Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home Read Online Free
Author: Matthew Batt
Tags: Humor, nonfiction, Personal Memoirs, Biography & Autobiography, Retail
around Sugarhouse, one of two viable neighborhoods for liberal types who want to live in Utah but pretend they’re still in America. I’m on my hazard-orange Vespa-ish scooter, wearing waiter’s clothes, carrying a messenger bag loaded with flyers, a notebook, and—honest to God—
Moby Dick.
I believe in accidents. Generally not the kind that will lay me out on the pavement, but rather the kind where I’ll turn a corner Jenae and I have turned a thousand times in her VW, and because I’m not in the Bug but on the vehicular equivalent of a T-ball stand, and therefore extra-careful about entering the flow of traffic, I might just see something I wouldn’t have seen before. A lime-green-jacketed realtor digging a hole for a new post, an appraiser down the street tape-measuring the yard, or the type of little red and white sign you buy at a hardware store to put on the dashboard of your life-size Camaro lawn ornament.
One blistering afternoon I notice a small, mustachioed man watering the lawn in the middle of the day—in the middle of a drought—in the middle of a desert! He seems more like a capricious landlord or sociopathic golf course groundskeeper than a homeowner. From what I can see, there’s no furniture inside and nothing on the walls. Only a ladder in the kitchen and a bucket of paint on the countertop.
It’s a house we’ve seen before. The cream-colored masonry caught my eye; it reminded me of the kind of brick they built everything with in Milwaukee, my more-or-less hometown. It’s got double-hung windows with huge stone casements and a big, fenced-in backyard with a haggard rose bush in the front, big as a small tree. The street name, Franklin, feels as full of promise as the Constitution itself.
It’s on the corner of the street Jenae and I have come to call our favorite in Sugarhouse: 800 East, a quiet, straight haven of pavement between two of the busiest roads in Salt Lake. Wide enough for parking on both sides, but narrow enough so that only ten-speeds or Big Wheels drag race here. It’s one of the few neighborhoods in all of Salt Lake where the streets have not just numbers and letters but names, like Browning and Emerson—poets and writers, no less. The homes are set back a fair bit from the road, but not so far that you can’t hear your neighbor when he
Hulloes!
to you in the morning. Any hour of the day you’ll find strollers, joggers, bikers, dog walkers, unicyclists, roller skaters, speed walkers, kite flyers, bums, drunks, missionaries, cops, robbers, cowboys, Indians . . . every day, the hoi polloi on parade under a thatchwork canopy of oaks older than all of us put together.
Although 8thEast, as it’s called, is not exactly on my way to or from anything, I had forced myself to take it as often as possible, having quickly learned that real estate, even in a supposed buyer’s market, can come and go in a day without so much fanfare as a SOLD sticker.
A few days later, when I see the red and white For Sale sign in the window of that house on 8th, I can’t help but feel like Ahab. Not the peg-legged one who nailed a gold doubloon to the mast, all cocksure and blustery, but the one who must have about choked on his hardtack every time some bloody fool atop the mizzenmast shouted,
Thar she blows!
only to have spotted another right or blue or goddamned Greenland whale and not the mighty sperm that was his Moby Dick.
But there it is, finally, on this scorching day in July: a sign—a
sign!
—in the window. This must be the place.
I park my scooter, drop my helmet on the seat, and run up to the door. I call the number on my cell phone as I peer inside. The phone rings and rings, and it begins to sound more like the distant alarm I’m feeling. The house, from what I can see, is disgusting. If this is going to be The House, I think, it’s going to start out like Cinderella’s story wherein we will be forced to spend a lot of painful time on our hands and knees at the behest of a
Moby Dick.
I believe in accidents. Generally not the kind that will lay me out on the pavement, but rather the kind where I’ll turn a corner Jenae and I have turned a thousand times in her VW, and because I’m not in the Bug but on the vehicular equivalent of a T-ball stand, and therefore extra-careful about entering the flow of traffic, I might just see something I wouldn’t have seen before. A lime-green-jacketed realtor digging a hole for a new post, an appraiser down the street tape-measuring the yard, or the type of little red and white sign you buy at a hardware store to put on the dashboard of your life-size Camaro lawn ornament.
One blistering afternoon I notice a small, mustachioed man watering the lawn in the middle of the day—in the middle of a drought—in the middle of a desert! He seems more like a capricious landlord or sociopathic golf course groundskeeper than a homeowner. From what I can see, there’s no furniture inside and nothing on the walls. Only a ladder in the kitchen and a bucket of paint on the countertop.
It’s a house we’ve seen before. The cream-colored masonry caught my eye; it reminded me of the kind of brick they built everything with in Milwaukee, my more-or-less hometown. It’s got double-hung windows with huge stone casements and a big, fenced-in backyard with a haggard rose bush in the front, big as a small tree. The street name, Franklin, feels as full of promise as the Constitution itself.
It’s on the corner of the street Jenae and I have come to call our favorite in Sugarhouse: 800 East, a quiet, straight haven of pavement between two of the busiest roads in Salt Lake. Wide enough for parking on both sides, but narrow enough so that only ten-speeds or Big Wheels drag race here. It’s one of the few neighborhoods in all of Salt Lake where the streets have not just numbers and letters but names, like Browning and Emerson—poets and writers, no less. The homes are set back a fair bit from the road, but not so far that you can’t hear your neighbor when he
Hulloes!
to you in the morning. Any hour of the day you’ll find strollers, joggers, bikers, dog walkers, unicyclists, roller skaters, speed walkers, kite flyers, bums, drunks, missionaries, cops, robbers, cowboys, Indians . . . every day, the hoi polloi on parade under a thatchwork canopy of oaks older than all of us put together.
Although 8thEast, as it’s called, is not exactly on my way to or from anything, I had forced myself to take it as often as possible, having quickly learned that real estate, even in a supposed buyer’s market, can come and go in a day without so much fanfare as a SOLD sticker.
A few days later, when I see the red and white For Sale sign in the window of that house on 8th, I can’t help but feel like Ahab. Not the peg-legged one who nailed a gold doubloon to the mast, all cocksure and blustery, but the one who must have about choked on his hardtack every time some bloody fool atop the mizzenmast shouted,
Thar she blows!
only to have spotted another right or blue or goddamned Greenland whale and not the mighty sperm that was his Moby Dick.
But there it is, finally, on this scorching day in July: a sign—a
sign!
—in the window. This must be the place.
I park my scooter, drop my helmet on the seat, and run up to the door. I call the number on my cell phone as I peer inside. The phone rings and rings, and it begins to sound more like the distant alarm I’m feeling. The house, from what I can see, is disgusting. If this is going to be The House, I think, it’s going to start out like Cinderella’s story wherein we will be forced to spend a lot of painful time on our hands and knees at the behest of a
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