by Ed Zotti
“Air in the line,” said the Chief.
I was ebullient. “Chief ! You’re the greatest! You did it! Unbelievable!” I shook his hand and pounded him on the back. The Chief smiled contentedly and ducked out for a cigarette—Mary would have none in the house.
All I had to do now was finish filling the radiators. I opened the intake valve. There was no sound of rushing water—not a good sign. I opened the vents on the radiators on the third floor. When I had done this previously there was a hissing noise, as the water pushing up from below forced air out of the system. Now I heard nothing.
“I think the water has frozen in the pipes,” I told the Chief.
I now faced a dilemma. I’d been told that if the furnace were operated with insufficient water in the system, it could overheat and crack the firebox. But I didn’t know what the minimum amount of water was. It seemed unlikely that the water had frozen solid throughout; I suspected that at most there were half-inch plugs of ice in the upper reaches of the pipes. But who knew?
I discussed the matter with the Chief. “I don’t think we’ve got any choice,” I said. “We just have to run the furnace and hope enough water circulates to keep the firebox from cracking and that it melts the ice.” The Chief agreed. We let the furnace continue to run. After thirty minutes or so I heard a hissing in the vents again. The bottom couple inches of the uppermost radiators began to get warm. The water had resumed rising.
By nine p.m. the radiators were full and hot. There had been no other leaks. The cheap room thermometer I’d bought a few days earlier read 50 degrees. We wouldn’t be able to get it any warmer than that for two months—only half the radiators were working. The house wasn’t sealed, much less insulated; many of the window openings were covered only with blue plastic tarps. The cycling of the furnace was controlled not by the thermostat but by the thermal limiter on the boiler, which switched off the burners when the water got too hot.
But I had heat in the house. There was no danger now that the water supply pipes would freeze. I could work without gloves with no risk of having my fingers get numb.
I walked around the house and inspected the work. I tell you true: Few experiences in life are so satisfying as staking out a little patch of the earth and making it warm.
I was ready to head for home. Not the Chief. Holding the reciprocating saw—I’d purchased a replacement for the one stolen—he indicated the old steel radiator pipes that still hung from the basement ceiling. “Might as well get these out of here,” he said. “They’re in the way.”
“Ah, jeez, Chief,” I said.
“Come on.”
We sawed pipes till one in the morning and stacked the pieces on the lawn. When I returned to the house the following day they were gone. The metal guys had visited us again.
A few weeks later while out doing errands in the car with the family I had an epiphany.
“Ah, shit,” I said, slapping the steering wheel.
“What’s the matter?” Mary asked.
“I’m a moron,” I said. I’d just realized that I needn’t have bothered drilling holes for the radiator pipes in the joists. The house had ten-foot ceilings—I could have run the pipes below the joists, then had the carpenters frame out a drop ceiling below the pipes. It would have cost maybe $300 and taken just eight inches off the ceiling. No one would have noticed. I’d have saved three weeks.
“I should tell people about this,” I said morosely. “I should write a book.” That was the genesis of the present work. Shakespeare may have had nobler motives for writing, but Shakespeare, at least to his biographers’ knowledge, never rehabbed a house.
12
One recognizes that home improvement shows on TV aren’t high on realism—that the charming young couple hosting the program can’t possibly complete the construction of that acre-size redwood deck in a half hour’s time; that in fact it would take a crew of three a week; and that in nine cases out of ten a couple trying to build a deck without professional assistance would never finish at all, because they’d have previously gotten divorced. Still, miraculous feats of construction aren’t the most improbable aspect of the TV shows, in my opinion. Rather, it’s that the programs give the impression that the home owner will spend the bulk of the project working on his house, instead of what he really will be doing—namely, assembling paperwork, calling up the contractor, and arguing with the bank. Admittedly such scenes don’t make for gripping drama, but you might as well give a presentation on human reproduction that plays up the twenty minutes of entertainment while ignoring the nine months of grief.
By early January we’d finally succeeded in getting the last of the documentation together, enabling us to close on the construction loan. This entailed a moment of ceremony. We came into the bank to sign some papers, and did; then the clerical staff made way for Wayne. Wayne’s role in the loan approval process had never been entirely clear to us. He was a vice president, but that meant nothing; as far as I could tell, everyone at the bank was a vice president. As now became plain, however, a key part of his job was to impart cautionary wisdom.
Wayne settled into his chair with the satisfied air of a man about to give a well-honed performance. Time has obscured some of the details, but the flavor of it was as follows:
“Let me tell you what’s going to happen,” he began. “You’ve got a lot of decisions to make. You’re going to be picking out countertops, and one of you is going to say, you know, honey, wouldn’t granite look nice instead of Formica? And the other one is going to say, sure, sweetheart, no problem. Then you’ll be looking at bathroom fixtures, and you’ll think, that steam shower, that would sure be nice—or what about a Jacuzzi? And you’ll say, hey, no problem. That front hall. You’ll want some nice tile there. A chandelier. A carpet upgrade. They’re not that much money, and when will there be a better time? So you’ll say, no problem.” Wayne went on in this vein for some time. He was really quite amusing.
At length he roused himself for the big finish. “And then the bills are going to come in. And you know what? Problems.” We laughed. Wayne drew the appropriate moral about the importance of not getting carried away. We promised we’d be good.
Fact was, the bank wasn’t going to give us many opportunities to get carried away. For starters, we didn’t get a lump sum—anyone daffy enough to rehab a house in the city wasn’t someone you wanted to entrust with large sums of cash. Rather, the contractor would submit a bill, usually once a month or upon completion of the work, and the bank, having satisfied itself that all was in order, would pay the contractor. First, however, the bank wanted us to sink enough of our own money into the project that we weren’t likely to walk away. The amount required was 20 percent of the value of the work—about $60,000—and what’s more, we had to prove we’d spent it. It was at this point that I learned that my days of document production had only just begun. I was about to be introduced to lien waivers.
It occurs to me that perhaps everyone else in America in those days knew about lien waivers, and I alone suffered from some peculiar disability that prevented me from grasping what was required. If so, please disregard the following tedious narrative—all I know is it was a slow job for me. The basic concept wasn’t that complicated. The law in Illinois, and I imagine most everywhere else, allowed tradespeople who had worked on your house to place a mechanic’s lien—a claim—against the title to the property if they felt they hadn’t been justly compensated for their trouble. Thereafter the lien traveled with the deed. In theory, I guess, the lien was a noble thing—it ensured that humble artisans would get their day in court. But as far as the real estate industry was concerned the lien was the equivalent of cooties. It was to be avoided at all costs. If the property was sold, the lien either had to be settled or “insured over”—that is to say, the title insurance company had to agree it would pay the judgment if the lien was finally settled in the tradesperson’s favor. This the title company wasn’t eager to do. I don’t know that anyone’s house was ever so
ld at a sheriff’s sale for failure to pay the plumber, but I guess from a legal standpoint the possibility was there.
In a construction loan, the property was the bank’s security, and the bank didn’t want to have its title encumbered by liens in the event of foreclosure. So the bank demanded that in making payments to tradespeople the owner obtain lien waivers in exchange, by virtue of which the tradespeople certified that they’d gotten what they had coming. With me so far? As I say, it wasn’t a complicated concept.
The problem was that lien waivers had to be completed in precisely the right way. It was the Noh drama thing again. The person in charge of making sure I did this was Sonja, who worked at the title company, which made payouts to the contractor on behalf of the bank.
The main thing to know about Sonja is that she was beautiful. Probably she had been chosen for her job for that reason, on the argument that when, as undoubtedly happened two or three times a week, a home owner became so popeyed with rage at her endless demands that he leaped across the desk to strangle her, he would be so mesmerized by her striking physical presence as to allow her the necessary few milliseconds to make her escape. The strategy had obviously worked; she still looked pretty healthy by the time she got to me.
Sonja’s title was escrow administrator, and her job was to make sure you filled out the paperwork right. I was, as I say, a slow student. There were two types of lien waiver forms. The pink ones, headed “Partial Waiver of Lien,” were intended for interim payments; the blue ones, entitled “Final Waiver of Lien,” were to be filled out when the job, or at least the subcontractor’s portion of it, was complete. On the first go-round with my subcontractors I had gotten the forms mixed up. Oops. On the second try I neglected to get the papers notarized (nobody told me they had to be notarized). The third time I omitted the following magical incantation, which was to be printed on the affidavit at the bottom of each waiver: ALL MATERIALS TAKEN FROM FULLY PAID STOCK, DELIVERED TO JOB SITE IN OUR OWN TRUCK. ALL LABOR PAID TO DATE. PRINCIPAL SUPPLIER IS: [whoever].
There were other documents to be filled out as well—sworn contractor’s statements, owner’s payment authorization forms, materials waivers, W-9 forms. I messed those up plenty too, and the ones I didn’t, Tony did. (Tony also was required to submit documentation out the wazoo.) Many times the mistakes were my fault, generally because I hadn’t followed instructions, one of my many chronic failings. Other times, to be honest, I don’t know what I did wrong, except that in Sonja’s unappeasable opinion it was wrong, and neither I nor anybody else was going to get any money until I got it right.
Then again, it’s not as though I were uniquely stupid. Sonja’s practice, on initial receipt of a batch of paperwork, was to issue a “corrections letter,” the purpose of which was to enumerate in exasperating detail exactly what you’d done wrong. Everyone with a building loan got these letters, I gathered; the main difference was how long they were—my first one ran to six pages. What’s more, after I dutifully resubmitted what I hoped were properly filled-out documents—not easy, because arranging for yourself, a busy tradesperson, and a notary to be in the same place at the same time was no trivial task—I sometimes got a second letter apprising me of certain necessary corrections to my corrections, which as far as I was concerned was the equivalent of failing the fifth grade twice.
I plugged away as best I could, ranting periodically to the loan officer at the bank, a young fellow named Chris. (Wayne, his fiduciary duty fulfilled, had moved on to other things.) “This is a crazy lady!” I howled at one point. Chris found this amusing, which mitigated my irritation to some degree; bankers rarely found anything amusing. However, the entertainment value I evidently provided didn’t prevent Chris from imposing still more requirements. One day, for example, it occurred to him (or to someone; one never knew who in the bank had had these inspirations) that the Barn House should be periodically inspected by a licensed architect other than Howard or Charlie to ensure that the work had been done properly. What’s more, Chris informed me, I would be expected to pay for the privilege, at $300 a pop. Fine, I said. Anything else? X-ray the solder joints? Bulls tickets? Hire your brother-in-law to guard the blue tarp? Chris laughed. But others expected things from me and didn’t find the matter funny at all.
The Chicago building department, and city inspectors in Chicago generally, have long been notorious for petty graft. “Petty” is the operative term here. Corruption-wise the serious money in Chicago, at least on a per-transaction basis, is made at the higher levels of government. Chicago aldermen are legendary for their industry in this regard—between 1972 and 1999, twenty-six were convicted of felonies, mostly involving bribes, with occasional instances of embezzlement, extortion, fraud, ghost payrolling, and other malfeasance thrown in. At least two other aldermen were indicted but had their trials halted or indefinitely postponed due to failing health; even if we cast those aside, 14 percent of the people who served as Chicago aldermen over a twenty-seven-year period, or roughly one in seven (fifty hold office at any one time), were found guilty of corruption. A statistic like that inspires a sort of awe.62
Even an alderman, if one judged from the newspapers, was unlikely to get rich from bribery alone. The typical aldermanic payoff was on the order of $5,000, which bought you a zoning change.63 A few got more—I once had a pleasant lunch with a pair of disgraced ex-aldermen, one of whom had done time for pocketing $50,000 (the property involved was unusually large, and the recipient unusually influential), and an enterprising council member in the 1970s stole close to $100,000 from the federally funded jobs program he ran. As a rule, though, the truly life-changing boodle—the put-your-kid-through-college kind, as opposed to the week-in-Vegas variety—went to those who could influence the awarding of government contracts, where millions were at stake. In 1987, for example, a former Chicago Park District official who had been in charge of the city’s lakefront harbors was charged with taking a $200,000 kickback for steering business to a marine contractor.64
In contrast, the amounts involved in inspector payoffs were often laughably small. In 1978, four Chicago building department supervisors were found guilty of taking $50,000 in bribes, a sum made more impressive by the fact that it had been collected in increments of $25 to $50 over a period of eight years. On the same day twenty-seven of the city’s seventy electrical inspectors were charged with taking bribes ranging from a few dollars to $100. In 1985, eleven of the city’s nineteen sewer inspectors plus three former inspectors were indicted for soliciting 1,287 bribes totaling $74,556 over the preceding fifteen years—an average of $58 per bribe.65
The mid-1980s were the high-water mark of small-time municipal corruption in Chicago in modern times, if one judges from the newspapers. While inspector busts continued to be reported, mostly from that point forward they involved individuals rather than half the department at once. With a few exceptions, the amounts remained small. In 1990, one building inspector was arrested after soliciting a $50 payoff, another for taking $400 to overlook safety violations in an apartment building. In 1992, an environmental inspector was accused of accepting six bribes ranging from $10 to $25.
Compared to the epic thievery of previous decades, it sounds pretty nickel-and-dime, and it’s possible that by the time we started work on the Barn House street-level corruption in Chicago was more the exception than the rule. But I wouldn’t have put good money on it, and doubt most Chicagoans would have.66 At any rate, I contemplated my upcoming dealings with city inspectors with apprehension.
My encounters with the city to that point had been relatively benign. In mid-summer the local ward superintendent, a good-natured but formidable woman of the sort one knows instinctively not to cross, had shown up at the house to chastise me for letting my contractor load the garbage carts with putrefying goo, to the distress of the garbagemen. In fact it wasn’t the contractor who had ditched the goo, it was me—I had scooped it out from under the decaying basement stairs, the partially liquefied remains of leaves seemingly u
nraked since V-J Day. I professed shock and promised the ward superintendent I wouldn’t let my guys get away with it again.
Then came Benny, the plumbing inspector. He was a hulking older man with a grim expression; he breathed with a rasp. He stopped by one afternoon to check progress to that point. He said little, glancing without much interest at the cast-iron soil stack and other pipework that the plumbers had installed.
On the way out he noticed a tangle of discarded electrical switchboxes and cabling lying on the floor. “You need those switchboxes?” he asked. I didn’t. Benny wanted them for some project. The switchboxes were the deeper-than-normal kind you didn’t see much in stores anymore. No problem, I said, they’re yours. Save them for me, said Benny. He would stop by to pick them up.
The next morning I arrived at the house early. About eight a.m. there was a rap on the door. It was Benny.
“You got the switchboxes?” he asked, his tone suggesting I’d better. I was a little taken aback, having expected I might see him in a week. Uh, sure, I said. I hunted up my tools and set to work disconnecting armored cable while Benny watched grimly, breathing heavily all the while.
After a few minutes I handed the salvaged hardware to Benny. He grunted an acknowledgment and left. Well, I thought as I watched him go, if that’s all Chicago building inspectors are demanding nowadays, I’ve got no reason to complain.
Others didn’t get off so easy. Kevin the plumber told me Benny had instructed him to deliver a load of plumbing supplies, at Kevin’s cost, to Benny’s daughter’s house in the suburbs. A neighbor who rehabilitated apartment buildings told me he’d had difficulty getting the plans for one of his projects approved. When he asked about the holdup, he received the cryptic response, “Oh, that’s one of Benny’s jobs.” But I was lucky. I never saw Benny again.