It's Not Tundra

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, unsh...

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...

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 co...

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.” ...

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 p...

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 t...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 dif...