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POMPTON X. GALA, CSR #(d)-10-5942
Certified Shorthand Reporter
The Handyman
by Eddie Muller
Alameda
First time I set foot in Alameda, I moved there. Laurie and I had been searching all over the East Bay for an escape route out of San Francisco, and not long after emerging from the tube that links downtown Oakland to Alameda, we spotted a For Rent sign in the upper window of a place on Central Avenue. It was a late June afternoon, and the sun cast a warm glow across the majestic Edwardian-style structure and the gorgeous garden that bloomed out front.
There was a phone number on the sign, too small to read.
“Let’s just go ring the bell,” Laurie said.
We’d seen more than two dozen places that week and this was the first one that had made Laurie excited. She was out of the car before I could get my glasses on. That’s crucial, looking back now. If I could have seen the phone number on the sign, if I had told her, It’s getting late, let’s call tomorrow, maybe everything would have turned out differently. Maybe not. I’ve thought a lot about how things might have turned out differently. It’s all I do, really.
We crossed the garden to a pathway leading up to the entrance. A woman was leaving the house, an attractive African American in conservative business dress, with a young girl, her daughter I presumed, holding her hand. We smiled in passing. I dismissed the possibility that she was the owner, or the current tenant. She said to our backs, “You don’t want that place, believe me.”
Laurie was nonplussed, and I turned around, saying, “Why’s that? Is there something wrong with it?”
“Yeah, I want it!” She tried to laugh it off, only it wasn’t funny. “Oh my God, the place is fantastic,” she said. “It’s everything I ever wanted. And a good school just blocks away? I won’t ever find a place like this in Oakland.” She picked her daughter up and hugged her, appearing to be on the verge of tears. Grimly, she said, “You looking to rent this place?”
“Driving around, that’s all,” Laurie said quickly. “We just like to look.”
“I could actually afford it. Maybe.” She stroked her daughter’s head. “But we’ll probably never get in a place like this.” She surveyed the lush grounds — a gorgeous Japanese red maple formed a canopy over a bubbling koi pond — then gazed at the house looming above. Finally she said, “C’mon, baby, we got to get home.”
“Okay, that was uncomfortable,” I whispered, climbing a few steps to the front door, which was still open.
We rang the bell, knocked, called out — that’s how eager we were — and presently a tiny figure appeared, coming rapidly down the stairway: a petite Asian woman, her wiry gray hair pulled back into a bun. Hard to figure her age; could have been anywhere between fifty and seventy. She wore a simple denim smock and slip-on sandals. Stepping between us, she glanced down the pathway, squinting through delicate, wire-framed glasses.
“She gone?”
“Who?” Laurie said, playing dumb.
“The black. She gone?”
We shuffled awkwardly, coughing a few noises that weren’t words.
“Single mother never good tenant. They bring home men. Men make them do drugs, maybe gamble. ’Specially blacks. Black woman means black man. No trust. She pay rent, maybe he steal her money, gamble.” She looked us up and down and grinned. “You last ones. Agent gone now, but I show you place myself. I live bottom unit, other side. You need something, I always here. My name Phi.”
Laurie loved the place so much it made me jealous. She certainly hadn’t oohed and aahed and carried on so ecstatically when she’d first laid eyes on me. The original house — probably a second home for some nineteenth-century San Francisco Gold Rush millionaire — had been converted into a duplex, and the upper unit was nothing short of glorious: two spacious bedrooms with high coved ceilings, big picture windows with leaded-glass panes, tasteful new carpeting, a large fireplace in a grand living room, built-in bookcases and china cabinets, a deck off the dining room, a remodeled kitchen with a Jenn-Air range — it was insanely great. And it was okay for us to have a cat. Our recently rescued Burmese would be moving from the streets to a dream home.
“Everything top-notch,” the landlady kept repeating. “You make sure keep good condition.” In the main bedroom, she gestured at windows on the east and west sides. “Best thing! Sun rise this room, all day never go way. Sun circle house this way, evening sunset living room. Light very beautiful, like Renaissance painting.”
We were ready to sign a lifetime lease even before she opened the narrow door off the central hallway. “Come up. Show you what I do in attic.” She led us up a slender switchback stairway almost too small for me. We emerged into an entirely separate apartment, which included a brand-new, unused bathroom. Skylights made the cloistered space feel airy, even expansive. Laurie dug her fingers into my arm. “Oh my God,” she whispered, more emphatically than when we had sex. “This is unbelievable. This is perfect. I can run my business here. I don’t need an office — look at all this room.”
As we took a final look around — we didn’t want to leave — we spewed our life stories to Phi, lying that we were married and otherwise convincing her that we were model citizens with abundant bank accounts, rock-solid credit, guaranteed lifetime employment, and no vices beyond having recently rescued a small black cat. She finally raised a hand, stanching our flow of self-aggrandizement.
“You handy?” she asked, measuring me with a level gaze.
“How so, exactly?”
“Handy! You good fixing?”
“Oh... handy. Oh, yeah, sure. She calls me Mr. Fix-It.”
Laurie was tall enough that Phi couldn’t see the comically incredulous expression on her face. Truth was, I couldn’t hammer a nail straight and I had a talent for stripping every screw I’d ever tried to tighten. But to score this place, I’d damn well become handy.
“Happy, happy,” Phi said. “Glad you handy.” When she smiled, she looked twenty years younger. She’d been an attractive woman once. She patted my chest. “You nice couple. I like you. You live here. I call company, tell them apartment rented.”
Before I met her, Laurie had been a high school teacher, but that didn’t work out, I figured, because every male student had crushed on her. She was a prize — smart, funny, empathetic, and beautiful in the most disarming, unself-conscious way. She had everything — but didn’t like to be reminded of it. A public job, she’d decided, was not her style. She didn’t like to be the center of attention.
By the time I’d fallen madly in love — and convinced her we needed to live together — Laurie had been seized by the entrepreneurial zeal that energized lots of young people in the early nineties. Bush was out, Clinton was in, and suddenly for us lefties making money was a capitalist continuation of the counterculture we’d missed out on. Fight the Man by making dough your own way. Find a live-work space. Build your own business. Make a few million and then sell out to a big corporation. Retire young and do fuck-all for the rest of your charmed life. That seemed to be the strategy, based on the few examples I’d seen. Follow your bliss, business-wise.
For Laurie, this meant founding a greeting card company. She dreamed of doing it all, bottom to top: designer, illustrator, manufacturer, marketing manager, distributor, CEO. All this responsibility, of course, would be just until she established her brand. Then there’d be expansion and outsourcing, maybe fewer eighteen-hour workdays. It’d take maybe a year or more to reach that stage — but in the meantime she’d found the perfect place to build the ship, rig it just right, and set it sailing.