Gas-fitters are bonded. I was quite proud of being worthy and I strove to live up to the excellence expected of me. After the first year, my Boss told me that compared to the gas-fitter employed by his partner in our shared warehouse, I was about half as fast. The good part, he said, was that the other fitter averaged a 40% inspection failure rate and thus wasted the time saved by having to return and fix things up. Boss had never had to re-do any pipes I made.
You can tell my pipes at a glance. They are all perfect right angles and tight tolerances. They are screwed shut like a boys eyes after biting into a lemon. They are strapped tighter than a race car driver's seat belt and they are spray painted with a certain panache. If they could speak, they would speak Swedish. Well over a thousand of my tradesman tags are yellowing as I write this, from Deep Cove to Horseshoe Bay.
Sometimes little things went wrong, the same as they do in your job, Dear reader. One morning I filled the gas tank of my step-van so I wouldn't have to stop for the rest of the day on the way to the other jobs. The first job was at a massive house in the British Properties of West Vancouver. That's the neighbourhood where Oprah keeps an address.
This place was landscaped, had a tennis-court, a swimming-pool and a little house in the backyard that would have served me and my wife just fine. The manse was situated on a hilltop and had one of those wonderful semi-circular driveways that was as fresh and black as a cup of Starbucks. I learned that it had been completed only a week prior. After coaxing our groaning chariot up the impossible slope of that asphalt ski-jump I set the hand brake, put the gear selector in Low and my young Danish partner Lars suggested we chock the wheels as well.
We had to use a lot of cardboard on that job to protect the white plush carpets within. It was necessary to set up my pipe threader in the garage because of the highly manicured lawn. The job went well albeit, slowly due to the care and attention required in such gentile and cultivated surroundings. One gas-fired swimming pool heater, furnace, water-heater, range and fireplace later, the little Dane and I were packing up.
I was coming out with a load of soiled cardboard when I heard him laugh. Lars could laugh in such a manner, that had he been in boot-camp, the Drill Sergeant would have quickly suggested that they all change out of their uniforms and just go home. I went to see the source of his mirth and I smelled it before I saw it.
The slope of the driveway was so extreme as to put the fill-pipe of my gas tank on a plane nearly fifteen degrees off the level. The good Mohawk gas had run out till only about half remained. The bad part was that we discovered something interesting about chemistry that day. Apparently, gasoline actually dissolves asphalt, rendering it absolutely liquid. It was the wildest thing you ever saw.
A rivulet of blackish muck had dug a bed about a foot wide that ran the length of the driveway and then veered off into the nearby drain. The ground underneath was showing through all the way down.
“M7 to M8. Over.”
“Go ahead Mick. Over.”
“Boss, I just found out that gasoline is the perfect solvent for asphalt. I also learned not to fill the gas-tank on this rig, she prefers to be half-full. Over.”
“Are you at that Properties job? The one with the steep drive? Over.”
“Yep.”
“Get your butts to the next job and I'll swing by later today to have a look. Over”
One time Lars' curiosity got the better of him. I tried to warn him as an older brother should. We were doing a job for two nurses. Lars had to traipse through the house to access the heat runs and thus was in every room as well as the attic. My time was spent outside and in the furnace room. I told him to stay out of the fridge. He was allowed to look but not touch. He was fascinated at the crap that non-Scandinavians called food and used to horrify himself at ever opportunity.
This time he went beyond checking out the fridge. I could hear some strange sounds coming from the living room. It sounded like the TV. I was mad. I told him to turn it off and get back to work. That resulted in him turning the volume up. I yelled at him in Swedish and he replied with the laugh. A laugh that would get a turtle to come out of its shell in a room full of raccoons.
I laid down sufficient cardboard to get me within striking range of the wayward imp. When I rounded the corner on my corrugated walkway, I saw the cause of this new mirth.
"Debbie Does Dallas, dude!" he grinned.
Twenty minutes later I told him to turn it off and I lectured him about touching other peoples things. VHS was the cutting edge at that time and I didn't know how to work the equipment. I stood sternly to verify that the youngster took the rented tape out of the player. He swore and he fiddled. He fiddled and he swore. Not only could he not get the freaking tape out, the TV refused to shut off! He tried every remote control device in the room and I looked at my ten dollar watch. A decision had to be made.
I told him to leave it playing. Hopefully the tape would run out. Each lady would likely think that the other left it on. If not, they likely wouldn't have the cheek to phone and complain. I told Lars that he would shoulder the responsibility for this one if they did. I began to feel like I was turning into my grandfather and he looked genuinely concerned for about two minutes. As we finished off the job he imitated the unholy noises issuing from the television. No complaints ever came forward from the good nurses but I never looked at medical professionals the same way afterwards.
One fine morning a few months later, Lars and I were treated to Radar Love on the radio. I had to pull over the truck until we were done with our air guitars. We were headed to a job high up on the hills above North Van. It was a spectacular day of turquoise sky and mother of pearl cumulus clouds. The address proved to be a grand old house with a well established garden. Lars said the owners must be Yugoslavian and I said Italian. I could tell by the pomodori tomatoes, rosemary plants, fig trees and the zucchini in the garden.
I was right. After we had worked studiously for awhile, the donna della casa invited us to come to her beautiful tiled kitchen for coffee and sweets. She was a pleasant single middle-aged woman and told us the history of her beautiful house. As we munched homemade biscotti we learned the story of her grandfather who had been born in hardscrabble Calabria. He tearfully left his home soil and immigrated to Canada armed with only a battered suitcase and a cutting from the ancestral grape-vine.
He did many jobs and found himself a nice Italian woman to marry. After our hostess's mother was born, he got a steady job, bought the lot and built the house. His daughter grew up and married. She inherited the house without need of it and gave it to her only daughter, our hostess who had spent many precious hours there with her beloved nonni as a young girl.
The lady motioned us over to her kitchen window. It was above a full height basement and it had a commanding view of a large back yard. The whole window was wreathed by a profusion of beautiful grape leaves. We were treated to a few of the grapes from the ancestral vine. It had become a mighty thing over the generations, growing up a trellis built by the old man himself. It ran above and around the kitchen window so one could sample the fruit without ever leaving the kitchen. Lars happily polished off the remaining biscotti and we thanked the kind and interesting woman for everything.
Part of my duties that day was to install a gas fireplace. I had to put a tee fitting near the gas meter and run pipe along the side wall around the corner and along the back wall. Then, according to my measurements, I had to drill into a joist-space that was behind the ancient grapevine. From that planned point of entry, I would be able to run hidden pipe under the kitchen floor and come up through the living room floor near the unit.
The location for the entry hole was about two feet to the left of the kitchen window on the second floor and several feet down. I made a little X with purple magic marker and after stringing extension cords, setting up my ladder and waving to the pretty woman in the window, I was ready to use the Makita.
It was my new pride and joy. It had cost a me a bundle but was worth every penny. It was an exceptionally powerful electric drill with a large end grip and two long thick handles set at right angles to the bit. My step-father had shown me how to file the auger bit into a formidable weapon. The auger was an inch and a half in diameter and about sixteen inches long. It had a screw for a point, so it pulled the main cutting surface into the wood.
It could happily chew its way through hundred year old fir that would have broken a good saw. If a man were to put the auger in a large vise and do a handstand, the motor would easily spin him around like a child on a merry-go-round. A week of using it rendered the thought of not having it as being impossible. I plugged it in and did a few test squeezes of the trigger. The motor purred like a mountain lion. I waved at the woman in the window and mounted the ladder.
I carefully parted the grape leaves, tendrils and branches just enough to get the Makita lined up. I had to jam the end grip into my shoulder to apply enough forward pressure to keep things level. Both my hands gripped the two cross-handles. The screw bit into the aged cladding and I could smell the aromatic wood chips being voided by the drill. When I calculated that I should be through the barrier, I could feel that I had come in a wee bit too close to the joist.
There was a spike which had gone into the joist on an angle and protruded out the side of it into the path of my drill. The bit caught fast on it. The torque was transferred from the arrested bit into the handle housing. My right fist which tightly gripped one of the handles, delivered a hay-maker punch to my jaw and knocked me sprawling.
Just before leaving the ladder I instinctively reached out to break my fall. The patriarchal vine peeled away from the old stucco in stubborn slow motion and set me down as gently as a kitten in a basket. The first thing I saw between the foliage when I regained my wits was the woman leaning halfway out the window holding her face. The Makita hung from the bare wall at a rude angle. Several hundred pounds of grape-vine lay all around the yard.
“Oh my Gad-da! Are you-a hoort?”
“I'm OK. Nothing broken. My jaw hurts, is all. Your grandfather's grape-vine saved me. Ma'am, I'm awful sorry for this.”
That's when I heard the laugh. Lars appeared from the basement and was more in need of medical treatment than myself due to his shortness of breath. He kept chuckling for the two hours it took us to re-attach the trellis to the wall and restore the vine to its former place. It was thick enough at the base that it had only bent without breaking. We had to use rope, two ladders, an entire roll of pipe hanger and dozens of sheet-metal screws.
When we finished the job we were treated to home-made antipasto. After a final inspection of the trellis, the woman decided that our Boss needn't be bothered with news of this incident. The vine was more securely attached than before and the fireplace was working nicely. I shall never forget that gracious woman and Lars seemed likely to never let me forget my debut as an aerial stuntman.
fin