Pick up the hard copy too. There's commentary from Don WIlliams, Michael Kaplan, Tony Murchison, stories on the Old City, the U.S. Social Forum, among others and lots of A&E stuff from Eric Lawson and others and still more.
The
Unhandyman
Confessions
of a repair-impaired home owner
by Scott
McNutt
There are
things that happen in a TV sitcom or a slapstick two-reeler that you just
aren’t prepared to have happen in real life. Recently I had such a Three Stooges
home repair moment.
Before I
tell you that story, I must first make a confession, then tell another story
that sets up the other story. Context is everything, you know. So. A
confession: I’m not a handyman. With any sort of do-it-yourself task, I am the
epitome of ineptness. I am the anti-handyman, the unhandyman.
Now, the
other story: My days of unhandiness probably began when my father taught me how
not to work on cars, beginning when I was, oh, probably ten years old. From
then until I was 18, we worked on the family cars.
Whenever a
car didn’t start, we’d replace the bendix. We were always replacing bendixes.
We owned three cars over that period, and we must’ve replaced the bendix eleven
hundred times on each of them.
I didn’t
even know what a bendix was, but I always imagined it was the automotive
equivalent of a human appendix: a totally useless part, which, if it goes bad,
kills you. Or, in this case, kills the car. (I now know that a bendix has
something to do with the alternator. Which is to say, I still don’t know what a
bendix is.)
Inevitably,
the car wouldn’t start, and my dad would put on his coveralls and one of those
train-engineer-type caps, get his tool box, then tell me to put on some old
clothes and follow him out to the carport, which I’d reluctantly do. Then he’d
proceed to climb under the car and curse it. I stood by to hand him tools to
fling in frustration. The conversation would go like this:
“Son,"
he'd say, "Hand me the five-seventeen-hundredths spaleen screwdriver with
the beveled head,” and I’d hand him a screwdriver.
“Son, are
you blind, or are you deaf?” He’d say. “I said the five-seventeen-hundredths spaleen
screwdriver with the beveled head.
This is the seven-seventeen-hundredths
spatial screwdriver with the tapered head.”
So I would
hand him another screwdriver, and he’d say to the part he was working on,
“Frimmin’, jimmin’, jangin’ dangin’ blazin’ thing! Why won’t you scrimmin’
lemon with the jim-jam FIT? Grunt,
grunt, grunt, grunt, dang-blame-hanged-! Why you, you’re gonna fit if I have
to- OUCH! MOTHER OF GOD!!!!!”
And the
screwdriver would come sailing out from under the car and whang off the side of
the house. Occasionally the tool would ricochet into me. Once, one instrument,
an adjustable crescent wrench I think, even bounced right back into the tool
box, which made me proud of my dad.
Anyway,
he’d ask next for the semi-arctic, transbobbler socket saw or similarly arcane
item. The names were always beyond my comprehension, but I stood by to hand
each thingy to him. Multi-factotum prickly span adapters, prick-adept spanning
factor multipliers, multi-faction-adaptive Spanish pricklers, they’d all pass
under the car and come sailing back out.
Saturdays,
from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., we’d spend in this way. Sundays, we’d get up and do it
again. Except longer. Usually, about 10 o’clock Sunday night, dad would
announce that the repair was finished.
Afterward,
dad would boast to me, “Do you know we saved $140?” When I was older, I’d
object. “But dad,” I’d whine, “if we wasted an entire weekend and spent 20
hours fixing something a mechanic could have fixed in two, did we really save
anything?”
He’d look
up from washing his grimy, bloody hands, fix me with a weary stare and finally
say, “You never have learned the value of a dollar. Or the importance of
self-reliance.”
He was
right on both counts. All I ever learned was that it takes me a lot longer to
fix things than it takes a professional, and if I try to do it myself, it
usually costs me even more to have the professional come in and fix what I
screwed up.
This is why
I am the unhandyman. And this is why I should have known better than to try to
fix the faucet that I was about to tell you about before I interrupted myself
to tell that story. Now, you’re ready to hear the other story.
It was a
Sunday afternoon, and what transpired was, my wife Dana was upstairs taking a
bath to soothe aches and pains. I had been reading the newspaper in the living
room and went into kitchen for something.
Our faucet
was leaking and, on impulse, I decided to fix the pesky thing. I climbed under
the sink to turn the water off, and the shut-off valve broke off in my hand.
Water shot into my face. And everywhere else in the kitchen.
A water
valve breaking off in your hand is one of those things that isn't supposed to
happen to you in real life. Really.
For a
couple of moments, I lay there stunned and drowning, with the water whooshing
directly in my face and running all over me, just like you see happening to
Curly in the Three Stooges shorts. Then, like the poor monkey in the joke about
the exploding pig, I tried to put the cork back in, so to speak.
It was no
use. The thing had broken off at the pipe. Water was pouring out, flooding the
kitchen, and I was trying as best I could to stem it with both hands and a
kitchen towel that I was just able to reach from my position under the sink.
Despite my
efforts, a lot of water was still pumping out of the broken pipe. But if I let
go the pipe, several hundred gallons of water would be submerging the house by
the time I found the key to the basement lock and got down there to shut the
water off at the main. Dana would be trapped on the second floor by the rising
flood waters, and the dog and I would be paddling around downstairs in the
upended coffee table. The cats, hopefully, would have drowned.
So there
was only one thing to do.
"HELP!!!!"
I yelled. "Helphelphelphelphelphelphelp!!!!!
Helllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll-ppppppppppppuhpuhpuh!!!!!!!"
Eventually
I heard Dana coming down the stairs. I heard her footsteps patter near to the
kitchen doorway and stop.
"Help!"
I screamed.
"Are
you hurt!" she called.
"No! I
need help!"
Are you
sure you're not hurt?" she insisted.
"YES, will you please come help me,"
I yelled.
She did.
Dana held the dish towel on the pipe and I went and shut off the water main. We
called a plumber friend who came over and replaced the water valve on the
kitchen plumbing. He tightened something on the faucet that made it stop
leaking. He didn’t even have to turn off the water to do it. And he only
charged $140.
Epilogue.
After our
plumber friend left, a thought struck me. I asked Dana why she asked if I was
hurt before she came into the kitchen. She told me that, unhandy as I am, she
imagined I had cut my hand off or something equally bloody, and she wasn't sure
if she could stand the sight.
"Well,
were you going to leave me there to bleed to death if I'd answered yes?" I
asked, reasonably enough, I thought.
"Of
course not," Dana said. "I'd have helped you."
"So
why ask if I was hurt?" I persisted.
"Because
then I'd have known to close my eyes before I came in," she said.
I love my
wife. And she loves me, even if I am an unhandyman.
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