by Matthew Batt
I’m mostly colorblind, and in carpet stores—like paint stores —you’ve got all of these little samples and, from them, you’re supposed to be able to imagine the whole surface covered with the junk. It would be like a car dealer having no cars, just the keys—a whole room filled with racks and racks of keys—and you base your purchase of a car on extrapolating what kind of vehicle would fit on the end of each key.
So, to be a good sport and to keep things interesting for myself, I decide I’ll cast my vote based on the carpet’s name. Not unheard of in any democracy, of course.
Monsanto, I think. Mohawk. Good, strong names. Like scouts in a James Fenimore Cooper novel. Berber? No. It makes my mouth feel regrettable. Also rhymes with Gerber, which is baby food, which you don’t want to walk on barefoot. Stainmaster? Yes. You bet your ass I want carpet that has an advanced degree in something. Doctor of Pile. Master of Stains. That’s my kind of carpet.
Suffice it to say, Jenae quickly pooh-poohed this approach, and we decided that the best way to choose carpet and remain married was for her to pick the bedroom and me the study. If I wanted to continue sleeping in the bedroom, she gently reminded me, I had better choose wisely in the study.
So I went conservative. And Jenae? She went Brady. She went really Brady. Three-inch-deep-shag Brady. If we were to have a Grateful Dead party—and I’m not saying it’s impossible, but a pretty long list of other things would have to happen first; for example, number one: start liking the Dead—we could have a black light installed in our bedroom and everybody could groove on the wavy forest of mighty white worms dancing on the floor. In the daylight, however, the sample from the carpet store looked like a scalped ram.
On the other hand, because the study was ostensibly a common space, I decided on high-wear, semi-commercial, tight-weave, beige/brown/khaki carpet. So, she got to pick out the dancing shoes, I got to pick out the orthopedic insoles. The stuff I chose was the color of toast and had about the same underfoot feel. But I was secretly planning this mild-mannered carpet to be my means of a discrete triumph, because, let me tell you, I eat a hell of a lot of toast while I’m working, and I’m pretty reckless with my crumb management.
After leaving Michael to his ministry upon the purpleheart, I wander around the inside of the house, waiting for the carpet guy. I try not to touch anything. Everything feels sticky, as though booger-smearing had been the previous tenants’ favorite pastime—right up there with home-brewing meth or crack, I dread. I open all the windows I can, but it still smells of ammonia, fecal matter, and, if I’m not mistaken, star anise—like the backed-up septic system of an Indian restaurant. I’m sure it’ll all be better with new floors. New carpet. The end of the day, this place is going to be a whole new house. That’s my story. I keep telling it to myself, taking shallow breaths to stave off hyperventilation and despair.
I don’t have any tools, per se, other than a starter-model Swiss Army knife—one without a saw or corkscrew, but with tweezers, a plastic toothpick, and the oft-sought Phillips screwdriver—and for three hours I try to slice through the decades of paint that have sealed the bedroom windows closed. It is a demoralizing first project. If I can’t even get the windows open, what will I be able to do?
The carpet guy finally shows up around eleven. I expect him to say something—to comment on how fit and righteous I must be to have been up for hours, busy as I am with my little red knife—but he doesn’t.
“We’re gonna have to do something about the smell,” he says. “Get these suckers open,” he says, as though he’s going to say Ali Baba! and the windows will pop right up.
He is wearing a short-sleeved blue mechanic’s jumpsuit, and the name “LaEarl” is stitched in a white oval patch. He seems at home in his jumpsuit. I am willing to bet he has a few of these and that he wears them everywhere except funerals. The waistband has a built-in belt that I do not understand. It is a jumpsuit. The belt is, I believe, pure fanciness. There is no chance the jumpsuit will fall from his shoulders, off his arms and torso, over his hips, and down. A belt on a jumpsuit is more redundant than a belt with suspenders. A belt on a jumpsuit is like lederhosen with suspenders and a belt. Perhaps he thinks the ladies like it.
LaEarl looks like my seventh-grade wood shop teacher, Mr. Hruska, not to be confused with my eighth-grade metal shop teacher, Mr. Tonz, who threw a roll of duct tape at my friend Joseph’s head and called him a “stupid homo” because he was talking during attendance. Shop teachers all have gray, G.I. Joe flattops, thick Lucite glasses, and an inordinate amount of ear and nose hair. Men who look like that are good at one thing, it seems to me, and it is not interpersonal communication. It is their work. And sadism.
Through the window I can see LaEarl’s rusty, failing blue pickup. One taillight appears to have been stolen from a school bus, because it is big, round, and red, mounted by the gas tank like a pencil sharpener. The new carpet is rolled up in twelve-foot tubes, wrapped in plastic like huge carryout burritos. It occurs to me that he might have stolen them from somebody else’s legitimate carpet company truck, but then I remember that I ordered the carpet, and unless he stole both the carpet and the order—as well as the money I have not yet paid—he would be doing me a tremendous favor.
“Fixer-upper,” he says, looking around, wrinkling his nose.
“How can you tell?” I ask. I don’t expect him to answer. It is not necessary to answer. Olfaction is forty times more receptive than any other human sense.
“Good grief,” he says.
“A little incense and a coat of paint or two . . .” I say, looking around as if I’m about to be lowered down a reasonably deep well.
“Where you want me to start?” he asks.
For a second, I am confused. I have never employed anybody before. I have never before had anybody perform manual labor that required my oversight. I suddenly feel I should be wearing a straw boater, sipping a mint julep, and fiddling absent-mindedly with my riding crop.
I don’t want LaEarl to think I’m some kind of schlemiel. I don’t know why—because I am from Wisconsin? because I am the biological son of a carpenter, the adopted son of a major league ball player? because I’m a guy?—but I want this guy, my fellow man, to nod at me at the end of the day, and maybe jab me in the shoulder, and say, “Know what? You’re not like all the other limp-wrists I work for. You obviously know your way around a toolbox. Wanna go shoot some stick at the Twilite? Maybe throw a couple lines after some crappies this weekend then?”
But he won’t. He won’t, of course, because he probably doesn’t drink, because he’s probably Mormon, because LaEarl is, after all, named LaEarl, and he is of, from, in, and about Utah. He also won’t because I do not exist for him. Not on a human scale, anyway. I am a job. I am the occasion for work. I am the thing he cannot do without but would ditch first if he could. His accent is semi-rural, and I bet he had to drive for more than an hour to get to my house. Moreover, I bet he had to drive to the warehouse and deal with a bunch of other guys like him who are all trying to get to wherever the hell the job is today because the sooner they get there, the sooner they can get home and change into their leisure jumpsuits. He is every bit of sixty years old. It’s embarrassing.
“I wish I had some coffee to offer you,” I say. We have no coffeemaker, never mind coffee. “I might run to the store for some. Can I get one for you?”
“That’s all right,” he says. “I appurciate ya.”
I don’t know that I have ever been told that I, myself—and not an act I have performed or a thing I have produced—have been appreciated. But Utahans are appreciators. They live to appreciate people. They absolutely would kill to be able to tell you how much they appreciate you. They appreciate the heck out of ya. It makes me feel a little unclean.
“I’m a milk man myself,” LaEarl says. “The wife says it’s my only failing.”
I do not know what he means. I only pray he is not talking about breast milk.
“Yeah?” I try.
&nbs
p; “Heck, yeah,” he says. “Got a gallon of the whole stuff in the truck. Drank half of it on the way up here. Go through two, sometimes three a day when it’s hot. Nothing like it for the joints, you know. Only downside’s the phlegm. Everything costs something, though, don’t it? Now let’s see about those windows.”
Clearly, there’s nothing for me to add here.
He marches right up to the office window, takes a pass around the painted frame with a utility knife, and zip, it’s open. He does not wait for my applause. He proceeds to open the rest before I can even unfold the little blade on my knife.
There is a metaphor in this, I know, but at the time he could have convinced me that he had super powers because he was from planet Utah and I, a degenerate coffee drinker, was not.
“Order says something about tearing out all the carpet?”
We’re now in the dining room. The room is empty and smells like the garam masala doggie bag I once forgot in the trunk of Jenae’s car for a couple of days.
I have already arranged with the carpet salesman for the installers (I imagined they would have been a team) to remove all the carpet so I wouldn’t have to. I didn’t know the first thing about how it was installed or how it was supposed to be removed or where I could take it if I could get it out of the house. But now I am alone with a sixty-year-old man who is asking me to give him an order, a command—something for him to do.
I want to tell him, Naw, LaEarl, I’ll take care of it myself. I want him to think, This guy here is a good fella. I bet he could do this whole thing by hisself if he just had the right tools.
But I know he is thinking, Please, God, let this gosh-darned gentile (all non-Mormons are gentiles in Utah—even Jews) make up his mind so I can get my job done and go eat a corn dog and slam some more milk.
I tell him he had better go ahead and tear it out.
He takes a small, candy-cane-like pry bar from his rear pocket and with one smooth stoke rips the carpet up from the corner of the dining room and yanks it clear of the wall as though he’s scalping the room.
As he pulls it away, I am amazed—not because there are indeed hardwood floors underneath the carpet, and not because the floors have stains of yellow and orange and brown, in fact all the subtle tonal variations of the urine/feces spectrum—I am amazed because I had never realized what carpet was. Just a topping.
The carpet is tacked with spiked wood strips that run along the walls, and as he yanks it up it sounds as if he is ripping flesh away from muscle. Once he gets hold of enough of it, he grips the corner of the carpet in both hands, squats down facing the wall, and springs up and spins around like a shot-putter, all in one motion. He pulls the corner up and over his head and marches the length of the room, tearing and ripping, dragging the carpet like a huge, stinky train from a most grisly wedding gown.
Before long, yards and yards of toxic carpet and disintegrating padding are draped over the porch railing like the skins of postapocalyptic beasts whose flesh reeks of naphtha and creosote. I wonder if asbestos was ever used in making carpets, because everything stinks now, and the air is chunky with particulate matter. I decide not to ask.
He is working like a machine, conserving energy by maintaining a steady pace. He doesn’t stop or rest at all, and it’s hard for me to know where I should or can be. Then he asks me if I want him to tear up all the tack strips that held the carpet down around the walls.
I wonder if he is going to be like this all day. Do you want me to take a break now? Do you want me to put the seat up before I pee? Do you want me to put the seat back down? It’s kind of hard being an overseer, turns out.
“I mean,” LaEarl says, “you might think about leaving it there. You know, just in case things don’t work out with the hardwoods and all.”
I take what he says into consideration—he means the floor is certainly hardwood but it looks like absolute shit. But the carpet strips have to come up, even if we end up putting new carpet in these rooms. We’ve got to try. Still, I want to save him some work. At the same time, I don’t want to be stuck with some huge project he’ll need to bail me out of by the end of the day.
“Maybe you can just quick show me?” I say. And I notice that I am decidedly afraid of him, so everything I say tends femininely upward, as though I were asking him if my ass looks fat in this dress.
“Sure,” he says. It comes out of his mouth like a curse. He cannot understand how I cannot understand how to pull up a freaking tack strip. In my universe, he would have just asked me where the space bar is and why it doesn’t have a label.
He takes his small pry bar in one hand and slides the blade end under the tack strip and jacks it up in one swift motion. He repeats this five times, once per foot, and in about seven seconds the tack strip is up. Some nails are left behind because the strips had obviously been no stranger to moisture, but he doesn’t fret over these. He flatters me by assuming at least this much inherent mechanical ability on my part.
“Get the picture?” he says.
“Yeah,” I say, thereby acknowledging how ridiculous it was that I had, a moment ago, prevailed on him to give me such a lesson. But of course I don’t have a pry bar and, until only a couple of minutes ago, didn’t know that tack strips existed, never mind that you could reason with them.
He silently walks into the next room to finish tearing out the old carpet.
As I’m debating how I could possibly get the necessary tools, he drags the last of the old carpet onto the porch and I sneak into the living room to see what kind of surprises lay beneath the padding. I’m expecting more stains and bodily fluid Rorschach tests, but what I find is worse than that. It looks as if the floor is made of cardboard. Four-by-six sheets of white cardboard. Everywhere across the surface, the round heads of nails shimmer as though he has dropped a ten-pound bag of dimes.
“Masonite,” LaEarl says. He is standing sympathetically behind me. He wipes his forehead with his hand, then wipes his hand on his groin. “My apologies,” he says.
“What’s Masonite?” I ask. “I’ve never worked with it.”
“That’s about to change right quick, ain’t it,” he says. “It’s thin and strong and cheap—somewhere between fiberglass, cardboard, and linoleum. Once it’s down, tends to stay that way. Great subfloor for carpet. You sure there’s hardwoods underneath?”
I am obviously unsure about a lot at the moment. I ask him if he feels like prying up a bit of Masonite, since my pry bar is on retainer at another job.
He looks at me. He squints.
Once more, with a swift, sure motion, he works the blade of the pry bar under the Masonite and then hits the end of it with his palm, jamming the blade farther beneath. I expect a grand pop and release when he pulls the pry bar up—a hundred nails will fly into the air and a four-by-six-foot section of immaculate maple will be revealed because of the protective Masonite covering! LaEarl will make a couple of calls, and before Jenae gets off work we’ll have the whole blessed Mormon Tabernacle Choir here singing a piercingly beautiful though tediously long song about how God saw our house through the trials of renters and crack cookery but lo! He hath delivered it—and these super-sexy hardwood floors!—from the hands of the wretched into the lap of the worthy!
LaEarl leaves the bar halfway jammed beneath the Masonite, stands up, and grabs the bar with two hands. He looks as if he’s getting ready to lift the house, and I wonder what all the preparation is for. He’s lifting with his back, not with his legs, and I want to tell him that he might strain something, but I’m too late.
He pulls up on the bar and instead of the whole sheet of Masonite coming up—instead of the great maple revelation I was hoping for—the Masonite simply rips around the tool, leaving a scar where the pry bar tore through. I can’t see beneath the surface. LaEarl jams the bar beneath the Masonite again, this time a couple of inches to the right of the last attempt. He pulls up with the same result: a seven-inch tear in the surface. Finally he jams the bar between the two previous tries a
nd manages to pull up enough of the Masonite to reveal what looks more like maple syrup than maple wood. Whereas the dining room just had a bunch of paint and shit stains on it, the living room floor is covered with some kind of thick shellac like that found on tables in northern Wisconsin taverns, or those toilet seats popular in the seventies made of Lucite with collectible coins floating inside.
“That’s hardwood, all right,” LaEarl says. “Wood the hard way might be more like it.”
I nod. He’s very pleased with himself for his partial entendre. I would be too were I not sure I could feel the floor beneath my feet turning into quicksand.
“Gonna be a lot of work for somebody,” he says. He’s smiling now. He knows it’s not going to be him.
As he leaves to drag in the new carpet and padding, I am left alone in the still stifling hot room, which smells mortally bad. Masonite, about two hundred and fifty square feet of it, awaits. Masonite, I think. It sounds like an anagram for Assassinate, which is a thought, or Samsonite, which is luggage, which is what I feel like packing at the moment. Everywhere across the floor shine the heads of nails. A thousand shiny dimes. If only they were as easy to pick up. Think of all the calls for help I could make.
“You be all right for a while, LaEarl?” I ask, unwilling to look him in the face. “I’m going to run,” I say. “Away,” I leave out. I am willing myself—forcing myself—to finish the sentence and the sentiment. “To the store.”
With that I hop on my scooter and set out like a latter-day knight. If Cervantes could see me now, I have no doubt he would favor not Quixote with his ass, but me—a thirty-year-old man driving an orange scooter onto the vast plain of a parking lot of a gargantuan hardware store in order to get tools with which I will wage war on a floor.
