Helluva dream.
I was working on a project to rehab old houses for the needy. Over the past few weeks, we gutted the inside, fixed some plumbing and electrical problems, and replaced fixtures. Now, this weekend, I’d been asked to take charge of tearing down and rebuilding the small rotting deck in the back.
By late morning, my team - myself, another guy, and two women - had demolished the old deck and hauled the debris to the curb. We had just sunk the new posts and started to cut joists when a window opened on the house next door.
“Would you mind holding down the racket out there?”
Hold it down? Did she think we had a volume control on our table saw?
Always best to use the diplomatic approach first. “Sorry, ma’am, we will do what we can, but building a deck does make a certain amount of noise.”
“Can’t you at least cut the boards inside?”
“Sorry, but no, we have drywallers and mudders working inside today, and they can’t have the dust.” Perhaps that should have been enough, but, given the ridiculousness of her attempt at micromanagement, I decided to fully explain what was wrong with her suggestion. “And if we had to go inside every time we need to make a cut and carry it back out, that means we wouldn’t get done today. You don’t want us working on this through tomorrow, do you?”
“No, I do not,” she replied stiffly, slamming the window shut. Okay, chalk up one failure for diplomacy, though maybe I could have stopped with my point about dust. But hopefully, she would at least leave us alone.
We got the stairs and joists done, and as we started to cut the decking we got a real rhythm going: one of the women cutting boards, and the man and the other woman placing them and screwing them down, one right after the other. We probably were making a lot of noise, banging things out like that.
The window opened again. The woman’s head now sported red devil horns. “Now it’s getting even louder! You people have been working on that house for weeks, and the noise just keeps getting worse!”
I didn’t have to say anything, because my team stood up for themselves just fine. The woman who’d been running the saw grabbed a 2x2 baluster off the pile, held it up, and yelled, “It’s two o’clock on a Saturday! Of course, it’s loud. If you don’t shut the fuck up and let us build low-income housing, I’m going to come over there and shove this up your ass! I bet it’d fit, too!”
Then the other woman brandished her drill and, with a slightly maniacal grin, added, “And I’ll screw your feet to the floor while she does it.” The two women exchanged a look that almost made me think they were prepared to carry out the threat. Yikes. I thought I saw the other man shudder a little bit.
My eyes popped open as Rick shifted his weight behind me.
Now awake, I remembered that I was in bed with my best friend. The construction episode was just a dream.
In truth, I really was building a deck this weekend, but it was at Rick’s house, not a charity project. And I realized the angry woman next door in the dream looked a lot like my ex-wife. Well, except for the horns. With her, I’d gotten used to starting with diplomacy, but quickly having things degrade to something less than that. Fortunately, she now lived hundreds of miles away, and couldn’t actually mess with the deck, or the new life, that I was building.
The other two women in the scene were my best friend Rick’s wife, Emily, who was mostly lesbian, and her girlfriend Jackie, who was a hundred thirty percent lesbian.