Radio is so much easier than writing: you say things and they go away, and, if not, you deny them. It’s a stream of lack of consciousness, an opportunity for an individual who, under ordinary circumstances would be the last to share, to come forth with the very things he was right not to. It’s ear candy; unlike an infinite number of monkeys, an infinite number of guys on the radio would never write Shakespeare, or even say anything very memorable (Fred Allen, excepted). How many times has someone come up to me and offered “What you said on the air today was really great” (pause). “What was it?” I can never remember either. This and young women coming up to me and telling me their mothers (and, increasingly, their grannies) LOVE me is the thing I hear most often from the public in public radio. The remedy, setting those very same ill-thought out remarks down on paper, requires that they be thought about, and it’s hard maintaining consistent ill-thinking through several re-writes of what was essentially an off-the-cuff crack of no great import, anyway. But, anyway, I’ve tried, and here they are in “Something I Said?” Buy me a beer sometime and I’ll slur a few of the very similar, if not identical, points of view. I hope your grannie LOVES this.

A House of a Guy’s Own

Fall is coming to A House of a Guy’s Own, time to think about raising the wheels on the mower to attempt one last pass through the thatch, maybe doing something with the flowers—but what? They seem to grow back, regardless, so they must be perennials. The natural yard needs a woman’s touch, but then, if it had it, this wouldn’t be A House of A Guy’s Own. Ted Kaczynski was wrong about a lot of things, but not about having his own place. Something there is in a man that longs for the time when he could hear himself think, and she couldn’t. When he could say to himself, “Let me buy you a cup of coffee, Mike,” pull a can of corn with a spoon already in it out of the refrigerator for lunch, play Steely Dan indiscriminately, and maintain a filthy toilet without anybody being appalled. A place where, by virtue of there being no roost, he ruled.

For a while I had seen it as a trailer in the back yard behind the basketball hoop, attached to the house by the merest wisp of a phone line, or maybe not. But the gravitational pull of the mother ship would soon pull it into lower and lower orbit until it would be captured and re-fitted as a play house. The same held true for the much to be dreaded addition where, after having your life torn open and exposed to carpenters and the elements for six months to two years, you end up still well within earshot of “Oops, I Did It Again” and they have but to fling open a door to wail “Mom won’t let me have a (bag of) caramel(s)!”

Then, three falls ago, alarmingly (and, I thought, fatally) ill with an undiagnosed something causing shooting pains where the heart is generally thought to be, I had just returned from a second fruitless trip to ER when I noticed, on the floor next to me, an info sheet on a little house for sale a few blocks away that my wife had brought home to show a friend. In my delusional state (and thinking it was another house entirely) I bid on it. When I came to, I was the owner of a hundred year old farmhouse/student slum, just out of reach of the children’s current bicycle range (although I may have to move soon). Once we closed, it was furnished within a matter of hours with all the things from former lifetimes which my wife would not have in the house: likenesses of me, my mother’s lamps and tables, the secretary from my childhood bedroom, Arthur’s bookcase, Uncle Max’s Flower pot, the samovar and candlesticks Dad got from the scrap metal people in lieu of payment, and even my old bachelor bed with the notches on the headboard, looking just like it did before it turned on me.

Since then, life has been good in the House of a Guy’s Own despite little things, like snakes and vermin; no big deal, my firstborn is thriving, so it must not be Biblical. The plagues were not from a defiance of Jehovah (although, Lord knows, I try) as from the fact that the HOGO could also be known as the Little House on the Landfill, sitting as it does at the foot of the sloping backyards of an upper crust of older houses whose owners never envisioned a human habitat springing up on their refuse or they might’ve thrown out a better class of garbage over the years. The landfill of a hundred years ago has grandfathered-in field mice which get cold in the winter and garter snakes which get hot in the summer and naturally want to come inside: for them this is a House of a Varmint’s Own. Having escaped the scurrying of family members, I don’t much cotton to (we’re folksy here at the HOGO) watching rodents scoot past when I should be lost in reverie, or take any pleasure in prying their crushed bodies out of the traps or in grabbing one half of a snake while the other half squirms back behind the kickboard in the kitchen. The ones captured intact get to try out life on top of the hill, something they could only dream of before Mike Feldman. A nice feral tomcat on patrol would be ideal, but let in just one living thing and it opens the floodgates; besides cats are higher maintenance than mice, which at least know how to make do on their own.

The House of a Guy’s Own provides refuge for other guys who don’t have a house of their own, at least one free from beds they have made, and should really be tax deductible on that basis. Here guys can open up and say nothing at all. I get meter readers with a lot going on in their lives coming by, and plumbers who run deep if you give them a chance. In fact, it’s getting so busy, I may need another place to go to. Now and then I confess to wanting to relocate lock, stock and barrel to a House of a Guy’s Own, and, once or twice I even moved in a few pairs of pants. On one occasion, after thinking I had, in fact, vacated my family home, I waited around here for hours, and, when no one seemed to notice, I went home. Well, I was hungry--I keep limited food stocks (mostly gift packages, very seasonal) at a HOGO, and there’s no cable or VCR so I won’t so comfortable I’ll forget the obligations due three females, a dog, two gerbils and a pair of Madagascar walking sticks. Should one move in, there (the middle-aged) one would be, living in the student pad of one’s dreams conveniently located on the edge of pathos. Living with your childhood furniture after fifty is not a good sign, and, in fact, not very good furniture (they call it depression for a reason); anyway, I was never good at living alone full time, tending, as I do, to face my mortality in lieu of light housework. Besides, if I lived here, where would I go?

A House of a Guy’s own doesn’t work for everyone; inspired by my example, a friend got a house of his own; while he was in it his wife left him, leaving him with a house of a guy’s own on his hands, and in a bad market. She, meanwhile, got a ranch house and a boyfriend of her own. Having a HOGO depends on having a stable household you’re fleeing from, but not to the point of abandon. It can be pricey, but a House of a Guy’s Own makes a great midlife present to yourself which turns out to be affordable when you consider what they’re getting for a Winnebago or a Crestliner with a big Merc on the back, and with tax advantages not found in most midlife crises. A cabin up north might work, but a cabin in the city is a /pied-a-terre/, and, as the French say, you can’t beat that.

So, every morning, after making lunches for the girls and feeding Sugar, I drive the five blocks, put on a pot of coffee, read the Times, and do what a guy’s gotta do, or not. Afterwards, I go home.

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