Chapter 1
I loved that house. There wasn’t much to it—seven hundred square feet of what the unappreciative call character—but it was built by hand in 1912, plank by board, nail by screw. Sometimes I’d close my eyes and imagine that first owner on a grainy black and white reel, sitting in front of his newly finished home on Sunnyside Hill, gazing at the mountain waters of the Bow River, tipping back a warm beer with a sigh. I envied that man of history, even though he probably never experienced such bliss.
What I loved was exactly what others did not: every botched alteration, every failed upgrade, every peeling layer of wallpaper and paint was there for the tracing, like Jacques Plante and his scarred mask: these are the blows I have taken, and survived. Walking from room to hall, from porch to soffit, from handy to buckshee, you traced not only the house’s history but the entire evolution, or devolution, of twentieth-century design.
The frontis was 1930 pebbled stucco, the siding 1950 faded pink asbestos, the front door grey plastic faux-wood with a tinted oval peek-a-boo window that said “disco and proud of it.” There were two chimneys: a crumbling brick affair providing fresh winter air to the broken fireplace, the other a rusted steel pipe that long since freed itself from the gravity furnace. The floor was fir throughout, splintered and worn and gapped, except where lino-ed over in swirling floral green or carpeted over in bright orange in the tiny second bedroom. The porch was pure entropy in motion, a snapshot of imminent collapse.
If you spent more than a month in the place, you got to know its inner workings intimately. No two appliances could be switched on simultaneously. Use of the shower or washing machine met with groans of objection from pre-WWI copper. The gas stove was flawless; the gas oven required foot-long matches, courage, and short hair.
In front of the house a century-old cotoneaster hedge propped up a rotten picket fence. In the back, the overgrown garden threatened a grey wind-beaten garage. The soil was floodplain peat. Tomatoes grew spontaneously, while stray carrots brazened their roots each August.
To me, the house was like an old ship on a journey through time. It hadn’t just survived the journey; it’d thrived. And this, I thought, was what made the house admirable, what gave it character. It’d been battered, neglected, and suffered the quiet humiliation of being dressed in someone else’s clothes. But its fundamental self was irrepressible.
It wasn’t just the abodal history that made me love that house. Behind every structural, renovational, architectural story is a personal story. Like the house, I’d had my shiny youth of new love, my stuccoed divorce, my asbestosed fallout of pipe pain and dry-rot, my ill-conceived disco years, and my disastrous mid-life reno.
But alas, all good things must end.
* * *
So it was with more than a passing sadness that I watched those three men take my house that warm solstice evening. The sun was throwing its pre-dusk wash over the land as Luc orchestrated the operation. Luc was a big bald Frenchman with both arms blanketed in tattoos. He brought along two beefy swampers and a flatbed truck, and the three of them smoked and parlez-ed non-stop while deploying an array of jacks and pulleys and levers that would have made da Vinci proud. Pre-industrial contraptions that eased my house mercifully toward the sky.
I crouched down and peered at the sliver of light between the house and foundation. The two had been co-joined for nearly a century, and I imagined a depth to their parting as Luc backed the flatbed into that membrane of light. Luc had already ripped the rotted picket fence out. My catoneaster hedge lay trampled, and I winced as the wheels crushed a century limb into its own roots.
I stood up too quickly and had to lean on the suspended house for support. Luc shouted at me to move away from the house, and I stumbled back into the dug-up terrain, touching a hand to the gauze on my ear. The lacerations on my face still stung, despite the fresh ozonol. Both my eyes were black, but I could see well enough. I suspected I had a concussion, but there were more pressing matters at hand than my own little aches and pains.
Luc and his men dashed about the house in a frenzy of de-jacking and de-levering, until it descended gingerly upon the flatbed, held in place by guy wires and ropes and bungies that seemed absurdly flimsy for the task. Finally Luc’s two swampers climbed in the truck cab, and Luc retrieved a small canvas lunch bag from behind the driver’s seat and turned toward me. I looked up at his big round head, which his neck ran into without transition, like a slab of baloney on shoulders. He had three creases on his forehead, his eyes set way back in their sockets. No hair, no stubble. I suppressed a suicidal urge to smirk.
Luc shoved the bag into my chest.
‘Thirty Gs. You want to count it?’
I shook my head. He grinned. He climbed in the cab and I saw that the truck had no plates. A black stream of exhaust shot into the air, and the truck eased off the curb and onto the street.
I stood on the sidewalk and stared at the concrete crater that was once my house—shingles and planks and bricks strewn around the yard like a post-tornado event. The apex of the roof was gone, as if the house had had a brush cut. They’d cut the top off to clear the roadway height restrictions. The rusted steel chimney lay sprawled on the lawn, the brick chimney in a heap where it had slid off the roof after one swat from the hundred-pound sledge.
As I watched the flatbed crawl down Fifth Street—with Memorial Drive and the Bow River sparkling beyond in the dusk—I felt an urge to wave. The street was narrow. The house and flatbed dwarfed the cars parked on either side of the truck. Luc had his head out his window checking his clearance, with one of the swampers looking out the passenger side, nodding okay with a cigarette out his mouth.
Then there was a loud groan, like a ship’s hull, and one side of the roof slumped to starboard. The brake lights lit up, and the entire house just sort of parallelogrammed to the right, like a cardboard box. It happened so slowly that for a moment I thought I could dash over and hold it up. But I just watched and listened. The ship-hull sound evolved to a cracking and snapping of wood, followed by the crimpling of a parked Mercedes’ hood that was now the master bedroom floor, where Chick and I had consummated our marriage several hundred times—our history laid bare on the street for all to see. Maybe we would have been better off doing it on that beautiful German lid. Chick always had a thing for the Mercedes star, and was a bit of an exhibitionist to boot.
Finally came the sound that stopped me dead: the krang of chromium on chromium, of chromium on asphalt, and of chromium on curb. The high-grade chromium that meant Harley Davidson, the Devils bikers, and their dark world, all closing in on me.
As Luc and his two swampers emerged from the truck, I saw Donald—the lead biker, my ex-partner, now loan manager—step onto his front porch smoking his signature cigarillo, staring at the carnage that was once his prized chopper and once my beloved house.
You see, the problem was, it wasn’t really my house anymore.
