Vinyl Cafe Unplugged

by Stuart McLean

  Odd Jobs

  It was on a Saturday afternoon in September, five years ago, that Dave and Morley sat in their backyard and had one of those conversations that married couples have from time to time, about where they had been and where they were going. It was during that conversation that they decided, once again, that they would, without fail, start saving money. They agreed to put away two hundred dollars a month in an account they would never touch, never, not ever. And for the last five years they have been doing that, making those monthly deposits—to their own amazement, without missing one month. They did, however, miss one step because it seemed so self-evident, they never hammered out why they were saving. This was not a problem when they were beginning and there was no money in the account, but after five years Dave and Morley had accumulated a significant nest egg, and nest eggs have a habit of hatching.

  What had hatched in Dave’s mind was a duck-egg-blue 1969 Austin-Healey 3000, with a cream scallop inlet, a red leather interior, fifty-two-spoke wire wheels and Lucas fog lights mounted on a shiny chrome bar.

  Ted Bescher, a retired schoolteacher who lives across the lane from Dave and Morley, owns a bright yellow TR6 that Dave has admired ever since Ted, and his car, moved into the neighborhood. Ted’s car hardly ever leaves the garage, but it is there calling out to Dave whenever he walks by. And sometime after his forty-fifth birthday Dave realized that under certain circumstances, just to be able to say that you owned an Austin-Healey would make your world a better place. He wouldn’t have to drive it. In fact, he wasn’t entirely sure he could drive an Austin-Healey without worrying what people were saying behind his back. But just to have one in his garage would make life better.

  Morley, of course, had her own plans for the money, which had nothing to do with little blue cars. When Morley thought about the savings account she imagined a new second-floor bathroom, where there would always be clean towels and a dry toilet seat.

  These were not things they talked about, however, until one summer morning when they were eating breakfast, and Morley looked at the toaster and said, “It would work so much better if we could plug it in at the table. So we wouldn’t have to get up and walk across the kitchen every time someone wanted toast.”

  It was just an idle thought, but it struck her as a good one. She considered it for a moment and said, “Maybe we should take some of the money from the savings account and get someone to put in another outlet.”

  This sent a chill through Dave’s heart.

  The next morning, a Saturday morning, Dave was sitting alone at the breakfast table looking at the toaster on the other side of the kitchen. He was thinking, I should install the outlet myself. It had nothing to do with toast. It was a defensive maneuver. It had everything to do with the Austin-Healey.

  Morley was already at work—they were opening a new play. As she left, she said she wouldn’t be back until after the curtain came down.

  The kids were still asleep—Dave wouldn’t see them for hours. Sometime in July their body clocks had slipped into the Pacific time zone. Dave had the whole day stretched out before him like a white line running down the center of a highway. How complicated could it be for an old roadie to run some wires through a wall and install an outlet?

  The more he thought about it the more he liked the idea. What he liked best of all was that he would get to knock holes in the kitchen wall. It felt good just thinking about that. Without thinking about it any further, without letting coffee or the morning paper waylay him, Dave fetched a hammer from the basement. He returned to the kitchen and stared at the bare white wall beside the table, tapping the hammer anxiously on his thigh.

  Like a Spanish conquistador sealing the fate of his troops by burning his ship as soon as his last man stepped on shore, Dave raised the hammer over his head and swung it at the wall with all his might. Hiii-yah.

  The hammer sank into the plaster with a pleasing crack. Dave pulled it out. Take no prisoners! No turning back! Three more whacks, and he was staring at a hole the size of a cantaloupe.

  What a glorious feeling of destructive accomplishment. Not as good perhaps as changing the oil of a small blue Austin-Healey, but good nevertheless. Dave gave the edges of his hole a few prods with the butt of the hammer and bits of plaster flaked onto the floor. Then he reluctantly put the hammer down. He went upstairs to look for the big Reader’s Digest Book of Home Repairs to see where he should find the wire that he was going to run to his hole. To his new outlet. It would have to come from somewhere.

  He rooted around the bedroom for a while and decided he must have lent the book to a neighbor. He went downstairs and stared at his hole and decided to clean it up a bit. By the time he had finished tinkering, the hole was more symmetrical, neater and considerably larger. More the size of a pizza than a melon. A largish pizza, thought Dave.

  He wondered if Jim Scoffield had his repair book. He didn’t really need it, but it would be good to see what the Reader’s Digest had to say before he went too far. He glanced at the kitchen clock. Jim was the kind of neighbor you visited rather than phoned.

  “I don’t have your book,” said Jim, “but I have a new mallet. I can’t believe you started without me. Let me get it.”

  Jim and Dave stared at the hole where Dave wanted to put the new outlet.

  “Where’s the wire going to come from?” asked Jim.

  “That’s what I was wondering,” said Dave.

  Jim pointed at a light switch by the back door. “There’d be wire over there we could patch in to,” he said.

  Then he smiled. “Of course, we’ll have to punch a hole in the wall to pick it up.”

  He was fiddling with his new mallet.

  “Be my guest,” said Dave.

  “Are you sure?” said Jim, moving toward the back wall, not waiting for the answer.

  Two satisfying swings and Jim was through the plaster. Dave pushed forward to peer into the hole. Jim pushed him back. “Maybe,” said Jim, “I should tidy that up a bit.”

  There were wires there. In fact, when Jim stepped back and they both peeked in his hole, wires were about all they could see—all sorts of wires. Black shiny wires, gray cloth-covered wires, wires snaking through the wall like . . .

  “Like spaghetti,” said Jim.

  “We’re not wanting for wire,” said Dave.

  Jim pointed at a gray wire running through a porcelain insulator.

  “Knob and tube,” said Jim. “I didn’t think that stuff was legal anymore.”

  “Those aren’t live,” said Dave. “I had an electrician in to replace all that a couple of years ago.”

  Dave reached into the hole with his screwdriver and jiggled the old wire. There was a sudden puff of smoke. Dave gasped and the right side of his body jerked spastically. A deep alien-like moan rolled out of him as the screwdriver flew across the kitchen, end over end like a tomahawk, ricocheting off the kitchen sink and disappearing through the window.

  There was a moment of stunned silence. Jim and Dave both stared at the broken window as shards of glass tinkled to the floor.

  “Could you do that again?” said Jim. “I especially enjoyed the way the chip of porcelain from the sink followed the screwdriver through the window.”

  A minute later Bert Turlington was standing on the stoop. He had Dave’s screwdriver in his hand. “This yours?” he asked, standing a little close, talking a little loud.

  Dave nodded. Yes.

  “Are you out of your mind?” said Bert, even louder now.

  Dave shrugged his shoulders. No.

  “I opened the back door,” said Bert, “and this is flying across my yard like . . .”

  “A tomahawk?” said Dave helpfully.

  “It stuck in the door frame about a foot from my head,” said Bert.

  “We’re moving some wires,” said Dave. “I got a shock.”

  “You’re moving wires?” says Bert, stepping back, his fists unclenching, his voice softening. “I got a new drill for my birthday. One of
the cordless ones. Maybe I should bring it over.”

  Something inexplicable happens when a man picks up a tool to do home repairs. Some force, as yet undescribed by science, but nevertheless well known to women, is set loose. It’s a force that lures men away from their families and the things they are supposed to be doing to the place where hammers are being swung.

  Maybe the act of a hammer moving through the air sets off a cosmic thrumming only men can hear. Or maybe when a man picks up a screwdriver, he releases an odor only men with tools can smell—a musty, yeasty sort of smell, with a hint of leather and WD40. Men in their backyards raking leaves and men in their basements listening to ball games on portable radios are seized by this odor the way the urge to migrate seizes lesser species. Suddenly they’re thinking, I don’t belong here anymore. I belong in another place. I should be doing something else, and I should take my coping saw with me just in case.

  Men can sense when a wall is coming down, and they can’t help the fact that they have to be there to watch it fall, or better yet, help push it over.

  It has been argued that the fall of the Berlin Wall had nothing whatsoever to do with the collapse of communism: it was just a weekend project that got out of control—thousands of German guys satisfying their undeniable urge to fix things up.

  Carl Lowbeer, himself of German descent, was the next neighbor to arrive at Dave’s house on this Saturday morning.

  He burst through the front door without knocking. Dave and Jim looked up to see him standing in the kitchen.

  “Hi,” said Carl, trying to slow himself down, trying to act nonchalant.

  “Need any help?”

  He was carrying a bright yellow thing about the size of an electric drill (except more dangerous-looking). It looked like a cross between an Uzi and a woodpecker. It was his reciprocal saw.

  Carl got the saw last Christmas. It is his pride and joy. But there are only so many holes a man can cut in his own house before he is told to stop. The saw spent most of the summer on Carl’s worktable in the basement—calling to him.

  At the end of August, when Carl’s wife, Gerta, went downstairs with a load of laundry and found him cutting random holes in a sheet of plywood, she took the saw away from him. She said he could have it back if he stood in front of the house on Saturday mornings with a sign around his neck that read Need Holes Cut?

  By noon there were seven men in Dave’s kitchen. Two of them friends of Jim Scoffield’s whom Dave had never met—guys with tools.

  Carl was in the living room, huddled on the sofa beside Bert Turlington. Bert was demonstrating his new electric drill. The drill had more gears than a Maserati. Bert was revving the motor and explaining what it could do. He handed the drill to Carl, who didn’t expect it to be so light.

  “Oops,” said Carl, holding it too close to Morley’s Brazilian hardwood coffee table. The drill skitted across the table leaving a long white streak in the dark finish, such as a skater might leave on a freshly flooded rink.

  “That’s okay—don’t worry, don’t worry,” said Bert, spitting on the table and rubbing the gouge with the palm of his hand. “I have something at home that will cover that.”

  Things were lurching along at about the same pace in the kitchen. There were now a series of twelve melon-sized holes punched in the kitchen wall at two-foot intervals, leading from the light switch by the back door to the hole where Dave intended to install the plug for the toaster.

  Twelve holes and seven busy men.

  Jim and Dave were routering putty out of the broken window. Phil Harrison was sucking up plaster dust with Carl Lowbeer’s Shop Vac. The two men Dave didn’t know were racing a pair of belt sanders along a couple of two-by-fours they had set on the floor. Everyone was productively occupied—except for Carl Lowbeer, who was sitting at the kitchen table, morosely cradling his unused reciprocal saw and watching the belt sanders shudder along.

  Counting Bert Turlington’s electric drill, there were, at noon on that Saturday, six power tools operating in Dave’s house.

  And noon on Saturday was the moment when Sam arrived downstairs, rubbing his eyes, taking in the chaos of his kitchen and asking the most reasonable question.

  “What’s for breakfast?”

  “Toast,” said Dave. He said this without turning the router off or even turning around. Sam stared at his father’s back for a moment, then shrugged and dropped a couple of slices of bread in the toaster. As soon as he pushed the handle down, the toaster began a loud and peculiar buzzing. No one could hear it over the din of the tools. Except Sam, who said, “What’s that?”

  No one heard Sam either.

  Then the lights went out.

  And the tools died.

  In the sudden silence someone, perhaps Bert Turlington, said, “Do you smell that?”

  It was an elusive odor, but it was there.

  Somewhere.

  “I think it’s coming from behind this wall,” said Jim Scoffield.

  “This wall,” said Carl Lowbeer.

  Sam watched the men, some of them bent over at the waist, some standing on their toes, all of them sniffing the walls, the ceiling, the cupboards.

  And then there was smoke hanging in the air like wisps of fog.

  Someone said, “We overloaded the wires. The wires are burning—cut the wall open over here.”

  And Carl Lowbeer jumped up and said, “My saw works on batteries.” And he lurched toward the wall, revving his reciprocal saw in front of him. Before anyone could stop him, Carl had cut a hole in the wall the size of a loaf of bread.

  “Not there,” said Bert Turlington. “Here.”

  “Coming. Coming,” said Carl, moving around the kitchen like a mass murderer. He cut a second hole five feet down the wall.

  Sam’s eyes were as wide as saucers.

  “I’ve got a fire extinguisher in the truck,” said one of the men Dave didn’t know.

  They found the remnants of the fire with the third hole. A mouse nest leaning against the overheated wires. It had burned itself out. The man with the fire extinguisher gave it a blast.

  “Just in case,” he said.

  At twelve-fifteen Dave took stock of what they had accomplished: the broken window, the chipped sink, fifteen holes, the sodden plaster where they had used the extinguisher.

  Arnie Schellenberger looked at Dave and said, “Uh, Dave, when’s Morley coming home?”

  Dave said, “Not until tonight, not until ten, eleven.”

  Arnie said, “There’s an electrician I know from the plant. He might come over. If you did the window he could do the wiring and we could patch the holes by”—he looked at his wrist —“ten?”

  The electrician, Ted—black jeans, black jean jacket, earring—arrived at five. He looked around the kitchen and pointed at the knob-and-tube wiring and crossed his arms.

  “I can’t repair that. It’s the law. Whatever you’ve exposed I have to replace.”

  He looked at the expression of horror on Dave’s face.

  “You need this done tonight. Right?”

  Dave nodded.

  The electrician looked around. “You guys got a reciprocal saw?”

  Carl Lowbeer’s hand shot into the air like a schoolchild’s. “I do. I do,” he said way too fast and about an octave too high. Everyone turned and stared at him. Carl looked down and said it again, this time slower and a register lower. “I do,” he said.

  The electrician pointed at the back wall of Dave’s kitchen. “We’re going to pop out the drywall,” he said. “Take the wall down to the studs. That way I can get at everything at once.”

  Dave was frowning.

  “It’s the fastest way,” said the electrician.

  He looked at Carl.

  “Cut around the top by the ceiling and along the baseboard. We’ll pop it out, nice and simple.”

  Carl was beaming.

  He was about to sink the saw into the wall when the electrician held up his arm.

  “You guys turned
the electricity off. Right?”

  Everybody stopped and looked at one another.

  Morley came home soon after nine.

  When she turned onto their street, she noticed her house looked strangely dark.

  She pulled into the driveway and parked the car and gathered an armful of junk, her purse, a sweater, some files. She headed toward the back door. She was exhausted. She dropped a file and stooped to pick it up. It was only then that she noticed the warm glow of candles flickering through the back window. She felt a wave of affection wash over her.

  Dave had made a romantic meal.

  She had barely eaten all day. She was smiling as she opened the back door. She put her purse down and called, “Hello.” She stopped dead in her tracks.

  Sometimes you are confronted by things that are so far from what you expect that your brain is unable to process what it is looking at. There is a momentary disconnect between what you think you are looking at and what you are actually looking at. Morley looked around her kitchen. There were candles everywhere. And flashlights and snake lights. And men. There were four men in the kitchen. All of them on their hands and knees.

  The four strangers on their hands and knees were staring at her the way a family of raccoons might stare at her from the back deck. She thought, This is not my house. This is not my kitchen. This is a frat house. This is a fraternity party.

  As her eyes adjusted to the light, she took in more details. The men were holding tools. There was a pile of pizza boxes on the floor. And an empty case of beer. Sam, her son Sam, was sprawled beside the pizza boxes. Asleep. What was he doing in a frat house? This couldn’t be her kitchen—two of the walls were missing. She looked at the men again.

  One of them stood up.

  “Hi. I’m Ted,” he said, “the electrician. We’ll have this cleared up in just a minute or two.”

  And then she saw Dave, her husband, crawling toward her. He stopped about ten feet away. “Hi,” he said.

  He waved his arm around the room—at the broken window, the holes in the wall, the back wall that had completely disappeared—and he said, “We’re fixing the toaster.”