Swim, Shower, Shit and Shove Off

I don't have any photos of when I first started sharing this house--with a German-Swiss windsurfer and his Austrian friend, but it didn't look like this. It had been in the hands of Western weekenders for many years (I heard the German ambassador for a while), and the house was obviously just a place to swim, shower, shit and shove off. There was carpet tacked into the straw of the tatami--red, I gathered, from the few threads that weren't completely worn down to the backing. Four huge heifer-hued faux leather chairs obviously pilfered from someone's boss's office sat around the living room like a posse of 19th-century robber barons. The wooden floors of the hallways were black from water stains and shoe soles. On one whole side of the house, the wooden storm panels had been nailed shut over old windows. None of the sliding shoji or wooden doors slid. Someone had nailed plastic boards over places in the wall where the original earth-and-bamboo wattling had eroded.

For the first year or two, I used the place like everyone else. I'd drive down on Saturday morning, hungover as hell, and undergo the ocean cure of swimming, barbecuing and lying passed out under a beach umbrella. Often, also like everyone else, I wouldn't even bother opening up the house, which does entail a rather complex series of sliding recalcitrant storm doors into their respective boxes.

One day, bored from a Robert Parker novel that I was sure I'd read five or six times before, I found an old handleless claw hammer poking out of the rubble under the veranda, and started pulling the nails out of the storm doors that covered the southeast side of the house. I slid them into their boxes, and went inside for a drink. Just then, the mid-afternoon sun hit the window glass--and suddenly I could see the texture of the water surfaces on which they had been made. I rubbed the glass and scratched enough grime off the wood lattices to see the signs of a beautiful piece of craftwork. The liberated windows not only brought a whole new time of day into the room, they showed me that there was more to this place than a beach shack for sweating out the excesses of the week.

I bought a sander, a real hammer, a Japanese saw and garbage bags, big ones.