The Barn House (27 page)

Monday, April 4.
Meet with Tony and Jerry at house to review progress. Exterior pretty much done but back door a nailed-up sheet of plywood. At first thought this temporary, but after passage of considerable time and still no door I ask Tony, who says carpenters waiting for me. I sputter:
Me?
Where does Tony think I'm going to get door? He points to passage in contract saying owner responsible for doors. Says
interior
doors, I retort; this is
exterior
door. We inspect relevant opening; exteriorness beyond dispute. “I guess we make a little boo-boo,” says Tony, shooting look at Jerry. Door appears in due course.

Tuesday, April 5.
Spend most of day nailing down attic floor planking. Tom hovers; says woman yelled at him because he told her she was beautiful.

Wednesday, April 6.
More planking. Tom tells me about bar fights in tavern at end of alley.

 

O
n Thursday, April 7, I started on the electrical work. In contrast to the heating, this presented no technical challenges of moment; the main problem was that there was an enormous amount to do, since you couldn't just tack up plastic cable in the slapdash manner countenanced pretty much everywhere but Chicago—you had to use conduit, as I say. I didn't mind; I liked bending conduit—it was an esoteric skill, like blowing smoke rings or twirling a lariat. More important, I felt conduit was better fitted to the gravity of the task—namely, keeping people and electricity separated, in contrast to plastic cable, an inherently flimsy material that to my mind didn't foster the appropriate attitude of respect.

A friend in California once told me about his house, which I imagined (never actually having seen it) to be a typical West Coast mountain domicile equipped with a hot tub and redwood deck. Like every other house in California it was wired with plastic cable. Some item of electrical apparatus in the house had ceased to function, and my friend ingeniously isolated the fault to a length of plastic cable running through the crawl space beneath the house. Hoping to ascertain precisely where the juice had hung up, he inserted himself beneath the house, scraped the insulation off the conductors with a knife (the cable was stapled to the underside of a floor joist, and I had the impression loomed perhaps a foot above his nose), and confirmed the presence of 120 VAC with a meter. “You did
what
?” I exclaimed, explaining that scraping the insulation off live wires was never smart, and doing so while lying on damp earth in a confined space was about as stupid as it was possible to get and still have a nervous system. Conduit, in my view, would have more successfully conveyed what the plastic cable hadn't—that is,
Muy peligroso, dumbshit. Mitts off.

First task: mounting boxes for outlets, switches, and light fixtures, which I'd later connect with conduit.

Saturday, April 9.
Up early, work on house paperwork. Feeling harried—been staying up late with fidgety Andrew. In effort to share kid-watching duties take Ryan to house; he's sweet but wants me to look at something every couple minutes—don't get much done, distracted, make mistakes. Tell Mary we need to rethink this or won't finish till December. She says she'll take kids full-time again. Up till twelve fifteen a.m. working on fax to Tony about changes.

Monday, April 11.
At client's all day. Mary calls; Andrew sick. Take to hospital; they both stay overnight.

Tuesday, April 12.
Tony calls to discuss Tom. Carpenters need to move him upstairs so basement floor can be repoured, but Tony doesn't want dogs to accompany him because of smell—they produce voluminous waste; he doesn't want it soaking into floorboards. We agree carpenters will build kennel for dogs in backyard.

Thursday, April 14.
Mail in federal tax return. As expected, owe $20,000 we don't have. Enclose note saying we'll pay soon. Chris from bank calls; architect inspecting house noticed owner's statement shows plumbing work as complete but obviously isn't. I freak—if project total increased by amount actually required to finish (as opposed to amount we told bank), we must come up with another $14,000 in owner's equity. Kevin the plumber calls looking for $2,200; I ask what he thinks it will cost to finish job. Says $4,500. Ask him to give me lowball estimate for $2,000 to keep bank happy. Feel as if organizing drug deal.

Friday, April 15.
Tony tells me Stefan, one of carpenters, who previous year had nearly sliced off thumb, fell four feet off ladder, shattered upper right arm, needed surgery to insert ten-inch pin.

Monday, April 18.
Town house showing in morning; at Barn House by two to do more electrical boxes. In evening drunk shows up asking for Tom; staggers down front steps when I say not here. Leave at eleven p.m., then up with Andrew till one thirty a.m.

Tuesday, April 19.
Meet Chief at house—down to plastic restrainer on arm but can't work yet. Discuss electrical.

Wednesday, April 20.
Real estate agent calls. City home sales slow; would we consider lease for town house? Not enthusiastic.

Sunday, April 24.
Warm day; Mary and I take kids to Fullerton Avenue beach. On return talk to Katie, one of town house neighbors, who says she and husband have sold unit, moving to North Shore with their two kids. Two other couples in development with small children also heading for burbs. “This is a great place for kids, but everybody with kids is moving out,” she says. People in our circle experiencing rash of petty crime—Jacki the babysitter has been burglarized four times in eighteen months in two different city apartments. Eventually she moves to California.

T
hat evening I went to the Barn House to inspect progress in the basement and was joined there by Tom. In preparation for pouring the new floor, the carpenters were demolishing the ancient partitions and carting out the debris. “Lotta history being hauled away here,” he observed. Tom was never so annoying as when he was right, and this was one of those times. It wasn't that the repulsive basement contained anything I cared to save—on the contrary, it was a collection of scabrous junk, and the practical man in me felt righteous for causing it to be expunged from the earth. At the same time, I recognized that I was erasing part of the history that was one of the reasons I'd bought the house—a record of futility and half-assedness, to be sure, but a record just the same. Twenty-four hours later there was no sign it had ever been.

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.

P
rior 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.