Laura, 15

Saturday, July 31, 2004

At a house in Sunnyvale I'm alone installing bathroom lights when a girl appears at the bathroom door.  "Oh cripes!" she says.  She's sweaty, hair bedraggled, wearing an athletic T shirt and running shorts.

"You must be Laura," I say.  Her mother had left me a note asking me to "make way" for her 15-year-old daughter if I could.  She'd be coming home after track team workout at St. Francis High School.

"Give me a minute," I say, "and you can have the bathroom."

"I'll give you a minute if you can give me the sink," she says, and without waiting for an answer she steps in and starts splashing cold water on her face.

There is nothing - nothing - as quickening to the senses as the presence of a 15-year-old.  Either gender.  At no other age are we as fully alive.  Laura has mousy hair, freckles, sweaty shirt clinging to her back outlining the knobs of her spine.  She smells like an old sock.  I love her.

I go to work in the kitchen.  I hear a shower running.  An hour passes.

Laura comes down the stairs looking like a fox — a 21-year-old fox.  Her face shines.  Her hair is gathered in a sweep over her head.  That's the beauty of this age.  In a flash they switch from kid to adult.

"Do I look like Ohio?" she says.

"What do you mean?"

"I'm flying to Ohio tonight.  Visiting family.  I've already been to New Jersey and Connecticut."  She laughs.  "That's my summer.  Not exactly Paris and Rome, but oh well."

"You look fine," I say.

She looks surprised.  "Thanks!" she says.  "Nice to meet you!"  And she's gone out the front door.

It's as if I stood on a platform at the station while the express train blasted through, leaving a few eddies of wind in its wake. 

I'd been struggling with a passage in a novel I was writing, and now suddenly I know what to do.  The passage has absolutely nothing to do with anything Laura has done other than the bolt of energy she shot into my brain.  The scene involves an 18-year-old boy named Abe giving a graduation speech as valedictorian of his class.  Abe, who is an impulse-driven brainiac, has just started a summer job as a laborer on a construction site.  In the fall he'll go to Princeton.

Given a chance, Abe would fall head over heels for Laura - which, again, has absolutely nothing to do with the passage I'm trying to write except to give me insight.  I drive home and go straight to the keyboard.  Through my fingertips, Abe gives his speech to the graduating senior class:

After twelve years in a classroom, I took a job last week on a construction crew. I found that my grade point average didn’t make a lot of difference. Some of the men I work with never even finished high school, and yet they know so much more than me. Now I’m learning a whole new body of knowledge. Physical, practical knowledge. Like the Zen of swinging a hammer. The more you force it the worse the result. Your role is to guide the hammer’s own internal force, not to push it. If any of those carpenters are in the audience right now, they’re laughing at me because they would never call it Zen. They’d call it banging nails.

I’m learning a new set of laws. They’re intended for construction, but they might apply to life in general.

Work safe.
Work smarter, not harder.
What looks simple, isn’t.
Measure twice, cut once.
Honor thy tools.
Respect the tree.
You have to get dirty.
Don’t leave a mess.
Help your crew.
Slow down and do right.
Build it tight.
Each house is a miracle.

If you’ve ever built a wall—framed it, sheathed and insulated—and a week ago, I couldn’t have told you what sheathing was—if you’ve ever built a wall and with the help of five other workers tilted it, lifted and nailed it into place with muscle and brain and heart, then you’ve had a chance to practice each of those laws.

That was the one and only time I ever saw Laura.  I'm sure she has no memory of me whatsoever.  Honor thy tools.  Thanks, Laura, for helping me write Clear Heart.  What looks simple, isn't.

Here's my own advice, given at age 63: always keep a teenager around.  Even better, two or three.  Nothing else will keep you as alert and alive.

They're like sparklers on a dark night.  So bright.  Then gone.

Wall Phone

Friday, July 30, 1993

I’m pissed at Beth Ann Liebowitz, an uptight young woman who is either a flake or a deadbeat.  She’s owed me $455 since April for a tough job at her expensive home in Woodside.  I removed popcorn from her ceiling, then repaired and replastered.  I ought to charge extra for overhead work - if you've ever had to reach over your head all day, you'll know what I mean.  But I charged my regular rate, and she's stiffing me.

Today I'm doing some earthquake retrofit on my own home, cutting plywood panels to stiffen the inside framing of the crawl space, which with its low clearance ought to be called the creep space.  I creep under the house, measure, creep out, cut the panel, creep back inside dragging the panel. 

In the darkness, I'm wearing a headlamp like a miner in a narrow tunnel.  The beam moves as I turn my head.  Awkwardly while lying on my side, my fingers grope for nail and hammer, and then from my horizontal position I fasten the plywood to the knee wall.  I've got a cordless phone in the pouch of my tool belt because I'm expecting a call from my son.

As I'm nailing one panel, I hear the phone ringing. 

There's no phone in the tool belt. 

Still ringing.  Where?

There!  Somehow - I'll never figure exactly how it happened - the phone got nailed to the wall through one corner of the plywood.  Nailed solid.  Sideways.  I crucified the cordless Panasonic.  It still works, and it's still ringing. 

I can't miss this call from my son.  I press the "Talk" button, then kneel against the wall stretching my neck awkwardly with my ear to the receiver.

"Hello, Jesse?"

A woman's voice: "I'm not Jesse.  This is Beth Ann Liebowitz.  Do I owe you some money?"

"Yes."

"Oh."

"Is there a problem?"

"Um..."  A pause.  "No."

That pause is a sign.  Here's where I need to be sensitive and fully communicative and encourage her to be the same.  I need to say, "I thought I heard a hesitation in your voice.  Is there something I did that was unsatisfactory?  Let's try to work this out."

I don't say it.  I mean, I'm on my hands and knees contorting my neck - which aches already -pressing my ear to a sideways phone that I've just nailed to the wall.

What I say is, "So can I expect a payment?"

She hangs up.

How could there be a problem?  What could possibly give her the idea that I'm incompetent? 

Carefully I pry the phone from the wall.

I wonder if she'll pay.

Kattila the Hun

July, 1990

Sometimes you're blindsided.  Sometimes the right thing turns out to be wrong.  Sometimes a client goes berserk - cracks - like the earth beneath your feet.  In October, 1989, the so-called World Series Earthquake shook La Honda hard.  My house sustained damage, but I felt lucky compared to one of my neighbors.  One rock-walled side of his house peeled open and fell off, leaving him exposed like a dollhouse.

Suddenly as a contractor I was in demand.  After a few weeks dealing with emergencies all over town, I settled into a long-term job rebuilding my neighbor's house.

Kal, my neighbor, was a small man with a competitive instinct.  If you jogged with Kal - which I did - he would run slightly faster than you.  If you played tennis with him, even if you were a better player - which I was - he'd find a way to beat you.  Kal was a vice president at a big corporation.   His coworkers called him Kattila the Hun.

Kal had a teenage son named Shane.  Kal made a bet that Shane couldn't beat him in a three-mile race.  The bet was for a hundred dollars.  Shane was already a big strapping boy.  Shane trained every day for a month.  Shane was taller, legs longer, heart younger - and yet Kal won the race.  "It's about desire," Kal said.  And he made Shane pay him a hundred dollars.

The money didn't come easy to Shane.  Kal wouldn't provide his son with an allowance.  Shane ended up working for me on a couple of jobs - digging ditches, carrying lumber - to pay off the bet.

Kal had a vivacious wife, a southern gal.  She was his third wife and, he said, his last.  He told her with a straight face that he would never divorce her because he had been through two already.  Murder, he said, was the only option.

Kal had three vintage cars.  Unlike most collectors, he didn't store them as museum pieces in a garage.  They were the family vehicles, driven every day to work or school or shopping: a '54 Ford convertible, a '55 Corvette, and a '46 Ford sedan.  All three vehicles were fun to look at and brought smiles to bystanders, but when he let me take the Corvette out for a drive, it made me appreciate modern automotive engineering.  On our mountain roads, those cars took corners like a bread truck.

The earthquake work went well enough.  After seven months I'd exceeded my estimate by about 50%, but I'd uncovered extra damage, and Kal had added several  changes.  The house looked better than ever.  He paid without a problem.

A couple months later, July, Kal asks me to install a new kitchen door.  He selects - rightly - a 1 3/4 inch exterior door to replace the old 1 3/8 inch model.  After discussing the options, we decide not to replace the existing jamb but rather to rout it to accommodate the thicker door.

On a pleasant sunny day I do the job while nobody is home.  There's a special pleasure in carefully performing an exacting task, knowing it's hard but knowing you can do it well.  Kal is a stickler for details.  I work cautiously, slowly, exactly.  The router throws wood chips all over the place, so I sweep the porch and walkway, leaving a tidy site.
   
A few hours later, Kal pounds on my door.  He wants, he says, to have a word with me.

The words are many and foul.  "You got sawdust in the fucking garden."

It never occurred to me to worry about that.  "It's good mulch," I say.  Perhaps not the most useful comment.

He's shouting:  "Look at that!  White sawdust on dark soil!  It looks like sugar on shit!"

"I could wet it down with a hose.  It'll darken.  I could rake it, mix it in."

"No!  You have to spread topsoil over it."

"Okay, I'll do that."

"No!  I'll have to do it myself!" 

"I'll buy the topsoil."

"No!"

At this point, I realize we've gone beyond reasoning.  The encounter is building like a thunderhead over the Kansas plain.  There's the rapid boiling rise, the ominous dark.  Now comes the blast of wind.  Lightning.  Hail.

"YOU'RE A FUCKING SLOB!"  He's in my face now, shouting jaw to jaw.  "I've been picking up after you for NINE FUCKING MONTHS!" 

"I wish you'd said something earlier if you think I'm not cleaning up.  This is the first I've heard about - "

"FUCK YOU!  FUCK YOUR FAMILY!  FUCK YOUR FUCKING DOG!"

Now he's totally lost it.  He likes my dog.  He's offered to buy that dog from me several times (which, by the way, shows utter cluelessness about family values - my kids love that dog).

So far somehow I've retained my composure.  This is my first experience with the military drill sergeant breakdown approach - with Kattila the Hun.  He's glaring into my eyes, slightly drooling at the mouth, bouncing on his feet like a boxer. 

"Kal," I say, "I wish you were handling this with a little more maturity."

"BULLSHIT ON MATURITY!  YOU'RE A FUCKING SLOB.  NOW WHAT ARE YOU GONNA DO ABOUT IT?"

"Jeez, Kal."

"WHAT?"  There's a look of eager anticipation on his face.

"No wonder Shane hates you."

Oops.

Kal breaks into a crooked smile.  "Nice try," he says.  He turns and marches into his house.

I wish I hadn't said that.  It's a true statement, and it's exactly what I was thinking at that moment, but my saying it ... he'd won.  He'd broken me down.

I was shaking.  All evening.

And I'd lost.

Kal always wins.

Big Creek, California (Pop 385)

Big Creek, California (Pop 385)            

In Big Creek all the men
wear yellow hardhats
and park their pickups in the middle of the road
because when they stop, the whole town stops
except for the occasional
wandering black bear
and the water always rushing
through silver pipes
under sugar pine and manzanita
down granite cliffs
while hawks circle soundlessly
in Sierra updrafts,
water from winter
from two miles high
dropping through mountain plumbing,
humming
through hefty turbines
attached by wire
to all the lights
in Los Angeles.






(I wrote this poem in July of 1984.  I was struck by how the whole town seemed to exist for one never-ending job, how it could seem so busy and yet so serene as the electrons kept flowing to L.A.  I wonder if anything has changed...)

One Pressed Flower

Wednesday, July 27, 1983

First thing in the morning, my six-year-old son set the toaster on fire.  I put it out with baking soda.  For some reason he had tried toasting a rubber pencil eraser.  It was going to be a day of unexpected, if not inexplicable, human behavior.

On the phone Janice told me the cabin was on a private road and the directions were "sort of complicated," so she'd meet me in downtown Pescadero in front of Duarte's Restaurant.  "I'll be driving an Alfa Romeo with the top down.  I have white hair.  You'll recognize me.  I sort of stand out."

Janice was lovely, an albino in dark sunglasses, bright hair blowing like a sexual semaphore in the wind.  The cabin was indeed a long way from town but wouldn't have been difficult to find on my own.  I suspected she met me in town because she wanted to check me out.  Safety.  Privacy.  We passed a sheep ranch:

Clustered in the shade
of a live oak tree:
dirty ragged hot
balls of yarn.
And two
tailwagging
yarnlets.

At the time, Pescadero was in the process of being "discovered" by people who were buying up local acreage and constructing classy weekend getaways.  Janice had one of those classy cabins.  It was on a hilltop surrounded by acres of golden meadow with a view of the ocean.  Serene, lovely, isolated.

At the cabin I met Janice's partner Kate, yang to her yin, a dark beauty who sulked on a sofa by a corner window.  She was reading a book, sipping lemonade, frowning, sighing.

I was installing a fiberglass whirlpool two-person tub which Janice and Kate had bought on their own.  As it turned out, the tub didn't quite fit in the roughed-out space.  I inherited the problem; I didn't cause it.  I had to notch the ledger board, sizing by trial and error.  Then the drain didn't fit.  The mixing T was the wrong size.  And the directions that came with the tub were utterly useless. 

Working so far out in the country, you don't run out to the hardware store when you encounter a problem.  You improvise.  Adapt.  I was used to country work and pretty good at it.  I'd brought a truckload of plumbing parts. 

Just me on a hilltop with two beautiful women - there was a weird vibe.  They didn't seem lesbian, nor did they act one bit friendly toward me.  Occasionally they exchanged glances.  Janice had no expression; Kate scowled.  Maybe it all meant nothing.

It took five hours.  When I presented the bill to Janice, Kate for the first time bestirred herself from the corner and said, "I feel totally ripped off."

"Why?"  I was shocked.

"We were supposed to leave here three hours ago."

"There were problems.  I had to - "

"I saw you reading the directions."

"Of course I read the directions.  Don't you think that's a good idea?"

"You should know already.  You're supposed to be a plumber."

"I am a plumber.  But there are thousands of different - "

"Simms could have installed it in half the time."  Simms was a Pescadero plumber.  

"No, he couldn't.  Even if he didn't have to read the directions, he would have had the same problems.  And if he's so good, why didn't you call him?"

"He's so expensive."

"So I did the job for less money and maybe took a few minutes longer."

"I feel totally ripped off."

Janice was fingering the bill.  With a glance at Kate, she said to me, "We'll talk about this."

I left in shock.  And utterly depressed.  Sometimes you see trouble coming.  Not this time.  I'd done a darn good job.

Anybody who deals with the public knows that most of the people are fine, a few are difficult, and every once in a while without warning one will clobber you right between the eyes.  It's that one rare customer who makes you want to quit.  Kate had done that to me.

That night, an old friend from college called.  She was working at Hewlett Packard and had quickly ascended to dizzying heights.  I told her about my day.  She said, "You're too smart to be putting up with that crap.  You're a writer.  We need technical writers all the time.  Come in for an interview."  Then she quoted an hourly pay that was 50% more than I was earning as a plumber.  For writing!  Incredible.

So a day later I was in a glass cubicle being interviewed by a man with a sign on his desk that said MANAGER OF THE WEEK where WEEK was crossed out and DAY written in.  He explained that he was the third manager of the section this week.  He said the great thing about Hewlett Packard was the dynamism and adaptability of the culture there, that unlike most corporations it was flexible and was growing so fast they could hardly keep up.  Then he asked about my experience in technical writing.

"Well, I've read some pretty bad directions."

"I mean, have you done any?"

"No."

"What about your training?  Any classes in technical writing?"

"Uh, actually, no."

"What's your experience with computers?"

"I worked as a computer operator in college and for several years after that."

"When was your last computer job?"

"Seven years ago."

"A lot has changed."

"I'm flexible.  Dynamic.  Adaptable."

"Why'd you quit?"

"I wanted to write novels.  It just didn't mix with a computer job."

"But you think it would mix now?"

As my friend had told me to do, I left two of my novels as samples of my writing.  Unfortunately, one of them was The Naked Computer, a wretched little novel I'd written just out of college, published wretchedly by a small press in San Francisco, a book which now embarrasses me.  I don't know what I was thinking, offering it as a work sample.  The title, I guess.  The other book was Famous Potatoes, the seemingly autobiographical story of an alienated young man who works occasionally as a computer operator and is a total fuck-up.

I never heard back from the manager-of-the-day, or from anybody at Hewlett Packard at all.  It was a book review, silent but bad.  A door had slammed on my career as a professional writer.

Meanwhile, more jobs came in: carpentry, plumbing, electrical.  I plugged along.  I appreciate the physical immediacy of manual labor.  It's a kind of therapy. 

In the previous year I'd written a novel, several songs and over a hundred poems.  Could I have done that if I spent my days on technical writing?  The word cells in my brain would be exhausted.

Janice mailed a check folded into a notecard with a photo of an elephant seal.  Full payment.  There was no written note, only a pressed flower.

My advice to beginning writers is this: keep your day job.  Work with your hands.  Take the occasional blow to the head.  Store some baking soda near the toaster.  One day, it may all make sense.  Then you can write about it.

Half a World

July, 1978

Mrs. Caswell opened the front door, took one look at me, and laughed.  "You have funny hair," she said.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Don't be sorry.  I like it."  Her own hair was elegant, smoothly brushed.  In fact, everything about her was elegant and smooth: her face, her poise, even the blue jeans which fit her like water.  She was small, trim, confident.  Older than me.  Like many small women she knew she had power over men, and she seemed comfortable with that fact.

I had come to install two gas fireplaces.  I didn't tell her I'd never done this before.  On the phone she'd said there was already gas to the fireplace box, so all I had to do was hook them up. 

In a mirror I checked my hair.  It looked normal to me.

She showed me the fireplaces and the gas log kits.  "I'm sure it's a very simple job," she said.  "Most people would do it themselves, but my husband is insane and my son is an idiot."  She smiled unselfconsciously.  One of her teeth was crooked.  She was holding a cocktail glass.  It was 10 in the morning.

This was a house in Atherton, a classy town. 

I went back to my truck for tools.  A stringy-haired man wearing a leather vest with the Hells Angels logo was repairing the electric driveway gate.  "Another piece of shit," he said.

"What?"

"Crappo gate," he said.  "Fancy design with a tiny motor.  Typical Atherton shit.  They buy first class furniture, and that carpet must be two inches thick, but look at those cheapo aluminum windows.  Shoddy.  So many of these places.  Shoddy shit.  These people have money but they wouldn't know a well-built house if they saw one.  Then they fill it with their fancy shit."

"You'd think they'd want a good gate."

He winked.  "I'm gonna sell her on that.  After I fix this."

"Did she by any chance say something about your hair?"

"She said it was pretty."  He cackled.

The installation of the two gas logs went easily enough, but when I opened the valve, nothing came out.  I started poking around the house, trying to follow the pipe to its source.  Somewhere between the main shutoff and the fireplaces, there had to be another valve or possibly a disconnect.

I saw the stringy-haired Hells Angel go into the kitchen, open the refrigerator, and help himself to a Heineken.  Elegant he was not.  "You seen her?" he said.

"She's somewhere in the back of the house."

He wandered off.

Outside, I found the problem.  The fireplace pipe had never been connected to the main.  I'd have to cut the main, thread it, install a union and a tee.  I went to find Mrs. Caswell to explain the extra work.  There were voices from the bedroom behind a closed door.  Hers.  The Hells Angel.  I walked away.

A half hour later the Angel came outside where I was working.  His hair was freshly brushed.

"You sell her on the gate?" I asked.

"Mmm."  He smiled.  "She's negotiable."  Then he left.

Though by now I was well into the project, I wanted to explain what I was doing.  Inside the house I called: "Mrs. Caswell?  Ma'am?"

I heard a muffled reply.  She was still in the bedroom, door closed. 

"It's a lot more work than I expected.  I want you to know."

"Just do it," she said without opening the door.  I heard the squeak of a knob turning, the hiss of a shower starting.

An hour later, I found her in the kitchen mixing a cocktail.  She'd changed into a pink dress, slinky.  Pink sandals.  Chic as ever.  She was half singing, half humming to herself.  Close to You, the Carpenters song.  She sang the instrumental break: "Waa, daba da da..."

"All done," I said.

She smiled.  "Can I fix you a drink?"

"No thanks."

"Can I trim your hair?  I used to do that, you know.  Before..."  With a nod of her head she indicated the kitchen, the whole Atherton house.  "Before all this.  I could make it cute."

"Not today, thanks."

"Well at least you have to let me brush it."  She already had a brush in her hand.  A petite woman, she had to reach high for my hair.  She smelled like - I don't know how to describe it - she smelled like the bar of a classy hotel.

Looking up at me with fingers still in my hair, she said, "We have a hot tub.  Would you like to take a look?"

"Is something wrong with it?"

She smiled.  "It's very private."

I could get laid.  Or I could get paid.  I wasn't sure I could do both.  And I desperately needed the money.  My wife was pregnant with our second child.   

Suddenly I didn't like Mrs. Caswell at all.  I was wearing my ring.  She could see it.

You talk about some things, joke about them, fantasize.  In real life - at least in my half of the world - you try for solid construction, good foundation.  "I better go," I said.

She blinked.  Nothing more. 

She wrote a check with an ostrich-feather pen, pink ink.  She misspelled ninety as "ninty," but she had elegant script. 

French Lessons

Monday, July 25, 1977

I'm just telling you what happened.

Gabrielle had a small house in a struggling neighborhood of Redwood City.  There were French signs all over the doors and diplomas on the walls.  She was a tutor.  She was slightly plump, very cute, with curly short hair and little gold earrings in the shape of a teardrop.

I began by repairing a leaky tub faucet in the salle de bain.  Gabrielle stood in the doorway, chatting, inquiring about my schedule, so I explained that ever since my first child was born my wife and I were splitting childcare time, each of us working part time so one of us could be home at all times.  That's why I was working at 8 p.m.

Gabrielle said, "If my husband had done half the child-raising, I wouldn’t be divorced today." 

Debra, Gabrielle's soulful-eyed, dark-haired, five-year-old daughter, came into the bathroom and without a word handed me three chocolate eggs.

"You sure you want to do that?" Gabrielle asked.

Debra nodded silently.

"Thank you, Debra," I said. 

Quietly Debra glided out of the bathroom.

"Mon Dieu," Gabrielle said.  "She's been saving those since Easter."

"What did I do?"

"I don't know, but Debra has very good taste in men."  Gabrielle stood over the tub where I was tightening the faucet handle.  She was pushing hair around on her head, fluffing.  "Are you finished?"

"Just about."

"Ah!  No!"  There was a tinkling sound, and one of her earrings bounced around the walls of the tub and then shot straight down the drain.  "Merde!  Can you get that?"

"It's in the trap.  I'd have to go under the house."

"Would you please?  Can you stay longer?  It was a gift.  Of course I'll pay for your time."

As I gathered tools and a flashlight, Debra came into the room and silently started stuffing little coffee candies into my shirt pocket.

"Thank you, Debra."

Without a word, she walked out.

"Bedtime, Debra," Gabrielle called.  Then to me she said, "You won't make a lot of noise?  I need to settle down, put Debra to bed, have a glass of wine.  Un verre de vin."

"A little clunking, maybe.  I shouldn't need any power tools."

"C'est assez bon. That's good enough."

"Are you tutoring me?"

She smiled.  "Pas encore."

"What?"

"No."

It was a tight crawlspace and a rusty steel trap.  I had to hunch my body like a worm, return to my truck for Liquid Wrench, hunch in again.  It took over an hour.  I recovered the golden teardrop in a mass of gooey soap and hair and that penetrating odor of sewage.  I emerged dusty, filthy, slightly smelly.

When I returned to the house - quietly, so as not to waken Debra - I found Gabrielle on her bed sipping red wine, wearing a flimsy gown.

I ducked quickly out of the room.  Softly from the hallway I said, "I'll - uh - leave the earring on the table with my bill."

I stood at the table, writing an invoice. 

"Would you like some wine?  Par hasard?"  Gabrielle had come out of the bedroom wrapped in a white fluffy robe.  With one hand she held the flaps tightly closed at the neck.  With the other hand she held up a glass.  She fidgeted with her feet.  Then nervously, softly she said, "I could wash you."

Our eyes met and held.  After a few moments she said, "I'm sorry."  She lowered her eyes.  "Je suis désolé."

"I'm honored," I said.  "Merci.  Really."

Now here's a strange fact.  Back in Maryland when I was at Walter Johnson High School, 1964, my twelfth grade French teacher had a crush on me.  It sounds like a school boy's fantasy, but in actuality it was awkward and embarrassing.  She was attractive enough, but even in my inexperience I could tell there was something off-center about her.  She asked to see me after class.  She offered a ride.  There was a French movie she wanted to see.  Did I like crepes?

No.  No.  And no.  Nothing happened.  Given my unformed social skills and complete lack of interest, I handled it badly.  I already had a girlfriend my own age.  The only benefit for me was that I got straight A's in a class for which I had no talent. 

Anyway, by the time I met Gabrielle, July of 1977, maybe I had more social skills.  I had a nine-month-old child at home.  I was still getting used to this fathering business.  One thing I know now, and perhaps I knew it even then: when you cheat on your wife, you cheat on your child. 

Another thing I know: sometimes attraction seems random and weird. 

Gabrielle whispered, "C'est moi qui vous remercie."

"What?"

"Thank you, sir.  Je vous remercie de tout coeur.  Next time something breaks, can I call you again?  I'm sure Debra would like to see you."

I worked for Gabrielle off and on for a couple more years.  We never spoke of that evening again.  Debra quietly gave me chocolate.  A gentle, friendly man appeared in Gabrielle's life.   She stopped hiring me. 

I saw Gabrielle one more time, years later, when we happened to meet in the coffee line at Peet's.  Gabrielle and her husband - the same gentle, friendly man - lived in Los Gatos.  Debra was studying engineering at Stanford.  In the photo she looked serious and shy, somewhat wide-eyed as if caught by surprise - and deeply attractive.

"She took Spanish in high school," Gabrielle said.  "German in college.  Never French."

The barista was ready to take my order.  I wish I had grabbed a bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans and handed them to Gabrielle.  I wish I had said, "Give these to your daughter, s'il vous plaît."

I could have repaid a debt.  But after all those years, I was still slow on social skills and had forgotten all my French. 

"Nice to see you, Gabrielle," was all I could say.

"Au revoir," she said.

Listen to the Locals

July, 2006

Construction is local.  Construction in the Adirondacks fascinates me because it's so different from what I encounter in coastal California.  In La Honda we deal with landslides, earthquakes, termites, punishing heat and sunshine.  At Silver Lake they deal with snow loads, frost heave, and simply being frozen for half the year.

Oriole is the name of a simple cabin constructed in the Adirondack style.  Now Oriole is tilting with one side of the cabin 3 inches lower than the other.  The low side sits on cedar posts which rest directly on the dirt.  As the post bottoms have rotted, the cabin has sunk closer to earth.

As I scoop away the dirt surrounding the rotten posts, I find flat stones nearby, set into the surface of the ground. 

This intrigues me.  And I know the man who placed these posts and built this cabin way back in 1943.  Ken Laundry is now 92 years old and still an active tractor-driving tree-cutting man.  I drive to his house and find him out by his woodshed, splitting logs with a double-bladed axe.  He's happy to loan me his jacks and give his advice.

"Ken," I say, "I'm a little confused.  Textbooks tell you never to build with wood in contact with the ground."

"I set those posts on flat stones," Ken says.

"That's kind of confusing to me, too.  Textbooks tell you to dig below frost level for your foundation.  They say you can't just lay a flat stone on the ground."

"Five feet.  That's the frost line.  You want to dig five foot holes for a dozen posts?  For a summer cabin?"

"Uh, no.  But the textbooks say you'll get frost heave if you just lay a stone on the ground."

"Yep," Ken says.  "The worst is if you dig part way down, like three feet.  Then you see the heave in frost."

"The flat stones were all about six inches from the posts.  Either the stones moved west, or the cabin moved east.  Does that make sense?"

"Yep.  It happens around here.  That's the frost heave."

"So you don't worry about frost heave?"

"You take it into consideration.  Every ten years or so, you might have to adjust the stones.  I built that cabin in nineteen forty-three.  What year is it now?"

It was probably a rhetorical question.  Ken's mind at age 92 was totally sharp.  I answered, "Two thousand six."

"So nobody's checked those stones for a while.  Now you have.  Take my jacks, lift the cabin, fix it.  Easy as pie."

I imagine going back to California and explaining to my local Silicon Valley building inspector that I'll just keep an eye on those flat stones and reset them every decade or so.  Do you think he'd sign off on the foundation?

You can't argue with this:  The cabin has been there, actively used, still lovely to sleep in next to the rushing waters of Coca Cola Creek within earshot of Silver Lake and the babbling loons of the night, for 63 years.

May it stand on re-centered flat rocks and new cedar posts for another 63 years.  I borrow Ken's jacks and get to work.



Note: If you follow this link, you'll get another - perhaps better - post about Ken Laundry and local technique.

Robins Nest and Little Brown Bats

July, 2011

Returning to the old Hawkeye Trail Camp now, I'm repairing the summer landscape of my teenage years.  There are about a dozen structures remaining from the old camp on Silver Lake.  The sturdiest of them - requiring, so far, the least repair - is an architectural peculiarity known as Robins Nest:
 
When Jules and Virgil saw Robins Nest, Jules said, “That’s your party home, right?”

Well, no.  The current owners use the ground floor to store firewood.  The upper floor is unused. 

Back in the days when Hawkeye was a coed summer camp, Robins Nest was an oddity: the only cabin with two stories, the only cabin with no screens.  Oddest of all, on the upper floor it housed the oldest teenage girls without privacy, exposed to bugs on their flesh and the occasional flying bat caught in their hair. 

I was raised to believe that bats knew their way around at night, but sometimes after lights out in the boys camp we’d hear another outbreak of screaming and beds crashing from up the hill, and we’d know that another little brown bat had entered the intoxicating, bewildering scent of hair recently shampooed with a disorienting cloud of strawberry or daffodil or lavender.  Those bats weren't stupid.  They'd gone where we wished to be.

Down the hill in the lakeside cabin of the oldest teenage boys where I lay, some of us would wonder: if it were my nose at her neck, would she scream and leap up and crash the metal bedframe against another?  Would a dozen angry girls surround and beat me with brooms and pillows until I flew away into the night? 

Those of us lacking experience, we suspected the answer was Yes. 

Those others, the experienced ones, would only smile.

Plattsburgh Hillbillies

Summer, 2005-2011

Most years as part of my contribution for staying at Silver Lake, after Labor Day I disassembled the wooden dock and the "big float" which is basically a raft on barrels.  I lifted them into the boathouse where they would spend the winter.  Every year, it killed my back.

In 2005 I finally got smart and hired a kid named Virgil to do the heavy work.  He lived in Plattsburgh, an hour away.  Virgil stood out in the relaxed, rustic, genteel environment of Silver Lake.  He was a city boy - if Plattsburgh, New York constitutes a city.  He looked like a skinhead.  He had, indeed, a shaved head, but he informed me that he was a "hillbilly."  He was the first hillbilly I ever met who spoke with a New York accent.

Virgil was a high school dropout living with an older woman and her four children, none of whom he had fathered.  Or maybe one was his.  It was hard for me to follow.  Virgil talked fast and his mind wandered.  ADD would be my nonprofessional diagnosis.  ADD with a side order of violent upbringing.  He grew up in the foster care system after his father had run over his mother with a car.  On purpose.  Virgil had seen it.

Surprisingly, Virgil had a high degree of personal responsibility.  He was working at two jobs plus picking up a few extra dollars on one-day chores such as removing my dock so as to support his older, unwed partner and her four kids. 

Virgil was baby-faced with some milk fat in his cheeks and absolutely no facial hair.  He also had the worst-looking mouth I'd ever seen, as if he'd grown up chewing on chains.  Actually, a lifetime diet of king-size Mountain Dew had rotted all his teeth.

Virgil was supposed to bring a helper named Jules, but Virgil arrived alone.  "Jules is in jail," Virgil said.  "He only hit the guy once, but he was already on probation."  Looking around as if he didn't want anyone to overhear, Virgil confided: "Jules has an anger management problem."

I liked Virgil up to a point, but his politics were appalling.  It was N-word this and N-word that.  Growing up in Maryland, I'd learned to separate people's racial attitudes from their broader character, as there seemed to be little relationship.  Also from growing up in Maryland I had always been drawn to the Appalachians, so I was comfortable with hill people.  I accepted Virgil - cautiously - on those terms.

* * *

The next year, 2006, Virgil brought Jules.  As they disassembled the big float and the dock, we talked.  Virgil said he was leaving his wife.  I said, "I didn't know you were married."

"Whatever.  I'm gone.  She can't do that."

"What did she do?"

"I saw her dancing with a nigger."  Virgil spoke without anger, simply stating an unacceptable fact.

While Virgil was sweet-faced and light-haired, Jules had gaunt cheeks with a dark shadow.  There was an air of menace about him.  He'd just finished a year in prison.  "I could've been out in six months with five years probation.  Fuck that.  I went the whole year so I didn't have no probation."

It made sense, actually.  The just-completed one-year sentence was for a probation violation.  Jules didn't strike me as somebody who was likely to go five years without another violation.  He had, as he admitted, an anger problem.  The one-year came about this way: "I was on a balcony with two friends.  I hear something, so I look down and there's this nigger on a balcony below with two friends and he was taking a leak off the balcony.  I told him to put it away and he didn’t, so we had to go down there.  I mean, it was a challenge.  He disrespected and we had to.  His two friends take off but he puts up his fists and you don’t do that unless you expect something so I had to.  Then they called it a hate crime.”

"Uh, Jules," Virgil said, "you had a choice."

"No I didn't."

"You and your buds beat the living shit out of him," Virgil said.

"Had to."

When they finished the dock, Jules surveyed some of the lakefront with a metal detector.  It was his hobby, collecting old coins.

I asked Jules, "You ever think about joining the Army?"

"Why would I want to do that?"

"They'd help you with that anger thing.  They're good at that.  They need you.  You need them.  Perfect match."

"Yeah," Virgil chimed in.  "Because they could beat the crap out of you."

"Really," I said, "you'd get training.  You might pick up a skill.  And you could find some foreign coins."  Also - though I didn't say so - he might learn a little racial tolerance.

Listen to me.  The old hippie war protester and draft resister is now recommending the Army to troubled kids.  But the military can be a good deal to young men who otherwise face a pretty bleak life.

* * *

Two years passed.  2008.  Once again in need of help with the dock and big float, I called around and learned that Virgil was in jail.  He'd been caught with one dose of Oxycontin, which he was taking because his teeth were in constant pain.  He bought it on the street - at a cost of $30 per day - because he couldn't get a prescription because he couldn't afford to go to a doctor.  Or so he said.  Math - and strategic planning - didn't seem to be among Virgil's strong suits.

As for Jules, he'd joined the Marines.

* * *

Two more years passed.  It was now 2010 and again I needed help with the big float and the dock.  Virgil had just gotten out of jail after another bust with Oxycontin.  He'd lost weight.  You could see he was in pain.  Besides the agony of his teeth, he said he had a cyst in his butt.  Hurt going in, hurt coming out.  Without Oxy, he couldn't chew.  Most of the time, he said, he simply didn't eat.  "The good news," Virgil told me, "is I just qualified for fuckin' medicaid.  Next week I get my teeth removed and surgery on my ass."

"How many teeth will they remove?"

"All of them."

"And then they'll take out your ass?"

He laughed.  "Not all of it."

Virgil’s third child - of three different women - had just been born, a daughter.  The mother, who at 29 was older than Virgil, already had several children, the oldest being 16.  "I keep fucking old ladies," Virgil said.  He showed me a photo of a dark-skinned baby.

I couldn't help but laugh.

"Yeah," Virgil said, "how 'bout that?"

I'd seen a bumper sticker on a Lincoln Town Car in Lake Placid:

        God
        America
        Ford

A friend had joined me on the dock, so as Virgil worked, my friend and I speculated what we would say if we had to summarize our values in three words on a bumper sticker.  I couldn't do it.  My friend came up with: "Family, kindness, education."

Virgil called out, “I only need one word: Unlucky.”  

"You ever hear from Jules?"

"His word is lucky.  At least he ain't blown up."

"Still in the Marines?"

"He'll stay forever.  He found home, man."

After Virgil departed, the old couple in the neighboring cabin came over and told me they'd heard my conversation with Virgil.  The old man, shaking his head, asked, "How can you talk to him?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I wouldn't know what to say to somebody like that."

"I just talk."  I was used to dealing with carpenters like Virgil.  The old man, though, had lived his life in a different stratum of society.  He couldn't imagine how to function at any other level.  I couldn't imagine cutting myself off from that much of the world.

* * *

A year later, it's July of 2011.  I don't need any work done, but Virgil drops by just to chat. 

"I'm in the chef business," he says.

"The what?"

"I got a job.  Starts tomorrow.  I'll be a chef."

"Where'd you learn to be a chef?"

"They'll train me.  Anyway, I done McDonald's.  Now I'll be at Denny's."

"Hey!  Great!  You'll be a cook." 

"Cook.  Chef."  He shrugs. 

"How's Jules?"

"He lost some weight.  Left leg, below the knee.  Some fingers.  Both eyes."

"Oh no!  I'm so sorry.  It's all my fault."

"Nope."

"I told him to join the Army."

"I bet he don't remember.  Anyway, ain't your fault.  He got in some trouble.  Said if they let him off, he'd join the military.  I never saw him so happy.  Marines was the best years of his life."

Virgil shows me his mouth.  Just gums.  "Another month," he says.  "You have to wait a year for false teeth."

"What do you eat?"

"Soups 'n' shakes."

"You off the drugs?"

"Absolutely.  I was never an addict.  I got no pain.  I'm clean for my kids."

"How many now?"

"Three are mine.  Three hers.  That's all.  She got the tubes tied."

"That's enough, huh?"

"She says she's too old for that shit.  Not me.  I love kids.  We'll be okay now."  He smiles with pride.  "I'm a chef."

On Vacation

Gone fishin'...


Be back in a couple of weeks.

I've been posting every day for 182 consecutive days and loving every minute. 


If you're relatively new to this blog, here's a chance to catch up.  You can sample a few of the more popular posts by looking at the right hand sidebar.  If you view this blog through a reader that doesn't show all the sidebars, go to the main blog page for a view.

There's no internet access at the Blue Heron on Silver Lake, where I'll be.  No cell phone service.  No television.  Just stars...  Which is exactly why we're going there.  Peace.

Herbert Hoover's Bench

July, 1974

Jan Anderson was my landlady.  I was her handyman.  She’d been on the planet since 1892.  We called her Jan when she was friendly and Mrs. Anderson when she was acting like a landlady.

One day Jan showed me a bench.  Or at least, she said it was a bench.  All I saw was a rotten pile of wood.  “Can you fix it?” she asked.

“No.  It’s too far gone.”

“Herbie Hoover gave it to me.”

“Herbert Hoover?  The president?”

“This was after he got fired.”

Jan had run a taxi company.  When Mr. Hoover left office, he settled in Palo Alto.  Upon his arrival in California, he called for a taxi.  Jan sent her best driver, a man who was polite and reliable, and that driver never came back.  Hoover hired him as chauffeur. 

Jan and Mr. Hoover met frequently.  She owned a peanut factory next door to the taxi company, and Mr. Hoover used to wander into the taxi office with a bag of fresh roasted nuts.  “Want some?” he’d always ask.  He loved peanuts, but he was not an interesting man.  “Not a conversationalist”, Jan said.

Jan grew up among the fruit orchards and dirt roads of the Santa Cruz Mountains near Los Gatos.  She rode a donkey to school.  Some days the donkey would stop at a creek, bend down for a drink, and then buck her off into the water.  Furious, she would chase the donkey, which stayed just out of her reach all the way home. 

Jan grew up fast.  At age 11, she confided to me, she was “fully developed” and grade school was a humiliation.  She transferred to a new town, lied about her age, and graduated from high school at age 15.  She wanted to be a pharmacist but found that nobody would respect a female in that field.  She found few opportunities for a woman to do anything except making babies, at which, she said, she was a failure.  With peanuts and taxis she found some success.

To me she seemed a piece of living history.  She remembered the 1906 earthquake - it ripped her house into three pieces.  These days, a widow, she lived at the edge of the Stanford golf course on land that Leland Stanford had been “furious to discover he didn’t own,” she said with satisfaction.  She rented cheap cottages and invited tenants over for whiskey sours and conversation.  I happily obliged.

“Did Herbert Hoover flirt with you?” I asked.

“No.”  She sighed. 

“Did you flirt with him?”

“Well of course!”  Even at age 81 Jan was a coquette, especially after a couple of whiskey sours, sometimes batting her eyes at me.  Once after a third whiskey sour she showed me two nude photos of herself, taken by her husband on a hill near Half Moon Bay.  She’d placed hands in strategic places and smiled warily at the camera.  Quite the babe.  Now with failing body and bad cooking she could still summon the come-hither smile but carried the permanent smell of urine and burnt cheese.

Jan told me that Herbie’s wife, Lou Hoover, used to call for a taxi about once a week, and she always asked for Car Number Seven. 

One day Jan pulled the driver of Number Seven aside and asked, “Why are you Lou’s favorite?”

The driver just smiled.  “I’ll never tell.”

After Lou died, the driver revealed that Lou used to smoke in the taxi.  He’d give her a pack of cigarettes and drive her around for an hour while she smoked.  He also bought beer for her, which she drank in secret at home.  Herbie wouldn’t have approved.

“So that’s the worst you have on the Hoovers?” I teased.  “His wife smoked cigarettes and drank beer?”

“Sometimes what’s normal is the scandal,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Scandal is what people are ashamed of.  Some things are accepted, so they aren’t tittle-tattle.”

“Like what?”

“Herbie had a sign posted at his ranch:  HELP WANTED.  NO JAPS OR NEGROES NEED APPLY.”

“He had a ranch?  I thought you said he had a house in Palo Alto.”

She looked at me darkly.  “Now you’re the expert on Hoover?”

“No ma’am.”

“He loved peanuts.”  She ran hands through white hair, once blond.  “Can you take me for a ride?”

“Where do you want to go?”

“A little hill I know.  Near Half Moon Bay.”  She smiled like a kitten.  “There’s something I want to show you.”

“I can’t today.  Sorry.  Did you ever ask Mr. Hoover to take you to that hill?”

“Once.”

“What did he say?”

“Same as you:  ‘Not today.’  He was a gentleman.  Anyway, if he’d said ‘Yes,’ I don’t know what I would have done.”

“You might have kissed him.  Just for fun.”

“I might have.  And then we’d have tittle-tattle, he and I.  Everybody should make some gossip.  So what can you do for this bench?”

“Burn it.”

“Everything rots.”  She sighed.  “I’m next.”

“Not yet.  There’s still time to make some gossip.”

“Go ahead.  Burn the bench.”  She winked.  “And some day, you’ll take me to that hill.”

“Yes, ma’am.  Some other day.”

Note: About those two photos:  Yes, they’re the real deal.  But Jan is not her real name, and I changed some details.  I asked a (mostly female) group if I would be a cad to post those photos, and they unanimously said it would be okay and in fact, given their impression of Jan’s character and the fact that Jan showed me the photos in the first place, they suspect Jan probably would have wanted me to post them.  Jan died 30 years ago.  Her spirit still hovers over the shady acre of land that Leland Stanford forgot to buy - though now it’s an acre of McMansions.