Den of No Equity

She lives in a house filled with filthy, post-goth teenagers addicted to cell phones. A cigarette is never far away. The pool remains covered despite the warm weather and the lawn needs to be weeded and mowed.

A young man stands before me. He is shirtless and his chest and stomach are covered with fine black hair that has grown back after a shaving about three weeks ago. Another stands at the end of the brick walk I must navigate to arrive at the porch. His hair is bleached blond and he’s wearing smeared purple and black eye shadow. As I walk around him, I notice that he has three handkerchiefs in his left, rear pocket: One yellow, one pink and one red, carefully twisted into tubes. In the infinitely small moment it takes to walk around and behind this individual, my mind calculates what sexual cues the placement and colors of the handkerchiefs might send to a gay male living in the Castro in the late 1970’s.

Sitting in the sunlight, the client smiles and smoke leaks through her teeth. She holds-up the paperwork I left with her to complete four weeks ago proudly and announces it’s almost ready. I think to myself that I must sell real estate because being a rodeo clown isn’t painful enough.

Please take this the wrong way: everyone is fucking nuts when it comes to selling or buying property. It is clear to me that it’s a hot bed of long-buried trauma triggers for most people, and Realtors are simply the sponges that suck up the dark psychic matter along with a few dollars, if we’re lucky.

How I have come to be standing here confronted with the abruptness of my current reality I am not exactly sure. Suffice to say it is the culmination of a lifetime of inconsistency; my constant hopping from one job or another, from firm to firm, navigating through the employment world in the survival, hand-to-mouth kind of way that befalls many of us who thought we were meant for much more luxurious circumstances that have failed to manifest despite all youthful presentiments to the contrary. Aim for the stars to land on the moon, and if you miss the moon, too, you might just end up in real estate.

I once imagined my days to be filled with witty encounters among the creative elite of the world, exchanging ideas, collaborating and amusing one another over trays of swank edibles, while we toasted one another to genius with glass of world-class champagne. Instead, I’m standing here, in a neighborhood at least two worlds away from the one I once dreamed. Instead of being dazzled at an art opening in New York, I’m staring with amazement the ashtray made of welded automobile parts that has replaced the abalone shell my client’s three teenage sons used to fill to the rim with cigarette butts. This new tray is full the same as its predecessor. This home is filled with items such as this malignant sculpture that serve as markers along the path of my clients self-sabotage. I’ve been subjected to the kind of anthropology found in the slices of daily human life that would give Margaret Mead the willies.

To say things are a mess in this house is only scratching the surface, which you wouldn't want to do. This is a short sale, or to the layman, the owner has over-mortgaged the property to the point that it is worth less than she owes. She’s done this with four of her properties. I’m helping her sell two. Lucky me.

Although it may sound contradictory, I do not speak here from a place of judgment; to the contrary, I understand perfectly that we all overextend ourselves in one way or the other in our lives and in fact, this boundary expanding behavior often does lead one to success. Nor do I judge how my client lives or the way in which she raises her children. Put simply, it’s just not my planet. So I feel very alien standing with her as she rubs the coagulating mascara from the corners of her eyes and says, “So get this. Last night I met a guy hot enough to fuck and wouldn’t you know it, this morning my ex decides he still loves and shows up while last night’s fuck’s still in my bed!”

I’m not sure how to respond. I wonder if the local community college has a Jerry Springer dialect adult ed evening class. I use a summarily rejected offer that I hold in my right hand as a sun visor and reply, “Yes, ironic, isn’t it?”

She then looks at her watch and tells me she must be going to pick up her just-adolescent daughter from Juvenile Hall and exclaims, “Luckily it’s only drug charges,” to which I respond, “Oh, good.”

She’s in quite a hurry, being late for leaving for her weekend getaway, a Narcotics Anonymous retreat.

I watch her as she climbs into her new-off-the-lot black SUV, aptly named the Dodge Excommunicator or something like that, and drives away playing a loud hip-hop song with a chorus that I swear is singing, “Go Fuck Yourself.” She flicks her cigarette out the window, and waves goodbye.

All of this has been so totally disorienting that I’ve completely forgot to tell her about her other short sale listing, the home on the river in which my client has allowed two of her friends, with a new baby and a pit-bull, along with a cast of guest stars to stay until it is sold. I’ve just received a call from a Realtor who described the scene she found when viewing the property as “uncomfortable.” Apparently, a motorcycle was under repair in the living room and as the potential buyers entered, they were also treated to a man scratching under boxer shorts, wandering out of the kitchen.

I promise myself I’ll search the net for rodeo clown openings as soon as I get home.