The Ken Archetype I shaved off a weeks’ growth of facial hair today. I’m on the weekly schedule now not because it looks good, but because it’s easy and it doesn't matter what I look like. While shaving, I was reminded a little of Ken, who probably also stopped shaving because of the effort involved. Ken didn’t look good with facial hair either, but he had stopped shaving entirely. In fact, Ken looked a lot like St. Nick. Except that he didn’t have toys for little children, didn’t wear red, was skinny, and wasn’t particularly jolly. He drove around a nine hundred year-old Subaru instead of a sleigh, and Austin bears almost no resemblance to the North Pole. So, Ken’s beard looked a lot like Santa’s.

This is relevant because I feel a sort of gravitational force pulling me towards Ken’s way of being. It’s gradual, but it’s always there. It’s more than the beard. It’s the whole attitude towards appearance, my aging Subaru, and perhaps also my expectations for the future. It’ll be thirty more years before I can really play the part with panache, but I’m off to a good start.

Ken was my landlord for two years. I lived in Austin with my sister, in a rental house that’s now in a very chic part of town. At the time, it was an ok place to live, and when Ken and his business partner, the silent and invisible Robert, bought it the area was strictly a rental neighborhood. Lots of homes built right after WWII that could be cute, but that needed a couple of decades of work to catch them up on all the deterioration. The yards were landscaped with weeds that had grown in stature until they were trees; still trash, but so large that nobody wanted to mess with removing them.

Ken was not a great landlord to rent from. Ken raised our rent $200 twice, forcing us out of the house the second time. He never fixed anything. Most annoyingly, when the washing machine destroyed itself in a spray of water and electrical arcing, he said that the washer and dryer were only extras and not actually covered in the lease. Whole sections of the linoleum floor in the kitchen had come loose, but we kept the loose squares in the kitchen. They slid easily over the tiles that the glue still held in place, and you sort of skated across the kitchen if you stepped on a loose one just right.

There was no consideration at all of the paint the house desperately needed or plugging the gaping cracks around the windows and doors. The cold air rushed out in the summer and came back in in January and February, like the snowbird that Ken should have been. My sister and I never complained, though. We were both slovenly, and we housed pets that were more or less feral in the house. If it was Ken’s fault the outside of the house looked like a flophouse (and Ken one of the semi-homeless residents), we had turned the interior into a communal zoo. The wild fluctuations in temperature and the intermittent appliances were very low on our list of concerns, so long as the building itself held together.

All that being said, Ken was a good guy. He was quiet and reserved but friendly. He would roll up unannounced in his ancient wagon, and then come inside and talk for a while before doing whatever it was he made the trip to do. He was always up on current events in Austin and the legal implications of them, as the events that interested him typically involved the ‘new’ Austin people with money coming in and displacing the poorer, earthier ‘old’ Austin people. He once noticed a poster of a Frida Kahlo painting in my sister’s room and gave me a lengthy dissertation on her life and the meaning of that painting, with all the necessary side references to Diego Rivera. He was friendly and confident with my sister’s dog, who weighed in at 110 lbs but looked much bigger because of her thick coat and who barked ferociously at everyone who came to the door. In short, Ken was a welcome guest even though, as a landlord, he didn’t treat us well.

What interests me about Ken is that he was obviously capable of so much more than maintaining a dozen rent houses. I would bet he had a couple of degrees to his credit and a respectable library of books he’d read. He could have cleaned up a bit, put on a suit, and passed for almost anything. So why was he content with such a humble existence? Was he content? It is entirely possible that he and Robert casually bought a couple of rent houses, Robert financing them and Ken doing the actual work, and gradually the business became Ken’s occupation. He did it for a couple of years, and then turned around to find all the other doors had quietly closed on him while he was re-roofing a house. I don’t really know how Ken became Ken, but I’m fairly certain the 20-year old he once was had held aspirations that the 55-year old not yet realized and will never realize. I hope that the 55-year old has written off some of those aspirations as unworthy of the effort or empty goals, but I doubt they can all be dismissed so easily.

I said that we liked Ken, but I also feel a certain kinship with him in our business acumen. In 2000, after Ken and Robert jacked our rent up to the point where we couldn’t justify staying, they sold that house and all their other real estate in Austin. They had been in the market for a long time and had made respectable money on all their properties. They decided it was time to claim their winnings and get out. As Ken put it, “We’ve had our cake, and we’re not sticking around for ice cream.” That might have been a saying in the dim corner of England where he hailed from. Almost immediately after they sold everything, Austin real estate shot skyward in the biggest real estate boom the city’s ever experienced. God bless you, Ken, but we're just not lucky.  ¶ 10:14 AM