This week, Adventures In Mechanics took me into a new region, one I'd hesitated to even investigate until now: trombone slide repair.
I've been a trombonist for over forty years -- just how much over I'm not certain. For 35-some of them, I've played the same instrument, a battle-scarred '40s vintage Olds bass trombone named Bertha (as in Bertha DeBlues, hahaha). In my long and colorful relationship with this venerable hunk of the brassworker's art, I've had occasion to do numerous field repairs, particularly on her cranky and highly idiosyncratic rotory valves. I've become acquainted with such obscure matters of the trombone technician's trade as the proper solvent to thoroughly degrease the outer slide and the difficulty of obtaining the proper gauge springwire for valve springs. But I've never been able to repair one of her most common maladies, one that I shudder to admit I've permitted to occur on all too many occasions: a dented slide.
Partially it's the nature of the trombone slide that brings it to grief. While modern musical instruments abound in mechanical oddments begging for deformation, few of them can top a precision bearing surface two and a half feet long made of paper-thin brass and capable of being misaligned by a harsh glance. Not for nothing is the trombone known as "the crotch of the orchestra." (Actually, I made that up. But it's still true.) Moreover, the 'bone is one wind that won't be fenced in. It needs room to move. The throwing range of the fully extended slide put the sliphorn player in the back of the wagon in the old N'awlins jass bands, from which "tailgate" style derived its name. With all that exposed length just cruising for a bruising, it's a wonder the present day sackbutt plays at all.
My own personal nemesis is the bell ding. Normal trombone stands are three-legged folding contraptions that let the dear things perch vertically, the slide safely off the floor and out of the reach of marauding gunboats. But this brings its own danger: what stands up can fall down. And Bertha is a big girl, a bass trombone with a 10" bell, its rim poised mere millimeters from the tender slide. A stray gust of gravity, a passing drunk, a misplaced elbow on a crowded stage, and suddenly there's an instrument down. With a neat little bell-edge-shaped nick in the slide.
And there I am in the situation most intolerable to a Thaddeus: dependent on the tender mercies of a specialist. But there's nothing to be done about it -- a dented slide must be fixed, and only a band instrument tech can fix it.
I've had some good techs in my time, but my favorite of late is a good-natured longhair named Fred whom I met through the New Old Time Chautauqua. He was able to do what no other tech had done in the previous fifteen years: resurrect my horn's dying valves from clacking, sticking near-extinction. He's a craftsman and a fellow boneista and I think the world of him. But he works in Marysville, thirty miles away. Given the price of gas and the nature of Seattle traffic nowadays, this is not a strong argument for utilizing his services.
The last time I had a bell ding, the result of a windstorm at an outdoor gig in beautiful Roslyn WA (home of Southern Exposure), I took Bertha to the nearest instead of the best. The worker at the local chain keyboard store returned her to me in pieces, utterly perplexed by my little dinosaur. I ended up combining a daytrip to Fred's for walkin service with a visit to a good friend even farther away, which resulted in my barely getting back time enough to pick the instrument up before the store closed.
So there I was last week at a rehearsal of my number four (or is it five) hobby band, the Emerald City Jug Band, and I'm swatting about between four or five instruments, and right in between removing Grandpa the mandolin and picking up the bando-fluke, I catch something wrong and there goes Bertha kissing the carpet again. At least she missed the jug. Prayers and curses alike go unheeded: bell ding.
Time for yet another trip to the wilds of Marysville? I don't think so. It's time for Thaddeus to put on his magic toolbelt and become: MISTER FIXIT!!!!
First, a call to my favorite tech's store. A respectful assistant reveals the secrets of slide dent removal: stick in a dent rod and pound it out with a rubber hammer. Of course, dent rods cost $150. So what's a dent rod? A piece of round stock steel. Oh, is that all? Quick, to the Fixitmobile (alias my ratty little Mazda 626, 230 k and rolling, ductape and all), and off to find a mandrel. A local steel yard is happy to sell me a 19/32nds "W1 drill rod" (don't ask me what that means). It's a dandy substitute for a dent rod and cost $12. I resist the temptation to spend the $138 I saved on cheap liquor and expensive women and head home with my prize. No rubber hammer? Fortunately, I live with a jeweler. A bit of discreet pounding with her rawhide mallet and voila!
Did it work? Tolerably. I can still feel the dent, jeest barely. But by gawd I took it out plenty enough to play. Six months ago I could not even spell trombone technician -- now I are one. Sort of.
I'm not a tinkerer and a fixit guy just out of love for the craft. That would be too easy. I did pick up a lot of the joys of repair off the various people I apprenticed under. Taking on the recalcitrant machine, diagnosing the malfunction by inspired guess or experience or good old-fashioned logical exhaustive testing and restoring it to proper behavior has its own game-like delights, more substantial and objective than rescuing the princess or putting away the Big Boss.
But there's also another side to my attraction to mechanistic rehabilitation: revenge.
I'm still a victim of that old standard bugaboo, A Problem With Authority. But in me, it doesn't manifest as hanging out on a Saturday night, black leather jacketed and booted, leaning against a motorcycle, a cigarette dangling from my permanently sneering lips. I ain't pretty enough for that. I just do my own auto repairs, guitar repairs, house repairs, trombone repairs. High-priced experts be blowed. Fix my computer? Ha! Maybe I come fix your computer, eh?
All too often in our culture, we're victims of our own technology, enthralled to crappy employment in order to afford the shifty-eyed specialists who can actually keep all the junk that we depend on running. When I made the choice as a young adult to live outside the comfortable maximum security prison of middle class life, I embarked on a long voyage of self-discovery and, all too soon, involuntary self-sufficiency. While I'd never think of myself as a self-made man, I'm certainly a self-reliant one, and for the most practical of reasons — the price is right. I'm as addicted to artificial accessories as the next 21st century post-industrial self-employed guy. But to keep them functional, at least I trade my ingenuity and persistent, not forty hours a week of my one and only life. Most of the time, anyways.
And in this small way, I extract a modicum of cheap retribution on the suffocating overstuffed civilization that sired and nurtured me, provides the infrastructure for my posturing and will most certainly survive my passing without a hiccup. Bully for me.
Most of all, we cannot know what we are, though we spend a lifetime of intimacy with ourselves. We may sense our own actions, glimpse our own motivations or dimly grasp the workings of our deeper or higher minds, but there is little hope of achieving Socrates' dictum to "know thyself". And perhaps happily so -- as Goethe retorted, "Know myself? If I knew myself I'd run away!"
What to do? How do you live a life of some reasonable righteousness (presuming you even care about such things) with no notion of your true behavior?
Okay, so this is maybe a touch overdramatic. It's something I've been thinking about recently, in the face of having to seriously adjust my attitude -- specifically, one of my most persistent character flaws, a foul, snarky capacity for meanness.
I suppose I came by my mean streak honestly -- it seems to run in the family. All of my siblings have a penchant for the occasional snide comment or blistering reposte. Being all brilliant didn't help. Maybe your older brother called you names as kid -- mine did it in rhythmic stanzas, veritable sagas øf tease. Perhaps it came from a grumpy ex-drill sargent stepfather, or maybe it was the result of losing our real father too early -- or maybe our father was the cause and we got off easy. I asked my brother about it and he said "I dunno -- I think I was just born this way."
Without going into pesky unnecessary boring revealing detail, I can safely say that I've had my moments of unkindness to Sandahbeth. Not that she wasn't capable of taking a few bites of her own. Ah, the noble disfunctional geese -- one moment all fluffy chest feathers, the next all serrated beak and spur. The incidents have decreased as she became increasingly disabled, but the stress of the ongoing situation hasn't helped.
Being as how picking on cripples is usually considered bad form in the better circles, it behooved me to take renewed effort to mend my crabby ways. Back in the when, living in a volkswagen and spending much of my time alone, I contended that I was a hermit crab -- a crab because I was a hermit and a hermit because I was a crab. Cute excuse, that. Those halcyon days are out the door, though, and I have to consider both my public image and my very real private desire to ease S's circumstance as much as I can, including canning behaviors that don't do any good.
I've been driven literally to tears on more than one occasion by my lack of civility. It's blown friendships and lost jobs and pretty much sucks, but it seems that like my brother, it's a factory installation that I can't just pull and replace with something cleaner and louder that plays CD's too. My general tendency has been to keep a sock in it and, when I temporarily go crazy, to clean up after myself as well as I can. Squinting through the visor in my suit of armor doesn't exactly give me a territorial view on all this, and I've frequently found out about my ickky behavior only after the fact. I even invented an imaginary teenage subculture, the Creeps, who ingested a drug that made them get weird and nasty without knowing anything was wrong. Part of that was just the old square peg/round hole blues, but irregardless of my eccentricity, I'm fully capable of being an asshole too.
I'm not sure when the revelation hit, or whether it was any kind of conscious event, or even whether it works or not. But in the last few weeks I've embarked on a new and different technique for managing the Crustacean Within. Oddly enough, it was inspired by an old wive's tale.
There's an old English tradition that says that on the first day of a new moon, if the first thing you say when you wake up is "White rabbits," you'll have good luck all through that lunar cycle. Another version instructs you to say "Rabbit rabbit" on the first day of the month. The trick is saying it first thing, before you say anything else. Being a pretty superstitious guy, I've followed this stricture as much as I could for a number of years now. Why? It works. I think. Anyway, it doesn't hurt.
And there's another reason to do it, luck or no: it builds in your mind the notion of locating yourself in time and space each time you wake up, before you say anything. In and of itself, this helps bring the process of consciousness into motion. You are immediately faced with a choice: whether to speak, what to say.
I realized that every day i wake up with a choice: to be a kind person or a grouch. And all through the day, at any given moment, I make that choice again, over and over: whether to be forbearing, whether to be sarcastic, whether to be stern or abrupt or insensitive or critical or cold. If I pay attention or not, that choice is there to be made, and gets made. And my primary choice is whether to do so with full attention or to let my reflexes (and we all know how reliable they are) decide for me.
It isn't easy. It hasn't been 100% reliable. But at least it's working better than other stuff I've tried. But it's a 24/7 kind of thing -- not a one shot deal, but a constancy, a meditation
At a recent benefit for the New Old Time Chautauqua, I described my newfound methodology with my friend Joannie (aka St. Joannie de Fuca). She nodded understandingly and replied, "You know, the Buddhists believe that kindness is a practice."
And there you have it. Whether you wanna get to Carnegie Hall or heaven or just through the day, practice is a core curriculum.
I'm losing faith in democracy.
This isn't a typical behavior for me. I am, when all is said and done, an American, a product of public school history and civics classes and a hundred PBS documentaries. In spite of its imperfections, I see a lot of strengths in our method of governance. I've voted in practically every election I could since I came into my plebiscite, sometimes with inordinate discomfort, and I've always encouraged others to do the same.
Sometimes this can lead to altercations. I had a job doing interviews at Home Depot one election fall and closed every one with "Don't forget to vote!" An African American man informed me that he had no intention of doing so. I argued that one of the few duties of a US citizen was to participate in the democratic process, and he shot back that Black people didn't owe the government anything. I could have disputed that, but I knew better than to play the dozens in public with strangers.
I've received more than a little vilification from various types over my support of our Terrible System That's Better Than Anything Else, but I stick to my guns. My instinct is, what's the alternative? And that's precisely the point at which my purely internalized despair at the current state of my country begins.
It isn't over the current state of partisan polarization. Loud, stupid arguments over trivia have always been uncovered latrines on the landscape of public debate, just another way for the body politic to relieve itself. My private hopelessness stems from the way in which the methods of mindless persuasion developed by Madison Avenue have been diverted to the service of cold-blooded secularity.
In the last three months, we've witnessed a brazen campaign of brute public opinion manipulation, hatched by the government and paid for with your tax dollars. Out of what constituted a clear blue sky, the White House initiated a disconnected, durn near hermetically sealed propaganda blitz against the duly established government of Iraq, claiming the divine duty of the American state to instigate a Regime Change (Trademark Applied For). No prevocation, no ongoing discussion, no indication of any continuity of purpose at all -- just a sudden, jack-in-the-box ad campaign of soundbites and photo ops, as hysterical and self-absorbed as the PR for a Hollywood blockbuster, and about as logical.
And here I thought Wag the Dog was supposed to be fiction.
Not only that, we've collectively fallen for it. By all indications, this mystery war movie the administration is drum-machining up is a big hit at the ol' cineplex. It sure seems to have bamboozled the opposition. The main spread of the Democratic Party is falling all over itself to prove its loyalty. Either those guys are getting a lotta loud noise from the folks back home or, with the fall elections coming up, they're awfully anxious not to be put over a barrel by the whole affair.
What protest of the whole artifice there is gets depicted by the media as lost somewhere between the 60's and the nearest loonie bin. Meaningful criticism is smothered under a mudslide of freeze-frames of funky-ass outniks with badly-painted signs and lame slogans.
The single most reasonable response to the whole sick parade is one summed up by Sen. Robert Byrd in the phrase, "What's new?" Why is it suddenly so urgent to go after Saddam? I know he's a sunnuvabitch, but what's he done for us recently?
It all bears the earmarks of a sudden, dismaying derailment of the entire mechanism of government towards a bloody, distinctly irregular and stupendously ill-considered foreign misadventure fraught with perils both obvious and unforeseeable. Worse, the perpetrators of this train wreck are blithely discarding sixty years of declared US policy regarding the justification of the use of force in international affairs. All of which begs on bended knee the question asked by Charlotte Corday in Marat/Sade: "Who invented this? Who profits by it?"
In the week after 9/11, I went through a Reader's Digest edition of a nervous breakdown, not unlike many Americans. I was unquiet in a shallow grave, haunted by what limited images of the catastrophe I'd glimpsed before I simply shut it all off. The following Sunday a progressive and gregarious woman down the street put out fliers inviting the neighborhood to come and talk out some of the horror. Only a few people made it, but we listened to each other and gave what comfort we could.
When it was my turn to speak, my response seemed to bipass my conscious mind entirely and spring directly from my gut. All my life, I said, I've had the exact feeling that this event acted out so graphically: that I was a hostage on a hijacked airliner, the pilot incapacitated, fanatical men with dubious abilities and ominous agendas commandeering the cockpit, hurtling through space trapped in a tiny sealed capsule towards some awful, unknown fate.
So as Air America comes screaming across the sky with gawd-knows-who at the helm, whether the outcome is good or ill or both or neither, I'm left with one security blanket: my right to vote. And it's beginning to look decidedly threadbare. If advertising can program the masses, if big money can buy elections and sway the judicial system to its own ends, then why try to decipher arcane initiatives or sort out a half-dozen doughy judicial candidates? What's the point?
And the reply is still: what's the alternative?
"There's a man whose work is unbecoming people hire him to unclog their plumbing with every job he takes another buck he makes odds are he'll have two more jobs tomorrow Mister--FIXit Man! Mister--FIXit Man! He's patching up your mansion just to keep his mortgage paid..."
That vagabond of many guises Work came back to town this week. This time, it came in the form of the Gentleman Handyman, a service I devised out of desperation as much as anything else.
While I've always been, uh, handy with fixing things, I never considered it a professional level skill. I would learn enough about some branch of the art -- sheetrock and painting, car mechanics, electrical, plumbing, wood-butchery -- to perform a necessary repair or get myself out of a jam, monetary or otherwise. If someone else needed help, I would oblige as well as I could, subject to limitations of time and self-confidence. If I made a little money as well, I was highly impressed.
Sandahbeth was always encouraging me to push my home improvement side as a cash cow. I understood that there was a need for such talents in a world populated by the thumb-fingered and maladroit, as well as a use for the income generated thereby. But I always felt the contrast between my slapdash abilities and the calm, slick, no-wasted- motions air of the real journeyman painter or carpenter or plumber, someone who'd done nothing but slap product on walls or put nails through studs for ten or fifteen years, someone who encountered no surprises in their work. Difficulties, yes -- surprises, no. Putting myself up as a fixit guy against such monoliths made me feel like a tack hammer in a field of piledrivers. If I was going to hold any ground, I needed a gimmick.
"Beware of little jobs that look too simple Trouble hides like what's inside a pimple Before you make it pop it's best to let it drop odds are you'll have two more jobs tomorrow... Mister--FIXit Man! Mister--FIXit Man! He's patching up your mansion just to keep his mortgage paid..."
A couple years back, I came up with the moniker "The Gentleman Handyman" as a handy hook to hang my services from. The idea was that those eminences of repair I was just talking about might be highly competent (or maybe not -- hard to tell beforehand) but they also smoked and cussed and grunted and kicked the dog and behaved like men (little snippit of "I'm A Man" by Muddy here -- bah BAH Bah Bah). Whereas in contrast I was cute and cuddly and courteous (yeah, right) and didn't leave cigarette butts in the yard. I put together a jiffy flier and stuck it up on a bulletin board at a church we played for.
Weirdly enough, it worked. I was immediately contracting informal construction jobs at (for me) enormous rates of pay, rates that shocked me in contrast to what I earned as a temp typing wage slave, my previous fallback work. The only other job I ever got professional pay for was music, and that (it seemed to me) was different. Maybe not -- pro is pro. Still, it was a pleasant awakening. I found myself responding like Son House at the college concert -- where's this been all my life? As usual, my bareboned lifestyle left me unprepared for the florid affluence of even an average working stiff.
But like music, the construction/handyman work came and went, and sometimes stayed away. You put your hooks in the water and took your chances. Plus, of course, it was work, and took time. Over the next year and a half I blew hot and cold (left and right?) about it. Could I afford to take on tasks that could wrack my lower back (as indeed one job did) and leave me unable to fill in as caregiver? Wasn't there some easier way to make this kind of good money? Why should I waste my life replacing light switches?
Mostly the answer was shut up and get back to work. Despite any comic book evidence to the contrary, most of human physical life is about the care and feeding of the all-too-common door wolf (canus disgustingus), and any bone that crunches will do. I did spend a year and a half as a freelance office manager, but it ended badly in caregiving overload and missed schedules, and I was let go like a single mother with no daycare who misses one too many days at the office.
"Basking on a mossy rooftop Sunday Lying in a moldy crawlspace Monday Don't let your budget blow By bidding yourself too low Odds are you'll have two more jobs tomorrow Mister--FIXit Man! Mister--FIXit Man! He's patching up your mansion just to keep his mortgage paid..."
Having completed both a comprehensive house remodel and a refinance over the winter, I came to realize that unless and until Sandahbeth got up to speed and we went back to being Amber Tide together, my best chance of paying the bills was to get the handyman back on track. So in a fit of duty I hauled out the old flier and upgraded it a little, throwing in a modified version of Bob from the Church of the SubGenius as a slightly subversive logo -- just erase that stinky old pipe and he's the perfect picture of a gentleman -- and tacked it up at the local food coop. With no immediate response, I assumed I should check other markets and forgot about it.
Then a month later, outta the blue, a realtor called me up. He had a house to sell and it needed a ton of really creepy and extensive foundation work to pass FHA inspection. He'd seen the sign at the coop. Was I available? Was I available now?
Was I not. I took a meeting and checked out the work. And immediately, I realized that my advertising was truer than I'd thought. The realtor was an affable, intelligent boomer who laughed at most of the same jokes that I did and was perceptibly comfortable with my more-than-monosyllabic conversational style. "Who's that guy on the card," he asked, "Ward Cleaver?" We hit it off immediately, I got the job, and in the next few months he sent me several more clients who also seemed relieved to be able to relate to the guy with the tools. Women especially were glad to be able to express their specific needs without having them bounce off the wooden exterior of a sure-little-lady assembly-line Dude.
Make no mistake -- I have to be able to deliver the goods. If I say I'm gonna paint the steps, I'd better paint them good like a gentleman should. But I seem to have found a nich here as a competent, reliable jack-of-all-trades-and-jill-of-none who also makes witty repartee. It's almost like I'm creating a vaudeville character, a kinder, gentler, hipper version of the venerable tradesmen of yore, sure of hand and awash with simple homespun wisdom and humor. Hey, even the touch of gray at the temples helps -- gives me an air of authority.
What the hey -- whatever feeds the meter.
"Mister--FIXit Man! Mister--FIXit Man! He's patching up your mansion just to keep his mortgage paid... MISTERFIXITMANNNNNNN!"