Life with Dick: House Werk

Executive Director of PhillyGayCalendar

I’m writing this from a home office in the south of Chile, in shorts, with the warm summer sun filtering in through the curtains. My dad, having recently moved back to the Old Country, flew my sister and I down here to marvel at my stepmom’s very pregnant belly in person, and I’m taking advantage of the relative quiet to do some writing. This is a far cry from my usual workspace in the Fishtown row home I share with Dick, where Abby Dog and Catarina Cat alternately stomp their little paws and mewl for attention while the hamper, floors, stairways, dishes, area rugs, garbage bins, surfaces, and wrinkled dress shirts make their own silent, yet compelling, demands on my time.

That’s right: I’m a homemaker. With Dick off working all the hours God sent, leaving early in the morning for real estate or construction duties, coming back in the afternoon for a costume change, and then leaving again to wait tables until nighttime, it’s up to me to keep the house running as smoothly as possible. Unfortunately, I am pretty ill-equipped for the job. All I learned in Home Economics (I believe the late-nineties term for the course was “Life Skillz”) was how to sew a pillow in the shape of the first letter of my last name and bake chocolate-chip fudge diabetic coma brownie squares with powdered sugar dentist nightmare on top.

So I’m learning how to keep house as I go along, and paying some karmic dues along the way. Thing is, I’ve pretty much been a slob my whole life. I was spoiled all the way through my teens, my dorm room in New York City was already a hopeless dump when I arrived and stayed that way until I dropped out, and by the time I peeled myself off of the orange and brown 1970’s-era couch in my mother’s basement in 2001 and left home again, I had sussed out my own cabal of like-minded beasts, or “bellhops” if you want to get technical, with whom I could happily wallow in shared filth. Once all the wallowing was done, once the garbage in the kitchen extended a friendly appendage of beer bottles to meet with the pizza boxes in the living room, once the loose alliance of minor-league (and, sometimes, bi-curious) drunks in our double-wide trailer had decayed into a stale husk of mutual distrust and resentment, we went our separate ways.

My well-meaning father, having absolutely no idea what carnage lay in store, offered to “tidy up the place a little” for me, and I accepted. I was away at work when he showed up – in my imagination, armed with little more than a pink feather-duster, because it’s funnier that way – so I didn’t see his face when he laid eyes on the small landfill that occupied the trailer, but I bet if I could package that look I’d make at least enough to pay him back for the small army of hotel maids he had to contract in order to make the place look liveable again.

Fast-forward to: July of 2010. After both my boyfriend and I had alerted our respective landlords and roommates that we’d be moving in together, I got laid off. Dick and I had to knock our rent budget down a few, as well as find a landlord who didn’t ask too many questions. Our prayers were answered when I discovered that a former landlord of mine had finally managed to evict a pack of slovenly deadbeats and was getting ready to undertake a major clean-up of a row home next door to the one I live in a few years ago. I negotiated a lower rent in exchange for doing the fixing up myself, and before you could say “karma karma karma karma karma chameleon” I was on my knees and scrubbing.

The row home was a bigger dump than anything I’d ever seen before. The evicted tenants had been, according to my former roommates next door, “hippie ravers” who spent their spare time blasting techno music and tripping on acid. It soon became apparent that what they did not do with their time, however, was invest in cat litter. There’s really nothing quite like the sensation of petrified kitty-dooks rumbling through the tube of your shop-vac to test the gag reflex. And that was only the beginning of the crap I had to deal with.

The walls and ceilings were sloppily painted in bright teals and purples and oranges. Torn-out magazine pages were glued to the stairs and had to be individually scraped off. A wall in the second bedroom sported an artless mosaic composed of spare change, broken glass, and pigeon feathers. A few floorboards had been torn up, presumably in a search for hidden treasure. Someone had removed the blades from the ceiling fan. The floors were badly scratched and caked in grime and paint and mysterious stains, and there was garbage everywhere. Naturally, as is the case with houses like these, there was also a heavily-soiled, abandoned mattress propped up against a wall somewhere. The inside of the refrigerator launched a felony assault upon several of the senses. All that was missing from the scene was a chalk outline of a body.

I spent pretty much the entire the month of August spot-cleaning, and painting (and painting and painting and painting some more), and vacuuming, and bagging trash, and scraping gunk, and spackling the wall where I tore down that hideous mosaic, erasing every trace of the slobs who went before me, and erasing every trace of the slob I once was, too. In the end, the house was transformed from a Merry Prankster flophouse into something closer to the spirit of its original incarnation as one of the oldest residential buildings in Fishtown. I nicknamed the house “Old Glory” because some of the colors we used, sandy canvases and dark gray/blues and red accents, reminded me of the American flag.

The rehabilitation of Old Glory was a totally new experience for me, but Dick is used to that kind of thing. He remodels homes regularly, and he’s been a Martha Stewart fan and clean freak since time immemorial. He’d be only too happy to take over some of the housework if I started bringing in the bacon, and sometimes he calls me during the day to give me little messages of encouragement like “I just spent three hours in a frigid crawlspace under someone’s house, in a puddle, with people screaming at me, and it made me realize that you really need to get a job.”

Earlier today, my dad pointed out that I seemed a little preoccupied, and I am. I’m worried about Dick, on the other side of the world, working all the hours God sent without me at the house to dust the coffee table or iron his work shirts or pour his iced tea when he gets home at night. He works hard, and the rewards aren’t what they could be. It’s a tough time to be a real estate agent, and the restaurant tips aren’t coming in like they used to. Meanwhile, I, along with the multitudes of other Americans who have been hit with layoffs, continue to trawl the streets and the internet in search of work as the clock ticks away, or times out, on our unemployment benefits. There’s a pall of uncertainty hanging over the year to come, and that’s the backdrop to the life that Dick and I are starting together. To add insult to injury, I didn’t even get a wedding reception or a honeymoon (or a registry!) to break things up before becoming a house-husband.

Nonetheless, Old Glory still stands, neat and tidy, her walls a uniform color, her polyurethane’d floor a-gleam, her picket fence all a-picket, her stairways and surfaces untroubled by dust bunnies or acid-induced craft projects, at least until we move on and our landlord chances it with the next set of Fishtown hopefuls. If I can be sure of nothing else these days – and these days feel as unsure as any – I can know for a fact that if I call upon the power of the elbow grease within, I can keep house like a motherfucker. And that is a good thing.

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