She walked on by the gigantic old place again this afternoon. For sale sign in the front, the grass now waist-high. On the market forever and a day, over two years now, I think; price drop after price drop, to no avail. It happens: they priced it way too high to begin with, scared people off, and people eventually forgot about it and wrote it off. I half expect to see boards over the windows next time I walk by.
Maybe we should just throw something ridiculous out there and see if they take it, she says.
It's an old place, full of what they call character.
We could afford it priced as it is, shit, we could have afforded it fifty grand ago. But things have changed, You need more than a heartbeat to get a mortgage these days, apparently.
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Not sure who decided home ownership equaled something they call the American Dream, but I never really figured on owning a place of my own. I grew up in a housing project, my parents barely had two nickels to rub together most of my life, but early in my college years they threw a ridiculously low-ball offer in on a lovely old craftsman bungalow before it ever went on the market, and they got it.
My father said when they walked out of the lawyer's office afterward, he turned to my mother and said, "we just stole a house."
I figured they got lucky in a way I never would.
I got married and just living in nice apartments with a beautiful woman I adored was more than enough luck.
First place we lived I begged my way into, a one-bedroom with a fireplace in the living room, hardwood floors throughout, an old-school kitchen and a dining room with enough space for us to set up the hutch and buffet my Nana got when she got married in 1927. It cost $590 a month including heat and hot water, and in 1995, on $18,000 a year - Lauren, my wife, came here from England and the conditions of her visa prohibited her from working for her first six months here in the US - that $590 a month was about we could handle.
We had $6,000 saved between us when she got here, and we blew threw it in the wink of an eye. I remember, when we deposited that money in our first joint checking account, thinking that we were rich, but we lived it up and the six grand disappeared in six months.
A year and change after she got here, we got a chance to move into the three-bedroom flat downstairs flat in a house owned by dear friends of ours. Lauren had a job at that point, but it didn't pay all that much. Our friends, the owners, lived in the upstairs unit. They wanted $625 a month plus heat and hot water; that was a friends-and-family discount. This place what fat, with a capital ph.
This was a big move for us. We worked the numbers over and over: could we afford it?
In the end, we didn't care.
It was a stunningly beautiful apartment, with friends we loved living upstairs. Who could resist? You'd have to super-human to resist that shit.
So we moved on in, and Lauren decorated it to the nines, that place belonged in a magazine, I'm telling you.
At this point, I figured, given my humble origins and mediocre career prospects, I had already gone as far as I would ever go. Married to not just anyone but someone exotic, a classy and beautiful foreign woman, and living in a dream-like apartment, well, shit, I couldn't believe my luck.
To hell with homeownership, my own little American Dream had come true. I could have cared less about buying a house.
Lauren's parents had other ideas.
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They came over and visited in September of '97. We'd lived in the perfect place for a little over a year at that point. We had a lovely time. We went out on the town, her Dad bought round after round. The four of us went to the wedding of the friend who'd set me and Lauren up. I'd left a job I hated for one I liked, and the difference in my mood was almost unimaginable. Things seemed about as perfect as they could get.
Near the end of their visit, Lauren's parents started agitating.
We went out for a walk one night. We passed by a house with a for sale sign.
When we got home, they started in.
You need to buy a house.
You're just throwing money away on rent.
Well, I said, we're paying less than market value to live in a place we love, downstairs from our friends. Things are pretty good. We're comfortable. I didn't see the problem.
Oh, no. You need to buy a house. You're paying all that money in rent and you're not building toward anything.
Mentally, I was living month-to-month. I didn't care a whit about building towars some thing. I was, as my buddy Michele used to say back then, "livin' like a hit man." I really didn't see any need to change things up.
I got worn down and outvoted, eventually.
They went home and wired us forty thousand US dollars and told us to buy a house.
So that's what we did.
We found a two-family that needed some work for a good price. I think we paid $114,000 for it. It had great bones. My brother-in-law, a civil engineer and an expert in these sort of things, came over and looked the place up and down.
He told me the place was rock solid.
We ripped up carpets and melted wallpaper off the walls, had the floors refinished, painted, that sort of thing.
We inherited some tenants, a couple with a young child. The kid had some sort of sleep disorder and the couple liked screaming obscenities at each other at all hours of the day and night. They were open for business twenty-four-seven; we liked to get to bed by midnight, and earlier than that once Bailey was born in December of 1998. I seethed, and wished we had stayed in the old place. Homeownership didn't seem my thing. One night in March of 1999, after yet another domestic drama, I couldn't take any more and I ran downstairs and blew my top, pounded at the door down there and read them the riot act, scared the shit outta them.
I am a nice guy but I am large and slightly intimidating and basically not to be trifled with when angered. They moved out, of their own accord, about six weeks later. We found some mild-mannered grad students for tenants. They were quiet and went to bed early enough and paid the rent on time, which was pretty much all we wanted in a tenant.
They moved out and Lauren's parents moved in, which was pretty ideal. We never had to worry about the rent check bouncing.
Eventually, we decided we wanted a single family thing and we sold the place and sunk in the forty grand plus profits into an old mock Tudor with a massive yard in one of Albany, NY's very finest neighborhoods. In about four years I had gone from not even thinking of owning a home to assuming I would never rent again.
A month or two after we'd moved in, we were cleaning up after dinner and I turned to Lauren and said, well, this is it, babes. This is the place. We're gonna be here for the next forty years. We're home. It felt more like home than any place I had ever lived. We weren't going anywhere.
Or so I thought.
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We had Evie in 2004. Lauren's Dad got pancreatic cancer in the summer of 2005. In January of 2006 we found out, to our utter surprise, that we had a third child on the way. In March, Lauren's Dad died.
We figured her Mom would want to come over from England for long stretches; Lauren was an only child. It seemed we needed more space. We put my dream home up for sale. It sold almost instantly, before we had time to find another place. As a temporary measure, we moved into the downstairs flat in the two-family my brother and his wife own.
We looked around. She wanted places I wasn't sure we could afford. Banks offered us all sorts of ridiculous mortgages, trying to tempt us into things we shouldn't do. I balked. We went around in circles, never agreeing on a price range. Out of nowhere, with little warning, Lauren died in the fall of 2007.
I spent the house money, and a lot of other money, being a stay-at-home Dad for more than three years. I didn't worry too much about paying my bills on time. I had other things to worry about, and besides, it wasn't like I was ever going to get married again, it wasn't like I was ever going to buy a house again. Thirty day, sixty day, ninety day late payments piled up on my credit report. I didn't care. I was hunkered down for the long haul.
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And besides, as 2007 turned into 2008 and then 2008, the so-called American Dream seemed to turn into a nightmare.
The economy collapsed.
Homes lost value. People lost jobs, and banks, unfettered by fear of consequence and desperated to squeeze out nickels and dimes wherever they could, began screwing people out of their homes, whether they deserved it or not. I thanked Gods I don't even believe in that we hadn't bought something we couldn't have really afforded; can you imagine worrying about holding onto a house on top of dealing with the unexected death of a life partner?
I'd enjoyed living in houses we technically owned, but those days were over. I had no further interest in such things.
Or so I thought.
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Time marched on, I healed. A random trip to a coffee shop before a Bailey basketball game in late 2009 led to the next love of my life. By the fall of 2011 Sheila and I were married with a baby.
And we were, and are, crammed into this place. Every closet is filled floor to ceiling with, well, stuff. Her stuff, my stuff. We get half of a two-car garage here and that, too, is filled floor to ceiling with stuff.
There's six of us living in a place that seats maybe four.
Not that I'm complaining.
When I think of the billions of people that have ever walked the face of this Earth, and then think about how they lived, and worse, how so many of them died, well, I can't deny I am one of the luckiest motherfuckers who ever lived. Born a white hetero male into a lower-middle-class American family at about the very moment this empire reached the pinnacle of it's power. Round the clock electricity, running water, healthy and delicious food available in shameful quantities. Love, friendship, music, literature, therapy for the hard times, fever-dreaming sweltering summer nights in air-conditioned bedrooms and hot showers to chase away the frigid, oddly beautiful days. Making a decent living sitting at a desk for a few hours a day. Cheap medicine to cure what ails myself or the wife or the kids. A few isolated, minor, life-unchaning incidents with the local constabulary when I misbehaved badly.
But much to my surprise, and despite both of us knowing what a sucker's game it is, all in favor of the banks who now run everything, we wanna buy a house.
We want the one a few blocks from here.
Big and old and, as I said, filled with what they call character.
We could easily afford it.
It wouldn't be much more than we're paying in rent now.
But all those bills I couldn't be bothered to pay on time have come back to haunt me.
Again, not complaining.
Just a little regretful tonight.
She walked on by this afternoon, looked in through the windows, she said.
She could see us in there.
But things have changed.
I could see in there, too, I guess.
I doubt it'll ever happen, and there's plenty of logical reasons to hope it doesn't, but for whatever reason, I'll probably walk on by there tomorrow, and wonder, what if.