Monday, August 31, 2015

The Green Machine Enters a Black Hole

A great silence has fallen across the country, from our architectural firm in Minnesota to the sullen modular factory in Indiana to the East, where fall is closing in and winter is not far behind, and our contractor Pete is tap, tapping the earth listening to it freeze in the not-too-distant future. It is as if our house is being constructed in the wind. Every once in awhile some breeze of information puffs in on an email, information that appears to be moving things along, but is, in reality, only a letter written in light.  

Two things have been accomplished to date: the rudiments of a driveway that comes to a confused end in the middle of the field and the purchase of our tractor, which in a creepy moment I gave the cute name: "The Hamster", because "ham" is the last syllable of both Michael's and my name (Grisham and Peckham).  On its second run, its brush hog attachment trembled like a baby and went to the tractor hospital, where the doctors found nothing wrong with it. I believe it longs, as we do, for the big bulldozers, the excavators, the well and trench diggers, all the ruinous engines of destruction required to carve out the surfaces for our ever-elusive house.


Throughout the first quarter of the year, we had jolly conversations back and forth with our architects, identifying the appliances in our fantasy kitchen, placing the lively wood stoves, thoughtfully choosing the sustainable flooring. One grim February day we drove an hour and a half to Paramus and wandered through Ikea's labyrinth looking at three million kitchen cabinets until we were stunned into indecision by its spectacular awe fullness.  We went home, opened up the wine in the beautiful silence of our living room, picked out our cabinets, worked out the kitchen layout on Ikea's clever website, and sent the plans to our architects.  Everyone was happy, everyone in cahoots.

In March we calculated the amount of kilowatts we'd need to make our house come alive, and, in April, Michael and our architects burrowed into the maze of insulation options. We hired Dave, a deeply cynical HVAC consultant, with misleadingly sad eyes and the jowls of a basset hound, to worry out where cold would leak into the house and how it could be counteracted by the heat-radiating PEX snaking under our floor and the heat pumps moving warmth from the earth via the geothermal wells.   

By May we wrestled our window decisions into place, choosing a Canadian company, which has a clever tilting apparatus that will let us clean the panes on the second floor without a ladder. At the end of that month, the factory also sent a letter of agreement with a series of milestones, including dates for sending them a lot of money for a bunch of materials, culminating in the big check for executing the final contract by June 30th.  Our architect estimated a delivery date of the modules in mid-September, assuming all the milestones were met.  Hurray! 

Then something odd occurred.  No one asked us for our money at the end of June.  The summer muddled along through July, with emails from the architect, irritating in their gnat-like importance (how about a small window on the second floor, would we like steel barn doors downstairs, what color do we want the priming paint and here's some pictures of paint cans). July ended with our money still in the bank (except for a fat payment to the window company) and no contract from the factory.  Pete was still waiting for final construction drawings so he could get a building permit from the town and start scheduling the foundation work. 

At the very end of July the architect promised a final budget and said he had been "plying the factory to keep to their expected schedule."  That month sped by, too, interrupted only by a lengthy discussion on garage trusses.  Michael remained Zen.  I alternated between trying to imitate him and screaming at random strangers and trees.

Then, at the beginning of August, the reason for the factory's limping behavior and sullen silence became clear. Its owner, a relatively small aw-shucks Midwestern company, had been acquired by a giant Florida-based real estate development corporation. Our architect had been blind-sided as well, and he apologized, passing on the inevitable shabby lie hissed by all company buyers, nation conquerors, and apple-offering snakes throughout time:  "Don't worry, they've promised that nothing will change."  

Of course, something had changed – the module delivery date and, a couple days after our architect talked to us, our basic agreement with the factory.  The acquiring monster corporation had no idea how to construct a deal with an actual human, so it wanted to do the contract with a business, which would be that of our contractor Pete. So, this meant that a bunch of lawyers would now latch on to our project like ticks, infecting it with more delays, and Pete would increase his fee – adding up to 15% to the cost of the modules -- since he was now managing the factory process for no reason at all and the fee for his liability insurance is based on his billing.  We were ready to walk away. Our barn apartment was looking pretty good.  So they caved. 

They'll do the agreement directly with us, they said, and get the agreement to us in a week.  But time had already passed.  On August 6th, we received a contract, which we reviewed and pointed out a couple things missing from the original agreement – nothing big, some bathroom fixtures, little stuff, nothing that couldn’t be restored to the contract in a couple of minutes.  Back into the darkness it went.  After some nagging, we were guaranteed that we'd have the agreement back by the end of the month.

Today is August 31st.  We talked to our architect about stair railings and a bathroom cabinet, with the contract still in the void or being ripped into strips by prairie dogs somewhere on the Great Plains to line their holes.  "What happened?" We asked.  "We were supposed to sign this in June?"

Our beleaguered architect stumbled through a number of awkward phrases that were not even pretend excuses. "Well, things have slipped… vacation…waiting for ducts…the acquisition."  He added, with some hope, that the head of the architectural firm is going to the factory tomorrow and would definitely exert pressure.

So, here's where it stands, or doesn't stand.  Once we finally sign the damn thing, the factory still won't schedule production of the modules for another five weeks.  And, we have to order the flooring, which takes six to eight weeks to be delivered to the factory for installation, which could bring us to mid October.  Apparently, the trolls now running the factory are very optimistic that they can put 2,500 square feet of housing together within two weeks, truck four modules across the country, and plop them on our site by November 1.  If they don't make that date or very near it, Pete warned, cold weather could prevent his crew from completing the last part of their button-up work until spring, and "you don't want to have to heat your foundation all winter long".

I am haunted by the memory of a meeting we had with Pete, Dave the HVAC guy, and our excavator Paul toward the end of June, soon after the factory ensured us that the final agreement was coming that month.  We wanted to schedule all the site work during that time.  "Everything should be done in time for the delivery of the modules, which the factory said will be here September 15th," I announced exuberantly (for tone, think Shirley Temple tapping out the Good-Ship-Lollipop).  At that point, Dave, staring at me with those droopy, knowing, sad eyes began a dirge under his breath, "We wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year." Haha, I laughed, enjoying the joke. "Haha."





Monday, August 3, 2015

Singing Into the Abyss

At seven o'clock sharp, Cameron Mitchell, the MC for Club Helsinki's open mic, introduced the first act, a fellow about my age, who clambered up the steps and rooted himself onto the stage, firmly clasping his battered guitar, beaming with amber light. After some string twiddling, he belted out Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit, exultant in his past acid-laced youth, pretty much on key, ending the song ecstatically, if inaccurately, "Remember what the doorman said, feed your head, feed your head".  

My son Geoff leaned over and whispered to me, "I hope they're all like that." He, his wife Kim, two of their boys, and Michael and were seated around a table a level up from the stage. Michael, my grandsons and I were eating; my son and Kim were not: they were there to perform. 

Every Tuesday, anyone can sign up for open mic starting at six, but it's prudent to arrive by five or five-thirty, since the time slots generally fill up right away.  The music starts at seven and ends at eleven, with each performer playing two songs for a maximum of ten minutes.  Geoff and Kim had gotten there after the slots had been booked but were told they would probably be able to play, so they reserved a table and we showed up a little later with their boys to have dinner and watch their debut. 

My son and daughter-in-law met at Music and Art High School in Manhattan 30 years ago, Geoff accepted for painting and Kim for singing.  Except for the essential college break-up, they have been together ever since. Now that their three sons have reached ages of, if not reason, then a certain measure of self-sufficiency, they have decided to resurrect their youthful talents. After practicing for several months and accumulating a cache of about 100 songs, they were eager to perform publicly. This was their first gig. 

Hudson is not only a foodie, art, and antique town, it's also a place for good music.  Fine local musicians and singers show up regularly along Warren, Hudson's main street, to perform in restaurants, book stores, farmer's markets, and even street-facing apartments, where agreeable residents open up their place to the public so their friends can have an audience.

Club Helsinki, however, is the town's best-established venue for rock, blues, and alternative music.  A block over from Warren on Columbia Street, it serves good Southern comfort food and hosts important musicians, gifted professionals just starting out, and, once a week, the open mic hopefuls. The owners moved the club to Hudson a few years ago after entertaining people down the road in Great Barrington, Massachusetts for 15 years.  They bought one of Hudson's old gorgeous brick industrial buildings and carved out three beautiful rooms: an event space upstairs and on the first floor the restaurant and night club, which can be closed off from each other or opened up and connected by a graceful dark wood carousel of a bar riding between them.  The club itself has three levels of dining tables circling half the stage and a wholly professional sound and lighting system, which enhances all its musicians – from the famous to the anxious and the brave during open mic.

Cameron, who is not only the evening's MC but also a co-owner of Helsinki, is assisted each week by C. Ryder Cooley, who wanders the stage between acts, fixing wiring, adjusting mics, and making the newbie musicians more at ease. Strapped to her back is a stuffed bighorn sheep's head named Hazel, who stares bleak-eyed at the audience while Ryder does her various tasks. At first sight, I dismissed Cooley as deeply pretentious, ("Oh, god. A local girl being cute with a dead animal.") As the evening wore on, however, Hazel evolved into an eccentric but effective punctuation point for Ryder's own impressive musical gifts. Over the course of the evening she strolled in every once in a while to sing and produce strange and beautiful songs on the accordion, the ukulele, and the saw.  (I Googled her afterward and saw that when she's not helping nervous musical newbies on Tuesday night, Cooley is a performance artist as well as a song writer and talented player of weird instruments.)

And she wasn't the only good performer. Unfortunately, the acts following the White Rabbit singer were significantly more skillful and professional than his.   Geoff and Kim were told they would be playing around nine, and as the evening presented one good act after another, my son became increasingly anxious. Even though Geoff has played the guitar since he was seven he had never performed publicly, When he and Kim were finally called up to play, he later described his reaction to being on stage as holding a guitar for the first time. I thought they sounded fine, skillfully performing two covers from Wilco and the Grateful Dead.  I noticed Geoff screwing up his face a couple times at some tricky chords, but he made no major errors and Kim was relaxed and easy. She was having a good time.  When they got back to the table, Geoff was silent.  His stage fright had been unexpected and disturbing.  After they returned to their home in Queens, he wasn't able to look at this guitar for a few days.  Kim was undaunted, however, and Geoff realized he had to get back on the stage, so two weeks later they were back in Hudson for another attempt.

This time they arrived to sign up on time so that they were officially slotted in.  We reserved a table again for dinner.  That night after the opening act -- a bearded fellow playing David Bowie songs on a battered electric guitar -- Cameron read a text from Ryder, who was taking the week off in the North Woods, in which she complained that Hazel, lacking even a phantom tail, was unable to swish off the flies and there were no cats, but plenty of mice.

The musicians for the most part were not the same as those who performed two weeks before.  An exception was a young man from Brooklyn with a pleasing Eddie-Vetter-like voice who sang and played his own songs and was noticeably more relaxed this time, a good sign, I thought, for Geoff.  Again, as during the previous event, nearly all the performers were competent, skillful, and occasionally thrilling.

An appealing feature of open mic night is the on-and-off again appearance of local solid musicians (including Cameron on keyboard), who jump in to play throughout the night, collectively jamming as an improvised band or playing alone as soloists or as back ups to enrich the sound of other less experienced solitary musicians. 

Aaron, a young bass guitarist with excellent long hair, was particularly generous with his time and talent, deepening and strengthening the tunes for a number of homegrown guitarists, fiddlers, and singers.  One was Joan, who, with her r 
ound glasses, curly gray hair, and frumpy linen skirt, looked like everybody's third grade teacher. With Aaron unobtrusively backing her up in the shadows, she stood wide-footed behind her large acoustic guitar and forcefully strummed out and sang two original songs. I particularly liked the first, which involved trapping garden pests – mice, chipmunks, voles, moles, and woodchucks – taking them down the road and dumping them in the neighbor's yard.

Another excellent singer/musician regular, wrapped in dark clothes and so incredibly skinny that he looked like black lightning, introduced an original piece that he described as a love song.  Funny and haunting at the same time, it spoke for every love affair stuttering to its end with the refrain, "We're half way cross the river. Why shoot the horses now?"   

Our kids followed the lightning man. With the first few notes, I knew Geoff was relaxed and handling the guitar with his usual skill and competence.  He also has a genetic facility for picking out cord progressions and arrangements for even ordinary songs that resonate with the heart. That night Kim's sultry natural voice and physical ease played off against his focused attention, vibrantly revealing both the musical tension between them and the harmonious rhythm of their long affectionate marriage.  Another Wilco.  Another Grateful Dead. Applause.  One of the other musicians complimented them.  They were happy.  I was happy.

Certainly since the late fifties, American culture has danced, swayed, raved, and hopped on its music, and the musicians that come to open mic, performing spontaneously and unrewarded, exemplify the aching joy, anger, and grief in their home made songs that, for better or worse, underlie the currents of our nation's fantasies.

 "We wish we could play here every week," Kim said after we had gotten back to our barn. "We're going to work up some original songs," Geoff added, "for next time."  And when they're back, I'm bringing a crowd.