In This House That I Call Home

by Jim Washburn

On this date in history, July 5, the Salvation Army was founded in 1865; Spam was introduced in 1937; the bikini debuted in 1946; the United Kingdom initiated its national public health system in 1948; Dolly the sheep, the world’s first cloned mammal, came into existence in 1996; and back in 1776, one has to presume, our Founding Fathers were drunk off their brandy-packed asses, celebrating the lovely document they had just brought forth.

And on this week in 2007, FourStory toddled into this august company, bringing into being a new website dedicated to issues of affordable housing, homelessness, and pretty much everything else, it’s turned out.

It all connects, at least to my addled brain. Though we may not always strive to make the connection obvious, whether we’re writing about Afghanistan or the price of popcorn at a movie theater, it cycles back to the basic fact that every person—the slow and infirm for sure, but even the assholes—deserves a roof over her or his head.

I read in the paper two weeks ago, for example, an interesting story about some of the private security contractors to whom we’ve outsourced tasks previously done in-house by our military throughout some 220 years of American history until Dick Cheney stepped in. These contractors, it appears, have been using some of our tax dollars—millions of them a week, actually—to pay “passage bribes” to, get this, the Taliban and other unfriendly Afghan insurgents, so that they can make their deliveries unimpeded to U.S. bases in that country. Which is one way to get things done, if you don’t mind being mercenary traitors to your own country.

You can be prosecuted in the U.S. for donating money to Muslim charities that help put roofs over people’s heads, but also may or may not have tenuous ties to terrorist groups. Meanwhile, these contractors who are already making obscene profits off war are cynically “getting the job done” by giving millions a week to terrorists in a war zone who are doubtless using the money to help kill our troops.

founding fathers, possibly drunk

Back in World War II or any other of our better wars, a story like that would have dominated the news in bleeding headlines until justice was served. What do we get? Three paragraphs inside the second section of the L.A. Times, cribbed from McClatchy Newspapers (which has thankfully broken several excellent stories recently), with no follow-up whatever.

And that pisses me off, and makes me think we’re sliding into the end days; that our moral compass has perhaps been so persistently oil-drenched, Enroned, AIGed and water-boarded that it just don’t work no more. But chiefly I think about the shelter that could have been provided to so many homeless persons with the tens of millions of tax dollars funneled to the Taliban, and the hundreds of millions going to the war profiteers and the trillions going into our military endeavors.

I ride my bike, and even in my well-off neighborhood there are foreclosed, vacant houses with dying yards. Ride across Newport Boulevard and there are warehouses sitting empty. Meanwhile, homeless folks in soil-shined clothes sleep on the grass strip near the 7-Eleven.

We’ve got people with no roofs over their heads, and an abundance of roofs with no people under them. And we’ve got more of both everyday because an arcane, abstract Wall St game went pffft! How do we, who would like to think ourselves rational and compassionate beings, follow the dictates of that game rather than our own hearts?

If I’m such a bleeding heart, why don’t I invite the homeless home? Well, I’m not that much of a bleeding heart. If I were, I wouldn’t have nicknamed our main local homeless guy Mr. Manatee. I just wish our society acted more like a society, and that the money we pay the government to secure the blessings, etc., would actually help those in need. Getting Mr. Manatee out of the shrubbery seems a better pursuit to me than concocting unnecessary wars to be profit centers for odious rich guys.

We’re not too many checks away from living in the bushes ourselves. My longtime readers—hi, Mom—know somewhat of our new house from reading about the traumatic big ass move from my home of 32 years last year. It wasn’t actually my home, but after three decades and paying for it thrice over in rent, it sort of felt like mine, right up to the point where the landlady decided she wanted her daughter to live there.

The wife and I like our new place much better. Our old house was a cheap tract home when it was built in 1955, and it didn’t get any better with time. It required a lot of goodwill and squinting to make it feel like a viable home. Once it was denuded of our eclectic clutter, I couldn’t help thinking, “Jesus, what a dump.” The contractor who came in it to spiff it up used nearly the same words. It is now spiffy, but I have to say I like things better where we are. We were due for a change.

Back in 1977, I decided I’d had it with college. My step-dad curiously around the same time decided he didn’t want a deadbeat kid living at home. My girlfriend and I moved into the only house we could find in Costa Mesa that didn’t make us cry. It was just one loser house after another, all looking like they were waiting for the day when crystal meth would be invented.

The house we’d rented out of necessity then became where I stayed through all manner of jobs and changes, always too poor or busy to move, not to mention having more crap than the Augean Stables. When my wife-to-be moved in, she made it clear she didn’t like the place one bit.

the old place

Then this move of necessity came up, and it was round two of looking at one creepy, soulless abode after another. My wife and I aren’t exactly the freshest chickens in the shop, and who knows how many good years anyone is allotted? When we found the house we’re now in, we had to ask ourselves: Do we want to settle for the cheapest, least hideous place we could find, so we might scrimp and save and maybe one day afford to buy a house we can barely stand? Or do we want to worry about the future later and live in a house today that feels like home even if we don’t own it?

It was a push poll, I admit. We ponied up the extra $1000 a month over what our old house was costing us and moved to a house that’s nice to wake up in.

It’s a mid-1940s home, with plaster walls, and hardwood floors that roll and pitch a bit. It feels like it was built to look pleasing to the human eye, not to look good on a spreadsheet. It’s got a big, private backyard with an avocado tree we’ve brought back from near death. It’s producing avocados now, and the squirrels eat them before they’re ripe, and our dog loves chasing squirrels, so everyone’s happy.

When I was a kid, I wanted to live in the Monsanto House of the Future. If you don’t recall it at Disneyland, it looked like something you could live in on the moon. It had that now-retro futuristic look that the optimistic late-’50s and early ’60s inspired. Nearly everything in the house, and the house itself, was made of plastic. Now I’m trying to minimize the amount of plastic in my life, what with all the petrochemical nuisances that come oozing out of them. Give me old wood and stuff.

It’s not a perfect house. Run the Hot faucet in the shower and it pumps out two and a half gallons before it begins to get hot. I know it’s that much water, because I put the showerhead in a bucket and use the water in the yard. Same thing doing dishes in the kitchen, but it takes three gallons there. We have a dishwasher, but we’ve only used it three times since we moved in.

I have my own Fortress of Solitude here, a free-standing back office where I can listen to a Pharoah Sanders tenor solo ten times over if I want, which I do want because it sounds at once like the cry of kindred human experience and the gnarliest dentist’s drill you’ve ever heard.

I only finally set up a stereo back here a few months ago. So much of our old life is still in boxes. I can’t access a section of my record collection, because I have the 8'x7' plywood mural from the early 1960s coffeehouse the Prison of Socrates leaning on the stacks, for want of anywhere else to put it. That’s the sort of clutter I engender.

“Why’s that there?” my wife often asks of various piles she finds in the house or yard, to which I can often only say, “Because it’s not somewhere else.” That is not a sufficient answer, I’m learning.

Comments

Comments closed.