Out Of The Slammer And Into The Fire - Part 6

(Parts 1-5 are below)

Lulu was a half-German, half-American Indian woman about 45 back then. She wore bright ruby lipstick and had jet black hair and a stern but elegant face with high cheek bones that had garnered her some modeling work back in the early seventies, when “ethnic” became the vogue in Vogue.

Vee was a tallish but thin redheaded man with curls and a beard and a constantly red face. He had wrists that always went limp and long, elegant fingers. Vee suffered from asthma yet smoked both lots of pot and cigarettes. He had an inhaler he carried around and used quite frequently. The most striking thing about Vee, though, was his posture. Sitting or standing, he always looked like he was ready to play the piano.

Mitch and I showed up and I looked the house over. There were several men on the roof, just finishing up re-roofing the structure. Lulu had barely owned the house, but she was anxious to get started and happy to see us. You got the feeling she had spent those ten years living in that tiny room above the barn just waiting to get a big old house and a wad of cash. She had the magazines to prove it.

There was rock music playing over big stereo speakers, and a pot of hot coffee in the old and tiny kitchen..

Vee was in what was considered “the music room” when we got there, sitting at his prize piano, playing his new band’s live songs over and over, trying to learn them all by heart.

Suddenly, it was all up to me. What do we do? What can we do? You're the expert. You tell me. There was an upstairs on the main floor, and a smaller downstairs with bedrooms along a narrow hallway, built in the space one gets when a house is cantilevered out over a hillside. I had always offered people suggestions and had my own opinions about look and structure in building, but I had never done any design work on the spot, for someone I didn’t know who had a bi-polar disorder where rage came and went in short and severe storms like summertime in Miami.

Mitch knew this side of Lulu and was always trying to keep her on this side of fury. Which just meant kissing up to her vanity a bit and keeping her mind from stalling and stewing. Mitch had lived on the same property as her (with she being his landlord), so he knew how to handle her.

I had no idea where I was going to get the energy to move from one minute to the next, so this was all fine by me.

I started walking around the house and envisioning possibilities. Lulu was always on the inside of artistic circles with no talent of her own, so my walking around like a depressed zombie and looking at things with glazed-over eyes seemed normal to her. I started to see possibilities and structure and traffic flow and new beams spanning sections where walls once stood…

I was rattling these off like a man giving a death reading in a séance… and Mitch and Lulu were really digging it.

In two days, Vee was to head off on tour for his first time with the band, and we would have six weeks to take a big chunk out of the main living/dining area of this funky old house.

Just me and my depression and my ex-drug dealer turned laborer, Mitch.

For a bi-polar woman who started smoking pot at noon.

It would be tough for me to describe what it felt like having your head inside someone’s building, on your own, while fighting depression and with ignorant help who was trying to keep a bipolar woman from exploding and a deadline and a giant crowbar ripping the wholly crap out of her house.

In fact, I don’t think I am even gonna try. But from the moment I first ripped open some drywall, I was committed. My days just got 12 hours long. I dragged my depressed body through the thick molasses of life, ripping and tearing and beating beating beating with a sledge hammer.

Meanwhile, the woman who lived at the bottom of the hill came up and introduced herself. She was a small woman named Marissa, not pretty but not ugly, with small features and straight brown hair, comfortably dressed in the attire of someone who rode horses and worked around the property.

She sold country real estate for a living, was single and had been for ten years, and was raising two kids on her own. She got her eyes glommed on to Mitch and never took them off him. They were the same age and Mitch had a particular “charm” about him. She invited Mitch home for a nice home-cooked meal and that was that.

Within a week, Mitch was studying for his real estate license and interested in houses in a whole new way. He suddenly wanted to know about everything we were doing and he was not heading home at night to his one room studio apartment I had built out of a garage.

Their business is, of course, their business, but the thing that was striking here was the differences between the two lives that came together. Marissa had always been even keeled, responsible, successful, a home owner and a breeder of horses, and Mitch…

Well, Mitch had always sold drugs and had the time of his life- until he got caught, that is.

Six weeks went by like a long, dirty, construction dream. I really don’t know how I got done what I did, on my own, but the day before Vee was scheduled to arrive home, we had carpet layers putting in some stunning teal carpet and I was down by the old pool, swimming around and still trying to shed the feeling of double gravity that cloaked me.

Mitch had the sparkle of a man who was getting laid afresh and had found a direction, finally, after six months of floundering.

I was too exhausted to be happy that I had pulled off a make-over under the conditions I had worked.

Lulu was happy chirping on the phone to friends, bragging about her carpenter and the new living room and dining room, smoking pot by the lung full, and anticipating the arrival of her man, who had been out touring like he was a rock star or something.