Can’t I Just Shutup and Move Like Everybody Else? Evidently Not

by Jim Washburn

Have you ever been swimming a ways out in the ocean, and no matter how hard you pull for shore you’re sucked even farther out by the tow of a wave that’s forming; and it’s huge and cresting and coming right down on you, and you dive knowing it’s going to pound you regardless?

Here we are in our new yard.

No reason. I’m just wondering.

As regular readers know (Hi, Mom), we’re moving in August. I’d wanted to get a lot of stuff organized, and to have sold off a lot of things before the move. I’d intended to pare my workload back to allow this.

The economy had been most obliging in that regard, but then the phone started ringing with one project after another, each meaning a challenge and money, at least one of which we could sure use right now. So organization has fallen by the wayside, and when we move, chaos will be my co-pilot.

Boo hoo. There are people having to walk away from their life-long homes, or from ones they’d sunk their life savings into; people moving into their parents’ basement or some plastic-smelling tent in a dry dump of a field; people cramming their lives into a U-Haul and hauling ass for parts unknown, like the pioneers in reverse, crossing the plains to some burnt out husk of an old American town where their savings won’t run out as quickly as in the Gold Rush State.

We've rarely been happier.

Us, we’re just moving a mile closer to the beach, to a splendid place with wooden floors, a fireplace and a swell yard. But it may be a good while before it feels like home. I’ve been entrenched in this house for 32 years, my wife for nine. (I’m sorry, does that read like I just said I’ve been entrenched in my wife for nine years? I should be so lucky.) I can navigate the house in the dark and can field-strip the wall heater blindfolded, not that I like to share my kinks.

There are a lot of memories planted here, years of band rehearsals, nearly seven million words written—many of them the—so many barbecues and dinners. The last time I played music with my so gone friend Chris Gaffney was under the olive tree in the back yard.

There’s a cat roaming the neighborhood we’d pretty much adopted, as much as one can with a cattle dog in the house. Every night, Ulysses S. Cat scratches at the kitchen window screen from his planter box workstation. He’s got a water dish there and I bring him his preferred mix of wet and dry food. Then at 5:30 in the morning, he’s at the door, waiting for his time-share here before the dog wakes. He’ll settle in my lap and watch with a critical eye as I write. I jkustused hiss pawwsto qwrite tris senmten ce.

Drop on by! We're just hanging around.

Then I walked his food bowl and him to my neighbor’s porch across the street. It’s in our new lease that we can’t have a cat—the owner has allergy problems. My neighbor is kindly willing to take him in, and this is the start of the transplant process. I felt like I’d dropped him off at his first day of school. When I looked back from my door, he was staring across the street at me, going “What’s with this?”

It’s hard saying goodbye, and it won’t be a breeze saying hello at the new house. Yes, we’re only moving a mile, but did you know that books and records are heavier than everything else on the planet combined? Individually books aren’t so heavy, but boxed their gravities combine into a superdense mass, like a Chunky bar in the heart of a dark star. And books by Jung weigh even more.

Our new house is $1,000 a month more than we’ve been paying and, this month aside, we’re not in a “here’s an extra twelve grand a year for a job well done” economy. Our outgoing landlady had kept our rent below the norm, though it was somewhat on a par with the minimal maintenance done here. I recently had a not altogether pleasant conversation with her. She called to tell me that, if I hadn’t already paid my last month’s rent of $1,800, to remember I had paid $400 last month’s rent in 1977 that I could deduct from that total.

At what other museum could you see this
and Porter Wagoner albums under the same roof?

She probably meant well, but I was incredulous: “I don’t think so. I paid you full value for a full month’s rent back then, and by any fair measure I should be due a full month’s rent now.”

“You don’t understand. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Why should it not? You had my money all these years—if you’d invested it in practically anything it would be worth more than the rent is now—while I’ve had neither the benefit of that money nor the rent I’d paid for with it. Surely you can’t be saying $400 1977 dollars only equal $400 in 2009 dollars?”

“That’s not how it works.”

I ended by suggesting she consult with whomever she does, and I’d speak to a lawyer friend or two so we might reconvene with a more informed perspective.

What George Bush pictured when he
thought about uranium from Africa.

With all the renters in California, you’d think there would be a clear set of laws dealing with such issues. From those I asked and what I found online, it’s a little murky and the laws have changed over the years. At one point, before landowners’ lobbyists prevailed in Sacramento, renters were successfully suing landlords for the interest earned on the deposits they’d left with them. From the decisions I could find regarding last month’s rent situations, the wording of your rental agreement or lease is crucial. If it reads “$400 for last month’s rent” or similar, it is what it says it is: you have paid your last month’s rent, and it is due to you in full. That’s just what our never-updated 1977 rent agreement states, which is really how it should always be.

The route landlords take around that now is to have the agreement read “$(your money here) security for last month’s rent” or they simply make the security deposit high enough to include the cost of last month’s rent, but never spell it out as such. In this manner, you haven’t given them money for rent; you’ve just given it to show your good faith, so that they might feel secure should you skip town or crash your helicopter into the roof. That way, if your rent more than quadruples over the years, as ours did, you would be stuck for the difference, even if the value of the money you had initially given them had quintupled.

I don’t know if my landlady learned the same from her sources, but she called back a while later to say that in light of my long, trouble-free tenancy, that she’d decided to let things be equal. And I said thanks.

 One of the things I’ve been working on is an exhibit of the worst album covers of all time (not that they had many album covers back in the Bronze Age), and, if I might self-promote for a moment, it’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Whether you like kitsch, graphic hucksterism, cultural insensitivity, smut, disembodied heads or visual puns, there’s no better place to be than the Fullerton Museum Center Saturday, August 1, when the exhibit opens with all the attendant white horses, golden carriages, and red carpets that I deserve.

I’ll give a curator’s address, which the experience of past exhibits has taught me should be no longer than four minutes—the museum hall has more echo than any five Mexican radio stations. Outside, Jann Browne is performing! I couldn’t be more delighted. We in this county don’t know how good we had it back in the days when Jann and her band were performing here regularly. She’s country and mighty good. The opening is from 6 pm to 9 pm, and Jann’s playing without a break if I have my say. Come have a beer with the good people of Fullerton. It costs $8 to get in (or free if buy a museum membership.) And tell me that I sent you.

The Fullerton Museum Center is at 301 N. Pomona Avenue, Fullerton. 714-738-6545.

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