EPILOGUE: GOOD NIGHT AUSTIN WHEREVER YOU ARE

Being a big fan of closure I wanted to let y’all know a few things. First, this is the last post of this little blog, which began just about a year ago in a moment of frustration with the insanity of the Austin housing market. Thank you so much for stopping by and following the chapters as I explored my housing history in Austin.

I had no idea– I mean none, zero, zip– that a few months after I began this emotional journey that I would be leaving Austin. I loved my little Cherrywood house. Figured I’d live out my days there if I could just keep paying the taxes, which, granted, was a big if. And I certainly could not imagine what would unfold for me later in the year.

The short version is I met up with an old friend that I’d only seen once before since we graduated from high school in 1982. We got to talking and talking some more and super fast forward here, he made it possible for me to move to a ranch in Garfield, which I am busy converting into a venue for weddings, memorial services, and other events, and also hope to use for meditation retreats. His generosity also allowed me to not rush to sell my Cherrywood house, which meant I could tell the occasional vultures who showed up– those fuckers who prey on poor people who have to sell their houses in a rush– to piss off.

I had tried selling my house on my own but that wasn’t going great. In my business as a wedding officiant, I hear from potential clients who, upon hearing my rates, balk and say they’ll have a friend do the honors for free. Sometimes that works out great. But I also hear stories in which a wedding is memorable not in a good way because a non-professional tried to run the show. Point is, I understand the benefit of having a professional take care of business. Trying to sell my house on my own wasn’t about hating realtors– I have lots of realtor friends. It was about hoping to not pay 6% buyer/seller commission because this ranch project is expensive and literally every single penny counts. I figured with my social media reach and the market being strong, I could make it happen. And likely I could have, but as one month turned into two, I also had to factor in that each month I didn’t sell it was another month paying my exorbitant mortgage.

Then another option was suggested. A friend of mine has twice used Aaron Farmer of Texas Discount Realty, a realtor who charges a flat rate instead of a commission. (That’s him up above, to the right of the picture of me meditating in my old house.) I had a talk with Aaron, liked what he had to say, which, coupled with the strong recommendation of my friend, convinced me to work with him. Aaron made the process super easy, gave direct and honest opinions, let me keep the walls blue, but convinced me to fix up the front and back yards, which my friend Doug busted ass to get done. 

Shortly thereafter, a young couple came to visit. They grew up in Austin. They loved the place. They particularly loved the yellow tile in the little kitchen, because that was the same tile the wife’s grandmother had in her kitchen. Now I had tried to convince myself, based on sage wisdom from a friend, to stop being sentimental, to concentrate on the business side of selling the place. But really what I kept hoping for, even if it wasn’t my place to do so, was just this sort of thing– potential buyers in love with yellow tile, who can see the house for its loveliness, who do not want to destroy it. 

Also, as I wished most of all, I am certain they will be good neighbors to Lawrence, which really, truly, was my greatest wish. He is the best neighbor I ever had. Leaving him was hardest of all. 

I still come into Austin regularly to teach and buy groceries at Wheatsville. I like being able to visit. But just as I never had a moment of buyer’s remorse when I got my little Cherrywood house, so far I have zero regrets about my move to the country. It is glorious out there. 

If you want to follow the adventures of my surprise new life, and learn more about how you can rent the Tiny T Ranch for events, or come stay for a quiet visit, please check out my new blog: Spike’s Tiny T Ranch.

Thanks again, y’all. 

Love,

Spike

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: GOODBYE AUSTIN AND WHO WANTS TO BUY MY HOUSE?

Yesterday morning I woke up in my Cherrywood home for the last time. I loaded my dogs living and dead into the car (Rebound perched gingerly atop the urn holding Bubbles’ ashes) and then I officially left Austin for good. This after twenty-four plus years of living in this town, and ten and a half years of living in one house. Even though I’ve known for nearly two months that I’d be leaving, and even though I’m really excited about my next adventure, the whole thing is terribly unsettling. 

I moved here in 1991 rather on a whim. I’m exiting not precisely on a whim, but courtesy of some remarkable circumstances so kooky that even I am having a hard time wrapping my head around them. A lot of you know the story already. For those of you who don’t, the short version is this: an old friend of mine stepped forward and offered to help me acquire land upon which to build a tiny secular chapel. The land we happened to find is a thirty-acre ranch in Garfield. The ranch has a house upon it with five bedrooms. We’ve got our work cut out for us rehabbing the house, which is a cross between The Money Pit and The Shining, but the goal is to very soon open up a space that can be used for weddings, memorial services, concerts, writing workshops, and meditation retreats, as well as offer sanctuary for bereft parents. 

Upon leaving Austin yesterday I stopped at the ranch to drop off Bubbles and meet my friends Doug and Stevage, who very kindly loaded and unloaded a Uhaul including my son’s five million pound piano and my seven thousand pound bed. There were contractors all over the place, blasting out the floor and knocking down walls in the barn. The only usable room right now, aka my Living Pod, is so full of boxes it’s hard to move around. And so once again I loaded the dogs in the car– this time just the living ones– and ran away to Galveston, to my secret writing garret, a space my generous friends let me use whenever I need to meditate a lot and process. 

Right now I can barely move. I have felt physically ill since I left my home yesterday. This is not related to fear that I made the wrong choice in moving. It is simply that old thing about how change is hard. I remember the day my son and I were scheduled to move from our Hyde Park rental to the Cherrywood house. He was fourteen. He’d agreed the new house was a good one. But when it came time to go, he panicked, grabbed his guitar, and took off to stay with friends for a few days. I tried to understand that back then. Yesterday I understood it way better. 

In the meanwhile, I’ve been trying to sell my Cherrywood house, but I’ve been doing it in kind of my classic punk rock style. A well-seasoned realtor friend offered to help me with the paperwork if I wanted to try to sell it on my own. That would save me a lot in commissions. I liked that idea. I also decided I would try to sell the house as-is. And by as-is I’m talking about a house in which nearly every single wall is painted some shade of blue (in some cases electric blue). 

Why as-is? The answer involves a combination of many things. For one, I think it would be stupid to give the house a whore’s bath, dump a bunch of cash into making cosmetic fixes that any new owner would then go and re-do. So let’s say I painted the walls beige and threw some pansies in the front yard and a $20K IKEA kitchen in. Toward what end? So I could price it higher? 

Also, there’s The Market, which is a sellers’ market, so you can actually potentially get a good price for an as-is house. Everyone says, “Oh your house will sell in a week!” 

But then, that hasn’t happened. Could be that the flier I put out is pretty grouchy, warning off hagglers, vultures, flippers, and agents. Could be I haven’t gotten the word out enough. Could be that I am asking “too much.” 

So how did I pick a price? Before I tell you that, let me say that whenever I say or type the number– which for the record is $333,000– I feel kind of like a dick. I mean, that is an insane amount for an 1136 square foot house, right? And yet it is priced less per square foot than most other listings in the neighborhood. On the other hand, those other houses have mostly had the Whore’s Bath Remodel Special. 

As I detailed in an earlier post, TCAD appraised my house at $329,000 earlier this year. I protested that and got it down to $298,000, though I was shocked and pissed off to find out that due to homestead blah blah blah my actual tax amount did not go down. Such a fucking load of horse shit. But when I decided to sell, I took into account the initial TCAD 2015 assessment and also that, based on that number, my house has very nearly doubled in value in ten years. 

While I can’t imagine it doubling again in the next decade– Jesus that would be right around $666,000, the Devil’s Deal– and while I do think there will be an economic dip soon, I know damn well that the Cherrywood neighborhood has been so gentrified that there is no way the value will significantly drop. Which means anyone who buys it will make significant money off of it when they sell it.

Sounds suspiciously like I’m referring to my house as a “potential investment” doesn’t it? Sounds like I’m being one of those asshole sellers I accuse others of being. Perhaps I am. Although in my defense I have repeatedly emphasized that I am most interested in finding buyers who want to live in the house, who do not want to knock it down and put up a McFuckingMansion, and who– above all– will love on my neighbor Lawrence, who is the best neighbor I’ve ever had. 

A few people have come to look at the place. I confess I dreaded these meetings. It’s like a worse version of a yard sale, when someone picks up the tchotchke you really didn’t want to part with, that stuffed monkey some hot carnie won for you down the Jersey shore in ‘83, the one you priced at a mere one dollar– such a sacrifice! such a steal! But some early bird shopper comes, picks up the monkey, winces, exhales theatrically, and says, “I’ll give you a dime for it.” 

In reality, the visitors who came to check out the place were all really nice. They did not (outwardly) mock my “taste.” For my part, proving that I could never, ever, ever sell used cars (or maybe anything), my strategy was to point out every single flaw I knew of. I’m all about the full disclosure. So I showed the casement window “repairs” I’d done with neon green duct tape. I explained the heating and a/c is uneven through the house. I admitted the plumbing is eventually going to need to be replaced. Three couples were especially interested, but none put in a bid. Still, I was pleased that they could appreciate this house, my home. 

Now that I’m all moved out, I’m going to cave in and list it. NOTE TO ALL AGENTS– SHUT UP AND DO NOT CONTACT ME. I have an agent. (Aside: I listed it on Zillow for one day, and did not include my phone number, and was nonetheless inundated with calls from shark agents who would not reveal how they got my number.) Listing it means that it is Whore’s Bath time. I’m not going to re-do the kitchen, but those blue walls are going away and the lawn is getting mowed and the pansies might have to make an appearance. 

I’m curious to see what the place fetches, and how fast (or not) it sells. Every penny I clear from the sale (not as much as you might think, since the original mortgage was interest only and I never could get it refinanced, so I owe a shit ton) is going to the ranch renovations and the Tiny Chapel project. 

Which brings me full circle here. Don’t let knowing I’m sitting at the beach feeling like puking fool you. I really am so excited for this next big chapter in my life. I can’t wait to have you all out for concerts and retreats. I’m excited that I’ll be able to see so many stars at night. I will so so so so SO not miss the goddamned motherfucking Austin traffic. I will not miss seeing cranes everywhere. I will not miss all the other signs blaring that Austin has changed so much, too much, too fast, and become on so many levels a playground for the rich, driving out artists and others who can no longer afford to live in the place they love and helped make so lovable.

But I will miss all the good parts that remain– and there are so many. And I will always miss that Cherrywood house, the longest place I ever called home as an adult. Hello Garfield. Goodbye Austin. Thank you for a quarter century of awesome. 

Love,

Spike

Austin Real Estate Cherrywood For Sale by Owner Gentrification Austin

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: HISTORY REPEATS– WEST AUSTIN HOUSING 1855-2015

Like so many people, I moved to Austin on what seemed like a whim but then I came to regard as fate. I know another big reason folks wind up here is because they attend UT and then stick around. I think part of my sticking around relates to UT. I never went to school there (though I did write term papers for a living back in 1991). But being around a place that has so many resources, so many smart people, and a perpetual influx if youth definitely keeps this place interesting. 

Recently I had two excellent opportunities to explore West Campus housing. One came as an invitation to learn more about the Neill-Cochran House at 2310 San Gabriel Street. The other came as an invitation to explore student housing options for the daughter of my high school friend Sean. Jocelyn, upon receiving a tour of Austin by yours truly, decided to transfer here. So yeah, that’s right– the same one complaining about too many newcomers rallied to get another person to move here. Can’t help it. Despite all the griping, I still have my Austin pride. 

Now you might wonder how in the hell I am going to relate brand spanking new, wildly overpriced private student housing with an historic mansion that was erected in 1855. My secret weapon is A.P. Perry. She is the business and projects manager for NCH. Among other things, the house, which is also a museum, hosts weddings. In my other life, when I’m not bitching about housing, I joyfully perform weddings. That was my first introduction to the place last fall. A.P. and I agreed to put our heads together to see about getting more folks to consider the location for their nups. 

Well our first meeting immediately veered toward the history of the place– I am a total hog for Austin history– and I was so impressed I immediately made a date to return with Noska, my favorite historian. Noska was the one who explained to me some time ago that if you want to really blame someone for the traffic problem in Austin, you should go back and point the finger at the dude who started the pre-bridge ferry across Town Lake. 

Noska and I sat and were joyfully schooled by A.P. who explained the story of NCH, which was built in 1855, began in 1839 when Austin was founded on the then edge of the Anglo-American Texas frontier to encourage folks to move further west. Eventually the capital moved away and then back again, and if you want to know more about that I suggest making an appointment with Noska at Southside Tattoo and getting some ink while he spells it out for you. 

For now let’s talk about Abner Cook, who moved to Austin in 1839, when he was but a 25 year old pup. Entrepreneurial and cunning, Abner built up some businesses quick, including a mill in Bastrop. Though not officially an architect, he was a supplier, contractor, and master builder. He had a monopoly on brick and masonry supplies. He was commissioned to build a lot of buildings that are now famous landmarks, like the governor’s mansion.

Enter Washington and Mary Hill. Wash was a 28 year old with big aspirations. He brought Abner in to build a house but his eyes were bigger than his plate, or something like that. Which is to say he couldn’t really afford to build his dream home. So he cut some corners. Namely he used rubble limestone– the bumpy stuff– and, sad to say it but it’s true: slave labor. Aside: of the 3400 people listed as living in Austin according to the 1860 census, 900 of them were slaves. So, you know, it wasn’t always an outpost of liberalism here. 

Despite taking first one mortgage and then another, and then selling his slaves for $2000 to further finance the house, Wash tanked, his decision to sell fueled not only by lack of funds but Mary’s fear of the Apaches. He sold the place to Swisher & Swenson (again, make an appointment with Noska if you want to know more about those early Austin fat cats). They both sat on the board for the Texas Asylum for the Blind and they leased the place to the asylum as its first brick-and-mortar location.

Then comes the Civil War, and the history of the house gets a little murky, though the house was used by Fletcher Stockdale, the lieutenant governor in 1863. Next George Armstrong Custer heads to Texas to oversee the return of the state to the Union, and he requisitions the house from Stockdale, promising to pay rent to Swisher & Swenson, but failing to make good on the promise, thus becoming squatter of elegance. He turned the house into a quarantine hospital for awhile, and in this incarnation it was sort of a de facto frat house, filled with a bunch of rowdy recuperating soldiers with too much time and too many guns on their hands. They trashed the place and some of the holes in the wall may or may not be of the bullet variety. Swisher & Swenson, learning of the demise, tried and failed to get federal funding to restore it. 

Enter Charles Whitis (as in the dude for whom Whitis Ave is named) in 1872 who ponies up the dough to buy the house and the adjacent 17.5 acres. He rented the place out whilst it was under repair, then flipped it four years later, handing over the keys to Andrew and Jenny Neill. Andrew was a man of questionable repute, kicked out of the Freemasons when a pile of money disappeared on his watch. I’m not saying these things are related, but he also apparently hosted many a grand party at his estate. 

Andrew kicked it in 1883, right around the time the face of the neighborhood was changing. The nearest community was a Freedman settlement– note that the currently-in-operation Freedman’s BBQ is not some randomly named hipster joint latching onto history. It is history. The University of Texas, which was legally created by the Texas Legislature in 1881 and officially opened in 1883, prompted the area to pick up steam and finally stand out on the pre-Google map. 

Jenny Neill continued to reside in the house for nine years after her husband died, eventually moving out and renting to the Cochran family, who bought it in 1895. In 1958 they sold the house to The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the State of Texas (don’t even try to acronym that), a group of women preservationists not unlike the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. 

Which brings us up to the now. The house, which is totally groovy and definitely worth a visit, exists as a museum and event space. Really, if you want to get married in town, I highly recommend it. It also stands as a testament to the ever changing times of Austin Housing. 

Toward that end, I have to say that my talks with A.P. about how the house came to be and changed hands over the years oddly cheered me regarding the current market. I am still really pissed off about what’s happening in Austin now, how there is no affordable housing, and how my son, who grew up here, will never be able to afford to buy a house here (which is why I tell him he better be really, really, REALLY nice to me always since he is my sole heir). But sitting in those high-ceilinged rooms, thinking about how the land had once been a wilderness, and then not, and now the place sits anachronistically amongst a bustling array of shiny new and crappy old student housing– well, you know, change happens. I don’t think I’ll ever fully adjust to the changes, but perspective and the longview are useful tools in not blowing a gasket every five minutes. 

On the other hand, and to bring it to the very immediate present, there is the matter I mentioned earlier– my friend’s daughter trying to find a decent place to stay as she moves to town to attend UT. Sean and I went to visit a company that rents out private apartments specifically for students. The place they actually had available for the fall semester was not open for viewing the day we went, so we looked at a model. The model was in a building adjacent to a liquor store and across the street from a frat house– utterly conducive to quiet studying no doubt. 

The space we saw was 698 square feet. The cost– sit down: $1385 per month. You have to sign a one-year lease. If you have a second person sharing the rent jumps to $1445 per month. If you bring a car that’s another $99 per month. Cable is free. The internet is $5 a month. WHAT? That is SO FUCKING STUPID. I mean just add it into the rent. Don’t make is sound like an option. Students need the internet. DUH. 

Let’s do the math here. So if I am a student that wants to live alone in The Quarters (yes, the private dorm is apparently named after a drinking game!), that is going to run me $16,620 in rent, $1,188 in parking (because if my folks can pony up nearly $17K in rent you better believe I’m bringing my Beamer), and, also $60 for the internet. GRAND TOTAL: $17,868 PER YEAR. TO LIVE IN LESS THAN 700 SQUARE FEET NEXT TO A BUNCH OF DRUNK FRAT BOYS. 

WTF? Who can afford that? When I moved to Austin I think I made maybe $14,000 annually working my various jobs at the Mag South, Esther’s Follies and The Chronicle. Rent consumed maybe a third of that. I don’t even know the cost of taking classes at UT these days, but I’d say if you are a student trying to make it on your own working for $10 per hour you’d have to work full time plus overtime just to pay the rent (or take out a loan that will more than quadruple once you pay it off, or die trying). What time is left to study and throw up with the Greek neighbors? ZERO. 

I don’t have a fabulous conclusion for you this time out. This city is nuts, totally nuts. Just like old Wash Hill dreamed bigger than his budget and used slaves to build a house he couldn’t afford to finish, we’re watching an awful lot of homes pop up, mortgaged by big dreamers spending beyond their true reach, hiring construction companies that rely heavily on workers who are People of Color– many of them Mexican-American and Mexican. I promise you these workers are not seeing the sort of big bucks the developers are. 

And so the rich get richer and the rest of us start thinking what? Buda? Buda isn’t so far away. Buda? Sounds like Buddha. Maybe it’s time to go. 

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Austin Housing Austin Real Estate Developers Suck Gentrification

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE NEW AUSTIN ECONOMY

For the past several months I’d been planning a trip to England. The way the plan worked was the way most of my international trip planning works. I get an idea. I wish really hard. I recognise that realistically the trip is far beyond my reach. And then at the last minute, I find a way to magically make it happen. 

I’ve used this method to get to Japan– twice. And Argentina. And France. And Israel. Two years ago the magic got super amazing when I won a trip to London. These secular miracles might be a testament to my sheer will, but I’d also say they involve a lot of luck, and plenty of encouragement from friends. 

As the 2015 wore on though, the more I tried to will the UK journey to manifest, the more obstacles appeared in my path. There’s this crazy root canal that has already taken four wildly painful sessions, isn’t done yet, and set me back about the price of a ticket to Heathrow. There’s my ancient plumbing (to which I am referring my house, not my lady parts) that continues to fall apart. I have a wonderful, big time proselytizing plumber who has worked to make fixes as needed on a budget, and still that work has run me the cost of a plane ticket, boarding the dogs, buying my twenty closest friends MIND THE GAP t-shirts, and enough Pret a Manger sandwiches to tide me over for two weeks in the land of the queen. And then, of course, there was the major jump in both my property taxes and my mortgage, which no bank will refinance.

So it came to pass that a few weeks ago I had to admit a truth that had been mocking me. The trip to England was not going to happen. I understand that not getting to partake in international travel is a First World Problem. Although my very pronounced defensive side wants to point out this was not going to be a mere leisure trip. Some of my very closest friends moved there last year and they are part of my chosen family. I miss them terribly.

Yesterday was the day I’d hoped to get on the plane. Instead, I spent the day in Austin. Did I stew in my juices? I did not. Far from it. Rather I spent the day, and several days prior, enjoying the hell out of myself, fully immersing in The Real Austin, which I am delighted to report still very much exists in spite of the insane housing market, the 158 daily interlopers, the criminally high property taxes, and the fucking dumbass lack of planning regarding all the buildings going up and the rage-inspiring traffic situation. 

Before I tell you some of what I did– not to brag but to inspire you to get out there, too– I want to tell you about a gift Molly Ivins gave me years ago, a book by Ann Powers called Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America. I confess I didn’t love the book. Many parts flat out annoyed me. But there was an idea I thought Powers captured very well, and as I contemplate my early days in Austin, I often revisit her take on a particular economy that is enjoyed by the young and the creative. Her story took place in San Francisco, but it easily applies to Austin, too. It involves that coming-of-age survival technique where a group of friends enables each other to cover basic needs at a great discount.

This could mean extending your friends deep discounts on the food and drink you serve at your waiter job, the clothes you shill at a place like Buffalo Exchange, or some other service or tangible– being on guest lists for example. Some of the generosity does, yes, fall under the umbrella of ripping off one’s employer (which Powers explains is covered by shrinkage insurance). But some of the free offerings are considered part of the perks of working crap jobs. 

Such generosity is how I managed to raise a kid in this town on very little income most of the years I freelanced. Everything from soccer scholarships to used furniture to free beer (back when I still drank) helped me to survive on very little. One of my favorite memories of these days is when Jonathan Richman was playing at The Electric Lounge (RIP), a place I frequented, often performing in poetry slams. Carter was working the door that night and said he’d let Henry and me in. Hen was maybe eight. To show my gratitude, I baked some brownies (just regular, to be clear) and brought them as a thank you gift.

We showed up early that evening and Carter gratefully accepted the Chocolate Bounty of Love. Which is when Jonathan Richman himself wandered by and asked if he could have one. Later, while Henry and I were playing pool, we were again approached by Mr. Richman, who Henry first saw when he was one and strapped in a carseat at Liberty Lunch. “Good brownies,” he said. “May I have another?”

It’s been a long time since I was poor. And while I’m not quite at the alleged Annual Income Sweet Spot of $75,00, I do okay for myself as a wedding officiant and writing teacher. Funny then, that while I have yet to return to nights lying in bed wondering if I’ll be able to swing food and utilities for the month, I don’t have the disposable income I did just a year or two ago. I mentioned in my last post how the rising cost of living here has forced austerity down my throat. 

What I didn’t mention is how that austerity is causing me to cut back on my own generosity. When it comes to money, I am what some might call a borderline mess but I prefer thinking I have a genuine hippie heart. I love sharing my bounty with others. I’m a big fan of crowd funding for art and medical expenses. I love supporting the arts, especially projects that are available for free to everyone: ForkLift Danceworks, Shakespeare at Zilker Park, and KUT/KUTX. But the more my day-to-day costs jump, the less I get to participate in this love/karma/communist/whatever-you-want-to-label-it economy in which we help each other out. 

Still, I try. I give when I can. And I’d much prefer to eliminate a few more unnecessary expenses from my personal budget than stop contributing to the arts. Also, while I know tipping is a totally flawed system, I don’t have the energy to fight for a universal living wage for every waiter and busboy in this town, so I just work within the age-old parameters of throwing down at the end of a meal. Having raised my kid in his early days largely on tips, I get what it’s like to have a slow night, to deal with asshole cheapskates. Even though I can’t afford to eat out as often as I have in the past, when I do, I overtip as much as I can afford to in hopes this will offset the rising rents so many service workers are struggling to keep up with. 

Getting back to my recent adventures in Austin. I spent a few days last week living balls-to-the-wall as I showed off Austin to my high school friend Sean and his daughter, Jocelyn, who was considering transferring into UT. I love showing off this town, even with all the construction at every turn. My joy goes beyond bragging rights for the uniqueness of the place. Playing tour guide is an excellent reminder to me of why I want to fight so hard to stay here, to do whatever I need to do to keep my house. 

Because Jocelyn is into media and comedy, I took her to The Chronicle, KUT/KUTX, Esther’s Follies, and out to dinner with my friend Erin, a SXSW linchpin. This was like time traveling for me– when I first got to Austin I wrote for the Chron, worked for Esther’s and Velveeta Room, and participated in SXSW as everything from a journalist to a performer. Over the years I’ve done commentary for the radio. Each stop we made, each conversation we had, was a reminder of how easy it can be to connect in this town. You really can pick up the phone or write an email to someone who has information you’re seeking, and odds are super high you will get a direct response. The lack of pretension is refreshing and not something I’ve easily encountered in places like New York and LA. 

I also got to revel in the ridiculous number of free things there are to do here. On Saturday I hosted Ney Day at the Elisabet Ney Museum, and hundreds of people came out to hear all kinds of music, hula hoop, and do crafts. Then Saturday night I had the honor of performing nine back-to-back weddings at SpiderHouse as part of a Marriage Equality Celebration. A ton of us vendors donated our services to make this happen, and it, too, was open to the public.

Jocelyn was won over enough to choose Austin (soon I’ll tell the story of her quest to find housing). I was, as I always am after hosting visitors, won over anew. I was also totally exhausted, in the very best way. Still, I dragged my ass out of bed at 7 am Sunday to go on a motorcycle ride around the town. I hadn’t been on a bike in twenty-five years and once I got past accepting there wasn’t a seatbelt, I settled in for the ride. Seeing the city cage-free provides visual and olfactory opportunities you just can’t get ensconced in a car. It was exhilarating and eye-opening and I have to admit that when we wound up in a New Austin restaurant for breakfast – Sawyer and Company– it was actually done up super cute and the food was great. 

Which was a good reminder to self that really, it’s not the new people or the new places that freak me out days I am losing my shit over Austin. There are plenty of people who understand the vibe and who want to participate, not just be Ambience Vampires out to slaughter the goose. It is the intensity of so much growth, far less personal space, so much jockeying for a limited amount of housing, parking, roadway, and blanket space at Barton Springs. 

Post-ride I figured I was spent for the day. I was so exhausted I actually felt borderline sick. But a semi-curative nap gave me half of a second wind, and when I got the call that the Purple Martins are staging at Capital Plaza, I snapped out of my stupor and headed over. Even though the bats are slacking this year, letting the hordes of flood-cultivated mosquitoes come under the bridge to them, the little swallows are busier than ever. To behold them just after sunset– the whirring sound of a million little wings, the nostril-flaring stench of the bird shit raining down on the crowds of onlookers– invigorating doesn’t begin to capture it. 

I’d taken my jaunt with my Ink Family, and we wound up our evening over at The Parlor, which once upon a time had been a dojo where I studied Taekwondo, and had my ass kicked many, many times. Now it is a punk rock haven, another example of newish Austin that easily dovetailed with the spirit so many of us fear will soon become extinct. Nick Cave and Gun Club and the Melvins blasted on the jukebox and I sat surrounded by my people, people who, no coincidence, I found in this city that draws so many of a particular lot. 

Don’t call it weird– that phrase is too tired. And I’m not saying “we the people” are some homogenized lot. That’s false, too. It’s just that for as long as I can remember, Austin has been very live and let live, very you show me yours and I’ll show you mine, with a level of acceptance that is at the root of what defines the thing we are so worried about losing. Maybe Willie prompted this attitude back when he brought together oxymoronic audiences at the Armadillo. Probably it predates him. 

Whatever it is, I revisited it in all its splendor last week. And so it goes, I am not sitting in Heathrow right now, slurping down Costa, trying to organise my jet-lagged head. Instead I’m hanging out on the home front, listening to the Jam and XTC and the Clash, not feeling stuck, not feeling heartbroken. Because if I can’t be somewhere I’m dreaming of being, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be than here. 

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN: LONG BLACK VEIL

I know a thing or two or ten thousand about grief– my own and others. Grief is a bear, a beast, a bitch. It levels giants, humbles the smug, destroys the otherwise placid. Years ago when I was going through my second nightmarish divorce from my second dumbass husband, I conceived and executed an anthology of grief essays. The title of this book came from the essay I selected by Laura House to open it: Stricken: The 5,000 Stages of Grief. 

Last year, as happens to me more often than I’d like, I was in a situation where a friend told me about another friend of hers that I “just had to meet.” Isn’t it embarrassing and confusing when you meet these other people and they are fucking assholes and you think Really? You thought we had so much in common? Am I really like this douchebag?

That guy was a self-proclaimed healer, a therapist of some sort, and when I trotted out something about the Five Stages of Grief, he condescendingly corrected me and said that theory was all wrong, and promptly launched into a narcissistic blowhard lecture on how he knew everything about everything. To which I said to him, in my head anyway, Fuck you. People actually pay you to help them? 

I’ve been thinking about the book title, that guy, and the more classic five stages of grief far more often than I’d like lately. I don’t want to think about grief. It’s been a long time since I’ve been deep in that dark hole, a place I most often visited courtesy of my own special brain chemistry and external triggers usually of the sort that come with a penis attached. 

But as I contemplate all of the changes happening so fast in Austin, and how uncomfortable they make me, and how it’s all anyone seems to be talking about anymore– housing and traffic– I realise that I have been, for months now, skirting around, dancing around, dipping my toes/feet/ankles/calves into the waters of another kind of grief. 

Let me trot out an imperfect analogy here. You can’t marry a city, I know. But I have been here very nearly a quarter century. Other than with my son, my relationship with Austin is the longest I’ve had in my life. I didn’t understand how much I took it for granted until I stopped taking it for granted. In that way, it does feel a bit like a marriage. You know, you go along for years, some things are good, some aren’t so good, you argue, you make up, you put up with shit. And then you reach a point. Well a lot of people do. Let’s set aside the anomalous folks who are pleasantly annoying in their ability to keep it going forever smoothly.

So all the rest of the more typical long-term couples, very often they come to a point– my informal observations suggest this point frequently comes when the kids hit adolescence or just after they move out– when two people look at each other and think, You know, we’ve outgrown each other. You’re not doing it for me anymore. I’m so fucking tired of arguing over all the nit-picky day-to-day shit. I’m out. Or, other end of the spectrum, they think, You know, I’ve been putting up with your shit for so long, and you’ve been putting up with mine, and I’m pretty weary but I can’t imagine life without you. So I’m sticking around.

Well lately I’ve been feeling a bit of this regarding my life in Austin. I love it so much. But I can’t seem to stop complaining about it. I could sell my house for a ridiculous amount of money and get out. But then where would I go? I bounce back and forth and back and forth. I think my heart knows I couldn’t really leave, I mean not unless/until I am truly forced out by taxes and cost-of-living. But then there are those days when I imagine being totally free, at least for the few years the profit on selling this house would buy me, and I dare myself: Leave leave leave. 

I’ve been examining this internal debate and I realise I am having some pretty extreme PALA– that’s short for Pick a Lane Anxiety. Before this housing insanity kicked in, I didn’t spend every single day humming Should I Stay or Should I Go Now? Now I do. Not consciously. Subconsciously. The way you finally cross the threshold from tolerance to intolerance of a long-term lover’s insistence on clipping his toenails with his feet propped on the dining room table. You snap. You break. You flip. You’re out. Or are you?

This week, I’m telling myself I’ve picked a lane. The lane I’ve picked is to stay. To not be driven out by all this bullshit. To increase my rates for weddings and workshops incrementally, to cut back on other stuff, and to see if I can make it work. I feel some relief, but not total relief. 

Because like so many other people, this anxiety I’m feeling is part of a collective grief. Yes yes yes yes yes fucking yes: CHANGE HAPPENS. I get that and quit fucking telling me already. I’m not stupid. But just because change happens doesn’t mean adjustment to change happens at the same rate. My therapist did me a great service when she explained the stages of grief are not linear, you cannot check them off like some bucket list operation. They are like a spiral staircase. One day you’re out and about eating an El Chilito’s migas burrito, admiring a grackle, and catching a matinee at the Violet Crown (granted that is New Austin, but I always pretend it’s the Dobie). The next minute you turn around and there are seventy-five fucking cranes in the rearview mirror and you burst out crying. 

Let’s talk about Merry Widows for a second. Not all loss equals permanent despair. In fact I’d argue most loss eventually leads to some adjustment (though I could also tick off too many exceptions to that rule in the form of so many of my friends who’ve lost their kids). There are some people who come through the grief process better off than they ever imagined. For example now that I’ve had time to chew on it, I’d say my divorces ultimately brought me far more long-term joy than the short-term foolish giddiness of my marriages. 

And along those lines, my first ex-husband inspired me to get into martial arts. Why? Because he stalked my ass and I wanted to learn how to kill him. And my second ex-husband inspired me to go deep deep deep in therapy. Why? Because he nearly broke my soul. But I’m not ever going to send those guys gold-engraved thank you cards praising them for behaving so shittily as to prompt me to better my own life.

So when I look at the ways New Austin is accidentally prompting what some might term “improvement” in my life, I think similar thoughts. I’ve got a bit of an austerity program going on over here that actually pleases me every time I find a new way to cut corners and save dough, cost savings I might not have gone looking for if the cost of living hadn’t exploded. I put more time into contemplating traffic and staying home when I can, with the advantage of saving on gas and the wear and tear of mileage. I walk around this town and try to remember to have Child’s Mind, to appreciate with new eyes and joyful wonder all the good things still here, most especially the people. (In that one picture, Noska and I are sitting out behind Southside Tattoo, away from the bustle but within earshot. I love that spot.) 

But I’m not feeling deep gratitude to all the clowns who enable corporate welfare, who made no plan for all this growth, who did not create traffic solutions in advance of the problem. I am no fan of the developers pushing out everyone they can push out because they did not get the memo that money and power will never truly bring you happiness. Certainly not the kind of happiness that was once in abundant supply here, and now is growing scarce, because the people who made Austin Austin are being forced to flee. 

I resent having austerity forced down my throat. I am more than a little annoyed that despite having a rocking little business I am increasingly worried about making ends meet. Some days I am enraged– that’s the anger stage. Other days I think maybe I could tolerate a roommate, if only it meant I could stop worrying– that is the bargaining stage. Then there is denial, those rare times I’m out on I-35 at 7 am on a Sunday and no one is around and I think it’s all been a bad dream, none of it happened. Depression, a fourth stage, I dodge as best I can. But as for acceptance– real true deep cellular level okayness with how radically different this town is now with all its fugly condos, trendy boutiques, playground-for-the-rich entitlement crap, and total lack of affordable housing– will I ever get there? Will any of us?

I honestly can’t see a way. 

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN: LOVE MY NEIGHBOR

I’m guessing the first time I met my next door neighbor, Lawrence, was the day I moved in, in April 2005. Trying to pinpoint precisely when on our shared boundary timeline we went from cheerfully waving across lawns to becoming very close is impossible. Like anything incremental– watching flowers grow or paint dry– you just wake up one day and realise somehow you made it from Point A to Point X over a stretch of time that appears long when measured by the calendar and short when measured by the heart. 

Earlier this year I wrote a little Love Letter to Lawrence over at another blog. He’s a retired Huston Tillotson professor of chemistry. He’s in his eighties. And he is always watching out for me. This cracks me up since, if we were going by age, I’m the one who should be watching out for him. And I try to do that. But sometimes, given how independent Lawrence is, that can be a little tricky, with him insisting he’s just fine and doesn’t need anything.

A few summers ago when it got dangerously hot, Lawrence’s air conditioning went out. I knew he couldn’t afford to get the central unit repaired or replaced on his fixed income. So on FB I solicited gently used window units. I failed to take into account that our casement windows don’t lend themselves to standalone units. (Side note: I have a really cool, really loud, super sucky swamp cooler I rarely use but is impressive to try once in awhile, and which scares the piss out of the dogs.) So we came up with a Plan B. Some FB friends kicked in some dough, and I added onto that, and I went to Home Depot and picked up a small a/c unit that doesn’t need to be placed in a window. 

That was the easy part. Convincing Lawrence to accept it was the hard part. I am not one for lying but in this instance, I lied right to his face. I told him a friend had purchased the unit, it was the wrong one, and he’d never gotten around to returning it. Then, because I’ve seen too many After School Specials and Lifetime Network Movies, I embellished by further adding, “You’d be doing my friend a HUGE FAVOR by taking this off his hands.”

Maybe it was one of those moments where two people strive to pull the wool over one another’s eyes. Possibly Lawrence saw right through my bullshit. Whatever the case, he accepted the air conditioner and I was relieved he did because the heat that summer wasn’t just uncomfortable, it was the kind that kills people, especially the elderly.

For his part, Lawrence has given me plenty. He likes to give me fruit. He used to give me egg cartons, back when I had chickens, and I’d return some cartons full for him. Then when the Great Raccoon Chicken Massacre of 2013 went down and I re-homed the pair of remaining traumatized hens, Lawrence took to offering me eggs. There was also a time when he’d bring me meat dishes. I can’t remember how we got into that habit, since I’m a vegetarian. I’m thinking maybe once he brought a pot of stew and I, on the spot, didn’t want to be insulting, so just said thanks and took it, leading to the delivery of more meat over the years. Fortunately I have Big Red the Carnivore as my secret weapon, so I am always able to report back honestly that this or that meat concoction was delicious. I just don’t mention the part where I got that information from Big. 

One year I tried to give Lawrence a computer so his older daughter could email him pictures of her new son, Lawrence’s first (and only) grandchild. I think that electronic gift might’ve been to him what his meat gifts were to me. He accepted it but after a couple of months (and one failed lesson where I attempted to demonstrate how a mouse worked), he asked me to please find a better home for it. So our revised plan has me receiving emails from his daughter, wonderful pictures I can then print up and take to Lawrence, or videos I can show him on my phone. 

As you can see from the top picture (during the taking of which, Lawrence said to me, “Is this what they call a selfie?”) Lawrence is African-American. We don’t spend much time directly talking about race issues, but nor are we in denial or ignorant to them. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we live in the Giles Subdivision, which, until 1946, had a “covenant” that disallowed any person of color to live in this neighborhood. And then, later, when that corridor of blatant segregation known as I-35 went in, this neighborhood was mostly non-white, considered “dangerous” by folks living west of the highway, and then eventually co-opted by some of these same former fraidy-cats who promptly gentrified it, drove out many black and Mexican-American residents, and drove the cost-of-living here to an insane level. 

And yes I’m white so yes some people point a finger at me as being part of the gentrification problem. I’ll talk more about race and class in broader terms in the future. Today I want to keep the focus on Lawrence and me. When Obama first ran for office, Lawrence and I were very excited. I think someone must’ve stolen my first Obama sign and so I, never one to under react, fixed the problem by planting so many Obama signs in my yard that more than a couple people stopped by thinking I was selling them or giving them away. 

The night Obama won, I had just come home from the hospital having undergone a hysterectomy the day before. I was in extreme pain and drugged out of my mind. When Jon Stewart called the election early, because he is Jon Stewart, and in light of the previous elections and the hanging chads and all that, I really thought it was a joke. I turned to my then boyfriend, Ira, to ask if it was real or if I was hallucinating. But he was passed out and snoring, exhausted from caring for me. So I picked up the phone and with massive amounts of Vicodin and residual Dilaudid coursing through my veins, I giddily rang up Lawrence, who confirmed Stewart’s words. 

“WE DID IT!” I shouted, another one of those non-under-reactions of mine. Then I dragged myself out to the front lawn, doubled over in agony, and banged on a pot with a spoon for about one half a second before going back inside to collapse. 

Still it was such a big moment. So big. To get to watch my friend Lawrence see the election of a black Man as President of the United States in his lifetime, the same lifetime that had once ruled he was not fit to live in our neighborhood– I won’t ever forget that. I got him a card and a cake to celebrate.

Which brings me to another Personal Is Political point. I was raised in a racist part of the world, by a racist man who proudly kept hanging on his wall a picture of himself strutting in blackface during a Philadelphia’s Mummers Parade. My father was inordinately fond of the word nigger and sprinkled it throughout his daily conversations. He told his eight daughters that when we grew up, if we were ever foolish enough to visit a city, odds were excellent we would be raped, tortured, and killed by a man of color. Of course that’s not the term he used. 

So while I do not dwell, daily, on our differences– age, color, gender– it does not escape me that this black man, roughly the same age of my (now dead) father, has told me more times in our ten years together how much he loves me than my own father ever did. Well since my own dad told me zero times that he loved me, that wasn’t a hard record to break. But Lawrence always tells me. He says You look so beautiful today! And he says God bless you in a non-proselytizing way that does not offend my non-theistic heart. And he says Need anything hon? And he is always very patient when my dogs bark at him– something my first dog Satch the Insane, taught all the other dogs to do.

The other night I was flying home from JFK. The flight was very delayed. It was the middle of the night. I couldn’t sleep so I popped open my computer. Wifi allowed in a text message from Lawrence’s daughter. She hadn’t heard from him in a week. Her calls were going to voicemail. Could I check on him.

My heart sank. I messaged back I would check on him as soon as I landed. Dread came knocking, a dread that visits occasionally, but which I mostly push away. It’s this: if Lawrence and I both die of old age, that means he is going to beat me to the exit by a few decades. Which means I might very well be the first to discover he’s gone when he goes. And which also means that I am going to have to live quite a long time without him in my life. 

I have friends who miss their dead fathers every day in a way I never could relate to. But when I think about Lawrence being gone, it stops me cold. I don’t want there to be a time when we can’t call each other and check in. Like that one year, January 1st, late in the day, when he rang me up and said, “Spike have you seen anyone yet today?” And I admitted I had not. He said, “Me neither,” then suggested we meet on the lawn and take pictures of each other, a chance to say hello to another human, and to document we each made it to another year. 

If I am pushed out of my house due to the rising cost of living, or if Lawrence (who as you can surmise, was fine when I checked on him– his phone service was just out) is pushed out of his– which is falling down because he is on a fixed income and has no spare money to make simple fixes– that will ruin this beautiful thing we have. We aren’t just neighbors. We are very much family.

Somedays still I think to myself FUCK IT. FUCK ALL OF THIS FUCKING HOUSING BULLSHIT. FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT. I think I will just sell my house, pay off every single debt I have, take the leftover $200,000 and just go traveling. The part of me that stays up late worrying about bills loves that plan. 

But then I imagine myself knocking on Lawrence’s door, trying to explain to him that I am taking off, leaving him behind, and this imagined scenario is all I need to make me want to redouble my efforts to stay. Here. A place I spent a lifetime searching for. A place I am loathe to leave. A place defined far more by my excellent friend Lawrence than by these walls, this roof. 

My True Home.

NOTE: If you are reading this on Thursday 2 July 2015 you can download my book for FREE at Amazon through midnight. Please consider sponsoring this blog by making a modest $1-5 monthly contribution through MY PATREON PAGE. Or GET AN AHS BUMPER STICKER HERE. 

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CHAPTER TWELVE: Roommates & The Mystery of The Missing Green Mug

Once Big Red got his Austin sea legs and a judge signed off on my divorce from Narcissus, Big moved out to his own place, a little apartment a few miles away. I can’t recall now why I thought I needed to bring in roommates after he left, but my strong hunch is that this related to how my work had fallen off during the tumultuous year in fucking hell I’d spent being married and separated and unable to tell my head from my ass. 

A friend of mine mentioned that a friend of hers, Fluffy, was moving to Austin to be with her boyfriend, Fuzzy, who was studying at UT. Fuzzy came by one night to check out my house which, as I recall, was Divorcee Disaster Deluxe at the time. Dry dog food scattered about the sticky, unmopped floor, sink full of dishes, crap everywhere. Fuzzy sized up the place. I told him he and Fluffy could have the bigger side of the house– two small bedrooms on the east side– for $800. We’d share the living room, dining nook, galley kitchen, and one small bathroom. 

Fuzzy agreed. Pretty soon they moved in, painting what had been my beautiful blue bedroom Baby Turd Brown and converting the other bedroom into an office/study, a place for Fluffy, an award-winning fiction writer, to ply her trade. 

I headed over to the west side of the house, the converted garage with the still very rough cement floor. I gave Fuzzy a discount on the first month’s rent in exchange for him painting the floor fluorescent green and the walls an eye-blinding deep blue: my representation of Earth & Sky. It drove him nuts that I requested he paint the green partly up the wall– like grass growing. This resistance to going outside the lines, his admitted love of rigidity, should’ve been my first clue Fuzzy was not going to be my ideal co-housemate. 

During the first half of my twenties, I mostly slept directly on the floor. I only caved and got a mattress when I was twenty-six and about ninety months pregnant and could not raise myself up quickly enough to pee without the bounce a mattress provided. Now, though, I returned to the floor. I put a futon down in there and bought a bunch of brightly colored circle rugs from IKEA. Polka dots to accentuate the acid green. For me this sleeping choice felt like a mashup between the futon sleeping I’d done on my trips to Japan and having one very large dog bed for me and the pack– then Satch (the crazed, aggressive pit bull mix; Tatum the Blue Heeler Australian Shepherd mix; Bubbles, my soul dog, a Boston mix diva who hated everyone except me, which is probably why she was my favorite; and Rebound the Boston Terrier, who’d joined the pack in May and was fast demonstrating an alarming lack of intelligence, which was fine, because she made up for it in cuteness.) We’d hunker down at night and I felt like at last I had the perfect teenage bedroom, the one I never actually had as a teenager.

Things weren’t bad with Fluffy and Fuzzy at first. They were very funny, and Fuzzy was a Yankee like me, well-versed in that special brand of Northeastern sarcasm that was my first language. Around the time they moved in, I began dating Ira, and while we hardly were a tight-knit band of double-dating fabulousness, we did have our moments of togetherness. 

Perhaps the greatest bonding that occurred came one night when I was at Ira’s and got an urgent, frantic call from Fluffy. Something– my dogs? a raccoon?– had gotten in the chicken yard out back. The current tally was one dead, one terrified, one missing, and one mortally wounded but still flapping and in need of a hasty dispatch. “I’ll be right there,” I said, attempting calm. 

I hung up and told Ira I had to go. He wanted to know what was up. I didn’t want to tell him. The relationship was very new then and I had no idea what this man’s threshold for bullshit and drama was. He’d already watched me cry numerous times over my divorce and residual PTSD symptoms. He’d help me do a suicide intervention that involved disappearing a gun. A dying chicken might seem easy enough to deal with, relatively speaking, but I was wondering which straw was going to break the camel’s back. But he made me spill. 

“Hold on,” he said, and disappeared into his garage, returning in torn up clothes. “This is my chicken-killing outfit,” he smiled. Off we went to help the poor bird crossover. 

I’d like to report that I’m a champ when it comes to dead and dying animals. I am not. Fluffy and I stood in the dining nook, peering through the French glass doors, as Fuzzy and Ira repeatedly walloped the chicken with the business end of a shovel. They were city boys, both, and so wringing or decapitation were beyond their skill set. Fuzzy nearly hurled. Ira seemed a little too enthusiastic. Fluffy and I squealed. But I was moved by Ira’s dedication to the cause, and we grew closer. 

Fast forward another couple of months. Another phone call from Fluffy to me whilst I was at Ira’s. Rebound had apparently shit all over the house– runny, smeary diarrhea I later learned was parasite related. I got home and Fuzzy went off on me, how awful it was that Fluffy had to clean up after my dog. I apologised and I meant it, but I did not appreciate the way this kid, in his twenties, was dominating me in a very stereotypical man-yells-at-woman kind of way. On the other hand, I felt guilty. I had been spending a tremendous amount of time at Ira’s, rationalising that Fuzzy and Fluffy would enjoy having the house to themselves– well, to themselves plus the four dogs, two cats, and the remaining chickens. In one of my more regretful moves, I attempted to placate Fuzzy by re-homing Tatum, who was generously taken in by good friends. Really, I should’ve re-homed his grumpy ass. 

Before long, Fluffy approached me timidly. First of all, she wanted me to know she’d been deeply depressed. Secondly, Fuzzy had put her up to telling me they were moving out. She assured me they would pay me a full month’s rent since they weren’t giving proper notice. Later she balked, offered me only half, saying Fuzzy felt like that was more fair. (On the bright side, Tatum moved back home.)

I never outright hated Fuzzy, but in the years it’s been since he’s been gone, I’ve really come to see how he relied on Fluffy to do his bidding, and how whenever she was sent to me as a messenger, she’d be very apologetic and then assure me that Fuzzy really loved me, which seemed weird and passive aggressive and totally false. Irritated on principle that they had shorted me some rent, I was actually happy to have my house back to myself. I’d gotten back on my feet financially and paying the mortgage myself was well worth the peace of having full run of the place, MY place, without having to tiptoe around Fuzzy. 

But then, a few months later, I heard from Peggy, a young woman I’d first met when I was her little sister’s teacher, and re-met when we both took an intuition class together. Peggy was super sweet, worked with Big Red, and wanted to know if I was in the market for a roommate. I’d tossed the idea out months before, and though I did love my alone time, I also liked that Peggy adored all animals and was willing to petsit for me when I traveled, without complaining like Fuzzy. I offered a flat-out barter, but Peggy insisted on kicking in a couple of hundred in cash each month. She was the ideal roommate with one exception.

Peggy had a boyfriend, let’s call him Arrogant Fucking Asshole (AFA). Of course I didn’t know at first what a jerk he was. She had asked if he could stay over sometimes. I readily agreed. Unfortunately, like Fuzzy, AFA had a stereotypical bossy dude attitude. He didn’t just stay a few nights here and there. HE FUCKING MOVED IN. Without asking. He paid no rent. He seemed to have no job. He was ever present. A militant vegan, he burned more calories chopping his kale than he ingested eating it, leading to this insane situation of him being constantly present in my kitchen chopping chopping chopping chopping. And then he started using my address to get his mail. Which mostly consisted of statements from Charles Schwab about his apparent trust fund.

I was livid but a) did not yet have the boundary skills I was still learning in therapy to kick his sorry ass out and b) worried if I made a stink, I would lose Peggy, too. By this point Ira and I were traveling all around the country, gathering stories and photos for a book I was working on. Peggy was indispensable to me. I kept my mouth shut. Well mostly. One morning I ran into AFA and, without thinking, said, “Oh I’m sorry, did I wake you?” I was not being sarcastic. I had inadvertently shown this wolf my throat, made it seem like it was his house and that I was the interloper.

I cannot remember how I got rid of him. Maybe I vibed him out. I did notice, shortly after he finally shoved off, that my chartreuse coffee mug had gone missing. This spooked me. Because the thing is, AFA bore an eery resemblance to Immature, my ex-husband’s stepson, the one who had smashed every single fragile belonging I had in the terrifying act that caused me to flee the Clarksville house. They didn’t just look alike. They had the same shitty demeanor. They both went by their middle name. And they both had unusual last names that ended in the same last five letters. 

Of all the things Immature had smashed, the thing I missed most was a beautiful coffee mug my yoga teacher had given me, made to resemble the tiles of Dolores Hidalgo in Mexico. It had come from The Cadeau. When I demanded reparations from Immature, he had begrudgingly shoved $100 into an envelope along with a violent note telling me what a cunt I was. It was not near enough to replace all the things he’d ruined, but I did hope to find a duplicate mug. There was not a similar one available, so I settled on a handmade, one-of-a-kind chartreuse cup that cost a whopping $45. I knew that was crazy but I tried to convince myself it would console me, bring me some comfort after the hell of that marriage and all the losses I’d suffered. 

Of course the mug, though very beautiful, did not bring relief. It just reminded me, every time I used it, of Immature and his criminal violence against me. And so I hardly used it at all. But I did notice that it disappeared around the same time as AFA. Peggy hadn’t seen it anywhere. Big Red hadn’t either. Nor had Ira. It just vanished. I thought that rather poetic, like AFA had maybe performed a weird kind of exorcism, showing up like a shadowy doppelganger for Immature, giving me a target to hate, then wandering off with the object that reminded me of my tormentor. And then, months later, with no warning, no note, no nothing, the mug reappeared, left on a little stool I kept in my front yard. I still never use it. But I find myself unable to give or throw it away.

From then on, I never again took on a long-term roommate. When Ira and I first met, two things really drew me toward him: 1. He never ever ever wanted to get married. 2. He never wanted to live with anyone. Having just come out of Nightmare on Ninth Street, these declarations thrilled me. I felt the very same way. 

Over the course of our six years together, Ira did move in briefly when his plumbing went out. I actually wound up rather enjoying living together but he did not. He didn’t just move out after that short stint of co-habitating, he broke up with me, one of ten thousand breakups we endured and then disclaimed, this go-away-come-back game the foundation for our every shaky union. There was nothing we did not argue about during our time together. I loved to stand in front of an open refrigerator just for fun and inspiration. He, infuriated by this habit of mine, insisted it was the stupidest waste of money on the planet. I liked to spoon. He wanted no one or thing to touch him while he slumbered, not even a sheet, and nights he slept over, often after I’d drift off, he’d go sleep in another room. I came to think living together might fix things. He vehemently disagreed, and so we settled on a pattern: three nights together each weeks at my house, four nights apart in our separate spaces.

When finally we broke up in 2013, that was it. My house was my house, seven nights per week, 365 days per year. I have had mid and longer term guests, folks staying anywhere from a week to several months. Notably last year I was temporary roomies with Jenn Shelton, who until very recently held the world record for running 100 miles. You read that right, and if you’ve ever read Chris McDougall’s Born to Run, you know exactly who Jenn is. (Chris is a great friend of mine and he introduced us so I could coach Jenn as she worked on a memoir.)

By far my favorite human roommate to date has been my nephew Matt, aka Reed Streets, a nationally renowned DJ. I missed the growing up of my twenty-five East coast nieces and nephews because I was the one that got away. But I’m getting to know them in adulthood. Matt wanted to check out the Austin scene. I was delighted to host him. He left me thinking that if ever I were to break down and get another roommate, my best bet would be a thirty-year-old guy. Matt spent most of his days working on mixes in the garage room (I long ago moved back to the east wing of this might 1000 square foot palace). Nights he went out and explored the scene. Like me he is an introvert. If you could’ve seen a livestream of us living together you likely would’ve fallen asleep– two workaholics holed up in their separate rooms, one on the turntables the other on a MacBook, both wishing there were more hours in the day to keep creating. 

Of course there are my canine roommates, the sort I will always gladly live with, the sort who will never pay rent, or for food. The sort who are allowed to eat meat under my roof and, if it’s a real emergency, shit on the floor. These days the pack is down to two– Rebound and Dante. They are best friends. The three of us spend vast amounts of time reclining upon the king-sized memory foam mattress some good friends bequeathed me when they moved across the pond. 

My mortgage might be out of control, but my living arrangements no longer are. This is my Palace of Selfishness, the place I am most peaceful. Some days I worry that to keep it, I’m going to have to AirBnB it or take in another roommate. I’ll explore those horrifying possible scenarios more in another post. For now, every day I get to stay here alone feels almost like I’m getting away with something. 

NOTE: Thank you so much for tuning into this blog. Please consider supporting my art. You can BUY MY NEW BOOK HERE. And you can make a modest $1-5 per month sustaining donation over at MY PATREON PAGE.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN: Return to Cherrywood

When last we left off, I was holed up in an Extend-A-Stay hotel in South Austin, falling apart over my marriage to Narcissus, which was also falling apart. But I am a stubborn motherfucker, prone to seeking out and/or co-creating situations in which I insist on continuing to participate long, long, long after I should’ve run. There’s something heady for me about the combination of false hope, deep denial, and misplaced loyalty that finds me clutching when really I should be releasing. 

I had all the evidence I needed to understand running like hell was not just the best option, it was the only one. And yet something kept me thinking I could somehow keep my marriage, work things out, salvage sanity from the emotional wreckage that came with being married to a narcissist who had zero interest in trying to help navigate through things with me. 

Before I go on, I offer an observation and a spoiler alert. The observation: the passing of time (all this went down in 2007), the fact that I’m in my fifties now, and the very real effects of trauma on the mind, collectively mean that I do not have a great linear grasp on the events that unfolded next. Less like an impressionistic painting and more like a finger painting done on the wall in soft brown feces by an angry toddler, the images my mind pulls up blend and blur and look and feel and smell like messy shit. The spoiler alert: Stick with me here– something very good happened, too, and I can’t wait to tell you what that was.

But first, I must flog the dead horse that was Life with Narcissus just a bit more. I couldn’t move back into his Clarksville Hovel of Hoarding. Not with that violent stepson of his threatening me. I very fortunately had held onto my own house in Cherrywood. There were three tenants then, and I was able to give notice to two of them to move out quickly. The third, Nigel the Englishman, had a lease to finish out. Fortunately his room was on the other side of the house, a garage converted to a bedroom, so though we still had to share a bathroom, at least we had relative privacy, and he was gone much of the day, holed up in his own space when he was home. 

I’m guessing I arrived back home around December 2006. Narcissus came to stay here sometimes, but still lived at his own house, with his enraged young adult children and, sadly, my own son. Henry had had it. He was so sick of my stupid shit with men. He was so sick of me making him move. He simply refused to move back home with me. He was sixteen, had his own car he’d bought himself, a job that paid very well, and, as I’ve mentioned, his own outbuilding to live in. I was furious he wouldn’t come back but there was little I could do about it. Some friends told me I needed to be forceful. What? Handcuff him and drive him here, and then handcuff him in his room? I started living independently when I was a teenager. I might’ve hated his choice, but I understood it. 

That January there was a terrible ice storm. Narcissus and I sat in my room, smoking in bed, and watching TV. I remember this because a friend of mine, a former co-worker from St. Louis, had been arrested for kidnapping and imprisoning a young boy for years. He got busted when he tried to kidnap a second boy. The headlines were filled with stories about my former place of employment, this man I’d known for years, my friends in the suburb where it all went down. There was nothing not depressing about my life then.

Also, Molly Ivins, my friend and mentor, was dying. Her cancer had come back and it was winning this final round. I went to spend time with her in the hospital, and Henry went with me. We both loved Molly so much. Finally they sent her home for her last day or two. I went over to the house, kissed her bald head, held her hand, told her goodbye. The next day, January 31, 2007, my friend Sarah called– had I heard? Molly had passed. 

I went to my bedroom and cried. Narcissus eventually showed up. I told him the news. What happened next was so absurd. He listened to me say, “Molly died,” and his immediate response was to start one of his long-winded lectures, this one about information he’d uncovered that “proved” Abraham Lincoln was a racist. That was really his response. Southpaw Jones and Matt the Electrician were playing their residence gig at Cafe Mundi that night, an event I attended weekly for years, my answer to church. Wanting to be comforted, I went to the show. Southpaw covered Bruce’s Promised Land, and I just wept and wept.

The very next day Narcissus and I had an appointment with Queeny, my therapist. Back when I was living in Extend-a-Stay, I’d had the dumb luck of being given Queeny’s number. I’d tried another therapist who was a Five Star Bitch, incredibly rude, totally judgmental, a capital-T Twat. She made me want to give up on seeking help, but the friend who referred me to Queeny insisted I give her a try. I will forever be grateful for that nudge. Queeny was just my speed, equal parts hippie and healer, who upon hearing that the Twat refused to allow me to knit during sessions, exclaimed, “You knit? I bead!” thus turning our ongoing sessions into a cross between heavy duty psychotherapy and a 1950s summer camp experience. 

In fact I’d managed, though only occasionally, to get various members of our fucked up non-family family into her office in my ongoing futile quest to fix the unfixable. This particular night, February 1, 2007, was most memorable. I was losing my shit over Molly. I was losing my shit over my marriage. My PTSD was whipping me around like a puppet in a windstorm. Narcissus sat down, extracted a piece of paper from his pocket, and dramatically read a statement he had prepared. The gist of it was that I had two choices: an immediate divorce or a separation of a length to be determined by him, and that he was doing this for my own good, because I was far too weak to do the right thing.

I can still see the details of that night. Us sitting in the hippie office. Me taking off my wedding band, handing it to him. Queeny being quiet, listening. Me crying uncontrollably. The three of us eventually having to move to another room when the session went over and she had to turn over the space to a different therapist. Eventually she told Narcissus to leave. I asked her what she thought. She told me three things of note: 1. I might consider that he could just be an old drug-addicted loser not worth my time. 2. At Molly’s funeral I might be crying over the marriage and the funeral but there was no need to break that down for anyone, to just cry as much as I needed to. And 3, upon my asking her what she would do if she were my mother, she replied, “I’d pay for your lawyer.”

I’ll say something now I said often back then, because I still hold that it’s true: While there is never really a good time to just walk out on a marriage, it is especially bad form to bail less than twenty-four hours after your spouse gets word of the death of a good friend. But then narcissists don’t understand any story in which they are not the center, and so Narcissus was probably still thinking about his Abe Lincoln conspiracy theory when he made his decision to walk out when he did. 

Poor Nigel. I tried very hard to keep a stiff upper lip in his presence, but he knew something was up. Finally I told him, trying to downplay my agony. He was distant but kind, stereotypically English, for which I was grateful. One night, during a downpour, he even stepped into the backyard and shoveled a quick makeshift ditch to keep the water from flooding the house again, as it had done weeks before when he was visiting the UK, inches of water in his room saturating piles of papers he’d left on the floor, and which I do believe, in a panic, I attempted to dry out in the oven. A couple of months later, lease completed, he moved out. I wasn’t alone in the house for long, though. And my new roommate surprised pretty much everybody.

Sometime during the Drama of Clarksville in the Fall of 2006, I’d gotten a call from Big Red. You might recall that Big is the father of Henry, that we moved to Austin together in 1991 when our son was a baby, and that Big moved back to St. Louis in 1993 because his drinking had gotten to the point that he had been hospitalized a couple of times, and I had requested he go back to his family. In St. Louis, his condition continued to deteriorate. We all knew his was dying– I don’t mean that in a figurative or hyperbolic way. I mean literally, he came as close to dying from drinking as a human can come without actually dying.

In the thirteen years he was gone, I always stayed in touch. I took Henry to see him, and once in a great while he would come to see us. Big would, to prepare for these visits, sometimes try to quit drinking temporarily, and this would cause grand mal seizures, as his body by that point needed the very poison that was killing him. To understate the matter: it was awful. Seeing him like that tore me up. Some people wondered why I even bothered. For one thing– I did not want our son’s only memory of our father to be him dead in a casket. But then there was that other thing, too: Love.

Big and I never didn’t love each other. Even when we broke up. There weren’t huge blowups. There were not vitriolic words. There was just the big, long, deep sadness. He was my first true love. We had this beautiful kid together. Henry bore so many of his mannerisms, his build, his stride, his smile. His alcoholism was a disease. I felt about it the way I would’ve felt if he’d had cancer that kept him too ill to parent. I did not hate him. I did not dislike him. I loved him. I missed him. It sucked that he missed Henry’s childhood. 

And now came the call, thirteen years after he moved away. He wanted to move back. How did I feel about that? 

I was okay with him coming back. My current drama notwithstanding, Big and I were both much improved from our twenties. I had quit drinking in 2000. Big had had a miracle bottoming out the following year, and he was sober too. By the time he made a plan to return, he had more than six years dry, I had just over seven. We understood Henry might resent both of us– Big for coming back, and me for not protesting. We agreed that whatever was going to happen would happen. There would be no pressure on Henry to be a certain way or to see Big. 

The timing of Big’s return to Austin was bizarre. When we’d first made the plan, my marriage had not yet disintegrated. We decided to let the idea sink in for several months before we moved forward with it. Which is how it came to pass that he arrived not very long after Narcissus’s big walkout and Nigel’s departure. I invited Big to stay with me until he could re-acclimate to Austin. I helped him find a job. Our son mostly stayed away. 

Here is what Big did for me those months he was my roommate: he took care of me like I was a little baby. I had always been the caretaker type. Maybe I hadn’t always been great at taking care of me, but I was a blur of action when it came to finding ways to be useful for friends and strangers alike. Now though, I was reduced to a level of helplessness that scared me. Queeny and I were making strides, but not without a big cost, digging so deep that I began to call our sessions Emo Chemo. I’d show up in her office sometimes too exhausted to speak, just slump over and cry, return home where I had set up my bedroom like that of a convalescing critically ill person. I was critically ill. What had happened in Clarksville nearly destroyed me, and the road back involved examining not only the present situation, but the haunting past that had informed my decision to involve myself with Narcissus in the first place.

Once during this horrible time, a mutual friend of Narcissus and mine told me he had run into her and announced I was crazy. Hearing this, initially I wanted to find him and punch his lights out. Then I zeroed in on what really infuriated me about that statement, and about the way Narcissus had nearly convinced Moss, my best friend and co-parent, that I’d lost my mind, resulting in a mini-intervention, an unexpected Moss ambush where he begged me to go on medication. I didn’t need medication. I needed to get away from Narcissus. And that was the source of my fury: Not that he was running around town stage whispering rumors about my declining mental health. Rather that HE had driven me fucking crazy and now he was acting like my instability was something I’d just one-click ordered on Amazon. This seemed to me on par with slicing someone’s jugular in your living room and then denigrating them for bleeding on your rug.

CRAZY? OF COURSE I WAS CRAZY. CRAZY WAS THE EXACT APPROPRIATE RESPONSE TO THE GASLIGHTING I HAD ENDURED.

I sat in the backyard every morning, chain smoking, drinking coffee, thinking my life was over, looping the memory of Narcissus’s cruel words in therapy, the actions of his cruel children, the absence of my beloved and angry son, waiting for the sixty days to pass between when I officially filed for divorce and when a judge could sign the decree. In my grief I stopped eating. I don’t mean I ate less. I mean that even forcing down a small yogurt made me want to puke. I dropped forty pounds in a very short period of time. I cried constantly. Every single day. For months. I was astounded at my capacity to cry so much, amazed that my body could continue to produce tears. 

Big is a very, very funny man. He is also a very gentle man. He would alternate between consoling me and cracking me up. Some days I’d be laughing even as I was crying. He bought me pints of Ben & Jerry’s and half-litre bottles of Mexican Coca-Cola and urged me to please eat and drink, this sugary junk food at least some measure of caloric intake.

The man nursed me back to health– mind, body, spirit. He did so with a quiet patience. He allowed me to tell the same story again and again and again as often we must do when processing trauma. He supported my efforts when I briefly joined a Buddhist AA group not because I wanted to start drinking again (I didn’t) but because my PTSD-related OCD had gone into overdrive and I felt powerless over my phone, which I kept using to call Narcissus to say, in essence, “YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKING COCKSUCKING PIECE OF GODDAMN HORSE ANUS I FUCKING HATE YOU LIKE I HAVE HATED NO OTHER. NOW COME OVER HERE AND LET’S MAKE IT WORK.”

Big also helped me through a pair of very stupid man moments. There was Paul, the online date, with whom I never even held hands. We went out once. Then he came by once to meet Big and share a meal. And then he announced we’d be getting into a committed relationship immediately. And I said go away. And he began stalking me. Then there was Strike Anywhere, who pursued me relentlessly, failing to inform me that he had not one but two girlfriends, involving me unwittingly in his beloved game of infidelity. (Aside: If you ever saw my show The Dick Monologues, you might recall it was dedicated to Strike.)

There was something else Big and I did, before he moved out once I was back on my feet. My friends Nancy and Tony run Kinky Friedman’s Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch in Medina. They had a whole passel of Boston Terriers that lived with them in their trailer and once I’d told them if ever a rescue Boston appeared, please give me a call. I got the call that spring, about a litter of six that had been dumped. In early May I headed out to the ranch and Tony handed over this amazing, fat, squishy-faced canine miracle. 

I named her Rebound, because post-breakup everybody needs a Rebound. She immediately imprinted on Big, apparently convinced he was her mother. It is a love that lasts to this day. We continue to co-parent her, and her brother Dante. Weekends Big comes to hang out with them. When I leave town, he moves in to be full-time caregiver. He still takes care of me, too, mows my lawn, washes my dishes, and remains on steady quiet standby for the times– far, far less frequent these days– when I need to unload something troubling me.

I look back now on what Big Red did for me and I will never, ever be able to repay him. We’ve now known each other for twenty-seven years. Our boy lives faraway in Brooklyn. And here we are, still in Austin, enjoying a friendship that has stood the test of time, tremendous stress, and horrific trauma. I am telling you people, Big Red Abides. 

ABOUT MY CHERRYWOOD HOUSE

There’s been a change in my mortgage since I last posted. I got my monthly statement from Nationstar Mortgage, the company that owns my bigger mortgage. A smaller company, Specialized Loan Services, owns a small chunk of it. I pay SLS $143 per month on an interest only loan. When I first started paying NationStar (they acquired the mortgage which has flipped a time or two) my payment was $1,249 per month, which fluctuated but not too much, because I have my property taxes rolled in with my loan payment. As of this month, after paying for ten years, I still owe the same amount of principal, because the original loan was 6.99% interest only (the only mortgage for which I qualified back then.) However, the ten-year mark means that I also now am paying $266.53 monthly toward the principal. The interest amounts to $783.49 per month. The taxes and insurance come out to $579.85 per month. So grand total I am now paying monthly is: $1,773. That’s about $550 more per month than when I moved in in 2005. Scraping together an additional $6,600 annually is not easy. I’ll discuss austerity in another post.

For now, here is food for thought: No bank will refinance my mortgage. I just tried again today. My adjusted gross income is considered too low. As a small business owner, I write off a lot (legitimately). The number on the AGI line gets put into their computer and they inform me my income-to-debt ration “proves” I cannot afford to pay the mortgage even though clearly I keep paying, month after month after month. But it doesn’t matter that I keep paying. They say I can’t pay it and so they get to keep me under their thumb. Financially speaking, I will “win” when I am forced to sell this house, which at least at the current market value, has more than doubled. But I will actually LOSE because this is my home. And I will be forced out based on a bunch of banking bullshit. The technical term for this is FUCKED UP. 

NOTE: Thank you so much for tuning into this blog. I know times are getting tighter for all of us but if you are able to help support this endeavor, please do. You can BUY MY NEW BOOK HERE. CLICK HERE TO BUY A BUMPER STICKER. And please consider making a modest $1-5 per month sustaining donation over at MY PATREON PAGE.

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CHAPTER TEN: Ninth Street AKA Hell on Earth

Yesterday I began the day with a fourth session of an ongoing root canal that is still not finished. Why is that? Because apparently I have such an intricate relationship with pain that even though I have been, at each session, administered enough Novocain to easily kill the Russian Army, I still feel it when Steve, my wonderful dentist, gets in there and starts digging. So we have to tackle it over multiple torture sessions. 

Post-dentist, I went for a pap smear. And while that did not involve anesthesia, and though physically it did not hurt, just putting the old feet in the old stirrups immediately fills my head with a montage of all the things that have gone wrong with my lady plumbing over the years. Like the Epic Ovarian Tumor Episode of 1997. Or the Please Rip It Out Now Hysterectomy of 2008, which came on the heels of far too many stretches of me lying on the bathroom floor, crying out in anguish, as with each monthly cycle my womb, chockfull of fibroids, attempted to destroy me. 

Perhaps it was contemplating my history of pain and my internal plumbing that prompted me, as I was driving home to my one-third-of-a-million-dollar palace on the East Side, to take a detour to Clarksville to see if I could sneakily take a picture of the home of my second ex-husband, Narcissus the Plumber, who caused me more pain in sixteen months than all of my tattoos, root canals, and reproductive surgeries put together. Times a billion. 

I had not been near his place in perhaps eight years. And even as I approached 9th Street, my head filled with sage advice garnered in the many years of therapy necessitated by that horrific coupling with him. I argued with myself that it was important that I show you all a photo of that house. I argued back that doing so might induce a panic attack of the sort I used to have all the time when I lived there. I shakily reasoned that I could abort the mission at the last second if I spotted him. 

As I neared the house– and honestly for a moment I wasn’t even sure if it was the house, so long has it been since I’d been there– my gut started to contemplate projectile vomiting. Fortunately, I’d eaten very little courtesy of the dental work pain, so there was nothing for me to hurl. When I did spot a couple of figures sitting on the steps, I didn’t scrutinize. I chickened out, made a hard right, and turned down a side street. 

So you’ll just have to take my words for it as I offer you the tale of my brief by hellish time living in Clarksville, where I moved less than a year after buying my house (read: renting it from the bank) on the East Side.

What prompted me to leave my dream home so soon? I was working as a teacher at a private school at the time. One of my students, let’s call her Big Eyes, took a shine to me, and I to her. She said she wanted me to hang out with her dad, a widower. He asked me out. After clearing it with the administration that I was not violating protocol, I agreed to spend an afternoon chatting with him. I’d already met him briefly at a school function, and then a second time when Big Eyes had volunteered him to fix my sink. He seemed funny and charming, as narcissists always deceptively do at the front end, and he was handy with a wrench. 

By the time of this rendezvous, January 2006, I was nearly seven full years into my Happy Life of Non-Dating. And though I was not exactly a Poster Child for Impeccable Mental Health, I had come a long way. I’d been sober six years. Henry and I were getting settled in to our Cherrywood House. I was working on another book, Pissed Off, for which I’d received a small contract. Austin Life was pretty great for us. Looking back, I would have to guess that I somehow reasoned that this relative calm, coupled with a belief that taking seven years off from dating, had brought me to a place of Some Wisdom and that I could handle dating in a way I never had been able to handle it before. 

So yeah, that’s some pretty blaring foreshadowing, isn’t it? Here’s a tangent for you. Once, long ago, I spilled a Coke into a laptop and, in my panic, decided I need to dry it out. So I grabbed a can of air and I blew it into the keyboard thinking I would fix things but instead, yes, blowing that sticky sugar water deeper into the machine. At the computer store, I insisted the repair guys come out and laugh at me to my face. They consoled me saying that actually, they’d seen worse, like the guy who was angry when he discovered, as he attempted to use the fax function on his computer, that he was unable to slide a piece of paper into his monitor, which he lugged into the shop demanding an explanation.

My point is, of course, that you know what’s coming here, that in diving in headfirst to another relationship, I was conducting the emotional equivalent of blowing the Coke deeper into the machine. So come on then, let’s all take a moment and laugh at the notion that I thought I’d figured out the man thing. Ready? GO AHEAD: HAHAHAHAHAHA. AGAIN!! HAHAHAHAHAHA. But don’t forget, hard as it might seem to believe, and not that it’s really any consolation, but surely somebody somewhere has fucked up worse than me. (I hope it wasn’t you.)

Let’s just speed through the next part of this saga, since Narcissus and I sped our way in real time from giddy false love into unfathomable depths of hell, our poor poor choices taking down several others with us. The time it took for us to go from that first sort-of date to living together was maybe six weeks. At first it was not an official living together. Let’s just say I showed up at his house and spent most of my time over there. Henry came with me, too. Big Eyes, was close to his age. They got along very well. Narcissus also had living on his property in little apartments two young adult stepchildren– we’ll call them Mature and Immature. The mother of all three kids, we’ll call her Saint Ghost Wife, had died eleven years prior. 

Initially there was more than a little joy. Big Eyes and Immature and Henry and I worked on decluttering the house. Funny thing– Narcissus not only shared my father’s birthday, but also his hoarding disorder. The very first time I walked into his house, I noted immediately (how could I not?) a tiny living room full of couches, one of them propped inoperably upright, as this was the only way it fit. That guy had such an incredible collection of shit that one time, before I came along, his neighbors offered to build him a privacy fence so they wouldn’t have to look at all the decommissioned toilets and other crap filling the yard. 

None of this phased me. In fact, I felt comfortable in the chaos. I’d grown up in a crowded house with not enough space, too many people, and mountains of useless salvaged broken furniture and items that had fallen off the truck. I acclimated quickly to my surroundings. Rather than be utterly creeped out that the falling apart house was a museum to my dead predecessor– pictures of Saint Ghose Wife adorned the walls, her clothes still in the old dresser– I put a fabulous spin on the story: Here I was with a man who clearly worshipped his partner. I was now his partner and so would benefit from his uxorious ways. 

Eventually it was decided I would move in full time with Narcissus and rent out my own house. SXSW 2006, I rented it to a couple of metal bands from Chicago– Deatholz and Baby Teeth, young men who’d met in a Christian high school. They were exceedingly polite, paid me a small fortune, left the house in better shape than they’d found it, asked only that I provide them the internet password and directions to the YMCA, and brought me a hostess gift– yarn– because one of them had a girlfriend who dug around online and discovered I was a passionate knitter.

After that I rented my house out to three separate tenants, tossing them together like a bad stew made of incongruous ingredients. One was a very serious Englishman. Another had big dogs, one of which killed the bird I’d left behind, and she never could pony up the rent. The third was a friend of a friend and I think she might’ve conceived her first baby in my old bedroom. 

Over at Narcissus’s, there was precisely ZERO room for my stuff in the house proper. So I stored bins in the makeshift basement, which Narcissus had dug out in his younger days when he had some extra energy from his meth habit. That was the same thing that landed him in prison for awhile (the drugs not the basement), not his first trip to the Big House, which, all told, he’d been to twice before I ever met him. Wait, is it time to laugh at my idiocy some more? Go ahead. I’ll wait.  

There was also no room for my son in the little house, so it came to pass that Narcissus was forced to clear out decades of shit from his Man Cave out back, in what had once been the garage. This was then converted into The Young Man Cave for my son, who– though pissed off that once again I’d made him move– seemed to adjust fairly quickly, likely as this bachelor pad setup gave him a lot of privacy, though ironically it had no plumbing, thus forcing him into the kitchen whenever he needed fresh bong water.

Though Big Eyes had once loved me so, her attitude toward me shifted wildly, swiftly, and mercilessly once I officially moved in, and she went from adoring me to hating my guts overnight. Now that nearly a decade has passed, can I see how, yeah, it might be a little freaky for your high school teacher to start sleeping with your dad? ABSOLUTELY. But here’s the weird thing– and I’m not offering it as an excuse for my poor choices and bad behavior (because I came to behave very, very badly)– for a little while at the very beginning we were all under this weird spell of something that did, momentarily, look and feel like happiness. Meals cooked and eaten together. The kids bringing their friends over. Lots and lots of laughter. 

I’m sure if you asked Big Eye, Immature, and Narcissus, they’d tell a totally different story, one that starts, middles, and ends with Spike is a crazy bitch and that was the real problem. But my theory of how and why things shook down as they did is this– I found out that when Saint Ghost Wife died, Narcissus had told the kids (quite young at the time) not to grieve, to carry one, blah blah blah. And I think that when I first showed up, it was fun because it felt like a party. But then, I didn’t leave. I occupied the space their mother had, space I suspect that they had been holding, awaiting her return, engaged in constant Magical thinking. My arrival marked physical evidence that she really wasn’t coming back and I do believe this triggered in them a latent grief that became uncontrollably explosive. Meanwhile, living in a super chaotic house where there was no room for me, a house headed up by a narcissist, so mirrored my own fucked up childhood that I, too, fell prey to my own latent, shocking, and explosive grief.

In short we were, collectively, a MASSIVE CLUSTERFUCK OF UTTER INSANITY. Big Eyes “moved out”– announcing if I was staying, she was going. She took some possessions and went over to stay long term at a friend’s. Henry grew distant. Immature grew shifty and mean, though that didn’t stop him from borrowing my car. Narcissus and I consulted some of the adults who helped us raise our kids to try to figure out what to do. And we decided there was something that would send a clear message and let the kids know we were serious and our relationship was real, and that we were going to be a family. 

Which is to say that, yes, WE GOT MARRIED. And we did so not quite five months into dating which, compared to my first marriage, was a considerable amount of time. Of course this did nothing to calm the kids. Big Eyes showed up at the wedding, held in the neighbors’ yard, dressed in black, chain smoking, talking on her phone, surrounded by a contingent of equally sullen friends. I think Henry skipped the event altogether. 

Our first morning together married, Narcissus and I weren’t even all the way awake when his phone rang. It was Big Eyes, calling him, demanding he bring her breakfast. It should be noted that she was calling him from Quack’s, where she was sitting with one of his credit cards in her pocket. Of course this was a loyalty test. Of course he got out of bed and went to her. 

I should have left then. I actually did leave. But only for a few hours. 

Imagine the months of hell that followed as I foolishly tried to make things work. Imagine incredible hell. Imagine Immature tearing down the fence in hopes my dogs would escape and get hit by cars. Imagine Big Eyes stealing my possessions. Imagine the smear campaign she started at the school where I still taught and she still attended. Imagine how the kids felt when an article came out about my new book, and the headline declared me their imminent stepmother. (Jeff, who’d written the story, had been really thoughtful in focusing on the book. But whoever wrote the headlines really fueled the fires of damnation.) Imagine Narcissus standing back, refusing to take a real stand and defend our marriage, immersing himself in endless Dos XX and Law & Order reruns while I grew increasingly distraught.

I have, thankfully, forgotten some of the worst of it. I have unfortunately, not forgotten it all. I remember Narcissus constantly comparing me to Saint Dead Wife, chastising me, telling me how much better she had always been, how she had never pushed him, how she had been so perfect, had just gone to work and brought home money to buy his drugs, and why did I have to be so pushy? I remember learning the hardest of ways that I had not married a man who was dedicated to his wife (me) but who could not let go of his dead wife. 

In October 2006 we came home from a ACL taping and I found every potted plant I owned (many) smashed up and down the front sidewalk. Not just broken but obliterated. Henry pulled up with some friends as I was trying to clean the mess, hoping hard it had been made by some passing vandal, though we all knew better. One of Henry’s friends, helping, cut his hand. The boys went in to deal with the bleeding but quickly came back outside. Henry was chalk white and incredibly shaken, urging me inside.

There I found that someone– Immature as it would turn out– had methodically taken every single fragile item he could find that belonged to me (wedding gifts, my special coffee mug, the list went on) and ground it into a sandy glass and ceramic dust into the kitchen rug. It was terrifying. It was a crime. I was scared for my life. My PTSD went into high gear. I began having severe panic attacks. I nicknamed him The Rapist which, as you might guess, did nothing to de-escalate the situation. But I felt so violated by his actions– not just the physical destruction but the clear message that I was not safe, and that he would destroy me– that I could not think of a more fitting word. 

I moved out of the Clarksville house. I could not yet move back into my own house as I had to give the tenants notice. I wound up taking just one dog– worriedly leaving the two others at Narcissus’s– and moving temporarily into an extended stay motel on Barton Springs Road. I went on anti-anxiety medication.

Thanksgiving that year, the sister of Saint Ghost Wife, who had once been so nice to me, and who had excitedly given her blessing for my marriage to her dead sister’s widower, took a stand. Let’s call her Cunt, since that’s about right. She threw a family dinner and informed Narcissus that I was not to attend. When Narcissus passed this information on to me the message– YOU ARE NOT WANTED. WE HATE YOU.– struck such a deep nerve in me, so echoed my childhood trauma, that I lost my shit. I called Cunt to confront her. Narcissus was MY husband now. How dare she do this? She made it clear that she was still his family and that I was not. She said her plan was to be happy that day and my presence would preclude that, to stay away. 

Narcissus, as he had left me on the first full day of our marriage to go to buy his daughter a bagel, now abandoned me on Thanksgiving. I wanted to die. I do think, if I had not had my son to live for, I would’ve seriously considered killing myself that day. The hurt ran so deep. I felt so betrayed. And yet still, getting back to my intricate relationship with pain– it would take another two months to make a true break, and years beyond that to find genuine healing. 

ABOUT 9TH STREET NOW

Narcissus told me the story of buying his Clarksville house about ten million times, the same as he told me every other story of his life. You’d think I’d be able to recite it then, but much counseling has thankfully helped me to block out the repetitive blathering to which I had been endlessly subjected. Still, if the ghost of memory serves, I do believe he bought that place for $15,000 in the ‘70s. It was much smaller then– he added an extension to Big Eyes’ room around the time I met him. And a few years prior to that, he and Mature, an architecture student, had put in an efficiency apartment on the back of the house, and a garage apartment in the backyard. 

Even with all those additions, it is somewhat unbelievable that TCAD appraised the place in 2015 for $627,019, up from $439,887 in 2014, and up from $382,263 in 2010. Of the current value, $255,000 of that is for the lot, which I have no doubt is still covered in shitty old toilets. The square footage of the original house, built in 1925, looks to be 1424, but that can’t be right. Maybe I can go over and ask him. Oh wait NO FUCKING WAY AM I DOING THAT. Let’s just note that the main house is a falling down piece of shit. Taxes without exemptions are $11,515.28. However, as you might have surmised from the clue that Narcissus is addicted to Law & Order, he is an old codger, eighteen years my senior, and so gets the Old Folks Cap, putting his taxes as $8,267.44 annually, merely half of what he paid for the den of sin. 

Far more interesting than his story is the Story of Clarksville. You can read the cleaned up version of the history of the neighborhood RIGHT HERE, where you’ll see a cheerful one-line nod to how, despite gentrification, the “spirit” of Clarksville lives on. Probably goes without saying but let me say, for the record, I CALL BULLSHIT ON CHEERFUL ACCOUNTS OF RACISM.

For a hopefully more accurate account, you can check out the Wikipedia Page About Clarksville, and yes, I know Wikipedia isn’t exactly the most accurate source in the world, but the article does come with legit footnotes. 

In short, Clarksville was founded by freedman (read: FORMER SLAVE) Charles Clark in 1871. The streets were caliche. The settlement was then considered outside of Austin. Eventually The Man, aka Whitey, started eyeing the land, its proximity to downtown, and decided the black families had to go. They were forced out. I urge you to read the longer version at the above mentioned link. 

Of course Anglos pushing out People of Color was nothing new– witness: Displacement of Indigenous People that began when those religious nutjobs landed at Plymouth Rock. Austin is a wildly segregated city– economically and racially (and yes, those two intertwine). If you want to read a bit about the segregation and how it has been legally sanctioned and purposefully shaped, here is A Texas Monthly Article on Segregation and here is An Academic Paper on the Topic. 

I do want to say that, despite my personal traumatic history in Clarksville, and despite the shameful way it was stolen from the residents of the original Freedman Settlement, this area of Austin is worth a visit. You can see some really great historic houses. You can shake your head with disbelief at the ridiculous ‘70s tennis player ensembles the valet parkers at Jeffrey’s have to wear as they run to park the cars of the people destroying Austin as we once knew it, and you can take a moment, please, to think about how gentrification is not at all a new problem here, it’s just getting exponentially worse.

Toward that end, last year I put up A POST AT KEEPING AUSTIN AUSTIN about my best friend, Noska, and his fascination with Texas history. He has a lot to say about the current overdevelopment, and how not new overdevelopment is. 

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TALKING POETRY WITH THE TAXMAN

Today I had my informal hearing at TCAD to protest my most recent ridiculous appraisal. And guess what? I WON BIG TIME!! But guess what else? I LOST BIG TIME!! To the point that, by the end of the meeting, when I received the big reveal on how I was being screwed, I wondered if maybe this whole thing had been set up by The Onion. 

Before I tell you about the actual meeting though, me being me, I’m going to go off on a couple of tangents. Bear with me please. They sort of relate to the matters at hand. Firstly, I was borderline delighted to note that my informal hearing was set for today, 29 May, as this is the birth anniversary of my father. There were many things my father could not stand, but two things that topped his list were:

  • BUREAUCRACY 
  • ME

I will go to my grave haunted by that time, when I was maybe eleven or twelve, and my father– as he often did– had my brother (two years my junior) and I working on one of his “home improvement” projects. This one was down the shore, a little deck made of salvaged plywood. The guy who lived in the house across from the empty lot behind our house was a year-round resident. He wore multiple hats. That year he was either the mayor and home inspector or chief of police and home inspector. Whatever– on that tiny island, he was king. He marched over and, citing my father’s lack of permit, demanded that my brother and I stop hammering. My father insisted we continue. We were more afraid of my father than the other guy. It was confusing and terrifying. 

My father flipped out (no surprise there). He began screaming he would kill the guy (though surely he must’ve done this after the guy left?). So ferocious were his threats that I went to my room and prayed that he would not follow through. 

Though my father was a lunatic, he wasn’t entirely off-base about bureaucracy. We all know palm-greasing is a real thing. As is nepotism, favor-granting, racism, classism– the list goes on. To give a current example of this bullshit, I urge you to take a few moments to read Michael King’s Chronicle article about the TCAD scam currently happening– with developers, shielded by non-disclosure rights, paying about 40% of the tax rate whilst us little people get the dirty end of the stick and are overtaxed (again– no surprise). 

Despite my hobby of bellyaching about my father’s rage, let’s acknowledge the obvious: that attitude was either genetic or contagious and I grew up to be a Protest Enthusiast, ever eager to march on the capitol for women’s rights and against war, to call out shitheads like American Apparel, and to confront people who illegally park in handicapped spots. So it was today, not precisely in his honor, but with his ghost hovering above my shoulder, that I marched down to TCAD to explain to them that they are fucking nuts for valuing my little East Austin concrete bunker at $329,887. 

On the form I sent in to arrange my protest, I had noted in the OTHER box that I was protesting BULLSHIT CORPORATE WELFARE. My sense going in was that my request for a reduction would be shot down, so there was no need to hide my true reason for wanting the meeting. 

I had another reason for going, too. I wanted to see what the process is like for a regular old human being. On Facebook, where unsolicited advice is annoyingly and often didactically hurled at me on a regular basis, I had been told repeatedly to hire ProTax to do the work for me. This actually did not fall under the annoying advice umbrella. But nor did it match my belief that the process should not be so complicated that we have to pay money we don’t have to people to argue on our behalf. We should be able to do this ourselves. I wanted to see how I would fare. 

Just as the ProTax advice wasn’t bad, I did get some other good advice. Take photos of every single flaw in the house. Take a copy of a building inspection. Take an estimate for repairs. One piece of crap advice I got was that I could not get a reduction because the jump in my property value from $289,543 last year to $329,887 this year was a jump on the “value” of my lot. WRONG. The value of my lot has held steady at $125,000 since at least 2010. Which means… wait for it:

TCAD REPORTED THAT MY 1947 HOME – THE PHYSICAL STRUCTURE WHICH HAS HAD ZERO IMPROVEMENTS SINCE A STORM IN 2008 WHEN I GOT A NEW ROOF– HAD JUMPED IN VALUE $40,344.

Time for the next tangent. In 1997, not long after my first divorce, the magic of the relatively new fangled internet brought back into my life a guy I’d met when I lived in Knoxville in the ‘80s. He’d been a teenager and I’d been in my early twenties. Now we were both in our thirties, and he confessed having a huge crush, and flattery getting him everywhere, I received his bad poetry with excitement and booked a flight to see him. In a lifetime full of memorably terrible stretches of time, that week is a true standout. Once I arrived he acted horrified to “discover” I was a feminist (like I ever kept that a secret). And he was terribly hurt when he took me to the park to watch men in dresses kneel down before him and beseech him to allow them the pleasure of a duel involving tinfoil covered wiffle ball bats. Because, yes, he was King of the SCA in his neck of the woods. I, mortified to be affiliated, sat off to the side pretending to be a woman alone reading. 

I mention all this because upon my return home, my friend Robert said to me, “Why is it when I think of you and men, the same song pops into my head every time?” (Whistles circus theme.) Robert then added, upon hearing the SCA part, “YOU DIDN’T TELL ME HE WORE DRESSES, TOO!”

This accusation put me in the odd place of suddenly feeling like I needed to defend the Tennessee Asshole because I needed to defend my choices and my “taste.” 

I thought of that whole years-ago scene because as I was preparing for my protest, I was doing the opposite. I was plotting how to convince some desk jockey just what a huge piece of shit my house is, persuade him it is borderline teardown, the future set for the Austin version of Grey Gardens, and as such should be reassessed at a far lesser amount. I didn’t really want to trash talk my house because to me IT IS PRICELESS. This is MY HOME. This is MY HISTORY. This is the place that if (when) I am pushed out of it due to taxes, I will be pushed out of this city where I have spent the past 25 years, which is just about half of my life. I don’t want to leave. But in order to try to stay, I must bad talk my little nest, hoping for a tax break.

I fantasized creating a dazzling PowerPoint presentation. I imagined composing a mini-musical featuring the song: My House is a Piece of Shit, But Oh How I Love It Soooooooooo! But the dumbass protest rules specifically exclude bringing emotions or politics into the conversation. So I settled on a low-key (for me) plan. 

I debated whether I should wear my HULK t-shirt or a boob dress. As you can see, I chose the latter. Not to wow the appraiser dude with my relatively decent rack (thank you underwire!). I didn’t even know if I’d be meeting with a guy or a gal, gay or straight and so could not gauge if, in fact, my mighty bosom would be useful. But I, personally, feel confident and cheerful when I’m rocking one of my Sexy Secretary ensembles. And another piece of good advice I’d gotten was to BE NICE AND BE CHEERFUL.

Now some of you might not believe this, but I swear, even before this was suggested, my plan was to ENTER CHEERFUL. While I still occasionally get irritable with customer service workers, honestly that’s very rare. The older I get, the more I understand the fucking ridiculous pressure they are under, the protocol, the reprimands, all of it. Plus I am trying to undo the horrible karma I amassed in my Truly Hot-Headed Younger Days when I unhesitatingly unleashed on such workers. (To wit– the text from my son awhile back, “Mom, was it the Chicago airport where you almost got arrested?” No, honey, that was San Francisco.)

When I arrived at TCAD, I checked in on an iPad then took a seat, figuring the wait would be anywhere from one to fifteen hours. I observed the children’s artwork on the wall, perhaps put there to cheer us up or dumb us down pre-meeting. But all I could think was– Somebody needs to tell these children about criminal mortgage companies and evil fucking developers. Within moments, before I could galavant down the path of cynicism too far, a young man stepped out and called my name. He had a genuine, easygoing vibe, was young enough to be my nephew, and he greeted me kindly. 

“I don’t envy your job,” I said pleasantly, admittedly shifting into try-to-win-him-over-with-empathy gear. 

He didn’t react much to my attempt, just showed me to his cubicle. I asked if I could record our session. He said sure. (I did. It’s pretty boring so I won’t bother posting it.) I told him, honestly, this was my first time to protest, and that I needed to be educated. He said we could talk as long as I wanted, and that he hoped we could figure something out so I could skip the formal hearing, which is what you can take as a second step if you don’t like the outcome of the informal hearing. The paperwork stating the rules for the formal hearing is so detailed and bossy that it, in itself, is a deterrent. I agreed with the nice young chap that figuring it out informally would be great. 

So then I started pushing across the desk in random order papers, pictures, and questions. Lots of questions– because as we now know thanks to the recent lecture at Austin City Hall, women ask SO MANY QUESTIONS. 

Nice Guy fielded them all, took his time, leapt repeatedly into his computer. When I told him I found some nearby property valued at less than mine for the lot, he said maybe they would have to increase the neighbors’ price. To which I protested NO! Jesus– all I need is the outcome of my meeting to be my neighbors hating my guts. 

He looked at the pictures of the big cracks in the slab foundation and the walls. He looked at the picture of how the Christian plumber did the unfancy re-stuccoing job after replacing the kitchen pipes. He admired (I hope) the images of home improvement I had rendered with duct tape. He said the pictures helped him a lot. He said next year get estimates for foundation and wall repair and bring those, too, and he’ll REALLY be able to help. 

All this went on for a half-hour or so, at which point again he dove into his computer, pulled up numbers for houses in the hood that had recently sold, and finally– FUCKING FINALLY– printed out a piece of paper that he showed me. Are you ready for this? 

HE LOWERED THE APPRAISAL TO $298,968! WHICH MEANS I, A MANY-QUESTION-ASKING WOMAN IN A BOOB DRESS WITH NO PRIOR PROTEST EXPERIENCE GOT MY HOUSE REDUCED BY $30,919!! WOO-HOO!!

I was so pumped I immediately joked that I would be buying a BMW on the way home. Then I settled down long enough to ask him, no really, how much would my taxes drop? Before the meeting they were at $5,475.71 with my homestead exemption. So I’m thinking maybe a thousand? Several hundred at least? And here is where the Nice Guy explained to me this:

I STILL HAVE TO PAY THE EXACT SAME AMOUNT IN TAXES. 

THE. EXACT. SAME. AMOUNT. 

NOT. ONE. FUCKING. PENNY. LESS.

Now call me stupid if you want but I had this crazy idea that if the appraised value of my house dropped by $30,000, then MY FUCKING TAXES WOULD ALSO DROP.

But no. And here is where, vowing that I was going in with zero expectations for a tax break and only hopes for an education came in mighty handy. Because I learned that in order to pay fewer taxes, I would’ve had to haggle him down to less than $251,309 because of homestead blah blah blah blah blah fucking blah. WHATEVER.

So, yes, that’s right. I spent all that time gathering information, documents, photographic evidence, and sitting in an office to get a smaller appraisal number THAT MEANS FUCKING NOTHING AT ALL.

And here I would like to take a moment to remind my money savvy friends why I continue to cling to my hippie ways, to try very hard to just be glad I have a house at all, to not think too hard about having the world’s worst mortgage, and to just carry on not trying to count beans I don’t have, but rather focusing on all the wonderful things I do have. Because THIS MONEY STUFF IS NOW WAS BEFORE AND ALWAYS WILL BE STACKED AGAINST THE LITTLE GUY.

And toward that end– calculating my wealth on a system of gratitude vs. money– something really amazing happened as I walked out of that meeting. I spotted in the lobby my most recent ex-husband who, crazily enough, has my father’s birthday, which, noted above, is TODAY. That I would marry a man born the same day as a man who was so nuts is, yes, a sign that I am colorblind regarding flags of crimson hue. I hadn’t seen that ex-husband in maybe eight years, which is no small feat in this town, which despite rapid expansion, can still feel very tiny when it comes to running into folks you’d rather not. 

I actually recoiled at the sight of him, pulled back, looked for a place to hide. Then I glanced again and saw a tattoo on his arm. My ex had no tattoos. It wasn’t him. It was his doppelgänger! This epiphany felt like winning a double lottery– a) I wouldn’t have to have an awkward interaction and b) I’M NOT MARRIED TO HIM ANYMORE!! YAY!! FUCKING YAY!!

And this is how, despite my very non-victorious TCAD “victory,” I nonetheless left that office feeling elated. Next year I’ll be back with the foundation reports, roofing estimates, wall figures, casement window prices. Next week, I’ll be back here with CHAPTER NINE, the story of the time I briefly lived with that terrible now-ex-husband in the Clarksville house he bought for $15,000. 

Today I’m just going to sit here in my TCAD-labeled one-third-of-a-million-dollar estate and be happy it’s not raining. 

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