Runs. Drives. Stalls [2007]

I hate being shrieked at in the morning, so I slapped at the pause button and snuggled deep down under the covers. But I'd promised, so I crawled back out four minutes later and turned off the alarm before it could yell at me again. There wasn't much to my morning routine. Fuck sliced bread--the greatest invention was the programmable coffee machine. Seven in the morning in winter might as well be midnight, but with a pot of coffee sitting and waiting and fairly screaming drink me! such times were so much easier. All I had to do was shed myself of the covers and march my way into the kitchen. Such a simple task, one might think. I shocked myself by just doing it.

I had the morning all mapped out. There wasn't much to it. Mostly it involved three cups of coffee and three cigarettes while sort of flipping through the newspaper--that ate a lot of clock. Piss and shit and get dressed. I thought it would be smart to toss in a couple minutes to toast an english muffin.

By getting up so fast I was at my fucking leisure. I'd calculated in at least 15 minutes wasted just leaving the bed behind. I had my clothes all laid out. We were in a cold snap that liked hanging out in our town. I'd judged there was no way the weather sources could be wrong about the morning dawning in the lower twenties. I'd found the long john bottoms I'd sworn to throw out last season because the elastic at the waist was so shot--you just pull the waistband up outside your pants and your belt helps cinch them too. The leather boots I rarely wore because they made me lumber around like Frankenstein's monster. Two pairs of wool socks. Directly by my side of the bed was a construct of three sweatshirts, already assembled.

There was so much time to kill I wound up reading through the Business and Sports sections and on into the Classifieds. Surely I could find a better job than this. Or at least a consoling puppy. I kept looking around at all the clocks. Forever it was never brush teeth, pee and go time.

Then it was, and I was still trying to get the goddamn dog back inside.

I was walking around the house like a polar explorer, wearing an old coat of Mike's that he and mostly Kathy had gifted me with. The coat poofed me out, and with a sweatshirt hood poking up and over my head--not to mention the goddamn boots!--I felt like a fucking lunar explorer. The Lunatic Explorer, stomping about and swearing having misplaced his housekeys.

Finally I was out the house and two doors down.

I knocked lightly. That was all it took. The four dogs began hollering, converging from their various lairs throughout the house. We joked and called it their dogbell. Following I heard heavy footsteps, and then Mike opened the door.

"What's up?" he exclaimed.

"You're looking at it."

"Huh?"

"I'm up! Before the sun. Isn't that miracle enough?"

"Exactly," Mike replied. "You, me, wasn't your bed feeling really extra nice right after the alarm went off?"

"What are you bitching about? I was the one who voted for noon."

Mike laughed, then waved, "C'mon in."

I waded in through the dogs and eventually reached the kitchen. Once at that open area, we sprinted for the safety of the table and chairs.

"Coffee?" he moved to the counter for a refill.

"No thanks--I tanked up already. Don't want to go through the roof quite yet."

We just sat there at the kitchen table. Bothered by the dogs until Mike shooed them all out the back door. There was no section of the paper I hadn't already glommed. Maybe my snoring woke him--Mike went into the other rooms, then returned with a two-inch roach. "This is the shit," he assured me.

He wasn't lying. Somewhere between two and four puffs apiece we agreed to give it up. What remained was still one big motherfucking roach. We lingered so long Kathy was getting up for her stupid fucking job.

"What are you all waiting on?" she asked, rubbing her eyes and spilling her coffee. "As if I didn't have a nose. Or as if I didn't used to."

"Waiting on PD, babe," Mike answered right off. "Told him to be here at eight," he shook his head, "and to bring one of his Portland buddies. I can't wait around much longer, 'cause I told George I'd pick him up at half-past. And sorry, he's worth more than PD & Company combined any time."

"Did you bother to explain to them the concept of Eastern Standard Time?"

Mike shrugged. "It's a different time zone over there. What can I say?"

"Portland Standard Time," I said, "where noon starts about three in the afternoon."

Kathy just managed to not snort coffee out her nose. "What is PD short for anyway?"

"Police Department," Mike nodded knowingly.

"Portland Dude," I said, and that was instantly it.

"Portland Dude," Kathy echoed.

"Portland Dude," Mike cracked up. "Exactly!"

Then the dogs were abark again and a shadow loomed in the frosted glass of the front door. A shadow? Yea! the sun had arrived to warm things up. Maybe.

Mike was swaggering waist-deep in dog. "PD! What's up? C'mon in." My head jerked from the uncontrolled jolt of recognition--it was like he was reading from his answer-the-door script.

I'd worked with PD before, so we didn't have to do nothing but nod. That's about all we did anyway. He was a quiet guy, and when he did talk, his words were hard to decipher. He rarely spoke above a mumble. It wasn't a traditional mumble, though. He was just soft-spoken, and chewed his words thoroughly before they left his mouth. He spoke like someone who doesn't want to part their lips too much when they talk because they have fucked-up teeth. Except PD didn't have fucked-up teeth. He was too young to have fucked-up teeth. Except he did have fucked-up teeth. He'd missed most of one job because he'd been nursing a rotting tooth with whiskey. I knew a 20-year-old guy who'd had a charity root canal. But that was just a fucking molar. The front side of his smile knew no need of the drapery of drawn down lips. The fucker just talked that way.

So when he introduced his friend, Mike did a double take. He had been doing the double-toke earlier. "PD, did you just introduce me to your friend PD?" His face screwed up and he pointed at me, "Portland Dude, exactly!" Then he burst into one of those laughs so huge and fast it created a vacuum, sucking away all sound but a little hiss like a deflating tire.

"Okay, okay," Mike smacked the tabletop, "So you're PD #1, and he's PD #2, and your brother Aaron is actually PD #3 . . . "

"Actually probably more likely," I interjected, "PD number thirty-two thousand six-hundred forty-three."

PD looked over at me and gave a barely perceptible nod. He understood I was giving Mike a dig in his defense, even if Mike didn't. I was expecting Mike to riff off the number, but PD spoke up first.

"Said his name's Petey, like Pete." I swear, the fucker jutted out his chin, then said, "You know, like Mikey."

Talk about a root canal. I'd never known anyone, not even Kathy, to call him in the diminutive, but the moment it was spoken he froze. In pain.

I'm a good friend but I was glad when the moment passed where he might've shared with us the trauma of being Mikey. Instead he said, "So what you got? Let's roll one up."

That seemed incredibly presumptuous. Moreso as he paused rolling one up from PD's bag to give him a sniff of the superbud he was holding back. Then I remembered Mike saying something a week back about not having bought a sack in awhile; he'd been paying PD extra for bringing in the work weed. And I was well glad that he about done rolling it up when Petey thought to pull out the big fat blunt they'd already done up.

Mike was certainly smart enough to finish up and light the joint. Kathy kept wandering into the kitchen, just rolling her eyes each time. If we'd started in on the blunt, well, christ, a cigar of that shit that early in the morning, we'd've wound up wondering what house we were sitting in. Instead we eventually remembered we had cars and trucks outside, that we were supposed to go outside and get in them and go do something.

We got in the truck and they got in PD's latest car. It was still running, though it was sitting a lot lower to the ground than Mike remembered. "Jesus Christ, what is it with PD and his cars? Do you know?"

I most certainly didn't know, except what Mike had already told me before. The guy was at the absolute bottom of the car chain. He was always having car troubles because he kept buying totally beaten beaters for under a grand that only had two or three months of life left in them. So then he'd have to buy another one. The money he spent a year on cars, he could've bought one car that would've lasted several years. He could've gotten a little bit ahead. That's what really stuck in Mike's craw.

So I faked PD's voice as best I could. "See Mike, like you and your scratch-offs, I keep hoping I'll hit a win. Get me a car that lasts a whole year, know, so when it dies I've saved up enough to get a good car, know?"

Mike looked at me. "But PD, if you get a nice car, you'll just get drunk and trash it."

I jutted my chin up defiantly. "But that beside the point, man."

"The point is," Mike laughed, "his uncle is pissed off at him. He keeps all the dead cars, parked in his uncle's yard."

"What? You can call someone and they'll come take them away and give you fifty bucks."

Mike turned to me. "Hello? We're talking PD here; he knows he can make at least ten times that if he strips the metal himself. But to do that, you have to actually do that, and he's come nowhere near to doing that."

"Gee, only sounds like the worst used-car lot in the entire fucking world."

"Exactly."

"Except for maybe some of those so broke countries so broke if you had some money you'd buy a broken car and have it hauled home and set out in your yard as a status symbol."

"Hello!" Mike about brayed, "we live in Kentucky--the state where you can't drive a mile without seeing an old beater up on blocks."

"If broken cars were bullion," I declared, "we'd be the wealthiest state in the nation. We'd change our state motto to Kentucky--The Broke Car Capital of the Fucking Universe."

There was a lapse after the laughs, and we were silent in the cab. Mike couldn't bear that. "Still, damn good engine in those old Mercurys--those V8s rock."

I'd had one of those. I'd had an $800 car that lasted me several years. It was a full-sized '78 Lincoln Continental, one of the biggest beasts Detroit ever built. After it died, I got fifty bucks from the guys who towed it away, and then later got chided by my mechanic because he could've gotten good money for that engine.

I knew that engine, and I knew its needs. I said, "Great to have that power, but if you're a guy who can't even afford your cigarettes, maybe you should buy a car that gets a little more than seven miles a gallon--highway!"

"I know, I know," then he peered between the mirrors. "Are those guys still following us? God, don't tell me they're lost already."

I couldn't see them, but it was hard to see anything as we took a long curve on rumpled pavement. "They'll be catching up, I think. They had to pull over for a little bit to get that big fucking blunt on fire. If they don't catch up, they'll put in their eight hours, driving around the city super stoned and trying to find their way back to Portland."

Mike just exploded. "Duh! When are we going to make a movie about all this? Huh?"

"Never. Because why haven't we already? Because we don't have bales of marijuana at our disposal." Mike was about to say something when I saw something in my side mirror. I scooted around quickly. "The boys are two cars back--we haven't lost them. I mean, it looks like their car, but I couldn't see the faces on account of all the smoke."

"It's them then, and they're not sharing. Remind me to dock 'em."

The turn arrow went green. I tapped Mike's forearm and pointed. He crunched the gas, and the truck roared and lurched. I thought we were going to kill everyone within a 500 feet radius, but instead that big fucking truck just churned through the curve and into its proper lane. That truck was like a serial killer with an etiquette fetish.

"Where exactly does George live?" I roared above the roar.

"Out behind the airport. Where the airport's been eating those neighborhoods."

I knew all about that. It'd been going on for years. Every now and again the newspaper would run a story reminding everyone about it. The buy-out was vastly underfunded, which was why it remained a newspaper story for so many years. The afflicted neighborhoods decayed. I'd just seen it in newsprint photographs.

Then we turned off Poplar into this area I'd never traveled before. It was just these cheap crappy houses, until we missed the dotted line and there were entire blocks looking like parks. Aside from the odd house still standing and looking shabby, wearing plywood panes for windows.

Block after block of this delineation. With the huge UPS terminal looming on the horizon through the wintry limbs of the remaining trees. A small church sprung up, tattered and denuded. It looked like some weird Hollywood backlot. Entire neighborhoods jacked up and removed one house at a time. Mike had clued me in several years ago that there was a market in that. You could buy the houses real cheap from the airport authority, with the provision that you jack them up and put 'em on a truck and get them the fuck out of there. All you needed was a lot, in some part of town crappy enough the houses would blend in.

It's not that the houses in the extant areas were run-down or anything. They were just those small cheap ranch houses that overran the city's peripheral fields in the fifties and sixties. Like mushrooms in a cow pasture after a hard summer rain. They weren't that great to look at from the start, and time hadn't been kind on their cheapo construction. Like a plain-faced stripper hit fifty.

Mike was going on about yea, how George had been telling him about how he'd been a kid running around these neighborhoods. He still lived there, but most of it didn't. I was thinking George is early/mid twenties, so what sort of bucolic bullshit was he talking about? The airport was still pretty fucking big back then. And as we pulled up to his house I noted that it was just a few streets from the Watterson. It was much closer to the freeway than the airport. And he was barely out of diapers when that quaint 4-lane ring road from the '50s got juiced up into the 8-lane behemoth it is today. Even with the windows up we could hear it. His joyous boyhood was a sack of shit. I didn't know. I reckoned roaring jets going up and down might've been a welcome interlude, a respite to the constant linear rumbling of cars and trucks across ever-worn asphalt. Did they wear hearing protection when they played outside?

Mike didn't even need to honk the horn before George came bounding out of the house. That was good, 'cause the horn didn't work. I had to shift to the middle of the cab's bench, but that was fair: George's legs were longer than mine.

The Portland boys had managed to stay on our tail. Mike rolled down his window. "Just keep following us." Then he rolled it back up.

George shook his head. "Man, that Mercury's riding a lot lower than the last time I saw it."

"Exactly," Mike rolled his eyes. He switched gears in synch with the truck. "So George, whatcha got?"

George pulled out a bag. "Oh, decent enough, but nothing special. Got it from a friend."

"So roll one up!"

I groaned to myself.

The concern became giving him something sturdy enough to break the shit up and roll one. There was nothing. Except how the phone book company gives you that useless half-scale edition as well, like you're supposed to carry it in your car or something. Or your truck, and thank god for that. We were in business.

Then the fucker got lit and I really didn't need any more, but I got sick of being the medium, the man-in-the-middle, the facilitator passing it back and forth. So I succumbed. I gave up. I took my tokes like a man. It was twenty-something-fucking degrees outside and all the windows were up, so I figured I was like The Boy In The Plastic Buzzbag anyway. Doomed, the way I'd been doomed from the moment I got out of bed. It was a fatty, and I managed to get it extinguished about halfway through.

Then I just sat there in the middle of the truck and watched the landscape unravel.

The way our city is laid out, you drive west and then you go under a railroad trestle and things instantly look much worse. If you keep going you cross another rail line, and things become downright nasty. We kept going.

Our path took us through the Park Du Valle area that I only knew from the newspaper accounts. Some years back the city had gotten a huge federal grant and torn down a set of the most decrepit drug-riddled public housing projects in town and put up this new mixed-use mixed-income village-style development. It was very nice, even better than the pictures! A pity though they hadn't instituted a ten-block scorched earth policy perimeter.

Two turns and two minutes later Mike, the pilot, was announcing, "On this job, we come in through the alley. We don't want a truck full of tools parked out front. That's called advertising."

And then true to word, Mike yanked the truck down an alley. After some jerking around we wound way up a long backyard parked. We clambered out and stood around. PD and Petey joined us. Man it was fucking cold. I was ready for work as a reason to move around and work up some heat.

Mike had the key to the front door so he went around in and let the rest of us in through the back. There was a wobbly stoop of rotting wood faked up over the original of concrete gone crumbled--you could see it through the slats. Over the threshold I went. There was a small useless mudroom, the cellar access enclosed. My first step found floor so soggy the joists had to be shot. Someone flipped a light switch. A florescent fixture stuttered on. Trapped in the plexiglas cover were the corpses of several hundred flies. I felt like I'd stepped into a fucking creepy movie. The adjacent kitchen wasn't much better. We hoisted in sections of new cabinets that Mike had scammed from our own alley, jumping ahead of the junk dealers that patrolled our neighborhood. They hadn't even been rained on yet.

Mike assigned the Portland Boys the task of cutting down a couple weed trees growing out of the foundation that'd been allowed to turn from weeds into trees. One of the fuckers was four inches at the base. There was also a real tree whose branches needed to be cut back from the roof, but he'd decided when we were packing up that we didn't need to tote a ladder. He was lamenting that fact when he looked at the biggest weed tree. It grew right up the side of the house. The plant was still way thick where it rose up to kiss the gutterline.

He looked at PD. "You think you could climb up that and get on the roof." Besides being illegal, from an OSHA point of view, and kind of wrong, I didn't think it was possible. And I was thinking back to my days when I was a 20-year-old monkey.

PD looked over then back, nodding, "Sure."

With the boys outside scampering around and using saws, Mike and George settled into the nasty kitchen and started figuring how stuff should proceed. I got bored and decided to take a quick tour of the place.

Sometimes first impressions are absolutely correct: I'd never been in a nastier house. And I've lived in some pretty nasty houses. I once had a roommate who got it into his head that he'd make a fortune--or at least his share of the rent--by gathering up all the aluminum cans that came by our house. Let me tell you, he did indeed gather up a fortune. But he never quite figured out how to get his trove to market, hence bankward ho! So instead they stayed in the kitchen, crushed but unrinsed. The kitchen was filled with a vast bunker constructed of huge black plastic garbage bags stuffed and spilling the stuff. This was after the cardboard refrigerator box had filled and then stayed. It was just like having another refrigerator, except if you opened it at all the unconstructed aluminum parts would clatter out onto the floor. The house got bulldozed before he cashed in his chips.

It wasn't a bad little house, but it'd been chopped up for no reason. It looked like it'd been built room by room, whenever the materials could be stolen from a nearby building site. And it'd suffered decades of neglect, which'd been patched up with plywood.

What I saw, room to room, simply ran up the tally. You just saw rooms of tenants who might as well quit splashing and just drown. The place was so beat-up. By the time I got to the front door, Mike'd caught up. He unlocked it and we stepped out onto the front porch and he started doing the blah-blah-blah of what needed to be done.

Then he refocused and turned back to the kitchen to figure out again what needed to be done. He had his list in there. I followed and I was barely into the front room when he turned, strode back, shut the door, and did up the bolts. "If no one's up here working," he informed me, "keep the door locked."

It was walking thence back through the rooms that something I'd glanced at before now struck me swift. All the walls were of this texturizing you normally associate with ceilings. Or exterior stucco. It was hiding fucked-up plaster. I'd noted that there were large letters on some walls. Now I saw that on every wall in every room someone had taken a pink stick of sidewalk chalk and stabbed deep into the wall, in 3-foot letters . . . every wall declaimed in pink SLUM LORD. The sole variation was a declaration on a door:

though in case you didn't get the point, there was another SLUM LORD clarification underneath.

Apparently the last tenant hadn't been very happy.

The walls just telegraphed a violent energy. The rooms may have been vacant for several years, but they still crackled. I started getting chilly ripples up my spine. It was like some horrible murders had happened in the house. Or the place had some spooky supernatural history, like some freaky idea invented in Hollywood. The statements seemed so vehement. I kept reminding myself that I was reading relics of a tenant dissatisfied with services rendered for rental monies paid. That I wouldn't hear a noise and turn and see some bloody corpses suddenly lumbering out of closets and lurching my way. That, in fact, I'd once been forced out of a piece-of-crap apartment and'd left the walls grossly defaced with the exact same phrase. Except I'd spelled it as one word--SLUMLORD--and I'd used black oil paint.

I finally got back into the kitchen, where I stood around ready to help as Mike and George shifted the scavenged cabinets around like puzzle pieces. It was a fair-sized kitchen but there was just the eight-footer with the sink, and the matching wall unit above. The plan was to keep them, just replace the fronts. I idly pulled out a couple drawers. Their insides looked so disgusting I couldn't imagine putting anything in them I'd ever want to touch again. They weren't broken, though, so they were keepers.

I lit a cigarette as I waited for someone to say hold this! and wound up leaning an elbow on the formica counter. Nearly immediately I looked down and decided I didn't want any part of me touching that formica. Passing through I'd seen that the far end of the counter where I now stood had seemed blackish with some dirty stains. I could see clearly now that there'd been two items left on the counter that'd decayed and left lumpy stained atolls of black nastiness. By their rounded nature I had visions of two steaks left out on the counter to rot. It had to be something like that because, well, the flies in the light fixture mystery was solved. The atolls of rot were themselves surrounded by cliffs of the relative mountains of dead maggots, the wee ones that never got a chance to fly.

I moved away entirely when the idea of steaks suddenly vaporized and I visualized instead the last tenants taking two big shits on the counter. I'd never done the dump trick myself, but in such circumstances I'd also never had a couple spare steaks sitting around.

Mike decided he wanted to think some more about how to arrange the cabinets. He wanted to check out the upstairs stuff he'd been contracted to do. The three of us went up. It was a story-and-a-half affair like I lived in. Steep and narrow staircases were well in my vocabulary. But this fucker started out barely two-feet wide, and halfway up the wall bulged and you had to sort of shift over, and by the top the treads were maybe 14 inches wide. At least no joists had been sacrificed in the opening.

The upstairs itself was a cramped little hell. The area had been drywalled into three tiny bedrooms. The roof was pitching up from all sides. But the rafters had all been tied together with cross pieces, so at no point was the ceiling higher than six feet. Other than ducking at the doorways I got over my fear of bumping my head, walking erect and almost enjoying the odd sensation of having my hair scrape across the drywall. The rooms themselves I couldn't imagine as anything other than a hole you'd enter stooped, bent over and broken, to lie down on a bare filthy mattress to just call it a day, to slit your wrists and just call it a life. To fire up a crack pipe and call it your wife.

Thank god the culmination was to squeeze out the little window up front and stand on the porch roof. A major point of the job was to make the house secure, so we laughed discovering that the latch on the window was so broken and painted over that what actually held the window closed was the swollen frame. We stood out on the porch roof. George sort of drawled, "Guess we should tell them they could've just come out the window to trim back that tree."

There was a pause, then we three laughed. That work was already done. The Portland boys were cutting down the weed tree they'd used as a ladder.

Up on the porch roof you got a grandstand of the sordid view. Busted up houses and alleys of death. But shit, above the ruins you could see some pretty excellent trees. Mike pulled out his cigarettes. We all did. George and I lit up too fast. Mike stomped and snorted, "Smoke this first!" He fished out a long roach from under the cellophane. He had a cigarette going before the nub came back to him. We passed it around as we all smoked. When it was done I still had a cigarette that was taking forever to smoke. Then suddenly it was totally done, so I lit another. Those guys were inspecting the gutters. I stood around looking at chimneys so eroded they looked like they should be natural monuments in deserts way out west.

I kept glancing down at the street. I was monitoring the couple porches across the street where all these black guys were just sort of hanging out. They were guys of all ages. Just hanging out. Granted, it was Friday, but still, it was barely past noon. Even my lazy ass was still on the job. Though then again I suppose they were all still on the job, lucky to be working out of their houses. I was just glad that they didn't seem to care that a bunch of honkies were working on the house opposite. Standing up there on that breezy roof, it seemed a safe bet that most whites in that neighborhood came in medallioned cars; and they carried, bearing the big guns.

I didn't care about the dealing of drugs. I just didn't want to get capped by a stray bullet. What a stupid way to die. It'd be like getting crushed by an eager city bus done hopped the curb. Or slipping in your bathtub. Or slipping on someone else's feces.

Like that! we tromped back downstairs.

Mike got me started out on the front porch before he and George got back into the cabinets. The outer trim on the door had to be replaced. Somebody had kept a small dog on the porch, and the wood had been chewed and scratched to ruination. It was a replacement door, with full casing, so I had to use a hammer and sturdy screwdriver to pry it all off without fucking up the underlying wood. It was slow work. All the prefab was done with staples, but someone had secured it all every so often with some monster nails. Eventually I went upstairs to get the small pry bar off PD and Petey--they were taking the gutters off the porch. Or, PD was; Petey was just standing around watching. It was nice to know there was someone even more useless than me on the job. I crawled out the window. PD was using a hammer and crowbar; the little pry bar was lying on the roof like a piece of scrap. They looked over at me. I nodded back to the window. "You all climb out that or climb up the tree to get up here?"

Petey snorted.

PD pursed his lips, then grinned, jutting that chin. "Mike told us to get up here and do this, I said, 'But I already cut down the ladder.'"

Petey snorted again.

I pointed down, "Can I borrow that little pry bar; don't look like it's much use up here."

"Sure," PD said. Petey went to work, bending down and picking it up and handing it to me. The effort earned him about five bucks, I reckoned.

Back out front I started going to town when George stepped out to help. We each went up a side, the crappy joined wood splitting off every foot or two. But we got the corners off intact, per Mike's instructions. He wanted a pattern to cut the new trim. There was no point in cutting a 45º angle for a house that'd settled out-of-plumb fifty years before. Mike made his measurements, but before he went to make the cuts he apprised the rest of the door. One of the underlying pieces of trim was also too dog damaged for wood filler. "Fuck it," he declared, "I'm not replacing that." He looked at us, "Pry it off and flip it."

I stood right inside while they put on the new trim. "Damn," I announced, "the whole wall in here is moving." They were trying to reposition the door so it would swing freely, but the whole damn door casing was shaky in the opening. Finally Mike got out some 4" screws to sink the fucker into place. I took a few steps back and finally saw what I was seeing.

"Jesus fucking christ!"

"What?" Mike asked.

"There used to be windows around the door."

"What?!"

"They just ran the vinyl siding long, and faked the walls out in here."

"No way."

"Look."

Rimming the door wasn't plaster, it wasn't even fucking plywood; it was eighth-inch pressboard. Slapped white with paint. It hadn't even gotten the texturizing treatment to match the walls.

Mike stood shaking his head in wonderment. "Do you think they even bothered to stuff some insulation into the cavities?" I asked.

Mike's eyes went round. "No!" he declared, "because that would've cost an extra dollar or two."

There was more to do outside, but I decided to linger inside first. My hands were freezing. Signs were up all around warning that the plumbing had been winterized, but thankfully the furnace worked. The water had been shut off, lines drained, traps and toilet filled with anti-freeze. If you had to take a leak, you had to find a bare bush out back and a discreet angle. If you, say, accidentally landed your hand in a pile of dead maggots, tough. Two birds, one stone, a hand and a bush--you could always pee on your hands, but otherwise a washing up would have to wait for lunch.

I stood over the grate in the entry room, trying to thaw out. The furnace was running non-stop, but the house wasn't retaining much heat. Even as the morning waned towards the noon hour, the day remained about ten degrees below freezing. I doubted there was a lick of insulation in the walls; there was certainly nothing between the vinyl and original siding--that opportunity had been left as a bread sandwich. There were broken window panes as well. Mostly though, it was our activity. The front and back door were constantly being opened and closed and then left opened. Most egregious was the window in the kitchen thrown wide open for the extension cord. Mike was making his cuts in the livingroom, though. The orange line was for the sawzal the boys had used on the trees. But they were done with that.

I left my perch for warmer climes. I went directly into the kitchen. I knew better than to undo the outside line, but I did close the window down on the extension. After that I decided to take a quick tour of the rest of the downstairs. I found a small bedroom off to the side, down a tiny hall. I took a few steps in the room, but half of them involved getting the hell back out. There was a smell in there, worse than all the other awful smells. The room, it oozed squalor like a contagion.

Off that same hall I discovered the bathroom. I knew at the threshold I didn't want to walk in there. I didn't want to see what I couldn't already. It was like the perfect bathroom for suicides gone wrong. It seemed a guarantee that you could hang yourself in that bathroom and expect whatever fixture you tied the rope around would break and you would die instead from the fall, bashing your head on the toilet. Or slit your wrists and get saved, wind up in the hospital with your wrists in stitches and then die horribly from a massive staph infection, the rarer home-induced variety. A bathtub postered as a polluted beach: do not enter water with open wounds.

Opposite the bathroom was a closet. I wasn't going to touch a fucking closet.

Then there was the mystery door. Closed, and captioned in chalk--the dead beat land lord door--it had to lead to the rest of the front of the house. I didn't want to guess why that was the only interior door in all the house that wasn't waving wide open. What waited inside? It had to be the most horrible thing of all. But what? But, exactly, just what? My imagination failed me. Unlassoed, my curiosity roamed free. I stepped forward, grabbed the knob, slowly opened the door, then stepped into the room.

I was stunned, so stunned I continued moving until I was in the very middle of the room. What I found was this: I was standing in the middle of a really beautiful room, and it was like a sauna in there. It was a spacious room, with a fireplace and original mantel. Sure it was bricked up and everything in the room but the floor and remaining glass was painted the same landlord white as the rest of the house. But, I don't know, there was such light in the room, and it was easy to see how totally glorious it must have been when there was no stupid little entry room and this room extended gloriously across the entire front of the house. If you had such a room in Manhattan, you'd be the envy of all your friends. You'd be swarmed with people wanting to marry you for the share.

I was delirious, delirious with the delicious heat. Hands, hands have so goddamn many bones they take forever to heat up. Chilled-to-the-bone means your hands have turned to permafrost. My only other exposed skin was my head poking out of my hoody. My face felt great! It was like all those millions of muscles in your face it takes to smile are getting the Asian Spa massage--all at the same time. God knows I was getting a bit tetched in the brain, the clumsiness of growth spurts as that coiled bastard in my skull swelled with the heat.

George went strolling by, did a double-take at the open door. I waved him in. He approached, looking at me standing in the middle of the room as He Who Opened The Door.

I was excited. "This is the room to come in when you need to warm up."

He did. He stood apart from me and paused, pursing his lips, sort of giving a glance up like a statue. It took him about ten seconds to break, shattering the pose with laughter. "Holy cow! It's hot as shit in here. This feels great."

He too liked the room. The lines were so nice. Even if too ruined to bother restoring. I glanced at the ceiling and happened to see something. I pointed for George, "Look how they heat the upstairs."

It was a passive grate to the room above. I'd seen such things in really old houses, but this wasn't period. It was a modern small size, and the grill was babyshit brown. The opening wasn't really enough to help the cause upstairs. It probably just made the upstairs legally inhabitable. If I'd had to winter over in that bedroom above I would have slept on the floor beside the grate, tenting the bedding over us both.

George was really disturbed by the opening between the two rooms. He kept shaking his head. He didn't like it one bit. That you could be up there and look down. Or be down there and look up.

Mike drifted in to hear about that. I had a funny idea, so I started talking. "But actually, it's a good thing, I think."

"How's that?!!" George asked, playing up the incredulousness.

"Well, you gotta figure this is the master bedroom, right?"

Mike shrugged enough of an agreement.

"And this wall, under the grate, is really the only place in the room to put the big bed, right?"

No one questioned that.

"I'm counting," I said, "and I'm coming up with 5 bedrooms and one bath. And what I'm thinking is, the bedroom above is the largest and probably belongs to the oldest child, and if that's me, I'm at the vent and shouting at my parents fucking, 'Goddamn it Daddy, use a rubber; we're out of room up here!'"

That cracked them up good, but then I heard the cracking of a hammer pounded on wood. I'm not a bad worker. It was time to join PD in taking out a stretch of fencing.

There was about a forty foot stretch of privacy fence along the side of the front yard slated to come out. The caveat was that it would then become a privacy fence out back by the alley. The sections were Home Depot prefabs in place and a decade or more weathered. They'd gone unpainted; I was thinking that the panels weren't even pressure-treated wood.

My style tended towards finesse; PD bashed at things with a hammer, or just gave great big kicks. His method made such work go much faster, but he was misfiring and breaking slats. Such things didn't matter much, so he was right. Removing the fencing was always the easy part. This job was projected as the worst job of the day because the 4x4 posts had to be extracted as well. We had shovels and hoes and a pickaxe, but still, the ground had been frozen for several weeks, and god help us if anyone had thought to dump a bag of concrete in any of the fucking postholes

We got lucky in Kentucky. We must have looked like monsters from across the street. With a little rocking back and forth we then just ripped those posts right out of the ground. Like a dentist removing wisdom teeth with his bare hands. I could've talked about unsheathing Excalibur from its scabbard of solid stone, but no one would've known what the hell I was talking about.

Mike came out on the front porch in time to be shocked that the fence was already totally down, the sections being taken to the backyard. I explained, "Helped that they sank them barely a foot in the ground. The stupid fuckers skimped and used 6 foot posts."

"You tell me: why am I not surprised?"

At least Petey showed up in time for the cartage. In fact, the two of us wound up in the front yard scanning for anymore scrap. All the fence parts were neatly stacked against the back of the house. There was still the fence across the front of the property, up against the sidewalk. That was due for removal too, but Mike'd gotten a consensus among us agreeing to leave it up as a purely psychological barrier. It was a shorter picket-style variety. You could kick it down, or just walk around, but still.

We'd gotten all the scraps. I lit a cigarette and stood there. Petey bummed one, and then we were a pair. We were enjoying the sunshine, the slightly rising temperature--it was a good brisk air around us. The bulk of the work was behind us.

Then all of a sudden there was this really muscular guy walking down the middle of the street our way. He seemed to be actually crossing the street, but at a long low diagonal. What concerned us was that he was casually swinging a big-ass aluminum baseball bat as he walked.

Even if you don't believe in God, you can still say to yourself, please god, don't let this happen. It's worked for me before. Who wants to end up as a couple grafs in the crappy local paper? Or as thirty seconds of words in the mouth of some jack-off newscaster? Not me.

And not Petey, who started edging slowly down the side of the house back to our crew. Back to the scrap heap and the truck full of heavy tools--the back of the house was a veritable armory of ad hoc weaponry. I hadn't thought of that! I followed, though slowly enough that in retreat I had a full view of the guy gaining our side of the street, only to get into his big red pickup parked just past our house.

Maybe he was putting on a show for us, though maybe the show was meant for other audiences. The bat apparently had a date with destiny elsewhere. Maybe he played on a team in a local softball league. It didn't really matter--Mike took it as a sign that we were done for the day. Or done for now; any more work first needed a trip to the Home Depot for more materials. He told the Portland boys we were done for the day. He began making up a list while the rest of us carried and stowed the tools and other valuables back in the truck. But not everything of worth.

"Hey Mike," PD piped up, pointing at the trash pile, "Can I take the gutters."

Mike looked over. "Sure, man. Go for it!"

PD and Petey immediately did, twisting and bending and stomping the scrapped gutters into more manageable pieces. Even as they did, Petey was muttering to PD, "We ain't got room." I didn't help, not wanting to get sliced by all the sharp edges. Though I did offer that if they folded over all the lengths one more time, the stuff should fit in the trunk of the car. "Trunk's already full," Petey scoffed.

That didn't deter PD I didn't see exactly how, but he got all that aluminum packed away by the time we all left.

After driving through all the scary blocks, we wound up back on wide, wide Dixie highway. Again I was wedged between Mike and George. There was a collective sigh of relief in the cab. It was still a decrepit part of town, but at least there was traffic. Multiple lanes of moving vehicles. A cop car now and again. Businesses that advertised on t.v. And a bus-line in case the truck broke down.

We were all so buzzed we could barely talk. Mike broke the silence, nodding at the long roach in the ashtray, "C'mon, fire it up!" We each took a couple hits before I put it back out; the damn thing didn't seem any shorter. We all kept getting even higher because the windows were up. It was like living in a bong. Finally I lit a cigarette just to force the issue. They followed suit, and finally the windows got cracked.

The smoke dissipated, but the silence hung just as heavy. "Damn we need a radio," Mike eventually declared. George and I concurred with vague grunts.

After another million miles Mike announced sagely, "I just sent those guys home." Uh huh. Trim the payroll, dude. Implied was that we had more work to do. Except I had no idea what the fuck that had to do with this aimless traveling we seemed to be doing. We were just driving. I knew we were heading south. If we didn't watch it, we'd wind up down in Tennessee.

Mike made some mention of lunch. The rest of us agreed. It was well past noon, but my stomach didn't need a goddamn watch to know that. I was about faint with hunger. The pot had had its effect, but mostly the matter was that my morning's english muffin was a memory from a previous lifetime.

The Dixie was such a huge endless commercial strip that I'd grown immune to signage by the time Mike shouted, "Burger King!"

"I love fucking Burger King," George answered. Mike almost swerved, but then George remembered there was another one further down, right around the Home Depot. I was grateful to hear we actually had a destination. I too had a fondness for Burger King.

Mike and I started riffing on our lament, that our neighborhood Burger King had gone away. "What happened?" George wanted to know.

We shrugged. "Dunno," I said. "One day it was there, next day it was closed, a week later it was torn down, and a couple months later there was a new building, but it was a goddamn bank."

"Yea," Mike vouched.

"Like we need another bank," I said. "I mean, who has enough spare cash to need another fucking bank. I mean, I keep wanting to go through their drive-thru, and after the teller-intercom says hello send five bucks through the vacuum tube. And when the teller comes back on and asks me what I want say, 'A Whopper with cheese, small fry and medium Coke.'"

That cracked them up. When he recovered, Mike said, "So it's decided: Home Depot, then Burger King."

By the time we got there, he'd reversed it. "Okay, Burger King, then Home Depot."

He got no argument. The extra mile or so of non-stop stop-lights had left us ravenous enough to eat the leather seat, even if it was vinyl. I was ready to start eating cigarettes! Mike parked the truck in the lot; we were gonna have us a sit-down meal. Probably the problem was that the ironwork rack looming over the truck was too tall to fit through the drive-thru portico. I was too trashed to have attempted an inside order on my own, but we were a work crew--I was running with my pack.

Inside was a line that kept on never moving. Five minutes passed, then ten. The place seemed to be having a problem with the computers that ran the registers. Apparently no one behind the counter--the manager included--knew the old-fashioned arts of writing orders on paper, and then doing the math. The delay made us marks for a really friendly talkative guy who engaged Mike; it transpired that he only had two dollars, not enough for a real meal and blah blah blah. Finally Mike blew him off, "Sorry man, can't help you."

The guy drifted back outside and finally the line started moving. The man in front of us turned back and said, "He tried the same buddy-buddy bullshit with me, too. I told him to get a fucking life, and while he was at it, get a goddamn job."

"Really!" Mike chimed.

George noted drolly, "Two bucks ain't much, but if you go to the grocery you can easily get a belly-full."

I pointed up at the menu board. "Shit, there's the junior burger, and sure you have to settle for a small order of fries . . . the drinks are self-serve so if you get a little cup for water you can get soda enough to have it running out your ears."

"Exactly," Mike nodded his head.

He then was soon shaking his head, in sympathy. Two women entered in line behind us, like a mother and not so young daughter, and the guy swooped in on them. I shut off my senses until I stood to give my order and pay my bill and wait for my food.

For some reason Mike and George got their goods right away. I stood on the wrong side of some sort of cut-off point, and had to stand up by the counter for fucking forever. Bored, I wandered around and filled up my drink cup. I fetched a straw. I pulled enough paper napkins out of the dispenser to soak up an oil spill. I gathered up enough packets of ketchup and sachets of salt and pepper to supply a small army. And still I had to stand around while this creep and the younger woman made some sort of love connection, the mother wagging her head in encouragement. I wanted my food just so I'd have something to puke up in disgust. A good man is hard to find and all that, but the task gets much easier if you lower the iron rod of your standards low enough to a mere cattle rumble bar sunk low into the pavement.

Finally my order came up. By the time I got to our table I had some serious catching up to do. Even with my mouth stuffed full, I related what I'd overheard.

"No way," George replied.

"No fucking way," Mike echoed more emphatically.

But the proof was just a few bolted down tables away. And we were on stoned time. Well before we were ready to leave the three of them had bolted their food and left together, happy as clams. Between mouthfuls I sputtered saliva, "This is like you're stuck home with the flu and you're watching daytime t.v. for so many hours you just want to blow your brains out, but you don't have the goddamn gun."

They nodded sagely. But I couldn't stop. "At best," I spat, then stopped to wipe the spittle from my lips. "I mean, if this doesn't wind up as something totally horrible in the newspaper. I mean, then I'll be delirious with a fever and watching Judge Judy, and that mean old bitch will be saying, 'You dumb cunts, you're so stupid you don't deserve a fucking penny. You deserve the loss of your collection of black velvet paintings. I sentence the three of you to rot in hell, together.'"

George jumped up laughing. "I need to see porcelain. Otherwise I'm going to pee all over the floor, and it's too cold to be wearing wet pants."

We all used the can, and then we were back in the truck.

Where, you know, there was that big fat fucking roach that refused to be smoked away just waiting in the ashtray. "Oh no-o-o" I cried, "if we smoke that we'll go into Home Depot and never escape."

Nevertheless we did, and we barely did. We got the vinyl siding pieces easy enough, then some other stuff. There was so many things, so much stuff you could buy. Tools, like archaic silver-setting pieces, the use of which you could only guess at. Food-stuffed and stoned and ready for a nap, I could've filled several carts an aisle. Fortunately I wasn't buying. George and I took turns pushing the big metal contractor tram, kids trying to be important while tailing Dad.

What fucked us up was that it took us all forever to surrender to the truth. We needed three panes of glass of specific dimensions. They didn't match any in the display of precut glass. What delayed our enlightenment was the utter disbelief that we were in a Home Depot that didn't cut glass.

I shook my head. "It's like, they pushed HQ out of business because, in comparison, HQ did totally suck. And ever since then," I cast out the palms of my hands, "they've slowly turned into HQ."

"I have one word for you," Mike answered. "Lowe's. Go there before they start totally sucking too."

"I always go to Lowe's," I said. "Well, ever since they built that one in Bashford Manor."

"Hallelujah," Mike exulted. "How many times were we there when we did your kitchen? 200?"

"Every day, it seemed like. Like eating lunch. And sometimes dinner too. I think my personal one-day best I went to Home Depot twice just to avoid having gone to Lowe's five times since the sun came up."

George shook his head in sympathy. "I hate those days."

"But you know what?"

"Huh?" Mike tilted his head.

"I've gone to Lowe's, and they cut glass while you watch."

"Exactly," Mike answered.

"You can go to any goddamn neighborhood corner hardware store anywhere in town, and they'll cut glass."

"I know," Mike agreed. He grabbed the trolley as a gesture. "Let's get the fuck outta here."

He paid and we loaded up, and then when I turned around he was gone. "Where's Mike?" I asked George.

"He decided he'd bought the wrong sized router bit, so he took it back in to get the right one."

"And you let him go in alone? Christ, we'll be here another hour waiting."

"I know," George moaned, "I didn't think about that fast enough."

In a sitting-on-tailgate and waiting-to-get-in-the-cab-and-go-away measure of time, it was close to an hour. In real time, the fucker was in there for like 20 minutes.

Once we were all back in the cab and getting to going, Mike flipped open his cell. He called no one. He scanned and said, "It's already 2:30. We're not going back down there today. Is that okay with you guys?"

Us guys shrugged.

"My thinking is, we get down there and get our work done before the crackheads wake up, before the street-fair begins, know what I mean?"

Us guys shrugged again.

We just traveled with the truck. Where the truck went, we came along. Mike was pushing us fast north up Dixie Highway. I held no objection to the truck starting to steer back to our neighborhood. I began to pray that way. Dear Whatever, I want to go home. I thought I was finally for once in my life getting my way, when instead he pulled the truck screeching across the opposing lanes to get into the little used-car lot run by the Salvation Army.

I thought the whole spiel was a dumb joke. Except that then I was just sort of standing around the Salvation Army's auto lot. I guessed you could get a tax write-off for giving them a busted car. Mike and George were in their element, though it took me longer to get into the spirit. What I liked best was that it was the most honest used-car lot on the planet. The windshields were all yellow oilstick, disintegrating haikus of utmost honesty. Nice interior/Needs motor. I was amazed that some of the cars were actually for sale--they couldn't leave the lot under their own speed. I mean, this was a crappy little lot with a dozen busted up cars for sale.

Mike started joking about how we should buy a couple, double the price, and sell them to PD

Sad but true. But George was busy seriously checking out a particular car. He wanted to give his girlfriend a car. His particular interest seemed like a bad idea. I asked George, "So is the thinking that she'll ball your brains out everytime you rescue her everytime her car breaks down?"

He waved me away, "Yea, right, something like that."

I was ready for the adventure to be done, but it just kept on. I'd seen all I needed to see of busted up cars, but the other guys were still in game. I wound up glad, because then I wandered all the way down the line of cars, to the final one.

I stopped, overwhelmed, when I read the windshield that read: Runs. Drives. Stalls.

Like life, if you get it off the lot, it's yours! No returns.

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