Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home Read Online Free Page B

stops abruptly, squares up, and shakes my hand. His fingers are callused and meaty, like thick-skinned sausages, and to him my unmanly hand probably feels like a warm, soggy croissant.
    “Hi,” he says. “How are ya?”
    I say okay.
    “Well,” he says, taking the key from his floppy pocket, “let’s get you on the grand tour.”
    As soon as he opens the door, the smell hits me—something between a derelict litter box, muddy diapers, and a basement backed up with wastewater—and my eyes begin to tear as I crane my head around for one last breath.
    “Lady used to live here,” Stanley says, happy as a man without a nose, “she had a cat or two.”
    It reeks like a state fair Porta Potty during a heat spell and a sanitation strike. I check to see if my nose is bleeding. Stanley, I’m thinking, must have smelling salts nestled into his little mustache.
    Stanley reminds me of the superintendent of the apartment building where I lived in Boston. His name was also Stanley. Stanley the super single-handedly taught me everything I needed to know about that peculiar Massachusetts accent. Whenever you greet someone, whether you know him or not, like or hate him, you say, all as one word, “Hihowahya.” At first I thought it was, perhaps, a traditional Penobscot Indian salutation, a terse but well-meant expression of welcome to weary travelers. But no. It’s the classic New England question-that-is-not-a-question.
    I keep my mouth shut for pretty much the whole tour and try to breathe through my T-shirt when Stanley isn’t looking. I needn’t let the smell distract me from the fact that I don’t know a thing about what to look for in a house. Hell, my wife and I have bought cars because of their cup holders, the synecdochic equivalent of buying a house because it has a nice mailbox. Which this one does not. It has a rusted metal thing screwed into the mortar by the front door. In a previous life it may have been a cracker tin.
    Stanley is a sharp judge of character. At the same time, I am not very hard to read. A crazy-haired, scooter-riding, table-waiting kid who apparently has some kind of delivery to make. Not an obvious choice for anything but debt and regret. So while I look around and nod and struggle with the might of olfaction, Stanley tells me the story of his house the way he might to someone with a hearing aid or conspicuous frontal lobe damage.
    “Last lady, she was just a renter. Rent the place for ten years or so. Never caused any trouble. One kid, ugly but quiet. No complaints. Had the HUD people come out, do a little insulation stuff, you know, to keep the bills down, but she was a good woman. Paid the rent on time.”
    He turns toward me, but he doesn’t like to stand face-to-face. I notice that as I pivot toward him, he pivots away, as though it’s important to him that we are constantly looking not at each other but in the same direction.
    “Neighbors’ll tell you she sold the crack cocaine—the windows was all shut up with foil and cardboard. But don’t you listen to that horse hockey.”
    I’m not sure what that means or why he’s telling me. He is a strange man.
    “Lady liked her privacy is all. Her kid used to bury his dolls in the yard. Not much to say about that.”
    We’re standing in the foyer. The walls are white. A shiny, hard, automotive white that would cover up nearly any kind of bad news from the past. For a while, anyway. The ceilings are high, and that’s an unmitigated plus, but the floors—they’re covered by carpets that look and smell like the oily, seepy mud revealed at low tide in industrial ports. At any time I imagine we could come across hypodermic needles, charred spoons, crack vials, spare tires, once-troublesome union organizers.
    “Anyway, before that,” Stanley continues, “the wife and I lived in it up until we had kids, and before that, my mother and dad lived in it, and before that, my grandparents. They built it their own selves in 1911. Been in the