15. Men's Bodies

Work, Men, Muscle, Weather: A Memoir of Building Houses

Women were not on housebuilding crews. I found their absence to be a relief mostly. Men without women were often in possession of their reason. The entry of women into every other type of occupation was well underway by the seventies, but construction was not only unchanged, but mostly unchallenged when I retired thirty-five years later. Job seekers occasionally stumbled upon our back road projects, but no woman ever did that I remember, and I would have remembered. You might conclude from this that women were not interested in working construction, or that their idea of equality had some interesting wrinkles. About this, the men of the crew never speculated. And had it been raised, it would have received little more than a shrug. Counter to the widely accepted narrative of who men are when women are absent, the topic was mostly avoided. Normal men did not readily discuss their sex lives. And except for the occasional, brief, and coarse reference, women in general were not talked about on construction sites at all. If any one of us was forced to guess why women were not interested in construction, we would have probably said merely that the work was too hard.

Of the many building trades, I think it’s fair to say that carpentry is one of the most physical. Sheetrocking is certainly worse. And though the digging and lifting that laborers do might seem to constitute a trade in itself, they are a part of the same progression of skill as carpenters. Carpenters lift and carry. Carpenters use shovels. If the first-rate housebuilding carpenter can read building plans and layout walls, stairs, and roofs, his greater knowledge does not always excuse him from simple labor when his help is needed. Every stud 2x4 in every house must be carried by someone, at least twice, and sometimes a half dozen times, before it finds its final place in the structure. And no one carries one single stud 2x4, ever. If you are a battered ancient journeyman of fifty, you might get away with carrying two stud 2x4s at a time, but if you are a young laborer of astonishing vitality, you will not be humping less than five. Of course, on the two brief occasions I worked with women carpenters, these adamant but unwritten rules were relaxed, and enamored laborers were only glad to carry a little more.

On the construction sites of the Montclair hills, our exposure to women was limited. We had all heard the probably apocryphal story of a Samoan woman who worked in the hills and specialized in tying reinforcing steel (which she reputedly did while barefoot) but no one I knew had ever met her. And on a number of projects we were visited weekly by the representative of a saw blade sharpening service, who arrived in an El Camino and opened the cover of her truck bed, wearing a tube top and tight jeans. Everyone went scrambling for saw blades. For the fifteen minutes she spent with us, my rough crew took on this bumbling softened dreamy manner, as if they had just suffered a hard thump on the head. And lastly, when the real estate agent made her appearance near the end of the framing (having had the foresight to don a pair of sneakers before driving to the jobsite in her Lexus and maybe needing help with her briefcase up the single plank leading to the first floor) all work came to a halt. It is impossible to convey how conspicuous on a jobsite is the scent of perfume.

Of the two female carpenters we actually worked with, neither lasted longer than a month. In both cases my boss had been the agent of their employment, and as foreman, it fell to me to treat them normally and make them welcome. The first had joined us when we were in the middle of finish work on a house we had already built. She had the stereotypical plain stoutness and short-cropped hair of a woman who might be interested in doing a man’s job, and I believe I had assigned her the task of cutting and nailing baseboard, a solitary task that often requires working on your knees. But the one clear memory I still have is of her sitting on her ass, nailing up a corner of baseboard trim, a body position no man in the trades would dare to use, or none that I ever saw. Soon she was gone, for unknown reasons, before we got to know her. The other carpenter was a pretty young blonde who sensibly hid herself in baggy overalls. She was treated with courtesy and respect by the crew although I don’t think any of us got over how strange it was. We were working on an atypical upslope lot with garage retaining walls twenty feet high, which posed multiple problems. One day when she suggested that we rent steel scaffolding to assist in making a single measurement to mathematically establish the elevation of the house in relation to the garage, the impracticality of the suggestion was striking. But not long after, she too disappeared with as much explanation as her arrival had prompted.

It was not just the physicality of the work: how strenuous it was, or how deep was the fatigue you sometimes felt. In short order, you came to understand the bumps, bruises, splinters, aches, and strains were not just temporary hardships but a permanent affliction that you could not avoid. After a day of tying steel, each of your hands might acquire a dozen scratches from the sharp cut ends of the wire that would bristle from a cage of steel. Or, after gripping and swinging a hammer all day, driving many hundreds of nails, your fingers could go numb when they curled around a steering wheel. Or, merely being in the sun all day, day after day, till your face and shoulders and the back of your hands turned a dark nut brown. The amount of damage a body could absorb in the course of eight hours could be grueling, toxic, and even debilitating in the long term. There was dust from concrete, sheetrock, insulation, stucco, sanding, and there were chemicals of all types, impossible to avoid, paints, stains, varnish, glues, acetone, and lacquer thinner. Over time a man’s body became not just strong or rough, but insensitive to pain compared to normal men, and accustomed to abuse. Constantly you bore the marks and bruises of a hundred tiny mishaps, the origin of which you couldn’t remember, and as long as you stayed in the trade, you lived with this changed state of being.

Demolition, which is as native to construction as hammering, is probably its most toxic and overlooked phase, and can include a kitchen removal or the piece by piece de-construction of an entire house. It was always a bit unnerving how eagerly carpenters took to it, with their sledgehammers and giant crowbars, considering how antithetical it was to their usual occupation. Part of the pleasure of destruction can be found in the fact that the knowledge of how to put something together also contains the knowledge of how to take it apart. Crashing walls, busting cabinets, smashing porcelain bathtubs, it was all great fun. Of course, once we got started, after a couple of days, the thrill was gone, though the danger went on. Few kinds of work are as hazardous as demolition, mostly because the amount of force required to swing a sledgehammer, or wedge a crowbar between a wall and a cabinet back, was equal to the force applied to your head or hands or shoulder if things went awry. We breathed plaster dust all day, or inhaled the ancient desiccated dust that had been capsulated in the walls. In the process of demolition I have stood on top of an unreasonably cantilevered portion of a roof supported only by a small section of wall and jumped madly up and down to a chorus of encouragement from my crew, without effect. It was commonplace how an isolated and unsupported assembly of uncertain date, and the stitching of hundreds of nails, could refuse to give way. But more often, our labor all day was punctuated by the steady thud of the sledgehammer and the releasing complaint of nails, one by one, finally letting go. That satisfaction—of seeing what had resisted you finally in splinters on the ground—was undeniable. It doesn’t seem too much of a stretch to hypothesize that that pleasure was particularly endemic to men.

It comes as no surprise, then, and not a little ironic, that the same men who joyfully wield such destruction, are, as often as not, its target. You might as well ask: What is a man? One clue that I found to the mystery of why Hispanic men were so much more likely to be better workers on the jobsite could be heard in the Banda music that we often played. A kind of blues set to polka with equal strains of nostalgia and irony, fatalism and defiance, comedy and violence. Even those of us who couldn’t understand a word of Spanish could hear the timbre of pride in the men’s vocals. The striking of that note was our own default attitude: how a strange eagerness for suffering becomes a badge of pride and becomes the debility that leads to the meaning of machismo. That, when men were men, at their very best, there was something disposable about them, about their role in the world—not as something to grieve, but akin to a kind of glory. It’s the same pleasure we take in the crash of bodies on the scrimmage line. Or in the ignorant eagerness of young men to be soldiers—how their sacrifice becomes a coin of pride in the culture overall. Something about the social role of men is accepting of the idea of the male body becoming a crucible of punishment. The bearer of the heavier load. When you think about all that men are supposed to endure without complaint, there’s no mystery why they die younger than women. The sum total of this burden at first glance seems to be one-sidedly negative, but it is not. The disposability of men’s bodies is the secret of their nature in the world.