My Neighbor Is Going as a Bungalow

"Hold the porch," Ruthie said, and handed me the porch.

It was a slab of corrugated cardboard, about the width of a dining chair, painted the exact chalky turquoise of a house that has been rented to six consecutive bands. She had hot-glued popsicle-stick balusters along the front edge. Three of them leaned. She said the lean was intentional.

"Nobody on Rainey ever fixed a railing," she said. "They just put a cooler in front of it."

This was Thursday night in her driveway off South Congress, under a carport light that buzzes in B-flat. Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, which means Rainey Street will hold roughly the population of Waco in sexy-pirate form. Ruthie plans to walk into the middle of it dressed as the thing that used to be there.

Construction

She has been building since the second week of October. Base materials: four banana boxes from H-E-B, a cereal box for the chimney, a roll of duct tape she called "the structural engineer," and a window unit air conditioner made from a Kleenex box with a pipe cleaner drip line. She glued a small blue bead to the end of the pipe cleaner so it looks like it's dripping on whoever stands next to her. That's period accuracy. Every bungalow on that street had a window unit dripping onto somebody's boots in the side yard.

The front door is a flap she cut with a box cutter. It opens. Inside the flap, she wrote "BYOB" in Sharpie, because she is a historian.

On the roof, she stapled a tiny strand of Christmas lights that run on two AA batteries. I asked why Christmas lights on Halloween. She looked at me like I'd asked why water was wet.

"Those lights went up in 2004," she said. "Nobody ever took them down. That's the whole point."

She also built a pecan tree. It's a tomato cage wrapped in brown paper grocery bags, with green tissue leaves and one plastic squirrel zip-tied to a branch. The tree attaches to her left shoulder with a camera strap. It wobbles when she walks and blocks about thirty percent of her vision, which, again, is accurate to the experience of parking under one.

Total spent: $11.40, most of it on glue sticks. An inflatable T. rex costume at the party store on Ben White runs about seventy dollars and doesn't include a porch.

The Problem With Walking

The bungalow covers her from shoulders to knees. She can walk, but only the way you'd walk carrying a love seat up a staircase: a sideways shuffle, elbows out, apologizing. I pointed out this might be tough in a crowd.

"It's fine," she said. "The original ones couldn't move either. That's how they got them."

That was the only grim thing she said all night. She said it while adjusting the squirrel.

The Test Run

Around nine we walked the costume down to the corner to see if it would hold up in the wind left over from Wednesday's norther. It did, mostly. The chimney fell off once and I had to retape it, which made me, for about ninety seconds, a roofing contractor.

A guy in a quarter-zip was walking a doodle past the bus stop. He stopped. He circled her. He looked at the porch the way people at an estate sale look at a Le Creuset priced at four dollars.

"Is it on a lot?" he asked.

Ruthie said it was on her.

"Because the lot's the play," he said, and walked away, and then turned around and asked if she'd take cash.

I swear this happened, or close enough that I'd swear to it at a council meeting, which is a lower bar.

Two minutes later, a woman coming out of the taco trailer asked if she could "do something fun with the roof." She was holding a cup of horchata. She said it like she was asking to borrow a pen. By "something fun," it turned out she meant a deck. With string lights. And a "small, intentional bar program."

"It already has string lights," Ruthie said.

"Different string lights," said the woman, and that's the closest anybody has ever come to explaining Austin real estate in four words.

Rezoning

Back in the driveway, Ruthie got quiet. She took off the bungalow and set it on the hood of her Corolla and stared at it the way you'd stare at a dog that bit someone.

"They're going to want it taller," she said.

I told her that was paranoid. Then I went inside for a beer, and when I came back out she had a second banana box taped vertically on top of the roof and was drawing little rectangular windows on it in silver paint pen. Forty of them. Then sixty. Then she started labeling floors.

"What are you doing?"

"Mixed use," she said, not looking up. "Ground-floor retail. That's the porch. The porch is retail now."

She drew a tiny sign on the porch that read COMING SOON: ARTISAN. Just "artisan." No noun. She said the noun is decided later, after the lease, depending on what's trending.

Then she taped a third box on top of the second one.

By midnight the costume stood about seven feet tall. The original bungalow, the turquoise one with the leaning balusters and the dripping AC and the 2004 Christmas lights, was still in there, technically. You could see it if you bent down and looked at the bottom eighteen inches. She'd preserved it the way developers preserve things: as a façade, with a plaque. Her plaque was an index card that read "HISTORIC CHARACTER RETAINED." The pecan tree was gone. She'd put it in the recycling bin, squirrel and all. "Easement issue," she said.

Saturday

Here is her plan for tomorrow night. She will carry the tower costume to Rainey Street in the back of her Corolla with the seats folded down and the hatch bungeed half shut. She will park, which on Halloween on Rainey is its own horror movie, and the parking will cost more than the costume did several times over. She will get out. She will put on seven feet of cardboard.

Then she will try to walk into a bar that used to be a house, wearing a house that has become a tower.

It won't fit through the door. She knows it won't. I asked her what happens then and she said she'll just stand on the sidewalk all night, blocking foot traffic, casting a shadow over the line, while people take photos of her and say "oh my God, that's so Austin" and nobody can quite explain what about it is so Austin.

"That's the costume," she said. "That's the whole costume."

I asked if she'd ever wear the plain bungalow version again. Just the turquoise box. The porch with the bad railing. The drip.

She thought about it for a long time. The carport light buzzed in B-flat.

"I'd love to," she said. "But I couldn't afford to live in it."