The Barn House (25 page)

That kind of thing happened a lot. The truth was, we were improving on the work of the house's builders, sometimes in unexpected ways. Many of the improvements were obvious, such as the new mechanical systems, the technology of which had evolved well beyond what had been available in 1891 and a lot of which hadn't been available at all. The radiator pipes now would be hidden rather than exposed. With its ten-foot ceilings, the house would never be cheap to heat, but the two-by-six exterior studs would allow us to install thick R-19 insulation, reducing heat loss. (New houses increasingly are being built with two-by-six outside walls for just that reason.) The new windows were double-glazed with nonstick vinyl sash glides (the sashes themselves were wood). We installed fire-stops—horizontal two-by-sixes nailed between the studs at floor level—to forestall the fire-racing-up-the-flue scenario.

Some of the improvements, however, were purely aesthetic. The upper third of the house had been finished in cedar shakes, which initially had been nailed flat, so that they lay in the plane of the wall. Charlie had decided the shakes ought to flare out in the front of the house, and that the flare should be carried around to the sides, under the eaves of the transept, to make what I thought of as a skirt. The idea was to lend a little flash to the house's silhouette. The drawings showed the flaring extending to the rear of the house, but didn't explicitly say that the existing shakes had to be replaced. Our understanding all along had been that, in the interest of economy, the contractor would salvage as much of the old work as possible. One might have made the argument that the shakes at the back at the house, assuming they were intact, could remain as they were.

The carpenters were having none of that. One day I arrived at the house to find them industriously working away on a scaffold toward the rear of the house. On inquiry I learned that they were extending the flaring unasked. Many of the shakes had to be replaced anyway due to sun damage, and as long as they were going to all the trouble, they felt, they might as well do the job properly. There was no additional charge. I watched for a while in admiration. The Barn House when it was done wouldn't simply be restored; it would be materially improved.

I
mean no disrespect to anyone involved, but it tells you something about our situation, and what it was like renovating city houses in those days, that a trumpet-playing homeless guy with two big dogs moved into the basement of the Barn House and that we were grateful he was there. His name was Tom S—; he'd been living on the streets for years. One day he'd shown up at one of Tony and Jerry's job sites and offered to keep an eye on things if they'd allow him to live in the house while work was under way. The project was one of a series of jobs Jerry had lined up under a city-funded neighborhood improvement program; the buildings were mostly in tough neighborhoods and had been plagued by thefts and vandalism. Tony and Jerry readily agreed to Tom's proposition. He'd watched a couple of houses for them; work was nearing completion on the second when the Barn House was burglarized.

How many homeless people live in Chicago or any big U.S. city has long been a matter of debate. During the 1980s homeless advocates had claimed enormous numbers, and in the early 1990s the newspapers still sometimes reported that Chicago was home to as many as sixty thousand. The figures arrived at by actual count were much lower—the 1990 census had turned up sixty-eight hundred, of whom around sixteen hundred lived on the street, with the balance in shelters. Whatever the number, they were a conspicuous feature of the urban landscape, most visible at the time on Lower Wacker Drive, a below-grade service road girdling the Loop, where many camped out on the loading docks of office buildings. Most subsisted on handouts, but a few earned a marginal living—I've already mentioned the metal scavengers who pushed old grocery carts through the alleys collecting discarded aluminum cans.

Tom had contrived his own method of getting by. I went out one cold January morning to meet him at a job site on the west side, only a few blocks from the neighborhood where I'd grown up. The project was a small single-family house. Expecting a shuffling derelict, I was surprised to find an alert-looking fellow with glasses and a salt-and-pepper beard wearing a sporty muffler and a plaid bucket cap. He was quite thin. He supported himself by playing the trumpet on street corners. For company he had two enormous dogs named Layla and Oscar. I wondered:
What is this guy doing living in basements?
We agreed that he would watch our house for the duration of the project.

Tony's guys moved him in a few days later, building him a bed in the front of the basement and hauling down the gas space heater previously installed in the dining room. He had a hot plate, a coffeepot, some utensils, and a few other odds and ends. I wouldn't describe the room as cozy—it was the sort of rough-hewn place where you expected to meet people named Igor and Trogg—but it assuredly beat the streets.

Tom went out to play his trumpet mostly in the afternoons; he was usually on hand when I arrived in the morning. He was often chatty and eager to be of help. Some weeks earlier I'd brought over an unassembled workbench, the kind you saw in home improvement stores with a smiling do-it-yourselfer in a spotless work shirt depicted on the box. My mother had given it to me for a Christmas present, thinking I might find it handy at the Barn House. I thought it a silly thing and hadn't gotten around to putting it together. Tom proceeded to do so, unasked by me. The workbench had jigs and vises—it was handy, I had to admit.

A few days later I mentioned that I needed to rig up a support rack in the basement for the furnace expansion tanks—they needed to hang clear of the air-conditioning ducts I was about to have installed immediately above. The following day I found the tanks suspended from a neat piece of apparatus fashioned from a length of gas pipe, scrap lumber, and metal strap. Tom had done it. I was delighted. I had a hundred such chores on my list; if I could delegate some of them to Tom, my burden would be greatly eased.

I mentioned this to Tony, who looked skeptical. “Just don't give him any money,” he said.
Eh,
I thought,
the laborer is worth his hire
. I gave Tom twenty dollars.

I was curious how this seemingly capable fellow had wound up on the streets. “So tell me your story,” I asked Tom as I washed up that night. He embarked on a complex narrative, the thrust of which was that he didn't get along with his father. The hour was late and the tale obviously long, so after a time I asked for a postponement. I had more urgent business: another assignment for Tom.

The next day Pete the sheet-metal guy was to arrive with his crew to install the ductwork for the first-floor air-conditioning system—a second set of ductwork would later be installed upstairs. In my ceaseless drive to save money I'd agreed to cut holes in the plywood subflooring at points where the ducts for the walls would angle up from the basement. The work wasn't difficult and I had much else to do—was Tom game?
Sure,
he said. I gave him the reciprocating saw and indicated the locations for the holes.

Tom was hard at work when I arrived the next morning, but his manner was odd and got odder. Initially I detected a touch of sway as he leaned over a spot on the kitchen floor, sawing away, though the resulting hole was competently done; then it seemed to me that as he moved to the next hole he waved the saw with more bravado than was wise.

“Tom, you okay?” I asked.

“I'm fine,” he said. His tone was belligerent. My suspicions belatedly aroused, I checked his corner of the basement and found a partly empty half gallon of vodka on the bed. When I returned upstairs to confront him he was unmistakably drunk.

“Tom, give me the saw,” I said. He refused. I yanked out the plug and after a bit of shuffling and bad language succeeded in extracting the tool from his grip.

All of this played out in full view of the sheet-metal workers, five sturdy suburban lads. I was acutely embarrassed, and in my opinion I had every right to be: I'd given an alcoholic the where-withal to buy booze, equipped him with a dangerous power tool, and invited him to cut holes in my house. What's more—this was the part even I couldn't quite believe—I'd put myself in the position where continuing to employ him as chief guardian of my principal lifetime investment was pretty much my only choice.

I finished sawing the holes myself. With the fading of the light the sheet-metal workers departed; Tom fell into a drunken slumber on the bed. Chief arrived and began sweating pipe; I returned to drilling holes with the right-angle drill, using an unorthodox arrangement of bit extenders in one particularly intractable location. As the bit broke through the bottom of the hole it caught and stalled; a snapping sound issued from the drill, followed by a grinding noise. I'd stripped the gears.

The next morning when I awoke my left eye was burning—I had the sensation that something was trapped beneath the lid. The usual first-aid measures were unavailing. I headed out to the house and attempted to work but the pain was not to be borne. I feared that a piece of metal or other debris had become embedded and would scratch my cornea or otherwise impede progress on the pipes, which had been plenty impeded already. I drove to the emergency room at Northwestern Memorial Hospital on the near north side.

You never knew how much time you'd spend in Northwestern's ER waiting room owing to the fluctuating volume of trauma patients, which on the near north side generally meant people who'd been shot, stabbed, or beat up. Although the neighborhood encompassed East Lake Shore Drive and other precincts of idle wealth, it was also home to Cabrini-Green, a public housing project notorious for snipers and random violence, as well as Rush Street, an entertainment district that in prior decades (it was then in transition) attracted a good many habitués of the Chicago demimonde, which was larger than you might think.
⁷⁵
If you weren't in imminent danger of death you could find yourself hanging out in the ER waiting room for hours even if, as I had once learned from experience, it was Saturday afternoon and there didn't appear to be many people ahead of you, because “ambulances keep pulling up out back,” to quote the triage nurse.

Luckily, it was ten thirty on a Sunday morning, when gang violence in Chicago was normally at a low ebb, so when I turned up with my injured eye that day I was seen with lightning speed by city ER standards—certainly less than an hour. The preliminaries out of the way, the doctor examined my eye by placing what I conceived to be a luminous sterilized golf tee on its surface. He found no agonizing granules, only a generalized bruise. “It's what we see when mothers get poked in the eye by babies,” he told me. A realization dawned—Ani, two and a half at the time, was accustomed to crawling into bed between my wife and me at dawn; she had a tendency then to flail. The pain subsided without treatment after a few days.

T
he events of the next few months, I confess, are mostly a blur. The only reason I can tell the tale at all is that I kept a diary of sorts, but it's none too coherent. Typically I tapped it out late at night on the computer after I'd returned from the Barn House. Often I was exhausted. What notes I took on the job site were scribbled with a carpenter's pencil in the margins of receipts and to-do lists. Much of the diary is cryptic or fragmentary and parts of it make no sense. I have vivid memories of certain episodes during this time, and between them, copies of faxes to Tony, and my midnight journal I've tried to assemble a reasonably linear account of this busy period. If the result seems jumbled or confusing in places, well, that's how it felt at the time.

Thursday, January 27, 1994.
Spent morning at house discussing change orders with Tony and Jerry. Extent of work required now being evident, have asked Tony to quote on additional projects. Price $48,500, more than we can afford. Decide to omit all but essentials—more drywall and insulation, new roof, new basement floor slab (old one an inch thick, crumbling). Cut and fit pipes in afternoon. Tom apologetic about recent untoward episode; I emphasize need for sobriety. On return to house this evening, though, he's noticeably listing, wants to get into conversation while I teeter on ladder. Can see drinking will be constant thorn.

Friday, January 28.
Bob calls—trying to replace three-way switch but has mixed up wires, now frustrated. At family gathering over holidays gave me static about foolishness of reinstalling Barn House radiators. No matter, I explain how to fix switch. Doesn't make Bob happy. “Ed, quit laughing so much,” he says.

Sunday, January 30.
Beautiful snowy day, maybe 25 degrees. Go sledding with kids, then spend rest of day on paperwork—first more “corrections” on forms for Sonja, then first pass on income taxes. Discover I haven't paid enough estimated tax on freelance income, owe nearly $20,000.

Monday, January 31.
At house with Chief to work on pipes. No carpenters today, Tony says too cold. Ice in basement sink despite radiators; thaws once propane heater started. Tom says cold water froze briefly Sunday. Sonja making me crazy, wants me to reorganize “owner's statement”—basically spreadsheet showing amounts budgeted, previously paid, now owed, and remaining, broken down by trade. Insists I follow inexplicable system of organization she learned as child on Neptune. Matters complicated by my idiosyncratic approach, with general contractor paying some subcontractors while I pay others.

Chris from bank calls—more problems. They just read title report on town house, proceeds from sale of which to be applied to construction loan; noticed two mechanics' liens from 1987. Call Bob to see if he can make liens go away.

Tuesday, February 1.
Sonja tells me everyone I plan to pay must submit federal W-9 form. Spend most of day on paperwork.