Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1

  What We’ll Call Home

  The Scene and the Scenery

  Economy

  The Cuts and Clarities of Diamonds

  Chuck Norris Time

  South of Bountiful

  On Moving On

  2

  Gathering Jacks

  The Mandoor

  This Little Knife of Mine

  Fast Dancing

  Lesser Acts of Transubstantiation

  Remnants of an Ancient Sea

  Getting Out of Sand Traps

  In Defense of Dilettantes

  Behind the Confectionery

  Finish, Carpenter!

  3

  Watershed

  Homecoming

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © 2012 by Matthew Batt

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  WWW.HMHBOOKS.COM

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Batt, Matthew

  Sugarhouse: a memoir / Matthew C. Batt.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-547-63453-1 (pbk.)

  1. Batt, Matthew C.—Homes and haunts—Utah—Salt Lake City. 2. Dwellings—Maintenance and repair. 3. Batt, Matthew C.—Family. 4. Authors, American—21ST century—Biography. 5. Life change events. I. Title.

  PS3602.A8977Z46 2012

  818'.603—dc23 2011028553

  Book design by Patrick Barry

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Jeanne, Jenae, and Patti

  Books and houses are a lot like piñatas. You never really know what you're going to fi nd inside until you hit them with a stick. Or, of course, start reading about their ingredients. Most piñatas, you'll learn, are fi lled with real things like hard candy or jelly beans, but sometimes there are imitation things — like little erasers in the shape of jalapeños. Much less oft en, rutabagas. Inside this book are some sweet and some savory things, almost all of which are real. A few of them, however, are more eraser than jalapeño. That is, I had to change a few names and details to protect the more-or-less innocent. The following are pseudonyms: Stanley, Saul, Emma, Fiona, Tonya, and Daphne. The street name Franklin is also a pseudonym. Now then, here's your stick. Start swinging.

  1

  It is a dreadful thing for the inhabitants of a house not to know how it is made.

  —RISTORO D’AREZZO, 1282

  What We’ll Call Home

  YOU’VE SEEN US. Them. You’ve said to your sugar, What the hell do they think they’re doing? You’re on your stoop, your porch, your lanai, your whatever—and as we pass by you scrunch forward, down to car-window height. I’m gonna say something, you say, handing your honey the hose. Can’t have people just driving around like that, all slow and everything, rubbernecking. Can I help you? you ask. You shake your head as we speed away. Freaks.

  But you’re just going to have to deal with it. We’re not burglars or pedophiles, missionaries or Hari Krishnas. We’re looking for a place to live. We need a home and we need one now.

  It’s the middle of July already, and it’s a desert wasteland here in Salt Lake City. For eight days running it’s been over a hundred degrees and the blacktop roads have begun to liquefy—not to mention this three-year drought that a thousand inches of rain won’t fix. The air is so hot and brittle it feels as though my skin might shatter, and beyond that the lease on our apartment is up in six weeks and we just can’t rent again. Jenae and I have been together for six years and have lived in nearly as many apartments. And it’s not that Utah is exactly what we imagine when we say we want a place to call home, but it’ll have to do for now. Still, we have no mover, no moving date, no home loan for that matter, and no home upon which we can make an offer.

  It is not, however, for a lack of looking. Since May, Jenae (sounds like Renee with a J, as she says) and I have picked up every homebuyers’ guide in the grocery store, studied each realty website till our eyes bled, and cased favorable neighborhoods so methodically we could put them back together from memory were they ever to fall apart. Then again, we’ve been driving around in Jenae’s VW Beetle, a yellow poppy waving like a drag queen from the dashboard vase; we are a threat only to good sense, fundamentalists, and long-legged passengers.

  Having rented apartments for so long, we usually lived near other renters. We met in Boston, where everybody we knew—rich or poor, young or old—lived in apartments, even if they owned them. In the West, and especially Utah, practically everyone we know owns her own house. Fellow waiters, writers, graduate students . . . everybody. Having just moved there, it made us feel like pariahs. It wasn’t only how we paid for the roof above us, it was who we were and what we did to our communities: we were renters. An easy mark for the missionaries, for that matter.

  When looking for an apartment, we had sought convenience, proximity to bars and grocery stores, off-street parking, soundproofing against the klezmer music that wafted around our invariably bohemian neighborhoods, a backyard for the beer-can bowling, a porch for the rocking chairs, and a nice corner for the spittoon. We didn’t have to worry about the neighborhood, the neighbors, not even the place itself. It would have been like worrying about the feng shui of a bus station bathroom stall. An apartment is utilitarian and temporary. Go ahead, dance with that glass of red wine, smoke those cigars, fry up some catfish, juggle those skunks. You don’t live here. You just rent.

  To buy a house—or at least to look in earnest for one—is to admit to yourself that you think you’re ready. At the very least, that you should be ready. Time to suck it up and recognize that there’s relatively little pride to be had in the fact that your downstairs neighbors are as careful as they promise about cleaning their guns or that you managed to keep a ficus alive from Halloween until Thanksgiving, whereupon it shrugged all its leaves ceremonially to the floor. You’re married, you’re getting older, and your parents are looking more and more like the grandparents they are pestering you to make them. It’s getting embarrassing. Your pathetic renter’s mailbox—the one with three former tenants’ names crossed out—is stuffed with your friends’ baby-shower invitations. Just a few months ago, right after my grandmother died, five different people mentioned the word “ultrasound” to me on the same day.

  There’s something dreadful, however, about buying a house. You have to be willing to say to yourself, There go my freewheeling days of touring the Arctic on a kite-powered bobsled. So much for starting up that punk-rock band that was finally going to answer The Clash’s call. If I’m hiking the Appalachian Trail, it’s going to be with a Baby Bjorn or not at all. K2 and Kathmandu will have to take a bid on somebody else’s death wish. I’m getting old. Forty might be the new thirty, but nobody who’s twenty thinks so. It was time to grow up and settle down.

  And, adulthood had just coldcocked us. First my adoptive dad died. Then Gram. Then Jenae’s grandfather. These losses were devastating in their own ways, but Gram—her death was utterly unacceptable. All bets were off after that. Our best couple-friends were getting divorced. Doctors detected a strange mass in my mother’s abdomen, and, not to be upstaged, my grandfather started having trouble with—among a raft of other things—his colon. It all seem
ed to be happening at the same time, on the same day, every hour on the hour.

  Between the birth announcements and the death certificates, we couldn’t tell up from down. Even the simplest facts and dates became obscured, irrelevant. All we knew was that everyone but us was dying, getting divorced, or having a kid, and we were stuck with our hands in our pockets waiting for the band to start. Life and death were coming for us, and we could either dig in, settle down, and try to defend the home front, or agree to shake hands and walk quietly away from the line and go our separate ways.

  True, Utah seemed the oddest of places for us to be buying a house, but I was in a graduate program at the university and Jenae had recently landed a good job at a theater downtown, and since Gram had died, there was nothing to pull us back to the Midwest. Gram had been fading rapidly with Alzheimer’s when I was admitted to the program, but she was perfectly clear when she threatened me if I quit school to move home. “Don’t you dare,” she said, clamping down on my hand like a pipefitter. “So help me God, I’ll kill you myself.”

  I didn’t want to stay in Utah, but I knew Gram could hold her liquor as well as she could throw a punch, and I just couldn’t let her down. If we left Utah and the grad program I was in, it all would have been wasted and I’d be waiting tables full time. The long and the short of it was I was her only grandchild and she wanted me to make something of myself. That drive and her daughter’s life were all she held on to all those years. After she died, it was time to act.

  I had tried to defer settling down, kept telling Jenae and myself, After I finish my master’s. And then, Well, we can’t buy a house on an adjunct’s salary, I better go back and get another degree. And then, Clearly we can’t buy a house on a student’s stipend. It was always something. Renting, like long-term dating or being a grad student or a waiter, is at once pathetic and comforting. You have announced to the world that you simultaneously aspire to grow up and move out of your childhood bedroom—your Michael Jackson Thriller! poster having been first hot, then sad, then ironic, then hot again, and then, finally, creepy and tragic—but you’re not yet ready to be on your own.

  We didn’t want to be those people.

  We began driving around and around, blowing off parties, leaving work early, eating nuclear things from the 7-Eleven, spiraling around greater Salt Lake City in our neo-retro car. The dashboard was littered with website printouts, pamphlets, for-sale-by-owner flyers, burrito wrappers, cigarette papers, ashes. Soon we felt like those dizzy, singed birds in that Yeats poem who can’t find their way home and accidentally trigger the apocalypse. There was no telling. Jenae’s car was a diesel Beetle and put out some fairly chunky exhaust.

  Every For Sale sign we passed presented a philosophical, theological, existential quandary vis-à-vis geography. It was in the air in Salt Lake City, the spot where Brigham Young and his fiercely oh-so-sober band of true believers succinctly if unpoetically proclaimed, after years of wayfaring, “This is the place.” Really. They did. There’s even a This Is The Place Park, right by the university at the base of Emigration Canyon. Utah’s a beautiful if somewhat literal-minded state.

  So, a spit of arguably fertile land shimmed between a desert and a mountain. What does it mean to call this place home? Not for Brig, for us. How, after all, do we know if it is home? How many years, decades, or generations have to pass before we can say our brood calls this place home? Our friends back east would surely mock a Utah return address without an apartment number. Maybe we could get a post office box in Colorado, have the mail forwarded. Do we have to say we live here? Isn’t it complicated enough to say, simply, we live?

  Moreover, how will we decide on an actual house? Will we know it when we see it? Will we be able to say, This is the threshold I want to cross into the world every day. This is the lawn I’ll hopelessly gird up for August. This the window the neighbor boy will break with his errant fly ball. This the tree from which the cat will learn to fly. The backyard where the spaniel will finally trump the squirrel. The kitchen where we’ll burn sacrificial birds for our family’s Thanksgiving. The office where I’ll get some work done. The stoop where we can sit and share anything. The bedroom where we’ll play God. The roof I’ll stand on, defiant, garden hose in hand, watering the shingles against some wildfire. The front door we’ll swing open, keys jingling from the lock, hollering like husbands, like wives, like fathers, like mothers, like those who own the thresholds they cross, Honey, I’m home!

  Is this the place? Are we the people?

  The Scene and the Scenery

  JENAE AND I met in graduate school in Boston. Neither of us really knew what we were doing there. It was graduate school. School for graduates. Even the phrase implied we were doing something we had already done. We didn’t know what we wanted out of it, just that we didn’t want lifedom proper to officially start.

  Initially I wore a blazer and glasses to class, even though I didn’t really need either of them. My thermostat runs hot and my eyes were fine, but I had seen pictures of the Kennedys; I was doing what I thought I had to. Jenae arrived in Boston straight from Nebraska, sight unseen, with a couple hundred dollars, no place to live, and nothing—no shit—but a duffle bag over her shoulder. She was a pioneer in reverse. She was astonishing. I immediately noticed three things about her: (1) she did what she wanted, (2) she said what she thought, and (3) she wore really short skirts. I don’t know that I’d call this feminism of the purest order, but something like it.

  The first day of class, I sat next to her. Paul, our professor, had us arranged in a circle. The whole group soon devolved into a brutal argument about the nature of communication and the dim prospect of anyone actually knowing anyone else. To prove this point, Jenae and I disagreed violently with each other. The next class, I sat across from her. And not because of her skirt. I was so irritated and bothered, but also helplessly smitten, I felt like I was sitting on broken glass. She was the most contemptible, contrary, downright ornery woman I’d ever met. I’d seen Casablanca. I knew what that meant. I was in for it.

  All the new students were invited to attend an informative gathering with something called The Bridge. At first I wondered if it wasn’t some pre-AA thing for those of us seeking a way out of the beer-and-vomit-soaked undergraduate days. It turned out to be a student-run, nonprofit theater company made up almost exclusively of transplanted flatlanders, and it put on overlooked works of well-known writers. Guaranteed obscurity, in other words.

  Despite my social awkwardness and complete lack of theater experience, I auditioned for and got the part of Duff in Harold Pinter’s Moonlight. I think my casting had more to do with the likelihood of my being able to grow a mustache by the show date than histrionic promise, but who knows. The mid-nineties, at any rate, were not a grand time for twenty-two-year-old mustachioed men in greater Boston. I looked like that washed-up, back-from-the-Yankees scourge Wade Boggs. Not a welcome sight in the shadow of Fenway where I lived. But it was all for art, I told myself.

  When the day of the show came, my joints went to jelly. I rode the T with my mustache and Irish tweed cap and vest, clenching my unlit pipe as if my virginity depended on it. When I got to campus the theater was awry with the whine of power tools and the smell of wet paint.

  Just then a girl in overalls, a goofy bucket hat, and pigtails came up to me. She held a paintbrush in one hand and with the other grabbed my arm and whispered something supportive. Her hand—I thought it was mineral spirits—her hand burned my arm. I had never been held quite so firmly or so hotly. It was Jenae. From school. She was working with The Bridge? She seemed so different outside of the classroom. She stood there. She smiled. She held my arm. Lordy.

  “I think I’m supposed to say ‘break a leg,’” she said, her words like subtitles of a sweet silent film. Power saws sparked in the background and the lighting rig rose right over our heads.

  I was vaguely dating a severely pale Connecticut girl who lived in an apartment where Edgar Allan Poe once vomited, and Jen
ae was going with a guy who had purportedly gotten her to eat steamed mussels on an early date. I told myself that that mattered. That we were in relationships.

  “So,” she said, “break a leg.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I just might.”

  My Fenway apartment cost $750 a month, as much as the lease on a Maserati in those days, but the kitchen was so small that you couldn’t open the oven if the refrigerator was ajar, and when you were in the bathroom you had to be in the tub or on the toilet before you could shut the door. But on summer afternoons I could hear the organist at the ballpark practicing everything from “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” to “Blitzkrieg Bop.” The Museum of Fine Arts was a five-minute walk across the Fens, and sometimes I’d go just to look at this one Hopper painting, Room in Brooklyn, which made me feel as if I were peering into a mirror that transformed me, awkwardly, into a mopey girl who sat around in her underwear waiting for something to happen. I was living alone for the first time and, for the most part, loved it, but I was also more lonely than I had ever imagined I could be. I only had classes a couple of times a week, and play rehearsals were infrequent. That left acres of time and space between me and the next human contact I’d have. If I didn’t count clerks, bus drivers, and panhandlers, I could go for days without talking to or touching anyone.

  Down my block was a bar and grill called Thornton’s. It was owned by two Michigander brothers, Bud and Marty, and they gave me a job as a busboy and paid me in cash. They wore ponytails, T-shirts promoting tequila or light beer, and silver-tipped cowboy boots. If there was a God in Bud and Marty’s universe, it was Bob Seeger and the Silver Bullet Band, and they tried to persuade their bartender Rock, an Iggy Pop stunt double who controlled the stereo, to play the great B.S. and the S.B.B. at least once a day. All of their sandwiches were named after Jack Nicholson movies or Grateful Dead trivia. Jerry’s Missing Fingers, for example, being the least popular, if most intriguing.