This February, in a push to finish my book, I’ve inhabited a room near Aspen, Colorado. My friends, Deric and Audrey, and their Bernese Mountain Dog, Sierra, have been kind enough to welcome me into their home for the month. By almost any standards, that’s a long time to impose on a young married couple, but they are gone most of the day. If they aren’t at work they're downward dogging or taking notes at a think tank seminar about flu pandemics or global warming. I have eight or twelve hours to myself everyday, and a bedroom to call my own. It’s a nearly perfect arrangement.
Two years ago, we were neighbors in Venice Beach. We lived on a block of bungalows and had private backyards that drained into a common backyard. I breached the borders nightly and slid in the backdoor as the scent of lentil soup or veggie chili wafted my way. I crashed their dinners as often as I was around, which would have been fine except when clean up came I’d always receive an important “work call” and retreat to my bungalow. They called me Kramer.
Luckily, I won a few points back with all the love and attention, walks and hikes that I gave their dog while they were at work. Of course, I used Sierra. The black and brown beauty was like chick bait on a leash. I’d parade her around the Venice Beach boardwalk like a proud dog owner and when the beach bunnies inevitably inquired about her breed, I’d unwittingly tell them that she was a Bernese Mountain Lion. My connection with their dog is probably why we stayed so close long after our paths diverged.
I moved to the NorCal Redwoods for solitude and a certain Ms. Brilliant and they moved to Colorado for work and snowboarding, and things like compost consciousness and sociological seminars. Last winter when I visited them for a long weekend, I half-joked about wanting to spend an entire month here. I wanted to write and write and read and write and snowboard when it snowed, and they said “Sure!”
They probably didn’t think I’d take them up on the offer. After all, at our stage in life, most people have sedentary careers without the flexibility to dart from this place or that like an electron. But with the help of the Internet and a cell phone, I eat off my laptop (a detail that compromises approximately 96% of why I wanted to be a “freelance writer” in the first place). Oddly, I’ve been creatively stifled in my cabin and needed to get away from my getaway, so I called them. “Make the bed! I’m coming to Aspen for February!”
“Oh… That’s great,” Audrey said. Clearing her throat, “Did you say the whole month?” Her voice trailed off as she calculated the days, surely praying this wasn’t a leap year. Vaguely satisfied that I was welcome, I subletted my cabin on Craig’s List and headed for the CO.
Never before have I been so hyperaware of my footprint on a living space. Partly because I’ve been terribly productive here and I don’t want them to shoo me away. Partly because they’ve seen the Encino me. Needless to say, I’ve been under intense scrutiny from Audrey’s leery eye. Every time I wipe the dinner table down, I can feel the gravity of her expectance of falling crumbs.
Luckily, for the past two years my girlfriend has been “training” me, as she likes to call it. Naomi is a few years older, a winery owner, a MILF, a cynic, and so, so much more mature. From the get-go I’ve known that I needed to ripen into an adult lickity split. As a result I’ve evolved eons in a short period of time. I no longer place my sneakers on the couch or spit out my toenails on the carpet.
While I have clearly made strides since Kramer left Venice, by no means am I batting a thousand in Colorado. We share different philosophies. Apparently, in their cosmology, dipping your tortilla chip directly in the jar of salsa is a no-no. Fingers in the peanut butter? Flagrant foul.
Picky fucks.
Of course, they have their own share of stuff that annoys me too, mind you. For one, their refrigerator is packed with yogurt and cottage cheese and other sorts of random containers that moonlight on the Tupperware circuit. You never know if you are getting organic sour cream or leftover brussel sprouts. But perhaps most egregiously, they are dirty rotten Scrabble players. Maybe you know the type, the cheapskates who turn two letters like ‘JO’ or ‘XI,’ into sixty-three-point bonanzas. Who even knew they were words?
Cheapskates, that’s who.
Despite our differences we’ve found a relatively easy harmony. Up until this morning that is when Audrey shrieked and screamed my name from the bathroom in bloody horror as if her fingers were caught in a meat grinder. I ran in to discover her pointing to the toilet bowl. Don’t you flush? she wanted to know. Yes, of course I flush, I told her. That time I even flushed twice.
“It’s just a little feedback,” I said.
A little?!!!
OK, a lot. I’m sorry, that will never happen again, I assured her. Damned straight she said, not in her bathroom anyway. And just like that there was a new rule against me using the upstairs bathroom. New house rules are never a good sign.
I fear I’ve overstayed my welcome. In fact, I think I have irrefutable evidence. Just a few moments ago I was carving turns behind them at the top of Snowmass Mountain when they raced ahead too far for me to follow. I must have made a wrong turn and now I’ve run out of intermediate trail and am staring down the barrel of a Double Black Diamond aptly named, Hanging Cliff Wall. At the bottom of lies a smattering of trees that poke out of the tundra like a bed of rusty nails. I’m literally paralyzed with fear, perched on the precipice of death with no way out except down or up, up, up and away in a rescue chopper, please!
Deric calls. He wants to know where I am.
Where am I? Where am I!?!
“!#&@! you, and !#&@ your mother in the @&&, too!”
Calm down, he tells me. You’re telling me to calm down?!? I’m so afraid to move an inch in any direction that I’m ready to blow chunks. If I slip, which by the way is a very high fucking probability since there’s no fucking nothing whatsoever to hold onto, an open casket seems unlikely.
Stop whining, he says, and slowly traverse back and forth with your heels against the mountain. “It’s not that scary.” Yeah, maybe not for expert snowboarders like yourselves, but I’m clearly an INTERMEDIATE, so unless you’ve got ropes and a harness so I can rappel down this hanging death wall, or Superman on the way, I’m not moving.
Click.
I’m alone up here for close to an hour screening out his incessant calls and wondering how long he’s been cooking up this plan. I keep coming back to earlier this morning and Audrey’s shriek and scream and the stray poop dissolving in their toilet. I can’t help but think this is Deric’s not-so-passive-aggressive revenge. Regardless, I’m getting cold and need to consider moving in some direction.
I gaze across the long Rocky horizon and ruminate about the lives of brave men like Lewis & Clark. This does nothing to summons my nerve, of course, but I rise to my feet nonetheless and begin my slow, but steady descent down the river Styx.
posted by Scott Keneally @ 12:56 PM
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