Most Exclusive Residence for Sale

by Jim Washburn

Torquemada

While driving around looking for a home the other day, I saw a bumper sticker on a car. Positioned next to a fading Bush-Cheney sticker, it read: You can’t be both Pro-Catholic and Pro-Abortion! There’s a logic at work there, but I think it’s the same logic that would support this bumper sticker as well: You can’t be Pro-Catholic and Anti-Inquisition! I mean, just how fallible does an institution have to be before its vaunted infallibility flies up the chimney?

It’s been a fun week, with Obama challenged by Catholics at Notre Dame on the issue of abortion, and by that modern Torquemada Dick Cheney in a televised speech on how “enhanced interrogation” is as American as blackbird pie. Love that word, enhanced. It makes it sound like the wall prisoners are getting their heads slammed against has a nice flatscreen HDTV on it.

This also was the week when it was reported in GQ that Donald Rumsfeld’s office dolled up the cover sheets of briefings sent to President Bush with photos of tanks paired with vengeful Old Testament Bible verses. Everyone loves a Crusade!

On the local front, our house hunt goes on. We haven’t entirely despaired of buying a home, but with our stunted freelance incomes, we’re having to come to grips with the reality that possibly all we can afford is a pup tent behind a crack house.

Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates

We’re learning things, though. For one thing: Real estate agents are like gods. You know those lock-boxes you see on houses for sale, which hold the keys to get inside? I assumed only one realtor or his/her office had access to it. Nope: every realtor has a magic electric key that’ll open the box. Though I’m sure most agents are sober, decorous people, what a fabulous opportunity for abuse. You could host a floating rave! You could bang hookers in a different house every night, and just leave them there when you’re done. Everyone wants to buy a house with a hooker in it!

With some houses, it’s really hard to tell if there are people living in them. Some are left sparsely furnished to make them look more appealing to buyers. Some have eviction notices on the doors and piles and smears of stuff left behind by the evictees. Some have Norman Bates in them.

The listings friends send us often look great on paper, such as one that seemed like a virtual estate, on a grand ¼ acre with three garages. In person, it was mainly a cracked asphalt driveway, three sagging garages, piles of hobo trash, and a small house with broken windows and gang graffiti painted large enough to be read from space, hemmed in by a Ford dealership and two-story apartments.

We spent an afternoon going through houses with a very kind and helpful realtor. One place seemed insanely good: huge, with five bedrooms, four fireplaces, with all sorts of cool build-ins, for $560,000. Another was a modest three-bedroom, with stains everywhere, a seriously buckling wood floor and a parched yard, for $675,000. One was an early 20th Century grandmother house, of white wood slats only held together by about 20 coats of paint, selling for $1.2 million as a tear-down for the large lot behind it.

Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast

We followed  open house signs to a place that looked vaguely familiar. We weren’t in the house long before realizing, “Hey, this is our friend Marete’s home!” She’s renting, and the house is being sold out from under her by the owner. So we’re not buying that one, either.

Not that we could anyway. Great credit and modest income don’t count for much. And we’re not the only ones without much money. A friend hipped us to a program some cities have to help people in just our position to afford homes, which is better from a city’s point of view than having blocks of derelict, untended properties.

If your city has such a program, I recommend reading its last paragraph first, to save yourself from unwarranted elation. As we read through Costa Mesa’s program, it seemed like a dream come true: We fit the profile, as did the price range of houses the program was willing to fit you with; in some instances, we could have only paid 3% down. All wonderful stuff, ’til that last paragraph, which said the funding had run out for the program this year, and they weren’t expecting any for next year.

I expect to soon be brimming with info and advice on renting a home. Here’s one nugget I just learned, when you’re on the phone with a potential landlady, discussing the always iffy subject of pets, it is probably best to have your pet in another zip code during the chat. There I was assuring the woman—who lives adjacent to the house for rent—that our dog is a peaceful, docile sweetheart, which she is, when our peaceful, docile Nikita decided to spell out the exception to that rule, which is whenever a mailman, truck, car, dog, child, baby stroller, or dust particle passes within 30 yards of our house, in which event she does a spot-on impression of Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast.

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