The Enigma

Our house is now officially an enigma.

My father, incidentally, who as most of you know is Israeli, labors under the misapprehension that this word is pronounced "exioma," which brings to mind an unfortunate skin condition or an anatomical component of an ant.

Anyway, as I was saying: our house is an enigma. Officially.

The downstairs (living room, dining room, kitchen and stairwell) have all been painted by a professional, and his three Mexican workmen who have undoubtedly given me the piggie sickie. Our front door, instead of the flakey, messy, yellowed white it once was, is now a vibrant Cherokee Red, a color trademarked by the eccentric and overly penile Frank Lloyd Wright, used in tasteful abundance in Pittsburgh's Fallingwater estate. It's a rusty, almost orange-y red-- and it looks quite smart.

The dining room is also Cherokee Red, above the chair rail. Below the chair rail is a soft, buttery yellow or cream.

The kitchen walls are swathed in an inoffensive color called meringue and, if you weren't careful, you'd find yourself licking the walls to get a taste of soft, lemony fluffiness. Pervert.

The living room is a real feast for the eyes. A vibrant, sunny yellow that warms your cockles and assorted parts makes the walls come to life. And there's a lavender accent wall above the faux fireplace and the same beautiful purple runs all the way up the stairs and softly coats the upstairs hallway.

I love to look at the walls-- it's far more fulfilling than watching television. Being in the living room or the dining room fills me with a sense of maturity and satisfaction-- that this really is a place where two competent, employed grown ups live and love together.

Then, I go upstairs.

Upstairs, it's a place where competent, employed grown ups fear to tread. Upstairs, it's a place where two rabid, epileptic tigers live and they use the walls as stratching posts. Upstairs, they test nuclear weapons. Upstairs has been ransacked by the Normans and the Huns. Upstairs is the place where visitors are strongly discouraged from visiting.

"But, we have a bathroom right off the dining room-- there's really no need for you to go... UPSTAIRS!"

The luscious lavender stairwell seductively beckons the unsuspecting houseguests.

"Come," it says naughtily, like a siren, "climb me and see what lies beneath my trestle."

You fool! You susceptible, vulnerable fool! Don't do it!

I beg you. Don't.

Our clothes are everywhere for want of closet space. The walls that still wear fifty-year-old wallpaper are offensive to the tastes of anybody under the age of 83. The walls that have been stripped of said wallpaper look like those of a Yugoslavian insane asylum. Wallpaper strips and shavings litter the floor, as if we were houstraining a puppy.

Seriously. It's like two different existences.

So, come on over. Just keep it on the Down Low.

A Little Bit of Color

Note to the Pretty, Witty, Small in Mass but Large in Heart Contingent that is My Blogosphere:

Some of you are behaving as if my last blog post was nothing short of my epitaph. Come on now, you know me better.

So, the painters arrived this morning. They were early, a phenomenon with which I am unfamiliar in terms of manual-labor folk. I thought I had more time than I actually did, so I sped over to my parents' house to bring in the newspaper, turn off the outside lights, open the shades, thus creating the illusion that they are home, and not visiting my great-aunt in Florida.

Come drop in-- my mom has dubious taste in carpeting, but she has an expensive pottery collection. Better hurry, though, they come home tonight!

They were putting their ladders and tarps and shit on the porch when I pulled up, twelve minutes prior to their scheduled arrival time. Seeing them there early was the first thing that startled me. Seeing three South-of-the-Border dudes with spikey black hair, sleeveless shirts and tattoos was the second thing that surprised me.

I don't know exactly what I was expecting. Being a very wet-behind-the-ears homeowner, the only experience I have with contractors and/or painters is O'Reilly's workmen from "The Builders" episode of Fawlty Towers. If the guy who came to do our estimate had been, well, Mexican (or hispanic-- I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I don't know what the difference is) then I don't think I would have been surprised-- but he wasn't. He was white. Very, very white-- of the blonde haired, blue-eyed, master-race variety. Maybe it's just me, but I felt real weird about him doling out orders to these guys and having them, "Si, boss"ing him. Silly me: I had thought that the whole idea of the pale-faced Boss Man giving orders to a bunch of darker-toned, beefy young men kind of went out of style in, oh, I don't know... 1865.

But I guess old habits die hard.

It's just funny, you meet Aaron, with the blonde hair and the blue eyes, and you are comfortable and confident with him. Then the crew shows up and you're like, oh. That's who I'm really leaving in my house from 8:30-5:00 while my wife and I are at work.

Oh.

It's like having an initial consultation with a doctor that you really like, and then seeing the P.A. every other time you go there, or the R.N. It's like-- but... what about the doctor? Is he just the bait to lure me and my insurance card into the practice? Or was he just window dressing? I mean, sure, Aaron was there this morning with the 3 Amigos, but he split after 15 minutes-- "to get supplies." I've been back to the house twice now today, and no Aaron.

Anyway, they seem like perfectly nice guys. I don't have gobs of evidence to support that since I think their grasp of English is, well, mal. I'm pretty sure that I know more Spanish than they do English, but I don't think it would be appropriate to start a conversation with them in Spanish. That would kind of be the equivalent of some random hiker in Connecticut wishing me good shabbas. You just don't do that. They've obviously been carefully trained to not make eye contact with caucasians, as they firmly gazed at the floor when shaking my hand and mumbling their terse introductions which all sounded like,

"Sihellomynamejorje."

Apparently, they're animal-lovers, too. After consulting on the phone with Mrs. Apron, I decided this morning to gate our 70 pound dog in the I suppose medium-sized bathroom, citing the advantage of a cool tile floor for him to relax on, a full water bowl (no, I'm not referring to the toilet) and the major advantage of him being out of the way of the painters. When I came home mid-day to take Finley on a little walk and air him out a little, I was a bit shocked to see that he was no longer in the bathroom, but he had been gated in our bedroom.

"putinbiggerroom," mumbled Paco.

That was very nice of you, I wanted to say. Instead, I just smiled. I was grateful for their thoughtfulness, though it was probably more a function of them needing to piss and being tired of stepping over the dog gate. (They had left the seat up.) Though they did think about giving the dog more breathing room, they didn't manage to move his water bowl into the bedroom. I suppose he could have just drank his own urine if it got really bad. I mean, it's not like he was stuck on the Andes Mountains after a plane crash, right?

In addition to depriving him of hydration, they also, um, painted him. I realized it when we were outside on our little perambulation. His ordinarily jet black tail was now, um, half white. I'm sure it was unintentional, but a brief vision of these three guys waving paintbrushes around, streaking through my house, buck-ass naked and slammed on mescal singing Harry Belafonte songs at the top of their lungs as they... you know... painted my dog.

He's okay, though. Look, if it were his face or his doodle, I would have said something to them, but it was just his tail and it all came off. Well, most of it did.

Besides, they outnumber me.

My Mind, It Hath Been Blown

I just got my mind blown, and it didn't even cost me $5.00 in a Chinatown alleyway.

Usually, I love it when my inbox pings. It's oftentimes bill, but that's okay. I'm comforted by bills. I like regularity, and they're regular, like I'd be after a bowl of Cracklin' Oat Bran, if I ate that shit.

Sometimes, my inbox pings with a missive from an old friend, or one of my rare new ones. All of my new friends are avatars, but I don't mind. You don't have to take avatars out to lunch or listen to them whine or buy them awkward wedding presents. You have to do that with old friends, but I don't especially mind that either.

Tonight, my inbox pinged and it was Aaron, the painter. Aaron, the painter just blew my mind.

Now, I'm the first to admit that I don't know shit about shit when it comes to painting or scaffolding or anything that really has anything to do with manual labor. The fact that I was even able to find my car's battery this morning is actually pretty miraculous. Let's face it; the Jews built the pyramids a long fucking time ago, man, and, since then, we've pretty much washed out hands of the unpleasantries of a physical life. This is why our benevolent and resourceful God invented Mexicans, and Aaron, the painter.

Aaron, the painter, wants to paint our house, because he's a painter and that's pretty much what painters do. The other thing painters do, apparently, is blow your mind. Paint your house, blow your mind. Well, Aaron definitely did the latter, but I'm reasonably sure he's not going to be doing the former.

Now, you have to picture the interior of our house in your mind. Living room, dining room and stairwell (well, most of it) were stripped of old lady wallpaper by the seller's son-in-law prior to our moving in. He used a hand-scraper for all of it. According to the seller, it took him three months, and after removing wallpaper with a scorer, a steamer and a scraper, I kind of believe her. Mrs. Apron and I, when we're not crafting & blogging respectively, are hard at work removing old lady wallpaper from the bedroom and the office and the upstairs hallway, and the kitchen.

If you want to picture what our downstairs and bedroom walls look like in their present condition, close your eyes and imagine a faux finish applied by Alex from "A Clockwork Orange." Our walls are a frenetic and haphazard splotchtastic effluvia of turqouise, pink, green and white. Our shelves lie unassembled against the wall in many, many pieces. Our boxes are still packed away in many, many boxes. There is paper backing in vertical streaks all along our walls, and there's adhesive behind that. In essence, there's miles to go before we sleep.

And we don't sleep much.

See, I like Aaron. Well, I did before I got his quote. Aaron came to our house ten minutes late, but he called to let us know he was running a little late. He showed up wearing a polo knit shirt with his logo embroidered on it-- classy. The only paint visible on him was on his shoes. He had one of those cool sonar-guided measuring devices which he used to take precise measurements of all of our rooms, to know exactly how much to fleece us for-- to the inch. He took notes in a professional-looking leatherette portfolio. He had a decent-looking pen. All these things, of course, cost money. I keep hearing Tom & Ray's warning over and over in my head, "When your mechanic buys a new boat-- beware."

While $3,925 probably won't buy a yacht of any self-respecting girth, it's certainly a start.

Brian, the second painter whom we invited into our shambolic home for the purposes of obtaining a quote, was the polar-opposite of Aaron, and I can only hope that his quote, which we have yet to receive, is the polar opposite of Aaron's.

Brian was 25 minutes late in arriving to our house, and he didn't call to let us know. I think that's because he doesn't own a cell-phone. I called him two weeks ago to set up a quote, and an elderly woman answered the phone. I left my information, and never heard back from him. A week ago, I ran into the woman who recommended Brian to me.

"Oh, yeah, that was probably his mother. I think she's a little, you know," she said. I looked at her and cocked my head. She contorted her face and stuck out her tongue, wobbling her noggin around like a bobblehead toy on a car dashboard.

"Ah," I said. "I'll try him again."

After meeting Brian, I have no doubt that he lives with his elderly, mentally-unstable mother. Brian is in his early fifties, with a weather-beaten face. He wore his paint like an accoutremont, like a pageant queen wears a sash or a salad wears dressing. His pants gave the impression that he was mauled by a horny tiger on his way over to our house, and his sweater was greedily feasted upon at the Moth Last Supper. This sweater was older than all of us in the room together combined, including the dog.

Brian doddered around our house, scribbling indecipherable scrawl in a black-and-white marble composition book-- the kind in which you wrote Susie's name over and over again in fifth grade. Ah, Susie.... I wonder if she paints houses.

I wasn't too impressed with Brian's presentation, but I'm certainly hoping that his thrift at the clothing store, or dumpster, translates into a more down-to-earth estimate.

After all-- I sure can't picture this fucking guy on a boat.