Afterwards, It's Still There

Diary of a Small Contractor, Days 10, 11, and 12

Wednesday, October 8, 1986

The porch is rotten.  Rusty doorbell button.  A dog barks.  The person opening the door has an undefined body: shirt, blue jeans, short hair — what gender?

“Hello,” I say.  “The owner asked me to look at two small decks.  She said they needed rebuilding.”

“Oh yeah.”  The voice of a young woman.  So, okay.  Female.  “The one you’re standing on.  And another.  Out back.”

She leads me through the living room.  She smokes.  The air stinks.  Massive stereo equipment, stacks of tapes.  A ratty chair.  Rock posters on the walls.  A bookshelf sagging with college texts.  A fine old oak floor covered with scratches and stains, ruined. 

The back porch has termites.  No concrete pad.  Wood in contact with earth.  I take measurements, then return through the stale air of the kitchen and living room.  I measure the front porch, where somebody built a nice pattern into the handrail, though now it’s wobbly. 

The young woman is lifting weights in the living room, taking breaks to puff on a brown cigarette.  Half the books are in German.  Rock music is blasting from the stereo.  In one corner there’s a playpen full of toys.  Otherwise, there's no sign of a child.

The house is a crime.  Absentee landlord.  Careless renters.  At a nearby pay phone, I call Carol, the owner, and tell her that the two porches are well on their way to becoming two piles of termite turd. 

Carol asks, "When can you fix them?"

"I'm booked up for a couple months, but I've got the rest of today.  I could juggle tomorrow, free it up.  Two days would do it."

Carol laughs.  "Somebody told me, if you want to get a job done, call a busy man.  You sound like my guy."

Her reasoning sounds flawed, but I'll take it.  Cash flow, needed.

As I lift off the boards, dismantling the back porch, I start to wonder how far the termites have spread.  I’d better inspect the house to find out where, if ever, the destruction ends.

In the crawlspace I see evidence of termites and evidence of repair.  No active infestation.  The foundation, however, is crumbling away.  Good grief.  As if termites ate the concrete.  The grade beam is turning to powder.  I can pull it off with my fingers — by the handful — like a sandcastle built wet but now dry.  There is practically nothing holding the house up.  If the earthquake chooses this moment to strike, I’m a goner.

Back outside, the almost genderless young woman is straddling a motorcycle.  I ask her to leave the door unlocked for me.

“What for?” she says as she pulls on a helmet.

“So I can use the bathroom.  The telephone.”

She laughs.  “No way,” she says.

Well, shit.  She’s a renter.  She lifts weights and reads books.  There’s a shadowy man who comes and goes in a van and never speaks to me.  There’s another woman living in the garage who ordered me to move my extension cord so it wouldn’t crush her plants.  “They may not look like much to you,” she says, “but they mean a lot to me.”

Actually, I’d admired her plants, especially an oddly shaped purple flower.  I’d intentionally placed my extension cord so as not to hurt the plants, but somebody moved it, perhaps the shadowy man.

I tear the porches out and leave them in a pile in the yard.  Mix and pour two concrete landings.  When I leave, both the front and back doors are three feet above the ground. I could build a temporary step, but I don't.  Take that, motorcycle mama.

At night I call the owner and tell her that before I build porches over the exposed foundation, I should do something to brace it.

To my surprise, she agrees: “Let’s do it right.”  I didn’t expect such an attitude because nothing in that house is right.  She must have recently bought it.  Maybe she doesn’t know what a wreck it is.

"What you really need is to jack up the house and build a whole new foundation.  It'll cost big bucks, though."

"Will you do it?"

"You need a different contractor for this.  I just do small jobs.  Since the house is in Palo Alto, the permit will be a nightmare.  It'll take months.  I can place some piers.  That'll remove the time pressure."

"Do what you can."

Thursday, October 9, 1986

I pull out the old concrete.  By hand.  Amazing.  Whoever mixed this stuff must’ve used the wrong proportions.  Too little Portland cement.  Impure water.  Something.

I mix a fresh batch of Quikrete in a wheelbarrow and pour it.  Then I shove two pier blocks into the puddles of concrete and wedge wood between the piers and the sill.  One corner of the house has already sunk an inch, and I don’t try to jack it up.  At least it won’t sink farther.

Next, I rebuild the front porch.  It goes up fast. 

Two Stanford students are practicing football plays in the street.

The motorcycle mama who wouldn’t unlock the house for me yesterday, today gives me a black cherry seltzer to drink.  On the wall by the telephone is a photo of her and another woman and a baby, all three naked, smiling, in a bathtub.  Definitely not genderless.  I feel like a voyeur.

Two mothers bathing
with one baby.  All look up
smiling at the man.

My hands are eroding.  The fingers crack and peel.  Copper Green, dry Quikrete, they do a job on your skin.  My thumb has a big tender bruise from a misguided hammer.  A nail scratched one knuckle; rebar scraped one wrist.  You can't always wear gloves.  Now I rub my hands with jojoba oil while contemplating the completed front porch.  It’s simple but solid.  Honest, plain, strong.  It’ll outlast the house. 

And that’s one of the reasons I like this kind of work:  afterwards, it’s still there.

Friday, October 10, 1986

This is my third day on a two-day job.  I had to postpone and reschedule; some clients are sore.

Today I'm under time pressure because I have to pick up my son at five o'clock.  On the back porch I cut one board badly but use it anyway leaving a half inch gap where there should be a tight butt joint. 

I load up the twuck with leftover lumber and concrete plus the debris of two porches with the wheelbarrow on top.  Then I pick up Jesse, my son.

With Jesse beside me in the front seat, there's probably a one-ton load in this half-ton pickup.  The truck sways from too much weight.  After four miles on Page Mill Road, greasy smelly smoke starts rising from below the gearshift knob.  It fills the cab.

I open the hood.  A cloud erupts, escapes.  It seems to be coming from underneath the engine instead of the radiator.  No, now it’s coming from the rear sparkplug.  How can steam be coming from a sparkplug?

I fix houses, not engines.  I know enough to use a rag as I open the radiator, but no steam rushes out.  It’s empty.  Bone dry.

Two hundred feet away is a large brick house which looks very rich and very private and very not to be messed with, but bless them they have a hose faucet right by the road, so Jesse and I without asking permission form a bucket brigade filling a Coke bottle and a thermos over and over until the radiator is full.

No water is dripping out.  Hoses tight. 

What happened?  How’d I lose it?

I wince, thinking of the mis-cut board, the half inch gap. 

I drive on.  We fill the Coke bottle and thermos, just in case.  A few miles later, the engine is overheating.  I’m now at the foot of the mountain.  I stop, empty our spare water into the radiator.  I teach Jesse how to open the radiator cap.  Jesse, by the way, is ten years old.  Today is his birthday.

Smoke billowing from
beneath my little truck on
a road leading home.

At the top of the mountain I’m overheating again.  There’s a gas station.  Jesse opens the hood for me.  I try to show him how to set the bar to hold the hood open.

“I know,” he says, and sets it for me.  So far, he's known a lifetime of car trouble.  It's normal for him. 

I re-water, then coast seven miles downhill with the engine off and arrive home with the radiator still cool, still full.

Back home, my wife has left notes all over the house.  A plan has developed: to celebrate Jesse's birthday, my wife and daughter and younger son have hiked to the Sierra Club Hiker's Hut which sits on a mountain ridge in Pescadero Creek Park, not far from where we live.  Jesse and I are to join them there.  We'll spend the night.  Perfect.

I shower and change.  Jesse gathers supplies. 

You can only reach the Hiker’s Hut by hiking.  Jesse and I, wearing backpacks, carrying flashlights, climb through the woods up the side of the ridge starting in a grove of creekside virgin redwoods, rising through oaks.  There’s no moon.  Through a break in the trees I see bright stars.  I say, "There's Cassiopeia."

Jesse walks ahead.

I hear a sudden sound from the dark woods.  I stop, spooked.

Jesse says, "It's a branch falling, Dad." 

Things fall apart.  Even trees.  Half inch gap.

Jesse hikes fast.  I’m getting winded.  My backpack gains weight as I ascend.  I want to protect Jesse from mountain lions in the forest, or at least from falling branches, but I can't quite keep up with him.

With my son climbing
a mountainside at night
toward stars.

The Hiker's Hut is no hut.  It has electricity, a refrigerator, stove, running water, even hot water.  Well-built, nice details.  No half inch gaps. 

Dinner’s over but Jesse and I have spaghetti, garlic bread, salad.  Somehow my wife carried a small cake a mile uphill, only slightly smudged.  Candles.

We lie in sleeping bags on the deck overlooking a meadow on the ridgetop.  Deer settle, making beds in the oat grass.  The stars are magnificent.  The Milky Way oozes across the bowl of sky from the ocean in the southwest to the distant glow of San Francisco, northwest.

A raccoon is rattling logs in the woodpile.

Exactly ten years ago Jesse came into my life and changed everything forever.
 
Next week I'll go back and cut a new board.

Gunther's Vent

Diary of a Small Contractor, Day 9

Tuesday, October 7, 1986

I’m in Gunther’s basement, eyeball to eyeball with a dead mouse.  He (or she) is sprawled on top of the concrete foundation.  I don’t know what killed it.  Gunther is upstairs, not dead, in bed recovering from eye surgery. 

I’m cutting pipes, drilling holes, banging and clanking and feeling guilty about all the noise.  Gunther's wife is at work — teaching my daughter, who is in second grade.  Neither Gunther nor his wife seem to take this surgery seriously, though I do — he’s an old man, after all.  Any surgery entails risk.

I, too, am doing minor surgery on his house, though there is nothing delicate about this operation.  Gunther hired a “yahoo,” he says, to plumb an apartment in his basement.  Twice he’s called me to correct errors that the yahoo made — minor errors, ones Gunther could have lived with.  Gunther doesn’t seem to tolerate minor imperfections in plumbing, though you’d never guess it from the slapdash style of the house.  Or maybe he can't tolerate being reminded of the yahoo, who must have been arrogantly ignorant.  Gunther is a retired schoolteacher, an affable and generous man.

Today’s yahoo error is a vent pipe that dips in such a way as to hold water like a sink trap, which defeats the purpose of venting.  And what is the purpose of venting?  To equalize pressure, the same way you can improve the pourability of a can of tomato juice by poking a second hole — a vent — in the top of the can.  Vents also allow sewer gases, which are both poisonous and explosive — methane, for example — to go out through the roof of your house instead of bubbling out in your bathroom sink.  Vents are not a glamor item.  But you need them.

My other task for Gunther today is to divert two bathtub drains into a graywater line for which Gunther has dug a trench.

While I’m working, one of the neighbors, an oldish woman, comes down to the basement and says, “I’m Karla Kartoffel.  Kartoffel.  That’s German for ‘potato.’  I’m wondering if you could look at a drain in my house that isn’t working right.”

Later, I go to Karla's house which her husband built in 1952.  He’s dead.  Karla has religious quotations on her walls.  She can’t look at me when she speaks.  She gazes off at a 90 degree angle, squinting, pursing her lips as if she’s reading from a teleprompter located too far away. 

All Karla's drainpipes are buried under a concrete slab.  There’s no way to change the pipes now:  “You’ll have to accept the fact that once a year or so you’ll have to call a rooter service to clean them out."  I point out the plumbing vent protruding through her roof under an oak tree.  "Put a screen over your vent so it doesn’t fill up with leaves.  They're plugging your drain and could cause gases to build up.  I'd do it myself but I didn't bring a ladder.” 

This seems to be vent day.

I charge her nothing for the advice though I’ve spent a half hour here.  I’m too easy sometimes.

Karla Kartoffel’s house, like the houses of many old people, is a house that is gradually shutting down.  She lives alone in one end of it.  Gunther’s house is more fully active, though the basement is full of old file cabinets and the smell of fermentation.

Gunther tells me that the doctor instructed him to call if he experienced “really severe pain” after the anesthesia wore off at home.  Gunther awoke at 4 a.m. in pain and wondered what is the dividing line?  When does it become “really severe"?  He vomited.  Is vomiting “severe”?  He was sweating.  Gunther decided that sweating meant severity, so he called the doctor at 6 a.m.  His wife drove him to the doctor’s office at 7 a.m. 

By the time I finish, Gunther is up and about.  Just 24 hours after surgery, he's inspecting my new pipes, praising modern drugs and medical techniques.  He’s been blind in one eye for 20 years.  When his eyepatch is removed, theoretically, hopefully, he will see.

We test his graywater pipes.  They leak — a slow drip.  I tell Gunther that I can fix them, but that the soap in his wastewater will plug them up if he does nothing.  Soap is a wonderful sealant.

Gunther will let the soap do the work.  Apparently, he’ll tolerate imperfections in my plumbing, but not the yahoo’s.

Gunther invites me to have dinner with him.  His wife has a meeting at school.  He's lonely, though he doesn't say so, and maybe a little scared, though he'd never admit it, and — I think I detect — a little ticked off at his wife for leaving him alone all day and all evening.  Women, take note: when a man says he doesn't need help, he means
    a) he really thinks he doesn't need help, and
    b) he'd appreciate a little chicken soup.

My job is home repair.  I stay for dinner.  I talk about how much my daughter enjoys second grade, how she blossoms under the teaching of Gunther's wife.

Conversation.  Equalizing the pressure.  Omelet, prepared by a one-eyed man.  Salad, prepared by a plumber.  Nothing glamorous.  But something he needs.

Crawlspace

Diary of a Small Contractor, Day 8

Friday, October 3, 1986

I have just wiggled on my belly through raw dirt and spider webs.  Now I’m lying on my back with a reciprocating saw in my hands.  I’m about to cut a pipe, which will then squirt water into my face, onto my clothes, and make a puddle in the dirt that surrounds me.  The question on my mind is, What am I doing here?

I don’t enjoy crawlspace work.  I’m thirty-nine years old.  I have a bad back.  I have a college degree.

What in hell am I doing here?

Of course I’m here because I promised to help Sonny install his new kitchen sink just as he helped me install two pairs of french doors in my house.  We trade labor.  He knows doors.  I know plumbing.  We’re friends.  I wasn’t Best Man at his wedding, but I was the guy who hired a stripper for his bachelor party.

When Sonny was a hippie carpenter, I was a hippie computer operator.  He loved his work; I hated mine.  I hired Sonny to help me fix up an old house I’d bought in San Francisco.  He told me I should quit my job and do what he was doing.  He had complete confidence in himself and in me.  One day, I quit.  Quickly I had an utter disaster — a one day shower repair turned into a three day marathon of faulty soldering, squirting pipes.  Sonny came to my rescue.

Ten years later, I still have occasional disasters, but I no longer call on Sonny to help.  He’s settled into a specialty — installing and weatherstripping doors. I’ve become a generalist — a licensed general contractor.  And you can’t be a general contractor unless you’re willing to hump it in a few crawlspaces.  Or hire somebody else to hump it.

My niche is the small job.  Details that the big contractors don’t want to bother with.  Adding an electric outlet for somebody’s new computer.  Installing a sink.  Repairing a deck.  My competition is not other contractors but unlicensed handymen who charge less and who as a result end up working for the people who have less money.  Which is why I quit being a handyman, myself.  If I have to wiggle on my belly through somebody’s cobwebs, I’d rather they were a rich person’s cobwebs.

Sonny is not rich.  When Sonny bought this house (cheap, by California standards), my first question was "How in the world did you qualify for a mortgage loan?"

Sonny answered: "I lied like shit."

At my own house in La Honda, Sonny replaced two sets of doors that leaked cold air into my rooms and water onto my floors — doors that I had installed myself — and now the air and rain stay outside.  He gave up two and a half workdays to do it, and if necessary I will spend two and a half days in this goddamn crawlspace to pay him back.

Oddly, in my perverted way, I love poking around people’s houses.  A construction voyeur.  I don’t peek into the medicine cabinet or violate private space.  I snoop around the attic where the electrician took blatant shortcuts (probably on a suffocatingly hot day, when I would probably do the same), and I stop to admire the handiwork of some previous tradesman in the crawlspace who took the time to properly insulate each hot water pipe when he knew nobody would ever see the difference if he left a few gaps — I notice, and I salute his dogged sense of values. 

I find beer bottles, candy wrappers, and I wonder: did somebody lie in this dusty coffin and goof off?  Who could be that desperate? 

I witness the work of fungus, and sometimes I bear the bad news of termites. 

A house is alive.  It breathes.  It expands and contracts.  It ages.  Sometimes it falls sick, and then I'm a doctor of houses.  I probe intimate cavities to learn its history.  I study the multilayered changes of an old house where generations of remodels have built upon themselves — I note the compromise, the painful choice, or the brilliant solution.  In new houses I learn the latest techniques, some good, some dismal. 

A house reflects the values of the people within.  If a strong person buys a strong house, it remains strong.  And vice versa:  Weak people, weak houses.  But if a strong person buys a weak house, he gradually, painstakingly fixes it up (which is what Sonny is doing).  A weak person in a strong house will gradually destroy it.

The structure will tell a story:  tragedy, comedy, or heartwarming family drama.  Day-to-day life slowly, inexorably leaves an imprint.  You can find it in the attic, on the roof, behind the drywall — or in the crawlspace. 

Anyway, that's what I'm doing here.  It's all Sonny's fault, and I'm grateful for it as I cut Sonny’s pipe and the first stream of water arcs upward and falls like warm rain on my eyeglasses.

We all need a bit of nursery...

Diary of a Small Contractor: Day Seven

Friday, September 26, 1986

Raccoons have been knocking over the Barleys' garbage cans.

My assignment: stop those 'coons.

I build a garbage can fortress out of boards that I salvaged during the deck repair.  I’d like to see them knock this over:  2x6 redwood walls, 16 penny nails into 4x4 douglas fir posts.

And yet I know that after a few winters of rain, the wood will soften and split, fungus will grow, and the raccoons will return.  All victories are temporary.

I present Mr. Barley with a bill of fifteen hundred dollars for the week's work.  Three Irish Setters bounce around us.  Then — the magic moment — Mr. Barley writes a check and casually hands it to me.  This simple act always fascinates me: the transfer of wealth.  So casual.  So vital.  A rich man of immense power, a tradesman with none.  What if he refused?  What would I do?

In ten years of contracting, I’ve never had to find out (although once I got into a shouting match...)

I move on to the modest house of a new client.  She's white and very pregnant.  Her husband is black and very large — like, left tackle large. 

She hands me a list of problems she wants me to check out.  On the bottom of the notepaper, preprinted, it says:

Sex maniacs leave notes.

On the wall is a framed drawing of a little boy and a little girl (cute, both white) examining their respective genitals in utter innocence. 

The whole vibe is a wee bit strange.  The husband sits at a computer, tapping keys.  The wife follows me around asking anxious questions about what I'm doing: does the faucet contain toxic chemicals?  Why did I replace the old chrome sink trap with a plastic trap? 

Any moment, I expect her to go into labor.

I drill a hole through the back wall of the bungalow and extend a water line from the kitchen.  I attach a hose bibb, turn the main valve back on, and test the hose.  Out comes steaming hot water!

The woman asks, "Won't that scald the plants?"

Embarrassing.  Humiliating.

I replumb to a cold water pipe and end up charging one hour's labor for a three hour job.

Oh well.  I've had worse days.  Much worse.  And in my pocket I've got two checks, a big one and a little one.

Moving on, I arrive at school a half hour early to pick up my kids.  The older kids would be bothered if I showed up in their classrooms, so I go to Nursery Blue where Will, age four, is folding paper boats and trying them out in a tub of water.  I sit on a sofa next to the rabbit, Bunny Blue, who sniffs me thoughtfully and then closes his eyes.  Bunny Blue has soft gray fur.  Will glances at me, then continues folding and floating paper boats. 

I fall asleep.  I dream of water pipes, bursting.

When I awake, Bunny Blue is cuddled against my hip.  It’s time to go.  Will doesn’t want to leave.  He's still folding and floating his flotilla. 

Nursery Blue is a safe, warm spot in the world.  Will is my third and last child to pass through here.  I’ll miss preschool — for myself as much as the kids.  We all need a bit of nursery toward the end of a day.

Mucking with Clients

Diary of a Small Contractor, Day Six

Wednesday, September 24, 1986

I don’t want to sound like a snob, but some houses are so poorly built that I hate working in them.  They depress me.

Michael has such a house.  It has no foundation.  The roof is rotten.  The ceilings buckle; the floor tilts.  And the plumbing is a nightmare.

Unfortunately, I am Michael's plumber.  He’s a friend and a business associate.  I can’t refuse.

His kitchen sink won’t drain.

I crawl under the house.  The drainpipe from the sink has no slope.  Dead level.  Opening a no-hub coupling, black sewage spurts onto my pants.  The blockage is five feet long.  I scrape it out:  black, soggy, matted food waste.

The fix would be to rebuild the drain lines with a better slope — any slope, in fact, would be an improvement.  But Michael doesn’t want to do it.  “Too big a project,” he says.

So in another six months, I’ll be snaking this line again.

I replace the ballcock in his toilet.  When I rejoin the water line, the supply tube breaks and sprays water.  I replace it, leaving a damp carpet behind.

I remove his kitchen faucet and install a brand new Delta.  I love  Deltas.  They operate nicely, and they’re easy to repair and reasonably priced. 

My final assignment for Michael today is to test a built-in dishwasher that has been in this kitchen ever since he bought the place five years ago.  He finally wants to find out if it works.

First problem:  the water line is clogged.  I unscrew the angle stop and scrape an inch of debris out of the supply pipe.

Second problem:  the control knob is sheared off.  I turn it with pliers.

Third problem:  the dishwasher starts; the water goes in, but it goes right back out again through the drain hose without ever entering the wash area.  This one, I can’t solve.  He needs an appliance repairman, and I tell him so.

I started at nine o'clock.  I’m quitting at 3:30.  I leave a bill for 5 hours labor, plus parts.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe to head off an argument.  People never believe plumbing could take as long as it does, and I get tired of justifying myself.  Most plumbers can tell you: it's not the mucking in sewage that's so unpleasant, it's the mucking with clients.

Back home I shower, wash my hair, shave, cut my toenails — trying to remove all traces of sewage sludge from my body.  It seems to penetrate skin the way oil penetrates wood.  My clothes I drop in the washer.

At last I’m ready to begin my own bathroom.

The first step is always the most frightening: cut a hole in the floor.  Once cut, there’s no turning back.

As luck would have it, I have to cut through a floor joist.  Now the floor is dangerously weak — directly under where I want to place a 300 pound bathtub to be filled with 400 pounds of water and 150 pounds of flesh. 

Normally, you’d solve this problem by cross-bracing with a perpendicular joist, but in this case I can’t reach one of the sides where I’d have to hammer nails unless I tear out the ceiling of a closet downstairs. 

Study.  Measure.  Trade-offs.  Think.  Finally I come up with a plan involving mini-braces and a sheet of 1 1/8 inch plywood under the tub.

I don’t have 1 1/8 inch plywood on hand.  I cut and install the mini braces, and I repair some gaps where flooring was never laid for some reason.  Then I call it a day.  Four hours work. 

My wife comes home, and all she sees is a hole in the floor.  “That’s a day’s work?”

"Four hours.  I was at Michael’s until three-thirty.”

"Four hours?  One hole in the floor?”

“And a lot of planning.”

She laughs.  She's familiar with how my simple projects can expand.  "You want a hamburger?"

"Please."

"It'll take about four hours."

Somehow, though, it's ready in fifteen minutes.

Lifetime Guarantee

Diary of a Small Contractor, Day Five

Tuesday, September 23, 1986

The wind is clinging to the mountainside today.  It thrashes the branches over my head and throws a few hard raindrops into my face.  I’m back at the Barley estate.  Deck repair, an outdoor job.  I’m wearing a shirt, sweatshirt, denim jacket, and nylon vest.  And I’m still shivering.  I can see under the ceiling of clouds to the valley below where the sun is shining and cars are glittering pinpoints.  It’s always a different world, these mountains.  That’s why I live in them.  And why most people don’t.

Mr. Barley has decided that I should replace all the decking but not the substructure.  So I'm laying 20-year decking on a 10-year foundation.  Go figure.  Maybe Mr. Barley knows something about his own body's life expectancy.  Maybe a doctor just performed a 5-year repair. 

Removing the old planks, I find termite damage in one of the joists.  The softness leads back to where the board joins the house and beyond — they got into a floor sill.  Then it stops.  Digging with a screwdriver, I find no live termites.  They came, they ate, they left.  Why?

I cut off the bad section of joist, replace it, and add metal flashing between the deck and the cabin, which is how it should have been built in the first place.  Then I lay the new decking. 

There is also a rotten step.  No termites, just fungus.  Usually a rotten tread means worse damage beneath it.  Not here.  So I simply replace the top board and coat the stringer with Copper Green.  Good for 10 years.  Not that I'm making any guarantees, mind you.

Now, the railings.  My instructions are to “do something” about them.  I drill holes, add bolts and shims to the posts.  Much better.  Ten more years.  But again, no warranty.  I'm not stupid.

Between the posts are vertical redwood 1x4s toenailed into the decking.  A poor design.  A running child could blast into a 1x4, knock it out, and drop 15 feet.  Most days, I’d consult with my clients and make sure they approved before I changed anything.  Today I’m too cold to be prudent, and anyway Mrs. Barley isn’t home and Mr. Barley is hard of hearing.  They said, "Do something."  Here's my something: I cut the rails shorter and add an outside horizontal 2x4.  It looks better, works better, and I’m getting out of this wind.

I move on to the house of one of my favorite clients.

Gunther lives in the foothills.  He’s white-haired, bearded.  A retired schoolteacher.  Looks like an old hippy.  In his basement is a photo of him as a young man — smiling, short-haired, in business suit. 

"I hired a yahoo," he says.  "Now I need you to fix his mistakes."

The yahoo plumber installed a vent pipe that slopes the wrong way.  In addition, Gunther wants me to divert a bathtub drain out of his septic system and into a graywater line.  Illegal, of course, but sensible.  Gunther has already dug a trench 2 feet deep and 20 feet long for the graywater. 

"Wow," I say.  "I’m impressed.  That's a lot of digging for a, um..."

"For an old fart?  I do okay.  I've got a good back but bad knees."

"I’m the opposite," I say. 

“Like the pioneers,” Gunther says.  “You know what was the number one medical problem of the pioneers who settled the west?  It wasn’t Apache arrows or anything like that.  When you think about it, it makes sense.  Building houses.  Making farms.”

“So what was the number one medical problem?”

“Back trouble.”

That’s typical Gunther.  A fountain of odd but interesting information.

I name a day when I can do the job.

"I'll leave the house open," Gunther says.  "I'll be having surgery."  He's having an eye operation, a retinal transplant. 

He’s blind in one eye.  I hadn’t noticed.

Surgery on someone of Gunther's age is never a sure thing.  "I hope you're okay," I say.

"Oh I'm not worried," Gunther says.  "It comes with a lifetime guarantee."

He waits a moment while I think that over.

Finally, I take the bait.  "What's that mean?"

"It means the surgeon guarantees I'll stay alive."  Gunther winks.  "Until I'm dead."

Poison

Diary of a Small Contractor, Day Four
 
Friday, September 19, 1986
 
I’m rebuilding a deck at the Barley house.  My instructions are vague.  Mrs. Barley told me: "Replace anything that needs replacing,” and also, “Do something about the railing." 

It’s going to be a physical day.  I love working on decks.  I love the muscle work, the big results, the fact that you're outdoors in a scenic spot because people don't want decks in ugly places.  This one is 15 feet above the ground on a hillside with a view across the valley, 30 miles.

The railing wobbles.  Whoever built this nailed the posts.  A few bolts will firm it up. 

Half the decking surface is cracked, weak.  No question: I tear it out.  Underneath, though, the joists are soft in spots but mostly sound. 

What do the Barleys want?  A twenty-year repair?  Or a five?  For twenty years, I’d have to tear the whole substructure out and replace it.  For five, I need only replace one rotten post.  The Barleys aren’t here today, so I decide to go for a ten year repair:  replace two posts and one joist, and treat the other joists with Copper Green.

The delicate part of the operation comes in replacing one of the posts, a 16 foot 4x4 which is surrounded by poison oak.  Armed with a shovel, I attack.  I clear an area large enough to stand in plus space for a temporary brace.  I have to maneuver a 16 foot piece of lumber in a 4 foot clearing.  One false move and I’ll suffer for a week.
 
My shoes touch a branch.  My Levis brush against a leaf.  Is that contact too much?  Tomorrow, I’ll know.

Back home I gingerly remove shoes and all my clothes and drop them in the wash.  I rub my legs and arms with something called Tecnu, which is supposed to prevent reactions to poison oak.  Then I shower, a long one, washing everything thoroughly, remembering my boyhood back in Maryland when my neighbor was burning a pile of leaves including poison ivy.  Just an ignorant little kid, I stood in the sweet-smelling smoke.  Within hours I broke out from my hair to my ankles.  My clothes had absorbed the toxin.  Every inch of my body itched, except the feet.  Every inch.  Inside my nostrils.  Inside my ears.  And — yes — down there.

Wash, wash.  The steam wafts.

Later, in fact all night long, my arms and legs tingle — pins and needles — where I rubbed them with Tecnu.  It feels like I'm being eaten by ants.   A warning from my skin: don’t ever use that stuff again. 

Today I balanced on joists 15 feet above the ground painting toxic Copper Green.  I climbed ladders.  I juggled heavy lumber.  I used lethal tools: power saw, power drill.  The only harm comes from a little bottle of crap I bought at the drug store.

But at least, I don't itch.

Earthquake

October 17, 1989

Today's job was rewiring a house in Menlo Park.  It was grubby crawlspace work creeping on my belly, running Romex, lying on my back hammering staples into joists.  Thinking, always, I'd hate to be down here in an earthquake.

Now I'm swimming laps.  Oddly enough after a hard day's work, there is nothing I enjoy more than swimming myself to utter exhaustion. 

It's 5:04:49 p.m.  Suddenly I'm surging on a wave.  Like in the ocean.  I'm body-surfing.  What the hell? 

I'm swept to the side of the pool.  Waves are breaking over the edge.  Aluminum chairs are dancing and rattling all over the concrete deck.  That was the sound of the quake for me — clattering aluminum chairs.  With water splashing all over the concrete deck, there is a smell like a dusty road after a summer rain.

The pool is at a private club.  My son Will, age 7, comes running to me wearing a baseball glove.  He's been throwing balls on the tennis court.  He says, "What happened?"

"Earthquake," I say.  "You feel it?"

"I fell down."

"I was in the pool," I say.  "Come to think of it, a swimming pool may be just about the safest place you can be in an earthquake.  Nothing can fall on you."

"Can I get in?"

The water level is a few inches below where it was.  The power is out.  Otherwise, everything is normal.  No damage.  What can I say?  When you've lived in California for a long time, you get blasé about earthquakes.  This one didn't seem any different, only bigger.

"Sure," I say.  "Jump in."

And so for the next half hour, I finish my laps while Will dives for pennies.  It would prove to be my last half hour of calm in the next few weeks.

Two boys also jump in the pool — with their clothes on.  Later their mother arrives.  “We fell in,” they say.  "The earthquake made us fall."

“I hope your shoes aren’t in there,” she says. 

“No, we took them off,” they say.  "Then we fell in."

After I shower and change, as I’m getting a cup of coffee, the bartender tells me that a section of the Nimitz Freeway collapsed.

Hmm.

Will and I drive to the Portola Valley Town Center, where my older son Jesse is just finishing soccer practice, which also continued as normal.  A soccer field — like Will on the tennis court and me in the pool — was a safe place to be.  The Town Center sits exactly, literally, right smack dab on top of the San Andreas Fault.  My 12-year-old son had been standing on it.  He said he fell down, then stayed perched on his knees watching waves move through the grass.

None of us have any idea how big the quake was.  But as I drive to pick up my daughter, on the radio we hear that a section of the Bay Bridge collapsed.

In my truck we follow the route of the San Andreas Fault along Portola Road, crossing back and forth over the fault line, then continue on Sand Hill Road to the gymnasium where my daughter has gymnastics.

She's waiting for us in the parking lot.  Everyone else has already been picked up.  Her class had to leave the building because ceiling tiles were falling down, so she’s been waiting outside.  "Where were you?" she asks.  She was bored.

We drive home.  Many radio stations are off he air.  KNBR is on.  They say the Bay Bridge and the Nimitz collapsed and fires are breaking out.

On the way home, a small barn has collapsed.

I stop in front of our house and hear voices and falling brick.  The La Honda Fire Brigade is dismantling our chimney, which was on the verge of collapse.  My wife is holding a flashlight for them.  Our power is out.

The house is a shambles.  Books, records, and cassette tapes all over the living room.  Food and glass all over the kitchen — molasses, peanut butter, vinegar, sugar, wineglasses, heirloom china — all over the floor.  And it’s now dark.  I find flashlights and light lanterns and loan a Coleman lantern to the neighbors.  Their house has a huge hole in the wall where the chimney collapsed.

I inspect our house.  Sheetrock came loose on the walls.  Papers and books flew around but the computer didn’t budge.  The bathroom medicine cabinets burst open.  The sink is full of pills and Band-aids.  The back porch detached itself from the house.

So we start cleaning up.  I bring in a garbage can, and we fill it up.  My daughter tends to her stuffed animals who are traumatized by the quake.  Will and Jesse clean up the living room.  My wife tackles the kitchen.  I reshelve the bathroom supplies.  We mop the kitchen floor several times, and it’s still sticky.  We replant some potted flowers that crashed.

The phone works, but you have to wait for a dial tone.  I call a friend across town whose husband is out of town.  "Are you all right?" I ask.

"I'm fine," she says.  "Don't worry about me."

Several days later I learn that this woman was standing in the rubble of her collapsed fireplace, an entire corner of her house suddenly missing, telling me she's fine and not to worry.  She thought I should help somebody who might really need it.  This attitude of altruism will show up again and again among practically everybody in the days to come.

We listen to the radio a bit, but its tone is basically one of panic — saying, “DON'T PANIC!!!” and giving a lot of foolish and contradictory advice such as, "Stay out of your house!" and then a minute later: "Don’t go outside!"  So we turn it off and deal with the real.

The kids — and the dog — sleep on the floor in our room.  We feel aftershocks all night.  We're together.  We'll get through it.

The next day, we start to rebuild.

As a contractor, the next few months will be the busiest period of my life.  At first I make emergency board-ups and bracings for free.  Then I charge my regular rates.  

The insurance inspector estimates the damage to my house at $11,000.  He warns me: "Watch out for profiteering contractors."

I tell him, "I'm a contractor."

The deductible on my homeowner's policy is $13,000.  I can fix it myself, except I'll get a mason for the brick chimney.

Of all the houses I repair after the quake, I never meet one homeowner who collects a penny from insurance.  I agree: let's beware of profiteering.

Note: I wrote an entire book about that earthquake with a no-nonsense title: QUAKE!  It's a young adult novel based on true events about people in the town of Loma Prieta, which sits on Loma Prieta Mountain, the epicenter of the quake.  You can get any e-book format from this link to Smashwords, or you can get the epub format from iBooks or the Kindle format from Amazon.  You can get used copies of the print book through places like aLibris or Amazon, or you could get a brand new, signed copy from me.  Send an email if interested: joecot@coastside.net

Cheerfully Picking

Diary of a Small Contractor, Day Three

Thursday, September 18, 1986
 
I’m supposed to work for Michael this morning, unclogging his sink drain along with a few other plumbing problems, but he hasn’t answered his phone for two days.  Where’d he go?

Aw, shucks — I don't get to muck about in Michael's backed-up sewage today.  What a disappointment.

Instead I spend a pleasant time building shelves, then reorganizing my garage where I store all my tools and supplies.  If I’m not careful, my yard fills up with lumber and old toilets.

For a couple hours at my desk I figure some estimates for people and order Mr. Rufus’s windows, which are an odd size.  In other words, expensive, even for the most basic aluminum model.  Can he afford it?  I call Mr. Rufus, quote a price.  “Okay,” he says.  “Let’s do it.” 

I really like this old guy.  He lives in a dump in a bad neighborhood; his health looks sketchy; his furniture is wretched.  I'm guessing he's an alcoholic who's seen the bottom and is coming back up.  And yet he and his homespun wife are as cheerful as can be.

When I was starting out in this business, I would have shunned aluminum windows.  Now I've suggested them — and ordered them — for Mr. Rufus.  I used to hate drywall, too.  I thought everything had to be high-quality wood, carefully crafted.  What a prick I was.

Here's to growing up.  Here's to the Rufuses of the world.  Here's to cheerfully picking among the crap that life throws at you.

What We Do Is Dangerous

October 13, 2011

Photo by Joseph Kral

Construction accidents can happen when you least expect them.

Yesterday on a narrow road in La Honda, a truck from GraniteRock was delivering 9 yards of concrete for the final pour of a house.  As he approached, the construction workers offered to help guide him with hand signals around the last hairpin turn.  The driver waved them off.  He had years of experience and had delivered to this same project on earlier pours. 

Making the turn, the rear wheels went off the pavement onto the soft shoulder of the private road.  The barrel of the truck was still mixing, which may have shifted the load off center.  As the shoulder crumbled, the guard rail collapsed.  The truck slid sideways and backward into the canyon of a creek.  The cab flipped.  The force of 30,000 pounds of concrete falling into a canyon flattened the cab as if it had been put through a crusher.  The driver died immediately.  It took the entire day and into the night before they could get his body out of there.

Photo by Joseph Kral

Fred Eisenstaedt, the driver, was 62 years old.  Everybody liked him.  Sometimes he brought his terrier dog along with him on deliveries.  Not this day.

A day later, the truck body has been removed.  The barrel containing 9 yards of hardening concrete is still in the canyon.


Lawyers and insurance companies will argue over who was at fault.  We in the trades only need to know that a good man is gone.


Be careful out there.

Head First

Diary of a Small Contractor, Day Two
 
Wednesday, September 17, 1986

The day begins at the house of a friend, Michael, who is also my literary agent.  He needs an estimate. 

Working for friends is tricky.  My first instinct is simply to do the job as a favor; but I do so much work for friends that I would quickly go bankrupt if I weren’t paid for it.  I compromise:  I charge them 20% less for labor.  (Come to think of it, Michael never gave me a discount when representing me as an agent — I tend to short-change myself like this.)

The big danger in working for friends, however, is not money but professional standards.  I don’t feel fear.  I relax, and if I’m not vigilant I become sloppy in my work.

As I talk with Michael, it begins to rain.  Among a number of projects, the immediate problem is that the kitchen sink is backed up.  In fact, it’s been backed up for days.

I snaked that sink drain several times in the past, and every time I’ve told Michael that it needs to be rebuilt or else the problem will keep recurring.  Today, at last, he seems receptive to the idea.  He'll "think about it."

It’s raining hard.

We talk for an hour and fifteen minutes.  That’s the problem with estimates:  they can eat up your day.

I drive through the rain to the Barley estate.  In the adobe house I sand and touch up the ceiling over the big old master bed.  Then for the cottage I build a new windowsill, which takes me to noon.

It’s still raining.

I take a break, eat lunch and make some phone calls, but then I give up.  I’m supposed to rebuild their deck this afternoon, but I’m rained out.

A long estimate.  Then rain.  Some days, it’s hard to make a living in this line of work.

Back at home, the rain stops.  Annoying.  It isn't worth returning to the Barley job, but I can spend a couple of hours working on my own roof.  It's an ongoing, when-I-have-time re-shingling project.  I set up the ladder, peel back the blue plastic tarp.

I'm placing step-flashing around the chimney, an awkward task.  I should use roof jacks for safety, but this will only take a few minutes.  The roof has a 1:1 rise-to-run ratio, which is carpenter talk for a roof that has a 45 degree pitch.  I'm balanced on my butt while chiseling mortar for the flashing when something slips and I'm sliding face-first on my belly down the wet shingles.  Toward the edge.  Like a toboggan on a ski jump.

This is the moment when your entire life is supposed to pass before your eyes.

Somehow, it doesn't.  I'm too busy trying to save myself.  With my arms outstretched, a hammer and cold chisel still in my fingers, I manage to grab the rain gutter and come to a stop with my face in the dark water and damp leaves of the trough.  My feet are uphill behind me.  A sharp point of sheet metal — a section of step flashing — is poking into my ribs.  Screws and nails and tools are spilling out of my tool belt and clattering over the shingles and down the ten foot drop to the deck.  I almost went there, head first.

I have a cut elbow.  Might need a stitch.

Can't complain.  I'm alive. 

I'll be glad when that roof is finished.

The Zen of Aluminum Windows

Diary of a Small Contractor, Day One

Tuesday, September 16, 1986

I shut off the engine.  Suddenly there is silence except for the crackling of the motor as it cools.  I’m scared.

Good.  Fear inspires my best work.

I’m scared because there are hundreds of ways to goof up a job, and only one (or at most, a few) ways to do it right. 

My first task is in “the cottage," which is the original house built on this land in the 1930's.  Now the cottage is used as a rental.  Two old wood windows are rotting.  The tenant has stuffed newspapers into the holes.

It takes ten minutes to tear out the windows.  They probably took hours to install plumb and tight.  Makes me queasy.  How easy it is to destroy a work of carpentry.

I'm no longer fearful.  Like stage fright, it disappears as soon as you begin.

Gingerly, expecting the worst, with crowbar and screwdriver I pry the outside trim.  Here’s a surprise:  the wood doesn’t split.  It’s virgin redwood, tight-grained, bone dry.  Wonderful wood.  Fifty years on this house, and not a trace of rot even though the nails within it have nearly rusted out.  More durable than steel, this wood. 

Probably the lumber came from a 600-year-old institution of a tree growing on this same mountain, felled in the desperation of the Great Depression.  This vertical grain — clear heart — would be much too valuable to use as window framing today.  Back then, they used redwood for everything.

The new windows are aluminum.  Wood is better-looking and transmits less heat, but would cost in this case three times as much.  Cost versus quality.  It’s up to the owners. 

Mr. Barley is a retired professional.  He has 3 Irish Setters and wears a silver whistle on a lanyard around his neck.  When he blows it, bedlam breaks loose as 3 dogs run to him and dance about, eager for a command.

Mrs. Barley is an elegant but easy-going woman, a gracious hostess with an east coast accent.  She seems to make all the decisions when it comes to questions of taste.  I told Mrs. Barley she could choose plain aluminum windows for $70, bronzed aluminum for $140, bronzed aluminum with thermopane glass for $270, or wood with thermopane for $600.  Mrs. Barley sorts it out:  Since the cottage is a rental, wood is out of the question.  Since the rest of the cabin is uninsulated, thermopane would not make a great difference.  But she chooses bronzed because it looks better.  Aesthetics, in this case, are worth an extra $70.

I cover the edges with silicone caulk which states on the tube that it is “guaranteed for 50 years.”  Total bullshit.  The stuff was only invented a few years ago.  Who knows how long it will last?  And what if it fails after, say, 47 years?  Can I tell by looking at a 47-year-old bead of caulk which company manufactured it?  Do I bring in the original tube and cash register receipt, which of course I've been saving for 47 years?  Will the company still be in existence?  Will mankind?  If I’m still alive, I’ll be 86 years old.

My next task is to install a screen door.  I rip off the plastic and cardboard packaging which says “all hardware included.” 

There is no hardware. 

There is supposed to be a closer, a handle, and a package of screws.  From this mountain, the store where I bought the door is a 30 minute drive.

I have screws.  My truck is a miniature hardware store exactly because of situations like this.  I can scavenge the handle from the old screen door.  But there is no closer.  For that, I will have to return on another day.

My next task is in the main house, which was built of adobe bricks in the 1950's on the side of a mountain overlooking the southern San Francisco Bay.  A lovely spot.  I can see over the smog of San Jose to Mount Hamilton and a tiny white dot on its peak: the Lick Observatory, 30 miles away.

A ceiling has been water-damaged.  Mr. Barley says that the roof leaked but now is fixed.  The damage is over a bed which is too heavy to move, so I cover it with a dropcloth.  On the floor surrounding the master bed are 3 round dog beds.  I slide them under the dropcloth.  Then I place a sheet of plywood over the dropcloth to spread my weight over the mattress, and I stand on it.

Cutting out the damaged section of ceiling, I have two surprises:  first, the drywall is 5/8 inch thick whereas I brought 1/2 inch drywall to replace it, and secondly the damage is directly beneath a bathtub drain. 

I’ll bet dollars to donuts that the damage was caused by the tub, not the roof.  I go upstairs and run water in the tub.  I come downstairs and shine my flashlight into the hole.  No water.  I go back upstairs and run the shower.  I come back downstairs and examine the hole:  no water.  I go upstairs and hold my hand over the shower nozzle so it splashes against the wall.  Downstairs:  water is dripping. 

To pinpoint the source of the leak — the shower valve — it takes several trips up and downstairs.  My knees are getting tired.  On each trip my eye catches on a book lying on the staircase about a pet owl “the size of a beer can with the personality of a bank president.” 

I explain the problem to Mrs. Barley.  Plumbing problems are never pleasant, always unexpected, usually expensive.  When the news is bad, blame the messenger.  Which is why plumbers tend to be defensive people.  Fortunately, Mrs. Barley has already weathered many a home-owning crisis, and this is a small one.  “So can you fix it?” she says.

“Yes,” I say.  And I do. 

The other surprise, the extra thickness of drywall, I cope with by using extra joint compound as filler.

I love this house.  The space is generous.  The view, stunning.  The furniture, comfy and worn.  The walls are covered with weavings, macrames, and photos of Irish setters.  There are dog scratches on the doors and floor.  The fixtures, though old, are of high quality.  Books overflow from shelves.  The rooms are arranged for human interaction.  The television in a corner of the bedroom appears to be an afterthought.  There are magazines piled on top of it.  I don’t even see a stereo.

It's been a good day's work.  Nine hours.  Satisfying.  Useful.  Somewhat hard on the knees.

I'll be back.

After the Barleys, I drop from the wealthy hills of Woodside to a little strip of Appalachia.  It's an unincorporated area in a hollow at the foot of the mountain.  This house belongs to a man named Rufus on a street called Rufus Lane.  He says there’s no relationship. 

I'm here to make an estimate.

Unlike the adobe house or its well-built cottage companion, here I see wood siding split and chipped, loose boards, a sagging fence overgrown by roses, and a general sense of the temporary nature of poorly built shelter.  Inside, an old woman, Mrs. Rufus, is boiling potatoes. 

Mr. Rufus shows me a fence and says, “She wants it fixed.”  Then two doublehung wood windows:  “She wants to replace them.”  Apparently “she” decides what must be done.  But it is his job to talk to tradesmen.  He says, “What kind of window do you recommend?”

“Aluminum,” I say without a moment’s hesitation. 

"Coffee?"  He offers me a chair.

“No thanks,” I say.  “I stiffen up if I sit down after a day’s work.”  In a hard chair, I mean.

He nods.  “Me, too,” he says.  He’s 30 years older. 

Listen to me!  I'm 39 and I sound like an old man!

"I'll call you with an estimate," I say.  Already we trust each other, a gut feeling. 

"All right.  I have to go to work now," Mr. Rufus says.

He's beyond retirement age and he works an evening shift.  I can't resist asking, "What kind of work do you do?"  He looks rough-edged like a longshoreman or a truck driver.

Mr. Rufus shrugs, his hands palm upward.  He lifts his eyebrows as if the answer is a surprise even to himself and says with some puzzlement in his voice: “I’m an accountant.”

Ancient calendars decorate the walls.  The Salvation Army would reject the furniture.  On the floor is a magazine, Field and Stream.  Mrs. Rufus in a calico apron and soft slippers is humming, boiling potatoes.  The kitchen is warm and steamy.  It feels like a home.

A Boy on a Bike

Friday, October 11, 1996

In the truck loaded with plumbing equipment I'm driving Will, my youngest child, to school.  It's a wealthy private high school where he's the scholarship kid.  He feels, shall we say, somewhat alienated.  He's playing in a rock band, the Burnin' Biscuts (the misspelling is intentional) that is gaining local notoriety.

We've argued about marijuana.  We've argued about unchaperoned parties.  Today Will is questioning why he should go to high school.  Any high school.  He wants to play music.

Since he's only 14, the law is on my side.  But I'm thinking ahead: "I want you to go to college."

"Why?"

"Because it's okay with me if your career plan is to be a rock star, but I don't want you to be an ignorant rock star."

Which ends the conversation.  It's a 25 mile drive to the high school.  The remaining 20 miles pass in silence, Will fuming.

When you decide to have children, you're aware of how much work it is to take care of a baby.  If you aren't aware, people will tell you.  But nobody warns you that eventually you'll be dealing with a 14-year-old.  Will is my third (and final) pass at this dealing, so at least I bring some experience to the task.

I spend the day repairing and rebuilding a shower stall.

Building a shower
all day getting dirty so
some people can wash.

Driving home, I take note of six boys in the bike lane ahead, single file, pedaling hard, apparently racing.  Just as I catch up with them, one of the boys loses control.  His front wheel wobbles. 

Suddenly boy and bike shoot into the road directly in front of my truck. 

The bike topples.  On his side but still on the bike, the boy scrapes a half circle in the road and comes to a stop.

I've already hit the brakes.  The wheels freeze.  The truck goes into a skid.  The tires screech.  The boy looks up at me in naked terror. 

Our eyes lock. 

The truck jerks to a stop with its front bumper just inches shy of the boy's head as I hear the toolboxes in the bed crash against the back of the cab.

Then there's absolute silence.

I can smell the smoke of my tires.

The kid stands up.  He's wearing a helmet.  Road burn on one arm.

For a moment, the kid and I are staring at each other, separated by a windshield, not a word spoken.  The kid has blue eyes.  Fair hair.  His stare transforms into a glare.  He seems angry as if it's all my fault.  No apologies and no thanks.  He hops onto his bike and pedals furiously away.

For a minute I can't move.  I'm shaking.  Cars come up behind me, honk, then pass.

Now I can move.  Slowly I drive home, re-examining my life. 

What am I hustling for?  Two kids in college, one starting high school.  I'm writing huge checks and working harder than ever.  Does it all come to this?  I'd been driving 5 or 10 over the limit, pushing the edge on speed just as I'm pushing the edge on my career.  That boy I almost killed will soon be 14 himself, angry, confused.  I caught a glimpse of it in his eyes.

A thought is crystallizing, and it isn't coming from my brain.  Something, some One, has spoken.

Back home when I walk into the kitchen my wife sees it right away.  "What's wrong?" she asks.

I'm 49.  She's 48.  I say, "I want to have another child.  Is it too late?  Can we do that?"

"Wow."  She checks my face for signs of a mental breakdown.  None there.  Water is boiling on the stove.

She considers for a minute.  The air tingles.  This is the essence of love.

"We can try," she says.

Impaled

October 1995

I'm installing ceiling hooks for a therapy practice. 

It's attic work on a sunny day, probably 120 degrees up there.  Dust hangs in the air.  I plow through spiderwebs and shove itchy insulation aside. 

I'm balanced on my knees over a joist.  Tightening a nut, my sweaty hand slips from the wrench and comes down hard on something sharp.

Ow!

In the beam of my headlamp is a nasty chunk of wood broken from the top of the joist.  Like a grainy dagger of Douglas fir, it is about 4 inches long coming to a point at one end.  The point is embedded in my right-hand palm with the wood hanging down, pulled (painfully) by gravity.

Cautiously, I try to tug at the wood.  It won't come out.  When I pull at it, I see stars.

I crawl back to the trap door, step carefully down the ladder.  Holly, one of the therapists, sees my hand and blanches.

"Ack!" she says.

"Little accident," I say.  "Could you try to pull it out?"

"It'll rip you apart!"

"Just try.  Please."

She pulls gently at the stick of wood. 

I see stars.

"I'll drive you to the emergency room," Holly says.

"Not yet," I say.  "I want to finish first."  I start climbing to the attic, still impaled, the piece of wood clattering (painfully) against the side of the ladder.

"You almost fainted when I pulled on that thing."

"Thank you for trying."

"You'll bleed all over the attic.  The ceiling down here will turn red."

"I'll clean it up."

One thing about me: pain makes me stupid.  It's happened before.  Another thing about me: I hate to leave a job unfinished.

Crawling across joists, I nearly faint again.

Okay, I get it.  I crawl back to the trap door and come down the ladder.  Holly is standing there, scowling at me.  "Get in my car," she says.

"I'll drive myself."

"You can't drive!"

But I do.  The truck is stick shift.  Changing gears, I see stars.  Instead of the emergency room, I drive to the Palo Alto Clinic where I have medical coverage and a family physician who knows me.  Of course, you're supposed to make an appointment weeks in advance.

There are 3 receptionists in the Family Practice Department.  It's a busy place with a waiting room full of people.  My face is smeared with sweat and dirt and cobwebs.  I step to a desk and say, "Excuse me.  I'm sorry.  I don't have an appointment but is there any chance I could see Dr. Wisler?"

I hold up my hand for the receptionist to see.  Blood is trickling down the chunk of wood and dripping onto the floor.

All 3 receptionists bolt from their desks running in different directions.

A minute later, one of them returns and says, "Dr. Wisler is seeing a patient and is supposed to go on lunch break after that, but he says he'll see you on his break.  Now let's get you out of here."

Everyone in the waiting room is staring at me and my chunk of wood and the little puddle of blood at my feet.  I suppose it looks like somebody attacked me with a wooden stake.  Like I was fighting a vampire.

I follow the receptionist to Dr. Wisler's office, where I take a seat in an armchair.  The receptionist places towels on my lap to catch the blood.

After about 15 minutes, Dr. Wisler arrives with a nurse.  For some reason he doesn't move me to a treatment room but operates on me right there in the office, holding my hand over a towel draped over the blotter of his desk.  The nurse squirts antiseptic while the doctor dislodges bits of skin.  I'm seeing stars the whole time.

Dr. Wisler seems to be enjoying himself. 

"I'm sorry to make you miss lunch," I say.

"This is better than lunch," he says.

The nurse and I exchange a look.  She shrugs.

The whole operation takes a half hour.  My hand is wrapped in white gauze.

Dr. Wisler orders me to take the afternoon off and to keep the hand elevated above my heart.  So I do.  I drive home steering and shifting with my left hand.  Once when I was hitchhiking, I saw a one-armed man do this in a Volkswagen bug.  You have to lean forward and press your shoulder against the steering wheel while you reach across to move the floor-shift.  You tend to swerve a little each time you shift, so you change gears as little as possible.

At home I take a lengthy bubble-bath, my favorite recreational activity.  My bandaged hand stays above water on the edge of the tub.  While soaking, I read a book of poetry by William Carlos Williams.  He was a doctor, so it seems appropriate.

My daughter (age 17) comes home from high school and finds me still bathing in bubbles.  Talking through the door, she reminds me that when she injured her ankle, she was told to keep the ankle above her heart for a few days.  Being a dancer, she could do that.

We all learn to adapt.

The next day, I return to work.  You can do a lot with one hand.

Starting Out

Saturday, September 3, 1983

At Plum Court Apartments in Sunnyvale the new carpets are too high, causing doors to drag.  I'm here to trim them.  The entire unit was refurbished after an old couple moved out.

The walls are utterly bare.  The tenants have no furniture.  No chair, no table, nothing.  Two sleeping bags zipped together.  The plush carpet will be their bed.

They look like kids,
so strong and fresh.
Bright paint in the kitchen.  
Tattoos on young flesh.

The girl has one large cardboard carton; the boy, a backpack.  There's an air of hasty arrangement in their move.  Amid the high energy there's a gentleness between them, a constant checking of eyes.  Little touches.  Fingertips.  They are totally in synch.  Buoyant.  Inspiring.

Besides the box and backpack, they have a kitten which is mewing and lapping water from a bowl on the kitchen floor.  From a small radio, strange drums are blasting.

"Just married?" I ask.

"Not yet," the boy says.

The girl smiles at him, blushing.

"Oops.  Sorry," I say.

"It's cool," the girl says.

Are you pregnant?  I want to ask.

The young woman is counting their money: not enough for a pizza.  "Top Ramen," she says, and she fills a pot with water.  She glances at the boy, bites her lip, a spark in her eye.  She turns to me.  "Are you almost done?"

"I'll be out of your way in a minute," I say.

They're so in love.  So sweet.  So simple.

There's hope for us all.

Hello, Old Dog

September 1986

Hello, Old Dog

You smell so bad
and walk so slow,
lucky for you
you love old Joe.

 
I wrote that poem in 1984.  Now it's 1986, Sunday morning.  I’m the first to awake.  Quickly without dressing I go upstairs and let out the dog:  Quinn, age 14, arthritic, incontinent.  This morning, I catch him before he pees in the house.  He hobbles to the door, hesitates at the top of the stairs, looks back as if to say, “Do I have to?”

I nod.  You have to.

Gingerly, sideways, he takes the first step.  Next, the tricky part.  At a 45 degree angle he takes the second painful step.  Arthritis has welded his spine.  Sometimes he has to drag his rear end.  This time he sways but somehow stays on his feet. 

I remember once when he was young, I was walking him at night on a leash.  He took off after a cat and dragged me on my belly down a hill.  I came home looking like I'd been on the losing side of a fight.  Years later, my children held the leash without incident.


Now Quinn drags himself back up the stairs.  Sometimes, climbing, he gets stuck.  His hind legs lock straight out like a rabbit, and he can’t make them bend.  This morning he makes it.

A few minutes later as I'm getting dressed, Will finds me.  He's four.  Will says, “Daddy, Quinn is throwing up all over the house.”

There’s a puddle in the kitchen, another in the dining room, two in the living room and one under the computer — foamy, oily, clear vomit with no grass.  Sometimes he vomits his pills, which currently are an awesome pile:  two Butazoladin, seven Medrol, two Epinephrine, and a vitamin E.  But he hasn’t had his morning meds.

I invite Quinn to go out on the deck.  There, if he vomits any more, I don’t need to clean it up — just hose it down.

He can’t get up.

Puppy Quinn

I carry him, 70 pounds of ribs and fur, out to the deck, set him down and shut the door.  We only selected 4 of those pounds at the Philadelphia dog shelter.  In his prime, he weighed 85.

My wife and I go for a run. 

Returning home a half hour later, Quinn hasn’t moved.  He looks up at me and smiles, panting, dripping saliva from his pink and purple tongue.  He hasn’t vomited since I put him there on the deck.  Gently, I hold his legs in a way that usually allows him to get mobilized.  Nope.  He can’t move.

Now for the first time, I’m worried.  I guess it’s a sign of his decrepit condition that up to this moment, I wasn’t concerned.

Rose is stretching, post-run.  Speaking softly so the kids won’t hear, I say, “Quinn seems to be paralyzed.”

We share a worried look.  We’ve both been dreading this development.
   
Rose examines him.  She knows tricks, therapy tricks, that can unlock his legs.

“He’s not paralyzed,” she says.  “But his abdomen is distended and his gums are pale.”

Suddenly we both have the same thought:  poison.  A neighbor’s dog was poisoned two weeks ago.  Time to move fast.  I call the neighbor, Kurt, who owns a car repair shop and has, coincidentally, a German Shepherd who looks just like Quinn.  What were the symptoms when his dog was poisoned?

“Bleeding from the nostrils,” says Kurt.

“Did his stomach swell up?”

“No.”

So that's not it.

Rose and I hurriedly talk it over.  We're thinking:  blocked intestine.  Sometimes in big dogs they get twisted and nothing can pass.  The problem occurred — or may have occurred — once before on a weekend when our regular vet was getting married.  We took Quinn to the Emergency Vet in South Palo Alto.  This man diagnosed intestinal blockage but nearly killed Quinn with anesthesia in the process.  We later showed the x-rays to our regular vet, who said it didn’t look like a blockage at all.

Now, this being a Sunday, we are stuck with the Emergency Vet again.  They have a terrible reputation, not just from our experience but from everybody we've talked to.  We also doubt that Quinn would survive the 45 minute drive over the mountain.  Rose wants to intervene, to help.  I want to let nature takes its course.  For weeks we’ve dreaded the prospect of having to put Quinn down.  Now it seems that nature has stepped in to do the job for us.

Rose calls the Emergency Vet and describes the distended abdomen, the pale gums and vomiting.  The woman who answers the phone says, “Bring the dog in right away or he will die a slow and painful death.”

Rose is dancing on hot coals.  I point out that the woman is a receptionist, not a vet, probably doesn't know her ass from her elbow, and in any event she had no business making that kind of a statement.

Rose calls Fawn, a friend whose old decrepit Irish Setter recently died, who keeps horses and runs a 4-digit monthly vet bill, who above all has a clear head and will be less emotionally wracked than we are.  Fawn comes right over.  Good friend.  Quinn, meanwhile, hasn’t moved.  He lies there, looking up at us, panting, sometimes smiling.  His eyes are getting cloudy.

Fawn’s first act is to put her arm around my back.  I’m moved by the gesture because  Fawn is not a touchy-feely sort of person — and neither am I.  She says, “Quinn looks just like my dog on the day he died.”

Fawn knows of some vets who make house calls.  Rose tries calling one and, miraculously, he answers the phone.  He listens carefully and speculates that Quinn is either having congestive heart failure or “a tumor that has outgrown its blood supply and burst” (which I don’t understand, but which seems to make sense to Rose).  The vet says it doesn’t sound like intestinal blockage because Quinn doesn’t seem to be in pain.  It’s now 11 am.  He’ll be home until 4 pm.  We can call him again, or bring the dog in.

Bless you, unseen vet!

I bet it’s heart failure — possibly brought on by the Epinephrine which we gave him for bladder control but which is a stimulant and made him restless all night.

The children have been standing around, asking questions we haven’t had time to answer.  Now we put it to them:  Quinn is dying.  He can’t move.  We can’t fix him.  All we can do is be with him and try to make him comfortable.

Will, though raptly attentive, doesn’t seem distressed.  He’s silent, sucking thumb and holding his raggedy blue blanket for comfort.

My daughter is eight.  She says she doesn’t want Quinn to die.  She cries.  Never one to repress her emotions, she gets it out of her system for the moment and moves on.
  
Jesse, age nine, gets very quiet.  He brings out his old sleeping bag, one with a “4x4 Truckin” pattern, now oozing stuffing from multiple wounds.  He lays it over Quinn’s rear legs and back.

Sometimes our job is just to be there.  To bear witness.  To comfort.  We stay with our dying dog.

But nothing happens.  Quinn gets neither better nor worse.  My daughter wants to know if we’ll bury him.  I say yes.  Where?  In the yard.  I feel uneasy discussing his death as we kneel over him.  He can hear us.  He’s always known the sense of what we’re saying if not the words.  But I’m sure he already knows he’s dying.  And he seems calm about it.  Maybe, I wonder, he feels relieved.

I’ve never witnessed a natural death before — only violent ones, or ones from sickness.

With nothing happening, the kids start wandering off.  I go to the garage and start building a wall.  Just yesterday, Quinn was out here helping — hobbling after me or sitting with his feet on his tail at the top of the driveway watching his favorite view:  the parade of dogs and children and joggers and bikes on the road below.

I remember the time Quinn chased a burglar out of our house.  A neighbor saw it.  First the burglar alarm went off — which is probably the only reason Quinn woke up — then the burglar leaped over the balcony rail with Quinn biting his butt.

That’s the purpose of our burglar alarm:  to wake up the dog.

When Jesse was a toddler, he used Quinn as an armchair.

When you have a 70 pound dog and a 10 pound child, you must have trust.  And training.  We only messed up once.  Will has — and shall always have — a scar on his cheek where Quinn nipped him.  It was our fault for letting Will crawl over to the food bowl and play with the kibble while Quinn was eating.  Afterwards, the dog apologized endlessly.  Go on, he seemed to be saying.  Eat my kibble.  You can have it.

You have to trust.

Other than that, he's been the kids' guardian.  It's his job.

Quinn was always a lover of puddles, a chaser of birds, snapper of bees — if he caught a bee, he made a face but never seemed to get stung.  When Rose and I quarreled, he’d stand between us — silently, solidly — as if to break it up.  He’d wake us with a warm wet greasy tongue.  If we tried to take a family photo, he'd always barge in front.


He had a big heart.

And now the heart was shutting down.

Rose calls to me where I'm working down by the garage:  “You may want to come back,” she says.

Quinn’s eyes are sinking in.  His tongue hangs down on the boards of the deck.  His eyes glaze — and then suddenly he twitches.  For a moment he acts alert.  His ears prick.  What does he hear?  He tries to move, fails, and drops back on his side.

We watch.  There’s no telling how long it will go on.  The vigil begins to seem like an ordeal.  We tell Jesse that he can go play if he wants.  Jesse touches Quinn’s neck, the soft fur, the friend he’s grown up with who followed him and woke him with that same greasy tongue.  “Goodbye, Quinn,” he says. 

I remember the time I left Quinn locked in our car, and he destroyed it.  At the body shop the manager said he'd only seen one other car shredded like this: by a bear at Yosemite.

I stay with Quinn.  He seems to be slipping away.  His breath is slowing down.  There are pauses when he is breathing neither out nor in.  His eyes, though open, are gone.  I rub his neck.

The breaths come farther and farther apart.  I’m still fondling his fur.  Then, as I am wondering when the next breath will begin, I realize it won’t.

We cry.

Jesse removes Quinn’s collar with its jangly dog tags and fastens it around his own neck.  When he moves, he jangles.  It startles me.

We decide to bury Quinn in the sleeping bag which is still draped over his rear.  I don’t cover his face.  I want to look at him.  He looks peaceful at last, jaws still open from his last clenching breath.  He never got mean, never snapped at us, not even at the end.

I’m amazed at how much water my eyes can make.  My glasses steam up.  I wipe them and they steam up again. 

I find two shovels and a pick.  Jesse, Will, and I dig a hole right where the ground is hardest on the hillside that we call our yard.  Solid clay and rocks.  We chose this spot because Quinn used to lie at the window and look out — for hours — on this ground. 

The work feels good.  I attack with a fury.  We haul dirt away in a wheelbarrow.  He was so full of life, it's hard to believe one small hole could contain him.

I wrap Quinn in the sleeping bag.  He’s half stiff.  I have to bend him — like unwarping a plank of wood — to fit him in the hole.  Taking turns, we each take a shovelful of dirt and drop it on the sleeping bag.  I bring some garden dirt we’d been saving in a garbage can.  Then I bring a compost pile I’d created last year.  Quinn’s grave will now be the richest soil on the hillside.

My daughter and Will pick wildflowers and lay them on the grave.  Jesse finds a jagged slab of broken marble that I’ve had laying around for years and sets it on top of the mound of earth.

Once as an experiment I left Quinn in my neighbor's house, went home, closed the doors and windows.  From my kitchen window I could see Quinn in the kitchen next door.  "Quinn," I whispered.  His ears shot up.  Amazing!  I repeated several times.  Each time, he could hear my whisper across a hundred feet through the walls of two houses.

I go to bang on the garage.  Hammering nails seems to be exactly what I need right now.  My plan for the day had been to build this wall on the rear of the garage, meet with two people about estimating jobs, and finish repairing a shower for my next door neighbor, Mark.

Mark finds me nailing in the garage.  He wants to know if I can work on the shower.  I say I feel like banging nails.  He understands.  But then I snap out of it.

Finishing the shower means cutting and gluing a sheet of CPE plastic for the shower pan.  The glue fumes are deadly.  Mark opens windows until a cold blast is roaring through the bathroom.  His family starts screaming that they’re freezing.  I’m probably stoned from glue-sniffing, but I don’t feel it and I don’t care anyway.

Dinner.  Sundays we make a point of having a special family dinner.  It’s usually the only day we’re all together.  Tonight we are all subdued.   The windowsills surrounding the dining room are deeply scratched where Quinn used to claw at them, expressing his anger at dogs he could see passing on the road.

After dinner I go down to the garage and try to finish the wall, defying darkness.

For bedtime, we read That Dog to the kids — a story by Nanette Newman of a boy whose dog dies, who thinks he will never want another, then is won over by a puppy.  Right now, it's hard to believe.

But it's true.  It will happen to us.  Quinn was my favorite dog in the whole world, and so will be the next one, and the one after that.  We'll go through this cycle several more times until our own cycle has passed. 

Tucking Will in, he remembers a puppy we met a couple of weeks ago named Litho.  Only, Will calls him “Licko.”  An excellent name.  He also says we had “barkeley" for dinner (broccoli).  Good names.

Standing at the back door I look out at the marble slab, the flowers, the mound of earth.  "Quinn," I whisper.  "You had a tough old heart."

I know he hears.




Quinn also makes an appearance in these posts:
Jim the Plumber
Bad Toilet
The Airplane Room Part Two.