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electrical work on Adderall
Saturday, August 13 2005
setting: Wyndmoor, Greater Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
John drove me into the hip Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia, and we went into a 50s-style stainless steel place called the Silk City Diner for breakfast. From there we walked around the neighborhood looking in windows and being curious about veins of gentrification and real estate transactions. "Nice place you got here," John would say to some guy sweeping his stoop. "Thank you." "I'm curious, if I might ask, what you paid for this place." "I'd prefer not to say." John was also interested in knowing where all the old fire escape iron goes when a building is torn down. He'd like to have a little to work with; he has a plan of putting in a spiral staircase down to his backyard from the back of his house. He thinks a spiral staircase descending to a stone patio is much nicer than the usual backyard detailing in his neighborhood: a pressure-treated deck hovering in midair. (No matter what, he still will have to contend with a serious mosquito problem in his neighborhood.)
As we walked under the big steel bridge that carries US 30 across the Delaware to New Jersey, we wondered what happens to old bridges when they've rusted too badly to support traffic. You can't just tear them down and build a new one; you have to think ahead and build a parallel bridge before the old one fails. "Maybe," I said, "that's what this area is for." I was pointing at a swath parallel to the bridge that was slightly less-crowded with buildings and what not. "In Europe," I explained, "the cathedrals all have forests allocated to them to supply replacements for their massive beams when they rot away."
Back at John's house, I helped him rip the wall out from between the kitchen and dining room. The studs of this wall were two by threes (1.5 inches by 2.5 inches), which is in keeping with the fact that the duplexes in John's neighborhood were originally built as low income housing. But for the most part these buildings were not cheaply built, at least not by today's standards. Their façades are all made of brick and they are supported by so much foundation steel that the foundation walls are mostly decorative.
By now we were both popping recreational doses of Adderall, medication that is prescribed to John to combat his attention deficit disorder. For John it's no big deal, but for me it's like being on some sort of pharmaceutical vacation. I grind my teeth and feel at ease with myself and everyone around me. Everything seems to come so easily and all traces of adolescent fear and uncertainty evaporate. I'm in command, I have control, and I'm quite prepared to shock and awe, but I'm waiting for the right moment.
There was so much household wiring running through the demolished wall that we had to go to Home Depot to get supplies so I could reroute the circuits through the nearest vertical walls remaining. As we were checking out, we went through one of those do-it-yourself robot-mediated checkout stations, but of course I didn't pay for everything we had in our cart. Our particular checkout robot had been complaining so much that when, as we left, the anti-theft alarms went off, the robots' human supervisor just waved us through. The Adderall had me feeling cool as a cucumber. It would be an excellent drug to take prior to robbing a bank.
We worked for hours on that wall. The wall itself gave up the ghost without difficulty and most of the work turned out to be electrical. It was a good thing I was there, because John didn't know anything about household wiring. Mind you, everything I know about electrician work could be taught in a ten minute lecture, but since it's considered dangerous, for practical purposes it's as if I can wield magic. I was covered with sweat and sawdust but I was swigging Yuengling and buzzing on Adderall so it was fun. For me the main differences vacation has in comparison to work are the presence of mind-altering substances and the absence of remuneration. But people love me and they want me to come again some time - that's really all you want out of a vacation, right?
Friendships are complicated and, like snowflakes, no two are alike. In the one I have with John, he pays an unusual amount of attention to the music I've discovered and is always asking me to introduce him to new stuff. So with every visit I bring him a pile of CDs. They immediately enter a tight rotation on his stereo that lasts until he's completely worn out what he wanted from them in the first place: their freshness. On this trip I'd put together a massive pile of Low and Songs Ohia tunes, using the maddeningly unconfigurable facilities of iTunes on my iBook to prepare the CDs. We were listening to Low as we began the wall demolition project, but its creepy sober Mormon gorgeousness was completely unsuited to the business at hand, particularly as the Adderall and Yuengling kicked in later in the afternoon. We needed something louder, faster, and more balls-to-the-wall decadent. So, as a lark, I hooked my iBook to John's stereo and played a selection of tunes from the Hold Steady. "I don't know if you're going to like this," I cautioned. I hadn't remembered John being a big fan of recycled late-70s classic rock riffs. But it was a perfect soundtrack to what we were doing, and John loved it. It is, after all, the perfect mix of sex, drugs, and Catholicism. Lyrically (if not instrumentally) it's about as John as music can get.
As the Adderall wore off and our appetites returned, John made another of his bean, pepper, and goat cheese soft taco dinners. He says that's all he eats these days, and it makes perfect sense to me. If you're only going to eat one thing day in and day out, you could do a lot worse.
After we were done with all the rewiring, John and I hit the town again. We went to a nearby street of bars and found the scene unsatisfactory, so we drove back into the city. Parking was a bitch so we had to settle on a garage. We ended up in some Irish dive bar sitting near a table of drunken geeks in love. They looked and acted like geeks, but they drank like sailors, which made them act all the geekier. Our waitress was a plain mousy girl who looked like she might breed tarantulas in her spare time. That made her seem kind of hot to me.
After sitting at a booth for awhile, we relocated to the bar and talked to two guys who were in town from New Haven. One was a nerdy urban planner who said little as his hair thinned before our eyes. The other was a pink slab of Irish former cop. He turned out to be smarter than the prejudices thrown up by his accent, and John and he really "bonded" (as people slightly younger than me like to say).
John in the Northern Liberties.
Trees along the sidewalks of the Northern Liberties have little soil for their roots, so they gradually coalesce into protoplasmic masses.
The place where a wall use to divide the kitchen from the dining room. Note the new junction boxes in the ceiling joists. Two upstairs circuits were fed by 14 gauge wire that had been in the now-missing wall.
John in his Wyndmoor duplex. He's in good shape for an American guy, but in Sierra Leone (where John recently went) the only guys whose arms aren't three times as ripped "got them hacked off in the civil war."
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