Not So Model Home - By David James Page 0,17

listing? I knew she was crazy the moment she walked into my open house two months ago.”

“The lipstick?” he replied. “A telltale sign if there ever was one. Normal people can put theirs on and manage to hit most of their lips.”

“I think she’s better suited for living under a bridge instead of in a mid-century house. I don’t know why we took this listing,” I added exasperatedly.

“Money? Penance?”

“Alex, you forget that I’m Catholic. Life is penance.”

“I never forget that you were raised Catholic because you remind me daily.”

“That’s because I suffer mental anguish from it every day of my life.”

“That was almost thirty years ago. It’s time to move on, Amanda.”

“I can’t. It’s not just mental trauma. It’s physical. Look at my hands. I still have ruler marks from when Sister Gerzaniks hit me because I colored Jesus’s face black in second-grade Sunday school.”

“Black?”

“The sister told us Jesus lived in the Middle East, where there are deserts and a lot of sun. So I figured Jesus would really be tan at the very least, and since someone had used all the burnt sienna crayons in the box, I used black.”

“Sister Gerzaniks was a racist.”

“She was. She pointed to a picture of Jesus, then a crucifix on the wall, and asked me if his face looked black to me.”

“And what did you say?”

“I said that was just one artist’s conception of what Jesus could have looked like.”

“You did not. You couldn’t have been more than eight.”

“What could I say, Alex? She was towering over me and had the dreaded ruler in her hand. The one stained red from all the blood. Before I knew it, she brought it down on my hands. I’ll never be a hand model again.”

“Did you tell your mother about this? This is physical abuse.”

“I did.”

“And what did she say?”

“She said I probably deserved it. Real supportive.”

“Did anyone tell Sister Gerzaniks that there is absolutely no description of Jesus in the Bible, so every painting or sculpture is completely manufactured. It all depends on the artist. It’s not like we had a yearbook to look at.”

“No one looks good in their high-school picture, Alex—except you. Imagine, Jesus with acne.”

“The Holy pustule.”

“We’re supposed to be made in God’s image, if you believe the Bible.”

“Amanda, if there was a God, do you think he would run around looking like Paris Hilton?”

“So remind me again, Alex, why we have this listing? It’s overpriced, the seller is psychotic, and no one is buying any homes.”

Alex looked at me as if to say, y-e-s?

There it was, staring me in the face like an oversized sty. The Great Recession that was really a Depression, but nobody wanted to name it that because it was too scary. But you couldn’t ignore it any more than you could a crack whore in your living room. It all started on Wall Street, with stock brokerages creating financial vehicles from borrowed overseas money with no wheels on them, lending money out to anyone who could successfully fog a mirror, to homeowners who bought houses at artificially inflated prices, then took out home equity loans with the false equity they had in their homes and spent it on masochistically ugly home improvements, more speculative housing buys, or boob jobs and cigarette boats capable of running down swimmers at over 100 miles an hour. It was a worldwide clusterfuck. It all was going along very nicely until the participants ran out of lube. Then things got uglier than an Amish fashion show.

Yes, we Realtors had our fine, manicured hands up to the third joints in this mess. We sold these overinflated houses by the thousands and made money like South American drug dealers. We lived like them too. Almost everyone was driving BMWs or Mercedes. The poorer agents drove Lexuses. All this wealth and fine living didn’t go unnoticed either. Soon, everyone was getting into the business. Waitresses, school teachers, interior designers, followed by the just plain stupid and inept, while the corrupt brought up the rear. They exploded out of nowhere like a squeezed zit, bloating the ranks of agents while the State of California struggled to keep up with those applying. After all, all you had to do was have a car and a Department of Real Estate license. You didn’t have to build a database of leads, follow up on them, do mailing, make phone calls, and build a business plan. And like Santa Claus, we all believed the lie, believing that home values were