I met my neighbor yesterday.
He isn't really my neighbor, since he doesn't actually live in the house across the street -- it is rather simply his workshop. Also, it isn't really a house. I live in a place that used to be a pub, and he builds doors and bookshelves and stools in an abandoned-looking stone structure that was once the schoolhouse.
His name is Jerry. He is either a youthful sixty or a poorly-preserved fifty; like his building, he is weathered and gray, with skeletal legs, fluttery hand movements, high cheekbones over unshaven cheeks, full of elegant disdain. When I pulled up to the house yesterday on my bike, he was outside, unloading wood from his red van.
"Hello, Jessie," he said. I was surprised -- we'd only met once, and I really hadn't talked. I'd simply been introduced to him, answered "Oh it's lovely!" to his obligatory "How do you like Ireland?" question, and gone inside. I was impressed that he remembered me at all, much less said this:
"Have you ever been inside this building?" he motioned elegantly, a toolbox in his hand.
"..No?" I said. When I'd thought that the building was abandoned, I'd definitely entertained the idea of breaking and entering, but as soon as I approached it, I saw that there were wires going into a window and fresh boards by the door, so even if it were falling down, someone definitely owned it.
"Would you like to come in? Have a cup of coffee?" Jerry asked intently.
The me before WWOOFing would have probably made some excuse -- here was an older man, who I didn't know really, inviting me into his house; even if it wasn't going to be him hitting on me, it would at least be awkward. I now, however, was just bored enough and trusting enough -- what with the whole Chelsea turning out to not be an ax murderer thing -- to enter, and so I did.
"Sure," I said, and stepped after his jacketed back, missing a step and falling on my hands as I followed him up the crumbling mossy steps. He didn't notice, being I suppose preoccupied with the problem of entertaining in a workshop without heat or water. (That was another reason I'd followed him -- I wanted to know how on earth he was going to make the coffee. I also love coffee.)
We entered into a cluttered garage-like part of the building, and as my eyes adjusted to the light I waited for him to go downstairs or wherever it was we were going to drink beverages. He didn't. Instead, he lit a sketchy-smelling gas stove and motioned to a sawdust-covered, object-strewn table. "Sit!"
So apparently this was it then. Jerry was intently pouring a jug into a teakettle, his back to me. Elegantly, he muttered, "Here we are. I steal holy water from the church."
I smiled widely and laughed uncertainly, then coughed in the sawdust. I looked down and brushed it off my leggings, where it had already settled in dandruffy flakes. Jerry clapped his hands. "Would you like to come and see my porch?"
I hadn't noticed any kind of a porch on the outside of the building, so yes, I did. I followed him to an open doorway on the other side of the room, and we walked out onto five cedar planks scaffolded to the outside of the building. He stopped me with his hand. "I'd be careful, there, I haven't got much of a railing..." I stared down at the twenty-foot drop, and wondered if he was about to make a move on me..
"See the view?" and I did -- the valley spread out below us, first our creek and then some trees and then further on the man-made lake opened, and on the other side more mountains. The sky was blue with turbulent clouds. It would, if finished, make a lovely porch -- perhaps he wasn't after all completely crazy.
Back in the sawdust-clogged workshop, he motioned to the cluttered walls. "I get all this stuff from skips." Skips? What were skips? I dimly assumed it was some sort of ship -- there were certainly a lot of wooden bits. I was however hard-pressed to explain the angelic thirties-ish painting of a girl, the stuffed stag head, and the nine-foot-tall decrepit Jesus oil painting.
"Where do you find the ships?" I said politely.
"No, skips," he said, and frowned.
"What are..."
"Sales," he said impatiently, "where people throw huge lots of stuff away. That's where all these bits of wood are from. Him," he thumped the stag head, "he came from a friend who bought a pair, only wanted one. He painted the other."
"Painted?" I said, imagining a Romanticism-like nature painting, only with a stuffed and mounted stag's head instead of a frolicking baby deer.
"Yeah, covered it in blue and made it some papier-mache antlers and sold it for four grand," he said.
"Oh," I said. "Of course."
It turned out that the Jesus painting had been tossed out of the neighboring church. "Think it's valuable, you know, Italian-school 1830s religious art..." Jesus peeked out mournfully from under a layer of filth. "I'm antireligious myself."
A cart of tools had come from a skip, too. "See that drill? It works! Got a hammer, a whole bundle of power tools..." he snorted disdainfully. "Old lady whose husband had died just threw the whole bunch out."
Finally I too could sound interesting. "Isn't it amazing what people throw away?", I said intently, and I told him about my friend Matt who only ate garbage and had for oh at least a year now. He snorted, didn't say anything. I was used to that now; I read in my Intercultural Competence textbook that Americans like me talk about themselves far more often than the rest of the world. Far from deciding to be less fond of self-disclosure, I have instead resigned myself to a semester of sharing anecdotes and receiving none in return, so I simply smiled and brushed sawdust off my pants again.
The coffee was ready -- canned espresso in a semi-clean French press poured into two mugs. "Found you a clean one," he said brandishing one free of dirt triumphantly. "D'you take sugar?"
I said I did. He rummaged through a closet and found me one single sugar packet. "It's damp, but it'll work."
It was indeed damp, and dirty; God knows what it had been through. "I do this too, collect sugar packets from restaurants," I told him, and he nodded, saying, "I stopped a while ago though." At that, old me would have politely declined the packet, but current me shrugged, ripped the top open, and dumped it into my coffee. It came out in one large lump -- bloop. I laughed, and sipped it -- despite everything it was good.
We talked awkwardly for half an hour, me offering muted and semi-unintelligible tidbits about myself in exchange for his colorful stories of how this neighborhood used to be, the pub open from midnight to six am, the schoolhouse a town hall then a ton of bricks with a fallen-through floor. After I finished the coffee, and he said, "Well, two o' clock's a good time to start work," and I said, "What time is it now?" and he said, "Two," I left him. Last I saw, he was two weeks past deadline, fretting over an as-yet-unassembled bookshelf that was 1/16th of an inch too high.
Later, I learned from Chelsea that he'd built all the beautiful doors in our house, and that sometimes he slept in the schoolhouse in a little bunk when he was on deadline. Both tidbits meshed nicely with what I'd learned about him, and both made me once again aware that I wasn't in the suburbs anymore.
