Things that Live in the Basement

What would Christmas be without a story about cockroaches.  I watched “Home Alone” for the BaZillionth time last night, and my favorite part of the movie is still when the kid puts the tarantula on the burglar’s face.  So back in the 80s…when I was young and fearless, I made my first real estate purchase.  It was a studio apartment in a Pre-War building turning coop in Brooklyn Heights.  When it turned coop we decided to renovate the building and hired a contractor.  I was on the board, “The Treasurer” I think…scary right?

One day the contractor needed us to go down into the sub-basement to check out some work that needed to be done on the sewer pipe.  No problem I thought.  So when they said this building was pre-war, I thought maybe pre-WWI…it was Pre-Civil War.  To get down into this sub-basement you needed to climb down this thin metal latter that was bolted to the brick wall.  Like way down.  It gets better…there’s no lighting.  Its pitch black…like being in the bottom of a coal mine.  The contractor has “a” flashlight.  We’re all assembled now and the contractor begins to shine the flash light along the sewer pipe, I want to say it’s about 12 inches in diameter.  He gets to a point in the pipe where it’s cracked and leaking…just lovely.  But what made it extra special was that there were about a dozen cockroaches feasting on the waste.  They also must have been part of an atomic experiment, because each cockroach was not less than 5 inches long.  So I’m staring at this horror show and a couple of thoughts race through my mind:  One, the contractor has done a very nice job of selling his services.  I’ll pay any amount of money to fix this situation.  The next and more important thought was, I wondered if any of the other guys down here were faster than I was.

The contactor makes some comments about the correct way to fix the broken pipe…we all cut him off before he can finish and just tell him to do whatever is required.  With that, the flashlight leaves the small predators and what comes next is an episode of the Three Stoogies.  There is an immediate case of the hebe-geebees where everyone is imaging the cockroaches are attacking.  There’s a race to the latter, or at least where we think the latter is.  There’s a sense of urgency probably similar to what goes on when a ship is sinking.  The last thing I remember is wishing I knew how to fly… as someone was using my shoulders as a latter rung. 

So my real estate expertise is very similar to my stock trading motto of buy high and sell low.  I bought the coop for $75K.  After owning it for less than 6 months I could have sold it for $100K.  Stock Market crashes and coops get obliterated…I wind up giving the coop away for $25K.  Roll forward 20 years…my daughter and I are spending the day in Brooklyn Heights in September.  We walk past a real estate office and a saleswoman comes out and asks if she can help us.  I say, “Just for kicks, what does a studio apartment on Columbia Heights go for these days?” ----- They start at about $450K.

You Snooze, You Lose

So one of my kids is going to a writing camp down at a North Carolina University.  I come up with the brilliant idea to drive her down.  So we get up early on the Saturday of 4^th of July weekend and from Northeastern PA get on Route 81 and start heading south.  I really shouldn’t complain because the weather was beautiful and the highway was very do-able…but I will anyway.

We’ve been driving on Rt. 81 for nearly 7 hours straight (one gas/bio break…which I guess in my case is a redundant phrase).  I can’t remember the last time I drove 7 hours straight so I’m pretty beat.  We finally get off 81 and start heading east.  In the back of my mind I’m thinking, “We maybe have another 45 minutes to go.”  I finally look at my MapQuest instructions and they tell a different story.  There are multiple 29, 32 and 40-mile segments that remain.  I have another 3 HOURS to go.  Forget about having the wind completely taken out of my sails; immediately a combination of depression, frustration and exhaustion sets in.  We arrive at our hotel, almost 10 hours to the minute from when we left.  I’m completely toast and will eat anything that’s put in front of me.  (That last phrase will produce immeasurable damage as this story progresses)

I spend the next day getting my daughter moved in and eating extremely greasy fried, really “butter-laden” foods.  Now you combine that with the fact that if I leave my zip code and drink the local water, my digestive track goes into a complete state of disrepair…trouble can’t be far off.  Next morning I’m back in the car driving up to Annapolis to do some fishing on the Chesapeake with a good friend from college.  Naturally I wait too long to get on the road and I run into traffic around DC and Baltimore.  As I sit there cursing myself, I hear a gurgling in my stomach begin…not a good sign. 

Without visible damage, I arrive at my friend’s house late in the day.  His wife, he and me go out on his boat and have a great time taking in the sites on the bay and maybe we down a couple of sociables.   We then pull up to a restaurant on the water…consume a couple more beverages and a fantastic burger & fries.  The burger might have been cooked in the same oil as the fries but I wouldn’t know, I’m back in the state of mind where if you put it in front of me…I’ll eat it.  We get back to the house and I have one more responsible beverage (mind you we’re on the water the next day around 5 AM to pull in monster-size Stripe Bass!)  I take a Zantac “Ha, like that’s really going to help” and go to bed at a reasonable hour…and that was the last reasonable thing that happened to me for the next 18 hours.

I woke up around midnight with cold sweats.  My digestive track is feeling like I’m the runner up in the national jalapeño-eating contest.   You know you’re in trouble when you get to the bathroom and you can’t figure out if you should be driving the porcelain bus or sitting on it.  Scary thoughts of a dual effort start to run through my mind but I fight them off.   This goes on for hours with no relief at either end.  Finally around 4AM I make the call, it’s time for the Woodbridge two-finger jam.  With a small amount of relief I head back to bed to see if I can get more than an hour of sleep.  No such luck.  About 5 minutes after I lied down, I heard the garage door opening under me.  My friend Brian is heading out to get bait.  He comes back about 20 minutes later with bait, sandwiches, and two massive coffees.  One is for me…what a good friend.  As much as I needed the coffee, as the toothpicks I wedged under my eyelids were about to buckle, the thought of pouring hydrochloric acid down my throat into my ulcerated stomach was frightening.  Time to Man-up.  I grab the coffee; quickly swallow about five large gulps (think of those episodes on a Survivor when the challenge is to eat nasty hunks of squid that have been sitting out in the sun for a couple of days.)  Almost immediately I feel a rumbling, probably not unlike the rumbling that the inhabitants of Pompeii felt when Vesuvius was about to erupt.  I put down the coffee, re-thank my good friend and excuse myself to a remote bathroom in the house.  I won’t be too graphic, but if I could have scheduled my long awaited colonoscopy that morning, I definitely could have killed two birds with one stone.  (It’s a been there and done that kind of thing…if you’re of the right age, you know what I mean)

So I emerge from the bathroom, a lesser man, but much better for it.  We pack up our gear, I swallow an Imodium AD, and we head to the marina.  On the short ride over, Vesuvius begins to rear his ugly head again.  It’s about 5:30AM and no one is in sight.  My friend can sense that I’m struggling a bit and just before we shove off he says, “Last chance to hit the head…pointing to the marina bathroom.”  I consider it for a second but didn’t want to hold up the fishing operation, so I say, “No, I’ll be fine.”  Nothing further from the truth could have been true.  We’re about 100 feet from the dock and I get a significant wave of gastronomic pressure that causes me to reconsider my captain’s offer.  But now we’ve pulled away and to go back would be an even larger gaff.  So I soldier on…praying that the modern technology built into Imodium will prevail.  We go about a ¼ mile and now I’m close to a panic stage…but again to turn around now would be a such a slap in the face to fishing etiquette and manhood in general, that’d I’d rather jump overboard than ask that question.   (You really have to pause and wonder where my priorities in life are.)

Now we’re miles out, we drop anchor and I have no choice but to go with “Mind over matter.”  (There was an old episode of Star Trek where these small alien creates would attach to your neck & spine and inflict such severe pain that you’d go out of your mind and shortly there after, die.  Spock get’s infected but because of his superior Vulcan mind, is able to hold the pain at bay…every once in a while getting an excruciating wave of pain that he needs to concentrate on to control…this is what the day was like.)

So we get to what seems like a good spot , bait up and cast off.  We have three poles on the boat with us.  Two are in stanchions, and one is laying on the back seat.  My friend is now towards the front of the boat and I happen to look at the smaller pole lying on the back seat.  It’s in motion and starting to fly out of the back of the boat.  I yell to my friend, “Brian, the pole!”  He grabs the pole and battles in a 24 inch Stripe Bass.   You may ask, “Steve, why didn’t you just grab the pole, you were closer?”  And here in lies where the title of the story comes from…”You Snooze, You Lose.”  And as things usually work…I caught nothing the rest of the day.

P.S.

Once Brian hauled in the bass, fishing boats from out of nowhere surrounded us.  One about 40 yards away caught about 10 fish the size of Brian’s in a matter of 40 minutes…I finally said to Brian, “What do you say we pull up the anchor and ram those &@#$%ers.”

Weekends are for Relaxing

So, after an unbelievable battle with my customer and then with my own company over end of quarter business…(and then having it spill over into the weekend), I get to our PA lake house on a Friday night around 11PM.  I’m Toast. 

The follow day I’m still in a complete fog, but we have company coming up, so I need to strap on my happy face and be a delightful host.  Being that I’m a curmudgeon by nature, this saps just about all the remaining energy I have.

We haven’t been up for weeks so I need to clean the yard.  (outside of being lit on fire, there’s not much else I really wanted to do more than clean the yard…Ah but patience, that’ll come later).  Also the battery in the boat was dead, so my wife took it out prior to me coming up and attached it to an overnight charger.

This is how the rest of the weekend went:

1)    While doing heavy lifting in the backyard cleanup project, I threw my back out…just wonderful.  (now you take the curmudgeon factor & the bad back, and my happy needle is hovering just above empty)

2)    Still in a funk, I wasn’t paying attention and put the battery back into the boat… backwards.  I attached the Negative to the Positive and… (I had a clue something was wrong when I couldn’t turn the engine off.  But what really gave it away was when smoke started coming out of the ignition key slot… as well as the battery compartment)  So I fried the boat…disappointing a waiting crew, clad in swimwear and tubing gear.  I also missed the only two-hour time slot that it didn’t rain that weekend.  Question you may be asking yourself is, well if you melted the ignition and the boat was running…how did you turn it off?  Simple, I electrocuted myself a number of times as I disconnected the sizzling battery.  (Now I can recharge my Blackberry in about 30 seconds by just holding in the palm of my hand.)

3)    Next, time for Chef-Boy-R-D to spring into action.  I go to start the dinner charcoal briquettes in my Weber Kettle…taking a stick match and flicking it on the box.  As I strike the box, the matchstick breaks in half, flying in different directions.  The head of the match lands on the underbelly of the last digit of my left thumb.  I look down (and again in my crispy mind this is happening in slow motion) I see the head of the match begin to ignite on my skin…kind of like when a sparkler goes off.  (Think Homer Simpson) 

4)    Sunday morning, still in a daze, I go out to buy bagels and fruit for breakfast.  Not paying attention but yet again, I find when I get back home that half of the bagels I bought are as hard as rocks and more than half of the fruit is rotten.  (People are loving me)

5)    Sunday night, being that my back is still spasming, I had my 17-year-old son drive me home.   Of course that won’t be stressful. This is the first time he’ll be making this 2-hour drive that includes a nasty patch on route 80.  I won’t provide details for fear that the Good Hands people will take my auto insurance policy and with those good hands…viscously rip it into a thousand pieces.  The only thing I will say is that a couple of months ago I was asking my insurance carrier how I might lower my rates since we’re adding my son to our policy. They suggested that they insert a blue box in the car he uses that monitors his driving.  We’re going to pass on that option…

P.S.

Last weekend I had too many friends and family over.  I had to breakdown and use the small propane gas grill to augment my Weber Kettle capacity.   The push button starter on the communist gas grill wouldn’t work, so I walked across the deck and got my trusty box of stick matches…the same ones that attacked me three weeks before.  I throw a match into the grill…remembering way too late that I had “not” turned the gas off.  This is not good at all.  I will say, “I got the grill lit.”  It happened literally in a flash – as the bursting cloud of flames were at a “Holy Sh*t” level.  One good outcome is I no longer have to worry about the hair thinning on the top of my head. 

The last thing I remember was my Godson screaming to my wife, “Hey Aunt Joanie, have you ever seen Uncle Steve without eye brows?”

How to Mortify your Daughter

So I’m not perfect.  Family members have told me that my sneezing is so loud and violent, that I can cause a heart attack.  I’m not the kind of person that slowly brings a sneeze along and then finally delivers anticlimactically.  With me, its kind like the sneeze is in stealth mode lurking in my body.  Then when it’s ready to explode, without any warning what so ever, it comes with the force of a raging Tsunami.  Lord help you if you’re in the way.  And not that I want to get graphic ;-} but unless I’m wearing a catcher’s mitt, the friendly-fire that’s generated by one of these episodes can be catastrophic.  (I’m only human).

So we’re at the airport, the Fam and me.  We’re waiting for our plane to arrive and take off with us on it.  We have a plane and most of the crew.  But due to a scheduling snafu, our pilot is just now leaving Mexico to arrive and drive our plane to its destination.  (If anyone could figure out why these unconscionable things happen so regularly, they’d most probably also have the ability to pick the PowerBall Lottery numbers too.)   We perform our requisite foot stamping, cursing of the airline gods and settle in for a few more hours.  My teenage daughter and I decide to get on line at the La Famiglia Italian restaurant in order to bring back some fine dining to our comfortable seats .  (Side bar: I am no longer welcome at any La Famiglia restaurant)

There’s an “L” shaped order/waiting line at La Famiglia.  As you walk along you can order what you want and then get to the end and pay.  The two of us are somewhere in the middle of the line facing each other having a nice conversation.  (Remember…the speed of a raging Tsunami)  Then with literally a split second’s notice, I feel this Godzilla of all sneezes coming on.  Now with only nanoseconds to spare, my fatherly instincts kick in.  In a heroic effort to save my daughter, I turn away from her…and the food that’s on the line counter (Yes you’re welcome), and launch my Sneeze and all of the fall out that comes with it into the middle of the room. 

Post mortem:  I saved a family member that day, but sadly there were two casualties who never had a chance.  As I can’t get this vision out of my mind (I‘m hoping that writing about it will be good therapy) I replay it over and over again in slow motion…which is really amazing considering how fast it happened.  As I’m turning away from my daughter… and releasing my payload if you will, I open my eyes and look down.  Sitting right behind us are two guys (literally 3 inches away) having their La Famiglia meals.  All I can say is, “Excuse me” didn’t come close to cutting it.  (I have to apologize for the lack of detail, but I’d need at least 3 pages of adjectives to describe the looks on their faces and the motions their flailing arms were making).  So now I turn back around to my daughter and expect to get a, “Hey Dad, Thanks for sparing my life.”  Instead I’m now facing a stranger.  My daughter is completely mortified and staring stone-faced straight-ahead acting like she doesn’t know me.  I might have also detected an air of “Why is this grotesque individual trying to talk to me?”  So this made things very awkward, as I should have been given an Oscar for keeping it together when I violated these poor guys meals.  But the look on her face was too much and I cracked up….still standing right next to my victims who were not in the mood to be laughed at.

Fisticuffs were never had; we didn’t even get to the point where someone said, “Well Oh Yeah!?!”  But my daughter did suggest that we should pay quickly, and that I should remain silent (although she didn’t say it that nicely) before these two guys punched my lights out. 

The Salesmen

The other day I got a good idea of what my son thinks of my profession.  I’m a salesman.  I’d like to think I’m not your every day “Tin-Man”…I strive for a high level of customer service and…Blah Blah Blah.

So the Fam and I are on vacation.  We’re on a small island somewhere in the Caribbean.  The pathways are lined with local folk selling a variety of trinkets.  They’re relentless as they constantly call out to you trying to suck you in.  My 17 year-old son is a great target.  He’s 6’ 3”, weighs maybe a buck 50 and has no idea how to tell people “No” ...except of course when I’m asking him to mow the lawn.  (sidebar: I'm told this is normal for a 17 year old.  But just for the record, it doesn't make me feel any better.  If memory serves me, when I was his age and my Dad would ask me to mow the lawn, I'd be doing cartwheels in gratitude for the opportunity to in some small way, repay him for the years of premium room and board he provided as well as the promise of higher education.  I guess times have changed, or possibly my dementia is really kicking in.)

My son decides to go off and find a place to get a drink.  He’s gone for a while and we begin to wonder where he might be.  He finally shows up with his arms full of trinkets.  He’s got hemp bracelets with beads, small wood boxes, some with his name carved in them incorrectly, some correctly.   He’s a bit frantic as he tells us the “salesmen” wouldn’t leave him alone, they pulled him in and he owes them money now.  We size up the situation and my wife hands him $10 and says, “Tell them this is all the money you have…period.”  My son looks at us incredulously and says, “You want me to go back to the salesmen and negotiate with $10?”  He goes back, completes his transaction and reports to us that the salesmen were not happy with him.

Throughout this whole episode, my son is constantly referring to the cat-calling street hagglers as “salesmen.”  And he’s doing it innocently enough, but every time he says it, I get a sharp dual  feeling of embarrassment and a needle in my side.  I finally asked him, “So what do you think I do when I get off the train in NYC…camp out on a street corner with some company gear and scream out to people to sell them something?”  I only got a slightly puzzled look back.

On our way out, it’s like walking through a mile long gauntlet of cat-calling street merchants.  I tell my son, “Don’t look at them or say anything.”  He comes up with a better plan.  Every twenty or thirty feet he keeps repeating the same phrase, “I No Speak English, I Only Speak Russian.”

No TV for me

So I’ve given up watching TV.  I’m not making some sort of noble cultural stand; I’m just physically tired of trying to watch TV at my house.   I want a retro TV where there’s an “on/off switch” and a “dial” to physically turn the channels.  And I only want channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9 and 11.

Here’s the problem: I come home from a fairly long day at work…(of course I’ve had my mini Club Med trip back from the City on NJ Transit, so that helps) and all I want to do is inhale some food, and zone out in front of the TV.  I’d prefer to watch something comical, maybe a repeat of Seinfeld or Cosby, nothing too challenging.  Jeopardy makes me think too hard and then I not only get a headache, but I also feel bad about myself.  They never seem to have a set of topics that fall into my wheelhouse (what my wheelhouse might be, I’m not exactly sure of).  So I sit down on the couch, food in hand and with our user-friendly universal remote turn on the TV.  It’s a 50/50 shot that the TV will come on.  You see we have Verizon FIOS, a very simplistic home sounds system, and an extra capacity storage system for the numerous shows being taped on a 7 x 24 basis.  The latest is an investment is a Blue Ray streaming gizmo that gets us some subset of Netflix I believe…but I can’t be sure of that.  I’m not allowed to touch it.  All I can tell you is I have an electric bill that rivals the city of Scranton’s.  To get any kind of program to come on, you need to have a remote in each hand, and one in your mouth and then simultaneously execute a command set.  I liken it to the sequence that has to happen to set off nuclear missiles.

Now let’s say I’m in luck and the TV actually comes on.  But it happens to be on channel 551.  Come on, channel 551?  Of course there is a “Menu” button on one of the remotes.  But it scrolls at the pace of a snail and by the time I get to what I want to watch I’m asleep. ( I’m a high energy person.)  Considering the small fortune I pay Verizon each month, you’d think they’d have the ability to take the few channels I watch and congregate them into a manageable grouping that’s easy to remember.  So let’s now say I’ve gotten to channel 337 and I’m happily watching an episode of the Three Stooges (again, I have very sophisticated tastes).  The tray table is set up.  I’ve reheated something desirable to inhale, Moe is poking Larry’s eyes out, and suddenly a warning block pops up in the lower right hand part of the screen.  It says something to the effect that I have too many things taping and unless I turn off the TV in the next two minutes, all hell will break loose and there will be a meltdown of epic proportions.   Really?  I just want to watch a freaking TV show.  Can that be so hard?  I’m not asking for an Atom to be split here…I just want a little bit of graphic violence and to watch the Stooges in peace.

Now I’m thinking if I’m responsible for the cataclysmic destruction of the taping hierarchy…God forbid we miss what the Pretty Little Liars are doing next… my name will be mud and I’ll be wishing I were Larry Fine. 

Family TV time is also fun.  I’m referred to as the TV Ogre.  So we’re watching a program, and we’re at the pinnacle of the episode.  Either my wife or daughter will decide it’s time to pause the program and pontificate about what’s about to happen…or even more interesting, they just decides to discuss an activity of the day.  I naturally lose it and say something that I’ll regret in a few seconds as I’m looked at with disdain and admonished for having no patience.  My son is a lot more predictable.  He needs either a drink or refresher of his snack at least four times during a 30 minute program.  On the other hand if while my daughter is paging through the commercials at mach 9 and I happen to see a commercial or preview I find interesting, I need to petition the Supreme Court to have the rewind button hit.  (I have lots to complain about in my life)

And the Piece of Resistance…I’m home alone, I’ve given up trying to watch TV for fear of being flogged for destroying the Tape Manifesto.  I hit one of the off buttons and the TV goes into a game of cat and mouse with warnings and instructions popping up with suggestions on my next step.  The only next step I’m thinking of is where to plant my size 11 shoe.