Krishna asks me to bring him lemons from my tree. That is not metaphor or a Hindu parable, it's a guy down the street who wants in on my citrus stash. He flagged me down on my morning walk, wearing one of those fluorescent vests like a lineman for the DWP, though I'm pretty sure he's unemployed.
Krishna was the first person Louisa took me to meet on my welcome tour, introducing him as if he were some sort of OG ambassador or de facto neighborhood mayor. I’ve been living here four years now but he’s not nearly as fond of me as he was of her. Then again, I'm not an Italian woman with an Australian accent and breasts so full they alter your orbit with their gravitational pull.
What he actually said was, "Do you mind if I come by and pull a few lemons off your tree?" Pull on my tree? You’re going to molest my precious little daughter of a lemon tree? I love those lemons. I confit with those lemons. I caress and candy their precious peels, and concoct with their precious juice, and you’re just going to come and “pull?” Trespass not, oh Lord Krishna, or meet Shiva Swerdlow’s wrath!
In the name of neighborhood solidarity, I smiled and said, "I'll bring you some," though inside I was thinking, keep your hands off my lemons, bub. (Reading that back I realize I'm a citrus Grinch and need to grab ten lemons and put them by his front door immediately.)
I never thought I'd be a homeowner. I had a great rent control place on Gower; a 1930s one bedroom with high ceilings and a formal dining room. The bathroom was a green tile dream, a perfect place to bathe and shit until the grave came calling. But best of all was the shockingly reasonable rent. It was a prophylactic against financial uncertainty and whenever I needed a pick-me-up I would do the math in my head, giddy at what it would cost in 2038, taking into account the allowable yearly increase ($2650).
Then one day I get a call from Karen, my ex-ish wife. She's a real estate watcher, craftsman homes a specialty. There's a house a little south of hers and I should go take a look. "I'm not buying any houses" I tell her but looking can't hurt, so off I go to take a gander.
I drive by and I like it. I stop the car, get out, stand on the sidewalk in front and like it even more. I feel a soul yes, something affirmative in the cells. A woman comes out on the porch (Louisa) and waves to me. "Just looking at your house" I call out." Would you like to come in?” I go and grab a mask out of the car— It’s April 2020 and the pandemic has just kicked in in earnest.
I stroll through the house and “yes” becomes “holy shit.” The original 1908 wood is warm but un-fussy, the floor plan, open, the wainscotting in the dining room just funky enough for my way funky ass. I could live here and be me. Maybe even more me. Maybe even a better me!
Louisa and I take to each other. I don’t look away from her Kabbalah blue eyes, and her Aussie accent hits my ear right. We connect deeply and directly. It's not sweep the dishes off with a crash and fuck on the dining room table but more like two runners on the same cosmic relay team getting ready to pass a meaningful baton.
But hold on. I got to be careful. I'm an excitable type, a #7 on the Myers-Briggs personality test, which means enthusiast. Breathe Swerdlow, this is a big life decision, don’t be impulsive. But then again, you have good instincts, you need to trust them, and most importantly call Karen, she’s the family czar on all matters real estate.
The next day Karen and I go see the house together. I’m curious to see what she thinks, and to find out if this is just a bit of fantasy (forty-eight hours of me playing house in my head) or an opportunity take a giant and life-changing leap through the portal of adulthood.
Karen has the same reaction. Not only is the place beautiful, it feels like me. This is where I’m meant to live, and we both know it. And so does Louisa. Yesterday, we talked about the house and neighborhood but today the conversation goes somewhere else, as we stand beneath the beautifully bent avocado tree, revealing things you tell a therapist, not the potential buyer or seller of a home.
I inform her that I know the neighborhood (a six square block area the average Los Angeles white person would be oblivious to) because I used to drive by it every day on my way to score, occasionally ducking in to marvel at the beautiful old homes. And since I am comfortable enough to divulge my drug-addled past she feels safe enough to talk of her life and upbringing in Australia, the physical abuse and worse suffered at the hands of her Italian immigrant father, the trauma and healing, her spiritual journey toward the light, the Kabbalah (a school of mystic Jewish teachings) serving as the sacred text. Karen notices the mezuzahs on the front and back doors, and we tap and kiss our fingers (Jewish custom) as we walk back and inside, deepening even further the positive wound that has opened between us.
It all feels meant to be, and it almost didn’t happen. She had a buyer, a lesbian couple, but they backed out due to the apartment building across the street. (Of course, Louisa and I think the apartment building is perfect, the young Latino kids playing in the courtyard, a joy chorus, not an eyesore.) Them reneging was a blow ‘cause Louisa was moving back to Australia for love and had to sell quick. It was a wild, gutsy, high risk move on her part, sacrificing the solidity of hundred-year-old oak for something as unstable and ridiculous as a man. And again, it’s early April 2020. The pandemic is limiting travel, the last flight to Australia is in two weeks and she needs to be on it and the house sold!
Over the next ten days she makes every wrong real estate move you can. We are in contact like we met on Match.com, not Zillow. If her agent knew how many texts we send back and forth and how fate-mushy they are, she’d have her thrown in real-estate jail. But she needs it. Needs the transaction to be human and personal. Needs to feel like this huge moment in both our lives is ordained by higher forces. And I need it too, my inherent Jewish mysticism dancing with hers step for step. We both see it as a mythic transference more than a material transaction.
But when it’s time to make the offer, I come in hard and low (A different kind of Jewish mysticism). It’s a good chunk less than the deal she had on the table with the couple, but it’s still a shit ton of money to me. She counters with a small bump in her favor. I say “yes” before she can get the last zero out.
Home buying is no fucking joke. The paper work alone is enough to send me to the nuthouse, but luckily Karen and her best friend Chani do everything from getting me my mortgage (through a shady Israeli madman named Moshe) to dealing with the bank records to any and all left-brain activity. All I have to do is have the loot and sign my name a couple of hundred times.
A few days before I get the keys, Louisa invites me over for a blessing ceremony. I’m into it because she’s into it and we are still mid love fest. I gather my people there: Karen, Chani, my son Stanley, my dear friend Deirdre, and my great pal Peter, an old mystic in his own right. Louisa throws salt, then lights the sage. She leads us single file through every room in the house, sage torch smoking as she chants the hundred names of God. It is both beautiful and goofy.
Three days later she gets on a plane and flies off to two weeks of quarantine and the love that is waiting after. I get a bunch of strong young Russians to move me a few miles south.
How I got the balls to plunge forward with a financial and custodial responsibility as serious as home ownership I have no idea. I just knew it was needed, and that something big was at stake. That being said, my very first night in the house I had a hospitalization-worthy case of buyer’s remorse. I was completely blended with the eight-year-old boy inside, and felt helpless as he quaked in terror, the only words he could say “Oh god, what have I done?” The next morning, I was fine. Within weeks everyone who walked into the house said it feels like you’ve lived here forever.
The first month Louisa and I trade house-question texts, then I didn’t hear from her. Eighteen months later she texts me that she has moved back to L.A. and wants to come by. I guess love didn’t work out. “Of course,” I tell her, “When’s good?” She never texts back. A month later she texts. “Sorry, the wound is still too fresh.”
It’s been almost four years and she’s never come to visit. About six months ago she texted, letting me know that if I ever want to sell the house, she wants to buy it back. “Okay,” I said, “for sure.” It would have been cruel to tell her I’m never going to sell or that one of the greatest mistakes of her life was one of the greatest boons of mine. I did feel a strong pang of compassion, having made so many irreversible mistakes of my own. I wanted to help her out and magic wand away her regret but this house is inside me now, and there will be no do-overs.
As for me, I got my own lifetime of griefs and regrets, but finally having a home has smoothed out some of the rough edges. Or to put it another way, let me borrow from one of our great modern poets -- You got real estate problems I feel bad for you son, I got 99 problems but a house ain’t one.
Man, I really love your writing.
This is so good.