I have very few if any practical skills. Stranded at sea in a crowded lifeboat, I am merely a source of protein. If you like your meat well aged and gristled.
You know who thinks I’m clever? The TSA. They think I can make a bomb out of contact lens solution and nail clippers. What would a contact solution bomb produce anyway? An explosion of tears?
When my daughter, Julia, was in preschool, she brought home a picture they had taken of her mounted in a cardboard frame and gilded with raw pasta. She was wearing a tool belt and holding a hammer.
In honor of Father’s Day.
Wrong. In our house, that’s a Mother’s Day picture.
Shelley is the handyman... woman… person in our partnership. She is the highly evolved tool user in the family. She can fix things, build things, grow things. I’m unskilled labor. I scrub things, sweep things, lift things, break things.
More on breaking things later, but first some back story.
Shelley’s father, Henry, was handy. As a kid, he loved taking things apart, studying their innards, and putting them back together. He was a radiologist by trade but could also do carpentry. He built a bed for Shelley’s younger sister, Laurie, that had rolling drawers in the base where she could store her clothes and ride inside them like a wagon. He built TV tables, bookshelves, a rocking horse, a wooden pedal car, backyard playhouses, and a wooden wardrobe for Shelley’s Barbie dolls, complete with miniature hangers. He also built outdoor play structures, one for his children with a swinging ladder, and later another for his grandchildren with a tire swing. Henry could fix almost anything inside or outside the house, bicycles, clocks, appliances, and the house itself.
These are skills he taught his hardy middle daughter, Shelley: measuring, cutting, and the proper use of various hammers, saws, and nails. Shelley used what she learned from her father to build among other things a loft bed for our son, Sam.
Do you understand what I’m saying here? A loft bed!
Shelley once took a survey on the homesteading skills you’d need if we ever decided to give up on Los Angeles and live in a little house on the prairie. There was a checklist of about eighty skills broken into four categories: Kitchen, Garden, Craft, and House/Outdoor. Shelley ticked off about seventy-five of the eighty skills required. The things she has never done, like “make fishing lures,” “make your own paper,” and “render tallow,” are for her just an eighteen-minute YouTube video away.
Correction. This just in. My sources inform me that Shelley has indeed made her own paper.[*]
My father could fix things, too. But he couldn’t pass on this knowledge to me, because he was not analytical like Shelley’s dad. Success for Clarence was more of a happy accident. His virtue was the willingness to dive in and just see what happened. While Henry was a measure-twice/cut-once type of guy, Clarence was an eyeball-the-sucker-and-start-hacking type of guy. He was a physically strong man who lived by the mantra, “If it doesn’t fit, force it.” He never cursed in front of me and my brother when we were kids, but he’d often invoke the Holy Family – “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” – as if they were the annoying neighbors who had detached the blade on the lawn mower he was having trouble reattaching.
My only job? Hand him the tools and enjoy the show.
My role was clear at an early age.
My childhood neighbor, Billy Middleton, could build stuff. One day, I wandered next door to find Billy in his garage constructing a go-kart from plywood and rebar. Two ropes served as the steering mechanism. Billy was four years older than I was, too big for his own go-kart. So he sized it to fit me and painted it black and red. He even asked what number I’d like to put on it. I chose 77.
When the go-kart was ready for its inaugural launch, we set up across the street at the top of the Manning’s driveway where a gaggle of neighbor kids assembled to bear witness. Although it was not exactly the Bonneville Salt Flats, the Manning’s driveway was a suitable testing ground. It was one of the few that had been paved and sloped down from the street.
I plunked myself onto the plywood chassis, still a bit tacky from the paint job, while Billy placed a box with eyeholes on my head for a helmet.
In the early days of the space program, before NASA risked putting humans on top of those flaming rockets, they used chimpanzees. On the org chart of this project, Billy was the engineer. I was the monkey in the space capsule.
“Ready, Stevie?” Billy asked.
“Ready, Billy,” replied the monkey.
Billy gave the go-kart a running shove down the driveway in what amounted to a combination test drive-trust exercise. My eight-year-old frontal lobe trusted that this twelve-year-old had built a steering system that would allow me to avoid crashing head on into the hard metal door of the Manning’s garage. As I careened down the driveway, picking up speed, the garage door loomed larger, that is, until the box slipped over my eyes. In fairness, the box helmet had been a last-minute concession to safety, one size fits all.* As precocious an engineer as he was, Billy failed to put much thought into the geometric challenge of fitting a square box onto a round head.
Despite momentary blindness, I yanked on the steering rope just in time to maneuver Ole 77 sharply to the left, away from the unforgiving garage door. It then tipped over and spilled me onto the soft summer lawn.
I lifted the box from my head so the other kids could see that the test chimp had survived, and it was now safe for them to give it a try. As long as their parents didn’t mind them coming home with faint swatches of black and red paint on their butts.
Billy went on to build custom sailboats in Florida.
His erstwhile test-monkey became a stand-up comedian.[†]
When Shelley and I lived in New York in the 1980s, I once lifted the lid on our malfunctioning answering machine and managed to reattach the tiny rubber band that had unwound from the spindle. That remains my singular triumph in the fix-it space. When Shelley encourages me to take a crack at fixing something now, she has to reach deep into the previous century...
“Remember when you fixed the answering machine?”
She’s not being sarcastic. That’s what’s pathetic about it. She’s sincerely trying to buck me up. I’d feel better if she teased me. Then I could reply with a snarky comment of my own, which is more in line with my true calling. It’s like: to make you feel better after you flunk out of college, your parents remind you of the one time in Little League you hit a ground ball through the infield that turned into an inside-the-park home run.
Our children attended a private, progressive elementary school in Pasadena, which required a lot of parent participation. Periodically, we were called upon to contribute our time to parent workdays. When a task required some relatively heavy lifting, I could be of use. Anything beyond that was beyond me.
One time, I was recruited to be part of an elite platoon of dads refurbishing one of the classrooms. Because the school was not far from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a number of these dads were literally rocket scientists. They were easy to recognize. They were, like my father-in-law Henry, the species of dads born with pencils behind their ears, busy wiring computer stations or sketching rough architectural designs onto the backs of envelopes.
One of the pencil-eared dads presented me with a design he had drafted for the installation of a classroom sink and asked what I thought. As far as I could tell, these could have been plans for the hydrogen bomb. Or Frank Gehry’s blueprint for Disney Hall. Or the solution to the Da Vinci Code. I had no idea what I was looking at.
I do, however, have some performance skills, so I narrowed my eyes, tilted my head thoughtfully, counted silently one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi, and proclaimed, “Looks good!”
He seemed pleased and set about to work, whereupon I turned away and called to no one in particular, “Hey, anybody need me to carry this beanbag chair across campus?!”+
From then on, I resolved to avoid the Pencil Ears for fear of being outed as the village idiot.[‡]
A few years ago, after trimming the bushes around our front walkway, Shelley told me she was going to lie down for a twenty-minute nap.
In the meantime, my job was to sweep up the cuttings and drop them into a garbage can.
Right in my wheelhouse.
I gathered my equipment. The rake, the shovel, the broom, and the barrel: the tools of ignorance.
About five minutes in, I stepped over a hose that was connected to a water pipe. That’s all I did. I stepped over a hose. Why then, all of a sudden, did an angry gush of water shoot into my face?
I’ll tell ya why.
Turns out I had stepped directly onto the PVC connection to the water pipe and broken it clean through, which caused water to shoot out at 300 miles per hour.
We’ve all seen in movies where ranchers strike oil, and they dance around like happy idiots as it sprays onto their faces and darkens every inch of their clothing. That’s because they know they’re going to be rich! Rich, I tell you!
This was exactly like that, except this idiot was not happy dancing. This idiot was soaking wet and completely bewildered. This idiot was not going to be rich. This idiot was going to have to pay an exorbitant water bill unless he found a way to cap this gusher.
In the shock of that moment, I did that stupid reflexive thing you see everybody do in sitcoms and cartoons. I tried to shove one end of the broken pipe back into the other. The reason that’s done in sitcoms and cartoons is not because it works. It’s because it’s even funnier when a 300-mph cylinder of water starts spurting in all directions.
It makes sense that I would do this. I’m a comedy writer. That’s my job. That’s what I do. I am trained to make things funnier. I am not trained to fix things.
This was a job for a handy woman… person.
I dropped the pipe and danced away from the geyser, horrified at the Old Man river now snaking down the driveway and into the street.
I jogged up the walkway to our front door and stepped into the house in my wet squeaky sneakers, water dripping onto the tile. I called up the stairs to my napping wife.
I must digress a moment here to tell you about Shelley and naps. Shelley loves her naps. And she’s good at them. She’s real good. She can fall asleep any time of the day. I can’t do that. No matter how tired I am, I need to read to lull myself to sleep. Shelley is a natural. She can even lie down for something she calls “a coffee nap.” She drinks a cup of coffee before the nap and still has no trouble falling asleep. She can take a nap as short as 10 minutes or as long as an hour, and it never ruins her regular bedtime. If I nap too late in the afternoon, I have trouble falling asleep at night. It probably has something to do with her mental horsepower. When you have the large bandwidth Shelley has, you need to reboot every now and again.
As you may recall, Shelley was counting on a twenty-minute nap. It took me less than ten minutes to “screw the pooch,” as the astronauts say. I called up to our bedroom as gently as I could.
“Shelley…? Shelley…?”
Fortunately, Shelley is not a deep sleeper, so she heard my plaintive cry.
“What?”
“Better get down here.”
Of course, she knew what to do. She called the water department. They told her to turn off the main switch. She found the main switch. Naturally. And turned it off.
Her demeanor was calm but business-like.
“I’ll go to the hardware store and get a cap for that pipe.”
“You want me to go with you?” I offered.
“No!” she blurted. Then sigh, “Thank you.”
She explained that if I went with her, the guy in the hardware store would just talk to me, it never occurring to him that the husband was not the solution to the problem, but the cause.
I waited for her to come back still in my wet clothes, an act of personal penance and self-flagellation befitting my Catholic upbringing.
At the hardware store, Shelley picked out two different types of caps and asked the guy which was best.
Even with me two miles away and out of sight, the guy at the hardware store said, “What does your husband want?”
Oooo…
Now, to her credit, Shelley was polite. She merely took a deep cleansing breath and chose one of the caps.
But as a comedy writer, I would have written it differently. When the hardware store guy said, “What does your husband want?” I would have had her say:
“What does my husband want? I’ll tell you what my husband wants. My husband wants forgiveness. My husband wants me to forget this ever happened. My husband wants me to come home, cap the pipe, and finish the rest of my fucking NAP! That’s what my husband wants!”
See?
I’m good for something.
[*] My source: Shelley.
* Ironically, this was probably around the same time my future mentor, Ralph Nader, was publishing his seminal work Unsafe At Any Speed.
[†] I am aware that monkeys and chimps are two different species, but “monkey” is a slightly funnier word, so shut up.
+ In truth, this particular pencil-eared dad was a musician.
[‡] In fairness to me, I found a more substantial way to contribute to the school at the annual fundraiser. I was the best parent at hopping onstage and babbling my way through an hour-long improv exercise known as a live auction.
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