How I Spent My PandemicBruce Feirstein, 2022
According to the location tracker on my cell phone, I seem to have spent most of the pandemic shopping at Home Depot. My local store is located on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, just down the block from Netflix’ headquarters, and a mile or so from the Dolby theater. From the rooftop parking lot, you can see the Hollywood sign.
Now the thing that’s always struck me as unique about this Home Depot — as opposed to others I’ve shopped, in Florida and New York — is the cast of characters who show up on a weekend to Do It Yourself. Sure, there are lots of pick-up trucks with Korean, Hispanic or white contractors in Oakley wrap-arounds. And painting contractors from every LA ethnicity in white panel vans, along with Black first responders in emergency vehicles picking up PPV and cleaning supplies. But also, young actresses looking for houseplants, Drag Queens checking out the Halloween decorations, independent film crews buying lumber for film sets, Armenian handymen stocking up on drain cleaner, and virtually every color of LGBTQ rainbow picking up everything from sheetrock to shower stalls to ceiling fans.
And then, there was me — who would sometimes joke that a trip to the Hollywood Home Depot was a show unto itself, and that on any given Friday night, no matter what your sexual persuasion, if you sent out the right signals, you could probably find someone to go home with.
But that’s another story, for another time.
During the course of the pandemic, when my college-aged kids moved back into the house, and my wife — a professor — began teaching on Zoom, I renovated a bathroom, rebuilt our sprinkler system, installed a through-the-wall air-conditioning unit, restored a 80 year-old redwood fence, planted a new rose garden, set up a mesh wi-fi network, and repaired more leaky showers and faucets than I’d care to admit. Some of these things I did by choice. Others were dictated by the lockdown, and not wanting to have strangers in the house.
But as the months rolled by, prowling through the aisles of Home Depot, I began to experience something I hadn’t expected: How frequently I was asked for advice by perfect strangers. And in turn, how often the questions went the other way, where I was the one asking for recommendations about methods or materials, from pros or amateurs like myself, but strangers either way. And as I stood in those aisles, debating the pros and cons of various Wi-Fi thermostats, (I went with Sensi rather than Nest), the best paint sheen for a kid’s bedroom, (eggshell), and how to turn hydrangeas from pink to blue (acidify the soil), something occurred to me, not just about home repair, but possibly the state of our current affairs in America:
Maybe the real divide among American men — and perhaps so many Americans – isn’t rooted in politics, or geography, or race, or income, but the ability to Do Things. To fix things. To pick up a tool, work with your hands, do it yourself and get stuff done. Because whether we were communicating in Spanish, English, Korean, Armenian or Mandarin — or more likely, some combination of all of them — my experience is that no matter where you go in America, the people who can Do Things speak the same language, and have no problem finding common ground.
***
Working as a journalist in New York, and then as a screenwriter Los Angeles, I used to be surprised at the way most of my friends and colleagues reacted when they learned could use tools. “Really? You’re handy?” they’d ask, usually with a combination of shock and disbelief, but every so often with a distinct undertone of disdain and horror, as if I’d dropped to my knees, pulled out a nail gun, and threatened to re-shingle the house.
At first, I was defensive about being able to fix things. Or as they’d say in HR, “the skillset in my personal tool kit.” I was even a little embarrassed: Yes, I can replace the screen in your laptop computer, and/or put up a ceiling fan. But I’m not a pro. I don’t own a tool belt. I’m just a pretty good amateur. But my reaction — my feelings about this — began to change after I sold an ultra-modern house that I owned on Long Island to an advertising copywriter from New York City. The house was like owning a Ferrari; there was always something that needed fixing. And sure enough, the day after the sale, he called in the tiniest, most plaintive voice to ask: “How do I get the upstairs toilet to stop running? And who do I call to change a lightbulb?”
Reflecting on this — after I walked him through checking on the toilet flappers — I couldn’t help but wonder: How can someone be so helpless? How can you buy a house and not be able to take care of the simplest thing? More to the point, none of it is that hard. There are a million videos on YouTube that can show you how to fix almost anything. And there’s the money part of it. Nobody likes to waste money. But as a friend who owns a plumbing company explained about the economics of fixing a leaky sink:
“Between hourly wages, inventory, and insurance, I can’t afford to roll a two-man truck to fix a 15-cent washer in your bathroom sink. So what we do is replace the washer, the water supply lines, the cut-off valves, and maybe the fixture itself. I’m not cheating you. We explain that sooner or later all that stuff is probably going to have to be replaced anyway, so it will be cheaper to do it now, all at once. But that’s how a 15-cent washer fix ends up costing $500. It’s the only way I can make money.”
***
As a child in suburban Maplewood, New Jersey during the 1960’s, I grew up taking apart telephones and television sets. I wanted to see what was inside. When I was in junior high, I took the mandatory “shop” class, where I learned how to cut wood and solder. Back then, not everyone was expected to go to college, and these were considered essential manly life skills to possess. In high school I played bass guitar in a band, learning to fix microphone chords, and troubleshoot pre-transistor tube-based amplifiers, along with putting new stereo systems and speakers in the family cars. And the summer before college, I talked my way into a maintenance job at Newark Airport, cutting the grass and changing the lightbulbs on the runways. It’s not that I was relentlessly ambitious. And none of this grew out of any family heritage. My grandfather owned a tavern in Newark; my father was a textile salesman in New York City. The truth was I needed the money. Especially for college tuition.
The one job that taught me more about fixing things — and maybe adulthood itself — was the construction crew I joined during my first years at Boston University, working weekends and summers rehabbing tenements and triple-decker apartment buildings on Blue Hill Avenue in Dorchester, Mass. Some of the three story buildings were trashed; others were burnt out. We used to joke that the neighborhood was so tough that you needed to yell out “Cover me! I’m making a break for lunch.” But over the course of two years, working with a dozen guys whose middle initials were “FX” (William Francis Exavier McGuire, Michael Francis Exavier O’Connor, Seamus Francis Exavier O’Mally, et al,) I learned to refinish floors, put up sheetrock, patch plaster, put in a kitchen, install a new bathroom, hang wall paper, flame tar a roof, upgrade electric service and slather bucket-loads of “Benny Moore” paint on anything that wasn’t moving.
The work was hard. And sometimes hilarious: I swore I was going to name my first children Bondo (after the wood filler) and Tyvek (after the house-wrap.) But more to the point, it gave me a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, and forever changed the way I look at the world and treat people. It’s why, to this day, I still find it easier to relate to someone who has worked with their hands, than some showbusiness jackass who insists on letting me know within five minutes of meeting that he went to Harvard.
Here are the six essential life lessons I learned from all this, that apply to virtually any undertaking or endeavor:
1) Ignoring a problem isn’t going to make it go away. Yes, there are things you can put off till tomorrow. But entropy rules the galaxy and almost nothing fixes itself. The quicker you make things right, the better.
2) Break out every step. Before you lift a finger, figure out where you’re going, and how you’re going to get there. So if things start to go south, you can make the appropriate course corrections. The same rule applies, writing a screenplay, producing a film, or putting in a kitchen.
3) Safety first. Whether you’re rewiring a house, investing in the stock market, or going to work at a new job, think about the nineteen ways you can get killed, and try to avoid them. Accidents happen. But situational awareness — even in a corporate board room – tends to cut down on the mortality rate.
4) Measure twice, cut once. Sure it’s a cliché. But not if you think of it beyond woodworking, and take it into the realm of life choices. Consider all the angles, and double-take the measurement of everything and everyone around you before you make any permanent decisions.
5) Pick Two: Cheap, fast or Good. In all human endeavors, you can do things cheap, you can do things good, or you can do things fast. But you only get to choose two. The rule applies across the board, whether you’re painting a house, creating an app, or waging a war.
6) Know your limitations. There’s no shame in admitting when something is beyond your ability. Me? I won’t touch gas lines, I don’t solder copper pipes, I don’t climb on rooftops, and I have no idea what goes on under the hood of a modern car. That’s what the pros are for. It’s always better to bring one in early, to fix something right the first time, rather than to unfix what you mucked up.
***
If there’s one universal worry among the folks who do things themselves, it’s that our kids don’t know how to do anything. In today’s world, there are no shop classes, nobody takes a working iPhone apart for fun, and at best, Photoshop, Minecraft and computer-coding have replaced tinkering around the house with hardware and tools.
How do you encourage kids to be confident, and self-assured, and self-reliant?
As my children would quickly and surely attest, I made my share of mistakes while bringing them up. But I put a cordless screw drill in my daughter’s hands when she was seven, to help build a tiny desk for a corner of the office where I write. And likewise, at the same time, taught her twin brother how to use an orbital sander to finish off a wooden sword we’d built.
A decade later, I was beaming with pride then when my daughter announced that she’d gone on Google to figure out why there was a puddle of water in the passenger footwell of one of our cars, and followed the instructions on a YouTube video to fix it — popping open the hood, and pulling out some dead leaves clogging a badly designed drain system between the hood and the windshield.
And again, likewise, I had to stifle a smile when my son showed up at his college dorm room, looked at all the furniture and shelves that needed to be put together, pulled out his own Leatherman multi-tool, and said “No problem. I got this.”
Above all else, we don’t want our kids to be helpless. We don’t want them to be incapable of fixing things. We want them to be able to take care of themselves, the people around them, and the places they live.
***
Somewhere in America right now, there’s a faucet that’s dripping, a room that needs to be painted, and a sink waiting to be unclogged.
There’s also a schoolboard that needs fixing, a neighborhood that needs to be rebuilt, and a city council in dire need of repair.
Somehow, one way or another, in the great spirit of Americans who can Do Things, I have faith that we can, and we will, fix this too.
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