I Have Been Working Lately

On a house my buddy Judson bought just past Boulevard on Grove. He intends to live there when we're finished.

The Carpenter Mike Smith

Has been doing this work longer than me, Judson or Darin. I myself have learned a lot from him over the years, and we all consider him a friend. Last Tuesday morning he came by Jud's house while I was restoratin' the porch and borrowed my two-foot level, said he needed it to true up some framing on a job around the corner. I think I mentioned that was last Tuesday; I haven't seen Mike or the level yet. I purchased it eight years ago from a hardware store in Hoboken, and it's a weird thing: red, all metal and tapers down at both ends. I think it's considered a plumbers' tool. It doesn't read true plumb, but the level bubble is still okay. At one point I put Poke'mon stickers on it. If you see Mike Smith, please let him know I'd like it back.

Addendum--Mike brought it back this afternoon.

Young Til I Die

Pogo, you old fuckers

"Snapdragon" for Mary

Fig.26-Hot Engine Heart

I no longer trust the nail gun my father brought home from Costco two winters ago for me to build him a monster deck off his house in Florida. I don’t know that I ever did trust the thing. It ran hundreds of nails at his house; it did the same last spring—a whole box of two and a half, ring shank, in one morning, plowing down a squeaky floor over an anesthesiologist while he chewed aspirin downstairs and watched his TiVo.

However this week, at Judson’s house, it misfires and jams. The thing runs nails at wild angles if it shoots them at all. I’ve been playing Andean Flute music for Victor and José, the Peruvian painters outside, worrying about how ridiculous it would be to catch a nail in the face, having it ricochet off some case-hardened yellow pine, with the “flautas” trilling along behind. José has no English so Victor has to help me tell him “La musica del Andes’ llena mi corazon.” Fills my heart. We swap stories about summer musicians in the hot subways of New York. Later I run onto the porch and announce “La musica del Britney Spears llena mi penga!”

I have to stop framing in order to demolition more of the walls of the “play room.” I keep calling it Baby Mary’s room because of the ancient pink paint. The plaster buckles and peels off easy enough. The sooty pink walls of some old man’s daughter, full grown and gone, shatter and give way to grey scratch-coat, mortar webbed with horse hair.

At the end of the day I notice the gun sitting alongside with the air-coupling up, covered in grit. I worry that grains of it will pressurize inside the housing next time I hook it up to the compressor, that the perfectly smooth chamber will swim with grey imperfections, that it will explode anyway as I go to toe-nail studs to the bottom plate of the closet. I still have a half bottle of pneumatic tool-oil I bought at Harper Hardware over a decade ago. I double up on the morning dosage for the rest of the week, hoping to drown the grit and potentially quench what could be the hot, dangerous heart of the tool.

It’s things like this that keep me up nights. Tools breaking, the assholes I work with. Sometimes I take the motorcycle out after the kids are down. If it jostles me enough and I am feeling angry or reckless I bank off Kensington onto Ellwood, and just on the other side of Patterson, open it up on the ramp to the bypass. The best part is the three-way merge with 95 and 64. It becomes less complicated if I go faster than everyone else, which is how I address most of my problems. Speed makes traffic two dimensional. I only have to worry about whatever’s in front of me. I think about the potential of dangerous people on the road---drug traffickers up from Miami, truckers on speed. I think about whether or not there is enough air in the tires. I consider the sensation of being simultaneously angry and afraid. There are lots of ramps merging on that stretch and everyone drives it very fast. I can hear truck tires, my chain flying through revolutions, flinging grease, the pistons roaring away in their cylinders. I try not to think about what could happen.

On the ramp off 95 to the downtown expressway there is an open joint where the two roads meet in the air—in a tangle of overpasses. A biker got stuck in it just before we left town, years ago. This junction, this expansion joint between two huge elevated slabs of cement, channeled his tires to the divergent point and catapulted him over the side, a hundred feet above Shockoe Valley. The ramp beyond it is a perfect descending radius which tightens incrementally before launching you through the center of downtown. This is the way I complete the circle back to the Fan. This is the way I wind tightly around a city I’d thought I’d never call home again.

Neat Neat Neat

Ha ha, Captain Sensible eats shit there in the middle

The Trigger on the Worm Drive

Finally shit the bed. It tends to stick "on" with the blade spinning, after a cut, which is not a very safe feature. I got to take it, as well as my old sander to Staley Co Inc. tomorrow to get fixed.

The Pool in the Omni at Christmas

When Grandmother came at Christmastime, she got a room at the Omni, in the James Center. The room came with access to the pool we didn’t even know it had. The lights were still up so we went downtown, kids and everything, to humor her. Henry flung pennies at the dwarves in the fountain, May-may pointed at everything, the sixteen foot Nut-cracker, and careened around the lobby. We went up and down the elevator, then to Grandmother’s room, got on our suits and went searching for the pool.

I never noticed before but the James Center must be terraced, because the pool had a greenhouse roof at one end and sliding glass doors surrounding it that let out onto patio. Being December, of course, the whole place was freezing. We found a thermostat that given a couple of hours might’ve heated the water a few degrees. There was a heat lamp suspended from the ceiling that was disabled. The kid’s were far too excited for us not to be going in. I was to be first.

Submerged, I pushed deep into the deep end. I banked frigid against the far wall and came back to shallow water, Grandmother and Henry hooting loudly. May clutching at her mother's side. My foot thumped on the pool floor and I felt it reverberate, like a drum. I felt the bottom with my foot; it was steel plate, painted white. The sides of the pool were metal.

I realized in a moment, that myself, that all of us were swimming in thousands of gallons of water, suspended four stories up by what was essentially a steel pan welded into the ribs of a building. Nobody else seemed concerned with my discovery. Henry with his water-wings and Grandmother's thin arms under his belly. I thought about the welds holding the sides together, the welds stitching the tub to the beams, the beams, whatever was directly underneath. The five of us were laughing to keep warm; splashing in the steel pelvis of what passes for a skyscraper here.

And it held us up.

Haste

Fig. 25-Worm Drive

A Sparrow World

I went back Sunday to finally fetch the sparrow carcase; a hatchling lying under a copper downspout at the head of the alley on Davis, a block up from Henry's school. I had been eyeballing it since it fell, rain water washing the tiny body clean. We'd walked past it for months though I hadn't pointed it out to Henry. Two days before the last day of school we'd run past it at a full sprint in a heavy May downpour; him clutching onto my back, my arms behind me holding him up, both of us laughing. Last week I finally showed it to him.

"What do you want it for?" he asked.

"I save them for mommy, little bones. Do you remember the duck skull we had?"

"Yes," he said

"And the bat in the glass box? I found that in an attic I was working on."

"Oh." There were roly-polys crawling in the rib cage, cleaning the last of it. All that was left were a few stems from the base of the feathers and the feathers that make up the wing.

"Is that okay if we bring it home? Does it make you nervous?" I asked.

"No, it's okay. It's cool I think."

It was nearly free of anything other than it's small skeletal mass. The impossibly fragile skull spread thin and open with vast vacancies through it, a perfect arch drawn by it's spine on the cement, each vertebrate the thickness of a nickel.

The last day of kindergarten we saved another baby sparrow from a cat on Stuart. It was pinned down in the gutter by the holly bushes lining the Fox playground. We found a trashed plastic cup in a tree well and Henry helped me gather it from under a van. In the cup it stopped crying but still heaved with it's beak open. I thought the bird was wounded, but it was just flared raw pink showing through new grey feathers set on end. We set it high in a Holly and both hoped it would be okay.

I almost didn't show him the bird in the alley. In Tennessee we lost too many animals. At four he helped me bury our dog Cleatus under two poplars bought at Lowe's for the occasion. Henry helped dig. Ralph dragged himself howling around Henry's room by his forelegs the night I had to drive the cat to be put down in Kingsport. He named Gidget's kitten Hammer four months before she was killed by dogs inside our ancient garden shed. A year ago May, Grandfather was killed in an automobile accident, a month later he almost lost me. He still says he doesn't remember the month I was gone.

Saturday it stormed, a torrent that lasted most of the night. When he rose the next morning I told Henry we ought to go get the baby bird for Mommy. He looked worried. I asked what was wrong. He said "I don't want to pick it up, Dad." I told him of course not, he wouldn't have to touch it. I crunched down the gravel by myself through the alley behind our house.

The bird was gone. Finally washed away, or crushed by some careening drunk. I knelt over the worn white gravels embedded in the concrete to see if i could find any part of it. A kid swung around the alley in a hurry, parked behind a house there and started loading up. He regarded me twice or more, I just about told him to fuck off. He was quick and jerky, agitated in his movements, I expected young woman to come throwing clothes off the back porch. There was only the back half of the pelvis left, with a few knuckled segments of the spine. The skull splintered, it's sparrow frame scattered, I had wanted to weigh it, to think about what remained. I had wanted to think about the socket that held the eye, the space created by the ribs, the ribs like hardened hair. I had wanted to think about it's short story. I had wanted to give it to my wife.