The Barn House

by Ed Zotti

  Saturday, April 30. Out of town on business. On return Tom calls, says dogs back in house—carpenters haven’t put up chain-link fence in backyard as promised to keep them from running loose; doesn’t want to chain up for fear they’ll get tangled. Also, Layla pregnant. Insist dogs remain in kennel, go out to house to put up chicken-wire fencing. Oscar easily digs beneath, so demand Tom chain him; he reluctantly agrees. Carry pregnant Layla out to kennel; clearly close to giving birth. Tom says he was arrested for not having performer’s license.

  Sunday, May 1. Work work all day. Feel overwhelmed.

  Monday, May 2. Spend couple hours hassling with Sonja over next payout. Chris agrees if project amount bumped up $2,500 to cover remaining plumbing and electrical, all salubrious, no additional money from us required.

  Tuesday, May 3. Cabinet guy arrives at Barn House to measure kitchen. “You’ve got yourself a project here,” he says. Thanks, Einstein. Tom says Layla gave birth to nine puppies yesterday, seven dead by this morning. Remaining two whimpering in cardboard box on his bed. Tony says Jerry mugged yesterday while sitting in car talking on cell phone near west-side job site—guy put knife to his neck, demanded wallet, got $90, credit cards. “When I get done with this house, I’m getting out of here,” Tony says. More complications with Sonja; Pete the sheet-metal guy hasn’t filled out lien waiver right. Forge changes so Tony can get paid. Mary tells me she’s stressed—home all day with three kids including newborn; I’m seldom home and when I am I’m working. Agree but don’t see much alternative.

  Saturday, May 7. Minimal house work all week. Tom says all puppies dead. Oscar in family room; tell Tom to put in kennel. Layla all skin and bones.

  Sunday, May 8. Forget to wish Mary happy Mother’s Day.

  Tuesday, May 10. Mary prices new woodwork—$10-15,000. Will have to salvage old stuff, although in bad shape.

  Saturday, May 14. On arrival at house, Tom says Layla dead. Find emaciated corpse on back porch, legs stiffened in air, eyes half open. Mary calls; planned to take kids on outing, but as soon as she started car temp gauge redlined. Tell her to stay home. Gabe’s wife complains guys pouring new basement floor have wrecked her fence, chipped masonry; apologize, promise we’ll fix. Need hacksaw blade; Tom volunteers to get at hardware store, but on way back Oscar attacks neighbor’s cocker spaniel, bites him (spaniel) in side. Owner, already unhappy with Tom, demands Oscar’s medical history. I think: My next house will be in the suburbs . It’ll have eight-foot ceilings and wall-to-wall carpeting and vinyl siding and I’ll spend my weekends on the couch watching sports.

  Sunday, May 15. Mary has 101-degree fever. Car redlines when switched on; probably bad sensor (not serious) but take cab to house, install 270 feet of conduit.

  Monday, May 16. Plague of locusts descends on house, soon our bodies covered with boils. Ha, just kidding. But it’s time for a little break.

  16

  Prior to Daniel Burnham, who in the Plan of Chicago cheerfully contemplated a city of 13,250,000 by 1952 (along with several other key assumptions in the plan, this estimate overshot reality by a generous margin—metropolitan Chicago’s population in 1950 was just 5.5 million and is 9.5 million now), no utopian or urban planner to my knowledge had proposed as a desirable form of human habitat a city of a million or more.79 The closest I could come up with in an admittedly unscientific survey (I read a bunch of books) was Idelfonso Cerdá y Suñer’s 1859 plan for Barcelona, which had that city topping out at 800,000, considerably shy of the 1,670,000 who live there now.

  Most ideal communities were much smaller. In his dialogue Laws, Plato envisioned that the population of the planned city of Magnesia would be fixed at 5,040 families, which modern commentators estimate would mean about 50,000 people. In Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), cities were limited to 6,000 households of ten to sixteen people, for a population of maybe 80,000—a respectable-sized town for the era, I suppose. But ideal cities thereafter didn’t get markedly larger even as real ones grew vast. The “garden cities” proposed by the English planner Ebenezer Howard a century ago were to have a total of 250,000 people, mostly distributed among satellite communities of 32,000—this at a time when the population of greater London exceeded 6 million.

  After Burnham a few planners proposed cities of bolder scale, the most famous of whom was the Swiss architect Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, whose proposed-but-not-built La Ville Contemporaine (1922), a stark essay in high-rise modernism, was to have 3 million inhabitants. This scheme, now generally acknowledged as mad, became the model for disastrous public housing projects in Chicago and throughout the world, in the process largely extinguishing any budding enthusiasm for planned megacities. (Unplanned megacities, of course, have continued to grow explosively, whether anyone was enthusiastic about them or not.)

  Instead, the preference for communities of modest size became if anything even more pronounced—community here being understood in the narrow sense of a municipal corporation having defined borders. The average Chicago suburb has just 18,000 inhabitants—the region, in fact, has the most independent municipalities of any city in the country, an oddity I once heard an urban expert attribute to the racist citizenry, who presumably figured it was easier to keep troublesome minorities out of small, homogenous towns. However true this may have been (I don’t claim racial views in postwar Chicago were especially enlightened), a simpler explanation is that most people prefer suburbs because they find it easier getting their hands around a small community than a large one—most people but, as we shall see, not all.

  I spent a good deal of time that winter and spring trying to get the insurance company to reimburse me for the December break-in. Obtaining estimates for the stolen mantelpieces proved to be unexpectedly difficult. The first couple salvage houses I contacted couldn’t be bothered trying to assign values to these unusual items. The woman answering the phone at the third salvager was likewise dubious, but agreed to check with the boss. She asked my name; when I told her, she asked whether I was the same individual who edited a certain newspaper column. I admitted that I was. “We love that column,” she said, and after a moment of offline consultation invited me to come on over—the boss would be happy to accommodate me.

  The firm, located in an old brick loft building only a few blocks from the Barn House, turned out to be one of the country’s largest dealers in antique mantelpieces. The owner, a ponytailed fellow named Stuart, had become something of a wheel in the architectural salvage business, spending his days traveling to demolition sites and extracting picturesque fragments of buildings otherwise bound for landfill or the scrap yard—elevator grilles, stone lions, terra-cotta ornaments. He had chunks of structures designed by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. A few items he’d kept for himself (eventually he opened a museum to display it). The rest was for sale.

  Stuart invited me to inspect the premises. Most of the mantelpieces were stored on an upper floor—the space was impressively large. How many items were stacked there I can’t say, but the number was surely in the thousands, each representing a building now dust, or anyway a room now dust, or remodeled beyond recognition. I wandered up and down the aisles, the photos of the mantelpieces taken from the Barn House in my hand. Not all the assembled woodwork had come from Chicago (and from what I could see, none of it had come from my house), but a lot of it had, and much more from towns elsewhere in the Midwest—places whose moment of glory had come and gone, and whose antiquities, if one may use the term, were now being stripped for export. (Detroiters were especially bitter on the subject.) A lot of the salvaged goods wouldn’t wind up in Chicago, the region, or even in a city. Some friends had a Louis Sullivan rosette in their powder room in suburban Atlanta; I’d heard Texas was an enthusiastic importer of Chicago common brick.

  Yet I can’t say I found the scene bleak—the stuff was being recycled rather than simply discarded, after all—nor (the initial shock having passed) had the experience of being victimized left me personally all
that upset. Truth was, the thieves had done me a favor—I hadn’t really liked the mantelpieces they’d made off with, two fussy Victorian relics, and at the moment, to be candid, I had more use for the insurance money. Although I wouldn’t care to advertise the fact, there was something to be said for an occasional encounter with chaos, assuming it didn’t entail bodily injury or leave you stuck for the loss. My friend Hank had come to a similar conclusion years earlier. He was initially dismayed when his house was damaged by fire, but when he realized the settlement would allow him to modernize his outdated kitchen . . . well, I’d be exaggerating to say he’d become an advocate of arson. But he could see it had its points.

  I went back downstairs, my due diligence complete. Stuart wrote up a generous estimate of my mantelpieces based on the photos, which I subsequently submitted to the claims adjuster. In the fullness of time the insurance company deducted a trifling amount and sent me a good-sized check.

  I’d gotten another break. At first I chalked this up to the fact that I was in a high-profile line of work, but in time I realized there was more to it than that. Fact was, I’d gotten a lot of breaks on my project, foremost among them the intervention of Charlie, Tony and Jerry, and the Chief. Eventually I realized a larger force was at work: I was a beneficiary of the city-guy mafia.

  Anyone who’s lived in the same place for an appreciable length of time recognizes the web of relationships in which he’s become enmeshed. I was periodically reminded of this by my Irish Catholic mother, surely one of the most social beings on earth. Anyone who knew my mom could claim at most one degree of separation from the rest of humanity, because she knew everybody else. One evening in a hotel in Jerusalem (I’d accompanied my mother on a trip to Israel with a church group following the demurral of my father, who figured there wouldn’t be anyone to talk pigeons with), we shared a dinner table with an older couple neither of us had ever laid eyes on before. Within twenty minutes my mother had established that the woman had grown up on the west side of Chicago in the house next door to the childhood home of her (my mom’s) sister-in-law—my aunt—from which said sister-in-law had departed in, oh, maybe 1941. “Ma,” I said as we left the table, “sometimes you scare me.”

  From ancient ties like that certain advantages easily arose. You knew people, they knew you—or if not you, then your mom, your neighbor, or your best friend’s sister’s ex. If you needed help or advice . . . well, if you were a knucklehead like me, you could just start calling people out of the phone book, only to discover that the party on the other end of the line was a pigeon-racing buddy of your dad’s.

  The city-guy mafia was a special case of these ordinary social networks. For the most part it wasn’t so different—on the contrary, inasmuch as a considerable fraction of the Chicago contingent consisted of graduates of the University of Notre Dame (about which more later), it could be as tribal as the best of them. It merely included a few extra nodes. In addition to the usual connections through family and friends, city people knew each other, or anyway knew of each other, by virtue of certain urban pursuits: writing for the newspapers, say, or belonging to civic or professional associations, or—let’s not be too hifalutin about this—hanging out at the same bar in Wicker Park.

  However you gained admittance, the city-guy mafia, in the manner of all networks, opened doors and made urban life less intimidating. This had two important consequences, both of which I grasped only in retrospect. The first was that, in contrast to suburbanites, city guys were comfortable with big-city scale—the city was their natural home. The second was that, once stirred to action, the city-guy mafia was a formidable engine for change, as we would shortly see. And so back to our story.

  Wednesday, May 18. Laryngitis in the morning, followed by shivers. Do financial projection; optimistically $16,000 in hole for year.

  Thursday, May 19. Get notice from city saying Oscar must be impounded for ten days. Can’t reach Tom.

  Saturday, May 21. Work on conduit. Tom says he’ll take Oscar to pound.

  Monday, May 23. Work work all week. Write pessimistic magazine column: “I like the city and hope that people like myself can work out a way to stay in it, and I think there is a reasonable chance we will. But I wish I could be more certain than I am.”

  Saturday, May 28. Ani’s birthday party. Pleasant day.

  Sunday, May 29. More conduit. Despite repeated admonitions, Tom still hasn’t brought Oscar to pound, but says he has arranged with Tony to do so.

  Saturday, June 4. Oscar still hasn’t gone to pound, crapped all over second floor.

  Sunday, June 5. Working late at house when Tom arrives, drunk and morose: “I have an IQ that’s tested out between one hundred and eighty and two hundred, depending on what scale was used, and I can’t figure out why people do these things to each other.” Turns out alley kids have been throwing stuff into yard at Oscar and won’t stop when asked. Still hasn’t taken Oscar to pound. “What if it were your wife they wanted to examine? Not that Oscar is my wife.” Tell Tom not interested in pursuing this discussion.

  Thursday, June 9. Do electrical work at house till eleven p.m. Tom arrives late, drunk as usual. Decides to change burned-out basement lightbulb, but it’s stuck and shatters as he tries to turn it. Wearing gloves so not hurt, but I shout at him to stop—fear he’ll electrocute himself, don’t want his death on my hands.

  Saturday, June 11. Oscar in house again. Floorboards in dining room reek of urine, will have to be replaced. Chew Tom out. “But I have emotional needs,” he says. Call Tony, say we needed to start thinking about getting Tom out.

  Monday, June 13. Tony’s fireplace installer calls, says can’t fit flue pipe into wooden chimney chase carpenters have constructed without having it jut into family room. Upon consultation, problem apparently that Charlie has designed offset into chase at point where pierces roof. Call Charlie, ask why offset. “We wanted to engage the rail,” he says. I love Charlie, but can be such an architect sometimes. Eventually conclude chase must be dismantled, rebuilt two feet east. Going to cost. Tony’s guys take Oscar to pound at last.

  Tuesday, June 14. Lee over, finishes installing new main electric panel. Decide to have him help me finish electrical in interest of concluding job before heat death of universe. Chief installs 250 feet of coax for cable TV.

  Wednesday, June 15. Lee calls to say we have problem—inspector says two-inch conduit from electric meter to main panel can’t run through crawl space beneath family room, as now; code requires cutoff switch within five feet of meter. We must run twenty-five feet of pipe with three right-angle bends along outside of newly re-sided house—will look hideous. Decide to appeal to chief electrical inspector.

  Thursday, June 16. Temp 98 degrees. Lee works on electrical with son Gordon while pregnant young woman watches. Lee’s supervision of Gordon consists mainly of screaming at him. Gordon not happy. During break ask how he likes being electrician. “Gotta be an easier way to make a living than this,” he says. Later tell Lee Gordon doesn’t see much future in electrical business. Lee agrees: “He says I work too hard and don’t charge enough.” Gordon pursuing other ventures with assistance of “his wife or girlfriend or something” (pregnant young woman) but has had problems. I ask: Legal problems? Yes, says Lee. Gordon has been in jail on drug charges.

  Gordon is right about one thing, though. Lee charges only $150/day for Gordon and self, less than $10/hour.

  Saturday, June 18. Still very hot. Chief reports hearing two gunshots near Barn House previous evening; remarks on trash on nearby lawns.

  Monday, June 20. Mary wishes me happy (wedding) anniversary. I’d completely forgotten.

  On Saturday, June 25, Lee, the Chief, and I spent the day pulling wire through conduit. Lee knew his business and from time to time instructed the Chief and me on fine points.80 In odd moments he revealed a little about his background. His father had been the first black electrician in Cook County. Now he lived with his family on the west side, where life evidently hadn’t been eas
y—his truck had been repeatedly broken into and his tools stolen. Concluding that he resided in a desolate ghetto neighborhood, I was surprised to learn on further discussion that his home was just a block or two across the city line from Oak Park, the middle-class suburb where my parents lived. It was a different world wherever it was, but I was only fitfully reminded of it. Lee was a craftsman, a member of the brotherhood, and that was bridge enough.

  Sunday, June 26. Finish pulling wire, get all outlets, switches, and pigtails (temporary bulbs) hooked up. House blazes with light.

  Wednesday, June 29. Tony’s guys put up insulation while Chief and I string telephone, intercom wires—gentlemen’s work compared to previous. Take break to admire house from sidewalk. Provided inspection limited to exterior, place is stunning. Formerly most decrepit structure on block; to my eye now handsomest. Passersby stop to compliment.

  Thursday, June 30. Tony calls—front door frame totally shot, should be replaced. Cost: $900. Noticed same thing, say okay.

  Saturday, July 2. Fax Tony saying my alarm guy will soon have burglar alarm operational; we should get Tom out before drywallers start.

  Sunday, July 3. At house doing odds and ends. Tom chatty: “By 2010 there will be ten billion people in the world. That’s a lot of folks. Of course by then we’ll be harvesting krill from the oceans and serving it at McDonald’s. Maybe we’ll be eating bugs, too. Fortunately by then our extraterrestrial efforts will be removing a sizable portion of the population from the planet.”

  Monday, July 4. Supposed to go to John’s for holiday but Ryan has hacking cough so stay home.

  Tuesday, July 5. Get letter from IRS—going to put lien on house for back taxes. Mary in panic.