I was reminded the other day of the times when I was self-employed. When I was self-employed I worked as a handyman. I usually worked by myself, however there was a time when I worked with another fellow, and his name was Gene. And actually, Gene and I both worked for Gene's dad, Gene Sr. Not all the time, but sometimes. Gene’s dad was kind of a handyman himself. He got a lot of his work from H.U.D. H.U.D., standing for Housing and Urban Development, is a federal program in our local area. And probably your local area, too. Gene’s dad worked (amongst other jobs) ‘debris and securing’ for H.U.D. This work was essentially to clean out recently vacated HUD houses and then board them up. The idea was to keep them from being vandalized until HUD sold them again. You’ve probably been in neighborhoods where you saw boarded up homes. That was done by an independent handyman contracted by or to, HUD. HUD had more debris and securing work than Gene's dad could handle. But their rules stated that each contractor could only have so much work. This meant that by noon we would have finished all the work that HUD was allowed to give us. So at Gene senior’s suggestion I filed a DBA form with the state of Michigan. This meant I was ‘doing business as’ Dave’s Debris and Securing and was therefore eligible to bid for HUD work. I had a bunch of checks printed up and I was in business. That is, I could utilize Gene seniors HUD connections to obtain enough additional work to keep us busy all day. This worked out well for all of us.

Except for the actual ‘debris’ part. The ‘securing’ part wasn’t so bad, but the debris part could be surprisingly unpleasant. And it fell to Gene Jr. and yours truly. For a home to need debris and securing in the first place a whole chain of events had already transpired. Someone had met HUD’s criteria to purchase one of their homes. Then couldn’t make the payments. Now HUD had to repossess and that took quite awhile. Folks might stay in the house for up to a year before HUD could actually get the sheriff to set their stuff on the street and lock the doors. Usually said folks would have vacated just prior to the sheriff’s arrival. Once the house was vacant it went on HUD’s list of homes to be boarded up. Except that first the debris work had to be done.

HUD had to follow a certain procedure, federally mandated, to repossess one of their homes in the event of chronic non payment of mortgage. Various and sundry notices, warnings, and threats had to follow in a proscribed fashion. This took some months. If that didn’t work, then HUD was allowed to take more drastic measures. HUD could and would shut off the utilities, one by one. First the water. Then the gas and electric. Each shutoff had to be preceded by warnings and notices. And here is the thing; folks would live in these houses anyway, sometimes for months, or as long as it took HUD to finally get the sheriff lined up. Since the bathtub wasn’t going to be filling with water, and the toilet was filling , but not with water, then the tub seemed to be the next logical choice as larger toilet. When that got full, a corner of the basement usually became the next latrine area. I am not making this up, it was a sad state of affairs.

Garbage was another problem. The city was notified by HUD to stop making garbage pick up. Another corner of the basement becomes a temporary landfill. Michigan winters can get pretty brisk. Fortunately there is lots of wood in these homes that might be sacrificed in a pinch. Especially if the house had a fireplace, as it seemed most of these lovely older two and three story brick homes were apt to have. Once the window casings were removed and disposed of, there were the lead window weights. Worth money at the scrap metal dealers. As were the old copper gutters, and any copper piping. A used hot water heater has a definite value to someone. So do sinks and french doors with leaded glass, cut and beveled. Suffice it to say that by the time Gene and I entered one of these homes it had been pretty will stripped to the bone. Boarding was a mere formality, at this point, to keep vagrants and the homeless from camping out. Not that anyone in their right mind would consider even entering one of these homes, unless it was to add to the landfill or the latrine area. Until Gene and I had done our malodorous and highly unpleasant job of ‘debris’.

Locate the oldest nastiest clothes I could find. Sometimes purchase old clothes just for the days work. Wrap garbage bags around my boots. Disposable gloves. Do what I could about a face mask. A gas mask would not have been inappropriate, had I owned one. In we went with two large wheelbarrows and coal shovels. A portable generator gave us light. We would have to make our way, sometimes shoveling as we went, to the basement. Working with determination and a will to get it over, we would fill the wheelbarrows. It soon became apparent that once we were in the basement, one wheelbarrow between us was more efficient. It took the two of us to man handle a full one up the stairs. The work was miserable, and heavy. Nauseating in the extreme. By the time we got there, the entire basement would be in an advanced state of decay and rot. Tied garbage bags burst their bottoms when we tried to lift them into the wheelbarrow, disgorging their decomposing maggot infested contents over our boots. Never mind the grief of shoveling out the latrine end of the basement. If we tried to go too fast we risked tipping a full load on the stairs, and woe to the man on the bottom end of that mess. I would find myself becoming light headed and faint, and realize that I was holding my breath. Once we had a load outside, the momentary relief was palpable, even if too brief. We would dump the wheelbarrow into the bucket of a small front end loader called a ‘Bobcat’ that Gene and his Dad owned. That thing was worth it’s weight in gold, as you will learn. When the Bobcat’s bucket was full it emptied into a large truck, also owned by Gene Sr. Gene senior would be measuring the windows and door openings and cutting the heavy duty plywood while we made our many trips into the slime and disgust. Usually Gene and I could finish our miserable chore in time to help with the physical boarding. Gene Sr. would casually work on the other side of the house from us, we noticed. We did get pretty ripe.

Depending on the state of things, we could ‘debris and secure’ two houses in half a day. Occasionally three, if things hadn’t gotten too far out of hand, and if they were all in the same neighborhood. Once Dave’s Debris was also pulling in work we could go all day, four or five houses, but what a day it was. It ended with a trip outside the city in the big truck, to the nearest landfill, or dump, if you prefer. We had to pay a large fee to dump, as you might imagine. We would sometimes observe other debris crews working in the same neighborhood. But none that came anywhere near our proficiency. It would take these other crews, working with a small pickup truck and usually just two guys, all day to do one house. Working with the Bobcat and a large truck, the generator for lights and power tools, and our determination and resolve, made a major difference. About all I can add is that it paid well. Hot showers never felt so good, either.

So it was always with truly supreme pleasure that we might hear Gene Sr. announce, on any given day, "Fellows, we’re not doing Debris work today." He had found some other job to do instead. A break. On this particular day it was to go see a friend of Gene’s dad. This lady had purchased a new automobile and it didn’t fit into her old garage. It stuck out the door nearly two feet. She hadn’t considered this when she bought the car. We were to extend the front of her garage into the backyard a few feet, since the back end was on the fence line. It would have been much easier, if we had access, to extend the rear. But we didn’t. Gene Sr. was going to do this work at cost, since this was for a friend. He judged that with the three of us working we’d be done in one day, or even less. We traveled in two trucks. The big red truck that was also the junk hauling truck, and a large white truck called a Step Van. The Step Van had an enclosed body. It was large enough to carry the Bobcat, our tools and a pretty good supply of lumber. Gene Sr. figured we had enough wood in the van to do the garage extension. So there was no stop at the lumberyard. He would do that later in the day while Gene Jr. and I nailed plywood to the new part of the roof that we were going to construct.

My usual routine was to be at the Gene’s dad’s house by seven AM. We’d have some coffee and discuss the days work, and wait for Gene Jr., who never seemed to be able to get up in the morning. Perhaps because every evening on the way home we would stop for a couple beers. Gene Jr., although married to one of the most beautiful woman that you have ever seen, had an extreme fondness for topless bars. And every evening after a couple of beers, that’s where I’d leave him. Even so, we were on the job by eight and Gene Sr. was explaining how to disassemble the front of the garage. The idea was basically to unhook the front, garage door and all, from the rest of the garage. Then add thirty-two inches to the length and put the front back on. Sounded easy enough.

So the work wouldn’t show, and to avoid having to take apart the header over the garage door, he wanted us to make the separation about sixteen inches back from the front of the garage. Make a break at the first stud in the side walls, move the cut off section out thirty two inches, and build a small wall to insert in the gap. Spike everything back together and shingle the new section. The existing siding was wooden boards. We would remove the first run at the front edge and Gene Sr. would bring some new boards with the shingles. With a coat of paint, the only thing that would betray the addition of the extension would be three feet of new shingles. Gene Sr., like all good handymen, had thought the whole job through in his head beforehand.

He sent Gene Jr. and I onto the roof to begin removing shingles. We needed to get down to the roof boards to make our cut. This roof, like another I had recently worked on, had two layers of shingles. Two roofs, as they say. This was the tedious part, and as usual Gene Jr. and I were the ones doing it. We didn’t mind at all. Using the claws of our hammers we were pulling up the two layers of shingles a few at a time. This exposed the wood beneath and we were pitching the old shingles into the yard. Gene was on one front corner of the roof and I was on the other one. Meanwhile Gene Sr. was clearing space in the front of the garage, and generally looking things over. He was comparing what he saw with the plan in his head. Unbeknownst to us, it wasn’t working out very well. The garage was old. The studs were rotting at the bottom. We were to replace the two old hinged wooden garage doors with a one piece aluminum automatic door that would, upon opening, fold up into the rafters. However, the size of the opening wasn’t working out right. Finally Gene Sr. decided that he would have to be flexible, as all good handymen must, and make a few on the spot changes to his original plans. He decided that the old garage door header consisting of two boards, each two inches thick and twelve inches wide over ten feet long, fastened together with nails, would have to go. This is what he had hoped to avoid, taking apart the door opening, but there was nothing for it, no other way to go. It was no big deal to pick up two more boards at the lumber yard for a new header, one of slightly lesser dimensions. Two by eight’s, he decided , would be plenty strong enough to support the new aluminum door. And would make the opening the correct size. Problem solved.

Gene and I were throwing old shingles left and right and generally enjoying ourselves. This was an infinitely better job than shoveling shit, if you’ll excuse the expression. We were totally unprepared for what was about to happen. This garage had a four sided roof, that peaked in the middle. The pitch of the roof, or steepness, was such that we had to be careful about falling. One could stand on the roof OK, and walk about, but you felt the need to spread your arms for balance. It was moderately steep, I guess you might say. It was still early in the game and we were still on the first couple rows of shingles. We hadn’t worked back far enough to turn around and face uphill. It would get much easier to work as soon as that happened. It wasn’t meant to be, however. Gene Sr. was about to change the course of our day.

Without announcing his intentions he decided that the time was right to knock out the old header. It was just held in place by a few rusty nails and its own weight. Well, that was true enough. He had removed the siding boards from the front of the garage and exposed the header, and was about to give it a whack with the sledge hammer, thinking to simply knock it off the top of the side walls and into the driveway. Each section of the roof was fastened to trusses, triangle shaped pieces, that also sat on top of the side walls. Each truss also held on by a few rusty nails and its own weight, and of course the weight of the garage roof, which was substantial. As it turned out the rusty nails in the header were just about all that was keeping the whole garage together. Because when he gave that header a wallop and knocked one end of it out into the yard, it set off a certain chain of events that collapsed the whole garage into a pile of scrap lumber.

"HANG ON!"

Was the first I knew that anything was amiss. Gene Sr. was quick to notice that the garage walls were now in motion. That’s when he hollered his warning. Without the header holding the walls together they were slowly pulling apart. Quite slowly, at first. It started right at the front, each wall slowly leaning into the back yard as the weight of the roof pushed them apart. It was a strange feeling, on the roof. Suddenly I was in motion! Coasting slowly out and down. Gene Jr. and I expressed our mutual feelings at about the same moment. "HEYYYYY!"

I rapidly calculated that I could just ride the thing down. I thought that once I got closer to the ground I would just hop off the roof, voila! So I crouched a bit and waited for the moment to seem right to make my leap. I had my hammer in my hand, still raised to shoulder height. What caused my well thought plan to go awry was the gravity of the situation. The roof was falling into the center of the garage, coming down under it’s own weight. As it did so, it first pushed the walls outward. Until it reached that point where the very top of the roof was even with the top of the walls, which were now about seven or eight feet off the ground. At this point the roof was flat instead of peaked. As it continued past this point a strange thing happened. The walls started going back up again.

This was not included in my hastily drawn plans to leap for safety. This reversal in the movement of the garage walls took us completely by surprise. Immediately both Gene and I were flipped into the air. The falling walls had picked up a bit of speed and with the sudden stop we were effectively launched like clay pigeons. Gene Sr. said we did identical forward summersaults and both landed on our butts. And that is exactly how I found myself sitting, after a mid air flip, with my hammer still raised in the air and a stunned look on my face.

I could hear the walls collapsing behind me. The garage folded itself into a neat package like closing a cardboard box. One wall lapping over the back wall lapping over the last wall and what was left of the front turning into a bunch of splinters. A huge cloud of dust floated into the air. It all happened in a very short moment and without much noise, except for Gene and I wailing. After determining that no one was actually injured, the laughing started. We couldn’t stop. Gene’s dad had tears in his eyes as he tried to apologize for knocking the garage out from under his two best workers. We were laughing so hard that at first that we didn’t hear the voice from the back door.

"I’m glad you can find humor in destroying my goddam garage!"

It all ended well. The nice lady got a brand new garage out of the deal, at cost. This is where the Bobcat earned it’s keep. We used it to pick up the old walls one at a time and set them into the red truck. We used it to break up the old cement floor and we carried cement with it to pour the new one. We had the new floor poured the same day. I learned how to finish concrete. The cement was still a little green the next afternoon as we placed the new walls in position with the Bobcat. Gene Sr. was a sight to see, an excellent carpenter at work, cutting wood over his knee faster than Gene and I could nail it together. The Bobcat lifted plywood and shingles for the roof. Early the third day we put the finishing touches on, again using the Bobcat, this time to lift a false front onto the completed face of the garage.

The experience I gained on that job stood me in good stead over the course of the next twenty odd years. Although I never again had occasion to be an aerialist, turning mid air somersaults, I have often wondered if perhaps Gene Sr. hadn't decided to just knock that old garage down and build his friend a new one.