Steve Bluestein - Memoir of a Nobody

Its Friday at about 11:30 a.m. and Ive started writing. My good friend, Carole Propp, talent producer, suggested that I should document my life for all to see because, Whod believe the crap that happens to you?! I guess I would, Carole, Im living it. Now I invite you, the readers, to live it along with me.

As we speak the handy man is in my garage trying to open the garage door, which fell on my car last night. Oh, its not one of those sectional garage doors you buy from Sears, with the row of tacky windows at the top. Oh no, its a solid wood, made by hand, weighs-a-ton door. Right now, its sitting on top of my car, the one that I was rear ended in last week by an eighteen year-old Israeli without insuranceThat car. I try to look on the bright side; the damage done by the Israeli can be repaired at the same time as the damage done by the garage door. I hope the body shop is having a two-for-one special. Couldnt you just kill me now?

So, the garage door has fallen and inside the garage are my car and the contents of the antique shop. What antique shop, you ask? The shop I opened in the hopes that it would give me something to do when I was not on the road, the hobby to keep my anxiety down, the place for me to go on Saturdaysthat antique shop. Its the one that, after I opened, got sold to a developer who gave me three months to get out. That one!

After filling the shop with thousands of fine antiques, I had to empty it into my carbefore it got rear endedthen crushed by my garage door. I brought home all that crap I mean fine antiques made my nice clean garage look like a flea market, and put out the garage sale notices on Craigslist: Come buy the antiques theyre half off. However, those antiques are sitting in my garage, which has no other access but the garage door and are being held hostage by a two-thousand-pound garage door built by some guy without a green card.

Let me explain my house to you. Its in Bel Air the slums of Bel Air but still Bel Air and it has been built into the side of a mountain. The same mountain that gave way last February and destroyed thirty years of memories when it filled my office with mud and water; that mountain (Feeling better about your life yet?). Okay, back to the house. You enter on the street level and travel up four flights of stairs as they carry you through the house. The foyer is on level one; my office is on level four. The garage is on level zerostreet level.

I needed to tell you this so youd appreciate the following. The handyman calls me on his cell phone from the garage (I told you its a big house) and asks me to come down and hand him his toolbox. Why? Theres no way out of the garage and after he squeezed in, the door closed just enough to trap him. Hes trapped in there with the car and the antiques and my tools and my trashcans and all the stuff one keeps in a garage. I walk down the four flights of stairs, hand him the toolbox through a crack just big enough to pass a wrench through and head back into the house. I find my dog, the new one, the one that weighs eighty-five pounds and eats whatever he feels like, that one. I find him with a wet coffee filter in his mouth and behind him a mountain of coffee grounds spread all over the living room. His tail wags rapidly so proud, look what I did. I stop and begin the process of cleaning up the wet coffee grounds that have fallen into the cracks of my antique pine planked floor. This process takes thirty minutes. I head back to my office on the fourth floor, the phone rings. Its the handyman, Can you come down and help me? I make the trek back down the four flights of stairs to find him peeing in an antique spittoon he found in my garage. Seriously, just kill me now.

We get the door opened. He rinses out the spittoon, which I plan to bury in my back yard after he leaves. What hes left me with is a two-by-four holding up the remnants of the garage door and five thousand dollars worth of antiques exposed to the street. Its sort of like a homeless persons wet dream.

Its 12:45 p.m. The Garage Door Doctor is coming at three oclock. This is not some name Ive made up. This is a company that does nothing but fix garage doors. There are all kinds of doctors. Ive seen the Door Doctor and the Rooter Doctor and the proverbial Doctor Doctor but this guy is the Garage Door Doctor. Youd expect him to show up in a white coat with rubber gloves. Instead you get a 350-pound Italian guy on parole for non-payment of spousal support. A guy youd run from in a dark alley, and this guy is going to fix my garage door. Ill fill you in on what good news he gives me after my consultation. Thats what they call it. Hes not coming to look at the door; hes coming to give me a consultation. What, in reality, hes coming to do is to suck out whatever is left in my checking account. See, hes like a real doctor.