When Dirtlease first bought its parks, the Founder would post long essays about galvanized water pipe and Orangeburg septic pipe. Galvanized pipe rusts and corrodes. Orangeburg, which is tar-infused cardboard, collapses. The posts were meditations on entropy, memory, perception, and the hidden nature of things. The way materials would degrade was a proxy for the impermanence of matter. The fact that more than half a park’s infrastructure is below-ground was a metaphor for the way most of an iceberg is below water, which, in turn, was a metaphor for something else. In 2022, in a fit of cojones, the Founder even compared the way utility lines degrade to the final four lines of Cavafy’s poem about Thermopylae.
That was then. Now, the Founder has outsourced the blog function to a PR firm which uses AI to churn out recycled baby-food-type content, and a busted water line or a clogged toilet is just Tuesday.
Here is a link to a video of a water leak that the Dirtlease staff discovered at the park in northern New York early this week.
Here is a picture of one stage in the repair process:
That park was developed in 1978 by a guy named Stan Hall who owned a manufactured home retailer and transporter in town. Here are some Google reviews of his home retailing business:
TM: From the month late set up, deviation completely from stakes on site, splitting halves, used and mismatched roof, unfinished siding, linoleum without pad, staples and tears in floor, leak from hot water heater, no appliances at delivery…..to the lack of keys, ever, the job was never finished. He placed a lien on the property for a small balance later dismissed as I disclosed the details of the poor workmanship (the laborers were good). Though I loved the house the horrible experience has taken its toll. Avoid at all cost.
UPDATE: I was unable to sell this home because I was never given a Title. My mistake was never doing my research thus being unaware of a title for a manufactured home. He refused calls and hung up repeatedly on me. He said “I have nothing to talk about.”
ST: They quoted me $650 to move a single-wide. When they went to move it they hooked up to it and the axle broke. keep in mind it took them 3 months to even get there to move it when he told me it would be moved in a couple weeks. I asked them to give me a quote to put a new axle under it and to get it moved. After waiting 3 more weeks they never gave me an estimate. I then bought an axle and put it under it and told them it was ready to go. After waiting another month and a half they finally moved it. I knew there would be an additional charge but he told me it was going to cost me another $650 after they moved it. I gave him $300 cash which I had on me and told him I wanted to talk about why he thought it was fair to charge me twice.…. They then placed a lien on my property. I would never recommend somebody to do business with them.
KJ: They moved a house off of a property next to ours and took it upon themselves to drive across our property. Not once did they ask if it would be ok. Now I have ruts through our lawn. Tried calling them to see if they were going to fix it. I never heard anything back.
Stan built the park the way he installed manufactured homes. He used shoddy materials for water and sewer lines. He ran underground electrical cable naked, with no conduit. Pipes and wires run every which-way. When things break – and they do break – you don’t know where they are until you dig them up.
In 2020, Stan delivered a few homes for Dirtlease. The Founder found his work to be lacking. He paid the outstanding bills and cancelled a work-order for the delivery and installation of another single-wide. Insisting that they had a binding executory contract for the work that was not done, Stan sent a bill to the Dirtlease Accounts Payable Department shortly after the work was not done. The GC sent Stan a letter explaining why the balance was not due. Stan continued to send more bills, with interest for the unpaid balance, for the next two years. In 2022, he was diagnosed with inoperable stage four bone cancer. The dunning letters stopped when he entered hospice.
(For some time, The Onion ran a column written by Herbert Kornfeld, an accountant who worked in the Accounts Receivable Department of Midstate Office Supply. Here is Kornfeld introducing The Way of The Receivable:
Whassup, G’s. Yo, check this shit out: Ever since I be testifyin’ about how I be tha Stone-Cold Hardcore Mack Daddy of Midstate Office Supply, all y’all wanna be part of my Accountz Reeceevable posse. Thas cool, but if you wanna run with tha H-Dog, you gots to have skeelz, know what I’m sayin’? You gots to EXECUTE.
Kornfeld had little patience with the bitch-ass bitches in Accounts Payabo. In 2007, he was reported dead in suspicious circumstances. Here is an excerpt from his obituary:
After dropping out of high school, Kornfeld found his niche when freestyle street accountant CPA-ONE took the him under his wing and taught him the ways of the ledger. Later Kornfeld graduated from Eastech Bidness College.
A strong believer in the Accountz Reeceevable code and renowned for his SKEELZ, H-Dog often expressed disdain for “them HR Bitchez” and his natural enemies in “Accountz Payabo,” especially “that wack Judy Metzger, always wearin’ a fool grin an’ pushin’ her muthafukkin’ snickerdoodle cookiez on tha Midstate krew.”
Although nobody from the Accounts Payabo Krew was formally investigated by law enforcement in connection with Kornfeld’s death, their involvement is suspected by certain people at Midstate. Kornfeld’s body was never recovered. There have been reports that he is not dead. Some people say that he has become a woman and is turning tricks in a Nevada brothel. Others say that he leads a crew of Somali pirates, and others say that he is living a quiet life under an assumed identity in Fineview, New York, where he writes a travel column for Crawdaddy Magazine. Mr. Kornfeld – if these rumors are true – if you are still with us – there is always a place for you in the Dirtlease Accounts Receivable Department. If you choose to go over to the dark side, you can head up Accounts Payable. You can do anything that you choose to do in the organization. You can write your own job description and name your compensation package.)
When the Founder travelled to the park in northern New York earlier this week, he found Mike, the manager of the park, digging up some leaky pipes. Stan had used black rubber pipe for the main, instead of PVC. The main had sprung a leak near a riser junction. Mike’s plan was to dig up a run of about fifty feet, to replace the black rubber pipe with Schedule Forty PVC, and to replace the riser with PEX. When the Founder walked up, Mike was operating the excavator arm of the park’s backhoe and Bob, his helper, was in the pit, exposing the pipe and scraping away excess dirt. Bob is ex-Marine Corps, but he is the nicest guy in the world. He votes Democratic and behaves like he blew his mind on acid.
‘Looking Good, buddy’, Bob said to Mike. He put the blade of his shovel on the pipe, to show Mike where it was. ‘Another eighteen inches.’
‘Semper fi’, the Founder said.
‘Do or die’, Bob said.
‘I spoke to Rex this morning’, the Founder said.
Rex is a resident who lives at the end of the park. He has light blue eyes, a strong neck, and a yoga-ball belly. Around his home, he plants flowers, tomatoes and zucchini. For some years, he was the head of public works in a neighboring town. He did some work on the park before Dirtlease bought it, replacing water mains and cleaning sewers. Mike turned off the backhoe, walked over to the Founder and shook his hand hello.
‘He told me that, when he dug up the water line under 3A, he found that Stan used vacuum cleaner line for the main’, the Founder said.
‘I believe it.’
‘And under 5C, it was washing machine flex hose.’
‘Nothing in this park makes sense.’
Talking about digging made the Founder think about money. That gave him a headache and made him imagine his own burial in a potters’ field. ‘Only one guy knows where everything is, and that is Stan, and he is dead’, the Founder said. ‘He took it to his grave.’
The Founder remembered the line Only the dead know Brooklyn. The sentence is the title of a short story by Tom Wolfe, published in the New Yorker in the late 1930s. The Founder had never read the story because Wolfe’s prose is too purple for his taste. For some time, he had thought that the sentence implied that Brooklyn was dangerous, and that to know it was to come into contact with a fatal force. He was already out of college and living on his own when he learned that he was wrong. In fact, the sentence means that the subway system in Brooklyn is so damn complicated that you need a whole life to get to know it. By the time you know it, you are dead. He reflected that he had ridden the G train as a very young man, to the garage where he picked up the taxi he drove. He had ridden it fifteen years later, when his young son, who he was taking to school, puked on his nine-hundred-dollar Hong Kong suit. You can’t ride the same subway line twice, he thought. The people and the graffiti are constantly changing, and you are a different person each time you pay the fare.
‘Only the dead know Agrestic Estates’, the Founder said. Mike looked at him like he was, well, strange. Bob continued to clear dirt off the pipe.
‘What do you mean’, Mike said.
‘I mean, it is a fucking underground spaghetti tangle. If you live long enough, you will dig up everything and put it where it is supposed to be. Until then, finding a sewer line or a water main is a tossup.’
‘That is when I will retire to my island’, Mike said.
‘And I will die in the poor house’, the Founder said.
Bob kept quiet and continued to shovel dirt away from the pipe. The day was very hot and humid – too hot to even stand outside comfortably, let alone shovel dirt or do a twenty-mile ruck – and he was sweating heavily. The Founder reflected that Bob might end up like Milton, the nebbishy co-worker in the 1999 movie Office Space. Milton is the guy you don’t want to be seated next to at the Christmas party. He is the guy who sucks the charisma out of a room and leaves you bored for months after chatting for five minutes. But in the movie, he is the one who ends up getting the embezzled money and burning the office to the ground. When I am drooling on myself and begging the government for Medicaid checks – the Founder thought – Bob will be living it up in Panama with a few Marine Corps buddies, surrounded by hot young Latina chicks and lighting his cigar with hundred-dollar bills. And when he finally meets his maker, he will be able to tell Stan Hall what we all think of him, because he is the guy who spent his life in the pit, exposing Stan’s shoddy work.