The real househusband of New Jersey

The househusband's best friend

I’m a househusband.

Now, when I say that I don’t mean that I gave up my career to tend for my children (I have no children). What I mean is that I am, quite literally, a husband inside a house. A house spouse.

It’s not by choice you see, I haven’t willingly turned my back on the world of work. It’s just that when you come to ‘merica on a fiancée visa (which takes around a year to secure), get married, become a permanent resident and then apply for a work permit, things don’t just happen instantly. There is paperwork to be done, photocopies to be made, questions to be answered. Questions like these:

Have you EVER been a member of, or affiliated in any way with, the Communist party or any other totalitarian party?

Do you plan to practice polygamy in the United States?

Have you ever called for, incited, committed, assisted helped with or otherwise participated in the killing of any person?

Have you EVER been a member of, or affiliated in any way with Boyz ll Men?

When all is said and done it takes the average newlywed immigrant 3 months to secure a work permit. And that’s a long time to be indoors.

***

Living as a househusband can be a discombobulating experience. The extended periods spent dwelling indoors and the absence of natural light can easily lead to the stay-at-home spouse losing track of time. You see, the indoor man is not tethered to temporal measurements as, in his domain, time has no real meaning. Instead he is bound to the great Biological Clock – it’s either before breakfast, before lunch, before dinner or after dinner. And then it’s time to sleep. The househusband is governed by his natural urges and things that no big or little hand can ever point to.

Handily, television is also there to place a hand on the rudder and steer the inside man through these clockless days. He wakes up and sees that Live! With Kelly is on. A giggling skeleton with hair extensions. Then it’s time for the Rachael Ray show. Why is she hell-bent on adding cheese to everything? Next it’s The View. Whoopi Goldberg? Is that really you? Why aren’t you telling jokes or singing gospel numbers? And then, woosh, the morning is done. He’s been sat there for hours, motionless as a mannequin, arse cheeks indented in the couch. Maybe later he can rise up on his hind legs and empty the dishwasher or make a token effort at vacuuming. In some extreme circumstances he might even brave the elements and venture outside to empty the garbage.

You think I’m a lazy b*****d now, don’t you? Well, it’s easy to sit there and judge. It’s far harder to actually just sit there.

Here’s the thing – paradigms are shifting and, in this day and age, it’s getting more and more acceptable for the man around the house to be, well, just a man around the house. Post-war society, bombed to buggery, hungry and desperate, was quick to hack down gender barriers and allow women to flood into the workplace where they gradually began to replace men (slower, lazier, more hairy). It was in this petri dish that the househusband gradually grew. The man, no longer the automatic breadwinner, had to learn to go to the supermarket and buy bread to turn into sandwiches. Perhaps master some other rudimentary cooking skills as well (boiling and toasting mainly).

***

And so, in the spirit of househusbandry, I have started teaching myself how to cook. And I actually mean proper cooking here – not just plonking a chicken breast in a pan and pouring a bottle of sauce over it. Really making stuff from scratch.

Much to my surprise I have found that I actually really enjoy it. Cookery is, in a homely and not-very-avant-garde-way, a bit like art – you start with a blank canvas, choose the materials you want and then set about creating something. The key difference is that, for the most part, the end result is edible.

And it’s in the kitchen where the househusband really gets a chance to assert his masculinity – I cook exactly like a man. How? Well, like a lot of men I always think that I know best and have a real aversion to following instructions or taking advice. This manifests itself in a variety of terrifying ways when armed with a spatula.

I don’t follow recipes at all really. Sorry, but did Columbus discover the New World by following directions? No. He set sail and went with his gut instinct. Left a bit. Now right. A little more. Up past Brazil. It’s the same when I cook. In my kitchen, I’m God – a vengeful, wrathful, jealous God who takes a really dim view of false prophets (I’m looking at you here Jamie Oliver).

Picture me stood there in my apron, palms caked in flour, fearlessly eschewing all known wisdom, punching knowledge in the face and making an enemy of the cookbook. I am a brave alchemist, measuring my flour by eye and adding beer to stuff. Sometimes cheese too.

The end results have been mixed. Last week I made a tomato soup that my wife politely ate. It’s nice honey, I do like it. Honestly I do … but is it meant to be that colour?

Here’s the recipe.

Not Jamie Oliver’s Tomato soup

Ingredients

Onion – a big one

Garlic – one clove

Carrot – a big one (obviously)

Basil – you just want the stalks chopped finely

Olive oil – you can never use too much

Tomato – 1kg (about 5) super-ripe ones

Chicken stock – a litre or so

Miscellaneous seasoning stuff – as much as you want

Directions

Get the garlic and the carrot and the basil and the onion and throw them (violently) into a pot with some olive oil. Stir them. Don’t let the b******s burn or you’ll f**k up the whole thing. Just gently let them simmer away for about 20 minutes (with the lid on, obviously).

While the veg are simmering you want to get the tomatoes and make little X incisions on their arses. That’s the end that hasn’t got a stalk coming out of it. Drop them into boiling water for 30 seconds (don’t worry, they won’t mind). Then you peel back the skin using the flaps created by the X (we don’t mutilate tomatoes for no good reason here). Warning – peeling tomatoes is an ungodly pursuit. Cut the naked tomatoes up. Dice their flesh. Feel like a serial killer.

Add the tomatoes and the chicken stock to the veggies. Let that simmer with the lid on for another 20 minutes. You don’t have to be exact though – all numbers in recipes are arbitrary and should be disregarded accordingly.

When the 20 minutes is up you get to the look-at-me-I’m-Hannibal-Lector part. Get a handheld blender, fire the f****r up and let rip. Massacre the pulp, obliterate every stray morsel of tomato flesh until everything is diced into oblivion.

If you want you can then add chorizo or parmesan. Jamie Oliver doesn’t say to do that, but f**k him.

Coming to ‘merica

Newark Airport. Border control. 11.1.11

“I wasn’t able to fill in the declarations form. I didn’t have a pen.”

“What were yu doin’ fu nine owas?” The customs officer responds gruffly in an accent as deep and thick as the soupy wetlands scattered across northeast New Jersey.

I shrug my shoulders apologetically and wonder if I should just come clean and answer his question honestly. The truth is that I passed the nine hours of my flight crowbarred into the foetal position because the f**kwit in front of me fully reclined his seat as soon as we’d taken off (I would have done the same but I consider it bad manners to drive my headrest into a fellow traveller’s skull). Crammed into this miserable seating arrangement, and for such a long period of time, I soon realised that ruthlessly ransacking the booze trolley would be the only sensible way to endure this journey. And so, tray table flipped down and jammed into my navel, I sat slugging mini-beers as the Atlantic zipped by below. When I finally trundled off the plane, half-drunk on free Warsteiner, I had totally forgotten about the customs declaration form crumpled in my pocket.

“Um, it totally slipped my mind. I’m really sorry,” I say, meekly. “May I borrow your pen?” I nod towards the pen on the kiosk’s desktop.

“Nah. I don’t gotta pen,” he says, ignoring the one lying next to his hairy knuckles. I look at the pen, then up to his face, all monobrow and malice. Doesn’t he notice it? Perhaps it’s a family heirloom and he’s just unwilling to hand it out to strange looking foreigners. I peer over the counter in search of an additional pen and notice that he has a handgun holstered to his side. F**k me, this man is armed! He’s armed and capable of blasting my head to smithereens before I’ve even stepped foot upon American soil. But still, I really need that pen.

“What about this one.” I nod towards his pen. “Can I borrow it?”

“Nah. This is my pen. I need it.” He taps his finger impatiently, starting to look even more pissed off. I wonder if he’d shoot me if I tried to grab it.

“I’ll just be a second. I promise. I write very quickly, I assure you officer.” I smile weakly, my hopes of charming him fading fast.

“You gotta go to the back uh the line. Go getta pen from the guy in the red coat. He’s at the endu the line.”

I turn to look back at the line, see it snaking endlessly across the vast expanse of carpet before me, writhing with tracksuited tourists and duty free bags. I’ve come too far to turn back now, waited too long for this moment. One year to get my visa and then one hour in this hell. It’s as if I’m a mountaineer a step away from Everest’s summit, poised at the threshold of glory, told he must return to base camp to retrieve a pen. A pen! There’s no way I’m going to give up that easily.

“Um, please can I have the pen?” I smile hopefully, wondering if politeness will win him over.

“No.” He furrows his brow and jerks his thick bowling ball head towards the back of the line.

***

“Have you got a pen I can borrow?” I ask the man in the red coat at the back of the line.

“You got 50 dollars I can borrow?” He replies.

***

When I finally reach the front of the line for a second time I’m the last person waiting to be seen. I decide to approach a different border patrol officer, thinking that my chances of getting through might be better. I go for a woman, a big haired smiling woman, smiling with those big American snowdrop-white teeth. Until she sees me.

“You gotta go to the next booth.”

I go to the next booth. Inside a stout Hispanic man shakes his head and thumbs towards the next again booth.

At his point I’m starting to wonder if I’m trapped inside some kind of fable and the officer at the third booth will embrace me, praise my perseverance and let me into America.

He doesn’t. Still, I’m thankful because the third officer only half grimaces when he sees me, as if I’m merely a case of mild indigestion rather than a major pain in the arse. I hand him the large white envelope containing all of my visa information that I’ve been clinching under my arm for the past hour or so. He tears it open, tilts his head and levels me with a withering look.

“K1 visa huh.”

“Uh, yes, that’s right.”

He’s giving me a kind of quizzical look now, like I’m a piece of abstract art that he doesn’t fully approve of.

“You like marryin’ a 90-year-old woman or somethin’?”

“Uh, no. No I’m not,” I reply, wondering if I should take this as a joke or if he genuinely suspects me of being a gerontophile.

“How old is she?”

“Uh, 26.”

“Okay. You gotta come with me.”

***

I’m held in a waiting room that seems to be some kind of immigration limbo. I sit on a leather chair, its upholstery mottled and warped by the wringing and gouging of hordes of nervous fingers. The room has two exits, each to the side of a central bank of raised desks where stoic looking customs officers stand like preachers at the pulpit, handing out passports and deliverance.

One of the exits, a narrow corridor to the left, appears to lead to a series of interrogation booths. Intermittent sobs and wails drift down this doomed passageway. At one point a Hispanic woman charges through, ink black mascara tears zigzagging down her cheeks. An officer, face blank as a taxidermist’s tiger, trails after her, shooing her into the women’s toilets. I hear the muffled echo of howling noises and something that sounds like Spanish.

To the right there’s another exit that, presumably, leads to America.

My name is called out. I walk to the bank of desks, trying to look as inconspicuous and law abiding as possible.

“You have 90 days to get married,” the officer says, handing me my passport. “Welcome to America,” he says, ushering me to the exit on the right.