What not to buy off Craigslist:

• Sex (I’ve heard)
• Gas stoves

A cautionary tale.

The thing about Craigslist is that it goes from being so lucky to so unlucky at breakneck speed.  You’ve narrowed your search, you strike like a cobra, and before you know it, you’re in bumper-to-bumper traffic along 93N with 100lbs. of rattling, echoing stove in the back of your U-Haul.  Banana breads!  You think.  Hurrah!

After the requisite E.’s head-in-the-oven photograph we sent to our moms, we set out to christen our glistening black stallion with chicken breasts in the broiler and stir-fried baby bok choi atop the range.  E. prepared a Mad Men and poured two glasses of Chardonnay.  I stood in front of our toasty friend, stirring.  Garlic popped.  I sniffed.

“Hey, do you smell gas?”

We concluded that it’s a gas stove, newly hooked up.  Of course a whiff or two must have escaped in the process.  We opened the windows, turned on the ceiling fan, and brought our meal to the couch.

***

THE NEXT MORNING I sleepily trudged down the stairs and into the kitchen.

“Ack!” I cried.  “Gas!”

Gas is that kind of smell that they design just to freak you out.  You can feel it making its way into your pores, into the cells of your lungs, digging in, waiting to become cancer.  “You know,” E. said, “it’s not actually gas that smells that way.  That’s just a synthetic smell to alert you.  The gas itself is odorless.”  Which, for some reason, is all I needed to hear to ignore the issue entirely.  I would walk into our gas-filled apartment, breathe deep, and comfort myself with the knowledge that, oh, unpleasant though it may be, the smell can’t hurt me.

My denial could only take me so far, as it turns out.  You know who isn’t delightfully cavalier about a minor gas leak?  The gas company.  After a few days, I cheerfully called NSTAR for some advice.  First things first, I told Judy The NSTAR Customer Service Rep: I moved.  How do I link accounts without going through all that hoopla of creating a new username, et cetera?  “Oh, easy as pie!”  I was told.  “Go here, click here, confirm here, done.  Now, what else can I help you with?”

“So, we just installed a new gas stove.  And weirdly, we’ve been faintly smelling some gas in our kitch-”

“WE’RE SENDING SOMEONE OVER WITHIN THE HOUR DON’T TALK ON THE PHONE NEAR IT, DON’T FLIP ON THE LIGHTSWITCH, GET OUT OF THE HOUSE RIGHT NOW.”

I chose not to take this moment to inform her that we’d already roasted a chicken, fried up spinach, and baked a particularly delicious batch of chocolate chip cookies.

***

WE GOT RED-TAGGED that very afternoon.  “Our kitchen is like a nuclear test site!” I exclaimed to E., delighted.

Our landlord called his plumber, and after an afternoon of testing and retesting the connection, we were told that the gas smell was “newness.”

Three days and several dead brain cells later, the plumber came back, and proclaimed the connection to be in excellent health.

“It’s got to be the stove, then,” I said to E., deflating.  “Crap.”

***

I SHOULD MENTION that before all of this came about, I was volunteered to host the pre-Kol Nidre dinner at my apartment for my father, stepmother, sister, brother, brother-in-law, and niece.  “It’ll be a mitzvah!” my father assured me.  Now, here we were, our gas shut off, our new stove some sort of porous dud threatening to kill us all.  It was Tuesday.  Family arrived Friday.  This was Day 16 of gas leak, and Day 5 of no stove at all.  I clearly had to take matters into my own hands.

The next day, Steve from Dell’s Appliances was lying flat on his belly on the linoleum in front of my broiler, a flashlight between his teeth, his gas-meter squealing.  “Heeya’s the prahblem: you got a faulty safety valve that’s leaking gas into the oven.”

“That’s ironic,” I replied.  He ignored me.

“You think she knew when she sold it to ya?”

I thought about this.  It had been a long few weeks of learning the hard way not to trust people I thought I could trust, of professional grown-ups acting like children, of regretting what I thought to be infallible adult decisions.  I was exhausted.

“Nah, I don’t think she knew.  At least, I choose to believe she didn’t.”

He paused and poked around.

“Yeah,” he agreed, “she prahbably didn’t.  It’s a good stove othahwise.  Anyway, we’ll ohdah the paht, it’ll prahbably come Friday aftahnoon?  Monday by the latest.”

“Wait, Monday?”

fuckfuckfuckfuck

“I’ve got a dinner,” I pleaded.  This whole drama was no longer cute.  I wanted a functional, non-lethal kitchen, not this Los Alamos crap.  “A dinner for my family.  For a HOLIDAY.  I haven’t had a proper stove in 2 weeks and I’ve grown to really, really hate the smell of gas.  I’m begging you.  There’s no way at all to speed this up?”

I handed him a paper towel.  He sighed and wiped his hands.

***

FRIDAY MORNING FOUND him back on my floor, slithering around.  He tightened the final washer.

“How did you make this happen?”  I asked, my gratitude beaming.

“You…seemed like you needed it soonah that my othah guy today.”

***

The Final Tally:

-Used GE Gas Range (black), off Craigslist: $300

-U-Haul cargo van, 18 miles, 1/8 of a tank of gas: $48

-New safety valve that actually maintains safety: $130

-The labor skills of Steve: $147

-The price of a brand new GE Gas Range (black), with delivery and installation: $599.99

-One bubbling pot of butternut squash and apple soup topped with toasted brown sugar walnuts, served with an hour to spare before Yom Kippur services: priceless.  I guess.