Batt - Sugarhouse: a memoir

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.

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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 hauntsUtahSalt Lake City. 2. DwellingsMaintenance and repair. 3. Batt, Matthew C.Family. 4. Authors, American21 ST centuryBiography. 5. Life change events. I. Title.

PS 3602. A 8977 Z 46 2012

818'.603dc23 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 piatas. 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 piatas, 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 jalapeos. 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 jalapeo. 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.

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

RISTORO DAREZZO , 1282

YOUVE SEEN US. Them. Youve said to your sugar, What the hell do they think theyre doing? Youre on your stoop, your porch, your lanai, your whateverand as we pass by you scrunch forward, down to car-window height. Im gonna say something, you say, handing your honey the hose. Cant 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 youre just going to have to deal with it. Were not burglars or pedophiles, missionaries or Hari Krishnas. Were looking for a place to live. We need a home and we need one now.

Its the middle of July already, and its a desert wasteland here in Salt Lake City. For eight days running its been over a hundred degrees and the blacktop roads have begun to liquefynot to mention this three-year drought that a thousand inches of rain wont 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 cant rent again. Jenae and I have been together for six years and have lived in nearly as many apartments. And its not that Utah is exactly what we imagine when we say we want a place to call home, but itll 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, weve been driving around in Jenaes 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 knewrich or poor, young or oldlived 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 wasnt 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 didnt 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 dont live here. You just rent.

To buy a houseor at least to look in earnest for oneis to admit to yourself that you think youre ready. At the very least, that you should be ready. Time to suck it up and recognize that theres 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. Youre married, youre getting older, and your parents are looking more and more like the grandparents they are pestering you to make them. Its getting embarrassing. Your pathetic renters mailboxthe one with three former tenants names crossed outis 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.

Theres 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 Clashs call. If Im hiking the Appalachian Trail, its going to be with a Baby Bjorn or not at all. K2 and Kathmandu will have to take a bid on somebody elses death wish. Im getting old. Forty might be the new thirty, but nobody whos 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 Jenaes grandfather. These losses were devastating in their own ways, but Gramher death was utterly unacceptable. All bets were off after that. Our best couple-friends were getting divorced. Doctors detected a strange mass in my mothers abdomen, and, not to be upstaged, my grandfather started having trouble withamong a raft of other thingshis colon. It all seemed 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 couldnt 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 Alzheimers when I was admitted to the program, but she was perfectly clear when she threatened me if I quit school to move home. Dont you dare, she said, clamping down on my hand like a pipefitter. So help me God, Ill kill you myself.