Curtain call
Home repairs, the magic of spackle, and the power of funkadelic pragmatism
Toward the end of the summer, I noticed that the curtain rod over my office window had come loose. The mounting that held the curtain rod in place had begun to separate from the wall. The combined weight of the curtains (a thin white set to let the light in, and a heavy blue set to keep the light out) tugged at the rod, which in turn tugged at brackets. Collapse was imminent, and so I did what comes naturally—I stuck my head in the metaphorical sand.
I had an excuse for my complacency, of course. I had shit to do. Important shit. Here’s a list.
Work shit.
Fiction shit.
Life shit.
Household shit.
Exercise shit.
Family shit.
Fun shit.
Friend shit.
Financial shit.
Miscellaneous shit.
Then one day the screw that held the mounting in place lost its grip inside the drywall. There was a loud breaking sound. I yelled, “Oh fuck!” The curtain rod hung there, threatening to come crashing down on my co-worker, Mortimer, who makes his contributions to our enterprise by lounging in a chair next to the curtain.
“Morty, move your ass!”
Mortimer jumped out of the chair as Christina burst into my office.
“Whoa! Is everything OK?”
Obviously, things weren’t OK. My complacency could’ve meant curtains—literally!—for Mortimer. He threatened to call California’s Division of Occupational Safety & Health to report an unsafe work environment. Christina bribed him with a piece of cheese, and Mortimer found a safer spot on the living room couch. All was forgiven.
“Get me the screwdriver and the step ladder,” Christina said.
I got the screwdriver and the step ladder. Christina went to work. First, she tried to salvage the installation, but the drywall wouldn’t cooperate. So, she tried to remove the screws and take the curtains down.
“Damn it,” Christina said. “These screws are stripped.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means, this sucker is coming down.”
Christina channeled her inner Hulk Hogan, tearing the rod and hardware from the wall.
“Save the curtains,” she said.
I put the curtains on top of a dresser that we had placed in the office, back when the office was a guest bedroom, back in the days when we had guests.
“What about the rod?” I asked.
“Put it in the garage.”
I put the rod in the garage.
“We’ll install new curtains this weekend,” Christina promised.
But this weekend became next weekend. And next weekend became next month. Shit (see the above list) just got in the way. And so I spent the final months of 2020 in a sun-drenched office, fighting the glare, and trying not to draw any connections between the broken drywall to my right and the scenes of a broken world on my computer screen.
Then, in the waning days of 2020, we got our shit together. Christina ordered new brackets and screws along with some spackle for the drywall. We picked up our order curbside at Lowe’s.
The drywall was easy to fix. Spackle, after all, is one of the world’s great products, not because it can salvage drywall, but because it has the magical power to salvage a security deposit. Seriously, that putty crushes it in the ROI department.
“Should we paint over the patch?” I asked. “If we want it to match, we’ll have to paint the whole wall, and if we want that to match, we’ll have to paint the whole office, and then…”
“I get it…” Christina said. “It never ends.”
No truer words have ever been spoken about home improvement.
It
Never
Ends
“On the other hand,” I said, “we could just hang the curtains because I’m pretty sure you won’t see the patches.”
“Love it! Get the drill.”
Having agreed to half-ass this particular repair job, we settled in to battle the hardware. But as it turned out, the battle of the hardware was a full-ass kind of undertaking.
The drill’s battery was low, so we sat on our hands for a few hours. My corny jokes about Christina finding the stud to sink the screws into failed to land. Once the drill was operational, we struggled to align the three new mounts in a level line across the window. Christina blamed the optical illusion created by a sloping ceiling. I made a note to consult Google to determine if there was a patron saint of home improvement so that I could curse him. Eventually, I’m not quite sure how, we managed to get the brackets mounted. But that’s when the real problem began. For the next thirty minutes, we struggled to attach the rod to the brackets.
“It’s supposed to snap into place,” Christina said.
I tried to snap it into place. Christina tried to snap it into place. Our frustration grew. Our exchanges became curt. But we continued.
“Get the big ladder,” Christina said.
“But we have the step ladder.”
“We’ll use two ladders, so we can both be up there at the same time.”
I didn’t see how that would help, but I got the big ladder. We climbed our respective ladders, hoisted the rod up to the mounts, and proceeded to futz, struggle, and curse for the next ten minutes.
“Fuck me, it’s hopeless,” I declared.
“It snaps into place,” Christina said for the hundredth time.
“It’s a lie,” I said. “Everything is a lie.”
“Get me the hammer.”
“The hammer? I thought it was supposed to snap into place.”
“Just get me the hammer.”
I rested the rod on the top rung of the ladder, got down, and got the hammer from the garage.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to brute force this motherfucker,” Christina said.
Brute force? Those are words that never appear in the home improvement manuals. Those manuals are written by sadistic copywriters who get their kicks dispatching people on quixotic home improvement quests, even though they know better than to DIY anything themselves. These copywriters use low-key matter-of-fact language that fools you into believing you’re Bob Vila. But the copywriters know there’s only one Bob Vila, and he’s ably backed up by Norm, an experienced contractor who helped Noah un-fuck God’s plans for the Ark.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I asked.
Without answering, Christina began to swing the hammer.
Bang
Bang
Bang
“Is that working?” I asked.
More hammering.
“I don’t think this is working,” I said.
Christina glared at me, and for good reason. The task was already a pain in the ass, and she didn’t need another pain in the ass from yours truly. You see, we made these vows to each other when we got married. We promised to love each other through sickness and health, along with all the usual vow stuff. But we also added in some pragmatism.
“When you think about it,” Christina said as we worked on those vows, “marriage isn’t all romance. Most of the time, you’re doing un-romantic stuff like putting together IKEA furniture, cleaning the house, handling money things, or trying to figure out which health insurance plan makes sense.”
So, we placed a lot of pragmatic stuff in our vows about supporting each other through the ups and downs of assembling IKEA furniture and having candid pre-meetings before signing leases. This, we told ourselves, was the stuff of a long-hall partnership, of a lasting marriage, of what we call our “life buddy” system.
But vow is just a fancy word for promise, and promises are broken everyday. Sometimes we break those promises on purpose, but more often than not, shit just gets in the way, and our best intentions crumble like drywall. You can fix the broken parts, spackle them over. You can even paint to make the broken parts to look good as new, assuming you’re up for that kind of full-ass undertaking. But no matter what, fixing something means getting real.
“This isn’t working,” Christina said as she climbed down the ladder.
“Huh?”
“We’re really out of synch here.”
“I thought it was the hardware,” I said.
“We need better hardware, but… you know what… I think we should just try again later.”
And so we did.
On the second to last day of the year, I put on some Parliament-Funkadelic. I chose P-funk because I love their music, and because the previous home improvement attempt proved that in order to succeed, we need to work as one household, under a groove, getting down just for the funk of it.
Christina picked up new hardware—brackets and rod—from Lowe’s. She removed the brackets that never did snap into place, then installed new brackets that didn’t snap at all. Without any help from the sadistic, and spectacularly unhelpful, written instructions, I un-fucked a potentially fuckable situation by connecting four component parts to form one new rod. I managed to do this without cursing the patron saint of rods, or shaking my fists at the heavens and demanding to know why thy rod couldn’t just come as one single piece?
Then, together, we mounted that sucker and finally hung those damn curtains.
Fantastic story Michael. Happy new year and keep em coming.