Hammered and Nailed #8 -- Stirring kitchen dreams

     December. They begin work on the kitchen in December. I've been repeating that, like a mantra, the way prisoners anticipate the day of their freedom. December. Lovely December. Dee-cember! 

      Note the vague plural "they" in the above paragraph. As if the federal government or Amish neighbors were remodeling my kitchen next month. But in truth, I don't know who's doing it. I've never met the fellow--a Tom somebody. A South Sider. He was recommended. My wife called his references and actually went to see a kitchen he had done, to confirm that it wasn't constructed of Play-Doh and contact paper.
     "Do you trust him?" I asked, trying to get a sense of the situation. My wife gave me a strange look, and I realized I had asked the wrong question. As an attorney, she trusts nobody, including me, certainly not a random stranger with construction skills. His brief, jotted estimate--which we were to initial to begin work--was recast into a very specific and detailed contract. You see why I leave these things to my wife. My role is that of the Greek chorus, standing in the background and moaning words of caution. With November dribbling away like slush through an hourglass, it struck me that we should, oh for instance, actually buy the objects that Tom would soon install in our kitchen. 

      "Shouldn't you order the cabinets?" I said to my wife, gingerly. She had not, she said, ordered them yet, because she didn't want them sitting around our garage for months while we tried to hire somebody. I thought that far-fetched; a far more likely scenario is our hard-won contractor drifting off to jobs whose customers actually possessed the materials he was supposed to install, while our cabinets were still in a steel box lashed to the deck of a container ship inching its way around the Cape of Good Hope. 

      "I've got an appointment tomorrow," she said, which I did not find significant. We've run through an infinity of appointments--at kitchen showrooms, at design outlets, at Home Depot, a place we do not visit, but rather we attend, regularly, the way others attend church. Many times, my wife has toddled off to the old H.D. to, I thought, buy the cabinets, only to return needing something: a measurement, a blueprint, a thimble. This week, however, something happened that shocked us both. She did it. She bought the damned cabinets. It came as a surprise, to me and, I believe, to her as well. You'd think with all this foreshadowing--the hiring of an architect, the production of drawings, the signing up, and subsequent release, of two previous contractors, the endless visits, we'd have seen this coming. We didn't. Each of us took the shock differently. My wife acted as if she had just handed $10,000 in cash in a brown paper bag to a stranger who said he'd invest it in Nigerian diamond mines. She was awake all that night, contemplating our ruination as a family, picturing us huddled on a piece of cold cardboard while our boys twirled for tossed pennies. Myself, I slept like death, content, at long last, that some kind of progress was being made. Not that I buy the palpable lie that the Home Depot people gave my wife in return for a swipe of our near-molten credit card--the claim that the cabinets will be ready by Dec. 17. 

     "Did they say what year?" I almost said but, measuring her fragile state, thought better and held back. And frankly, I was in too good a mood to fight.  Just the prospect of the unseen Tom—a Paul Bunyan figure in my mind by now—striding into our kitchen somehow next month and shattering that miserable counter with a single stroke of his mighty sledge—is enough to keep me happy. 

      Seeking to distract myself with numbers that didn't have dollar signs in front of them, I did the math. We bought the house in June 2000. Work on the kitchen commenced in December 2002. That's 30 months, or roughly the span between the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the D-Day invasion. That seems about right. The actual buying of the house wasn't precisely a surprise attack—I mean, we knew what we were signing. But the repercussions certainly were unanticipated, with wave after wave of repairs and set-backs and projects sweeping over us, while we dove behind barrels and tried to get our pathetically inadequate remodeling forces off the ground at Hickham Field. 
      Yet we recovered. Marshalled what energies and spirit we had left after the initial shock. And now the liberation of the kitchen is about to commence. The might of Home Depot, harnessed to do our bidding. Armies of workers, mobilizing. Sleek stainless steel appliances on their way from distant factories. We began moving boxes--sealed boxes of kitchen stuff we had moved into the pantry in June 2000--down into the Stygian netherworld of our basement, in anticipation of The Beginning. I'll probably be at work when they arrive--someone has to pay for this, or try to. But I wish I'd be there, to see the workmen as they file in, led by the mythic Tom, all toting their pry bars and 4-pound drilling hammers. They would stand, in flanneled glory, waiting for the word. I'd cast a final glance at the old kitchen, from its yellow, worn linoleum floor, up through the horrific, warped counters, to the splotched walls and stained ceiling. I'd leap on a stool, twirl my finger in the air dramatically and, trilling my "R's" like a bad Shakespearean actor, shout: "RRRRRRRR-Rip her out, boys!"
                                      --Originally published Nov. 24, 2002

Hammered and Nailed # 7 -- Slava, you're fired!

     This is episode #7 of "Hammered and Nailed," the 2002 horror story about home remodeling that ran in the Sun-Times.

      'Hey Slava, you're fired!" That wasn't so hard, was it? In fact it was easy. And fun. So much fun, I'd like to do it again. "Hey Slava—so long! Dos vedanya, buddy! Go find some other house for your ham-handed greenhorn pals to practice on."
     Sure, I can do that here. But in real life? It just doesn't come out. My mouth opens to say the words, and instead "Oh yeah, great, great," tumbles out. Pathetic.
     Faithful readers might recall when last we left the bathroom project, at the end of August. Having finally girded what loins I have, I explained to Slava that the cheapie pasteboard shelves they put in were no good and they must do them again—with something called wood, wood that had been primed and painted. I even trotted over to Home Depot and bought $35 worth of fancy trim, to put under the shelves, so they wouldn't have to bother replacing the crudely sawn brackets holding up the shelves. They could hide them! Always considerate—Neil Steinberg, the contractor's pal.
     With the shelves on their way, I was emboldened to actually christen the new bathroom. That isn't my way. My way would be to wait until it was absolutely done, finished, complete, then stock it with new towels and pristine soaps and savor some kind of sublime moment of existential joy in perfection before inaugurating the bathroom's 20-year slide into decay, filth and ruin.
      But with new shelves coming, I was energized. I figured we're home free. Celebrate! I bought a thick, new, white towel—somehow, taking your inaugural bath with a threadbare Big Bird beach towel doesn't quite do it.
     Everything except the shelves looked great. I squinted, happily superimposing in my mind the rotted, ruined, broken apart, mold-ridden, creme yellow shell of a bathroom that had once been there over the sparkling, white tiled splendor. Hmmm, nice. The chrome shower curtain rings, with the little ball bearings, gave a hugely satisfying "shrick" as I pulled the white curtain aside. The shower head—one of those big, saucer-sized shower heads that dribbles down rain--was in an unexpected position: above my head. Until that shower, I had never really noticed that most shower heads are about eye height. You sort of have to do a bunny dip to wash your hair. This is a result, I assume, of the gradual shrinkage of houses, along with 7 1/2-foot ceilings and hollow core doors. Not here, not anymore, no sirree Bob!
     My heart was filled with joy. I didn't remember ever telling Slava to put the shower head way up high. But he did! Good old Slava! It wouldn't be long until, guided by my subtle American concern for quality, that all would be set right. Then, on to the kitchen! This was early September. You might recall, all last month, there was no column rejoicing the redone shelves. Instead, I drew the veil. Wrote about sump pumps. Wrote about trees. These were smoke screens. I was ashamed. The truth is: I couldn't bear to think about the bathroom. I still can't. But at some point the truth must be told: Heading toward the fifth month, the bathroom's . . . still . . . not . . . done. Aiiiyeeeeee!!!!!! (Does that convey in print? Think of the undulating scream that warriors waving scimitars make as they plunge into the bottomless pit in those Sunday afternoon "Sinbad" movies). 

     Sure, I got the Russians to agree to fix the shelves. "No problem," Slava repeated, though not really paying close attention—I realize now--to what he was "no probleming" about. We pestered them to get the shelves done. Hope bloomed. I had forgotten one vital element: These were the same guys who had screwed up the shelves to begin with. And you know what? The second time was screwed up more—my nice, considerately-bought Home Depot maple trim? A slapdash paint job, Old Mr. Wood peeking through. Artlessly hung at nowhere near horizontal, affixed by nails driven right through the facing of the trim. It looked like hell. And the thing of it is, the hot shame that I'll carry to my grave, is when he showed me the second botched job, I mumbled "Oh yeah, great, great," squinting and trying to tell myself it was great. I did not, as I should have, grabbed him by the shirtfront and screamed, spittle flying off my lips, "You bumbling Belarus bastard! You call that improvement? This isn't the john in some crumbling Stalinesque concrete apartment block back in Oostkaminagorsk--this is my HOME!" 

     But I didn't say that. I waited for my wife to come home and then showed her the bathroom, like a remorseful husband revealing the tattoo he got on a Las Vegas bender with his buddies. 

     Still we clung, pathetically, to the hope that these guys could still do our kitchen—the plan had been for the bathroom to be a dry run, a test, before they embarked on the kitchen. We didn't really think they were going to fail. 

     "OK," I said. "So they can't put up woodwork and they can't do plumbing—is that so important in a kitchen? The floor will look nice." But our hearts weren't in it. We knew we'd have to start looking all over again. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. 

     At least the Russians were gone. Or were they? While this was going on, autumn had arrived. We fired up the radiators. Soon they were hot and radiating away, except—and you saw this coming, didn't you?—the radiator in the bathroom. Cold as a stone. So it seems that Slava will be coming back—at least to fix the radiator, though, if history is any judge, he'll find a way to make it worse ("Yup, oddest thing—this one radiator here removes heat from the room . . .") 

      And, like exhausted circus ponies returning to the miserable ring, we begin again. The first contractor we got to go through the kitchen was a class act. So classy, in fact, that his bid was exactly twice what we could conceive of paying in our wildest dream of profligacy. I took that as a good sign. When we finally find somebody, he'll be the third person contracted to do our kitchen. Perhaps the third time, as they say, is the charm.
      —Originally published Oct. 10, 2002

Hammered and Nailed #6: Oft-delayed kitchen takes the cake

     This is Episode #6 of Hammered and Nailed, the series that ran in Homelife in 2002 and 2003, and is being featured here. The Saturday "Where IS This?" contest returns in two weeks. To begin at the beginning, start at Monday, Aug. 4.

     Why did I not realize it before? "This Old House" is pornography; porno for people like me. A fantasy for owners of old homes with as much basis in reality as a stag film. The odds of a squad of competent workmen in flannel shirts, tool belts and beards showing up at my home and speedily, say, framing a new porch, are about the same as the odds of the meter reader turning out to be Traci Lords in a breakaway dress.
     Here I was trying to pick up practical tips. What a fool. It was like was watching "Horny Housewives in Heat" hoping to learn about actual human behavior.
     And you know what's the most deceptive thing about "This Old House?" Not the calm, quiet skill of the workers (my workmen are as jittery as Lucy Riccardo moonlighting on an assembly line; I have a feeling that if I spoke to one, he'd shriek and toss his tools in the air). Not the way the TV guys carefully discuss their every step, guided by established rules of Yankee carpentry. (My crew seem to figure out what to do next by a lot of shouting, shrugging and hand gestures).
     No, the most deceptive thing about "This Old House" is the sense of time compression. One moment Hank is showing the host how he's nailing down those hand-cut cedar shingles. The host nods gravely, they cut to a commercial—a commercial for door handles, for shop vacuums, not the kind of ad you'd normally see on television—and then Bob (or whoever; they keep changing) strolls back to Hank and says, "I see you're about finishing up that roof. . . ."
     Ha! Not in my world. I glanced at my 2002 planner the other day and noted, under May 20, the scribble: "WORK STARTED ON BATHROOM." I like to think it was a bray of triumph, but something tells me that I knew, in my heart, they'd still be at it now, more than three months later, and I wanted to give myself a mnemonic aid when groping to recall a time when the bathroom wasn't under construction.
     Yes, they're still at it. Or rather, not at it, since if today is an average day, the workmen are at another job or visiting their relatives in Kyrgyzstan or doing something else somewhere that isn't our house.
     "A lot of that is our fault," says my wife, all Sandra Dee perkiness, when I brought up the subject (not in words, but by taking my hands and raking my fingernails over my cheeks, letting out a loud, quavering moan. She knows what I mean when I do that now).
     She's wrong of course. Yes, work was suspended for a few weeks while we struggled to get a few boxes of hexagonal white tiles. But even if it took an entire month, that still means they spent two months (and counting!) on a job that Slava swore with his hand on his heart and tears in his eyes would be done in two weeks (leading me to the awful fear that there is a kind of remodeling code: merely substitute whatever your contractor says with the next higher unit of time measure: if he says the job will take two days, figure two weeks. Two weeks? Figure two months. And so on).
     After the bathroom is done, the kitchen is on deck, and has been, for two years. Two years! My wife is beginning to come unhinged. After spending hours picking out appliances for the third time, since all the appliances we picked out the two previous times are no longer manufactured, my wife immediately announced that perhaps we shouldn't remodel the kitchen after all, seeing as how we can't actually afford it.
      "It's cheaper than a divorce," I said, in a flat, emotionless voice, pressing my fingertips to my temples to keep my head from exploding. Two years.
    "OK, we'll remodel it then," she said. "Or maybe we shouldn't. It'll be expensive. So let's not. Except of course it looks horrible. So we will. But not now, unless of course we do, because prices will only go up. So why not. . ."
     She might have continued in this vein, perhaps fluttering a finger over her lips, but I was already backing away, eyes bulging, shaking my head back and forth like an extra in a sci-fi flick about to be eaten by the alien.
     This sense of horror crops up in unexpected moments. Take last Monday--our 12th wedding anniversary. We have a tradition ... I'm a little reluctant to share it, lest it shatter the crusty, unpleasant, middle-aged-man-going-out-of-his-mind persona that I so carefully develop in this space. But it, like the persona, is true. We do have this ritual, on the day of our anniversary, where we take the cigarette-pack-size piece of our wedding cake out of hibernation in the freezer, place it on the good china, kiss, take a picture, savor a tiny bite, read the love notes we jotted for each other last year and tucked inside the wrapping, write something sweet and hopeful for next year, then return the package to the deep freeze.
     The notes really are the best part. Dripping with hearts and nicknames, scribbled over the past dozen years--we keep them all in the cake package--they quickly trace the progress of a marriage, from the heady honeymoon days, to the time when babies loomed on the horizon (identified as "?") to, well, maybe I better just reveal my note from last year.      Looking ahead to my fondest hopes, I wrote: 
     "Dearest love: Happy 12th! Together in our new old home.  Thank you for all your work getting the kitchen done, finally."
     Ha! Double ha! I had expected the kitchen would be done in a year. Had assumed. Naturally. How could it not? How pathetic.
     The mood couldn't have changed faster had I dashed the wedding cake to the floor and jumped on it. I suppressed the urge to write: "Happy 13th--if the kitchen isn't done by now I'm divorcing you." Instead I wrote something pleasant and positive. One must be positive. I made no mention of the kitchen being done. A guy has to learn from his mistakes.
                              —Originally published September 8, 2002 

Hammered and Nailed #5--Insanity reigns

      It being August, I'm re-publishing excerpts from my 2002 series on remodeling, "Hammered and Nailed." To start at the beginning, go back to Aug. 4. The inexplicably-popular Saturday "Where IS this?" contest will return Aug. 23.     

     Sometimes I ask myself, "Once the remodeling is done, what . . ."
     Gosh, that has a strange ring to it. "Once the remodeling is done." Sort of sounds like, "After the Earth crumbles to dust."
     Sorry. I ask myself, "Once the remodeling is done, what is this leading to?"
     Yes, a shiny new bathroom and a shiny new kitchen, to start. But what are they for? What will we do with them? Throw lots of big dinner parties with money we no longer have for friends who drifted away once we moved to the suburbs? Take long, luxurious baths in our gleaming white bathroom, eyes locked on the pristine, schizophrenic order of the hexagonal tiles on the floor?
     Frankly, I can't picture it. Right now, the only end I can really, truly imagine is myself, eyes wild, hair in disarray, running madly through the house, gas can in hand, pouring fuel everywhere, then standing amidst the flames, head thrown back, shaking my clawed hands at the ceiling and laughing hysterically as the house goes up around me.
     Sorry (again). Thursday is still weighing on my mind. The day had been so pleasant. The workers, I knew, were putting in the final touches on the bathroom--the toilet paper holder. The towel hooks. The little sproingy thing that keeps the doorknob from carving a circle in the wall. I love those little sproingy things.
     On the train I was relaxed, happy. I strolled home, prepared to savor the new bathroom. Perhaps, thought I, a celebratory bath might be in order. I had not taken a bath in the main bathroom, I realized, in the two years we owned the house. Why would I? It would be like bathing in a scummy pond.
     I opened the front door to a scene of madness. Water was pouring as if from a hose, directly from the center of our kitchen ceiling. The boys were running and shouting. Cats flew by, mewing wildly. My wife was screaming, and a heavy man, naked to the waist, wearing white painter's pants, sneakers and suspenders, was for some reason there too. The only thing missing was the Marx Brothers with flappy paddles and seltzer bottles.
     I should have turned and bolted, but I went inside.
     "The water!" My wife shouted, nobody knew how to shut off the water. This was odd, I realized, later, when I had time to think. Very odd, considering these guys were plumbers, supposedly. But lost in the moment, I merely hurried to the basement and turned a few big valves that seemed connected to the water pipes—even I know how to do that—then headed back upstairs to see the cascade had diminished to a trickle, being examined by the half-naked man, who turned out to be a workman.
     "What's going on?" I said. Drawing a blank stare, I dredged up my college Russian.
     "Shto etta?" I asked, pointing at the water. ("Shto etta?"—"What is this?" are the first words they teach you in Russian class. I almost automatically followed with "Etta capusta"—"This is a cabbage.")
     Concealing my rusty, etiolated Russian had seemed a good idea—I got to eavesdrop on the workers, and knew that showing it off would be a form of cozying up, a social breach akin to those junior executive idiots who pause to pal around with the bums on the bridge out of the mistaken belief it makes them into hip, happening kind of guys.
      But this was an emergency. The workman—he was a painter of some kind—praised my language skills, and said that nothing could be done until the bossman showed up. We waited.
     Finally he arrived, declared that nothing could be done until tomorrow, and then set to chatting with me in Russian.
      Soon the bathroom was forgotten, and he was inviting me to visit Belarus with him and hunt women. (At least I think that's what he said.)
     Four days passed. They finally came back, the problem was located. It seems they forgot to actually bond a pair of pipes, but merely shoved one into another and—gee, guess what?—it leaked.
     Somehow, the bathroom being so close to completion, then having success yanked away, started to affect my mind.
     "We could just keep the water off, use the other bathrooms and look at this one," I suggested to my wife, in all earnestness. "We wouldn't have to worry about cleaning it then."
     One thing vital to surviving home remodeling (practical tip alert! pay attention here) is to inculcate a certain hardness. After the leak crisis, the built-in shelves were installed. We praised them to the bossman then, after he left, actually looked hard at them. They were a kind of pressboard, already showing through the paint, held up by wooden brackets artlessly sawed. I delivered the ultimate criticism.
     "I could have done that," I told my wife.
     We agreed that I should place the call, thus giving the demand the bass and authority of the male. The shelves, I said, in my best butch voice, were no good. They would have to be ripped out and done again.
     "No problem," he said.
     I hung up, amazed. Not so much that he agreed so readily—we'll see what Shelves Part II look like—but that I had delivered the bad news with a minimum of hives and Barney Fife trilling. I thought I was having a bathroom and kitchen built, but it seems they're also constructing a hardened personal shell in the bargain. Imagine that, something extra for free in home remodeling. A miracle.
                                      — Originally published August 25, 2002 

Hammered and Nailed #4 -- That sinking feeling when desires die

    The feature normally in this space, "People Far Richer Than Yourself Show off Their Mega-Mansions as If You Could Possibly Own One in Your Wildest Dreams of Avarice," is on summer sabbatical. In its place, we present a continuing saga of remodeling an old house when money is not just something stuffed in walls for insulation.

     You know what I think makes a kitchen really elegant? A little round sink—not the main sink, mind you, but an auxiliary sink, say, set in a freestanding island. That way, if the main sink is filled with dirty dishes (and really, when is it not?) and you want a drink of water, no problem! You turn, hold your glass under the delicately curving stainless steel swan's neck of a tap and slake your thirst.        
      Fancy!
      Many times, I've fantasized about using such a sink: to rinse brightly colored summer fruit, to pour cool water on my dusty hands, to ease some complex cooking task, standing back-to-back, romantically, with my wife working at the main sink in our brand-spanking-new kitchen.
     You would think this desire would mean that the plans for our new kitchen would include such a little sink. The island is there. The pipes are there, somewhere. But no little sink, and herein lies the tale.

     First, let's back up a bit. Any construction effort, be it a spare bathroom or the Taj Mahal, is a compromise between imagination and practicality, between the fever dreams of the bountiful trappings we know we deserve and what our pocketbooks and spouses will let us get away with.
      Usually, unless we are toward the Taj Mahal end of the spectrum, those constraints are considerable, and a good thing, too. When you see the sprawling monstrosities that the rich tend to throw up (and I use that term aware of its dual meanings), it seems that a few restrictions are beneficial. I mean, as much as we would like Bill Gates' billions, did anyone look at the photos of that enormous hotel-like construction he calls a home and think, "Gosh, I'd love to live there"? Nobody.
      OK, that's a cop-out. Having lots of money would be great when it comes to remodeling. I can't tell you how many times we've noticed something we really like, just to later realize that not only can't we afford it, but we can't believe there's anyone in the world who can afford it.
     Take the stove. We surveyed the stoves available and settled on a Heartland, based entirely on the fact that it had a cute semicircular window. I could see myself peering through that window for the next 25 years, at bubbling pies and browning turkeys. It would make me happy.
     Turns out a Heartland stove costs about $5,000. A lot of money, considering you can get a perfectly good stove for about a tenth of that.
     So we set our sights lower. My wife selected a stove that would do the trick and set us back only about a grand and a half.
     But I had a problem with it. For $1,400, it just, well, it just didn't look cool. I wasn't expecting a round Heartland window. But I wanted something. At least the knobs should be nice. Hefty knobs. Industrial knobs. I scanned the store, and found one I liked. It had big, solid, black, hand-filling dials, knobs that would control the nuclear missile launch in a James Bond movie. The stove costs $3,000.
     Both stoves worked equally well. (Actually, the more expensive stove worked less well, because it had powerful, industrial burners designed to bring 10-gallon stock pots to boil. The thing literally couldn't dial down to low, so it came with a round metal plate you had to put over a burner if you wanted to approximate a low setting, a major pain if ever there was one). I knew, in my heart, it was insane to spend an additional $1,600 for knobs on a stove that demanded you insert a special blast plate whenever you wanted to simmer a can of soup. But that wasn't how I viewed it. I viewed it that you could spend $1,400—still a lot of money—and get some chintzy, Oreo-knobbed, nothing stove. Or you could spend a bit more—and what is $1,600 in the money furnace that is remodeling an old house?—and get a mighty-knobbed stove.
     My wife convinced me this is madness. Which brings us back to the little sink. Features she wants—such as an extra wall oven for Thanksgiving and the other two days a year when we might need lots of cooking room—are vital elements intrinsic to any basic, minimal kitchen. Simple expressions of practicality, on par with church key can openers and straw brooms. You can't live without them.
     The elements that I want—the oven with the hearty knobs, the little round auxiliary sink—are wasteful, fanciful frills that need to be trimmed away to stick with the budget and avoid bank-breaking financial ruin.
     I know this makes me seem henpecked, and I've tried dozens of times to argue. "Why," I ask, "do you dismiss what I want in the kitchen as a needless expense?" She, of course, denies it. "Lots of things in the kitchen were your idea," she says. "The floor—you wanted a floor, and you have one. Or stainless steel appliances. We're getting those."
     I try to point out that she, too, wanted stainless steel, and that I'd happily switch to something else—red is popular nowadays—to prove my point. But somehow the point is never made and I sigh and let it drop, while the little round sink drifts away on the gentle breezes of regret, off to that misty land of sports cars and summer homes and all the luxuries that life hands to the select few but forever denies the rest of us.

                  —Originally published July 14, 2002

Hammered and nailed #3: A plan of action, of sorts

   This is the third installment in a projected 495-part series on the remodeling of Neil Steinberg's 1905 Queen Anne house.

     The Russians have gone. On to another job, at the home of a more organized couple, while our bathroom upstairs sits, a jumble of wallboard and jutting copper pipe and dust.
    "Don't let them leave," I had begged my wife. "Put them to work doing something else. Get them going on the kitchen." But they didn't want to start the kitchen until all the

appliances and cabinets and such were stored in the garage, and who could blame them? The reason they had to halt work on the upstairs bathroom was because the tile hadn't shown up. Our fault. When we ordered it last April, and the tile guy said it would be in stock within a week, we failed to realize that "a week" is tilespeak for "next July."
     "Why not," I asked my wife, as we sat on the front porch, each staring straight ahead at the sugar maple, "order new tile somewhere else?"
     "My heart is set on that tile," she said, with deep seriousness.
     My own heart sank. I turned to look at her, and opened my mouth to say, "My heart is set on getting that bathroom done."
     But I closed my mouth--a very important skill in remodeling. Because the next sentence would be, "It's white tile, right?" and after that, "How hard could it be to find white tile?" And the fourth: "Unless its some kind of special tile, fancy tile--Blanco del Tile Extraordinaire Supremo, maybe."
     Silence is easier.
     Fact is, I have been surrendering fairly regularly on these disputes. For instance, over the permits. I was dead set against getting permits. That seemed the coward's way. There is an old adage in journalism: it's easier to apologize than to get permission. (Okay, maybe it's not an old adage. Maybe I made it up. Who knows anymore?)
     Of course I was influenced by all the contractors who, in snooping around to make their estimates, always asked, in a dubious tone, if we were thinking of getting permits, exactly the same tone that a parent, looking up at a child, sitting on the roof of the garage with a towel pinned to his shoulders, would say, "You're not thinking of jumping, are you?"
     I wanted to listen to the contractors, the experts. First, permits cost some hideous amount-- I could never bring myself to ask exactly how much. Second, they take time and bureaucracy to acquire. Years maybe. Third—and worst—in my mind, they invite inspectors into the house where they'll find God-knows what and issue God-knows-which kind of fanciful orders costing God-awful sums to comply with.
     "Oh gee, Mr. Steinberg, look at this. An arrowhead. Looks like there's an ancient Indian burial ground right here under your foundation. You'll have to have a team from the University of Chicago in to excavate. Or you could just jack up the house and move it 30 feet south."
     So I urged defiance. Silly me. That wasn't going to get me far. My wife, remember, is the last lawyer in the world who considers herself an officer of the court. Who thinks she has a moral obligation to be upright and honest. She is the one who, when I downloaded my first song off Napster ("Satisfaction" by the Stones. It seemed apt.) stood over me, haranguing that I was committing a crime. Not in a teasing fashion, but frantically, as if I were about to drown a puppy. "Don't!" she said. "That's STEALING!" (It's okay," I answered, "I'll send Mick Jagger a check.") Aware that an appeal to moral scruples wouldn't get far with me, she rather cannily played to my deep strain of pragmatism. We have an old house. If something shorts in the wall it could burn down and kill us. The inspector will check the Russians' work and maybe save our lives. When I seemed reluctant to follow this chain of reason, she pulled out her trump card.
     "We live right next to the Village Hall," she observed. "They're bound to notice trucks, a dumpster, workers going in and out."
      I would have still argued, but I remembered the American Elm. The village had left a note that our elm was sick, and needed to be chopped down. "Wow," I said, impressed that the city would diagnose our tree and take it away. That's service. Turns out, the condemning the tree part was the service—we had to have it removed at our own expense. Still, there was a lesson: If the village noticed a sick tree, it would certainly pick up on work of a scale to rival the pyramid at Cheops.
     We eventually got our permit. It's in the window now, which is cold comfort, since there is no tile and no workers. As the tileless days clicked by, I carefully constructed a question, breathing deeply, measuring my words. "So," I finally ventured. "Honey. How long . . . do you suppose . . . we should wait . . . if the tile doesn't show by July?"
     A pause. I almost added, "Remember, the guy who told us the tile would be here in July is the same guy who said it would be here last April." But I didn't. My point had hit home. My wife contemplated. "If it's not there by July," she said, slowly, "we'll go somewhere else." Triumph! Yes, she felt bad about the prospect of losing her dream tile. But at least now we have a plan of action, of sorts.

                                        —Originally published June 30, 2002

Write about the cop, or he might arrest you

   I know I've just begun off two weeks of Hammered & Nailed, and today's installment is below. But yesterday's column in the Sun-Times is too fun not to share, for those of you—and you know who you are—who might not be checking the paper's web site as much as you should. I hope this is half as enjoyable to read as it was to write.

  

     Years ago, I was combing through the Reader classified ads, looking for something to write about, when I noticed a boutique offering women’s shoes in large sizes for men. I toddled off to Elston Avenue and plunged into the world of cross-dressing, safe houses and secret dances.
     After the story ran, I got an out-of-left field call from the other boutique in Chicago catering to cross-dressers, drag Gimbels to this store’s Macy’s, as it were. The owner demanded to know when he would get his due. How could I focus on one and not the other?
      I’m sorry, I said, my goal was to describe a hidden subculture to readers who were completely ignorant of it, not to list stores. Besides, I didn’t know about the place before. “Next time I write about the transvestite community,” I said, using a term that wasn’t derogatory back then, “I’ll include you.”
     That was 22 years ago. The paper has never, to my knowledge, run another in-depth story looking at what is now called the transgender community, so in a sense I was true to my word. Still, that “What about me?” reflex is a common complaint, reflecting a misperception of the news, the belief that we’re some kind of social service where fairness demands all people and all situations be given equal attention, when actually we’re trying to offer news that’ll keep you ponying up quarters and clicks.
     All of this came tumbling back Friday morning when the first email I got in response to my column about quixotic mayoral candidate Amara Enyia was this, which came whistling over the transom at 1:35 a.m. and which I read, rubbing sleep from my eyes, about 6 a.m. Friday. Since many communications and media sorts read this column, let’s play a game I’ll call Find-the-Spit-in-the-Soup. See if you can ID the sentence where Gerald Thomas goes off the rails.
     “Hello Mr. Neil Steinberg,” he begins.

     “I would like to introduce you to the only candidate in this race with the experience needed in this day and time to combat the violence our citizens of this city continue to face. Mr. Frederick Collins is currently serving as a 21-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department. With all due respect sir to Ms. Enyia, Mr. Collins has a website, buttons, T-Shirts and literature currently being circulated throughout the city. We are the only campaign with a radio ad being played each and every Sunday on WPWX POWER 92.3 FM. According to election law, we are to be allotted the very same time you granted any other declared candidate. You can go to our website at . . . "

     There's more, but I assume you stopped at "According to election law," to guffaw, as I did, or at least shake your head in wonderment. So let me get this straight: If I don't write about Frederick Collins then I'll be breaking the law and . . . what? He'll come by the newspaper and arrest me—he is a cop—and drag me away to columnist jail?
     Maybe I'm missing out by generally avoiding political contests as an annoying buzz best left to others. There's gold here. I'm not going to write about Collins, of course—my colleague Mary Mitchell already did so on Sunday. I suppose if he swears out a warrant for my arrest for breaking this imaginary law (his flack must have been thinking of the FCC equal-time rule that applies to broadcasters), I could point to her column, or offer up this one as a defense, if the rule applied to print, which it doesn't. Heck, it hardly even applies to TV.
     And really, is Chicago looking for a police officer to run the city? I would never be so self-punishing as to characterize the esteem or lack of which that cops may or may not enjoy, nor contrast it with their self-image. And while I shouldn't be doling out advice to political candidates, if Collins is considering a slogan along the lines of "Vote For Me or Face Prison," he might want to rethink that.
     I should tip my hand lest people accuse me of hidden motives. The reason Rahm Emanuel is so unpopular is because he's doing the hard things that need to be done, closing schools and cutting programs that can't be paid for. There is no easy way he was going to try to dial back pensions for city workers and end up with cops like Collins cheering. "Sure, Sarge, I won't be getting the money I was promised, but look at our improved civic solvency . . ." You can't tear off the big bandages Rahm's been ripping from Chicago without the city starting to howl.
     For me, the classic mayoral opponent was Joe Gardner, the water commissioner who stocked his first campaign rally with gang members who then menaced the media trying to cover it. Though Collins' guy invoking an imaginary law that demands his candidate be written about has to rank right up there. Memo to all candidates: Life ain't fair.