it on to take the kids’ door with us.”

“What?”

“We’ve been measuring their height on the door since they could stand. Seemed like a good thing to take with us.”

He looked through the papers on the house sale agreement.

“I don’t think we have an exclusion on that.”

“It wouldn’t work,” I said. “The door didn’t fit and it started to seem like too big a thing. But the point is, I pulled the door down and nothing fell.”

“Well, we’ll have to get it looked at.”

“The agent’s trying to screw us, isn’t she?”

“Well, she’s…”

“It’s okay. Just say it. We’re in a corner and she’s trying to take advantage of us.”

“They’ve got someone coming out to look at the garage. Okay?”

I knew he was serious, because he didn’t say “right?”

The next morning I went out and looked at the garage. Not only was it not dangerous and not a part of the frame, what was there was something someone had clearly added later as part of an elaborate[1] network to increase storage space.

All the guys who came by to do the work on the house[2] were really nice and efficient. The guy who was replacing the toilet seemed to have a little trouble fitting the new one on, but he did it.

As I mentioned earlier, it was a low-flow toilet, necessary in a city that was built on a desert in a state with little naturally occurring fresh water sources and in the midst of a ten-year drought --- you can’t waste a lot of water on poo. But still, no comforting “flush, gurgle-gurgle-gurgle, whine whine whine (as the water re enters the tank), THUMP”. No. Now there was a super-efficient “Whhhoooopsh”, like an airlock opening in a sixties sci fi movie follow by an ultra-quiet “fooooooo” of the water refilling which then just --- stopped. The first few times I had to go and check to make sure it hadn’t overfilled onto the floor because I was used to the thumping noise. The first time I checked, I noticed the hole.

There were a lot of wacky things in the house. The bathroom counter had been done in a heavy white tile with a shelf running the length of the wall. I think this had been done for --- well, I actually have no idea why anyone would do something like this. It was a great place for geegaws and knickknacks --- maybe that scented candle you kept in the bathroom to mask --- you know. But it was right under neat a towel rack that was right underneath a linen cabinet, so that seemed to be a perfect prescription for combustion.

The toilet itself sat right below that and after they put the new one in I noticed the hole.

Yes. The hole.

About three feet long and maybe six inches high. A hole that led into the space between the walls and down into the crawl space below. Apparently, when they had put the original toilet in, they had cut into the wall to fit the toilet in[3]. And that had been two toilets and several droughts ago.

So the new, ultra-low flow toilet with pressurized flush-o-matic airflow[4]left a hole in the wall.

Well, the buyer would have to hear about that.

Then the guy came to look at the “very dangerous” situation in the garage. I can’t testify that he giggled, but I can say that he made two hundred dollars for some pretty easy work. And I left the old doors, carpet remnants and brass bed up there. Never had to move them.

Arrangements to move all the stuff were surprisingly easy. Made three calls. One gave me a quote over the phone[5]. Two sent people out. One was a woman celebrating her thirty-fifth year of estimating moves. All of them gave me prices about one-third of what I was expecting to pay. I hired the company with the woman celebrating her thirty-fifth year. She was the nicest, the most interesting and could really use the skin resurfacing I think the commission would get her. She looked like leather, which is what thirty-five years of driving around in eight to ten UV status gets you[6].

Two calls got the cars taken care of. Again, for much less that I expected, but I did cheap out on the delivery. They WOULD bring it right to your new home, but I opted to save a couple of hundred bucks and go pick it up at the local transit station.[7] Not only would they come to the house and pick up the cars, but also if you had the tracking numbers you could actually trace their progress across the country.[8]

So there was only one more moving arrangement to be made. We had to take care of…

THE THIRTY FIVE HUNDRED DOLLAR RABBIT -- NEXT

[1] And by “elaborate” I mean “amateurish”

[2] And they WERE all guys. I mean, really. Where’s feminism in the contracting arts.

[3] Or something. I really have no idea.

[4] I am making that up.

[5] Based on the size of our house. Which I thought was bizarre because we could be total hoarders. Well. Okay. We WERE total hoarders.

[6] But she didn’t have any brown spots on her face. I did. Time to go.

[7] Please resist skipping ahead to find out what the local transit station was. Some things are worth the wait.

[8] Yes. There will be humor growing out of this.

Home Inspection, Part Two

2009-10-04T17:36:00.000-07:00

Tripper and I went over what the inspector had found. Nothing huge. But it’s continually amazing how different people in the same profession can find different things wrong with a house that you’ve been living in for twelve years and you never knew.

We knew that the plumbing was part copper/part galvanized. This was common in L.A., especially in houses that had been remodeled once or twice. You want copper plumbing, but you don’t want to rip the walls out. The problem is that if the correct connecters aren’t put on, it turns into a chemistry set and REALLY starts to corrode in a process called electrolysis – which I thought was hair removal.

We also knew that the crawlspace attic was clean – because we never went up there and it hadn’t been opened since the last house inspection. The guy who’d inspected before we bought told us it was a great storage space --- which we could have used, but with an opening in the ceiling the size and shape of a box of corn flakes, I couldn’t see how you could get much in there.

He found two leaks in the plumbing under the house, both near the washer/dryer in the kitchen and he said those were attracting termites to the old wood and cardboard stored in there.

Tripper looked at me.

“You know,” he said, “the stuff you have down there.”

“I don’t have shit down there,” I told him. “You couldn’t pay me to crawl around under there.”

“Oh.”

He looked like he didn’t believe me. I didn’t care. I just cared that this mean I needed a plumber AND an exterminator.

Visions of dollar bills with wings on them, all of them flying away, filled my head.

We’d had to have the place fumigated for termites when we’d bought it. It was on the borderline of just shooting them with some kind of electric gun[1] and tenting the whole house. I was kind of excited when it came to tenting. You have to understand that coming from Western New York, “tenting” was something you did on a camping trip, or, if you were ambitious, at a circus. When I’d first moved to California, I’d seen houses completely covered in what looked like canvas for days on end and finally figured out it was for cockroaches or termites[2]. When I was getting the house ready for sale, I found a couple of the sings they’d posted around saying, basically, “This house has been filled with really dangerous shit and we think we got it all out.”[3]

This time the only problem was some termites under the washer and they could be taken care of with some liquid. Or some powder. Or their mothers would be threatened. Something like that. No biggie.[4]

There was some dry rot – we knew that. Once again, I’d not heard of it in New York, but I guess that may have been because I wasn’t’ paying attention. Dry rot was as much a part of life in SoCal as sunscreen. We’d had some taken care of, but there was some more the inspector found.

The roof we knew had been re-roofed and would need a new roof in a few years. We knew that.

The air conditioner/heater was exactly what we knew it to be. Damn thing never broke when we had a home warranty.

But there was one thing…

A beam in the garage ---- THAT WAS ABOUT TO FALL!

OH.

MY.

GOD!

Danger! Danger!

“What?” I said.

“Yeah. She called me really concerned about this. Right? She said there’s a beam in the garage that’s cracked, part of the frame. And there’s stuff stored up there and that there shouldn’t be stuff stored up there because it’s putting a strain on the frame and that’s probably why it cracked.”

I just stared at him. I was hearing what he was saying, but it wasn’t making much sense.

“Do you know what they’re talking about?” He asked.

“Yes.”

“She’s really worried about it.”

“She’s nuts.”

“I don’t know. She thinks…”

“Tripper, that’s been like that since we bought the house.”

“Well, do you have a lot of stuff stored up there?”

“There’s stuff that’s been up there since the original owner. There’s scraps from this carpet,” I said, pointing at the floor. “There are the original interior doors and the doors that originally went on the kid’s closets. From BEFORE we owned the house, in case you think I’d pick out that horrible faux wood door. There’s a brass bed frame. When we moved in there was a ton of stuff in the garage. When we bought it, it got left. There was a cheap black lacquer vanity. There were old family pictures of a 1964 T-bird and someone we had no idea who it was. But the pictures were cool, so we kept those. There was also a torah and Tefillin in there.”

“What?”

“A torah and tefillin. Do you know what those are?”

“I’m Jewish.”

“You could be Reform.”

This didn’t get him to crack a smile.

[1] Which seemed very “Captain Video” to me.

[2] I guess I may have seen buildings in Manhattan tented when I was living there, but I was drinking a lot and it was the heyday of performance art. I may have just thought it was Cristo’s house.

[3] Liability insurance. What can I tell you?

[4] More dollars flying away, though.

HOME INSPECTION, PART ONE

2009-09-28T12:56:00.000-07:00

I took off for the afternoon and Tripper took care of the inspector guy. He called me about two hours in and said there wasn’t anything big to worry about, but that the guy was going to be there about an hour longer than expected.

When I got home, it was dark. Patricia and Lauren were off at a Girl Scout function[1] and I had the boy with me. I took a look through the house and you could tell things had been moved. Tripper called me as I walked through the house to make sure everything looked okay. He told me that he had to wait for the final report, but that nothing looked too bad and he’s be over later when they delivered the report to him.

It was after five and I had to get dinner started. Connor was working on his homework. I turned on the lights in the backyard and noticed that the faucet was dripping.

There were two faucets in the backyard – which seemed excessive for such a small house. One was over in a corner by the kitchen and was not only a faucet, but had, for a while, contained the pressure relief for the house. One side was a regular garden faucet. The other side was a red plastic hand that if you turned it, all the water for the house funneled through. Or at least that’s what a plumber told me. It was one of those things that didn’t make much sense to someone who writes and makes TV for a living.

“Well, you know that’s the pressure relief for the whole house, don’t you?”

“Really? And can we switch to camera three?”

You see, there is a failure to connect at a deeper level.

We’d had to have that and one of the sprinkler valves replaced the previous January. It was Sunday and I had gotten up too late to go to church. Patricia and the kids had gone and I was walking through the living room to get more coffee when I saw and heard one of the sprinklers thump on. It was the middle one in the back yard and you could see it from the big window as it moved back and forth and back and forth.

Then about an hour later, as I was reading the paper[2], I realized that it was still running.

When it was usually set for 15 minutes.

And, oh, yeah, it was a Sunday and they weren’t set to go off on Sunday.

Curious, I walked out back and saw that the top had blown off the faucet and it was spewing water into the air[3].

I called a plumber. It seemed reasonable.

It took him a while to get there. It had been a record cold in the San Fernando Valley the night before. It had gone below freezing before and in December the field across the street was often covered in frost[4]. But this night it had not only gone below freezing, but had done it for hours and the pipes for the in-lawn sprinkler system had frozen and burst. Why it burst with one fountain and one sprinkler going off, I don’t know. But it had.

The other faucet ran out of the house behind the bathroom and was the one we most often had the hose hooked up to.

As I walked by the door on this evening, I looked out and saw that it was dripping and there was something black on it.

I went out to check. It was very weird. It looked like there was electrical tape on it. I reached out to turn it off, took the handle and it flew off as water shot out of the pipe which remained in the house.

Boy, was I pissed.

I went inside, called a plumber and then immediately called Tripper.

“Their inspector busted a pipe,” I said.

“What?”

“He busted the pipe that connects to the faucet in the back of the house.”

“I’ll call and Ill be right over. I’m going to pick up the report.”

Tripper sounded angry.

“They’re responsible for any damage their inspector does, you know,” he told me.

Well, I didn’t “know”, but I had suspected.

Tripper showed up while the plumber, who had come after I’d called four others, was busy at work welding in the back yard. Nothing like having a talk in the light of a Welding arc flash.

Tripper, resplendent in jeans and a sport coat[5] showed up with the report.

“I called the realtor and she put me on with her and the inspector and he said it was already broken.”

“That’s bullshit,” I said. “We live here and I would have…”

Tripper put his hand up.

“They said it was on the other inspection. The one you had done.”

“If it was, I would have…”

“Shaun, this is about selling the house.”

“But…”

“You don’t want to piss off the buyer and the buyer’s agent. Just pay for the faucet and be done with it.”

I looked at him.

He looked at me without even a trace of a smile. Dead serious.

I knew how serious it was. He hadn’t said “Right?” once.

But right he was. We were making a decent profit. We had four offers and one serious as a heart attack buyer who showed no signs of backing off. I should just take it, pay the couple of hundred bucks for the repair and be grateful.

I kept my mouth shut. It wasn’t easy.

[1] Lauren was the scout, but don’t think Patricia isn’t capable of scouting!

[2] The funnies.

[3] Which is something you’d think you’d notice.

[4] Once it was covered in frost on Christmas morning – which was really cool.

[5] Tripper bought the kind of jeans that might as well have been worsted wool. These were the kind of jeans you could only get at places that called themselves a “men’s shop” and not the sort of thing you’d find at a mall. It may have been that he secreted starch where other men perspire.

GETTING RID OF IT ALL BEFORE GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL

2009-09-22T08:48:00.000-07:00

It’s amazing that in this consumer society[1] that you can build a pretty decent business out of being the guy who’s there to catch when people are throwing things away.

I mean this in several ways.

First: There’s the guy who runs the company that rents dumpsters.

Second: There’s the guy who crawls into that dumpster and pulls things out so he can sell them.[2]

I couldn’t believe the crap that built up over the years. Part of the problem is that it’s actually hard to throw stuff out or give things away in Los Angeles.

Seriously. When did Goodwill and the Salvation Army get so picky? No computers more than two years old. No books. No videotapes, especially those recorded yourself off television[3]. Each piece of furniture was carefully scrutinized for imperfections and many were rejected.

Really? Didn’t they know that we were GIVING them this stuff? Oh, and what about those ads about providing jobs for people who would fix these things and thereby learn valuable and marketable skills?[4]

So a lot of stuff had to go. I called the city for a manual pick up, which meant someone – um – manually picked stuff off the curb and put it in a truck.[5]

The big thing that worried me was an old automatic garage door opener that had been taken off when the original garage door had been replaced. The original had been a cantilevered wood beauty with an old Sears opener that could be operated from a remote, or from a button inside the house. But it had been replaced because of dry rot. The new door was personality-free aluminum and the garage door opener had to be scrapped because it wasn’t up to current code with an electric eye that stopped the door should a kid, small animal or playground ball roll under it. Never mind that a NON-automatic door can come crashing down uncontrollably and who’s putting the electric eyes on those?

Have you ever tried to get rid of something like that? It’s huge. It’s heavy. It’s got a winch and a motor on it. When I called the city for the manual pick up…

“We can’t take anything over six feet.”

“What?”

“A refrigerator is the biggest thing we can take.”

“Well, if we’re going by volume…”

“Is it more than six feet long?”

“Yes.”

“Then we can’t take it. Our trucks are only six feet long.”
“Excuse me? Were they made by Tonka?”

“We can’t take anything bigger than a refrigerator.”

“Then what am I supposed to do with this?”[6]

“You can leave it out by the curb. People come by and pick up stuff like that.”

“People?”

“You know. People.”

“So you’re telling me to just take junk and put it out by the street and hope that some scavenger comes and picks it up? Because what happens if they don’t come and pick it up and you’ve given me advice that leaves garbage out on the street? I ask because people used to dump TV’s in the field across the street[7] and not only was that unsightly, not only was the broken glass dangerous, but no one ever came to pick it up. When I called the DWP…”

She hung up before I got to “…they asked me why I was letting people bust things up and not calling the cops when I saw it, even though I would call the cops and they’d ask if I owned the property.”

So we decided to get the dumpster.

And the crap just kept coming.

Not only was there the garage door opener, but also there was a patio table, four chairs and two chaises all missing pieces that head been left by the previous owner. We’d made use of them[8] but we weren’t taking them anywhere.

There’d been an article in the L.A. Times a few years before we moved about dumpsters. About how when you get a dumpster for your house it becomes the neighborhood dumpster and that at two AM you can find the old lady from down the street reliving herself of her multiple cat-transfer boxes or that building debris from a demo job will be there in the morning where the night before it was empty.

What they don’t tell you about is the people who come to take things OUT of the dumpster. Several times I’d hear a truck pull up[9] and someone would hop in and start rooting around. I asked one of them what they were doing.

“I look for metal.”

“How do you know I haven’t made a deal with someone to take it already?”

He stared at me blankly.

“I take metal.”

What he wouldn’t take was the dog shit one of the local dog runners tossed in the dumpster every day while we had it in the driveway.

[1] Of which I am a card-carrying member and, perhaps, poster boy.

[2] I guess.

[3] It seems VHS tapes are now some kind of hazardous waster and it apparently has nothing to do with what’s recorded on them.

[4] But I haven’t seen one of those ads in a long time and I guess those marketable skills are now only marketable in Canton and Sonora.

[5] As opposed to the automated trucks with the tongs on the side that picked up the trash cans and shook them into the truck. These Michael Crichton things so fascinated me the first time I saw them that I called Patricia and work and asked her if she’s seen the garbage truck.

[6] A question I should have had answered ten years earlier, but I had things to do.

[7] Which they did. In fact, for a while there was a group who would come by in a pickup every two-three weeks and throw a TV off a pickup and then they would attack it with baseball bats. I’ve only thought about doing that

[8] Because I’m a cheap bastard.

[9] Blocking the street, the sidewalk and my driveway.

AFTER The Big Change

2009-09-07T17:54:00.000-07:00

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.

The Big Change...

2009-08-31T16:25:00.000-07:00

Ingo Inept, Realtor Ordinaire, told us he was making the jump to a new firm.

“This could work out well,” he said. “Remember how many people we had coming through at the start? New listings always do better. Well, because I was taking your listing to a new company, I could get a new MLS[1] and it would be a fresh listing at a new price.”

And what price was he thinking?

He leaned back and chewed on the earpiece of his glasses[2].

Five hundred and eighty nine thousand dollars.

I really had to wonder how you go to a price like that on something as big as a house. My instincts would be to go for round figures, or at least fives. Ingo liked nines ‘cause it gave the impression of a bargain[3]. I didn’t care.

If that enough of a drop, I wondered.

He continued chewing his glasses. He thought so.

Yeah. Like he COULD think.

“And if we don’t get anything at that, we’ll drop it again. It’s a volatile market.”

Well, no it wasn’t. “Volatile” means explosive and unpredictable. This market was implosive and totally predictable.

But we were willing to take the new shot. We wanted out.

And since we weren’t getting out in time for school, we set a new deadline: We had to have the kids in new schools at the start of the January semester. Failing that…

Well, failing that we were stuck and we might as well pull the house off the market until things got better. You know. After election. No, not the Obama election. Like three/four elections after that.

Yeah. It was looking that bleak.

So Ingo was promising us a really fresh start. New website, new ads, new everything. We would even start it off with a new broker’s open house!

Oh boy!

After a few months of absence, Ingo seemed to be a man possessed in these heady days of the NEW! NEW! NEW! Selling of the McLaughlin house. He was there quite a bit and seemed genuinely interested in my schedule and what work there was to be done.

Ingo arrived on time for the second broker’s open. I took off for the park with some work.

The park I went to was where we used to take the kids when they were little and it was working as a good metaphor for what I saw going on.

When Lauren was little, there were clean sand pits around the playground equipment. On Sunday mornings you could park, walk through the park; maybe you’d see someone setting up a birthday party in one of the parks shelters[4]. She’s like to walk near the small lake and really liked it if your brought some bread to feed the ducks.

Now there was almost no place to park. Not only were the lots full, but also the roads, on both sides, were parked, leaving a fairly narrow passage. You had to be especially careful at corners. Some cars spilled over into the bikeways.

Every shelter was taken and so was every built in barbeque. They were already being fired up[5] and I wondered did you carry enough wood/coal for the day? Well, I guess they did, except for the people I saw unloading a gas grill and propane tanks from the back of an SUV. Something I saw a couple of times. This was, I suppose, a good way to get around the limited number of barbeques, but…come on. A gas grill? Like the kind you have in your backyard? A big one[6]?

There were balloons everywhere for the parties. Kids were running around and playing the swings and stuff. These were the playthings we stopped bringing our kids to when my daughter suddenly developed a fear of bridges and there was a wooden one on this. Also, there were the used condoms, beer cans, cigarette butts and cat shit in the playground sand[7]. The atmosphere was not what you might call family friendly.

As I sat in my car and made laundry lists of possible projects and made a few calls, I watched several cars pull up and disgorge a wedding party who then tramped around the park taking pictures before they all piled back into the van and left.

There was something[8]essentially SAD about going to a public park, a pretty nice one but far from the nicest I’ve ever seen[9] and having your wedding pictures taken while dodging balloons, used condoms, beer cans and barbecue smoke just didn’t seem romantic. It seemed like a very sad way to spend the happiest day of your life. The indignity afforded the bridesmaids – well, those dresses should have been enough. And the image of the bride getting out of a 1989 Dodge Caravan didn’t help any.

I went home feeling worse than when I left. My daughter was twelve and I was worried about her wedding if we didn’t get out of there.

Yeah. Things stopped making a lot of sense around then.

Ingo was there when I got home. What did the realtor’s think?

“The number one thing they said was that they liked the backyard.”

Was this the same group from last time?

We did start out a little better the first few weeks of the five eighty-nine price. There were people coming through. One of which was familiar.

“It was the guy who was looking for a house for his ex-wife and kid again,” Ingo told me. “He said the price was fifteen percent too high.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him to make an offer.”

But he didn’t. We went along for two weeks before I called Ingo to talk about dropping the price.

“School’s just in,” he said. “New people driving by. I think we should leave it just the way it is and see.”

Which I agreed with.

But this was about the time I started to see something disturbing.[10]

There was something awry with the marketing.

Ingo had changed realty companies and the price of the house had changed, but the information on the website for the house was just the same.

I checked the other websites, like Realtor.com and Trulia.com. It was the same thing.

And worse, when I clicked on the contact information for the house, it sent me to a different website in a different county.

I was appalled. I called Ingo. He was flummoxed. He had “a guy”[11] who did the websites for him and he would get right on it.

I watched it the next few days. Nothing happened. I called Ingo again. He seemed annoyed at “his guy”.

Another week. Nothing happened either with the websites or with the house. We dropped the price again. No movement except the guy looking for a house for his ex-wife and their kid came by --- again. And again he said the house price was fifteen percent too high[12].

But now, after six months of doing nothing[13] we were veritable dynamos. After a month we SLASHED the price to five-twenty-five.

“Well,” Ingo told me Mr. Fifteen Percent said when he called. “I see they’re finally coming around on the price.”

“Did you tell him that we were willing to drop but you were suggesting we stay…”

“No. I didn’t see any point in that.”

“Did he express any more interest?”

“Not really. No.”

[1] Multiple Listing Service. Not Major League Soccer. One is much more entertaining than the other.

[2] Most bad actors have a few moves that they do over and over. This was meant to show “deep thought”. He needed to do something to show it since he was incapable of doing it.

[3] Only nineteen ninety-nine!

[5] This was around 10 in the morning.

[6] Like the one the guy next door tried to cook the Thanksgiving turkey on one year when I was a kid in Buffalo. That became one of the regular rotation of “really boring holiday stories”.

[7] The children’s choir at our church was once looking for a place to have an end-of-year picnic for the kids. One of the mothers suggested this park. I replied in an email that we had stopped taking the kids there and she said: “Well, we’re just careful of things like that and that’s what any park anywhere is like.” I’ll be telling more stories like this in my next book: “Self Justification: Polishing the Turds or Modern Life”.

[8] And I’m copping to being a snob here, but if you haven’t picked up on that already you need to ride a shorter bus.

[9] Buffalo being home to a park system designed by Frederick Law Olmstead – go ahead and look it up.

[10] And I mean MORE disturbing that the “for sale” sign outside the house for six months and the cat shit in the yard and

[11] I wonder how many “guys” like this are out there and how they survive in a world where building a website CAN be as easy as starting an email account – not that there aren’t people who find that hard. But, really, setting up a website with some pictures, some canned midi music and a click through for contact? My daughter could do that when she was ten. I could do it by the time I turned forty.

[12] While home prices were dropping, his standard was, apparently, constant.

[13] You know, except for trying to work in a house with little of the stuff I needed, taking care of the kids and dealing with whatever lunacy the neighborhood decided to drop on us.

BUT IT'S SO PRETTY ACROSS THE STREET!

2009-08-23T17:39:00.000-07:00

The kids finished school in June, Connor finishing Third Grade and Lauren finishing Fifth. It was a pretty good year. Lauren was finishing elementary in the L.A. school system and would be gong into middle school the next September. We didn’t think we’d be there in September, but we filled out the paperwork anyway, just in case. Being in the magnet program meant that if we hadn’t filled it out, she would have to go to the home school, which was just down the block and we didn’t like that. We didn’t like the kids we saw coming out of that school.

Maybe the kids around the corner WERE just kids. Maybe kids are just kids and I’ve read enough to know that kids in the 30’s, 40s and 50s, 60s and so one really weren’t THAT different than kids are today. Perhaps the language was coarser, perhaps not. One has to think that kids who grew up in an agrarian world were better informed on sex and that kids who were a few years away from the draft probably either knew cuss words they’d learned from their older, already-drafted brothers, or that they would learn them in short order. I’m POSITIVE they knew and used a lot more racial epithets. Probably more colorful and descriptive ones, too.

But I didn’t live around the corner from those kids. And those kids weren’t packed into a school with an ever-expanding enrollment and static building who, when loosed at the end of the day, exploded into the neighborhood like a bunch of – um – ah—kids.

There had been a couple of HUGE fights in the field across the street. One on a Tuesday[1] at about one PM. I was walking through the living room and saw a large throng[2] of kids gathered near one of the power towers. I heard yelling and I’m not too old to know what it sounds like when a fight is going on. I am too old to get involved in one, though. I picked up the phone and dialed 9-1-1 and I heard…

“I’m sorry. All circuits are busy. Please try your call again later.”

What? On a TUESDAY afternoon? What was going on? Had someone bombed the police station? Had a two-car pile up on PCH turned into a massive chain-reaction accident?

I never found out. So whatever it was, it wasn’t even big enough to make the papers. I called the school and they sent over one of their “officers”[3] who broke up the fracas.

Yeah, kids’ll fight. But kids’ll also not know when to stop.

I had a similar experience with the LA 9-1-1 system about a year earlier. I had picked Connor up from some birthday party and as I was driving him home, I saw what looked like a homeless man head butt what looked like a homeless woman.

Now here was a situation where, even being the pussy I am, I would have jumped in. I’d done it before[4], but I had Connor with me and it didn’t seem a good idea.

So I called 9-1-1. I gave them a good description and told them just where it was and then I drove home.

About forty-five minutes later I was in the backyard with Connor when my cell phone rang.

“Hi, this is Los Angeles police dispatch. Did you call to report a man and woman fighting?”

“Yes.”

“Well, are they still fighting? Officers just got there and…”

Christ. In forty-five minutes he could have planned a murder, committed the murder and disposed of the body, too!

There were other things with the kids and the field across the street, too. Things that bothered me, but didn’t seem to bother anyone else in the neighborhood. I once had to tell some kids to stop bouncing a soccer ball off the front of the house. They took affront at this. There were people who parked their cars there to take spiffy pictures and, in spite of the “No Trespassing” signs that were everywhere, there were people trespassing. I wouldn’t get upset as a few kids playing ball, but when people began showing up with TEAMS of kids for practices or games, that was a bit much. It wasn’t a park and there was no place for them to put their cars. So sometimes on a Saturday or a Monday evening[5] the street would be lined on both sides with cars, leaving only one lane. Once, early on a Saturday morning, we heard the usual slamming of cars doors.

But this time it kept up and up and up. When we looked out, both sides of the street and around the corners were parked full of cars and at least a hundred people were on the field.

And they stayed there.

We kept out heads down and didn’t go anywhere – it would have been merely impossible to get out of the driveway, anyway. We put up with it for two hours and when it didn’t look like it was going to end, we called the cops.

The police showed up quickly.

And then they went away.

But the throng stayed.

I called the dispatch back and was told that the officers were told that it was a church group who had permission to be there from the owners.

Of course, I called the owners of the property, the Department of Water and Power, the next Monday and no one had given permission for anything like this. Of course, there was no one to call on Saturday and my favorite thing they asked was:

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

And my second favorite thing was:

“Well, who gave permission for this?”

As you may guess, I was at a loss for words.

And once again, just so I don’t sound like the cranky “Hey you kids get off my lawn!” guy[6], it’s not the one time or even the fifth time something like this happens that gets on my nerves. It’s the regularity of it.

It really wasn’t even that. There were a bunch of guys that showed up every Thanksgiving to play touch football. I never called the cops on them[7].

When the groups of kids started to play touch football, I didn’t call the cops. It was when the groups swelled to over thirty, they were there for hours, left trash all over the place AND they started playing on our lawns and dancing in the street that I really got upset.

Yes. Dancing[8]. In the street. With music.

It all looks well and good in “West Side Story” or a video[9], but after the first three hours, it gets a little old.

The thing that really got me is that no one else seemed bothered by it.

It really wasn’t that unusual an occurrence. I once saw a fat woman in shorts and a maidenform dancing to music from her car in the parking lot of a department store[10]. And I don’t think anyone did anything about that. Sometimes you’d see kids break into dancing outside a music store[11], but on your street?

[1] Those of you who have been keeping notes will recognize this as an early release day.

[2] That’s “throng”, not “thong”

[3] More about this later.

[4] And come to think of it, I’d never had to do something like that before I moved to California. Perhaps it’s having an ocean on the other side that does it.

[5] Who came up with the idea of youth soccer practicing on Monday evenings? And is one practice a week enough? You don’t want them to over practice, but my kids can’t remember what I told them the day before, let alone a week before.

[6] Though I hope to become one.

[7] Partially because they were freaking PATHETIC. A bunch of fat guys who you know didn’t make the team. And that’s coming from a guy who was freaking’ PATHETIC when we made the team.

[8] When I was in high school, guys who danced I public were often tarred and feathered. And that was in the school gym.

[9] I was searching for a proper reference, but the David Bowie/Mick Jagger collaboration was the only thing that came to mind and that made me feel old.

[10] And the anti-psychotics have done nothing to erase this memory.

[11] And there are hardly any of those anymore.

ON THE SOUTH SIDE

2009-08-16T17:51:00.000-07:00

If you’ll recall from our early reading, this house had an interesting history, at least as far as we were concerned.

Patricia was TREMENDOUSLY pregnant when we moved in. Her sister sent her some baby stuff packed in Styrofoam peanuts. I was at the studio and she decided to throw the box and the peanuts out[1]. The wind came as she was waddling toward the curb and suddenly we had a lawn covered in Styrofoam peanuts. Patricia started to pick them up when she saw the woman next door come out.

She looked at Patricia, then went inside and came out with five little kids to help Patricia pick up the Styrofoam.

“You know,” she said to Patricia, “I run a daycare next door…”

Honest to God. We moved in pregnant next door to a family run daycare. A good one. Run by a great woman names Maya who became not only one of our best friends, but also the children’s Godmother[2].

But things end and eventually Maya’s landlord decided to stop renting and sell the house as the market was climbing. It was okay. Maya wanted to retire anyway, but it sucked to lose a good neighbor.

That was the beginning of the renovations in the neighborhood.

The owner decided not to sell. Or maybe he didn’t really mean to sell and just was trying to get around rent control. But after extensive renovations (which made the interior look like the Vatican Bathroom[3]) he put the “For Rent” sign up.

It was an interesting array moving in and out. No one really stayed more than a year.

First came the couple with the two kids. The man had teardrop tattoos under his left eye[4]. This was okay at first as they had a daughter Lauren’s age. The man of the house built and elaborate tree house out of scrap wood that was anchored between an old oak in the front yard and the garage and looked so great that I told Lauren that if she were ever invited into it, she should run home immediately.

These people didn’t stay in the house too long after, one summer night, I had to close the windows in the bedroom after hearing the man[5] one evening scream, as I’ve said before…

“Do you want me to go back to jail? Is that what you want? Do you want me to go back to jail?”

Which is something that makes you feel comfortable.

So they moved out and the homeowner, when he was looking at the house after the move out came up to me and, pointing at the tree house said:

“Did you see what they did to my house? Did you see what they did to my tree?”

Why, yes I did. And, funny, I thought a homeowner, even one renting his house out would actually LOOK at the place once in awhile. You know, drive by. Wave at it.

I guess I was wrong.

There was a parade moving through. A couple whose house had burned down and needed a place to live. They had two beautiful dogs. One got hit and almost killed in front of our house.

A couple with a son Lauren’s age. He and my kids grew to be great friends, playing almost every day. This was a great year. He moved away.

A young mother and her son. He was a little kid, but she was very, very nice and we enjoyed her. She’d invite us over for an Easter egg hunt every year[6]. Her kid was cute and she had nice people with her, cousins or the like, to help watch the kid.

Somewhere along the line, the first owner sold to the guy who was too busy to help with the fence and we never knew it. But we’d had our first chat and I knew what a pleasant guy HE was going to be.

So I was not happy when I came home as saw a stranger walking around our driveway taking pictures of the house next door.

It went like this. I started with a…

“What are you doing here?”

And he came back with…

“None of your business.”

“You’re in my driveway.”

“I am NOT in your driveway.”

“Yes you are. It’s the thing I just drove my car up.”

“Well, I’m not in it now.”

“But you were and what were you doing?”

“None of your business.”

“Well, it is if you’re on my property.”

“I’m NOT ON YOUR PROPERTY ANYMORE.”

“Okay. Tell you what. I’ll just call the cops and let them know…”

“I own this house.”

“Well, why didn’t you just say so?”

“Because it’s none of your business!”

“Then stay out of my yard.”

“I know my rights! I own five houses.”

“You own five houses?”

“Yes. I own five houses.”

“You own five houses and you didn’t have the money to fix the fence?”

“It’s not my problem if you get greedy and want to sell your house.”

“I’m greedy?”

“You’re greedy! You want to sell your house, you pay to get the fence fixed!”

“Well, I did.”

“Good for you.”

“It cost seventy-five bucks.”

“Good for you.”

“It’s too bad you couldn’t afford part of that.”

“Well, you know, that’s what you do in business.”

“You lie?”

“Yes.”

Okay.

I walked up to him and put my hand out. He took it. I gave him and extra firm grip and then put my hand on his shoulder, also with an extra firm grip and I said:

“I just want you to know that we try to be really good neighbors. Do you understand? We look out for each other. It’s really important to be good neighbors and if you need anything involving our house, you just come talk to us first, okay?”

And then I walked back inside, fairly certain I’d made my point.

Also fairly certain that he was either going to sell the house or the good neighbors were leaving.

They were. We talked to her one night when we all came home at the same time.

“Yeah, it’s time,” she said. “I mean with what goes on across the street and I can get a better school for the kid and, you know, with the earthquake I always thought that I had you guys that I could depend on and right next door if I needed anything. But with you gone…Yeah. It’s just too creepy here.”

So we weren’t alone.

But we soon would be.

Because it hit me that we were a house for sale wedged between another house for sale and a house for rent.

Nice.

[1] Never bother giving advice to a pregnant woman. Especially a REALLY pregnant woman. I came hoe one day to find the furniture rearranged. ALL the furniture. I think she would have moved the stove if she could have figured out the gas attachments.

[2] We baptized the kids Episcopalian. Their godmother was a Persian Jew, their Godfather Catholic. We were trying to find a Moslem so we’d have the religious trifecta, but ran short of time.

[3] I never thought of marble in a ranch house living room. On the floors. And the walls. He’s probably put it in the ceiling if it wasn’t too heavy.

[4] Which has a lot of connotations. None of them good.

[5] I’m not sure they were married. Or even if they knew each other.

[6] And I’m embarrassed to say I don’t think we had her over.

AT LEAST...

2009-08-09T18:01:00.000-07:00

In the six months the house was on the market, there was a little bit of advice, attempts to pick me up, shake me out of my doldrums that I heard a BIT too often...

“At least you’re not underwater with your loan,” They were saying. “At least you don’t owe the bank more than you can sell the house for.”

Never, EVER tell anyone something designed to make them feel better and begin it with “At least…”

“Well, the cancer ate your face, but at least you still have pretty blue eyes.”

“Your family was killed in a mountaineering accident, but at least they left you the Corgi breeding business.”

“The alligator ate your leg, but at least you can get one of those spiffy spring running legs now. You know, like that guy who jogged with the President?”

“At least” doesn’t make it better. Just think about the phrase. “At least”, meaning in the smallest or lowest degree. It’s a positive way of looking at the world, but it can be a pretty stupid one. It’s like giving thanks for a world that can be brought to nuclear destruction with the press of a button, but at least we have post it notes and aren’t they handy?

When I’ve been in really bad places, either in relationships or lack of work or lack of decent work[1], I became a devotee of self-help books and especially power of positive thinking books. I read them all, from the Grand daddy of self-help books “The Power of Positive Thinking” to more esoteric fare, like the “Sutras of Patanjali”.

Lemme tell you: There’s only so much to pull from these things. They’re not crap[2], but after a point they’re redundant and being thankful for what you DO have as opposed to what you DON’T have doesn’t make much sense in a world where Kevin Federline gets two million dollar endorsement deals[3], where Heidi and Spencer seem to have no problem getting along despite no real means of support and The Real Housewives of Where Ever They are This Month even EXISTS[4] --- in a world like this, how can you be grateful to have a roof over your head and three-five squares meals a day?[5]

When you start cutting back on cable, telephones, movie rentals, comparing prices are the grocery store and driving an extra mile to get a few cents off gas WHILE you’re living in a house that’s supposed to put almost five hundred thousand in your pocket if YOU COULD JUST SELL IT!, that sucks.

Sure I have a beautiful wife and two great kids. I have a great education, I have talent, I’m happy with my looks[6], good health and pretty good exercise habits.

But, you know what?

Let’s be honest.

It really isn’t enough. Nope. Sorry. Just the way it is. Bite on that, purveyors of enlightenment. Screw the status quo has ALWAYS been my mantra. There’s something better out there and it’s pissing me off that that something better isn’t here.

So, anyway:

I was getting depressed, pissed and stressed, all at the same time. Every week one of us would call Ingo and every week we’d here that there were no showings planned, but that he’s sure let us know!

July I realized that there was no way in hell we were getting out of there before school started.

And that meant we were there until, at least, December.

And another fall of starting school, going to the busses and trying to make sure the kids and I were safe from the rogue Honda Odyssey[7].

And I’m here to tell you, that didn’t help the depression/sleeplessness/stress track I was on one little bit. If you wonder why I refer to my wife as the “sainted Patricia”, it’s because she has to put up with me in my dark, dark, darker than a really, really dark place moods[8]. Like sitting in a corner and not moving moods. Like getting REALLY pissed because someone’s chewing too loud moods.

I’m a guy who can handle BIG stressful situations well, but not long drawn out stressful situations. Give me a big, scary event and I’ll be fine. I would have been aces on the Titanic. I would have handled Normandy beach okay. I would have found my way out of the North Tower okay. But in a prison camp, a desert island, or living in Kentucky? Those things would make me crazy.

And we were closing in on four months.

Patricia and I had a long – and LOUD talk about this. She insisted that there was still a way that things could work out before school started and I took the negative position[9]. Slowly it sunk in on her, too.

We were trapped.

It’s a funny way to put it, but we were literally trapped in our thousand square foot ranch house. Any place can become a trap. Even some place where you’ve picked out the wall colors and planted peonies in the front. Any place, even a place that you’ve invested with love, can become a flaming shit hole of doom.

Patricia blamed the market.

I blamed Ingo.

And, like Beetlejuice, say his name three times and the douchebag called.

Every call was filled with hope. If I saw his number on the caller id, my heart leapt with the anticipation of hearing “We have an offer”[10].

But instead I heard:

“Can we get together?”

[1] Did I mention that I worked in retail?

[2] Well, some of them are. A lot of them are. My favorite was the one that exhorted followers to live a clean, moral, upstanding life if they wanted to succed. Not to fall prey to drugs or homosexuality. Yeah. THERE’s a real douchebag of an entrupreanuer. I stopped reading in case the next chapter was “How to overcome Negroness”.

[3] They guy got to where he is by starting off as one of Britney Spears’ dancers and attracting her attention. Does he think he’ll be able to perform this trick with, say, Katey Perry? Will she say “Hey, there’s that hottie from the no more fat guy ads! Whoo-hoo!”

[4] And can I say that these were the kind of people we were trying NOT to grow up to become?

[5] Food IS love, after all.

[6] COULD lose a few pounds, but food IS love, after all (as you may have heard).

[7] I some times still have nightmares about that. It’s not so much the car, it’s the sound of that woman’s horribly scretching voice with the accent like a villain from a 1960’s anti-commie movie. I don’t think we haten then because they were commies, I think we hated then because their voices could give you a headache that could cut wood.

[8] Once again, Irish and American Indian descent. We know depression.

[9] It was also the correct position, but you know you can’t start out a conversation that way. I learned that much from reading self-help books and being married to an Indonesian woman

[10] It HAD to happen sometime.

HOW WE GOT THE HOUSE

2009-08-03T09:56:00.000-07:00

I was working at the studio at the time and it seemed such a tremendous pain in the ass[1] and unpleasant to do just the MINOR renovation that it was easier to just buy another house.

And we thought about it. We even took a little action now and again by doing the math and looking at what was on the market. When we’d moved into the house as a rental, I was a lowly production assistant dreaming of someday not doing my own Xeroxing. When we bought the house, I was a not-so-lowly-but-still-pretty-small-potatoes Senior Production Coordinator[2], 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.

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[4], 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…”.[5]

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[6] 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.”[7]

But instead he said:

“Would you guys like to buy it?”

“Sure,” I said, trying not to laugh at him.[8]”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[9] of what he was talking about.

And, as it turns out, neither did the guys who were setting up these new first-time buyer programs. If I had read a bit more, maybe I would have gotten out sooner.

[1] I mean that literally, as all the furniture was covered in plastic and, quite often, shards of drywall.

[2] A made-up title. And don’t ever let anyone ever tell you that EVERY title in showbuisness 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…?”

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

[4] 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.

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

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

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

[8] Because he was a very nice man.

[9] 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.

PREPARING TO SELL

2009-07-25T14:14:00.000-07:00

I never thought it would be EASY to sell my home. I’d never sold one that I owned, but my parents were serial monodomusites and we moved 5 times in my first thirteen years[1]. But I’d never been involved in the sale beyond having to toss some of my stuff in boxes or once going to the lawyer’s office to make the down payment and being all googly-eyed at the wad of bills my bank-distrusting father carried.

But while I never thought it would be easy, I didn’t think it would be the razor wire mobius strip it became.

It’s not like we hadn’t thought of it. We’d been on our way out of L.A. and I was going back to grad school when I got a temporary job at Warner Bros. Animation as a P.A.[2] That became a permanent job with promotions and the next thing I know I have an office, a secretary and a career.[3] Every year or so we’d reach the requisite number of episodes for an animated series and I’d start thinking of life after cartoons and every years we’d get picked up for another series and I’d get the requisite 5% raise and there I’d be. It wasn’t golden handcuff. Maybe brass, but really good brass.

Patricia and I wanted out by the time Lauren got to seventh grade. Lauren was born when there was still such a thing a Junior High school and we thought that would be a good time to make our escape. Then they went and changed the rules on us and created this Middle School thing and it didn’t look possible to get out by the time she hit fifth grade.

But then I made the capital error of working in a large corporation: I told the boss he was wrong. And then I was gone.

It was a relief really. I’d topped out and reached the Klingon level of show business: If I wanted to advance I either needed to kill my superior or defect to the Federation. I need a swift kick in the drawers and I got it by pointing out this particular emperor was in the buff.

So we started talking more seriously about leaving, but inertia works it’s magic. A year and a half later and I’m commuting one week a month to Montreal to work on a movie and we still haven’t made plans.

But the icing on the traffic cake did it. We kicked it into high gear. And by high gear I mean we started talking to people about it.

In late 2007 we had just topped out the market in Southern California. The bubble hadn’t burst, but someone was jabbing at it with a sharp implement.

Friends of ours had recently sold their house and purchased another and spoke highly of their agent. We invited Ingo Inept[4], licensed realtor, over for a meeting and liked him.

Ingo was about my age, a bit taller and had either once been the recipient of a hair transplant or, more sadly, had lost his hair in precisely the pattern that would mimic someone who, at a young age, had spent a large sum of money getting a transplant and then nature had it’s revenge by continuing it’s relentless march of deadening follicles.[5] The overall effects was not the intended youthening, but instead the top of his head looked like a fallen Mohawk surrounded by a Friar Tuck fringe which would be a mix of metaphors if you didn’t know exactly what I was saying. He wore a lot of sports coats and slacks with broadcloth shirts and no ties --- which was a look I always wondered about. Was it studied casual? It was Southern California where people wore gym shorts to fancy brunches[6] so why try to meet anyone halfway? Wear a tie or wear khakis. Don’t try to look like a New England doctor on vacation.

But if I held the way people dressed against them, I’d never work with anyone. My doctor wears clogs. So there you go. Can’t judge a book by the cover.

So Ingo showed up with a briefcase full o’ paper. He had comparables for every house sold in the area with particular attention paid to our sad little pad.

He showed up on time, which began to endear him to me. Hardly anyone in L.A. is ever on time. You’re either fifteen minutes early or twenty minutes late and there’s no way to tell which one you’re going to be. The best rule of thumb I found in my years there is that when you leave really early to make sure you’re someplace on time, that’s when everyone else who’s getting on the road at that time will have to stop to tie their shoes and you’ll get a straight shot to where you’re going.

Etiquette has turned itself upside down as a result of this. It’s not only correct to be fashionably late for a party, but in many cases it’s taken for granted that you’ll be fashionably late for business meetings as well. I’ve never been insulted by being called “That guy who’s always way fucking early” anywhere else. Nor do I expect to be.

And that was my motion picture agent who said that, by the way.

So Ingo started out well.

Ingo was a little over six feet tall and wore wire frame glasses on a longish nose and he liked to take them off and chew on an earpiece while he stared thoughtfully at you. This gave the impression that he took you seriously.

He wore the California compromise business uniform: Dress slacks, a sport coat and an open-collared shirt. From the looks of his stuff, he wasn’t a fashion plate but it was pricey. Brooks Brothers, maybe. It was one of those looks that was neither this nor that and I think it was cultivated that way. Like a lot of network TV, it was designed only to NOT offend and didn’t offer anything of itself.

And it WAS little. Three bedrooms. One bath. This had been the usual model of house when the wilds of Edgar Rice Burroughs estate were settled in the Fifties when America was rapidly suburbanizing. Ruth, our neighbor on the North side had bought her house in Nineteen Fifty-Six. She and he husband had been the second owners of the house, having purchased it in 1956 and they had raised two children to adulthood in that house with one bathroom. And she said they never complained. Her daughter told a wholly different story, but Ruth was in her 90s and we cut her slack if her memory wasn’t what it once was. When I was a wee tike, five of us lived in a four bed, 1 ½ bath house – and the half bath never really worked. It was nasty wooden closet in the basement that was cold and an excellent breeding ground for spiders. So when 17 year-old brother was bathing and shaving for the fifth time in preparation for a date and four-year old baby brother needed to pee --- four year old me learned to hold it, rather than brave the stinky room that John Carpenter wouldn’t film in – too creepy.

Of course, in modern times[7]people find one bathroom wholly inadequate. It was enough for us before our daughter hit the outer edges of puberty. Then hair care went from ponytails, or on a really sassy day, pigtails[8]. Ah, for days of yore when “Getting ready for school” meant making sure shoes were on and socks matched and not an argument over who had used who’s Paul Mitchel styling gel. So we needed another bathroom.

But we’d been in that house for 11 years before the need for another bathroom really became urgent. And by “urgent”, I mean “convenient”. We COULD have gone on with one, but I will point out that we were not looking for houses with one. Early on in home ownership, we had looked into expanding the house and had talked to contactors about expanding the house and putting another bathroom in. We’d talked about putting a toilet and an office off the kitchen, a W.C. off the kitchen, knocking out the back wall, turning the patio into a family room; adding a second bathroom and turning the second biggest bedroom into a master suite; knocking out the front wall and expanding the living room, and, most ambitiously, we briefly flirted with putting a second floor on the house.

In the end, we had the kitchen ceiling and floor redone, the bathroom floor redone and the living room/dining room repainted. THAT was enough of a pain in the ass with a crew of five coming and going, the kitchen out of commission for a week and when you could get in to make a sandwich or a bowl of cereal, you were likely to find it covered in dust just from walking through a house that was undergoing a minor renovation.

[1] This did include selling one vacation home, so techinically they weren’t always monodomusites. But the laws on bigamy have changed since then.

[2] Production assistant. Part gopher, part secretary, part ass-kicker and all ass-kisser.

[3] “Career”: An equal number of admirerers and enemies.

[4] Not his real name. You’ll figure out why.

[5] Look at my picture. I know about this stuff.

[6] I saw it once at the Roayl Dining Room on the Queen Mary. But they may have been the royal gym shorts. I didn’t ask.

[7] What? When I was a kid it was ancient times?

[8] And I can braid, thank you very much, thanks to the Eighties “rat-tail” trend.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND

2009-07-20T10:11:00.000-07:00

When I moved to Los Angeles after college, I swore that I would never complain about the weather. After growing up with WINTER, what was there to complain about?

To be sure, Buffalo, NY and its environs have a reputation for tundra-like conditions that it doesn’t deserve. We’re not Inuits. We don’t dog sled to work and school and I never once saw anyone use a snowshoe. We had several pair in the basement, along with ice-fishing equipment and an ancient violin and none of these saw the light of day.

It snows, sure. It snows in a lot of the world. Buffalo is not only not the snowiest place in America, it’s not even the snowiest place in the State of New York. It’s not even the snowiest place in the county. But you’d never know that to watch the national news. Once, after I’d been in California for about five years, I read in the paper about a big snowstorm hitting Buffalo. The city was shut down. Animals were escaping the zoo. It was chaos. I called my college buddy, a public school teacher, who told me that not only was school in session and that the nuclear winter hadn’t hit. And the escaped animal? A rogue ring-tailed lemur (weight 5 lbs) was running amuck – which in the case of a 5 lb. small ape means it was searching for an apple. Or, considering the neighborhood the zoos in, it was looking for a beer at a preppy bar.

But it’s colder than L.A. and it does snow and there’s a certain displeasure in coming home from a hard day at work or school and finding the entrance to your driveway two feet high in snow caked with ice and you have to get out and chip away until you can pull in. Or the way the salt on the roads eats at your muffler until a couple years in you’re driving something that sounds like a 1926 John Deere and isn’t as useful.

Oh, I SWORE I’d love L.A. and the weather and eventually got used to people complaining about the “cold” winters in SoCal while I was ready to go to the beach. I eventually divested myself of so much warmer clothing that a business trip to Korea in January was a bell-weather event for local retailers as I outfitted myself with sweaters, a parka and boots that I never really needed.

It turns out I really don’t mind winter.

I didn’t move to L.A. for the weather. I moved there for work. I had a degree in theatre because when I was going to college degrees in film were for fancy-dancy kids whose parents could afford colleges where they taught things like that. And the equipment[1].

I always dreamed of being in the movies and television and so, with no specific plan, I moved to where they were made. To the entertainment capital of the world!

What a blazing shit hole.

Well, not at first. I kept a good attitude and persevered. I worked in retail for a few years, spent an urban Christmas alone, eventually met my wife and weaseled my way into a low-level position at Warner Brothers Animation where I eventually wound up working with people like Steven Spielberg[2] and on high profile projects like Superman, Batman and other shows where people in tights beat the crap out of each other. I got to wear tuxedos[3], go to awards shows, meet the occasional famous person and once got to see a guy walk into a wall because Raquel Welch was coming in to record a voice[4].

But even that glitz and glamour wasn’t enough to keep me in the Los Angeles area.

Oh. Yeah.

And I got laid off.

Some people say I got fired. That’s not true. I was laid off and I have the paperwork to prove it. True, it was sudden. But, as the President of the company said to me after HE was laid off[5] “You can’t tell your boss he’s wrong too many times before he gets this idea you shouldn’t be around.” He told me this because he had suffered a similar fate.

Truth is, we had been planning our escape for sometime. Tiring of the freelance life[6], I had been thinking of going back to school for an MFA that would allow me to teach at a collegiate level. Even then we had been tiring of Los Angeles, it’s environs, the ever-growing population and – yes --- the weather.

Oh, yeah. Sunshine. Blue skies. Endless beaches. Gorgeous.

And then there was the February day when my wife, the blessed Patricia, came home from work to our pre-baby apartment, threw he bag on the ground and pronounced:

“It’s February. It’s eighty degrees. This fucking sucks[7].”

You should know this: There are people who don’t mind the cold. I went outside on the coldest day of the year. Around five degrees. Not that bad without the wind blowing. Seriously. I’m not going swimming outside or sunbathing nude[8], but it was nice. Went to the bank. Got a latte. Nice day. Also there’s a slight snow shower and with the sun breaking through the trees it looks like rhinestones falling from the sky, so I guess maybe God’s in the mood to be a gay television dress designer right now. But it’s gorgeous.

Yes. You CAN tire of endless perfect skies. It got to the point where were prayed for El Nino[9] just for SOME kind of change. People continuously found and still find this amazing but it’s dull. “Oh, how can you leave that beautiful sunshine?” I don’t know…Fear of melanoma? The sainted Patricia is part Indonesian and I am part American Indian and neither of us seems to have inherited a single sun-friendly gene. Had we settled warmer climes the human race would have taken a very different turn, perhaps evolving into the underground dwelling Moorlocks of “The Time Machine”. As a matter of fact, living underground doesn’t sound half bad now that I think of it. No noisy neighbors. Moles and worms are pretty much silent. Well insulated. Hmmm. Maybe Bin Laden’s onto something. But I really don’t want to join him in his caves. There’s all that running with Kalashnikov rifles above your head and they do monkey bars in what look like burkas in their recruitment videos. I don’t know who they think they’re recruiting. I could never do monkey bars in gym shorts, let alone the identity hiding things they’re wearing. Plus there’s the ideological differeneces. No. It would never work out with Bin Laden and me. But maybe I can start a new underground race and 5000 years from now we can kidnap the Eloi and…hmm. Maybe not that different from Bin Laden[10]. Guess I should stay above ground.

It SHOULD come as no surprise that while many people enjoy the heat there are people who if they don’t enjoy the cold, at least don’t mind it. Yet everyone and I do mean EVERYone seems to think we’re nuts for wanting to come back here. Someone in Greenfield, Indiana asked us, upon being told of our plans, what “…turnip truck did you fall off…?” And I’m fairly certain just about any citizen of Greenfield, Indiana has fallen off more turnip trucks than I.

People like to ski, don’t they? Celebrities pay big bucks for vacation homes in Aspen. People LOVE New England. Is it THAT odd that we would enjoy the weather here?

And besides, the wife was right. Some things just aren’t right. Eighty degrees in February is one of them. Tumbleweeds on Christmas are another. Again, in the pre-baby apartment, I walked out on Christmas morning to get the paper and a tumbleweed blew by. I walked back in the apartment and said:

“It’s time to go.”

Chirstmas is trees, songs, fireplaces and the laughter of children.Tumbleweeds are for The Sons of the Pioneers, Marty Robbins and a cliché opening of a sixties TV western. They aren’t for Christmas.

We still opened presents. But our heart wasn’t in it.

Having a decent Christmas was one of the things we missed. Also a decent Thanksgiving. Easter was okay. When I was a kid, Easter was the family trip to some sunny clime[11]. Fourth of July was okay. But I’m a traditionalist when it comes to Christmas. The only place sadder than Los Angeles at Christmas is Florida. For some reason the inflatable snowmen and the ten-foot tall swirling snowglobes on the lawn look even more dumb there. Many years I hung Christmas lights on the front of the house while wearing shorts[12]. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

But then I started working steadily. What was supposed to be a temporary job as a production assistant at Warner Bros. Animation turned into a permanent job and as long as I was bringing home the checks clutched in my Xerox-toner stained hands, we made a family decision[13] to stick around. The gravy train got better and better, I kept getting promoted and before we knew it, we owned a house.

Well, it was a house only in the strict Webster’s dictionary way. Any place but Southern California, a three bedroom, one bath one-thousand and thirty-seven square foot house would be called a “cottage”. There are people with garages bigger than that.

It was a sweet little stucco ranch house with white shutters and awnings and it wouldn’t have looked terribly out of place in an episode of

But it was ours. We owned it.

[1] Which was, to the surprise of many, sound-equipped even when I was in college. And real sync-sound, too. Not the Vitaphone system that involved hand-syncing a record with film.

[2] who I’m sure wouldn’t recognize me, but he would piss on me if I were on fire ‘cause I’ve heard he’s a humanitarian and he was very nice the one time I met him

[3] Not to work.

[4] I was not able to find out if he was stunned by the fact that she is gorgeous or that she is STILL gorgeous given that she was born when FDR was in his second term. I would have asked him – but have you SEEN her?

[5] Good company to be in, eh?

[6] Which in the early stages of a showbusiness career is not really that far off homelessness.

[7] She insists that she only said “This sucks.” My memory states otherwise. And my memory more accurately reflects her feelings.

[8] Which would only alarm the neighbors in this fairly conservative area.

[9] A weather formation which can bring torrential rains to Southern California. Rains that the rest of the country would call “April”.

[10] To the Fatwah-inclined: It’s a joke. Okay?

[11] Clearwater. Then when we got more money, Bermuda and Jamaica. When we lost the money, a sunlamp and a potted palm in the basement.

[12] At least I have the legs for it.

[13] Really. It was mutual. Many think I am pussy whipped. Not true. I simply know which side my bread is peanut-buttered.

OUR FIRST HOME (AWWWWWWW)

2009-07-12T18:24:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

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.

[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.

THE DECISION - PARTE THE LASTE

2009-07-07T08:05:00.000-07:00

What the hell, right? She was in a crosswalk at a school. She backed into a crosswalk, saw people in it and then drove by close enough that putting my arms out, I hit her car. Let her take her lumps and maybe learn a lesson. And to use the word “Car” or “Van”. She wouldn’t let it go, she thinks she’s in her rights. Let the guys with the badge handle it.

So we sit down to wait. It’s midafternoon and it’s getting hotter, probably in the nineties. I buy the kids water. I’m hungry and I’d like to get home and do some work. I call the guy I’m working for to see if there’s anything pressing. I know there are some animation models waiting for me but being a freelance producer, I could work my own hours most of the time.

He’s aghast when I tell him the story and wants me to call him back and tell him what the police do.

I call Patricia and tell her what went on. She’s not aghast, just tired of the sum of the shitty parts of living there.

I see the Odyssey. It drives back and forth a couple of times. It drives off, then it drives back. She double-parks so she won’t have to get out of her car to talk to someone else in an equally ugly van.[1]Then she pulls into the teacher’s parking lot. She’s on the phone. I walk over and show her my call log and said that I had called the police. A school administrator comes out and tells he she’s in the teacher’s parking lot.

“I’m WAITING for the POLICE because he HIT MY CAR,” Russian Ruda says.

“She backed into the crosswalk while my daughter and I were in it,” I volunteer.

“Uh-uh! Oh, no!” the administrator says and walks away shaking her hear.

It takes the police about an hour to show up, which is pretty good for the LAPD. Two officers get out. I start to explain what’s happened; in a voice that’s so calm it surprises me. I’ve remained calm the whole time, which surprises me[2].

The officers separate and take us to get our stories. I relate mine in the peaceful voice even while part of me is asking myself “What the fuck? GO NUTS!”

I can hear the winner of the greater San Fernando Valley Safest Driver competition yelling and she takes the cop around to look at the car where I had dented it. I can hear her yell:

“And I had my BABY in the car.”

Apparently her baby being wrapped in American assembled steel is somehow more dramatic to her than my daughter, wrapped in a cotton “Hugs not drugs” t-shirt in the cross walk.

The cops meet and talk it over very quietly, their heads close together. It’s very warm now.

The cop who had spoken to me approached me and said: “Anyone hurt?”

I raised my hands to show him as I said:

“Nope.”

Then he walks back to his partner.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“I’m going to try to not take you to jail for vandalism.”

WHAT?

I mean seriously…

WHAT?!

So this is the short version: They didn’t SEE her drive into the crosswalk[3], but the can see the dents in the car. I’m not hurt. No one’s hurt except the Odyssey. So they can see what I did and I could be booked on a vandalism charge.

I wasn’t. They took insurance information and sent her on her way – after I pointed out that if she was such a good driver, she’d broken at least three traffic laws while I watched her – including being parked in a red zone yet again while talking to the officers.

“I HAD to speak to them SIR!” she said, totally ignoring the now wide-open parking around the school.

The policemen, to their credit, shooed her off telling her she’d done enough yelling for the day. They stayed and talked to me for a bit.

“So what,” I asked. “Do I tell the kids? My daughter saw that woman almost hit us and heard you say I could get taken to jail. What are they going to get out of this?”

“Well, what do you want me say,” One officer said. “They’re just children.”

And that summed it just about up as to what anyone thought about anything. “Just” children. ‘Cause how could they ever be important. Let’s just make it easy and if anyone asks any pesky question, find a way not to answer it.

I went home that night and told Patricia this story with Lauren chiming in to add details as she thought necessary. And when it was over, I said:

“That’s it. We’re going. We’re outta here.”

Yeah. Like it would be that easy.

I know what you want to say: There are assholes everywhere. There are people like this everywhere. No place is any different.

Well, to begin with, you’re wrong…

And to continue: If L.A. hasn’t cornered the market on people like this, it sure seemed to have a majority share. I’m willing to own that it was my own negative attitude and desire to move someplace else that contributed to my experience of L.A. But it wasn’t the whole ball game.

For instance, that night I discovered a hole in my favorite shorts[4]. I don’t thing my personal zeitgeist contributed to that. But it was a nice capper to the day.

But I was determined to get my family out of there.

For real this time.

The clock started ticking. Only fifteen months to go

[1] I drive a Mustang, which you have to admit is a lot better looking than a van.

[2] And probably everyone else.

[3] One wonders what happened to her witness “…who is an adult!”

[4] Couldn’t be patched, either.

THE DECISION Part II

2009-07-03T08:46:00.000-07:00

Understand: When I first moved to California, I was told that there was only one thing holy and that was the crosswalk under California law. You have to stop when there are people in the crosswalk. Even if there’s no light, if there are two parallel white lines on the pavement and they aren’t cocaine, you gotta stop. I’ve seen old ladies dragging shopping carts across Ventura Boulevard at 8:45 in the morning and cars, even cars carrying very important movie executives, stop to let her hobble across.

Admittedly, this rule had become a little less firm in the popular consciousness than it was when I was first there. Pedestrians once beset me when I tried to make a legal-in-New York right on red and the people in the cross walk attacked like villagers in a Frankenstein movie. Now cars creep into the cross walk, they wait until the pedestrian is out of their lane and gun it.

But a SCHOOL?

Crosswalks in a school SHOULD be sacrosanct. They’re not, but if you’re going to run your oversized vehicle into a crosswalk near a school you should at least do it in drive and not in reverse.

And don’t be heading for my daughter and me.

I started to yell.

It did nothing.

Well, she did stop, but that was only to look out the window at us and then put it into gear and drive forward. Toward us.

She came close. Very close. Close enough that I screamed, “STOP” and shot my arms out and HIT HER CAR. I’m not terribly tall and don’t have the reach of a boxer. We measured later and she came within two feet of me, my daughter right behind me.

I was shaking with anger and fear. At a school, a place where you can reasonably expect safety in a crosswalk, and where I had looked both ways to see that the NASCAR auditioners had stopped to let us cross, someone had come close to hitting us not once, but twice as we had the temerity to try to pick Connor up.

Lauren was pale behind me, partially because she knew I was likely to be really angry in situations like that and partially because she had just come close to getting nailed by a forty-five hundred pound vehicle describe by its manufacturer as having “aggressive styling”.

No kidding.

We sat down outside the school and tried to calm down while we waited for my son’s bus.

Lauren was dead quiet. She wasn’t even reaching for her cell phone, which means it was really serious.

I continued to watch the folderol and frivolity that surrounded a day’s release. Some administration people came out of the school office and tried to manage the traffic flow that now no longer resembled a motor sport, but instead metallic salmon rushing upstream to spawn.

One woman told a man he was parked in the school bus zone. The offending fellow, a small, tightly wound Middle Easterner fairly leapt toward her while maintaining a not-too-threatening distance and yelled:

“Where am I supposed to park to pick up my kid, then? Huh? Huh?”

“You’re in a school bus zone.”

“Where am I supposed to park?” He yelled again, leaning forward toward her like he was fighting a wind when he was, in fact, causing it. “I got a kid to get.”

I was going to add: “You could park a block away and walk to the school like I did,” but I think I’d topped off my confrontation cup for the day.[1] I was also thinking of mentioning that it’s “I have a kid to pick up,” but really, it seemed he had bigger problems.

The administrator shrugged and walked away.

The bell rang. Kids began to come out of the school, running into the street and dodging between cars to reach those double and triple-parked. Parents would wave them over the the driver’s side of the car to get them in, which made me flinch even if they were parked three deep and the driver’s side was actually the sidewalk on the other side of the street. The administrators, amid a chorus of vindictive vocalizations had given up trying to control the situation and seemed to be concerning themselves with making sure the kids didn’t get killed.

The most amazing thing, looking back, is that everyone just seemed to ACCEPT it. The administration attempts at order were half-hearted, but really, what are they supposed to do short of calling the cops[2]? Any voice raised in protest was a lone one and likely to be met with derision from the fellow parents. In the big picture, they should channel some of that driving aggression into, say, career or home repair. Perhaps a hobby. Like mass-murder. Something more socially acceptable than playing Simpson’s Road Rage in three-d. Leave that stuff for the Playstation.

Connor’s bus came and the driver had to let the kids off between parked cars. Mrs. W, his bus driver, was one of the best, most conscientious people I met out there. She got off the bus with a big STOP sign and stood between the cars so the kids could get off with at least the illusion of safety. Luckily there was no one in the cars right around her. She was a pro. She must have done this before.

I gathered the boy with a hug and headed toward our car, hoping we could get across the street without incident.

And that’s when I saw the Odyssey and a fat woman standing outside of it taking my picture with a cell phone camera.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“You damaged my vehicle[3],” she said in a heavy maybe-Russian accent.

“You damn near hit me in the crosswalk.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Yeah. You did. You almost hit me and my daughter in the crosswalk.”

“No I didn’t and I have a witness. And she’s an adult!”

I started to take the kids and walk away again, trying to keep from blowing my top.

“What is your name, please?” She called after me.

“Why do you want to know?”

I knew why she wanted to know, but I wasn’t going to make anything easy for her.

Also, I was fairly sure she was full of shit.

“You damaged my vehicle.” She said.

“You were in a crosswalk. At a school. That’s illegal and I was trying to get you to NOT HIT ME!”

She looked at me with total derision. Then she turned to my son.

“Whose class are you in?”

That about drove me over the top. She already tried to hit my daughter, now she’s going to pump my son for info?[4]

“He doesn’t go to school here,” I said and I started to take the kids again.

“Who’s going to pay for my vehicle?” and then she started to ask people as they went by. “Do you know him? Do you know who he is?”

That was it. I stopped and with a terrible calm[5]said:

“You want the police? Fine.”

And I called the police.

[1] Or so I thought.

[2] Not a bad idea, but as we’ll see…

[3] “Vehicle”? Seriously?

[4] I am still TOTALLY pissed off as I write this.

[5] “Terrible” because I really wanted to kill her.