I'm two days back from my fourteen day stint at a camp in northern Ontario, a gold mine under construction called 'cote gold'. As a union electrician it was lucrative, but in other ways it was harrowing. All our work was outdoors. Stunted pine trees or bulldozed, barren, naked hills, now just dirt and rock, surrounded us. We had four inches of slushy snow October eighteenth. Can any of my readers out there say the same. The camp was crowded, regimented and the food terrible. I now know the meaning of 'gulag'. I'm not going back. So I'm back here, writing. I did strike a few veins of gold up in that wasteland, not in the ground but in the stories I heard from my companions there, travellers from all over Ontario, leading the gypsy life, often rude and rough characters (the types a gold strike attracts) but full of stories and tales, human interest stories, which with a show of interest on my part they shared, as it was often all they had, gambling, ex-wives, drugs and other vices barely maintaining the two thousand dollar a week salaries they made. Some of them, after twenty years of hard toil would be homeless except for this ever shifting camp existence.
Here are a few pictures I took a week ago for any of you doubters out there. The sunrises were beautiful. The rest was dismal. Being a literary fool, I sometimes wondered in my jaded imagination which circle of Hell Dante would have placed this camp, as his descriptions included both burning and frozen landscapes.
So I'm glad I escaped live. Northern Ontario is a bitch from October to May when it starts warming up again with mosquitoes and black flies that eat you alive.
Let's return to my youth (my forties) and a time in the beautiful village of Hoboken.
Remodelled since our work in the Fall of 1996
Two days later we landed in Newark. One thing I talked Buddy into, which turned out even more to his satisfaction, (and Mike’s, his boss) was to take Frank with us, the taper, the drywall finisher, black Frank. Buddy hadn’t met him or seen his work. But I gave him such glowing praise, which I gave to no one else, he trusted me on this one and within a few weeks thanked me for it, agreeing he was a miracle of talent. I’d seen Frank at work for several years. Even before I met him Jaime praised him to the skies, saying he’d never seen such a prodigy and Jaime had as good an eye for skill as the best of us.
Frank could take any uneven wall and with one-third the mud and one-third the time and effort make it ice rink smooth and perfect. In our store build-outs we tested him sometimes, just to admire the sight. We’d give him one sheet-rocked wall to tape and mud and finish, one half of the store, and the other side to any other finisher. He’d be done in half the time, taping, mudding, sanding through the three coats and his walls were perfection, with one five gallon bucket of mud used. His closest competitor took a day longer and used three buckets and in the end had flaws to the close observer.
Frank was a Picasso at his trade and every contractor who saw him at work recognized it. He was having problems with his family life in Rincon and jumped at this chance of escape. He sat beside me on the plane flight. Buddy saw his talent and flew him back again for other stores. Mike even loved him, Italian, Mafia Mike, and the most prejudiced and unlikely person to befriend or even speak to a black man.
He had a habit of calling black people ‘Moulinyans’ or ‘eggplants’ because of their black-purple color, but never Frank. Mike ran ten high class bars, spread all over northern New Jersey and catering to the rich and famous, building a new one every few years. This was his latest, with no plans or permits, only bribes for inspectors, all cash, ‘Planet Hoboken’.
I remember the electrical inspector came by once in the middle of our build-out. He was told to be there at ten, an older man in his sixties, grey hair. I was waiting at the front door and a little worried, as we had no permits, and I had no New Jersey license. Just as he arrived Mike pulled up in his black Cadillac, got out, walked up and asked if he’d like a coffee. He was handed a Styrofoam cup, lid closed. He smiled at Mike, handed him a piece of paper and drove off. It was the mid-progress electrical inspection, signed off, everything passed. The final permit, the ‘use’ permit to open the business would cost another coffee cup. I never knew how many hundred dollars bills were stuffed inside. But from my previous experience with wads of bills I figured it could have been up to five thousand. More wouldn’t have fit.
I loved this job for all the possibilities it gave me, fully in charge to design an electrical system from scratch, the architect and builder all in one, a whole new game for me. The building was situated at the front of the large cobblestone square facing the ferry building and the waterfront. It had been a well-known breakfast restaurant there for fifty years, called ‘Schaefer's’. Mike bought it, we gutted it and began to turn it into a high-class bar, or rather three bars in three sections it was so large, each with a unique ambience and look. He was brilliant in his business acumen and the place became a huge, profitable success from the day it opened.
Few people drove into Manhattan. Parking was next to impossible near Wall street. Many of the brokers lived in mansions in northern New Jersey. They parked in Hoboken and took the five minute ferry ride across the Hudson for two dollars, picking up a bagel and a Wall Street Journal for the ride. Then they had a three minute walk to the stock exchange.
Their day’s work done, back in Hoboken and on the way to the parking lot and a forty minute drive home, why not stop at this fancy, neon bar for one or two quick shots, with music booming, all the waitresses Playboy Bunny material, (interviewed and hand picked by Mike) three sections on two floors, each with its distinct look, music and women, all dressed to the hilt, not only the knock-out bartender girls but dozens of women clients on the prowl, ready to meet and drive off with the Wall Street types, discreet prostitutes. The place was always packed from five to eight. But many stayed on, getting drunk, so it rocked till closing at two.
Mike made a fortune, with high priced drinks and the décor and clientele to match. Buddy and I built it from scratch. Mike gave us vague instructions of what he wanted, the atmosphere of each section. In the large front bar at the entrance he wanted panache. He had us hang from the high ceiling, upside down and slightly angled, the body of a fifty-six Cadillac convertible, cherry red, with whitewall tires, on wires, with only the engine and transmission taken out to lose weigh. But you couldn’t see that.
He had me build a wall of large T.V.’s, sixteen of them stacked up, four by four. I made the brackets to park each one, the screens touching each other in one big square and lifted each into its spot, nearly wrecking my back. But I did all my work alone, without any help. When I powered them up, they were so close together the remote control for one would activate four or five of them randomly. What he wanted was sixteen different news channels, a stock trader’s dream. But he didn’t figure in the cacophonous sound of sixteen different channels blaring, drowning out each other, impossible to watch and annoying to be near, a headache machine.
I convinced him to buy a special mixer, which split the sixteen screens each into one-sixteenth of the picture, making one huge T.V. on one channel. He loved that solution. But this mixer cost sixteen thousand dollars. It was high tech back then. I don’t recall how I knew about it, but I did. He’d never heard of such a thing and didn’t like the price tag but got over that as soon as he saw the result, an impressive ten foot square screen.
Like I said he had no blueprints, no architects or fees, saving tens of thousands in that respect. But no legit electrical contractor would touch his build-outs, having nothing to bid. He’d tried a few on earlier projects with disastrous results. He kept changing things as the bar would slowly materialize and take shape before his eyes.
He was like a painter at his easel, reconsidering the picture with each new dab of paint. But contract electricians would demand exorbitant prices for every rework which happened every few days, as he was on site every day for hours as it neared completion, wandering and looking about, staring at one wall or another for ten minutes, rubbing his chin, musing. Then he’d call Buddy over and say he wanted some piece of art moved or a mirror added, and the bar shortened by three feet to make room for another decoration he’d just bought from some antique shop. Buddy was happy with every alteration, being on an hourly wage and so was I.
Buddy told me from the start this would happen frequently. I had a simple solution for that. Buddy guessed this before we started, from my wide experience. The old restaurant had a low, six foot high basement underneath the entire first floor. The previous electricians who had worked on the building and modified its every change for over fifty years were fools. I hate to say this against brother tradesmen, but they really were so. They ran single circuits in a metal clad wire called ‘bx’ to every location they needed for a plug or light from the three large panels at the entrance of the basement, the distribution center for the whole building. I found that all the buildings in this area were wired like this and fixed several others after their owners saw what I did with Mike’s place.
The first thing to do was to rip everything out. It was a tangle of wires, a jungle, a spaghetti of ‘bx’, some used, many long dead, because when anything was added or obsoleted, the lazy fools took the easiest route leaving the old wires there, disconnected and stuffed behind a ceiling beam, and each new plug or item was fed anew with another ‘bx’, pulled from the panels, the old wires pulled out, still hanging in bundles beside it. So the basement ceiling and the panels were a huge mess, sixty percent of them dead and in the way, the other forty all tangled around them. I’m reminded of some lines in Milton’s Lycidas:
Were it not better done, as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair?
So I turned the panels off and stripped that ceiling bare. This only took a few days. Then I set up a grid of one inch metal conduit. It comes in ten foot lengths. With each piece I parked a large junction box, (a four-eleven for any of you in the trade). This gave me a network covering the whole basement ceiling, built in less than a week. From there I could tap through the floor to any power needed with short whips, now four feet long instead of eighty. The conduit could hold eleven circuits in wires and I had five of these plugged into each panel and the panels themselves joined together with two inch sleeves. Because it was a square grid I could re-route wires anywhere within minutes. It was something like a subway grid, servicing a city.
Mike wondered at my design, (never having seen anything like it) but was happy at how quickly it was built and the wires pulled, (and far cheaper than miles of ‘bx’) as I hooked up each item as the bar progressed. One day he decided he wanted three huge, six hundred gallon fish tanks arranged in one far corner. They would require six new circuits for pumps and lights and filters. That’s what the salesman told him. He asked me what trouble that would be, expecting it would be a lot. I told him I could pull six new circuits to that corner in a few hours, the grid and boxes to handle it were in place. When the equipment came in I told him it would take three more hours to install the power strips needed. He was amazed.
Any electrical contractor would have come up with a figure well over a thousand, and he knew it. I was getting paid twenty dollars an hour and finished it off in five, working alone.
