The Barn House

by Ed Zotti

  Copper pipe, however, is superior in almost all respects to the material it replaced, threaded steel. It’s vastly easier to install, for one thing. Cutting and threading steel pipe involved numerous steps using tools that would fill a small machine shop. You clamped the pipe in a vise; cut it to length using a cutting-wheel tool that you clamped against the pipe and then rotated, screwing the wheel progressively tighter until you had sliced through the pipe; reamed out the burr; applied a thread-cutting die set into a multiarmed die holder having the appearance of an airplane propeller; squirted on oil to reduce friction; muscled the die through an arc of ninety degrees or so; applied more oil; rotated the die another ninety degrees; and so on till the thread had been cut to the necessary depth. Then you removed the pipe from the vise, flipped it around, clamped it in the vise again, and threaded the other end. On a good day cutting and threading a single length of steel pipe took two adolescents twenty minutes (I suppose if we had really busted our humps we might have done it in ten), without even getting into the business of fitting all the pipes together and stopping the innumerable leaks.

  Soldering copper pipe, on the other hand, required one merely to cut the pipe using a tube cutter, which was similar to a steel-pipe cutter but maybe one-fifth the size; burnish the ends to a shiny finish with sandpaper to ensure proper bonding of the solder; daub on a jelly-like substance known as flux, which melted when heated and distributed the solder uniformly around the joint; assemble the pipes and fittings; and then solder the whole mess together using a portable torch. The work required some skill, and carried with it the not insignificant risk of setting the house afire, but in terms of physical exertion it was a frolic in the daffodils compared to fitting steel pipe. Plus it was twice as fast and, since the pipes were light, could be done without a helper.

  Soldered pipe had one other large advantage as well. Threaded pipe had a tendency to leak at the joints—sometimes copiously, as my father had discovered to his sorrow and my amusement, but more often in minute amounts that no amount of tightening could entirely eliminate. Even in the best of circumstances a few joints would weep, which rankled the old man’s perfectionist soul, but there was little he could do about it except wait a few weeks till rust plugged the gaps. A properly soldered joint, in contrast, was watertight from the start.57

  The upshot of all this was that while piping a house full of radiators using threaded steel pipe wasn’t a practical possibility for one man with limited time, few tools, and no experience, it wasn’t out of the question using copper. That’s not to say it would be easy. I’d sweated pipe, as plumbers say, exactly twice before, both times small jobs at my mother-in-law’s. Unfortunately, by the time I began working on the Barn House I’d forgotten how I’d done it, as I discovered one morning when I spent an hour trying to hook up a temporary water line for a toilet and wound up burning a hole in the pipe with the torch.

  Now I was faced with repiping the entire house—perhaps a thousand feet of pipe and hundreds of solder joints—and I had to get it finished before the arrival of sustained subfreezing temperatures, perhaps six weeks. Or at least get it finished enough to start the furnace. Here I had done one smart thing. In designing the piping I had divided it into two loops, one supplying the radiators in the front of the house, the other those in the back. Each loop was to be isolated from the other and from the furnace by valves. My plan was to finish one loop and stub out the other as far as the valves—a matter of a few inches of pipe. Then I could shut the valves on the unfinished (indeed, unstarted) loop, open the valves on the finished one, fill the system with water, start the furnace, and warm the house sufficiently to keep the water supply pipes from freezing. After that I could finish the other loop in . . . well, comfort perhaps is not the appropriate term. But at least I wouldn’t get frostbite.

  Still, while I had a big-picture sense of where I wanted to go, I was resoundingly ignorant of the details. What’s more, there was no one I could ask. Finding a male acquaintance who knew the basics of pipe soldering wasn’t that difficult, but guy-knowledge of hot-water heating systems had fallen to historical lows. The technology hadn’t disappeared—the term used nowadays is “hydronic heat”—but it had become a specialized art, like rigging solar panels or rebuilding carburetors. I knew no one who had ever installed radiators, not counting my father, who with my grandfather’s help had installed one in the rear addition in 1958, too long ago to count. Kent the engineer had some book knowledge of the subject, and could answer the occasional technical question, but for many practical details my best bet—often my only bet—was to study the antique hot-water system I already had.

  I did have one odd nugget of knowledge that was to prove unexpectedly useful. Somewhere along the line I had picked up the idea that the pipes needed to rise continually (or, to use a term that hasn’t come up since high school algebra, monotonically) en route from the furnace to the radiator. I wasn’t sure why this was so—electric pumps made it unnecessary to depend on convection to circulate the water, and could push it down as easily as up. Nonetheless, I went to great trouble to ensure that the pipes sloped in accordance with what in retrospect seems an almost superstitious conviction, and for reasons that didn’t become apparent till much later was fortunate that I had.

  I’d gotten off to a modestly encouraging start. Having positioned the first radiator and gone mano a mano with the bushings, I’d established that I’d launched a project I had some prospect of successfully concluding. Now I girded myself for production. First I set up a work space. The previous owners had left a beat-up old wooden workbench in the basement. I dragged this up to the second floor and lined up my collection of pipe fittings, solder, propane torches, and other plumbing gear on top of it. Then I hung a fluorescent shop light overhead—the bright circle was cheering—and got ready to go to work.

  It wasn’t long before I ran into another obstacle. The short pipes dropping down from the radiator needed to make a ninety-degree turn and run about eight feet horizontally to the risers, vertical pipes running up through the walls from the basement. To enable the pipes to make the horizontal run, I’d have to drill holes through a series of joists, the long planks tipped on edge that held up the floor above. The joists were closely spaced and the pipe didn’t have enough flex for me to shove in a single piece running from radiator to riser. Instead, I’d have to cut a series of short lengths, one per joist, slip them into the holes, then solder them together with couplings. Running two pipes eight feet would require fourteen couplings—twenty-eight solder joints. Progress would be agonizingly slow.

  Another problem became apparent once I got started. Some of the joists were so close together, as little as ten inches apart, that it was impossible for me to fit an electric drill between them at the requisite angle—I couldn’t drill the holes. I made repeated trips to hardware and home improvement stores to buy bit extensions, flexible shafts, right-angle jigs. Nothing worked. After three days I’d extended a pair of pipes approximately four feet. I could go no further without help. It was time to call the Chief.

  The Chief ’s real name was John, but no one who knew him in high school ever called him that. He was a wiry little guy who played the tambourine and sang in the school folk group. I hadn’t known him well in high school, but we’d become buddies while helping organize our fifteen-year reunion. He’d never married. He lived with his beloved West Highland terrier Duffee in a Chicago suburb called Westchester. At one time a branch line of the L had operated in Westchester. One day in 1951, while the Chief’s mother was pregnant with him, his father had been killed in a head-on collision while working as a motorman on this line. I was born the same day. No significance is to be attached to this coincidence, but it lent the proceedings the shivery air of fate.

  The Chief was a man of unexpected talents—in seventh grade he’d taken second place in a citywide math contest. After college he became the teletype operations manager for a brokerage house at the Chicago Board of Trade. The brokerage house had
been sold after suffering financial reverses and eventually the Chief had been laid off. At the time that I knew him, he had no obvious means of support.

  The Chief had two salient characteristics. The first was an inexhaustible ability to talk. Subject matter was incidental to these discussions. If the Chief had been held in a sensory deprivation tank for a week, he would afterward be able to spend two hours describing the fluctuations in his pulse. The second characteristic, which was closely tied to the first, was that he couldn’t be rushed. If the Chief were talking and a ticking bomb thirty seconds short of doomsday were left in his lap, you could run in frantic circles begging and pleading all you wanted, and his only response would be to acknowledge the urgency of the situation and proceed as before.

  The plus side of this was that the Chief never got flustered. He didn’t always know the right thing to do, but he would approach a crisis in the same methodical manner that he approached everything, and at such times he could be very calming. In all the years I’d known him I’d never seen him at a loss.

  The Chief had a vast fund of information on useful subjects, and many valuable skills. Provided there were no great hurry, he could rebuild an auto engine, repair a garage door opener, or remodel a bathroom. He took particular pride in being able to procure hard-to-obtain items. When we’d been working on the reunion and needed to find a caterer or a bartender or some such thing, the Chief always knew somebody. Every commercial establishment in North America seemed to have an outlet within ten minutes of his house, and if you needed some obscure part or product, he was happy to make the rounds and shop for it, presenting you in a couple days’ time with a long list of possibilities neatly written on a sheet of yellow legal paper, complete with model number, availability, and price.

  Notwithstanding the fact that he had no regular employment, the Chief contrived at all times to be busy. I never called him that I didn’t find him in the middle of some project, which always took longer than planned and entailed numerous setbacks and complications, all of which he patiently overcame, and all of which he described to me in meticulous detail. The first ten minutes of any conversation with him consisted of a detailed status report on tasks completed, work in progress, and prospects for the days ahead. The agenda was always long. But he had a good heart, and would help you with anything, especially if the project interested him.

  I called him late in the day. I was in the dining room. The house was cold and dark, the only illumination provided by a bare bulb suspended overhead. I was feeling bleak. I looked at the ruined parquet floor. I had no idea how I was going to fix it. I explained my manifold problems to the Chief. “Chief,” I concluded plaintively, “you gotta help me.” I attempted to maintain my composure, but finished on what was closer than I would have liked to a wail.

  There was silence on the line. Probably this was the Chief puffing on a cigarette. I wasn’t an advocate of smoking, but there were times when the introduction of nicotine into the situation provided a certain baseline solace. “When I was out there I said this is a huge project,” the Chief said finally—he had put in some time on the demolition crew. “Ed’s never going to be able to finish it on his own. He’s going to need some help.” Another pause. “I got a couple things to do. But I can give you a hand.”

  Relief washed through me like some turbulent cleansing drug. There were a great many things I wanted the Chief’s help with, and a great many other things I didn’t yet realize I needed help with where his assistance would prove decisive. But all that lay ahead. Right now I wanted him to perform an essential comradely function: I needed him to buy tools.

  The Chief knew about tools. These days not everyone does. Some years ago Esquire magazine, which has taken upon itself the formidable task of teaching the men of America how to be manly, ran a short primer on tools. Among the featured tools were—I’m not making this up—the hammer, the handsaw, and the electric drill. As one might expect of an article in Esquire, the focus was not so much on what one might do with these mysterious implements as on which brands to buy.58 I was initially taken aback, wondering what sort of ninnies the editors of Esquire felt they were addressing that needed such matters explained. At the time I decided it was preppies—endearing tousled-hair youth with names such as Jock and Reggie and Tripp, whom I imagined earnestly studying up on hammers, in the manner of Boy Scouts learning the Morse code, in case Muffy wanted a towel rack hung in the bathroom on the super’s day off. (Less the detail about Muffy, this was the example given in the article.) This was unfair, I now realize. The truth was that if you were born into the upper middle class, even in an old working-class town like Chicago, an introduction to tools didn’t constitute an essential part of your upbringing, and it was possible to arrive at adulthood with no more thorough acquaintance with a pair of Channellocks59 than you or I might have with the harpoon.

  The Chief didn’t have that problem. He wasn’t, strictly speaking, a blue-collar guy—all his formal employment had been in office jobs—but he had the basic reservoir of tool knowledge that modern man doesn’t perhaps require but could certainly stand to have. He owned a fair selection of tools, all bought for some project or other—the Chief wasn’t one of those people who bought tools in the frivolous hope that a task requiring them might eventually arise.60 That’s not to say that he didn’t enjoy buying a good tool when he had the excuse—he was, after all, a guy, heir to 3 million years of accumulated mitochondria, whose Paleolithic predecessor had spotted an intriguing configuration of stone and thought, Whoa, ax, while the female of the species (you’ll excuse the sexism, but one must call a spade a spade) mused, Here is something for the knickknack shelf.

  I felt the same way myself. Already I’d purchased a reciprocating saw. A reciprocating saw—commonly but incorrectly called a Sawzall, a trade name of the Milwaukee Tool Company—is the machine pistol of power tools. It’s unsuited to precision work, but rather is used chiefly to cut large irregular holes in things, or chop hunks off the end. I’d purchased it to help with demolition, in particular the cutting up of old pipes, with which the Barn House was crammed. (Each of the old apartments had been equipped with a sink, long since removed, but the pipes remained in the walls.) Mine, which I had purchased at the home improvement store on sale for $145, was a jaunty number with a yellow plastic housing, and I was as proud of it as my primordial ancestors had surely been of their clubs and spears.

  Now I needed another tool—specifically, a right-angle drill, which would let me fit a bit into the narrow space between the joists and drill the holes. It was a specialized tool. The local home improvement store didn’t carry it. Not a problem, said the Chief. A few minutes from his house was an establishment called Berland’s House of Tools. Berland’s was open late. He would go there and see what they had.

  A half hour later he called back. “I’m calling from my cell phone,” announced the Chief. Cell phones were not then common. “I’m in the parking lot in front of Berland’s. This is an amazing place. They got all kinda tools here.”

  “That’s probably why they call it Berland’s House of Tools, as opposed to Berland’s House of Pancakes,” I said.

  The Chief ignored this. “Get a piece of paper,” he said.

  “What do I need a piece of paper for?”

  “Just get one.”

  “Chief. Tell me why I need to get a piece of paper.”

  The Chief sighed, as if dealing with a dim child. “I’m going to read you a list,” he said. “You have to write it down.”

  “Why do I have to write it down? Just tell me if they have a right-angle drill.”

  “They got different kinds. You have to tell me which one you want.”

  “Tell me what they have.”

  “Get a piece of paper.”

  I’d been through discussions like this before. The Chief was perfectly willing to spend half an hour sparring over procedural details—he’d have made an ideal peace conference negotiator for the North Vietnamese. I got a piece of paper. Ch
ief dictated model numbers, prices, and specifications. After some discussion I decided to get a unit with a three-eighths-inch chuck. (A mistake, as it turned out; the drill proved to be too fragile and was eventually replaced with a more substantial model.)

  “You going to be there a while?” the Chief asked.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I’ll buy the drill right now and bring it out. You can pay me back later.”

  An hour and a half later Chief arrived at the Barn House with the drill. It was now close to ten p.m., and my only ambition was to go home, take a shower, and go to bed. The Chief, however, was just getting warmed up. I inserted a bit into the drill and got up on the ladder. The drill fit between the joists easily. In a few minutes I’d drilled a pair of holes, and in a few minutes more had fitted a couple additional lengths of pipe. We were on our way.

  11

  One cold Monday morning in mid-December I got a call from Tony. Bad news: The Barn House had been burglarized over the weekend.

  I was annoyed but not surprised. Thefts from construction sites were common; tools and building supplies were easily fenced. The brazenness of these crimes was often astonishing. One night, Tony told me, thieves had stolen two gas furnaces from a two-flat he was renovating in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood—and mind, the furnaces weren’t just sitting in cardboard boxes on the job site; they had been installed, one of them on the second floor, with all the ducts, pipes, and wires connected. On another occasion one of Tony’s men had been up on a ladder on the side of a house when he saw a van pull up next to his own vehicle on the street below. A man hopped out and began pulling tools out of the worker’s vehicle and loading them into the van. When the worker began climbing down the ladder to put a stop to this, a second thief began shaking the base of the ladder, obliging the worker to hang on for dear life till the first thief was done.