the saga of the pee house

(This one's for Jeano, who requested More about the beach, more about summer, more about everything.)

Two weeks from today, the B and I will be backing our 10' U-Haul truck into the driveway of our rented house in Georgia. From what we can tell from Google Street View, this house looks like a lot of the houses in the southeast: one-story, carport, scrub pines and sand in the front yard. The blurry photo reminds me of the house we rented in Aiken, South Carolina, when I was four and five, a bright pink one forever dubbed Bubble Gum by my family .

This house is not pink. It is brick. But it may or not reek of urine, and as such, the B and I have taken to referring to our new place as The Pee House.

Let me tell you a story.

*

I spent the first week of May en route to, and in, Vermont. The semester--and our jobs--had ended the week before, and the last week of April was a strange whirlwind. I recycled three years of student essays and final grade sheets and portfolios, turned in my keys, went to a combination farewell/birthday party, got dismissed from jury duty, turned thirty, and accepted the position at my new university. I was planning to spend the month in Vermont writing new poems and finishing work on a second manuscript; the B wanted to spend his free month working on his own new manuscript and doing various bachelor things. So before I left, we agreed that our Georgia house hunt would be suspended. I told myself I would take care of it when I got back.

(Here, the month of May transpires. I keep calling the residency Summer Camp, which sounds demeaning, except that I mean it in the best possible way. At a residency, like at summer camp, your needs are met. You do some writing, some reading. You show up at certain times of the day, and someone has laid out Gouda and carrot-ginger coconut milk soup and fresh bread and juice for you. On Fridays, you leave your sheets outside the door of your room and someone brings you new ones. During the day, you sit outside in a chair and read books until you decide you don't want to, and then you wander over to the sculpture studio to see what your new friend is working on, and then you decide to go buy beer [in the middle of the afternoon!] and you drink it by the river.

To leave a residency, then, is to be sent kicking and screaming back into your real life, where bills and dental checkups and house-hunting tasks await, and so you spend much of the three weeks of your re-entry inexplicably tearing up at odd times during the day. In fact, you get so used to this sensation that you start to schedule it on your daily to-do list: Listen to the new Bon Iver; mourn Vermont. It reminds you of nothing so much as the year after you left Minnesota, when you cried every single day for six months.)

When I came home the second week in June, we set about the task of finding an apartment to rent in a town we've never seen, using those trusty sluts, the Internet and Google maps. This is exactly the same method that I employed to find my current apartment in Grand Rapids, and it's served me just fine. In fact, I might actually prefer it to the way I found my Mankato apartment, which involved arranging many apartment viewings for a blitz viewing weekend, and I definitely prefer it to the way we found the Madison apartment, which involved us lining up four awful Craigslist showings, each more dismal that the previous, and then breaking for lunch at a Schlotzsky's Deli and me weeping in the parking lot, and then grabbing the Apartment Finder and choosing one of those places with a banner out front that reads IF YOU LIVED HERE, YOU'D BE HOME BY NOW!

So we got our little speech down--university professors, relocating from the north, won't be down to see it but happy to rent based on pictures, clean-living!, small dog! excellent references!--and started surfing.

We encountered the usual sort of minor roadblocks that searching for an apartment online will get you: despite our accents, and repeated mentions that we'd never been to the town, people insisted on starting sentences with Well, you know Statesboro!, and I spelled my e-mail address eight times for a women who couldn't understand my vowel enunciation any more than I could fully understand her syrup drawl, and we spent a totally fruitless week waiting to hear about a place that ended up being rented on the same day I'd spent thirty minutes on the phone being assured that the place was ours, etc. But then we got hooked up with an agent at one of the town's four property-management monopolies, and then the fun started.

This agent has the most southern name I've ever seen outside of a Barry Hannah novel. I can't reproduce it fully here because I'm sure it's super-Googlable, so let's just say that it rhymes with Cobie Stanley the IV. That's how he signs all his e-mails, with the IV. Our journey with Cobie Stanley the IV began when I e-mailed his property management company inquiring as to the availability to a specific apartment, only to have Cobie Stanley the IV write back and tell me that the property was neither pet-friendly, as the listing suggested, nor available, as the listing also suggested. He promptly attached a new copy of the listings, which included the house I'd originally inquired about, still listed as pet-friendly and available.

Ah, the joys of apartment searching!

From there, Cobie Stanley the IV suggested several other properties, but none as strongly as a patio home that just happened to belong to his father-in-law. After I passed on the patio home, the B went back and forth with Cobie Stanley the IV for a while, and then the B found a house for rent relatively close to the campus. It had a fenced back yard, wasn't downtown (one of the other frequent, if totally context-less and thus useless, piece of advice we kept hearing was You want to avoid downtown!, though whether this is because it's  super industrial or overrun with student beer pong tournaments or racially divided, no one would clarify), and, perhaps most importantly, was not a patio home on a man-made lake ten miles south of campus, which seems to be pretty much every non-student apartment for rent in this town.

So we filled out the application and sent a large check to Cobie Stanley the IV. Two days later, the e-mail came:

I realized that yall were just renting based on pictures, and wanted to give yall another option. We have heard that there is actually some damages to the floors because of 3 dogs they have and it concerned me for you guys just taking it pretty much based on what I have told you and the pictures.

But, Cobie Stanley the IV continued, he had another option: he was moving! Did we want to rent his condo? He was attaching pictures! The condo was nice. It was fine. It was near the high school on the outskirts of town.

It was the sort of place I really, really didn't want to rent. I know I'm weird in this regard. I just ... I like living in somewhat shabby houses. I don't feel comfortable in nice apartments, even though they have working appliances and they weren't wired for electricity forty years after their original construction and ants don't fall from the dining room ceiling onto your head when you are eating breakfast. I know this doesn't make any sense, but there's something I find sort of sterile and sad about a too-nice place. Plus, it makes all my furniture, much of which has been stolen from curbs and basements, looks crappy.

(Last summer, when three friends and I arrived at my apartment at ten o'clock at night, after spending eight hours driving from New York State to Michigan, we walked in the door to find that my upstairs neighbor had left her toilet running and gone out for the weekend, and the water had seeped through her floor into our living room ceiling and was now gushing through three or four distinctly vagina-shaped opening in the drywall and pouring down onto our living room floor into a series of pots and pans the B had put out. Our landlords weren't answering their phones. I told my friends to get back into the car, and we went to the gas station for bourbon and Cheetos, and then I checked us into an air-conditioned, non-collapsing-ceiling room at the Holiday Inn downtown. Weeks later, one of those friends said to me, I guess I'm just looking forward to the day when you live in an actual apartment.)

Now I found myself composing yet another e-mail in which I delicately framed a variety of reasons why I would rather rent an old, dirty house instead of the place where this man currently lived. So I wrote back, and I asked what, exactly, the problem with the house might be.

His response: I have not been in myslef but our inspector and another realtor things that they let dog pee sit on the hardwood floors and it soaked in.

Oh! Just a little pee-soaking! Well then.

We wrote back: What are our options? 

Cobie Stanley the IV replied that they might convince the owner to replace the hardwood floors, or, barring that, the place would at least be professionally cleaned. Then the B and I got to have one of those truly bizarre discussions about the sort of thing that I am pretty sure rational grown-ups never actually have to talk about:

Me: What do you think?

The B: I don't know. I mean, it's just pee.

Me: And it's not cat pee.

The B: And it's not on carpet.

Me: I guess I don't know what to do. I know [the man who hired us] had offered to do a walk-through of any potential place for us, but this is sort of a weird question.

The B: "Hey, [future boss], could you walk through this house for us and tell us just how badly it reeks of dog piss?"

Me: "Because, you know, we can handle a mild to moderate pee smell--"

The B: "--But if it's remarkably or overwhelmingly pee-smelling, could you let us know? Thanks. Looking forward to working with you!"

Me: (sigh) Let's just take the fucking place. We can call it The Pee House!

The B: Okay.

So then we wrote back an e-mail asserting that no, we didn't want Cobie Stanley the IV's perfectly nice condo, or Cobie Stanley the IV's father-in-law's perfectly nice condo, and no, we were okay with the possibility of a pee-scented house. We were down with the sight-unseen pee house. WE WANTED THE PEE HOUSE! CASH OUR CHECK! WE ARE FROM THE NORTH! NORTHERNERS LOVE PEE!

At this point, I am sure that our file was relabeled as CRAZY FUCKERS, but our check was cashed. And, Cobie Stanley the IV mentioned, he was actually moving to Charleston, so his mother would be taking over our rental account. Is there a person in this town that Cobie Stanley the IV isn't related to? NO. NO THERE IS NOT.

Much of this unfolded via e-mail while we were at the beach, so of course the B and I would be sitting around in damp swimming suits covered in sand and sunblock, reading my smartphone's screen. My family members found this mildly amusing. As my aunt said when she dropped us off at the Philadelphia airport on Monday, Let us know how things go in The Pee House!

Will do. Because next week I actually get to drive down to The Pee House and get the keys and walk through it. It will be nice to know, at last, what this places looks and smells like, and where the bedrooms are located, and what challenges we have ahead of us. Like whether or not we need to buy eighty or ninety scented candles. Because, you know. Nothing smells as good as Clean Linen dog pee.

But here's the thing: as we've been preparing our current place for the great pack-up, I'm suddenly aware of all the odd sacrifices we've made to live in this apartment. I think about this when I have to shove the B's clothes out of the way so that I can open the door to our tiny, shared closet, or when I have to walk from the kitchen through the dining room to the storage room to retrieve a Tupperware container from the bin next to the power tools, or when I wake up in the middle of the night to a sound that I recognize now is one of the living room windows slamming shut. I thought about it yesterday, when, returning to my house via the church alley next door, the dog and I interrupted a homeless man peeing on our bushes. And I thought about it as I've slowly been dismantling the pot rack, the under-cabinet halogen lighting, and the nice showerhead that I installed and putting back up the awful fluorescent fixtures, the broken and stained blinds, and the showerhead that drips mostly on my feet.

I think we can handle a little pee.