Indoor Camping: Fixing Up the Fixer-Upper

Thursday, December 23, 2004

Pain

“My step-daughter complains about life and tells me her troubles,” my sister says, “and I want to tell her, ‘I had a perfectly good plan for your life. Why didn’t you follow it?’”

My sister’s joking. She is the last person in my family who would make plans for other people’s lives. She is the first person I’d go to if I needed such a plan. Wouldn’t life be easier if someone you trusted told you the right things to do? You’d have to follow through. That would be the hard part. Nobody in my gene pool is that humble.

“You can see kids heading into a mess,” she says. “You want to tell them, ‘That’s going to cause some pain. I know; I’ve been down that road.’ No matter how you say it, they wouldn’t listen. I didn’t. Pain gets your attention like nothing else.”

When you care about people, you want to keep them from pain. As a parent, I’ve learned that keeping kids from pain is a guarantee they’ll have more pain. If you can let them suffer through their decisions, they’ll learn. They’ll remember the pain better than the warnings.

My gene pool has a high pain threshold when it comes to learning. We need to put our hand on the hot stove many times before we learn not to do it again.

This is not my first fixer. I’ve put my hand on this particular hot stove enough to leave permanent marks. Dangle a deal in front of my gene pool and we’ll bite, no matter how painful.

We tell ourselves, “It’s not that bad,” and sign the papers. Only later, when we have to work, does the pain start to set in. We should have more compassion for our kids. They learn faster with little things than we do with the big ones.

“You’re both overwhelmed,” our counselor once told us. “Why don’t you think about not doing a fixer next time?”

Charlie and I looked at each other and said nothing. It was as if he told us to cut off our arms. We don’t listen when someone gives us a perfectly good plan for our lives. All we have to do to be happy is follow a simple suggestion. We can’t. We stick our hand on the stove again.

It’s easy equity; it can’t be that bad this time, we say. Normal people couldn’t do it, we know, but we’re not normal. One more time, we say, we’re the exception to the rule. These are the same things my kids say when they do something stupid. I don’t tell them where they get these genes from.

“I’m giving you a get out of jail free card,” the counselor said.

“I feel like . . . I like jail,” I said. “I’m used to it.”

“There is absolutely no way,” Charlie said. He isn’t known for mixing messages.

The counselor changed the subject and Charlie and I haven’t argued since. If we’re going to touch the hot stove, we’re going to touch it together. We do best when we’re both on the same side, even if we’re both wrong.

Charlie gets right to work today, starting with the downstairs bathroom. Directly above him is the upstairs bathroom, with the ceiling between the two ripped and ready for replacement. The Vegan gets up and turns on the shower directly above.

The tile grout is so old up there that Charlie gets a shower, too. If it were me, I’d stop what I was doing and remodel the upstairs bathroom. This is why I’m not in the construction business.

Charlie stops what he’s doing since he doesn’t need a shower. “I’m recaulking up there,” he says. “I know you think it’s a waste of time, but there’s mold up there. It’s a health hazard.”

“You’ll be ripping that bathroom out in a month,” I say.

“It’s disgusting today.”

“Can’t you get the skaters to do it?”

“Not if I want it fixed,” he says. “Remind me of this day when I want to do a fixer again.”

Cheyenneh appears, demanding work. She’d rather demand money, but she knows we’ll put her to work. She’s learning.

Charlie hands her the paint roller and points downstairs. Rolling paint on these new walls is my job. I’ve been looking forward to doing it. I save the good work for me and try to get someone else to do everything else. I saved this work too well. Now it looks like Cheyenneh gets to do it.

Charlie started showing her how to roll before I got a chance to explain. He must look at the bare walls and think I’m procrastinating. I don’t think I could convince anyone the reason I haven’t painted is because, more than anything, I can’t wait to paint. Even I wouldn’t believe that excuse.

“What’s the one rule?” Charlie said. We don’t know much so what we do know, we say over and over. We have our own personal fixer clichés.

“Let the paint do the work,” I tell him. Do we sound old or what? I assume Cheyenneh is hoping she never has conversations like this with her husband. At her age, I thought the same thing.

“Let the paint do the work,” Charlie says.

Cheyenneh looked at him with an expression that speaks pages. These particular pages were filled with the pain of making a wrong choice. Unlike me, she’s a quick learner; it’ll be a long time before she forgets the pain of working on fixers. This might not be all bad in the long-run, at least for her.

“Just so you know,” she says, “I’m dangerous when I’m bored. Last night Nicci fell asleep and we shaved her face. I did, actually. I’m the instigator. I even shaved her forehead.”

She finished painting her future bedroom and made an excuse to leave. Good. I got my coveted painting job back. I’d better do it today, though. Who knows how soon she’ll forget the pain and want to finish?

“I showed her three different times,” Charlie said. “She kept scrubbing the wall with the roller. Everybody does that when you put a roller in their hand. You think you have to scrub the wall.

“I used to work for a painting contractor when I was in High School,” he said to no one, because Cheyenneh was gone and I’ve heard these stories every time Charlie even thinks about paint.

“I worked for my best friend’s uncle two summers in a row. We painted apartment complexes, new construction single dwelling homes, big apartments where every apartment was the same. I learned how to paint everything. It was really boring.

“I’d wind up shooting caulk in my buddy’s hair. He’d sneak over and stick painter’s putty in my ears. His uncle would walk in on us playing and he’d yell at us, like I yell at the skaters.

This must have given him an idea. He ran upstairs and soon the penniless skater kids were doing work no one was coveting.

First they spent an hour breaking up scrap sheetrock and moving out the last remnants of construction materials from downstairs. Then Charlie took them to the wood recycling place and made them unload a trailer-full of heavy, dirty wood.

They came back all sweaty. “They charge you to drop wood off,” the Vegan said, “yet they turn that wood around and make bark dust out of it. We should start a business where you charge people to give you the materials you need to make the products you sell.”

“I never thought about that,” Charlie said. “They should be paying us.”

“Speaking of paying,” the Vegan says, “we want our money before the skate shop closes.”

“What?” Charlie says, “You only earned $15.”

“All we needed was $12.” They seem so happy. To them, living in a fixer is heaven. Whenever they need money for a new deck, they play in the trash for an hour.

Charlie grumbles about their poor work ethic but I’m happy to pay them and see them leave. The biggest room downstairs is still paint-free. If I hurry, I can cover it with Sweet Marzipan and Pumpkin Butter before anyone returns and wants to take my coveted job.

I think I’m going to have to make fixers more painful for the skaters. They don’t seem to mind heading into a mess.

A little help? [] 10:48:57 PM