It’s a kind of nerve, I guess. In a way it’s a form of egoism; in a way it’s abject modesty or selflessness. You offer your puny effort to the void, and the mob.
When I was a performer I called it facing the other way. If you’ve ever seen the discombobulation that grips the average person when you bring an audience member or an amateur up on stage in front of a substantial audience of strangers, you’ll grasp the chasm between facing one way or the other.
I’m proud of The Heir. He is brave. He’s writing music. He’s facing all the way the other way already.
It has rained most every second since I finished re-roofing the desolation that the non-hurricane Irene visited on my roof. It’s as if Divine Providence wished me to know that my mad-scramble efforts weren’t in vain. Or maybe is was just water falling out of clouds. I’m not sure which.
I’m wearing my best trapeze outfit.There’s a buncha straps that go here and there and hither and yon and constrict and befoul your motions and efforts and the end result is a kind of safety. You’re too exhausted from donning the stuff to climb the ladder and do anything, and so are protected from harm. In the first picture you can see the big metal ring on the middle of your back that you attach via a lanyard to a the rope you see trailing down over the plank. The lanyard has a kind of removable brake/ clamp on the end that slides up and down the rope if you squeeze it, but brakes hard if you yank on it, like you would if you heard the noontime whistle and forgot where you were for a minute. It works like a more elaborate version of the retention mechanism in your seatbelts. There’s a problem with this contraption, which I’ll get to in a minute.
That’s our “before” picture, of course. It was plenty difficult to reach, and I had to do a good portion of it while hanging upside-down like a vampire bat or a congressman. The lump you see there in the “after” picture below is either the spot where I just yanked out the roof jacks, which are flimsy metal plates you nail to the roof to lay a 7-1/4″ wide plank atop and then tell other people to go ahead and work on it, or maybe it’s a squirrel, I don’t remember. The jacks have angled slots on them and hang on three spikes you pound into the roof. When the sun hits it full, the shingles heat up and get as flexible as a crooked judge, and they lie down real flat of their own accord, just like the roofer does.
Here’s another “before” picture. My house is one, big before picture.
And the result. Only cost me a couple hundred dollars in materials, and four years off my life. I would have felt stupid, lying in a bed, dying of nothing anyway. Now someday I can have a doctor look at my vital signs while I eat a puzzle my grandchildren just brought me in the rest home, and he’ll say, “You used to roof, didn’t you. You’re a goner.”
There’s the problem with your fall protection system, right there. That big, iron ring. It’s attached to the roof deck on a big metal plate that’s attached with dozens of big screws. Someone has to climb up there and install it in the first place. The phonebook says I’m “someone.” This is known in the trade as “your ass in the breeze.” You can generally remove the rings when you’re done, but I leave them for fixing the other 493 things wrong up there in the future. Eventually there’ll be so many of these things here and there that my house will look like it’s wearing chainmail armor and hurricanes won’t bother it.
Roofing shingles cost exactly double what they did a little more than a year ago. They are just little slabs of petroleum emulsions with aquarium pebbles stuck on them, and since our government thinks we don’t need any of that sort of gooey black stuff any more except to put into bulletproof limousines and corporate jets, we’ll have to economize elsewhere. Before you go all Tea Party on the government on my behalf, I suppose I should admit that we probably would have wasted the money anyway, on food for our children or something equally dumb. Maybe a luxurious 9-1/4″ wide board for me to stand on instead of the 7-1/4″. Or Faberge eggs or something.
Roofing is one of those barbarian arts I know about but don’t care for. It highlights an essential truth about a woodframed house, at least a traditional one that’s not all plastic. The proper way to make a house weatherproof was described to me by a man that looked exactly like the carpenters you see in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. He even wore a fedora while he worked in overalls pulled over his street clothes — hence their name, even though no one wears them like that anymore that I’ve seen.
Anyhoo, he told me to picture myself as a drop of water, falling on the highest point on a house. Now picture how I’d get all the way to the ground without getting in. Now make every piece of the house overlap the piece just below it to make sure it happens. When you roof, like most everything on the house, you just assemble it all correctly, backwards.
I never could have managed it by myself. The heir fetched and carried quite a bit, and he took this picture of me with a little Star Trek remake lens flare for effect. I probably shouldn’t wear a red shirt if Star Trek is involved, huh?
It was 75 degrees while I roofed, so the temperature on the roof was about 1500 degrees Kelvin. That’s an estimate; it might be low. But I’m glad we hung in there long enough to finish 3/8ths of the turret roof before it rained. By any measure, the job must be deemed a success. Don’t get me wrong, the roof still leaks; it just leaks somewhere else now.
{Author’s Note: I’m re-running this because I refuse to work three jobs on Labor Day. And there is no editor}
First, my bona fides:
Unions are not an abstraction to me. I was a member of the second largest union in the United States. My brother is a Teamster. My next door neighbor, who is not a bad sort of guy, is a retired union delegate for the Teamsters. I guess I should mention my brother is not a bad sort of guy, too. [Note: I’ve since moved, and my new next-door neighbor is an upgrade. I think he was in a policeman’s union at one time]
When I was a manager, part of the company I worked for was unionized. Part was not. I hired many companies as construction subcontractors over a large part of the United States that were unionized. I hired many more that were not.
I am not wealthy. I was not born wealthy, and will likely not die wealthy. I have worked at hard, physical labor for a great portion of my life. My parents and grandparents almost all worked at least for a portion of their lives in those mills you see in grainy photos, where an untimely lapse in concentration could cost you a finger, or worse. Before them, it was all Europe and lord only knows how bad it was to send us all here.
While it’s true that I’ve been treated pretty badly by many employers — and imagined I was being treated badly by some employers who weren’t treating me very badly at all — I have also been threatened with the destruction of the only valuable thing I owned at the time — my car–and serious bodily harm if that didn’t convince me never again to exceed the quota of work deemed appropriate by my “brothers” in the union. In a parking lot at midnight. I know what I did, but I’m not sayin’. Tell me; what would you do?
When I worked for others, I’ve negotiated such things as trash hauling contracts in New York supplied by perfect gentlemen who are very much in a union. Conversely, I’ve been shown a chrome plated .45 as a means of collecting Accounts Payable by a decidedly non-union fellow. Life is not as simple as they portray it in the movies. In the movies, any evil fellow in a suit always has a picture of a Republican president prominently displayed in their office, usually where any normal person has a picture of their family. In my life, the only really crooked executives I ever met all had pictures of JFK in their offices. I don’t know what any of that represents, really.
I have always had a predilection for reading, especially history, so I know all about the Ludlow Massacre and I know what a Wobbly is. I’ve read Ida Tarbell articles from McClure’s. I’ve got a picture of Mother Jones with Calvin Coolidge around here somewhere. I know what a Pinkerton man was for. I’ve read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States and John D. Rockefeller’s biography alike. When I read Studs Terkel’s Working, I didn’t run around yelling “Something must be done!” ; I played a sort of game to compare how many of my own jobs had been worse. I’m old enough to recall a rather thrilling union tableau in a shipyard in Gdansk. And I know all about Sacco and Vanzetti. They were guilty as hell, by the way.
That’s a long list of things to explain one thing: People enter into all sorts of organized things– corporations and unions; rock bands and time-share condo deals; bowling leagues and the Cosa Nostra. I wish you all well. But me? I never wanted to be equivalent of the child in that picture, who doesn’t even know what the sign says; and as long as there’s breath in my body I’ll never again put myself in the thrall of that hand you see, if you look closely, reaching in from the top right corner of the picture.
Happy Labor Day everybody.
Month: September 2011
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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