A Good Guy Is Hard to Find: Week #19 of 52 Mini-Essays Project

On homeowning ambivalence, repair people, and grace

The list of adult traumas for which childhood does not adequately prepare you is a long one: sex, death, feeding yourself every single day, best man toasts, getting fired, insomnia. But one crushing adult responsibility looms larger than all the others, because—should you be fortunate enough to be able to accept it—it permeates every other aspect of your existence for pretty much the rest of your life: home ownership. I don’t care if we’re talking about a tiny studio apartment in a wildly expensive city, a 4000-square-foot McMansion in a suburban subdivision, a working ranch, or an off-the-grid yurt: if you own property, you are its bitch. You assume, of course, that home ownership is working for you: you’re building equity, planning for retirement, saving on rent money every month. All of these things are true (albethey side effects/ necessities of capitalism), and I do not mean to belittle the importance of these huge financial benefits (under capitalism), particularly for people who have traditionally been denied them (under capitalism). But there’s no such thing as a free lunch (under capitalism), and I think it’s important to know up front how much your tuna salad on rye with a side of Ruffles Sour Cream ’n’ Onion and some sad, obligatory carrot sticks is going to cost you.

Let’s talk about repair people.

Repair people are kind of your friends and occasionally your heroes, but they’re also kind of the vampires who come and feast on your blood at night while you’re sleeping. Like doctors, they sometimes get to be present at happy events—the birth of a baby, a beautiful new tile installation—but mostly they’re around either to prevent something from going horribly wrong or because something has already gone horribly wrong. And no matter what, their mere presence on your doorstep means that your budget for that month is fucked. Perhaps there are people in the world who build into their expenses such line items as “Unexpected plumbing repair” or “Monthly hurricane damage possibility,” but I am not one of them.

In our brave new world of employment precarity, soaring house prices, and crushing student loan debt, not only can most people not buy property, but many people who do can’t really afford it. Scott’s and my first “house” was a microscopic studio apartment in Vancouver that cost approximately 4 billion dollars and had a 485-year mortgage; I think we owned about 0.000005% of it outright. (We also managed to lose money when we sold it 4 years later—? Losing money on a property investment in Vancouver in the 2000s and 2010s actually violates the known laws of physics. We’re in talks with a director who wants to make a Netflix movie about our tragic experience.) When you’re that over-leveraged, having a problem with your home that requires a costly repair can really sink you. Fortunately we were lucky with our miniscule first condo; it was a new building and the place was so small that there was nearly nothing in it to break or malfunction. We probably should have rolled over our repair-bill savings into couples counseling to help us deal with the strain of living in a 600-square-foot studio together. (Me, to the real estate agent who first showed us the apartment: “It’s really cute. But where will I go when we have a fight?” Real Estate Agent: “There’s a Starbucks in the lobby.”¹)

I wish I could say that the next place we owned was equally as repair-resistant. In a bid to get a little more space for ourselves, we moved to East Vancouver, a “transitional” neighborhood an hour’s bus ride away from the campus where we were teaching. Our apartment—a mini-house, really—was part of a late-Victorian single-family home that had been renovated and carved into three separate apartments. We had the best place in the building: the whole front half, three stories, with views of the mountains, Burrard Inlet, and the Lion’s Gate Bridge. The renovation was slightly dated, from the 1990s, which was the only reason we could afford the place. It also meant that it was exactly at the point where everything was starting to break down and fall apart, and was no longer under warranty. Nevertheless, I loved that house. I still do. Even though I now live in a comparative palace in Mississippi—which I also love—I still dream about our “jewel box of an apartment” as my friend Trish once called it. It was cozy and chic; it had soaring cathedral ceilings with exposed beams and skylights; it managed to feel sunny and bright in a city where it rains 972 days a year. But sometimes I wonder if our relationship with 1616 Grant Street was psychologically dysfunctional, perhaps even abusive. Maybe she was a pathological narcissist, our beautiful apartment, or a sociopath. Maybe she had Munchausen Syndrome, but with repairs.

From my files:

24 December 2010
I feel like I’m getting to know Colin, our adorable boiler repairman, pretty well now. He just quit smoking three months ago and it’s been hard since he’s gained a bunch of weight and his roommate still smokes. He also has a tendency to over-apologize for not being able to fix things as he hands you a bill anyway. Merry Christmas, Colin! God bless us every one.

26 December 2010
Happy Boxing Day! I’m hoping to spend at least part of the day with Colin, the adorable boiler repairman. I hope he got some good stuff for Christmas.

6 January 2011
Colin is back, and flummoxed.
Later: Well, he thinks he has the gas fireplace fixed now. It’s hard to say which is more painful: his inexorable billing, or the depressed and hangdog way he keeps pronouncing himself unhappy with his own performance as a boiler repairman. I shouldn’t feel the need to constantly reassure him, and yet I do.

That particular streak of visits from Colin ended in spring of that year. All told, he charged us upwards of $1000 without fixing the fireplace. Eventually we called in someone else, who replaced the $3 on/off switch on the wall, which solved the problem.

But our apartment was not done with us. Not. Even. Close. Over the course of the next eight years, she indulged in a series of repair crises which built to a dramatic climax just as we were preparing to sell her. These repairs increased in intensity, disruptiveness, and expense with the masterful plotting of a Stephen King novel. At first there were the garden-variety issues—a minor leak here, a roof tile there. This was just our apartment getting warmed up, flexing her muscles. About three years into our relationship we learned that our entire heating system had to be replaced to the tune of $10,000. After we did a bunch of things to redress the situation that I have mercifully repressed (all three floors had different kinds of heating), we figured we were in the clear for a while—but our drama queen of an apartment immediately understood that our jerry-rigged heating system was rich fodder for new, terrifying repair situations. Those went on for the rest of the time we lived there, a kind of menacing bass line thumping along beneath the soaring melodies of total roof replacement, critical balcony leaks, and major appliance breakdown.

Things came to a head in the spring of 2019, when our apartment got wind of our intention to sell her. Maybe she was hurt. Perhaps we should have fudged the truth a little, protected her ego a bit more. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, but the fact remains that for whatever reason, our apartment decided that this was the perfect moment to wreak her final Amityville Horror-style vengeance on her hapless owners.

Our downstairs neighbor, Ken, had undertaken a major renovation of the garden apartment—the footprint of the whole building—over the course of the previous year. He gutted his apartment, structural load-bearing walls and all, and rebuilt it as an open-plan space. What he failed to do, apparently, was get the proper permits and inspections ahead of time. (This is apparently a “gray area” in Vancouver law. It doesn’t seem like this is a great place to have a “gray area,” IMHO. I kind of feel like anything having to do with the structural integrity of residential dwellings should be blackest black and gleaming fucking white.) Fast-forward to our own pre-sale inspection, when it was discovered that our apartment was gathering her skirts in preparation for an epic, dramatic fainting spell—she was teetering on the verge of collapse. Our neighbor’s renovation had weakened her load-bearing elements and she was (maybe?) no longer safe for habitation.

The next few months are a blur of engineering reports, petty obstructionism from our neighbors, and a pinched nerve in my neck that rendered the right side of my body numb. We finally learned that the previous inspector had been over-zealous and had misread the original plans; it was actually okay after all and we could proceed with our sale. The pain in my neck started easing up just in time for me to pack boxes. But our apartment had the last laugh, since of course all of those extra reports and inspections and document retrieval requests cost us thousands of unnecessary dollars. (Well played, 1616 Grant Street. Well played.) To this day, though, I’m still not sure. When we finally sold the apartment, packed up all our stuff, and pulled away in the moving truck, I refused to look in the rearview mirror—so I cannot attest that there wasn’t a pile of rubble and a smoking hole in the ground resembling the remains of the hellmouth below Sunnydale.

Our experience in Vancouver was an important training ground for our home ownership in Oxford. Nothing serious has gone wrong with our house here (yet); I think our new home is basically psychologically healthy and has no particular reason to want to torture us. Which is a good thing, because getting anyone in the town of Oxford, Mississippi, to repair anything in your house is one level of difficulty above brokering a peace agreement between Palestine and Israel. Very few repair people seem to have official businesses, let alone websites or published phone numbers. If you want, say, a plumber to come and fix a leak, your first step is to email everyone you know and ask them, in faintly hysterical tones, if they know or have ever heard of a plumber in the area. You will receive a clutch of phone numbers, and you will thus be lulled into thinking that this is going to be easy. You poor sap. Next you will call several candidates (each phone number represents a single guy with a truck) and if you’re lucky, one of them will tell you that he’ll come do the job on, say, Tuesday. But wait! This is where you are probably about to hear the spine-chilling three words that signal your imminent doom: I’ll text you. Spoiler alert: the repair person will not text you. Not that Tuesday, not the following Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. You will have to call again, usually three to four times, and each time act out the short absurdist play in which he promises to text you and you pretend to believe him. Eventually, if you demonstrate the fortitude and patient determination of a Gentile asking repeatedly to be converted to Judaism, the repair person may deem you worthy of his services, and condescend to visit your home and accept gobs of money from you in exchange for doing the work to which he has dedicated his career. Good luck paying with a credit card.

Now this scenario plays out primarily with repair people who perform essential services like plumbing and electrical work, and who are generally sympathetic to the fact that you are standing ankle-deep in water while loose electrical wires crackle around your head. (N.B. this does not mean that they will text you on Tuesday.) If you actually want anyone to come to your home to do optional, “vanity” projects such as tile work, painting, or renovations of any kind, your only hope is to convince a young niece or nephew to undertake decades of training in the trade that you require and agree to pay for their education in exchange for future services rendered. Even then—I wouldn’t count on it. Last year friends of ours excitedly told us about a landscaping/outdoor handyman guy they had just discovered who did some cool terracing work on their yard—and most importantly, he actually showed up! Repeatedly! We were beside ourselves, and immediately commissioned him to build a small patio in our backyard. He actually showed up! Repeatedly! That is until the day when he simply disappeared, leaving the edges of the patio incomplete and sand piled throughout our yard. Dozens and dozens of phone calls and messages later, we finally gave up and finished the work ourselves. Recently we were at a party in our friends’ (admittedly very nicely landscaped) backyard, and they told us that Mike had also ghosted them just shy of their project completion. Another guest overheard our conversation and reported that he had the same exact experience with Mike: he had gotten thisclose to finishing a flagstone path and then just stopped showing up. “The worst part,” he said contemplatively, opening another beer, “is the feeling of disappointment. I assumed all my yard work problems were solved.” He took a long swallow and looked off at the horizon. “I thought I had a guy,” he said sadly. “I thought I had a guy.”

I have given a lot of thought to the bizarre home repair situation in my new town. There are some plausible explanations, like the fact that the area has recently exploded in growth, with dozens of huge new housing developments going up in the past few years, and there are not enough skilled workers to go around. (And don’t get me wrong—I think it’s generally a wonderful thing that electricians are getting rich off of homeowning assholes like us.²) Perhaps people tend to leave small towns once they realize their expertise is in demand. Maybe as newcomers, Scott and I are simply a low priority for repair people who’ve grown up in the area and already have full client lists. In my more paranoid moments I worry that it’s our Biden-Harris yard sign, or our “rewilded” front lawn, or even our requesting that people wear masks in the house that has led to us being placed on some kind of underground repairs blacklist. You can go to some dark places when there’s water weeping down your living room wall and you can’t find anyone to fix your roof.

Things are getting better, though. We’ve been here long enough now to have found a core group of relatively reliable repair folks who mostly come when we need them, more or less. (I’d be happy to give you their numbers, but I can’t promise anything.) Some of them we’ve discovered through recommendations of neighbors, particularly neighbors who have been here their whole lives and are deeply connected to the hometown network that is inaccessible to the rest of us. Sometimes it feels like we Yankee newcomers (by which I mean anyone who has lived here less than 470 years) are swimming along the surface of a deep sea, oblivious to the miles of ecosystem stretching beneath us: an enormous intricate coral reef of multi-generational families, epic love stories and ancient rivalries, memories stretching back to before the Civil War. We are buffeted by currents emanating from below, but we don’t really understand where they come from and have to learn to just ride the waves. Sometimes support and help will come out of nowhere—a friendly dolphin will help guide your broken little bark to shore. Because you can’t force it, and you can’t predict it, and you can’t replicate it, it feels like grace. Sometimes the guy will text you on Tuesday.

1. Reader, that Starbucks closed at 9:00 p.m., long before Prime Marital Fight Time.

2. In a longer, more self-indulgent, more boring version of this essay I would talk about my profound ambivalence about the entire idea of private home ownership. So part of me thinks I have no right to complain about having trouble finding repair guys at all.