The Write Thing

This is the beginning of my third year in Houston and I have recently moved out of the garage apartment I rented when I first arrived to a house of my own centrally located in Houston’s Museum District.

Today my landlady sent me a check with a partial reimbursement for my deposit.  I have repeatedly said that people are normally inclined to do what is the most convenient thing for them rather than what is the right thing to do.  The faded check on my desk just attests to that.  It is striking when you see $300 get the best of a person and make them crawl in the mud to chip away at your money and accuse you of things you never did.  They think they lose more in reimbursing you a full deposit when it is due, so they resort to lies and ridiculous concoctions in order to squeeze as much as they can from an initial deposit you gave in earnest and they should have taken care of.  No, they don’t.  They probably use it to shop for tacky lingerie (I once found a receipt for a thong she got someplace inside a bag she left in the apartment into which she got in without letting me know first), or to give themselves a well-deserved treat after working hard in finding out how to rip the next tenant off.  One thing is certain:  they will not stop until they are confident that they have taken as much as they could from you.  Little does it matter if you make repairs in the house that will be left for the next person, or if you have left the house clean as can be.  It will not be enough for them, because in their book, convenience precludes fairness.  So $300 will make her a whore, even though she thinks she has made a killing by taking money she had no right to.  A whore, however, would be more straightforward and you would know what kind of transaction you are making.  Prostitution disguised as self-righteousness is dangerous, and yet she will be elated to have gotten away with murder again, until the next victim arrives.

Small claims court would be a solution, but being a foreigner makes you wary of dealing with the law unless you are really required to.  I won’t take her to court.  I will just wish her the same fairness from others as she has awarded me, and I know that down the road she will receive it.  I believe life is not a continuum of nice and lovely impunity.  I believe you ultimately reap what you sow, and her crop is certainly too poor to get much.  May she enjoy her foreign boyfriend and her life in a repaired house she hasn’t paid for, and may the Houston hurricanes be mild on her roof.  I am afraid the next victim will end up feeling the same way I do today, and I am sorry about him or her.  I only hope one of those who will follow me that they will do what I cannot do, and justice will be served.

Saturday March 10.  It has only been 11 days since a string of signatures on cluttered pieces of papers signaled my entrance into the world of home ownership.  This is the US and it is where I could do it the way it should be: no need for anyone to die so that you can inherit the start up for a bigger loan or the cash to buy it upfront, the way you would have to if you were living in my native Argentina.  Here, there is only the need to prove you have a steady job and your employer kind of likes you, that you have a credit score that is decent or can be marginally improved, and that you are not fooling around with the idea of becoming indebted above your means.

Yes, I am finally a home owner.  It cost me years of suffering, tears and the sense that family is better left miles away from me than nearby.  It took the courage to look ahead and dream about it little by little, when others accessed their dream and inspired me.  It took growing up on my part, knowing that now I will have to put more of my money to a house rather than to average savings.  I do not complain about it.  I am happy that I can risk and dare to undertake the responsibility of monthly payments that absorb a lot more cash than I would have liked to give, and that the decision means I will have to sacrifice here and there in order to meet my obligations and not lose the dream.

No matter what happens, whether a hurricane hits me or I no longer can be responsible for my decision, I am a homeowner…or at least I will once have been one.  It is huge when you come from nothing and your own family has turned their back on you because they did not want to deal with banks.  When you have been had by your own next of kin, you know that trust should be a hard currency.  I wish I had known that four years ago and I wish I had learned my lesson well.  I did not.  As was to be expected, you were not here with me this special weekend, in a house together.  I know someone once told me I would move into a house with you one day, and that would be my destination after the rented garage apartment at Cortlandt st.  They were wrong, unfortunately.  Maybe life is less glamorous than it seems from the runes.  Maybe life is constantly in flux, the way you are, unable to hold a steady feeling that will see you through the maze in which you trapped yourself.  I do not know.  I just know that it would have been nice to have a house with you, the way you do with someone else, even if that had meant my own crusade of going against my fate would have been solved with a shortcut of two salaries going against mortgages instead of one.  Oh, love…you have taken yourself so far away from us that now I do not know how or if we will ever come back.  Perhaps this had to be so.  Perhaps it was my own quest and my own holy grail, and you were there just as the vehicle that would make me believe a change of life was worth it.  Maybe, perhaps, who knows?  After all, this is what life is all about.

So the story should be simple, but for one reason or another it is not.  Meet J, the owner of an unconventional gym in the city of Houston.  We agreed on a 5.30 pm appointment, which I was early for.  I grabbed a quick cup of coffee while the15-minute interval between arrival and meeting passed, and only delayed my appearance at his door by five minutes.  By then, he was already on his smartphone, having a peculiar and revealing conversation with a friend or client…who knows?  My girlfriend has by now given me extensive training on the boundaries of privacy in America (at least by her own standards), so I know better than to eavesdrop on other people’s talk.  However, what can you do when you are standing on the sidewalk waiting for an Asian-lookingman the same height as you to walk you through his gym and he is on the phone singing himself praises?

By the time he was done — about ten or fifteen minutes after I had arrived and stood silently before him counting clouds in the Houston sky — I had finished my coffee and was holding the plastic to-go container in my right hand, glancing around me for a garbage can which I would fail to find, even after our one-hour interview.  He introduced himself — or maybe I did, because he probably thinks he needs no introduction — and he sent the first missile.  The whole thing (mind you, still on the sidewalk looking into the gym) was Russian KGB with almond-shaped eyes.  What do you do? Where do you live? Where are you from? Of course he had been in the oil and gas industry as a business development manager.  He could not stop speaking about himself and how cool he was, even when he was 50 pounds heavier and a drinker and smoker back in the day when he probably was happy.  He had been certified in all areas known to man, had sucked up all the books you might need to read in a lifetime to find out when to eat beans, and was of course the only person in the world who knew how you should exercise.  He had tried all other gyms which, of course, could not compare to his barebones warehouse in a trendy area of town.

I knew it was a bad idea not to tell him that I had a severe case of loose sphincters and needed to go home, or that perhaps I had a plane to catch I had completely forgotten about.  We went inside the gym, which was indeed a warehouse with tires and no equipment, just hand-made rubber elements that you may use to exercise but did not look like you would.  The place was a Les Luthiers for body-builders, and he showed me around until we got to the coolest place in the whole warehouse…the restroom.  He claimed he strove for excellence and he was pretty confident he succeeded at it.  If people did not join his gym, they probably were not worth it…

In a forty-year life span,  if therapy and being an Argentine citizen have not allowed me to lead a better life, at least they have given me tools to read addicts and people who are too much to deal with in any environment.  It is my duty to put up with them at work, but my choice to have them in my extra-hours.  J may be the coolest guy on earth to people whose self-esteem is either higher than his or so low that they won’t notice he is a fake.  At least, my self-esteem is about average, and I know he is an addict.  You can pick your addiction…wine, cigarette, sex or workouts.  I think when you switch addictions, you become a purist of the impossible, and life becomes a boring succession of days in which you are not addicted to what society praises…a major reason to think you are indeed cool.

Yes, I admire J, because he could replace addictions and get a few people to buy his time for $300 per month to attend a gym with no equipment and just a restroom.  I admire him because during the course of a full hour he was unable to offer me a recycling-friendly bin where I could throw my empty coffee cup.  I am sure he is going to do well in a society where success is all that matters, even if it is a lie and underneath the surface you are as dysfunctional as the fat guy next door.  It is always good to be the living example of The Biggest Loser and boast how you beat the odds and stayed outside them.  However, when you close the door of your expensive high-rise  condo at night, switch on the energy-saving lights of your living room and pour yourself that glass of Evian…isn’t there something missing?