Movin’ to Monterey…..

When you love the Pacific Ocean as we do and you realize you can live there simply by transferring within your company and just switching the territory you cover…you do it.

Changes were being made at my husband’s place of employment and there was going to be an opening in the San Francisco Bay territory.
We talked about it for maybe 20 seconds and then jumped on it.

We had a house to sell before we could go and we had to move fast to find a place to live.
His territory would cover from as low as Salinas and as high as San Francisco so we settled on Monterey, kinda in the middle.
Actually we wanted Pacific Grove, a beautiful, kind of secret little Hamlet that extends out to the furthest point into the Pacific along the entire California coast, but the rentals there were non-existent.

This was a time when the housing market was practically closed.
Maybe you’ve never experienced anything like this but it was a nightmare.

We had one month to sell our house and four week-ends to drive to Monterey and find a rental before the new job began.

Saturday mornings we’d head for the coast, a 3-hour drive.
We’d arrive early enough to get the local newspaper hot off the press, park near a phone booth, read what was available and with a bag full of change, we’d start calling.
Yep, a bag full of change.
This was before cell phones were in the palms of every living human being, if you can believe there ever was such a time.

Rentals were less than slim.
If we were lucky, there were maybe six possibilities for us.
I mean, there were more than six listed in the paper, but most times our calls were met with the four words we hated hearing; “already rented” or the frustrating ones, “no pets.”
Really? No pets? Rotten, miserable kids but no pets?

Sometimes we’d actually get an opportunity to view a rental but we quickly learned we weren’t alone in the search.
We’d stand in a line outside the house, along with 20 or more people and couple by couple we were ushered through.
Dumps, mostly all old dumps and the rent they were asking (demanding) was insulting but…..location, location, location, right?
One place in particular that I’ll bet rats wouldn’t even nest in was a vision I’ll never forget.
We were ushered in the front door, given quick glances at the rooms and out the back door.
The current renter was sitting in the teeny living room in his underwear reading the paper.
He never flinched.

Every rental application cost from $35 to $50 and it took almost an hour to fill out and answer all the stupid questions.
We tried making copies but that didn’t work because everyone’s application form was different.
Oh how bad I wanted to tell them what I thought of their ridiculous forms but instead we smiled and thanked them for the opportunity to waste our time, assured them we’d be their greatest renters ever and could we kiss their butt on the way out the door?

So, along with a bagful of change for the phone booth, we were dealing with a dwindling balance in our check book, writer’s cramps and nerves right on the edge of explosion.

People bid on the rents going from the asking price higher and higher.

I cried every week-end on the 3-hour trip home.

Our Monterey trips were coming up with nothing.
We’d have rented a tent if there’d been one available.…on the beach of course, and allowed dogs.

We got close once.
The address was 1111 and it was half a block from the water.
We were in the running but lost to another couple because their two dogs were smaller than ours!
I hope those two little dogs peed all over and ate through the carpeting!!!

At home in Sacramento we had another drama going on.
Like all Realtors, ours wanted to sell so she was doing her best.
We’d get a buyer, we’d lose a buyer…a horrible emotional roller coaster.

And one day it happened, a serious buyer.
Now it was turning real and it hit me.
We were abandoning our cute little house nestled in the trees, blocks from Folsom Lake and full of wonderful fun memories with our kids and friends.
Sadness and excitement at the same time, what’s a word for that? Sadment? Yes, sadment…I was sadment.

We took days off in the middle of the week and drove to Monterey.
No different than the week-ends, lines of people and bidding on dumps.

We laughed at ourselves because in the beginning, we had a street map of Monterey. We drove around with the map and a marker, got familiar with the different areas and wrote notes on the map of places we’d like to live and places we would refuse to settle in.
By the end, the places that said “shit-hole area” looked real good to us!

Just when I was considering jumping off the next bridge, a miracle!
A rental was placed right in our lap.
No credit app, lines or bidding to deal with.
It was ours if we wanted it.
IF WE WANTED IT? Who’s feet do we kiss?

We were given the address and although on our first trip there, we weren’t able to get inside, we were told to go take a look to see if we were interested.
Interested?
We’d take it sight unseen.

It was on a corner lot.
A big corner lot.
It kinda needed some cleaning up and maybe a coat of paint would help?

It was surrounded by what barely fits being described as a wood picket fence; half the wood slats were missing and lying around on the ground and the other half were barely being held up by rusted old nails and kinda just dangling like a wood chime.
There was no grass just all dirt in the front and side yards but….. OK wait, I’m gonna be honest here……
It was a dump!
The true definition of a old beat up, run down, crappy lookin’ dump.
But we were now the beggers that couldn’t be choosers.

We pulled up on the driveway along the side of the house that led to the back yard and parked in front of a garage that looked like it was built during the Civil War, along with the fence.
The front gate was leaning up against the fence. We found an opening, held our breath and carefully squeezed through.
We immediately discovered why there was no grass, just mounds and mounds of dirt and holes.
Gophers!
This would be our first experience with the cute little diggers that could ruin a yard in no time flat BUT…..not our last. (But that’s another story!)

We tried to watch where we were walking but the holes were everywhere. My foot slipped into one and my leg went down almost knee deep.
The rest of our time walking around that yard was like walking knowing there were land mines planted everywhere.

The blinds were closed on the front window but we found a side window that allowed us to peek.
There we stood, side by side, window peeking, taking it in and not saying a word.

We could see from the living room straight through to the kitchen.

The walls looked kinda crusty but hey a coat of paint fixes everything, right?
There was a white brick fireplace on one wall…well, wait…I think it was suppose to be white but it was black with smoke that must have escaped the fireplace for years with no one giving it any attention.
I wondered how much scrubbing it would take to get it white again.

The wood floor in the living room looked like maybe Polo games were played in there with horses wearing football cleats on all four hoofs.
If there’d ever been any finish on that floor, it wasn’t there now.
My initial thought was clean it and hide it with a big area rug.
There was a tall external heater on the wall opposite the front door.
You know, the kind in old motels from the 50’s, you see ‘em in movies sometimes.
We had no idea at that time what a bad spot that heater was in.
The kitchen had big, tall, white cupboards and the floor looked like the linoleum at one time had a print on it but like the living room wood floor, the Polo game had stomped in there too.

We were quiet for what seemed like a long time and finally my husband pulled back from the window and said…..”We don’t have to stoop this low.”
I pulled back thinking to myself….”don’t be so sure, Chuckie!”
Years later, we still laugh at those famous words.

It was a big back yard with a long, narrow, strange-looking dilapidated building situated along the back fence.
We had no idea what it was.
It had windows across the front and a door.
We tried to get inside but the door was locked.
The windows were covered with cardboard so we couldn’t even get a peek.
There was a big yellow fire hydrant smack in the middle of the dirt, gopher-holed back-yard.
The garage? We wondered what kept it standing.
We’d seen enough.

While we were in town, we looked for more rentals. None.

On the 3-hour ride back home we knew our time was up.
We contacted the owner, and tried to sound thrilled and upbeat when we told him we’d love to rent his dump. We knew we should feel grateful and we were… but it took a whole bottle of wine to get there.

The owner, a young man who worked at my husbands place of employment forgot to tell us that there was a guy living in that back building and would we mind just letting him live there?
Think about that one for a minute, as if things weren’t bad enough…..maybe a killer would be living in our backyard.
We considered his request for maybe 5 seconds and then shook our heads NO.
That’s when we named the place The Norman Bates Motel.… I was convinced it was Norman who lived back there.

Next, the deal fell through on our house.
That was my breaking point, I cried for the next few days.
My sweet husband who always looks on the bright, positive side of life assured me it would all work out and, it did.
We renegotiated with the greedy buyers, gave them what they wanted and the house was sold.

We moved into the little house on the corner the week of the Monterey Jazz Festival, which was held directly behind the house across the street from us at the Fair Grounds.

My daughter and I scrubbed on our hands and knees for a week to the sounds of Jazz music and singers belting out and sounding like they were at our front door.
I’m not a real fan of Jazz music and there was no turning the volume down.
I scrubbed and cried to the beat of some nerve-wracking sounds.

That was not the worst of it.

The very first day there we realized that smack behind the Norman Bates Motel was the air strip for the airport where planes took off and landed.
I’m telling you, I could see the pilots as they approached their landing strip which lined up perfectly with the long driveway leading to the ready-to-fall-apart garage.

By the way, the entire time we lived there, we looked in that garage only once and never went near it again.
If Norman Bates lived in that back building, I KNOW his mother was in that garage somewhere in her rocking chair! And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, well…..you’re lucky!

I guess every neighborhood has a Nosy Neighbor. Ours was smack across the street. She told us the reason the fire hydrant was in our backyard was because that property was suppose to be part of the airport but something happened and plans were changed.

President Clinton arrived at that airport via a helicopter one day. I was watching this event on TV until I heard it hovering over our house sounding like it was going to land on the roof. I ran outside and there he was, the president of the United States flying over our little house and I could see him!

Speaking of the roof.
My nephew climbed up there one day to see why the teenagers next door were continually crawling out their windows and then up to their roof.
It was the ocean… a great view from atop the roof.

I used earthquake putty to keep all the hangings on our walls in place because each time a plane came overhead, everything shook and moved.
The screen covering the wall heater rattled and fell off and on to the floor daily.
We never figured out how to keep that from happening so if we were in the room, we’d run to the screen and hold it till the plane landed.

Oh, and every time we opened the front door, the wind from outside blew out the pilot light on that heater.

We lived right on the edge of town where if you turned left you headed toward Fisherman’s Wharf, Cannery Row and beautiful Pacific Grove.
If you turned right…well, kinda not a turn we wanted to take.
One night after first moving in and not knowing any better, we turned right to a fast food place.
We ordered our burgers and stood at the counter and watched the kid who was cooking them…..in between wiping his nose with his ungloved hands, coughing and then blowing his nose in a napkin, he prepared our burgers.
Needless to say, the burgers went into the trash can right outside the door.
That’s when we developed our mantra…..”Don’t turn right.”

We did the best we could to make that little place livable and we stayed for 14 long months.
We practiced The Secret and acted as if we lived in Pacific Grove which was our goal.
We did everything in Pacific Grove; shopping, banking, post office, restaurants, Ocean walks and exploring the area.

We were still in that house the day I learned that someone so close to my heart had died.
I remember calling my husband and asking him to come home and then dropping to the floor when my legs turned to jelly and couldn’t hold me up.
My husband came home with a bouquet of flowers.
I asked him to take me to my favorite part of the Ocean.
I climbed the rocks, sat for a long time trying to make it fit in my mind and then tossed the bouquet out to my other man.

I’m a nurse.
I’ve dealt with death many times over and over. It never gets easy.
I’ve sat and cried with grieving families but this time it was personal and I didn’t know where to put it.

My emotions were running wild. One moment I was wrought with grief, the next full of anger that he was gone and then oftentimes just a feeling of emptiness.

My husband suggested that maybe I should sit and write, as that was my usual mode of dealing with stuff and figuring things out.

And, so I wrote and wrote and wrote and that’s how my story of ACM My Other Man came to be.

My fingertips flew over the keys emptying on to the screen everything I was feeling.
I wrote from morning ‘til night but there were distractions; the planes landing overhead, the smell of cows, chickens and pigs from the nearby fairgrounds and…..the things that went on right next door to us, horrible, horrible unbelievable things but…..that’s REALLY another story!