by Ed Zotti
Wednesday, July 6. Mary calls IRS—they won’t put lien on house if we pay $11,000 by July 23. Around ten p.m. Tom calls; wants to know if I left used diaper in bathroom. Say no, kids hadn’t been out there. Subsequent remarks stranger than usual: “I am not prepared to deal with . . . here I am and there you are . . . I expect to find things a certain way . . . in the capacity I am providing I have an enormous degree of insecurity. I feel it’s important to maintain . . . please understand where I’m coming from.” End discussion with some effort.
Thursday, July 7. Pete returns to finish upstairs AC. Duct routing simplified by my drawings, but still more complicated than new house. Drawbacks of hiring low bidder now apparent. I stare at knotty problem in master bedroom ceiling muttering, “I don’t know,” only to have Pete say he doesn’t know either. After study, figure if I can get forty-five-degree whatsit to hook onto ninety-degree thingamajig, can get around funky framing without ducts protruding into room. Pete not seeing it. Say I’m certain parts exist, although as usual no definite knowledge of this. Pete says if I get he will install.
Sunday, July 10. Have to redo radiator supply piping to Ani’s room, forget why. Job takes three and a half hours; first time around took three days. Call Mom, who inherited money from frugal spinster schoolteacher aunts, arrange to borrow $11,000 to pay IRS.
At some point in mid-July I needed Lee to sign a final lien waiver, which as always had to be notarized. He insisted we drive out for this purpose to a currency exchange in a tough west-side neighborhood called Lawndale, which still had vacant lots dating from the riots of the 1960s. On arrival the stocky man behind the counter greeted Lee familiarly. “This came for you,” he said, handing a piece of mail past me to Lee. It was a compact window envelope containing an official-looking document; I couldn’t help noticing the return address. It was a welfare check.
Lee and I concluded our business and returned to the car for the trip back to the north side. We drove in silence for a time. “I guess you saw I was on relief,” Lee said finally. I said nothing. We never discussed the matter again.
Friday, July 15. Porch balustrades finished, look fabulous. Go to building supply store for duct parts for master bedroom, find what I want in ten minutes. Back at house lay out pieces, write detailed note to Pete explaining how to install. Call city about request for waiver on electrical work. Inspector says he talked to boss: “At first he said, ‘That’s not how we do it.’ But then he said, ‘Ah, hell, give it to him.’” Convey gushing thanks.
Sunday, July 17. Stop at house in afternoon to see how Pete doing. Unbelievably, still doesn’t have master BR ducts right, defying expectations of male superiority in spatial reasoning. “Gimme the nut driver,” I say, show how supposed to go. Leave on errand; when get back still isn’t right. Get up on ladder and fix myself; while at it redo several return ducts where Pete’s attention apparently drifted. “Huh,” he says later.
Saturday, July 23. Arrive at house to find Chester has propped up front porch roof with two-by-fours, disassembled fabulous balustrade, taken down pillar, sawed six inches off bottom. “Chester, what are you doing?” I shriek. He says blueprints showed railings thirty inches high; as installed only twenty-four inches. Ask to see prints. Drawing of entire house in fact shows thirty-inch railing, but refers to detail drawing further back in sheaf. Thumb through drawings, now bedraggled after months of use, discover detail drawing torn out. Retrieve my copy of prints, show Chester detail drawing—indicates twenty-four-inch railing. “You got it right the first time. If it were wrong we would have said something,” I say. Chester looks stricken. “My head is cabbage,” he says. Puts porch back like it was, although line on pillar six inches from bottom shows where reattached.
By the end of July we’d finally sold our town house and had to be out by early September. We now turned to postponed details such as woodwork. We’d saved the house’s original trim during demolition, thinking we might be able to clean and reinstall it, and in fact the doors, magnificent multi-paneled affairs that looked like they belonged in an English country manor, had come out of the dunk tank looking pretty good. But the baseboards and window trim, I realized on close inspection, were hopelessly splintered—we had no choice but to buy new. We might have used stock molding, I suppose, but never seriously considered it; we hadn’t come this far to cheap out on the finishing. On the other hand, we also had neither the time nor the money to get new woodwork milled and installed before move-in day. I decided that once the drywall had been hung, I’d have the interior painted white to seal the walls. We’d get to the millwork when we could.
Monday, August 1. Chief and I work at house till late. On way home tire goes flat on Lake Shore Drive. Pulling over I discover two problems: first, flat; second, seriously low spare. Past midnight, nearest gas station half mile away. Car pulls in behind mine—it’s Chief. Gets out silently, forages in trunk, then approaches with grin, carrying flashlight and battery-powered air pump, come to save my sorry ass again.
Wednesday, August 3. Chief and I finish last of intercom cabling, other odds and ends before drywall. Tony has moved Tom to different job site. “It’s kind of strange with Tom not being here,” Chief says. “Then again, a lot of times it was kind of strange when he was here.” Air of constant crisis has subsided in any case. Take numerous photos of electrical conduit, of which very proud. On arriving home discover no film in camera; by time I return, drywallers have covered everything.
The Mexican drywallers had made an initial appearance in early August and shown up in force a few days later, the empty bottles of Woda Sodowa seltzer water left in odd corners by the Polish carpenters giving way to the tamarind soda preferred by the Mexicans. I’d long since come to terms with drywall. In my youth, no doubt influenced by my father, a self-taught plasterer, I considered it emblematic of shoddy construction and the decline of the West. However, my sense of the rightness of things had had to adjust to reality: Drywall, done properly, produced work not easily distinguished from plaster (ignoring the occasional nail pop), with the decisive advantages of being cheap and fast.
The Mexican drywallers now proceeded to demonstrate how it was done. As a kid I’d helped my dad hang gypsum board as an underlayment for plaster; it’d take us an hour to cover perhaps thirty square feet. In that time the Mexican drywallers would have finished half the house. There were two crews—the hangers (who affixed the drywall to the studs), followed by the tapers (who covered the seams between boards with paper tape, then ladled on copious quantities of joint compound, commonly called mud, which they troweled smooth and sanded flat). None of the hangers was taller than five feet eight or weighed more than 160 pounds, yet they tossed around four-by-ten-foot pieces of drywall as though dealing cards.
Saturday, August 13. Ricardo the taper starts. Explain major challenge, replacement of curved ceiling in service stairwell—basically quarter-toroidal helix. No idea how to accomplish using flat drywall. De nada, says Ricardo.
Monday, August 15. Hangers conclude their part of stairwell ceiling—soak quarter-inch-thick drywall in water to soften, slice at one-inch intervals so will bend, then mount to ceiling with one million screws. Still pretty lumpy.
Wednesday, August 17. Don’t arrive at house till five; Ricardo and helper still there, work till eight. No ladders, walk around on stilts. Helper muds seams with ten-inch-wide applicator. Ricardo says planned on staying in Chicago six months, still here after eight years. Now buying house in suburbs. Ladles vast amounts of mud onto stairwell ceiling. I ask, you sure this will work? De nada, he says.
Monday, August 22. Upstairs AC not cooling, although compressor and air handler running constantly. Take cover off air handler, find giant block of ice. After study of manual, deduce Pete has run returns into side of air handler, not bottom as specified, so air isn’t drawn past cooling coils, allowing condensation to form ice. Splice two more returns into bottom of air handler, solves problem once ice melts, though takes all day.
Wednesday, August
24. Meet with painters at house about spray-painting interior. Hoped to pay $1,000; after haggling agree on $3,400.
Friday, August 26. Ricardo finishes mudding in A.M.; do a little touchup. Staircase ceiling a work of art.
On the last Saturday in August, we left for Door County, Wisconsin, on a brief low-budget vacation, stopping at the Barn House en route. The floor guys were installing oak flooring in the master bedroom using sleepers (crosswise strips) rather than plywood underlayment, which I knew would be trouble and would eventually necessitate my having them tear the floor out and do the whole thing over—but we’d worry about that another day. Right now life at the Barn House was about to enter a new phase.
17
We moved in on Labor Day weekend. The three-man moving crew was supervised by a wiry, long-haired young guy who drove his crew hard. I wasn’t on hand for most of the work—I was engaged in last-minute preparations at the Barn House while the movers loaded the truck, then cleaned up at our old home while our possessions were off-loaded at the new one. Mary told me it had been a long day—at the end of it, one exhausted mover refused to take another step. The unforgiving foreman had fired him on the spot, which was all very well, but we were left with our piano sitting under a tarp in the backyard.
That night after we were in bed Mary jabbed me awake—she thought she’d heard a noise coming from downstairs. I groggily roused myself to investigate. After shuffling to the top of the stairs and flipping on the light, I looked over the railing into the beady eyes of what was surely the ugliest creature on earth, which crouched on the landing below. It was roughly the size of a rabbit, with gray fur, a narrow ratlike face, and an obscenely long, hairless tail.81 I had no idea what it was, but it clearly had teeth, no doubt sharp. We stared at one another for a long while without moving. Finally I called to Mary in a low voice and asked her to bring any weapon she could put her hand on, which turned out to be a fireplace poker, plus my work boots—I figured if I was going to take this thing on, no sense losing a toe. Thus prepared, I advanced on the critter, which retreated into the narrow wall cavity for a long-gone pocket door. Cornering it there, we called the police. Two uniformed patrolmen arrived by and by.
Peering into the creature’s hiding place, one cop informed me that it was a possum. I was nonplussed. I was a city guy; my experience of possums to that point had consisted of reading Walt Kelly’s comic strip Pogo.
“You should call animal control,” the cop said.
“When does animal control open?” I asked. We were now about a half hour into Saturday.
“Monday morning.”
“That doesn’t seem like a practical plan.”
Just then two plainclothesmen arrived from the tactical squad. Unlike the beat cops, these were men of action. One of the tactical guys directed the available adults to arrange packing boxes in a sort of gauntlet leading from the possum’s lair to the front door, then waved a two-by-four at the animal in a manner calculated to alarm. The possum promptly scooted out the door and down the front steps.
The incident epitomized the first few months following move-in, during which we didn’t so much reside in the house as camp in it. The place was at best 60 percent done. It lacked the most basic amenities, including a complete bathroom or kitchen. The rooms (including the bathrooms) lacked doors or woodwork, the openings merely framed with construction lumber. Most of our household goods were stacked in cryptically labeled boxes in what would someday be the living room. There were no window coverings of any kind; the lighting consisted of a few $3 fixtures and bare bulbs. We slept on mattresses on unfinished floors; Mary rose early each morning to take a shower at her sister’s apartment two neighborhoods north before heading off to work. Her tolerance of disorder had never been high and she was in a perpetual low-grade froth. I, on the other hand, had adopted the put-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other mind-set of a refugee fleeing the Khmer Rouge: First we’ll do A, then we’ll do B and C and so on in the bleak expectation, or anyway hope, that somewhere in the vicinity of step quadruple-Q we’d achieve normality.
We told ourselves the kids were too young to grasp the rudeness of their surroundings. However, one Saturday night after his bath, Ryan, now almost five, observed while getting toweled off that the bathtub (which had no faucet, only a length of half-inch copper pipe projecting from the wall) was in one room, the sole operating toilet was in a different room downstairs, and the house’s only sink was in a third room, the kitchen. “Dad,” he said, “that’s weird.”
It turned out the possum wasn’t the only variety of wildlife to have found its way into the house. We also had mice, who presumably had taken up residence at some point during the long interlude when the principal barrier to intruders was the blue tarp. At night we heard them scampering in the walls; I looked up from the table one evening to see a little gray head peering out of an electrical-box opening in the kitchen wall. The following evening Mary spotted a mouse darting across the kitchen floor and, moving at an impressive percentage of the speed of light, squished it against the wall with a board. Later I regaled friends with this tale at dinner: “You should have seen it. That mouse was two-dimensional.” Mary didn’t find this funny.
Notwithstanding my preoccupation with the house, ordinary life proceeded in its inexorable way, abetted chiefly by Mary. Our older two kids had now entered preschool, a momentous event. School had always been a concern for us, as for most city families. In 1987, then-Secretary of Education William Bennett had described the Chicago public schools as the worst in the nation, which was easy to believe; in my recollection they hadn’t been all that hot in 1965. The city’s Catholic elementary schools, once a mainstay, were in decline due to sharply rising costs and falling church attendance—enrollment was down 60 percent, and half had closed. Middle-class Chicago parents typically moved to the suburbs once their kids reached school age.
To counter this trend, the church we attended, Old St. Pat-rick’s, had started a new school. The parish was one of the few in the city undergoing a resurgence. Located in a decaying old building on the edge of downtown, Old St. Pat’s had had only four registered parishioners in 1983, but its energetic pastor, Jack Wall, had boosted attendance through outreach efforts, such as the “world’s largest block party,” an annual summer event that drew thousands.
I had nothing to do with the block party, but I knew a few of the people involved in organizing it. Many were graduates of the University of Notre Dame or St. Mary’s College, its neighbor in South Bend, Indiana.
Growing up, I confess it had never quite sunk in that Notre Dame was in Chicago’s orbit.82 I realize this bespeaks a certain obliviousness on my part. I had of course heard of Notre Dame, Ara Parseghian, and the golden dome; I’d seen Knute Rockne: All-American , with Pat O’Brien and Ronald Reagan. Just for that reason, I thought of the school as a remote national icon, like the Washington Monument or Fort Knox. This impression was undoubtedly reinforced by the fact that Notre Dame was in Indiana, which Chicagoans from childhood (to be precise, from their first car trip to Michigan) regard as a primitive backwater on a par with Chad or, perhaps more aptly, the desolate reaches of eastern Germany—a wilderness of swamps, rusting industrial infrastructure, and deserted towns, overhung by a stench that would kill a goat.83 South Bend, it’s true, was a pleasant enough hamlet well beyond the most toxic industrial zone, but that only heightened the sense of antipodean isolation. My mother had taken me on an excursion to Notre Dame when I was nine or ten; it might as well have been on the banks of the Seine.
I was obliged to take a different view of things on graduating from college and settling on the north side. Domers, as Notre Dame alumni called themselves, were an inescapable part of the Chicago social scene—far more so than graduates of my alma mater, Northwestern, or the University of Chicago. This stemmed in large part from their indomitable will to party, which Lord knows wasn’t a major motivator for the U. of C. Maroons.
Sociability, of course, isn’t unusual among the coll
egiate set; what distinguished the Domers was their ability to put it on a commercial basis. At some point during the 1980s I became acquainted with what I thought of as the boat people, the nucleus of which consisted of two Notre Dame graduates who shortly after moving to Chicago had begun entertaining themselves and their many friends by organizing parties. Several of the more memorable events were held on rented boats, which spent the evening plying the local waterways. Cruise boats in Chicago were not then numerous. As I heard the story, which may have been colored a bit by beer, the principals found themselves beneath a table toward the end of one of these revels and vowed to establish a boat company so they could have waterborne junkets whenever they felt like it. A week later, sobriety evidently having done nothing to diminish the charm of this notion, they flew down to Florida to inspect a boat they eventually bought. A year or two after that they commissioned the construction of a custom party . . . well, yacht would be putting things too grandly, but it was a nice little craft. In 1987, Mary and I, by no means party people, nonetheless thought it would be a hoot to get married on this vessel.84 Today cruise boats in Chicago constitute a sizable fleet.
These were the people Jack Wall had enlisted to help revive his tumbledown parish. They were well suited to the task, and not just because of their proclivity for parties. If gays and artists were the shock troops of gentrification, Domers were the occupying army. They filled entire apartment buildings in downtown Chicago. (Well, maybe not entire buildings, but I know of one where they were so numerous it was commonly known as the dorm.)
A few Notre Dame alums didn’t merely live in downtown apartments, they built them. In the mid-1980s a large downtown housing project had been constructed a couple blocks from Old St. Patrick’s by a team of local developers, one of whom was a former Notre Dame football star. The venture was a typical Chicago production from beginning to end, involving massive public subsidies, a mortgage default, and years of protests after the developers tried to evade federal rules requiring that some apartments be set aside for low-income tenants (they coughed up a few in the end).