The neighborhood’s new house is big. On our ranch-house street, it’s humungous. Now it’s only a wooden frame, but two stories, and deep.
The construction workers say, “it will be all steel.” We hope for good neighbors, like the people next door from Mexico. They have a lot of jobs.
There’s a cleaning company truck, a small food cart, pizza delivery, Uber driving, day-care. They have two dogs. A little one name Pepe and a big one named something that sounds like my name.
I think they are always calling for me. On the other side is a single young man with a tattoo who is also a good neighbor, but sometimes his friends drink too much and play night hockey driveway.
They lose the puck in the bushes and beat the bushes as for birds. My therapist wants me to meditate on that steel box of a house. What is in store for me within?
I talk about the outside. A silver-gray cube, perhaps studded with fat rivets like an old safe, the windows pill-box slits and the roof a flat sheet.
Inside. What about the inside. Crack that safe. I know I’m in for it. The steel house may help. Herald a transformation of the neighborhood and our lives. Right? I think I hear my name again.
A flat roof to raise a ruckus in the rain. You’d think a steel house would be pretty hot within. And silent. We hope for a good neighbor. A good hot silent neighbor. Go on.
A happy healing steel house, a hot center of education and recreation, meditation and sharing. Hot yoga. To become bigger, fuller versions of ourselves.
A bit of a Bauhaus block of hot talents and cool minds, but this time it stops the Nazis, a sock in their swastika, a grunt of schwa, and they’re out for the count, Joe Lewised to Schmeling salts.
Sure sure. But what does the new house have in store for you? What else would a happy steel house hold? Only happiness? I tell the therapist there will be transformation.
Form will follow function. Classes on things like yoga and tai-chi. Form following function, like Jeeves the Butler after Bertie.
Or Bertie after Jeeves? Art and writing and political action. The personal is the political. Vice Versa. A place where we can become the bigger better versions of ourselves. Sure sure.
Go on. Let’s say different rooms for different views outside the windows of the house, so that to be outside would be the same as being inside. Hologram projections on the outside of the inside.
Our therapy sessions are on the second floor of the clinic, and in our last session, squeegees on poles appeared in the windows and squeaked slow and gurgling down the glass. Again and again.
The therapist had been talking about seeing things clearly. I say to him, you set this up, didn’t you. This is something like the steel house effect of the inside becoming the outside, inside.
It will be hot in the steel house. That’s where the air-conditioning units will come in. Like the early movie theaters were the first public buildings to install air conditioning. Imagine the chill whoosh.
Then our refrigerator got hot inside. My wife and I went to Steinhaufels, which we call Steinawfuls, because they sell furniture that is spectacularly vulgar. Bizarro Bauhaus.
Form gets function drunk. The sloppy mean kind. Cripples it with grain alcohol. Refrigeration uses gas installed in tubes. Air Conditioning has built-in chemicals and draw air from outside.
So spectacularly vulgar we always unpack a standard joke when we go in: we need to be stoned or on acid to truly appreciate this place. Or gassed. Hey, where’s my weed and acid? Or gas?
As if on weed or acid or gas, the sales lady asked what we wanted, and we said, a refrigerator. She said, there are no refrigerators. Steinhaufel’s has never sold refrigerators. We said, what?
We bought our last refrigerator here. Our microwave. Our stove. Our washer. Our dryer. Several steel boxes. No. We have never sold those things. Like on weed or acid. Or gas. The wrong store.
American Appliances was next door. Used to be. They had closed and were gone. We hadn’t noticed. Our washer and dryer had just broken down too. It was time.
We went to another store. The salesman showed us a nice Kenmore in the scratch and dent section. We were all ready to go when they said, ten days to delivery. That’s a deal breaker, I said.
I just walked away from the salesman. My wife called my name. Are you just going to walk away, she said. Yes, I said. I’m just going to walk away.
Then the therapist says, what would a bad metal house be? A bad metal house would be a rich, paranoid, very right-wing conspiratorial house. Things of Nazi, things of hot Nazi.
Air conditioning made the movie industry really take off and become what it is today. Maybe it is the same for us, that computers would never have truly taken off if it hadn’t been for porno.
What is the connection there, my therapist says, and I say I wasn’t really thinking clearly there, and just go on with whatever. Partly what the steel house will help with.
Then we went to The Brothers Main Appliances. We found a nice, new Kenmore. Only two days until delivery. While the salesman prepared the paperwork, we used the bathrooms.
The salesman said he had sold the same model to his mother. This was impressive to my wife. She came out of the bathroom and gave me a little rubber alien toy, the kind with the big slanted eyes.
It was a metallic blue color and molded in gooey rubber. Did you find this in the bathroom? Then my therapist asked, now what would the steel house be like if it were haunted?
I squeezed the alien in my pocket. She said, I found it at Saint Vincents. People think that we are witnessing poltergeist phenomenon. It’s not ghosts but actual mental records of people.
The records are uploaded into digital files that have been set free to roam. They inhabit the smart appliances so that the house appears “haunted.” The therapist has been sitting quietly, crying.
A smart refrigerator can read recipes to you, leave messages on the touch screen door, show you on your phone what is inside, without having to open the door. Watch the inside, in real time.
When the refrigerator was delivered, the door was hinged on the wrong side. The delivery men, including someone I thought was a man that the other two referred to as she, said, no problem.
Her electric screwdriver’s batteries went dead. She had no charger. Did we have an electric screwdriver? We did. She switched the door.
When they backed out, the truck knocked down the neighbor’s mailbox. Later our neighbor came to the door in tears to tell us she was being targeted by gangs. Look what they did to my mailbox.
The therapist asks, what would the steel house be like if you lived in it yourself? I say, I think that I would like the house to reproduce in miniature the street outside.
There would be the hologram recording, the continuous, real-time recording of outside the house, of bad luck and lost pucks, in the bushes and beating them to death. Hot Nazi things.
Then, when you go outside, you will see, perhaps reproduced and projected on different sides of the house, the inside rooms of the house, and yourself, inside just a second ago.
Planning to heal, and free the street, and yourself., inside and out. I wasn’t thinking clearly there. Everything in the refrigerator was covered in ice.
My wife called them and said, no, we don’t want a repairman. We want a new frigging refrigerator. Two days later they delivered another refrigerator, a nice new GE.
In the 1920’s there were horrible accidents when people tried to chop out ice and punctured the coils, spraying them with flesh and eye-eating sulfur dioxide.
The nice new GE turned out to be not new and had a big dent. The delivery men, who were twins, said the problem with the Kenmore was that the door they switched was put on incorrectly.
The gasket was on the bottom instead of the top. Did we want the Kenmore put back? No. Get us a nice new GE like we paid for. But we have no more. How about a nice new Frigidaire?
We emptied the refrigerator again, putting things in a little basement freezer and in coolers with cold packs. We said we would take the smaller Frigidaire. Only one of the twins delivered it.
The nice Frigidaire had a dent, and a cracked shelf. My wife was distressed that there was no drawer for cheese. It groaned more than the original groaning Kenmore. We wanted money off.
They took the warranty fee off. And one hundred dollars off. So far, the Frigidaire has worked ok but groans. Eventually the refrigerator ended up costing about two hundred dollars.
Frigidaire invented the first home use refrigerator as a self-contained unit in 1923. It cost about seven hundred and fifty dollars.
The first “widespread use” refrigerator was the 1927 GE “Monitor Top,” named after the gun-turret of the 1860’s Union ironclad ship, which resembled the round compressor above the cabinet.
Before Freon, the refrigerant was sulfur dioxide, corrosive to the hands and eyes and a cause of blindness. Or methyl formate, highly flammable or toxic if inhaled.
More common fatalities were the many cases of children suffocating while playing in abandoned refrigerators, with externally locking doors.
Locking refrigerator doors became standard in the late 1920’s, but it wasn’t until the Refrigerator Safety Act of 1957 that they were banned. Thirty years of children suffocating inside refrigerators.
The original draft of Back to the Future had a refrigerator as Doc’s time machine. Fearing it would have kids playing in locking refrigerators again, Robert Zemeckis changed it to the DeLorean.
Conditions inside the pillbox turret of the Monitor battleship were hellish. Unbearable heat, dense smoke and the deafening clang of Confederate cannonballs pounding the steel hull.
I gain an inexplicable comfort knowing that, nearly a century later, GE and Frigidaire are still the same cool fellas, now black, or brushed steel, talking to you while standing at attention in the store.
The inauthenticity of that statement hits me like Steinawfuls furniture. Freon was an incredibly effective refrigerant until it was banned in 1987 because of its ozone-depleting effects.
The rotating turret of The Monitor was powered by “donkey engines,” but in the smoke and chaos it was difficult to turn quickly or see which direction the turret’s twin cannons were pointed.
To reverse direction, the gearing required a full rotation, and could become jammed with shrapnel and debris.
The new house is progressing. My wife and I stroll through the empty site. The walls are going up. They are thin vertical panels, not riveted steel, like the Monitor, or Nazi pillboxes in Normandy.
There are no interior walls yet, or maybe never. Curiously, the driveway and garage appear to be in the front, and the door is in the back. The garage is huge.
There are only slit-like windows in the front, very high. The back wall facing the woods seems to be all windows. The owner of the steel house does not want to see the street, just the trees.
The owner may also own many vehicles, like the Mexican family. They may be people who use their phones to watch the inside of their refrigerators in real time. Check to see if they need milk.
Or just watch. I had my hearing tested when I was a kid. I couldn’t understand what other people were saying, and it’s still true today. I don’t think it was ever my hearing. It’s my head, my heart.
I just don’t understand what you’re saying. I assume you don’t hear me, either. My therapist looks like he’s going to cry. He cries. He says, couldn’t this be like Zen Beginner’s Mind?
No. Or the Holy Fool thing? No. Or the wisdom of madness thing that was fashionable in the 1960’s? No. I’m just dumb. I think the neighbors just called my name. Get me out of here.
Freon has been replaced by R-410A (Puron). No. I don’t feel like I’m at the beginning of anything. R-410A cylinders are colored pink.
Gregg Williard's work has been published, most recently, in Waxing and Waning, Free State Review, New England Review and Always Crashing. He teaches ESL to refugees and does a book-reading show on WORT community radio.