the storage space, when we came to a door with a homemade sign taped to it: “Rosa’s Room. Do Not Enter.”
“Who’s Rosa?” Michelle asked, immediately suspicious.
The couple glanced nervously at each other. A look of panic came over the face of my compatriot from Flint. She was about to speak, but her husband shook his head to silence her. “It’s really nothing,” he finally offered, stroking his beard and looking at the floor. The thick accent that had once been so endearing now made him sound like a double agent about to betray his best friend in a spy thriller. “It’s not a problem.”
The door opened suddenly and an elderly woman, clearly pissed off that we were making a racket, scowled at us. Behind her I could see a bed, a dresser, and other telltale signs of habitation. She amped up the dirty look to make sure we fathomed the depths of her displeasure and slammed the door shut.
“That was Rosa,” the composer said softly, a note of defeat in his voice.
“Is she living in there?” Michelle demanded, not softly at all.
“Well, in a way, I suppose,” he said. “But you don’t need to worry about it. We’ve got it all taken care of. It’s fine.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Michelle said to me and Traci as she turned and headed for the stairs leading out to the street. Apparently, the inspection was over.
We were about to discover a new San Francisco real-estate term, one that has killed many a promising deal in the city: “protected tenant.” Over the next few tortured days we learned that Rosa had lived in the building when the couple bought it years earlier. At one point they had attempted to get her to leave. She filed a complaint with the San Francisco Human Rights Commission and received a favorable ruling. She now had the right to live in the building as long as she wanted, a situation that not only dramatically lowered the value of the property but also opened us up to all sorts of legal entanglements if we became co-owners. Worse, as Michelle emphatically pointed out, the couple tried to hide this information from us and their real-estate agent, who quickly dropped them as clients. Not exactly the way to start off a TIC partnership. The deal was off.
“I thought Midwesterners were supposed to be wholesome and honest,” Traci said when it was clear we were headed to more open houses.
“Flint’s not really the Midwest,” I answered feebly. “Neither is Norway.”
Eventually, even my competitive spirit, stoked in the gyms and on the football fields of Flint, was overwhelmed. Traci and I decided we’d look at one more batch of houses on Sunday, then call it quits. We didn’t expect to find anything. It was more of a token gesture. We checked out a cool little place in Bernal Heights. The flyer called it a “tranquil and magical cottage!” (“Cottage” is San Francisco real-estate jargon for incredibly small.) It had fish ponds in both the well-landscaped front yard and the backyard, a privacy fence covered in climbing passion flowers and trumpet vines, and a front gate with a Zen-like copper hand from Nepal for a handle. The place was crawling with house hunters, and the list price was $519,000. Given that virtually every place we had bid on went for at least $50,000 over asking, we figured we didn’t have a chance. I wrote my name and number on the sign-in sheet just for the hell of it, and we went back to our apartment. We had put up a good fight, made a noble effort, but we were beaten. It was hopeless to keep trying. We accepted our fate. We were renters.
A few weeks later, we got a call from Michelle. The owner of the house, who was sometimes referred to as the unofficial “Mayor of Bernal Heights,” had allegedly only gotten offers from contractors who wanted to tear the house down and dramatically transform it into a McMansion. She had rehabbed the place herself, had close relationships with her neighbors, and didn’t want to see her baby become a soulless giant on a street of modest homes. She’d spotted my name on the sign-in sheet.
We wrote a syrupy letter gushing about how we fell in love with the house the moment we saw it and that we’d be honored to live in a place so lovingly restored. (We didn’t mention the $25,000 in foundation work we knew it needed, or that the “new” roof had five layers of shingles on it, or that the so-called plaster walls were really just poorly installed drywall.) I wanted to put in a low-ball offer, but after our long ordeal Michelle recommended bidding everything we had.
And it worked.
The instant we gave up trying, a house was presented to us. It made me wish we had quit six months earlier. Now all we had to do was arrange financing.
We made an early morning appointment to meet with Jimmy the mortgage broker at his office in San Jose. But it was deadline day, and Traci couldn’t show up late at the small magazine where she worked as an editor, so she dropped me off in the forlorn parking lot of a cinderblock office park, circa 1950, where Jimmy did business. I planned to walk to the university where I taught, located about a mile away, after the papers were signed.
“Is this place even open?” Traci asked after I kissed her goodbye. She was reluctant to leave me there in the parking lot. The nearby streets were clogged with early morning traffic and a greenish-yellow smog was already collecting around the distant hilltops, bolstering my theory that San Jose possessed all the unsavory attributes of Los Angeles without the glamour, money, or excitement of the movie industry.
“It’ll be fine,” I said, trying to sound confident. “I’ll call you later and let you know how it goes.”
The door to Jimmy’s office was locked, so I knocked and a secretary opened it almost instantly, startling me. I turned and waved to Traci, who was looking back at me from the edge of the parking lot, a worried expression on her face. She waved tentatively and nosed the car into traffic. Inside, the office had the feel of a fake place of business in an infomercial—a collection of bland, brand-new office furniture, a suspicious absence of papers, files, or clutter of any sort that might indicate actual work being done. It smelled like plastic. It’s the sort of office you might assemble if you had three hours to set it up. I felt like I was in a David Mamet movie, about to get conned.
The secretary picked up the phone and announced that a client had arrived. A harried-looking guy in a black suit, a red shirt, and a loud tie burst out of a nearby door. He looked a little like Conan O’Brien gone to seed. This would be Jimmy. “Hey, man, it’s too late now,” he said, his reddish hair flying around in the flurry of activity. “You snooze you lose. You were supposed to be here an hour ago.”
I had a moment of panic. I thought I was early, not late. Had I somehow ruined our chance for a house because of tardiness? “I’m Gordon Young and I thought I had a 9:30 appointment,” I said, my voice quavering.
“Oh, Gordon, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry about that. You’re early. I thought you were my other appointment, who’s late. Come on in.”
I glanced at the secretary and she smiled reassuringly, just the way a seasoned grifter would smile in a Mamet film. I noticed Jimmy’s face was glistening with sweat. I thought of Ralph, the responsible mortgage broker with his sober calmness and his woody, well appointed office near city hall in San Francisco. Now I was out in the sticks of San Jose dealing with shady characters. I seriously considered walking out, but I told myself that Michelle had recommended Jimmy, so he must be legitimate.
We were working our way through a stack of loan application documents that I had only a rough understanding of—Jimmy pointing and talking rapid-fire and me signing—when he let out a low groan. I looked up, and he was grimacing and clutching his chest. Sweat dripped off his chin. I have to admit that my first thought was selfish annoyance: Don’t have a heart attack now, you
