Chapter 13 — Buying a house in front of a diesel bus stop and...making a run for it.
Chapter 13 — Buying a house in front of a diesel bus stop and...making a run for it.
An Ordinary Disaster — chapter 13 — Desperate Exit
A ceaseless hum of outdoor noise filters in through the old plaster walls as I sit at my desk—the same graffitied tilt-top from my high school room on Church Street. Nominally, I’m working from home while I recover from back surgery for a blown disc that I suffered six weeks prior over the Y2K New Year, just before my thirtieth birthday. In reality, I’m marking time with no specific end in sight, trolling the web and feeling a nice buzz from the Tramadol that I take for the pain the surgery was supposed to alleviate.
My laptop is open and I’ve been sitting there for a couple of hours already, flipping back and forth every few seconds between bank statements and my email, hoping for a message from someone else out in the ether who happens to be searching for a particular kind of sex on a weekday morning, when the bus comes by downstairs. The monster machine grinds to a stop at the corner right outside with a squealing complaint from the brakes and a gargantuan, exhausted fart as it squats to swallow a load of passengers, all the while emitting an interminable series of high pitched safety beeps. Finally the doors judder open and there’s silence for a few seconds before the bus roars to life again and lumbers away, funneling diesel exhaust from the angled stainless steel stack directly upwards towards my home office window.
Just as the sound of the bus is finally receding, I watch wide-eyed as a wheezing, humpbacked Sunset Scavenger garbage truck bangs up in front of the apartments across the street, trailing a stream of dribbling waste from its rear jaws. Leaving the rig running, the driver jumps out and skips up the steps into the building, the rain cap on the exhaust stack clattering along over the idling diesel like the muppet drummer Animal bashing on his kit.
I hit command-R a few times in quick succession, as if that might conjure something to appear in my inbox, but it remains empty as the trash truck sits there clattering. I picture the driver inside having lunch with his wife, maybe some leftover enchiladas and a Coke—but I’m all by myself, and I’m gripping the sides of the desk like a life preserver, wishing for some quiet.
How could I have been so naïve as to not have noticed the city bus stop literally right outside the front door before buying my first home? You’d think I would have seen the signs—or the riders who I often find patiently waiting on what is now my very own front stoop. The fact is, I’d made a mental note some years prior to never again make the mistake of living on a busy street and yet in my haste to take advantage of what seemed a timely opportunity, I’d forgotten my own advice to myself and ended up precisely where I didn’t want to be.
My buddy Ted and bought the building together the year before, just before I went in for surgery. A gifted songwriter and natural front-man, I loved the way he seemed able to be himself without thinking about it, but Ted was also prone to mania and anger—and this handsome, charismatic, rock-star of a guy was a super-magnet for bad luck. At this point he was raising an infant daughter in the downstairs flat, picking up bit parts when he could, and driving a cab for cash. Neither of us were made guys by any means, but this was before even the first tech boom, and a two-up B-class post-earthquake Edwardian in the lower Mission didn’t cost anywhere near a million yet—in fact, I think we bought it for about $550,000—not bad for two full flats with a good coffee shop around the corner.
Ted wasn’t exactly my ideal partner, but he was an old friend and when he came to me with what appeared to be a deal, I felt like it was finally time to buy into a piece of my home town. We didn’t have idea know how naive we were though, and we were being led by the nose by an unscrupulous realtor ‘friend’ of his who didn’t say jack about how we might deal with the half-dozen existing tenants.
When it came time for us to move in, they were all cool except for one random dude who decided to make it his mission to try to extract that maximum from his fortunate circumstance. We were in the right—and we weren’t aiming to “evict” anyone, but we did want to live in the house we’d just bought—but our attorney fucked up the paperwork and we ended up getting sued, and lost. This guy was squatting in what was to be my flat, so I had to wait for this all to be resolved before I could even move in.
The trashman’s probably having his siesta. I’m sitting there, heavy breathing and staring at a jumble of figures on my screen when it dawns on me that Ted has already missed a couple of his half of the mortgage payments. Six months into our deal, and our joint account is headed towards the red zone—and just then, a Harley with open pipes slow-rolls through the four-way and then blasts down the block in second, setting off an overlapping cacophony of novelty car alarms with the synthesized siren sounds of a hundred cheap plastic toy space pistols.
My mouth hangs open in frozen disbelief as yet another wave of sonic chaos crashes over me. I’ve got a place of my own for real, but at the moment it feels like it might have been a mistake. I try to shake it off, but I’m short of breath, and my heart is beating triple-time. I’m starting to feel a familiar, desperate feeling—the feeling that I don’t know what I’m going to do, or how I can do anything, really, when something else happens—something outside of my normal experience, something ill and seemingly ill-willed.
I feel my skin go cold as this loathsome and terrible something tries to force itself into my perception. It doesn’t make any sense, but yet I can’t avoid a glimpse of a fearful sharp-edged whirring. I blink my eyes and see like bright flashes within a filthy cloud that swells with threat. It’s coming from inside me, and it’s also clear that it’s trying to get out into the air of the room around me as I sit there at my desk.
Whatever’s rising from the unhappy depths, I’m damn sure I don’t want to see any more of what it is, and I gather my will to shove it back down into my unconscious.
As soon as it subsides, the brief buzz of the unhinged is replaced by the glowing coal of the inflamed nerve in my back pressing against my chair. Scanning the room for relief, my eyes land for a moment on my favorite pin-up calendar. One girl for each month, their signatures scrawled in Sharpie over images of them making sexy eyes in dirty welding gear under the sign for a local metal shop: Complete Fabrications.
None of those girls are calling me. I’ve seen a therapist a couple of times, but I have no idea how it’s supposed to work, or how or when it might help. Nobody explains anything.
I take a couple of deep breaths, doing my best to ignore the cluster of filthy house-pigeons that gabble on the windowsill, which is covered in bird shit and a pall of black particulate dust. The noise leaking in from the street seems to back off for a moment, and something bubbles to the surface of the sea of static in my head. Holding back tears and willing my heartbeat back towards normal, I turn back to my computer and pull up my bookmark for the grad school at UW Madison—the leafy, sedate, lakeside state capital of Wisconsin, and begin to fill in the application.
Thanks for reading, and for being part of this journey.
This is part of AN ORDINARY DISASTER, the book-length memoir about a man learning to listen to himself, and the price I paid until I learned how to do that, serialized right here on Substack with a new chapter published every week.
You can find everything from the memoir that I’ve published so far right here.
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Further reading
Here’s the table on contents for the memoir. You might also enjoy some of my other work, such as
or any of the other essays that you can find here
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Have you ever had to make a desperate exit? I’d love to hear your story!
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The urge to run is something I’m very familiar with. You tapped into that “thing” rising up in you very well. To be conscious of it is half the battle. Even in my long recovery I find it rising now and then. Solitude and silence always...always quiets the thing.
Love it. The sounds of the bus resonate. I once lived on 26/Judah in SF and I remember how the whole apartment slightly shook when it stopped or passed by. Memories. This would a been 2008/9.