Come On-A My House

adventures in "asking for help" while being a huge idiot

Not long ago, our family Jeep had gotten really, really dirty. We’d recently taken both of our short-haired, beige dogs to the vet, and not long after, our children had a pie fight* in the back seat. I’m pretty sure the upholstery was starting to smell, because I’d noticed that when I gave rides to friends, they’d start to speak in a kind of cartoony, strangled voice while trying to “subtly” open the window for air.

Which all resulted in me summoning a car-cleaning professional to our house, via an app. At around 2.5 hours after the time I specified, just as the sun was going down, a man I’ll call “Terry” arrived in a custom-wrapped peach Tesla with a “Thick Thighs Save Lives” bumper sticker.

Terry was regally short, maybe mid-thirties, and smelled strongly of artificial melon. He was also in a mood that suggested his being nearly three hours late was somehow my fault. He curtly asked if I “had a hose or something.” Then he proceeded to fuck up my car in ways I had previously not thought imaginable.

After spraying the entire body with what I am pretty sure was Mrs. Meyer’s Lavender countertop cleaner, Terry flipped on a 100-year-old shop vac the size of a mini-fridge, and began rubbing the bristly “furniture attachement” in long, confused strokes over the paint of the car, sort of like he was combing the hair of a large, unruly animal. The resulting noise was deafening.

All this led me to ask — had Terry ever cleaned a car before? No, he admitted, through a puff of cantaloupe-flavored vape smoke. This was his first day on the app. Signing up for it was all his new girlfriend’s idea.

As gently as possible, I told Terry that I needed him to stop what he was doing (“doing” being a bit generous, here). It was ten o’clock, the noise of the vacuum was causing people to look out their windows, and he probably shouldn’t have opened my neighbor’s garage to find a place to plug his equipment in.

When Terry left (leaving a squeegee with the tag still on in the middle of the street), my husband gave me a real “look.” He wasn’t reading a newspaper and glaring at me sternly over reading glasses, but he might as well have been.

“Please,” he said, “stop doing this.”

“Doing what?” I replied.

Although, I knew.

Despite being a reasonably handy and marginally functional adult, I have sometimes outsourced tasks to strangers with almost unilaterally disastrous results.

This is, of course, on me. Obviously, the vast majority of gig workers and housekeepers and handy-people are capable, safe, and sane individuals. But, as the old therapy maxim goes, we attract that which we have not healed.

What follows is a short, very incomplete list of people I have invited to our home to help me do things for money, with not-so-great results.

You can ask my husband all about it. But, please don’t.

Millie, Hired Via Colleague

Once I was working on a TV show when an absolutely DELIGHTFUL actor did a guest arc. (If you are a woman, or gay, and I told you who she was, there is a 90% chance that you would go, “Oh, I love her!” in a high-pitched voice.) This actor was around the show for a bit and did nice things like talk to the writers like they were people.

One day she was chatting with a few of us and said that she and her husband (another lovely actor!) were moving, and wouldn’t be able to use their housekeeper, Millie, any longer, and asked if one of us could give her some work. I was single and living in a one-bedroom apartment at the time, so I didn’t really need a ton of help cleaning it, but so charmed was I by this actor (who now has her own TV show!!!!! Sorry, I love blind items) that I that I took Millie’s information.

A few weeks later, I arranged to leave my keys under the rug and $100 in cash on the counter so Millie could clean my place while I was at work. Around lunchtime, my building’s super called. He told me not to be alarmed, but that he’d had to call an ambulance for my housekeeper.

I was, of course, alarmed.

“Don’t be!” said my super, who was a laid-back sort of guy who was always inviting me to throw a frisbee around with him. “She ate a whole bar of your weed chocolates and thought she was having a heart attack.” He said he tried to tell her she was “just super high,” but she made him call 911.

I apologized, and explained that I don’t, nor have I ever, kept “weed chocolates” in the house, which is true.

“That’s between you guys,” he said.

The next day, Millie texted, somewhat frantically apologetic, and told me that she would clean the place again free of charge. I said that wasn’t necessary, but Millie insisted. Ultimately, I didn’t want to be “weird” about the whole thing, especially to a person cool enough to eat a whole bar of weed chocolate on the job, so I said sure, and left her the key again the following week.

When I got home, the apartment was sparkling clean. However, all four burners of the gas stove were on. Like, on high. I was beginning to sense a theme, here.

I texted Millie to about the burners, and she said she had no idea how that could have happened, althought the “how” of it all was kind of coming into focus by that point.

She texted a few times about coming back to clean, but, because I am a coward, I ignored her, and hoped that word wouldn’t get back to the fun actors—though, I feel like they’d probably take my side in this one.

About a month ago, over ten years after Millie almost set my apartment on fire and accused me of poisoning her with “my” chocolate drugs, I got a text from her. She said she knew it had “been a minute,” but asked if I’d be willing to write her a nice Google review.

“Sure,” I texted back.

Marc, hired via TaskRabbit

A relative of mine was kind enough to send our oldest son a genuine Radio Flyer Wagon when he was still a baby. Unfortunately, it arrived in roughly 70,000 parts and required tools usually reserved for Revolutionary War-era cobblers, like a rasp and an awl, whatever those are.

A good way to choose a skilled handyman on apps like TaskRabbit is to sort by “Rating,” but I felt bad doing that. Wouldn’t that give all the same six professionals all the jobs? What if some handyman -- or handy WOMAN, even -- was out there trying to feed their family but no one was choosing them because they were all sorting for the best ones? It should probably be noted that I was also newly pregnant with our second child, and coursing with hormones that made me sympathetic to all creatures forgotten by God.

So, instead, I sorted by “Tasks completed” from low to high, and chose Marc, a friendly looking young man who seemed like he could use a break.

I could tell this was maybe not the smartest methodology when Marc arrived and immediately started acting what we’ll call “just a little rude.”

At first, his zings felt kind of general, like the fact that it was too hard to park on my street and that it was a probably a little fiscally imprudent to pay someone $100 to put a kid’s toy together.

But then it got more personal -- Marc pointed at a velvet painting of birds that I’d purchased from a fire sale at a Mexican restaurant.

“This is so ugly,” he said, pointing to the painting. “I don’t like anything about what you’ve done with your house.”

“Okay,” I said, trying not to sound wounded. I don’t consider myself a professional decorator or anything, but, as you can tell from my description, the bird painting was empirically a very beautiful ‘piece.’ “Maybe we just … get to the wagon. Did you bring an awl?”

Then suddenly, Marc shook his head. “Damn, I’m doing it again,” he frowned, slapping his forehead. I didn’t want to ask, but, I guess I sort of had to at that point.

“Well, I guess you should know,” Marc explained, “I was in a construction site accident where a beam fell on my head. And now, I just kinda say everything I’m thinking. I have no filter. I don’t even know I’m doing it sometimes!”

I nodded, wondering if such a thing could be true. Or, if it was perhaps just a creative excuse for being a big, huge asshole about someone’s wonderful velvet bird painting. Either way, I try not to get testy with people who have just told me about their massive head injuries. “Wow, I’m sorry that happened to you,” I said. Then, gesturing to his still-unopened toolbox, I added brightly, “At least you’re still doing what you love!”

“I’m not,” he said. “What I really want is to make a line of cosmetics and hair care products for women.”

“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” I said, backing out of the room to text several people my location.

Just a few short hours of hiding in my garage later, Marc texted me that he was all done. And you know what? He’d done a great job on the wagon, which ended up lasting our kids several years of use.

I was just seeing him out the door, when my husband and son returned from a day trip to the botanical garden. Before I could make introductions, Marc turned to me.

“Your hair is so dry,” he said. “I make my own shampoo. All I want to do is put it on your head.”

I thanked him and closed the door. My husband turned to me, confused, our very young child in his arms.

“Marc put together our wagon!” I beamed.

Mary, Organizer, hired via TaskRabbit

I’d just started a new job and had a second baby, and, in the throes of stress and overwhelm, I began seeing an old therapist again. This one was a wealthy woman who sort of did psychotherapy “on the side, for fun,” and whom I eventually broke up with when she asked for help getting an agent. (Los Angeles! Such a country!)

Anyhow, this therapist told me I wasn’t “delegating” enough, and gave me an assignment: take one thing off my plate, and give it to someone else. So I hired “Mary,” a grandmotherly looking TaskRabbit to do what I’d planned that weekend: sort, bag, and store a mountain of disorganized baby clothes in my kids’ closet.

Hours after Mary had begun, I checked in on her, and oh, boy. Not only had she not organized the clothes, she had thrown them all on the floor in a heap. Then, on top of that, she had dumped out two large toy boxes, and the contents of both kids’ cribs, including the mattresses. There were infant Halloween costumes I could have sworn I gave to Goodwill sitting on the top, like a star on Christmas tree. Finally, and perhaps most inexplicably, she had taken the pictures off the wall and leaned them against the pile.

The resulting heap was taller than Mary, and looked like some sort of ceremonial offering, or perhaps a display in a toy store run by a doom metal band.

Mary also appeared to be packing her bag to leave.

“Uh, Mary..?” I said.

Noticing me at last, Mary said, “Hey Mama,” and hit me with her most nurturing smile. Then she walked over and put both of her hands on my shoulders. “I saw how stressed you seemed, and I wanted to do a little ‘something extra’ for you by cleaning the whole room instead of just the clothes. Then I just plain ran out of time!”

She said that she was sorry, but she had to leave to go to another job, and that I’d have to “take the wheel” from there.

Then, she hugged me.

“Please don’t give me a bad review for this,” she said into my hair.

“Well, of course that happened,” said my therapist the next week. “For a good organizer, you’ve got to spend some real money.”

Carrie, Psychic, hired via a Friend of a Friend

In 2018, I was cleaning out a storage space in our house when I found several very old photographs of a beautiful, sad-looking woman.

Two years ago we’d bought the house, which had been built almost a century before, and while I hadn’t seen a ghost in it, I’d definitely had that “people have been here” feeling you get in, like, historical societies or old cemeteries or other places where I force my children to listen to me read plaques.

It goes without saying, but, finding pictures of a beautiful, sad-looking woman stuffed in a crevice is a fairly good indication that you are about to be “Insidious”-ed.

And of course, even flimsy evidence of a haunting meant one thing: the end of me farting or having sex in my own home. I mean, probably not the END-end, but, I’d have to at least yell out, “Please don’t watch me do this!” first, which seemed like it could get old.

When I told my friend, Walshie, about this, she told me about a friend of hers who had just moved into a great old house, too, when her toddler son began complaining that a floating man with no legs was standing in the doorway of his bedroom at night.

This friend had hired a woman named “Carrie” who, for a fee, would perform a small ceremony, in which she’d address the deceased people who’d lived in the house before, and gently ask them to leave. Here’s where I somewhat redundantly remind you that I live in Los Angeles.

When I texted Carrie, she sounded enthusiastic about taking the job, to put it mildly; she told me that she could -- nay, felt she must -- come to my house the next day.

Now, I feel the need to point out that I was between jobs, had a second new baby, and was feeling a little stir crazy. I had nothing much going on aside from caring for two babies and ranting to my poor husband about the existence of a new TV show called “God Friended Me.”

Carrie showed up at my house looking and acting appropriately woo-woo. She was in her mid-fifties, and wore lots of florals, and told me a bit about how she “communicates with spirit,” just like in that old psychic reality show on TLC. You know, the one where that gay tween lied to grieving widows.

I left Carrie to her task, and I was just beginning to wonder if I should have gotten an estimate beforehand when I began to hear her “speaking in tongues.” I don’t know if you’ve seen someone do this, but, it’s very funny at first, and then very, very scary. Think of an episode of Widow’s Bay without the team of writers and self-awareness.

After wandering through my house, for a long, long time, she grabbed a stack of index cards and post-it notes from my desk and began to have what was either part of her process or a full psychotic break.

She could see “demons everywhere” in my house, and in between shouting at them and banging on the walls, she started writing “Demon!!!!” on post-its and then taping them to our things: My son’s stuffed T-rex, some body wash, a particularly breathtaking Mexican restaurant bird painting that I cared about very much, and more.

I messaged the friend of a friend who’d referred Carrie to me and asked if this had been her experience ('“No? Definitely not?”). Finally I told Carrie that this had all been very helpful, but that I needed her to “wrap things up,” regardless of whether all of the demons had been dispatched. Preferably before my husband got back from LA Fitness to witness all of this.

“Your husband needs me even more than you!” she said, slapping the walls some more. “There is a malevolent spirit that follows him!”

Normally I’d make some kind of joke like, “I’ve noticed that, especially after he has a meatball hoagie,” but I was genuinely uneasy at this point. Who knows why? I wish I could say that I was kind but firm to this person. But, because I am a coward AND an idiot, it took me a long, long time to get her out of my house and back into her Kia Soul.

I know what you’re thinking. A professional exorcist from Glendale? How could that person have mental health issues? I guess what they say is true: you never know what someone is going through until they’re trying to tape a post-it note that says “HELL BEAST!” to your husband’s golf clubs. Later, she sent me a Venmo request for $570.

And yes, before you ask, I always tip.

* If you don’t have several kids under ten, the “why” and “how” of a pie fight might not be immediately clear to you. Let me explain: long car ride, lax parenting, pie.