At that time, on every weekend morning, on the morning of every day I managed to have off, I would be walking in the cold lonely dark to the mighty Tercel, that crazy blessed contraption of a vehicle.
It was funny because we were leasing an apartment in this complex where all the streets and buildings looked the same and parking was scarce and I often had to park a ways away from our place and sometimes it took me a while to find the bloody hell car. In some sense it felt like being in an episode of The Twilight Zone. Wait. I know I have a car, but do I actually have a car? And all this landscaped area looks like it’s from the 1950s and it’s never used. Seems like a staged set. People don’t walk on the grass. The trees are trimmed to have abnormal circular foliage. The buildings have no graffiti and are all the same maddening cream color. Do all of us who live here have the same name and wear the same clothes? And where is my bloody hell car? And did I park it, or did my other park it? Some alien entity who calls himself me …
We sublet a place from a woman we called the Buddhist B*tch. She, she declared, was an artist. She had a bunch of canvasses slathered with paint to prove it. Ok, maybe I should provide more detail. Let’s go for the DIY approach. Go to the hardware store and get some cans of paint, like white, red, brown, blue, yellow, green, purple, and get big brushes like the ones you use to paint a house. Now, take a canvas about four feet square. That’s it. Now mix up some red with the brown and purple and slather a big heart on the canvas. That’s right, a big heart. Cover nearly all the space and just leave a little space on the borders. Now dip brush in yellow and green and splatter it on top. Done. Occupation—check. Now get a bunch of pictures of you standing with monks in robes and press your palms together with elbows out parallel and fingers towards the firmament and put a sublime smile of smug enlightenment on your face. Transcendent piety—check. Voila! Buddhist! Artist! B*tch!
She had a rent controlled unit intended to limit financial pressure on those in need. She turned this bit of charitable policy into a tidy profit making enterprise. Her gig was subletting her rented rent-controlled unit for months on end while living rent free with a family member and stocking away thousands in cash. A clever hedge with strong margins. The problem was the place was full of mold of which she performed a cursory cleaning right before a new two-legged ATM sublet her digs. Another part of the problem, the most inexcusable, was that the pious saintly selfless soul played dumb and denied it. Press those palms together now! Mold? What’s that? What have you done? Never saw mold before. I think you guys brought that mold with you.
In any case, our little peanut was coughing and coughing and coughing. She would stand there in her crib, hands on the rail, looking up at me, tears running down her little cheeks, crying and crying and coughing and coughing saying, “No thank you! No thank you!” She didn’t quite know what it meant but it was one of the few things she knew how to say at that time. We thought she had pneumonia and took her to the doctor who prescribed amoxicillin. Well BB had some kind of conflict with family (probably tired of her mooching Buddhist ass) and was giving us the boot, months before the agreed upon departure date. We had to scramble. We were both working. What were we to do? Well, of course that was not BB’s problem. Funny coincidence though, one of those ugly “paintings” was worth, with a substantial discount extended, she affirmed, $2000, exactly the amount of our security deposit. We, she suggested, could just walk off with that sublime iteration of creativity nirvana and leave her with our cash. No. We did not think so, but thank you for that generous offer oh Saintly Selfless Nonmaterialistic One.
We managed to legitimately rent another unit (for less than the amount charged by BB) and immediately, when we moved in to the new spot, brighter, no mold or bad karma, the peanut was all smiles and prancing about in her blue onesie with the zip up and the little snap under the chin happy as pie. No coughing. Teletubbies were big then. She loved that damned show. We had no furniture but had a little TV and a beanbag chair on the floor in a corner with her books and stuffies. She used to march around shuttling her forearms doing the Teletubby walk. Loved that.
So, I would get in that car. Ok. I can’t say it. All right. Here goes. It was always loaded with wood, building materials, wire, tar paper, bags of concrete, all that was necessary for whatever was the projet du jour. Ok, let’s just get it out there. The car only had one seat, the driver’s seat, because someone (won’t mention who) had removed all the other seats so he could fit in all the building materials. Oh praise be to you wherever you mightst now be oh Mighty Tercel. So there in the dark and cold in the am, I would start the car—and that crazy car always started and when I turned on the radio, at that time, it was always that Cold Play song that goes, “And it was all yellow …” It was so God damned morose and I’d be sucking it up, singing along. I think the worst part of any project, especially in those days, was starting. I arrive and everything is empty, cold and hopeless. I feel the cold damp. I see the trench I am digging for the bathroom drain lines but I also see the layers and layers and layers of all the other projects I have to complete in the next six months to make the place livable before our money runs out.
I remember one day I had to pop over to the local hardware store rather than do the half hour drive to the Home Bleepo to get something quick, a drill bit or a saw blade. I just recall driving down the street past the cafes and restaurants and it was as if I were floating past a Broadway set with all these little tables on the sidewalks and mini dogs dressed in mini dog clothes and arch hip types in black and gray and black and gray and black and gray keen on their laptops other more colorful types quaffing wine or clustered at tables with cups off coffee, throwing back their heads with great guffaws. My funky self in the habitual work getup covered with stains of paint, dried silicone, sheet rock mud, remnants of expanding foam, torch burns, rips, solder burns and flux … was just floating by, mouth open, kinda dumbfounded, like some sort of troglodyte who had crawled up from the earth. What the f*ck was this?
The point is, at that time, with two jobs, full time day and part time nights and working like a maniac every spare moment I had to get that shell of a house move-in ready, I was always hearing that these were the best years of my life. That was the buzz. These are the best years of your life. Outside of the joy brought by my kid and my wife, I didn’t quite get it. I was just working my ass off.
In reality though, what makes it the best, I guess, in retrospect, is the energy and the vision, the relative absence of heath fears, the habitual eating and drinking whatever I wanted, working from dawn to midnight nonstop for an entire week during vacation with alacrity and focus, living with a feeling of promise. So, I realize now that was it. I guess, younger people, though hard to grasp when you are busting your ass, it is true.
One thing. Oh thirty and forty and fifty somethings, you must never raise your eyes to some glorious imagined horizon. You must never be deceived by snowy haired couples riding bikes in neat Sears and Roebuck attire, smiling with white teeth. Believe me. They are all on some kind of pills. They live in terror. Some or several parts of them barely work anymore and if they are lucky, the teeth were installed, with stabbing cost, through multiple sessions of needles and drilling, socket wrenches and head clouts, screwing of nuts and bolts into bone; the process makes Laurence Olivier’s work in Marathon Man seem like playground shenanigans—you don’t want to know about it. In fact don’t think of it. Ever. Yes. Make a plan, but live now. But again, there’s the rub. Some are loaded. Praise be. That’s wonderful for them. For the vast majority though, they are locked into the economic system. They can’t just drop everything and say screw this I’m out. They have to power on or make a sustainable plan. It has its frustration, but escape plans can be systematically laid while the best years of life must be lived and lived through.
S/V koukla 