The Barn House (2 page)

Yowsah,
I thought as I peered out the car window. The house was the kind of place that the neighborhood kids probably held their breath and crossed their fingers when walking past. The front porch pillars splayed out and the porch roof seemed on the point of collapse. The steps and railings sagged. The paint, an ugly yellow and brown, was peeling in birch-bark-sized flakes. Some of the window sashes had rotted; pieces hung at odd angles. The roof had a misshapen appearance that bespoke weekend re-modelers with too little patience and too much beer. The entire building was covered with enormous weather-beaten cedar shakes installed by someone whose architectural goals had pretty much been limited to keeping out the rain. Still, it was big and cheap compared to other places we had seen, and sat on a lot that for the city was unusually large. We called the real estate broker and arranged a walk-through.

That night I looked again at the address on the real estate listing. “You know,” I said to Mary, “this place is two doors up from Mike and Betsy's. You remember. We went there one time.”

“I remember,” she said after a moment.

Two weeks later, in February 1993, we signed a contract to buy the Barn House, as the kids, and then we, called it. This is the story of that house.

I
don't remember when I decided I wanted to fix up an old house, but it must have occurred at an early age. The fixing-up part I came by naturally. My parents had started renovating their first house (of two) in 1952, a few months after I was born. I spent much of my childhood holding up objects (boards, pipes, screen doors) that my father was working on the other end of. My father was an irascible perfectionist in all things. I shivered in the cold for hours while he fussed with storm windows and chimney caps and asphalt siding. The experience taught me several things:
Life is hard. Things take a long time. There is no job that, with advance planning, can't be made twice as complicated.
But also:
There's a right way to do everything.

I became the family electrician at the age of fourteen, shortly after my parents bought their second house. This was partly by default and partly by design. The design arose from my determination to avoid plaster-mixing duty, the fate of my younger brothers, which I found tedious beyond description. The default part stemmed from the fact that all my father knew about electricity was that you weren't supposed to connect the black and white wires together. I, on the other hand, had played with electric trains as a child and had owned Remco Thinking Boys' Toys—men of a certain age will recall these as small cardboard canisters containing bits of plastic and wire that could be assembled into electric motors and telegraphs and such—and on the basis of this rigorous technical training had learned how to wire a three-way switch. In addition, I had a certain rough-and-ready ability to figure things out, although I claim no special gift in this regard.

The key thing, and you'll forgive my bragging a bit, was that I was dogged—again, not a unique gift, but an indispensable one for grappling with life's more intractable tasks, of which home renovation was certainly one. Take the matter of three-way switches. As it turned out, there are actually two ways to wire a three-way switch, the way every electrician knows and another way that I've never seen before or since.
¹
This second way, I discovered one afternoon, had been used to wire the lights in the front hall of my parents' home. The lights had manifestly worked at one time, but in trying to change the switches (they were the old-fashioned push-button kind, which my parents found unseemly in their updated house), I'd mixed up the wires. Now, examining the grimy interior of the switchbox, I discovered to my alarm that the available wires didn't lend themselves to any combination that in my limited experience was likely to produce the desired result. It was like a third-year medical student opening up a patient on the operating table and finding a kidney where he expects to see a lung. I had no idea how to get the lights to work.

Thoroughly confused and a little panicky lest my parents find out, I sat down with a piece of paper and a stubby pencil to draw wiring diagrams in an attempt to parse the matter out. It was a long afternoon, made longer by the fact that I had connected the wires incorrectly at one point, shorting out the switches and rendering them irreparable even if I'd been Thomas Edison. (They were the silent type, which used mercury as a conductor, and in shorting them I had apparently vaporized the mercury.) But by suppertime, by God, I'd figured the thing out.

“Took you a while,” said my father, as I flicked the lights on and off at last.

“Eh,” I said, “bastards didn't use travelers.” My father had no idea what a traveler was, which wasn't surprising since I myself had learned the term not three hours previously from a book I'd consulted in hopes of clarifying matters. But he was suitably impressed.

My parents' second house, in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, had been built in 1890; they purchased it in 1966. It had been reasonably well maintained, but no substantial work had been done on it in the seventy-six years since its construction. The kitchen was tiny and primitive; there was no family room. My parents proposed to remedy these defects by building an addition. They hired a contractor to dig out the basement, pour the foundation, frame the walls, and put on the roof. Most of the interior work we did ourselves. This included replacing the plumbing and much of the wiring, and then plastering the walls.

My father's principal assistant and consultant in this work was his friend George, a sheet-metal worker. George and my father had their hands full with the plumbing. One afternoon after hooking up the supply lines for the second-floor bathroom they signaled my mother to open the main valve. Water squirted from every joint—they'd used threaded steel pipe. The bathroom looked like the fountains of Rome. “Jesus Christ, Mare! Shut it off!” my father shouted from the top of the basement stairs. I was in stitches, of course. The old man was less amused.

Preoccupied as they were, George and my father didn't have much time to hassle me about the electrical work, which was fine by me. George didn't know much more about electricity than my father, but he presented me with an electrician's manual that he thought might help me out. It had been published by Sears, Roebuck—probably, as I think back on it now, in the wake of the Rural Electrification Act of 1936. I remember there was something in there about how to wire up your egg incubator. The basic principles were universally applicable, though, and what I couldn't get from the book I picked up by trial and error.

There was a great deal of entertainment value in this process. I remember once I was connecting overhead lights in the kitchen. It was late in the evening; I was tired; I wanted to finish up and go to bed. My mother was providing assistance, which consisted of throwing switches on the main panel in the basement when instructed.

I twisted one last wire nut. “Okay, Ma,” I shouted down the stairs. “Switch it on.”

There was a moment of silence, then a loud pop. A shower of sparks shot out of the ceiling box. (I don't remember what I had done—probably connected the black and white wires together.)

Whoa,
I thought.
Being an electrician is
fun
.

It was, too. Three things could happen during a wiring job. First, it worked. You had gloom and powerlessness before; now you had light. This was always cool. Second, you could be killed. The chances of this were small, luckily, but the possibility lent a daredevil edge to the proceedings that you didn't get from mixing plaster. Third, you had a spectacular failure, which might involve a loud noise, destruction of tools, blackening of surprisingly large areas on exposed metal parts, loss of power to much of the premises, and alarmed expressions on the faces of those nominally in charge, none of which was likely to strike the average teenager, and certainly didn't strike me, as problematic. (I'd long since gotten over the harrowing uncertainty associated with anomalous three-way switches.)

Once, while working as a summer helper for an electrical contractor a couple years later, I was given the job of cutting the wires that powered the portable cloth cutters at a factory that made men's suits. (We were replacing the old wiring with new.) The cutters used “three-phase,” a specialized type of high-voltage power. I was supposed to pull the plug out of the power source in the ceiling, yank the other end of the wire out of a retractor suspended below, then clip off the connector on the end. Pull, yank, clip. Pull, yank, clip. There were dozens of cutters, the work was repetitious, and it was a warm summer's day. My attention began to wander. Pull, yank, clip. Pull, yank, clip. Yank, clip—
pop!
There was a blinding flash, a pencil-lead-sized hole appeared in my wire clippers, and all work on the assembly line involving cloth cutters came to an abrupt halt. The foreman ran over and chewed me out. I looked suitably abashed and promised I would never do it again. But I considered it a day well spent.

Being the electrician gave one a certain basic life confidence. On one occasion while wiring my parents' house I was trying to hook up two lights in different locations that were to be operated by the same switch. Not knowing any better, and thinking I might economize on wire, I connected the lights in series rather than in parallel. When I flipped the switch, the lights shone at half intensity. I puzzled for a moment, realized my mistake—I'd had this problem with Remco Thinking Boys' Toys once—then corrected the wiring. When I flipped the switch again, the lights shone at normal intensity.

My father, who'd been observing this procedure, asked me what I'd done. I explained. He was mystified. I provided a more detailed explanation using my stubby pencil on a scrap of gypsum board. He still didn't get it. I hammered away at the subject for a good twenty minutes. At length my father leaned back and said with a resigned expression, “Well, at least
you
understand it.”
²

You can appreciate the position this puts one in. I was just short of fifteen years old. Like all adolescents I affected to believe my parents were morons while secretly clinging to the belief that if things really went off the rails I could get my dad to put things right. Now that pleasant sense of security had been swept away. I was in effect being told:
It's all up to you, schmuck.
At some point in life everyone comes to such a realization. Prior to it he is a child; afterward, whatever profound mental, physical, and moral deficiencies he may have—I'm thinking of my brother here—he's an adult.

So it was with me. I spent the rest of the summer wiring the house and can say with some assurance that everyone was satisfied with the result, which is to say the lights all operated and the house didn't burn down, to my mind the acid test of quality electrical work. To be sure, I made my share of mistakes, some of which didn't become apparent until later. There was the business of the soffit lights
³
in the kitchen, for example, where, having packed the maximum number of conductors into a conduit run and not having any more wire anyway, I decided to hook a switch into the neutral side of a circuit. The lights seemed to work fine and I considered the project a job well done till some years later, when I got an anxious call from my mother: There was something wrong with the soffit lights. It wasn't that she couldn't turn them on; she couldn't turn them
off
. They were fluorescent lights, you see, and one of the ballasts had melted and shorted to the frame. Normally this failure would have tripped the circuit breaker, but, owing to the inopportune siting of the switch, it instead provided an alternative path to ground for the balance of the lights on the line.

Obvious, no?
⁴
It took me a couple minutes, too. I was able to repair things for the time being, but—I tell you this truly—for the ensuing thirty-one years it bothered me that someday long after my time the ballast would fail again, the lights wouldn't shut off, and some electrician called in to deal with the mess would think:
What horse's ass did
this
?
Which is why one day at age forty-six, with my own house far from finished, I went out to my parents' home with several spools of wire and, while my flabbergasted family watched (I had timed this to coincide with a reunion), pulled all the wiring out of the kitchen ceiling, ran new, and hooked up the lights correctly, thereby, in my view, getting right with God at last.

You may think I digress. Not so. I speak for a class of person that is little heralded in this day and age—the class that says:
I will get this right or die.
And for another class also, to a considerable extent coinciding with the first, that says:
It's all up to me
, and (I suppose this class is somewhat larger, since it includes Frank Sinatra):
I'm going to do it my way
. It's largely these people who have rebuilt cities in our time, and if they recognize themselves in this book, the effort will have been well spent.

That brings me to a second point I want to address before taking up my story. It wasn't enough for me to fix up an old house; I wanted to fix up an old house in the city. I'm not sure exactly when or why I fastened on this idea. My family's first home had been in the city, but my brothers and sisters had lived there without in consequence forming the opinion that they needed to reside in cities ever after. Just the opposite—the city was something they were happy to leave behind. I was different. I was a city guy.

It may be presumptuous to say so, but it seems to me that being a city guy is a little like being gay. There's nothing inherently good or bad about it; it's just what you are. You may try to live in the suburbs like other people, and for a time you may succeed. But one day your primal impulses will reassert themselves, and you'll find yourself prowling the streets looking for Italian beef or cheese steaks
⁵
or some other low commodity; or riding the subway doing the crossword (or I suppose nowadays the sudoku) puzzle;
⁶
or sitting at a rickety café table adjacent to whatever grand promenade your town may have, ostensibly reading the newspaper while surreptitiously checking out the
boulevardiers
; or bicycling along the waterfront on a warm summer evening with the lake (ocean, river, whatever) on one side, purple clouds coiling behind the tall buildings on the other, and the human pageant all around; and you'll think:
Who am I trying to kid? I'm a city guy. This is where I live.