The Wicked Child

Learning to work with my hands after a life at the keyboard

I’ve been wanting to tell you something, to write something, for what feels like years now, but I haven’t had much to share. Since moving to Crown Heights just as the vaccines started to proliferate, my life has become hermetic in the blankness of work from home. Pale walls gather and release sunlight. No kids or pets race underfoot to trip up my time. After a roaring childhood, a quiet house to myself with wool rugs and muted furnishings is like a comforter in a winter bedroom. But I have to be careful. With too much quiet the tidy rooms and quiet hallways become a minimalist mid-century modern coffin.

I sit at my laptop in a room with ivory walls. I move to the office for a video call and then back to the alabaster breakfast counter. Spare walls and filtered sun create a silent white wash, the same color Jews wear at our story’s end.

A kittel is a white robe Jewish men wear at major holidays and then at death. Yes, you wear your death shroud throughout your adult life. Very punk rock.

Along with all this visual blankness is the silence. I’m one of those unlucky people who find music distracting when I work. So I sit in my silent house working on my laptop to coax a handful of digits to rise and regrettably diminish on my bank’s website. At home. Alone.

We should have seen it coming. For well educated, vaguely upper middle class, usually white folk born from middle class white folk, working at a laptop is our teleology. Being tethered to an internet connected computer is our end of days.

And by internet-connected, I mean everything. If you’re in publishing, academia, design, the arts, finance, marketing, communications, many forms of the law, photography, gaming, genomics, psychotherapy, you get it, if you’re making money in the modern economy, more often than not you’re on a wifi-enabled laptop. And laptops are designed for one person. You.

If you’ve gone to a more selective school and ended it with a pat on the head and a badge on the wall, then the hardest thing you’ll ever do with your hands is make a sandwich. And with indentured gig workers with no benefits literally sweating it out to deliver your food, not even that.

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I’m bred for physical uselessness. Most of us are like this now. For me, I sit at a white breakfast bar and look at a grey laptop, I turn to the white patio doors that lead into a green backyard crowded with weeds and I wonder what it would be like to be outside.

If you’ve been following my writing, or if we’ve met, you’ll notice I’m a little feral. My father is a farm boy from the Connecticut River Valley. He picked wrapper leaf tobacco at age 11, darting along rafters scores of feet in the air in steeple-roofed tobacco barns you can still see on the side of the road. There were no ropes or safety equipment.

My maternal grandfather grew up in an communal village for Jewish refugees way up in the woods of the Laurentian Mountains. They didn’t have electricity or running water. They definitely had a Clydesdale for logging work and to pull the family wagon. All of the grandchildren know his name: Big Jim. Like my dad, grandpa and Big Jim, I’m bad at following rules meant to pent me up. I have my own ideas about how to do things. Often this results in injury and alienation, but that’s another story.

When I open my kitchen doors to at least imagine being outside as I type on a keyboard, houseflies the size of bats race in as if they’ve been impatiently queuing up. Once inside, they draw fast, tragic spirals in the air until I chase them out or discover their corpses days later, massacred by a window.

Come darkness, mosquitos make the whole thing impossible. It took me a while until I realized it. I needed screens.

How does one get screens for doors that open outwards? Indoor screen doors—right?

The developer sold me this house in a finished state of bland yet luxurious renovation. It’s the first home I’ve owned. After leaving my mother’s well-tended suburban house outside Boston at 18, I’ve only been a renter. Making a repair means emailing the landlord.

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Hours before the closing on the house, I arranged to have one of the cable duopolies install a fiber optic line.

The installer drilled a hole under the office window to thread an outdoor cable through the wall, along the baseboard and into a closet. He noticed the exterior hole he drilled went into the metal flashing of the window. This could leak. Then he noticed me noticing him noticing his hole, which was now my hole.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Just get your window guy to patch it up.”

I kept it to myself, but I felt a canyon of absence. I didn’t have a window guy.

In time I learned. I have windows so I need a window guy. I have oak floors so I need an oak floor guy. (Thanks to my friend Jesse, I found Maurice, happy to send a reference.) I have a roof with mounted condensers, a basement, half a dozen heat pumps, plumbing, toilets, a dishwasher, a microwave and an oven. A clothes washer and a dryer. A water heater. Masonry and drywall. I have a yard. Electricity runs in the walls. All of these things need a guy. (Fun fact: half of the listed items broke in the first six months.)

Then, for me, comes the very slow realization that you’ve probably already figured out.

You don’t need all those guys. OK, for the microwave motherboard replacement you need a guy. But otherwise, you are the guy. You must be the guy. Or more like, the little kid, since there’s no way one person can be grown-up smart enough to fix all these things. The moment the closing happens—or in the hours before in this case—you need to gain a massive amount of knowledge in no time.

For those Jews reading this, let me put it like this. I will explain it later. You need to transition from being the Wicked Child, to the Child Who Doesn’t Know How to Ask, to the Simple Child, and finally, if you’re lucky, to the Wise Child. And you have to do it right now. The basement is flooding, a smoke detector shrieks and the dishwasher just made a weird sound before it stopped. If you can’t afford the mortgage payments you won’t be evicted, you’ll be financially ruined. No you can’t call anyone for help. Go!

Like the Wise Child, who says “what does this story mean to me, ” I have to do the work, or at least talk about it in a halfway intelligent way. Or at least drill holes into things not easily patched.

During the Passover seder Jews read a book, the Haggadah, that recounts Exodus. There’s a famous passage about four children who grapple with the story. The wicked child rejects it, the silent child doesn’t know how to question, the simple child asks “what is this?” and the wise child takes responsibility for it.

So, the patio screens. I wanted screen doors for my kitchen to keep out the baby bat flies and vampiric mosquitos, but I couldn’t buy screens from my window manufacturer and have some hotshot big man install them. That would be too easy. Why? The manufacturer doesn’t make screen doors. They make glass doors and windows, which all need screens, but for some reason they don’t make them.

Since the doors have tight dimensions by the breakfast bar where I spend 99% of my time, and not wanting to remove shades that I had perhaps foolishly paid to have a guy install on the patio doors—since who needs shades on patio doors?—there was no room for aftermarket retractable screen doors. Yes, by now I had realized I could call the salesman for the door manufacturer and ask about aftermarket screens. But third party retractable screens wouldn’t fit. I got quotes. From two different resellers who sent guys to my place to make measurements.

Now what? With unavoidable help from the internet search monopoly, I found a manufacturer: MosquitoCurtains.com. More like, CurtainsAgainstMosquitos.com. I could buy curtains: panels of fabric made of fine woven netting. The two panels click closed with magnets. They articulate back and forth on a track; they are fastened to the ends of the door frames with heavy duty metal snaps, so they form something like a wall of netting that you can pull apart from the middle, like regular curtains over French doors. In theory. If panel measurement and the installation is correct.

The product comes from a website full of pictures and words, not from a neighborhood store with a kindly person with experience. You have to do all the selecting and measuring yourself. Except you don’t know what you’re doing.

“What does this mosquito screen mean to you?” the Wicked Child asks.

After many measurements, emails to the company, three wrong website orders — they kept putting in the wrong colors (I wanted white, like my kittel), and after I misinterpreted the scores of parts needed to assemble the bug resistant curtains, I paid my money and waited. Weeks later, a delivery guy dropped off a 7’ tall cardboard tube and a surprisingly heavy squat rectangular box. I moved them to a corner in my dining room where they remained for weeks. The few people who visited didn’t notice them, but I have a thing about things piling up in corners. It’s very, very, very bad to have items not in their right places for more than a few minutes. Chairs are designed for your tush, not clothing or books. You get the idea.

Then it got worse. The packages began to taunt me.

“Go ahead,” they scolded. “See if you can assemble us. I dare you.”

I did the right thing and ignored them. Never give in to pressure—cf. my desire to go my own way that usually leaves me alienated… but proud.

One day I found myself with too much time. The gravity of an unkempt corner and the badgering of the objects pushed me too far.

I taunted them back with the Massachusetts grammar of my youth. “Let’s go see if I can’t open and assemble you!”

I watched how-to videos on a website owned by the search engine monopolist. After repeat viewings I had a fuzzy picture of how to set this thing up. Could I hire a handyman to assemble the curtains? Yes, but that handyman would have to puzzle out the kit the same way I was puzzling out the kit. Could MosquitoCurtains.com, which should be CurtainsAgainstMosquitos.com, send a guy to do this and be added to my gender-specific harem of house repair specialists? No, they couldn’t. Believe me, I asked.

I opened the 7’ tube, like a poster container for a giant teenagers’s bedroom, and the very heavy box. I laid out the parts they contained on my white marble counter with very few counter top appliances because you should never have too many of those.

There were fabric panels, fiberglass rods that needed to be cut, sanded and burned for some reason, a metal rail that needed to be trimmed with a hacksaw I didn’t own. Then it had to be marked and drilled. There were plastic bags full of heavy duty “marine snaps” that needed to be drilled into the wall and then stapled to the fabric edges, a collection of high strength magnets, plastic clips, scores of curtain gliders and various tools. I watched the video a few more times.

Finally I felt it.

Fuck these motherfuckers.

Music pumps, spotlights fly over the room.

“Ladies aaaaaaand gentlemen,” booms a voice. “Welcome to the President Street Fight! In this corner, weighing in at what we hope remains 150 lbs and would honestly be better at 140, is Zachary Thacher. In the other corner, with over ten thousand pieces and several sharp objects, we have Mosquito Curtains. Now fight!”

The bell gongs! I race in and throw a right, a left, I’m sawing into my marble counters and drilling on wood cutting boards, things are looking good, I’m making progress and damaging some things but it’s cool and then….!

I realized two critical pieces are missing. I checked the many items again. I watched the video, slowed it done, replayed it. The fight was now over. I was deep in forensic mode. I took a screenshot of the video to examine an image more closely. Yep, the two important pieces were not here. I was pretty sure I was right. I think I understood it now. I emailed the company. They agreed, I was right.

Victory!

If you’re keeping score, I’ve made no progress, but my intellectual abilities have been validated. To me this is an important pat on the head.

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I waited for the pieces to show up. No, I couldn’t pre-assemble the rest of the curtains in their absence. You’re so silly to try and be all efficient about this. I had thought about continuing the work long and hard while in bed late at night. I’m not kidding. I was consumed. I came to the conclusion the missing items were critical early stage pieces. In the end, like in most things, I was wrong. But at the time, if you were to bring in a psychoanalyst and she listened to me for a few months while charging me the price of a used car, we’d realize it felt comforting to have an excuse to avoid the work. Boxing is scary.

Then the parts arrived. My online calendar — which is owned by the same monopoly that controls the search engine and the video website — showed a free column of time.

Now there was no boxing match metaphor with bright lights, no hip hop remix of Hava Nagila to introduce me. Assembling the curtains became a march into darkness. It would take me to dangerous terrain I could only imagine. I was scared, I had no flashlight, my compass didn’t work, my shoes were falling apart, mosquitos plotted against me, but the only way to survive was forward.

I took a hacksaw I had bought from a local hardware store to recut the metal track. I had learned to put down more mats so I didn’t deeply scratch my kitchen counter. The track jerked around each time I pulled or pushed the saw. A person to hold it would have helped, or a vise on a work table would do the trick, but I didn’t have a work space in my house and if I did, I wouldn’t know how to use it. It was also better to be alone. I didn’t want to discuss assembly plans with a friend or a lover, plans barely formed in my mind, plans with a tenuous connection to physics and logic. Plans that start discussions that spark arguments that incinerate relationships.

I watched videos, accomplished a few tasks, watched more videos and somewhat completed more tasks.

I was scared, frustrated, nostalgic and annoyed. I was angry and full of loathing. I was furious and felt diminished in my loneliness, a child in a thunderstorm. I had all the feelings a man my age has who keeps bad thoughts under a vast and injurious pressure deep inside him instead of just saying, “I want to cry.”

I’m not a violent person so I didn’t smash anything, I mostly criticized myself, which is the same self destructive reflex as breaking an item you love.

I needed water. It had been two hours. Pieces lay on my floor, on the counter and in my pockets.

I used a power drill with multiple bits, a seam knife, a plastic drinking straw (really) and a hammer.

I thought of my maternal grandfather, Chaim Lazar Vozick, the man from the mountains outside Montreal. He was born in Odessa and went through Ellis Island as small child. He didn’t finish high school. He may never have gone. English wasn’t his first language—Yiddish was the mama loshen, the mother tongue. As uneducated and rural as he was, he somehow taught himself to be an X-Ray technician who then faked his way in New York City as an engineer and entrepreneur. When I was thirteen, I asked him what he had done special for his Bar Mitzvah in La Macaza, the mountain hamlet. He thought about it a moment. “We ate a chicken.”

I did a few more steps. I now needed two types of wrenches and a gigantic claw-like metal tool for the marine snaps. And two pieces of chalk.

I thought of my father. We have a more mysterious relationship than I did with my grandfather of blessed memory, whom I never knew as a young man.

My dad and I have a hot and loving and challenging connection that is often like whiskey, it’s good at the right times and helps make life joyous, but it can kill you if you’re not careful. OK, that’s what it was like in earlier years which no longer linger. What we have now is love. It’s no longer so complicated.

As a young man punctured by two years of combat medic duty in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, he had learned how to maintain and fire weapons and practice field medicine. I’ll spare you the grisly details but let’s just say hacksaws were involved. When he came back to the USA he taught himself how to repair cars, he ground valves and fixed engines and did other things I don’t understand.

At age 16 I was deep in my alternative skate punk phase. My parents were divorced. My dad took me on a night drive in the suburbs to a parking lot. He said he wanted to teach me to drive stick shift. It requires working with your feet and hands at the same time in careful coordination. That’s when he noticed I was wearing John Fluevog “creeper” platform shoes.

For the next few hours he hollered, “Clutch! Now gas! Now clutch!” The car lurched and stalled. I slammed on the brakes, something was burning. My left foot was trying to ease off the left pedal and never touch the middle pedal—since when are there three pedals?—while my right foot was gently pressing on the right pedal. It was impossible. “Gas!” he yelled into my right ear. “Clutch! Now shift!”

Eventually I got it into first and then possibly second. Maybe. He took over and dropped me off at my mother’s house in Newton.

A week later we drove to Maine where he had a work meeting. This is a true story. We got out of the car and then he announced he needed to stay all day. He tossed me the keys, told me to drive home myself. And this is before GPS.

Thirty years later, I’ve only ever owned a manual. I love every minute of it. He’s a mad man but my dad knows there’s wisdom in treating fear like a mosquito: an annoyance to swat.

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By hour three, working in my kitchen, alone, in the silence, I was ready to hand myself over to the damn blood suckers. Inserting the fiberglass rods into the panels was impossible. I had made cuts in the fabric that were jagged and pock marked. I was burning things and drilling holes in places that didn’t seem right. The magnets weren’t lining up. But, with effort and time, the pieces slowly merged together to form a larger picture.

I felt fear and anger and intimidation, but it was a little less now. It was more like a worrying rattle when there should have been a steady, confident hum.

After four hours—really, I’m not kidding, I had noted my start time—the sunlight had shifted its angles across my walls. I had re-sawed and then drilled the upper metal track into the top of the door frame—but at a 45º angle since the wood frame is narrower than the track. I figured that out myself.

After using tin snips for shears, a metal file and a lighter, I had trimmed and smoothed the ends of the 7’ long fiberglass rods, which I threaded through the curtains ends. I added magnets so you can neatly snap shut the curtains. I drilled in marine snaps along the borders of the far side of each of the doors so the curtains would stay in place when shut, like how you might snap down a tarp. I threaded plastic glides to the curtain track.

It was over.

I stepped back. Yellow chalk stained the borders where I had marked slots for the magnets — as instructed. The curtains were a good two inches too long, they spilled over the floor like J. Alfred Prufrock’s unrolled trousers.

Had I installed something wrong? Was the track too low? I checked and rechecked. No, the factory had cut them too long. I could deal with that later. Or get a tailor. I tried clipping them with those black metal file clips from an office, but that didn’t look right. OK stop, just do the next step.

I pulled the curtain panels closed, the magnets didn’t “snik” together. The panels were too far to touch. Turns out I had drilled the marine snaps too far away. Turns out curtains with magnets need a good inch of slack to work properly. They need a little room to float. Curtain Guys know this, but to me it’s news.

I contacted CurtainsAgainstMosquitos to confirm that they had incorrectly cut the curtains too long and that my marine snaps were indeed too far apart. By now I had renamed the company CurtainsAgainstZachary.

An email said, yes, the curtains are too long.

I took it all apart. I spent an hour taking a subway and standing in line at one of the delivery duopolies to mail back the curtains.

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The third delivery from CurtainsAgainstHumanity arrived. I unfolded the curtains and noticed they hadn’t washed off the yellow and red chalk marks I hadn’t been able to get out with dish soap. OK. Not exactly full service.

I needed to rehang the curtains, see if they’re of the proper length, remove and redrill the snap male ends—or were they female? I never figured it out. For snaps, gender is a construct.

I threaded the gliders in the track. The panels now hung too high. The snaps didn’t line up anymore. The curtains weren’t even touching the ground. They must have tailored the panels wrong.

“What can customer service do for you,” the Evil Child asks.

I sent an inflamed email to the company. By now I was on a first name basis with the help guy, who, to his credit, never lost his cool while I was the temperature of an internal combustion engine driven by a teenager.

Before he responded, I realized—guess what?—that I was the one who had made a mistake. Not some other guy. This guy. I removed a few curtain gliders and voila. The curtains now hung right. I noticed a missing magnet that had previously been there but that’s small stuff. Over the next half hour I drilled many more holes in previously unblemished door frames so I could adjust the snaps. I removed and replaced items. I used a sponge and water. Smoothed creases and worked the track.

I took a few steps back to look. My anxiety uncoiled and drifted like smoke to other parts of the house I needed to fix and didn’t understand. The curtain wall stood firm.

I emailed the company, more gently but without apology for being a tad over the top in my previous communications because hell no. Never apologize until it’s too late and you’re so full of remorse you feel like a terrible human being.

They agreed to send the missing magnet. When it arrives, instead of fear and denial and being so overwhelmed it feels like drowning, I’ll cut a hole in the fabric, insert the magnet, line it up, use a lighter to melt the netting and seal the hole. I won’t need four boys to walk me through it. I’ll be the guy.