mansion - Surviving Life After College

The Tending to and Uprooting of Sumacs

July 28, 2013 by Josephine Journeyman Leave a Comment

There is an old Chinese proverb that says, “If you plant a sumac, you better like sumacs, because in ten minutes you’ll have fifty more.” Or something to that effect. This week at the Acrapolis, I approached the sumac invasion eagerly, at first. It was a change, a chance to avoid painting or planting and it was a project that would last a few days, so I wouldn’t feel as though I would have to ask all the time what I should be working on. After the first day and a half, though, the project grew old. By the end of the week, I decided I would never plant a sumac, unless my life depended on it.

One of the reasons I enjoyed working at the mansion at first was that it gave me a feeling of accomplishment. My job right before the mansion was a position as a desk clerk at Econo Lodge. It’s no understatement when I say there wasn’t enough to keep me busy for two hours in an average eight hour shift there. Working at the mansion gave me concrete tasks to finish, and sometimes I had sore muscles to prove that I worked hard, too. There is still an element to that, but I also find myself running out of topics for thought during the long hours of tasks such as taking out hundreds of sumac plants.

Around 9:45 the second day of hacking at sumacs and digging up their roots, I heard what at first sounded like a car in the distance braking too fast, squeaking on the asphalt. Then I quickly realized that it was in fact the sound of the family opera singer practicing in the mansion. She was good, but very loud. Distractions like that can get you pretty far when the only other things are your sore shoulders and the shovel or mattock your arms mechanically wield.

While my mind ran through various topics this week— what would I do if I could play the guitar like Joe Walsh? how many hours would I be working this week? what would it be like to be the stripper I was reading about in Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper? isn’t foreshadowing overused in stories?— I remembered a dream I had last year in the spring. At the time, I was still packing up all the things in the house. I had moved into the basement, and was packing hundreds of boxes of books and papers. In my dream, I was Harry Potter. Presumptuous I know, but it was just a dream. I had been demoted from the increased status I had earned from saving everyone and just generally being Harry Potter. Everyone else had gone off to bigger and better things, but I had become more like Filch, forgotten and looked down on. I didn’t have any magic anymore. I just went to work every day and packed up box after box of clothes. It was miserable. At the end of the dream, I had to leave work to go to school, and on my way I realized I was still in my work clothes, and my jeans had a rip in the bottom. I had no time to take a detour and stop somewhere to change, and I couldn’t go to school looking like that, so I looked both ways on the street and pulled down my jeans to change. Right then, a police car turned onto the street. The cop noticed me right away, and put on the lights and came over to arrest me. As you can see, the vast amount of stuff I had to pack was getting to me, along with a few other things. The sense of doom I felt, and the exaggeration of the amount of clothes I would have to pack in the dream, mirrored the reality of my day job. I felt like I might never finish packing up everything.

Physical labor has its benefits (a common comment upon hearing what I do for a living is, “At least you get a workout in at work.”), but it also leaves your mind with hours to wander. I spent a good amount of time this past week listening to music on my phone. I sing along part of the time, or find myself wondering things like, “Why crimson and clover?” That, in fact, was such a pressing question that I looked it up. According to Tommy James, he just woke up with the two words in his head. They were supposedly two of his favorite words. Once the question was answered, I went on to listen to “I Think We’re Alone Now.” I have also spent entire hours making up hypothetical situations and acting them out in my head, complete with dialogue and facial expressions.

Thankfully, on Thursday afternoon I finally reached the end of the sumacs. I dug out as many roots as I could, without completely uprooting all the soil for yards. It couldn’t have ended too soon; by Wednesday I had decided that digging up sumacs could be a form of torture. Particularly for a gardener. One could send him out into an infested area to do his best, but maybe stop him just short of finishing the job. Then put him in a room with a view of the grounds, so he is tortured by watching them all grow back. Intermittently send him back out to try his hardest, ultimately failing. Through rain and shine, quite literally, I had done my hardest to show those sumacs their place. Working at the mansion can often start to resemble a unique form of solitary confinement, and it is only once a project is finished that you can regain your sanity and put it aside.

Everyday Heroes Sand Drywall Too

July 21, 2013 by Josephine Journeyman 2 Comments

At the end of Mystery Men, when the team of ragtag superheroes has saved the day, they get interviewed by the newscast and say this:

“‘Excuse me, could I say something? I think we would all like this victory to go out to all the other guys, and I’m talking about the people in this city who are super good at their jobs but never get any credit. Like the lady in the DMV – that’s a rough job.’

‘To the people that remember jingles from tons of old commercials.’

‘And uh, uh, people that support local music and seek out independent film.’

‘And the guy that drives the snow-plow. And the school nurse, that’s a…’

‘Eddie, Eddie, I think they got the point.'”

While it’s memorable for being funny, this quote stayed with me for a different reason after having watched the movie for the first time a few weeks ago. It made me feel vindicated and sufficiently thanked for my work at the mansion.

This past week, I spent a lot of time in the three by two foot floor space of the entry way to one of the apartments in the mansion. I sanded drywall compound, primed the walls and ceiling, and painted. During that time, I probably listened to “Crimson and Clover” at least fifteen times and sang along to all kinds of songs from the 1960s. So it wasn’t all bad by any means. The only difficult part was not being able to find anything in the garage, so I used a worn down sanding block and didn’t have safety glasses.

During one of the days, the youngest son of the house owner began a conversation with me about college extracurricular activities. At the age of 17 or 18, he is the black sheep of the family, in part because he is attending college late. On the bright side, he was just accepted to be a part of a national debate team. He asked me what extracurricular activities I had done, and I told him I was in choir, took voice lessons, and once put together a basketball team, primarily made of people who hadn’t really played the sport before.

It was at this point in the conversation that he said something very telling: “And you went to Metro State, right? And majored in library sciences?”

I’m sure Metropolitan State is a great school, and I have heard some good things about it. But in point of fact I went to Colorado College. It isn’t a state school, and the tuition proves it. Even though a lot of people from Colorado haven’t even heard of it, and some people ask if CC stands for community college, Colorado College is in fact a renowned liberal arts school. I also studied not library sciences, but English. When I said these things, he suddenly became more interested in me, and his esteem for me visibly increased.

I like working with my hands at the mansion, being able to see the effects of my work. Even so, there are times that I’d like to be able to quote Mystery Men to the homeowners. Or even say something as silly as, “Lucille, God gave me a gift. I shovel well. I shovel very well,” like the Shoveler says to his wife. I’d like credit for supporting local music, or picking up the dog poop in the basement of the mansion, or doing a bang up job at drywall sanding. Where we went to college shouldn’t be important in deciding what we think of a person, nor should we be able to treat people any worse for whatever job they might have. I work hard, and yes, I’m pretty good with a shovel.

Frau Blucher Comes To the Acrapolis

July 20, 2013 by Josephine Journeyman Leave a Comment

For those of you who have seen Young Frankenstein, the name Frau Blucher will bring to mind Cloris Leachman at her oddest and eeriest. She plays the housekeeper and former girlfriend of Doctor Victor Frankenstein. Her hair is done up in a strict bun, and her clothes are old-fashioned, even though the movie takes place during the twentieth century. Every time her name is said, the horses neigh, and she has an unsettling presence. Keep this in mind when I tell you that I met the real-world version of Frau Blucher while working at the Acrapolis one day.

It was a sunny day in the summer of 2012 when Frau Blucher came to visit. Patrick, my coworker, and I were upstairs in one of the apartments in the mansion. I was outside on the roof sanding the exterior of the windowpanes, when I heard what I thought might have been a knock. I turned off the sander and stood for a moment, waiting to hear something. I decided I had just heard Patrick moving in the apartment and went back to sanding. Suddenly, Frau Blucher was knocking on the window in front of me. It scared me half to death.

Frau Blucher was dressed in a bright blue shirt and denim capris. She had on a turquoise necklace and her eyes were a striking, startling blue. She carried in each arm a miniature dachshund, to which she occasionally addressed herself. Her hair was the color of gray which I had always presumed Frau Blucher’s was. This woman introduced herself and began to explain how she had ended up inside, on the second floor of a strange house: “I knocked on the door and no one answered, but it was unlocked so I let myself in to see if anyone was around.”

Over the course of the next ten minutes or so, she explained to me her connection to the house, or lack thereof. “I saw this house first a few years ago when I was taking my dogs for a walk, and I went back to look for it, but I could never find it until today. When I saw it, I wanted to come talk to the owners. You really need a caretaker here.” In spite of her apparent attraction to the house’s exterior, it seemed clear that she saw it as a rundown place and wanted to let us know that it obviously was in need of more care. She also explained that she wasn’t from around here. In fact, she was just visiting from Wyoming. When she found out that our boss wasn’t there, she asked for his contact information and Patrick took her over to talk to him. As I recall, by far the most memorable part of the experience was that someone would feel comfortable walking into a stranger’s house, and bring her dogs with her. Her appearance and the eeriness of the encounter were so like what I imagine meeting Frau Blucher would be.

After talking to our boss for half an hour or so, Frau Blucher left. I haven’t seen her since, so maybe she lost the mansion again, or found the duties of a caretaker at the Acrapolis too daunting to face. The mansion attracts an interesting sort of person. People come to the house looking for work or a place to live, and stay to chat. Of all the people I’ve met there, though, Frau Blucher was the most peculiar. Cloris Leachman will forever seem like a personal acquaintance to me.

Welcome To the Acrapolis

June 23, 2013 by Josephine Journeyman Leave a Comment

I like telling people that I help remodel a mansion. Then I can laugh when they say, “Wow, that sounds so cool! It must be really nice.” It has been an educational job, and it pays the bills while keeping me supplied with crazy stories. On the other hand, it often gets into the realm of palm-to-the-forehead frustration. One thing I realized after six or so months of working at the “Acrapolis”, as it has been dubbed by a fellow worker, was that I can tell a story about working there, and it will seem strange, but the entire concept of its strangeness only becomes clear after months of experiencing it.

I got the job through a family member, and it seemed perfect kismet that he should call to tell me the job might be a possibility on the very day I had resolved to go to Econo Lodge for work and give my two weeks notice. He told me I would be responsible for packing up all the things in the rooms we would remodel and labeling them accordingly. During the phone call, he told me that some of the rooms were full of stuff, and it included interesting gifts from ambassadors and other unique acquisitions from a life in politics. I still remember picturing rooms filled with unique and interesting things that had been left in cobwebs and dust for years. Little did I know what a full room actually looked like.

I began a few weeks into January 2012, and spent the first eight months probably packing box after box of clothes, broken glass that was being saved for art projects, drawers full of gum wrappers, dirty socks, over 150 boxes of books, paperwork, and the kind of refuse that exists in rooms children leave behind when they go off to college. There would be the occasional model boat that was a gift from an ambassador, or the 150 year old straw art piece from China, but the vast majority of things I packed up were evidence of a life of not wanting to get rid of anything. Things were kept because of an idea that children would come home from college and live in the mansion again, or because they had the handwriting of a dead relative on them (not journals or school work, but tax receipts).

Imagine while you spend months packing all these things, working around such normal conditions as dog puddles or presents on the floor, a dog with a name that suggested it would be nice, but is actually wont to bite for no apparent reason, and so forth. One of the jokes was that we needed to pack and label a box full of the dog crap that we regularly swept up in the basement.

My purpose here is to give a starting point for imagining life in this mansion. It’s a rough sketch, but I think it may help in understanding the realities of working in a mansion full of eccentric people. One story I like to tell involves a day where we were moving boxes from one room to another, in order to start remodeling a former dentist’s office to be an efficiency apartment. The boxes we were moving had been packed years ago and put in the walk-in closet. I picked up a box full of old papers and a candle and started carrying it into the storage room. It was dark in the basement room we had to go through, because the electrician had already taken out the wiring overhead. As I walked, things started to fall off the bottom of the box. It was an old box, so I assumed things were falling out of the bottom because it was falling apart or had a hole. Things kept falling, so I put down the box and went to pick up the contents and mention it to my coworker. Possibly I thought I would complain about some part of not having light, or about how we had had to move most of the things in the room twice already. I went in the room, though, to see my uncle noticing that the wooden crate of Ritz crackers that had been under my box had something on it. We thought at first the wood was rotting, but looking closer we saw what we thought were maggots. Both of us were disgusted and decided we should go tell our boss about the situation before we moved anything else. He went into the room, joking about how we couldn’t handle a few maggots, looked at the bugs, and walked out with a different look on his face, saying, “Ok, just leave everything there for now, we’re going to have to deal with this situation.” We were confused and asked why he had gotten so serious all of a sudden, and he said, “You know those aren’t maggots, right? They’re termites.” What had been falling off the bottom of the box I was carrying was a trail of termite larvae, not things from inside the box. It was the first time I had ever seen termites, and thank goodness it was the only time I was there that I had to see them. What followed was a trip from the exterminator, and the realization that the floor in that room had been built right on the damp ground, which meant that a hoard of termites was under and in the subfloor. The last hurrah the termites had was when a box that had been taken to the storage unit came back and a swarm of termites flew all over one of the bedrooms.

Working at the mansion has made me want to get rid of all my stuff and live in a very small house, that I can’t fill as full with junk. Odd things always come up, and while it can be humorous or hair-raising, I sometimes feel as though it’s another world, which you have to see and experience daily to understand how strange it is. If anything, a great deal of this blog could be considered an expose on why working in a mansion isn’t as fun as it sounds.