unhandy
Handymen are gods. In my Maslow pyramid of important people in the universe we have whoever invented football, Quentin Tarantino, Serena Williams, Nacho Libre (not Jack Black) and on top of all that, we have those heroes of the drill, the hammer and whatever caulking is.
My idolatry for handymen started at a very young age. I grew up seeing my dad fix and build everything around the house. He would be cutting the grass and suddenly the lawn mower would stutter and die. In my young and innocent mind, I’d be foreshadowing my total absence of handyman skills and think “well, that’s that. Time to get a new one!” Cut to my dad disassembling the entire thing, cleaning it, going to the hardware store, coming back and either changing the spark plug or messing around with the carburetor. I obviously googled “troubleshooting lawn mowers” before writing that last line. I have no idea what works nor what breaks down on those things.
Even though I hadn’t shown any interest in manual repair skills, my dad decided to train me in the art of DIY. I look back and I’m pretty sure it had nothing to do with his sudden interest in father and son bonding. It was most probably born from my dad wanting to take a break from hearing Star Wars Ewok’s theme song for the zillions time. Not sure who bought me that 45 vinyl, but man did I put that record on a loop for hours! Listening to that “song”, I now feel that I was torturing my entire family while blasting that incessant nonsense of jabber for hours. “Yah wah, ee chop yah wah…toe meet toe pee-che-keene g’ nop dock gling oh ahhhhhhhhh.” Years later I saw that the US Military used the same noise torture of blasting horrible music on loudspeakers to force Panama dictator Manuel Noriega out of the Vatican Embassy, where he had taken refuge. It worked for my dad and for Noriega. So, dad opened the hood and listed all the engine parts of his Ford Pinto. This presentation was followed by nothing. Just awkward silence and looks between each other. Was I supposed to be excited? Might as well fake some sort of interest. Just as I reached out to touch a shiny ring that was wrapping a hose (aka hose clamps, yeah googled that too!) my dad slapped my hand and said “tócate el culo”, which translates to touch your butt, yet Puerto Rican parents use it in context to say I’d rather you put and keep your hands on your butt cheeks rather than touching anything because you will ruining it.
My parents divorced a year later. Pretty sure my lack of interest in mechanics was not the main cause. In those days, there wasn’t the shared custody philosophy, so I lived full time with my mom and that officially ended all kinds of possible training opportunities for my dad to influence my domestic troubleshooting proficiencies. But, my mom gave me the most important lesson in home troubleshooting and improvements; the professional handyman. Blown fuse? Call the handyman. Dryer dancing its way out of the laundry room? Handyman time! It was great, until we started dealing with the reality of a divorced woman budget and mom started skimming on the quality of handymen. Blown fuse turned into blown fuse box. Dancing dryer turned into a conga line of us all trying to hold on to that demon machine from running out of our house.
Years later my girlfriend Patricia and I moved into a very spacious apartment, two blocks away from the beach. Patricia and I have an agreement regarding work around the house. The agreement is that I’m horrible at it, yet that new space and the saline in the air gave me a newfound urge to do stuff. Not owning any kind of tools nor toolbox, I asked Patricia’s dad for his drill and I prepared for my task, drilling a hole to display my skateboard collection. My hands are eerily similar to my dad’s hands. Mine are, for previously stated reasons much less callous and are free of sunspots, but the size and weird palm to fingers ratio is spot on. When I was holding the drill it took me back to those failed attempts of my dad trying to teach me these domestic skills and it got me thinking about how different things would be if I’d taken to learning and enjoying fixing stuff, feeling accomplished and passing on these skills to my children. That feeling lasted for a whole two seconds as I didn’t measure my strength (a recurring theme in my life) and drilled through the wall and into the main pipe that supplies water to the entire 12-story building. The water jet coming out of the drilled wall was so powerful it blew my glasses off and streamed with force for about 10 feet to the wall on the other side of the living room. The building manager had to leave a meeting and rush to close the intake of the 40,000-gallon galvanized water tank that was emptying in our apartment, leaving all the neighbors without water for the entire day and night until he was able to overpay major money for an industrial welder who came in to seal the pipe.
The next day Patricia’s dad came to take the drill, or as I say, disarm me of the drill. Just like her love, his love has always been unconditional. No negative comments came from him as he took away that damn weapon of mass destruction. But as he left, I did catch a particular look from him. His eyes closed a bit, a compassionately disappointed glance, as if to say: “tócate el culo”.