Crazy Stable

 
A Hymn: O God of Earth and Altar

O God of earth and altar,

             Bow down and hear our cry,

Our earthly rulers falter,

            Our people drift and die;

The walls of gold entomb us,

           The swords of scorn divide,

Take not thy thunder from us,

          But take away our pride.

From all that terror teaches,

           From lies of tongue and pen,

From all the easy speeches

          That comfort cruel men,

From sale and profanation

         Of honour and the sword,

From sleep and from damnation,

        Deliver us, good Lord.

Tie in a living tether

        The prince and priest and thrall,

Bind all our lives together,

        Smite us and save us all;

In ire and exultation

       Aflame with faith, and free,

Lift up a living nation,

       A single sword to thee.

                     -- G.K. Chesterton

Image: Fra Angelico, Christ Crowned with Thorns

"Writers are, far more than the general population, a high-risk category for the renovation virus. We can live and work almost anywhere, have a talent for blocking out inconvenient facts (like the slum next door) and are more than usually prone to delusions, not least those of grandeur. Couple this with a tenuous cash flow and the further delusion that we have an instinctive understanding of things like cabinet hardware, and the situation becomes positively dangerous."

--Adam Goodheart (of Washington College in Chestertown, Md.) reviewing The Caliph's House by Tahir Shah in The New York Times Book Review, 3/19/06

In honor of the 20th anniversary of our acquiring the CrazyStable, I will attempt some past-life regression therapy...back into the wild, strange time just after the place became "ours." Spouse claims to remember little of this harrowing interval. My memories seem lit by lightning--surreal, ghastly, and disjointed.  I took shockingly few pictures,  not even documentary shots of each room, just haphazard snaps between unfolding crises.  It felt like the "fog of war." And with my dad recently deceased, it was just the two of us--no friends or family who were handy, or renovation-seasoned, to guide our steps.  We were 29...but felt older (having inherited my widowed mother), and yet also much younger, like orphaned kids, running  around a haunted house with a toolkit.

Although  Chang had been forced, on pain of escrow, to clear the junk out of the house by closing day, we soon discovered how much he had managed to "overlook." Several 20-foot dumpsters-worth, actually. The back yard was a forest of head-high ragweed. We started pulling it up--in September, during the worst "hay fever" season I've ever had.  Gloved, masked, and sneezing convulsively, I labored alongside Spouse as we discovered What Lay Beneath the Ragweed:

One chopped-up tree, too rotted for firewood. One demolished small building, including crumbled roof tiles and insulation. Lots of random other nasties. And, in a pile by the garage, 200 assorted glass bottles, and many more broken ones.

As we made our umpteenth trip to the dumpster in the driveway, beneath a baking sun, our next-door neighbor, Mr. Dominique, appeared alongside us. His house was as rambling and almost as raggedy as ours; but Dominique, the paterfamilias of a multigenerational Haitian-American household, never gave up his efforts to subdue the place. We would see him wandering around, hefting a tool contemplatively, and be reminded of Mark Twain's saying: "To a man with a hammer in his hand, everything looks like a nail."  When we weakly protested at his generosity, he hoisted another bagful of crap and said, kindly but firmly, "You will never do this all by yourselves." Together, we worked for the rest of the afternoon. (He had, of course, been right.) 

And then there was the garage. Why hadn't we thought to look during the walk-through? When we finally yanked up the door, we were appalled to find it stuffed tight with...more Chang crap. A whole 'nother dumpsterload full.  Since we weren't planning on putting the car in there (if only because the door required a hernia-producing maneuver to lift open), Spouse suggested just leaving it for awhile, but I was adamant. All crap must be purged. And so, more trips down the driveway. (We learned to pack a wicked dumpster. You put the big stuff on the bottom, and wedge the little stuff and big flat stuff in around it, and pour the pourable detritus on top of that to settle in. ) 

Fueled by stories of brownstone renovators who'd found their original crown moldings or mantlepieces gathering dust in the basement, we never lost hope that something cool might emerge from the endless stream of rubbish. And there it was: a steamer trunk! An old, ghost-story-worthy steamer trunk, with a few yellowed labels attached! Visions of mysterious bundled letters, or tarnished antique bric-a-brac, or God knows what, flashed through our minds. We ripped the hasp off and lifted the lid.  The trunk was full...of Chinese menus. Recent ones. The take-out kind. From all over the country, perhaps all 50 states.  Do you have any idea how many different ways there are to spell "General Tso's Chicken"?

(Several astute CrazyStable fans have brought it to my attention that "our" episode of Law & Order was repeated again last week--the one where they set a stunt man on fire in our garage.  Yes, we caught it--and yes, the garage facade that NBC's location crew put in place like "Extreme Home Makeover: Pyromaniac Edition" is still standing, and still an improvement over the original, even though it was meant to be the workshop of a mad bomber.)

Jesse L. Martin takes aim at our garage interior, September 2005

The sky wept here in Brooklyn Saturday. Was it the remnants of Hurricane Ernesto, slogging up the East Coast--or were the heavens wracked with recollection of the day we closed on the CrazyStable, September 2, 1986? (Either way, the roof's Valley of Death leaked so copiously that we upgraded from foil roasting pans to an old baby bathtub...and a new leak popped open in the pristine snowy ceiling of Dear Tenant's freshly re-plastered apartment.)

Our closing day was as nerve-wracking as the one immortalized by Dave Barry (in which he describes signing an endless parade of documents including, perhaps, the realtor's toaster warranty, or a description of the digestive system of a badger).  We signed papers, and we signed checks--checks for just about all the money we had (except for a lump sum to fix the roof and electrical systems--that was the rest of the money we had), along with a good chunk of all the money our surviving parents had. Mr. Chang, the seller, said little, speaking in Chinese with his lawyer, a wizened little Hobbit named Mr. Pan. Our lawyer, Morty, was also Hobbit-sized, but mustachio'd and pure old-style Brooklyn. During the course of closing, we got to watch the two Hobbit Lawyers, Chinese and Jewish versions, engage in an elegant little legal tour-de-force: They used a yellow legal pad to save our deal from disaster.

Because, the day before, we had shown  up at the CrazyStable to perform a routine called the "walk-through." It's just that--a chance to make sure that, on the eve of closing, your seller hasn't, say, burned the house down or sold the copper pipes for scrap. A mere formality in most cases, but in our case, these both seemed like real possibilities.

What we found on our inspection, however, was...that nothing had changed. No pipe-selling, but nothing else had vacated the premises either since our house inspection the previous spring--cheap furniture still there, basement still stuffed to the rafters with unidentifiable crap, even some occupants still puttering around.  What the hell?

We had called Morty in a panic. The place was to have been delivered "broom clean" (a strange concept in a house coated in sticky black gunk with a lint coating, but you get the picture--all portable debris was to have been removed). Not to worry, said Morty--the closing would go on, but he'd execute an "escrow rider" or something that basically gave Chang two weeks to clear out the junk or else pay us $10,000 to do it ourselves.

And so it went, as Morty and Pan scribbled at length with nice ballpoint pens on the yellow legal pad, which everyone of course dutifully signed. "Bloom creen," muttered Pan to Chang, who betrayed no guilt or remorse over the affair. It was over. We staggered out onto Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, looking for once in our lives for a place to get hammered. We couldn't even manage to find a bar (I realize now we should have gone to a hotel, but we were in shock), so we went to a fancy little ice-cream parlor in the Fifties and stuffed ourselves with sundaes as twilight fell.  The CrazyStable was ours.

The next day, with trepidation, we drove up to its stockade gates. Now the place was a whirl of activity; the barren front yard looked like the set for Sanford and Son.  

One little old Chinese man was carrying up all this stuff from the basement on his back, in time-dishonored coolie fashion, God help him, while Chang, a strapping middle-aged layabout, laid about. Well, no, he kept busy negotiating with us to keep some of the crap and thus reduce his dumpstering fees. "You buy furniture!" he wheedled. No, no, and no.  (We later  learned that he'd pitched it to everyone on the block.)  Then: "Okay. I give you furniture!" No! However, I added, seeing a few intact tables and bureaus, you could leave those two if you want. Chang's  face lit up with scorn. "Aha! Now you WANT furniture!"

At the end of the day, the house was not bloom-creen, and we haven't really finished cleaning it 20 years later. But the busted chairs, car seats, and mattresses were gone, and so, mysteriously and immediately, were the poor tenants. A few filthy appliances were left in the two kitchens, and trails of white powder (some lethal ancient roach-killer, we presumed) festooned the floors; we vacuumed them up, the heroic last act of my parents' 30-year-old canister vaccuum before its motor burned out in despair.

It would be close to a month before we moved in on October 1, 1986--a month we spent shuttling between our cozy Park Slope newlywed apartment and 3,000 square feet of Flatbush squalor.  The nightmarish part of our dream had begun.

"And you will say to yourself, this is not my beautiful house...

And you will ask yourself, my God, what have I done?" 

--The Talking Heads