lucy ricardo redux redecorates

Lucy Ricardo Redux Redecorates,
a small adventure in home improvement

We are living in the year of El Niño.
It's a wet and very soggy Saturday morning. There are big pools of water on the lawn and my new landlord's five-year-old daughter is tromping through them in her RED boots while my dog, Bunny Shmenkleman, watches her. Miss Bunny keeps cocking her head like the RCA dog because she can't figure out the purpose of such strange behavior. She's also trying to figure out why this little girl won't throw one of the dozens of grapefruits lying on the ground under the tree so that she, the quickest and most agile of dogs, can fetch it.

Mrs. Beasley, on the other hand, has climbed onto the bed, and has burrowed under the covers, curling herself into a snug little ball. A sensible dog. I am eating breakfast, such as it is. Sesame lemon rice cakes and dried mango slices. How unbearably Californian. I won't have a refrigerator until Tuesday, or more precisely, I won't have enough power to run my refrigerator until then, because that's when the electrician has promised to reappear, bringing more juice to my new garage home.

Moving here was not without its traumas. Yesterday was the appointed day to get things out of my storage space. There I met up with John, a Viet Namese gardener who moonlights as a mover. He was right on time, but he was alone, despite his assurances that he would bring a helper. I was the helper. It was raining hard. He had a beat-up pickup truck and we loaded all my stuff into it. Mercifully, it stopped raining while we loaded, until the very end, when it commenced to pour, and we scrambled to cover everything with strange rumpled shower curtains he uses for tarps. The truck was packed in it's entirety. Stuff on the front seat, atop the cab, hanging off the sides. It looked like those old Dorthea Lange photos of Okies fleeing the dust bowl, lacking only a cage of chickens lashed to the hood.

I met him back at my new place, and he had miraculously picked up a helper. Only trouble was that the helper was Mexican and spoke hardly any English, and John's Asian accent was so thick even I couldn't understand most of what he said. Typical Californians. To compensate for the language barrier, John shouted orders in a louder and more insistent tone. He was actually quite Napoleonic once he had an underling. The rain took a violent turn. Pedro, yes, that was his name, wearing a shower curtain cape, began hauling objects five times his size into the house while John barked unintelligible orders. By the time all was unloaded they were both drenched, and I wasn't exactly dry either. I wrote a soggy check, handed them each a little extra, in the form of crumpled wet bills, and was left alone to grapple with the enormity of my material possessions, in contrast with the limited size of my new space. I spent the rest of the day and late into the night in a flurry of pushing and arranging clammy boxes and damp furniture into some semblance of chic, like a new breed of decorator ant.

The rains are getting rather biblical. Roads turn to rivers, trees topple, and hillside houses slide on shifting mud until they are piles of debris. The power flickers on and off. Pools of water on the lawn have started to merge into one larger, deeper pool. Some of the fallen grapefruits are bobbing now. The wind whips the rain in every direction all at once. Wind chimes are silent where they have blown into a tangled heap on the sodden grass. We huddle inside, making excuses not to go out.

Except for Bunny Shmenkleman. Bunny is keenly aware that she has not been to the beach, or had any violent exercise at all, for over a day now. She is beside herself. She is a total athlete, the dog equivalent of Carl Lewis, or Michael Jordan. She comes over to where I'm typing away and sits with her very best posture, slightly trembling and straining with desire. I ignore her. THUD, Power Paw strikes my lap. THUD again, I push it away, THUD. Now she tries the torrent of kisses approach. I'm immune. She finds Mrs. B asleep in her nest and starts gnawing at her. PLAY WITH ME NOW!!!!

Mrs. B. tries to ignore the dog chewing on her leg, and gives me a long-suffering look, silently pleading 'make her stop'. Eventually I give in and haul them to the storm-drenched beach where Bunny explodes with energy, and Mrs. B and I huddle in clammy misery, waiting for the moment when we can scramble back to the dry warmth of the car. I'm trying to remember why I moved back to California—but I can't.

I mentioned to my new landlord, Avi, an Israeli, that the electrical set-up in my new garage abode looked wildly outdated and dangerous. He immediately agreed and called a friend of his, also Israeli, who is an electrician, to come put things right. He was supposed to come before I moved in, but his back went out, and he had to re-schedule. Just as I was getting the place in order, the electrician and his mostly-mute helper showed up. The electrician looked like a young Buddy Hackett—plump with a cherubic face. He immediately started in about how he would have to do extra work, and whoever did the previous work did a lousy job that he now has to compensate for, etc. He shut the power off and I was without phone, answering machine or computer for the day. Back to the 19th century.

He and his quiet friend brought box after box of grimy tools in and strewed them on every surface in the semi-darkness. I fled to dog beach and stayed extra-long. They left some time after 7 that night. They were not done. They had to return, but couldn't come until Tuesday, five days later. So I now had a refrigerator I couldn't use for fear of blowing a circuit, a huge mess, and two more plugs than I had that morning. They had done all the wiring by running conduit through pipes mounted along the wall. They had mounted a new gray metal circuit breaker box smack-dab on the kitchen wall, at eye-level. So attractive.

I needed more juice brought in from the main house via conduit running underground, and the landlord, always looking for a bargain, volunteered to dig the trench himself, to save money. Tuesday finally arrived and there was a trench from the house to my garage. Well, almost a trench. More like a furrow, actually. A shallow furrow. Avi had left for work and the electrician took one look at the trench and had a fit. "YOU CALL THAT A TRENCH? I told him 10 inches deep. Now we have to dig it and we're going to charge him $200 extra, and we won't be able to finish today, blah, blah, blah. He's my friend, but there's a limit, blah, blah, blah" I was at MY limit.

My whole life was on hold and this man was whining again. He was charging $1400 for this two-day job and every few minutes he wanted to charge extra for something. I cut him off in mid whine, "FINE. YOU WANT A TRENCH? I'LL DIG YOU A TRENCH!" I marched to the back of the yard and grabbed a shovel, marched back to the furrow and started digging furiously. He tried to stop me. He was embarrassed now. "No, no, I'll do it, really." I was having none of it. I kept digging. He had his weird assistant start digging. I did two-thirds of it and Igor did the rest. It took all of fifteen minutes. I had shamed him now, and for the rest of the day he tried to make it up, but it was too late. He knew I thought he was a big baby. They finally finished well after dark. He and Avi aren't friends anymore.

Next on the list, the toilet and sink in my bathroom were leaking. I got a fancy plumber to stop by for a look. After handing me the estimate, which took him five minutes, he said that they usually charge for estimates, but I didn't offer to pay, since it wasn't mentioned beforehand.The estimate for replacing one sink and toilet was $2,000. NO SALE.

Avi hears of a retired plumber who works for $15/hr and can come on Monday. We make a little junket to Home Depot and buy the cheapest toilet they have. I talk him out of getting a sink mounted in a cheesy, fake-oak cabinet, and we settle on a plain pedestal number.

The plumber arrives. Remember 'I Love Lucy'? He looks like an older version of Fred Mertz. He has on brand new blue jeans rolled up at the cuffs and a new plaid flannel shirt which give the impression that he has never done a plumbing job in his life, but has gone out and bought the right costume, and can't wait to give it a try. Little happens to dispel this notion. He is quite sweet, but does not inspire confidence, especially when asked about instant-hot water units, which he's never heard of. Then he sees the sink, and he's never seen a pedestal sink either. Uh oh.

After much cursing, grunting, talking to himself, and a couple of hours , the old toilet and sink are out on the patio. It is at this point that my inner Lucy Ricardo kicks in. I got these cool linoleum tiles at Home Despot (sic). Black ones and gray-blue ones, to make a checkerboard pattern. Only 59¢ each, and I only needed 20 of them. And it would be so much easier to install them now that the fixtures are out.

Fred's happy to take a break anyway, so he looks on while I start prying off the layer of too-shiny beige plaid vinyl tiles. Oops. There are two layers under it, but since the toilet and sink have been leaking for some time now, it's not too hard to get the whole mess up. And I do mean mess. Lucy Ricardo is on the cramped 4'x5' floor scraping away while Fred Mertz stands in the doorway and watches, jabbering away. Every few minutes he says something like, "Well, just as long as you know what you're doing" which I clearly don't. I just bought the tiles, some adhesive and a trowel. I remember vaguely reading in some how-to book in a past life about starting with a squared-off corner, but it's such a small space, why bother?

He starts working away at the edge where the floor goes under a piece of 1'x2' some amateur carpenter has half-heartedly nailed up for trim most of the way around the perimeter. We're both down on the floor now and it's getting a bit cramped, so naturally Avi shows up to start supervising. He decides to hold the dustpan so we can put tile splinters in it. It's now hard to find floor to take up, because it is covered with bodies, a foot here, a butt there, and then they discover that they both lived in the same building a few miles from here and start comparing notes, listing every neighbor they ever knew to see if they know anybody in common. These two can talk. It also comes out that Fred is a retired truck driver, NOT a retired plumber. Things suddenly make a lot more sense.

Finally, amidst the jumble of body parts, all the floor tile is removed and we gaze upon a damp cement floor. I dry it with paper towels. Isn't this how Martha Stewart would do it? I would have used a blow dryer, but I don't have the kind of hair that merits owning one. I start slathering on adhesive. Ricky and Fred gather around the doorway to watch. Fred is now calling Avi, 'Boss'. It becomes clear after the first few slathers that I'm going to run out of gunk, so Avi is dispatched to Home Depot to get more. I trowel the goo into furrows and start laying down tile. Fred is enlisted to dry the tiles and hand them to me. He does such a bad job I have to dry each one again, but he doesn't seem to notice. This isn't a good sign.

Avi returns with a gallon of goo the color of chocolate, and it has separated, so I need a stirring stick to mix it up. He goes to get one and returns with a stick 5-feet long. So I'm working in a tiny four-foot wide space with a gallon can o' goo and there's a five-foot-long stick protruding from it. I'm using paper towels to dry tiles, and troweling adhesive, and the two jobs start to merge.

Paper towels begin to stick to my hands. My hands start to stick to the trowel. I'm kneeling on the floor and goo starts to ooze from between the floor tiles I have put down and stick to my jeans and socks. My jeans start to stick to discarded paper towels. I start using a mat knife to cut tile and it sticks to my hands, then I sit on it and it sticks to my leg. My hands are becoming encrusted with semi-sticky adhesive layered with paper towels. I look down at them. I have become an amphibian or wolfman or both and my flipper paws are covered in crackled brown scales of slime. My head itches. REALLY itches. ETHEl!!!!!!!

The boys have gone, leaving Lucy to finish the job, "Just as long as you know what you're doing". Everything has adhesive on it now. I am sitting on my finished work because I have no choice. My butt is covered with adhesive. There are paper towels and tools glued to my butt, my hands, my sleeves. My nose itches. My knees feel ninety-years-old. Finally, all the tiles are down, but as I step on them, goo spurts out the sides of each tile clinging to my socks, which are covered with pieces of paper towel. The mat knife hangs off my thigh. There is a shmeer of goo on my nose which itches again. I have no sink. I have no water whatsoever...

The next day, the plumber is back. He leaves his tool box out and there is his real name. It's not Fred Mertz, it's Harold Fitzgerald. Sounds like a character in Dr. Seuss books. Never trust a man with a rhyming name. He needs to get into the main house to use the bathroom. When he returns, I'm eating breakfast, but he needs to explain to me that when he has to go, he has to go, and it's all
liquid-y. I'm suddenly finished with breakfast.

I begin to work on the computer, but he needs to tell me everything he's doing in detail. I explain that I'm working and need to concentrate, but it doesn't register. He is DRIVING ME CRAZY. It's also clear to me that he doesn't know what he's doing. He finds the toilet seat in a box and doesn't know what it is. He can't find the tank for the new toilet. "It's right there" I say, pointing to it . "Oh, maybe this is it", he says. He can't figure out how to get the sink hooked up and seems to need to involve me in every decision and thought as if I'm his auxiliary brain. I explain that I have no idea how to do any of it, and can't help him. It makes absolutely no impression on him at all. I flee.

When I return late that night, I have a toilet. After two days of work. No sink. The first thing I heard him say the next morning was, "Hoooh boy, I hope this works" I didn't hear much more because I fled.

I returned later that day to find,

this isn't happening,
this isn't happening,
this isn't happening...

he had managed to break the new toilet. Cracked the base. The sink was on the floor. He couldn't figure out how to hang it on the wall. He asked me.

He won't be coming back. Real plumbers are coming Monday, and meanwhile, I have no water at all. I sent a friend the above via email, calling it 'I Love Lucy' His comment: "This isn't 'I Love Lucy', it's the Three Stooges!" Hate to admit it, but he's right! I don't want to think about which one I would be...