Hammer Head Read online

  HAMMER HEAD

  The Making of a Carpenter

  NINA MACLAUGHLIN

  Author’s Note

  Hammer Head is a work of nonfiction. Certain names and

  identifying characteristics of the people who appear in

  these pages have been changed.

  FOR MARY

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: Tape Measure

  On the distance between here and there

  Chapter 2: Hammer

  On the force of the blow

  Chapter 3: Screwdriver

  On screwing and screwing up

  Chapter 4: Clamp

  On the necessity of pressure

  Chapter 5: Saw

  On severing a part from the whole

  Chapter 6: Level

  On shifting, settling, and shifting again

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  HAMMER HEAD

  PROLOGUE

  How do we decide what’s right for our own lives? A close friend posed this question to me, and it echoes often in my head. What shape do we want our lives to take, and, if we’ve had the fortune to figure that out, how do we go about constructing that life? In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the gods are the reigning agents of change, and repeatedly “give and take away the form of things.” People are transformed into owls, bears, horses, newts, stones, birds, and trees. Without the gods to guide us, to cast their spells of transformation, how do we become something other than we were?

  I used to be a journalist. Now I work as a carpenter. The transformation, like the renovation of a kitchen, happened first in big bashing crashes and now has slowed as it gets closer to complete. In college, I studied English and Classics and engaged in the abstractions of ancient history and literary theory. A journalism job followed, and with it, continued interaction with intangibles (the Internet, ideas, telling stories with words). The world around me, material reality—the floors and cabinets, the tables, decks, and bookcases—all of it was real enough to knock or kick, but it was an afterthought, taken for granted, obscured by the computer’s glow. After nearly a decade working at a desk in front of a screen, I longed to engage with the tangible, to do work that resulted in something I could touch. I grew more interested in making a desk than sitting at one.

  In the Metamorphoses, mortals are transformed by the gods for two reasons: to punish and to save. My shift from journalist to carpenter was neither punishment nor salvation. It was an unexpected veering, a welcome re-forming. Under the guidance of my boss Mary, a carpenter and unexpected mentor, I’ve been given entry into the material world. I’ve watched, again and again, as one thing becomes something else—the way a seed becomes a tree becomes a board becomes a bookshelf. For people, such transformations are subtler, and perhaps more difficult to achieve. We cannot take a hacksaw to our habits, after all. But as Ovid writes, “By birth we mean beginning to re-form, a thing’s becoming other than it was.” This book is a story, a simple one, of things becoming other than they were. It’s a story, like all of them, of transformation.

  Chapter 1

  TAPE MEASURE

  On the distance between here and there

  From the sidewalk on Memorial Drive where the Mass Ave Bridge begins on the Cambridge side of the Charles River, the view across extends a little less than half a mile. To the south, the Boston skyline rises above Storrow Drive. Closer to the water, and lower to the ground, brick predominates; glass and steel rise behind. To the west, moving upstream against the current, the Citgo sign lights up over Kenmore Square, and if it’s a home game during Red Sox season, the floodlights over Fenway make it daytime in the park. The river bends and snakes its way out of the city, through twenty-three towns, sidewalks and river paths giving way to shoreline with pine and maples. Great blue herons stand in shallows on stalky legs and box turtles with warm shells sun themselves on rocks and logs. For eighty miles, the river wends through eastern Massachusetts from its start at Echo Lake in a town called Hopkinton. To the east of the Mass Ave Bridge, back near the city, sailboats dip and swerve. Oars on the eight-person sculls thunk in the oarlocks as crew teams run their practice and glide underneath the bridge. The Red Line train crosses over the Longfellow Bridge about a mile downstream. Beyond, the new Zakim Bridge rises above the river, suspended by white strands that look like the skeletons of wings. The river meets the harbor, freshwater merges with salt, and the Charles River is altered and absorbed into the Atlantic.

  For seven years, I crossed the bridge on foot, once in the morning, sun at my left shoulder, and once in the evening, when sunsets sometimes blushed the sky. It was part of the three-mile path I made from my apartment in Cambridge to the newspaper offices where I worked in Boston. On the way home, depending on weather and time of year and if it was a deadline day, bands of pink spread across the sky upstream, or else it was cold and city dark, and lights became the thing, streetlamps, headlights, taillights like embers, all blinking and sparkling up the road ahead. The river glittered with Cambridge above it, squatter than Boston, lower to the ground. Sometimes, the moon. Sometimes, a few stars. The wind blew stronger on the bridge. Tourists handed me their cameras and asked me to take photographs with the river and the skyline. I dodged joggers and cyclists on the sidewalk afraid of the bike lane. I was usually alone when I walked the bridge, occasionally drunk, a few times crying, one time kissed by someone I didn’t like too much. The walk across the river was a ferrying for my brain—toward a desk and noise and tip-tapping of keys, clicking and interviews and story ideas, and away from my desk in the evenings, toward quiet and home, toward a bar, toward not having to talk or think or be clever or click. Oh I am fond of that bridge, the whole stretch of it. It’s the longest one to span the Charles at 2,164.8 feet. That’s 659.82 meters, or 364.4 smoots.

  Oliver Smoot was the shortest pledge of MIT’s Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity in 1958. Late one night that year, he was tipped head over heels, over and over, across the length of the bridge, Boston to Cambridge, by his fraternity brothers. They made an official tally of 364.4 smoots, plus or minus one ear. Ever since that fabled measurement, twice each year the boys of Lambda Chi Alpha have repainted the markers on the sidewalk across the bridge that delineate every ten smoots. (An exception has been made for smoot-mark sixty-nine, which as of this year, had the addition of “heaven” painted underneath.) When the bridge was reconstructed in the 1980s, the sidewalk slabs were made in smoot-lengths, as opposed to the six-foot standard. Oliver Smoot’s contribution to measurement continued well after his fraternity days. A plaque at the base of the bridge commemorates the 50th anniversary of the smoot, and notes that Ollie went on to head both the American National Standards Institute and the International Organization for Standardization.

  I trotted across the bridge, face reddened by wind in winter, sweat soaking the back of my shirt in summer, and I went to my desk at a newspaper where I’d landed a job out of college. First I did listings, which meant inputting the city’s every concert, contra dance, art exhibit, comedy show, poetry slam, and movie time into a massive database week-in, week-out. I wrote about cheap Salvadoran restaurants, interviewed David Copperfield, profiled an art-porn collective, reviewed documentary films, covered a conference on virginity, and wrote about books and authors and the literary scene in Boston. Eventually I got bumped up to managing editor of the website, which meant I was tasked with making sure every story showed up in the right place at the right time. It meant a lot of clicking.

  For a long time, I loved it. I loved the rhythm of the thing, the peaks and lulls, the energy of a room of people, mostly men, on deadline. All the furious typing, all the opinions and shit-talk, listening to writers on the phone with sources, the concentration and filing and
release—the newsroom possessed a charge. And I was proud to be part of it. What good fortune, to be able to go to a place every day and be surrounded by all these smart maniacs telling stories, all working to produce this thing that had a history, that was part of the fabric of the city, that was committed to long-form, investigative, issue-based journalism and had the strongest set of arts critics in Boston.

  What a set of weirdos sat at these desks with me, what a collection of brains. There was the sharp-witted, chain-smoker with untucked shirts and rogue charm who had worked moving houses before becoming a journalist. There was the practitioner of make-the-world-better journalism and expose-injustice journalism, who sat at her desk and worked with the focus and fire of someone possessed until you got her out to the bar, where she’d talk about how she’d followed the Grateful Dead. The managing editor was a first-rate grump, a big-hearted cynic who had helped start the paper, and still believed in its power and necessity. The arts editor with the encyclopedic memory threw cursing fits, slamming books on the floor of his cube, his standards unmeetably high. And the features writer, from hard-knocks Brockton, wrote a weekly column about the city’s strangest characters, which struck me as maybe the coolest job in the world. In my head, she towered tall above me; I saw her not long ago, and realizing that she and I were the same height came as an immense shock and had me questioning, for a moment, if perhaps she’d contracted some shrinking disease. Such is how these people loomed.

  I couldn’t believe how lucky I was. Every time I got to answer the question what do you do?, I felt proud to answer. This was exactly what I wanted. Until it wasn’t.

  Talk of readers turned to talk of users. Print was sputtering, and it was the responsibility of the web operation to inject “youth” and “relevance” into the operation to keep advertising dollars coming in, and keep the paper in business. It’s a familiar story now.

  The clicking started to get me down. There is a dullness in all forms of work, a “violence—to the spirit as well as to the body,” as Studs Terkel put it in Working. There are repeated tasks and empty time and moments you wish you were swimming. These are unavoidable, even in jobs we love and feel proud to have; these are natural, even if you’ve found your calling. It’s when those meaningless moments pile and mount, the meaningless moments that chew at your soul, that creep into the crevices of your brain and holler at you until ignoring them is not an option. Deadening moments that lead to the hard questions, the ones that swirl, in the broadest sense, around time and dying.

  After years in which most of my waking hours were spent in front of a computer screen clicking buttons, I realized I’d become a lump in a chair, present only in the physical fact of my flesh at the desk, soul staling like a Saltine. It got worse by the day, like a shirt that had once felt so comfortable, so flattering and familiar, but had started to tighten, constrict at the neck, pull across the shoulders. The grooves of my brain seemed to be getting smoothed out, a slow dulling, gradual and slothing. It was harder and harder to find pleasure in the atmosphere or meaning in the endeavor. The people I liked most were starting to move on to other jobs at other places.

  The screen exerts an oppressive power, and I am as seduced as anyone by the clips and pics, the news and noise of the Internet. I would rather e-mail than talk on the phone. I have pals I know only online and am grateful for those connections. But there is no other place I can think of where one can consume so much and absorb so little. The Internet has no equal in that regard. I am leery of its siren song, the way it beckons, and of my own inability to ignore its call. It’s a rabbit-hole exit, a tumbling in space with Wonderland ever always one click away.

  My brain went bad. Hangovers hounded me three out of five workdays a week. Mouse in my limp, damp hand, my head raw and frayed, I spent months thinking, I’ve got to get out of here. But I had a familiar routine to cling to, and health insurance, and despite it all, I felt an allegiance to the institution. And so I stayed, kept scrolling, kept clicking. Plus, what would I do next? What could I do? Inertia and fear and laziness, the three-headed dog that keeps us from leaving situations that have passed their expiration date, growled around me for months, the way Cerberus allowed souls to enter the realm of the dead, but allowed none of them to leave.

  The tipping point came in the form of an online list. As a sardonic response to Maxim’s list of sexy women, we published a list of the 100 Unsexiest Men. A place on the list was granted not for physical repugnancy, but for poor character, bad deeds, and general unpopularity. Scandalous politicians, misogynist athletes, racist pundits, public-figure villains of all kinds. The first time around, the list was so popular it crashed the site, and thus became a must-repeat feature. Devising and executing it the first time was stupid fun—nothing to be proud of, but no big deal. When the third annual list rolled around, I found myself dispirited. More than that: sitting at my desk making sure the number on the list matched the number on the blurb about the man, I felt desperate. It was more than stupid and my brain hollered: You will die and this is an empty way to spend the days.

  Slumped at my computer during those unsexiest days, all I could think about was leaving. I craved something away from the screen, away from the echo chamber of the Internet. I wanted something that had a little more to do with reality. But what did that mean? Our lives online are as bound in reality as making pancakes, driving to the dump, spilling a glass of wine. At my desk, though, I felt far away from an anchor, a grounding agent, satisfaction. In a vague way, I wanted to put my brain where my hands were. These impulses were question marks, shadow urges, pipe dreams. I wanted to be an Olympic speed skater, too, but that wasn’t about to happen.

  I had worked at the paper for nearly the whole of my twenties. Closing in on thirty, it wasn’t just disenchantment with my web job. My brain stirred with change, with the idea of a wholesale altering of life as I’d been living it. I spent months in this mode, fed up, deeply bored, trying to corral enough courage to leap.

  On my way to work on a bright and mild September morning, I crossed the Mass Ave B ridge. The smoot marks, paint faded, blurred below my feet, counting out the distance. I looked at the river as I rehearsed what I would say to my boss that day. I reached the Boston side of the river with resolve but mostly fear and some hands-in-the-air hope. When I got to the office, I quit.

  It wasn’t just the job that ended. I moved out of my apartment, broke up with a boyfriend, and left the city for a little while. Sledgehammer, slam, dust, done.

  My days were blank, every day an emptiness. The fear—that I’d never find work again, that I’d made a very bad decision, that I’d derailed myself with no chance of finding another train—morphed into regret, that sick feeling of knowing that time only moves one way with no chance to change what’s been done.

  Small efforts and loose routines were weak antidotes. One teary morning in early spring, doing my daily click around the Craigslist jobs section, reviewing, once again, the same few posts in the Writing/Editing and Art/Media/Design sections, I clicked on the Etc. category. Amid postings looking for dog walkers, surrogate mothers (up to $40k; tempting), and catheter users ($25 for your opinion; less so), I came across a line of text that registered itself in my chest with a quick extra thump of my heart.

  Carpenter’s Assistant: Women strongly encouraged to apply.

  This simple post seemed to glow, holding in it the promise of exactly what I’d been craving. My fingers fluttered above the keyboard, ready to write the note that would convince this person that I was the right woman for the job.

  I tried to explain my experience. None. None at all. I tried to think what might qualify me. I didn’t know the difference between a Phillips and a flathead screwdriver. Should I admit that? No, don’t admit that. I explained that my professional background had more to do with putting together sentences than working with hammers and nails and wood, but that I was curious and hardworking, and that I longed to work with my hands. “What I lack in experience,” I wrote to th
is anonymous poster, “I would definitely make up for in curiosity and enthusiasm.”

  I pressed SEND and the initial excitement and blast of optimism was extinguished by a wave of despondency and pessimism. What a joke, I scolded myself. What a ridiculous long shot. You don’t get carpentry jobs based on claims of curiosity and capacity for hard work, I admonished myself. Putting together sentences? I sounded like an asshole. I imagined the person reading my email and laughing—oh, perfect, curious is exactly the quality I need to help build a safe set of stairs—and then discarding my note to continue the search for someone who actually knew something. I regretted how I’d approached the opportunity, and tried to put the whole missed chance out of my head.

  That same morning, I applied for a fiction-editor position at an online literary operation (unpaid), and a gig writing product descriptions of adult novelties ($20 per description, seven descriptions per week). The adult novelty place got right back to me and asked if I’d please choose one product from the list they provided and write a sample description, no more than a paragraph, demonstrating an understanding of keywords.

  I scrolled through the options. Smartballs silicone kegel balls. The Liberator ramp. Bound To Please nipple clamps. The Luxe Adonis G Spot and Clit Vibe. I heard the words of my high-school Latin teacher: when your eyes are open, you’ll see classical references everywhere. Caveat emptor. So I put my Classics degree to work. Adonis, his beauty unsurpassed, born out of the trunk of the Myrrha tree, was so lovely that Venus herself, goddess of love, couldn’t resist him. So began my blurb. I did not mention that lovely Adonis was the offspring of an incestuous pair, that his mother was also his sister, that his father was his grandfather. I did make mention of plunging in, the way the wild boar plunges his tusk into Adonis’s groin, killing him, until Venus who loved him, changes him into a flower that blooms deep blood-red, “the very color of pomegranates when that fruit is ripe and hides sweet seeds beneath its pliant rind,” as Ovid tells it in his Metamorphoses. Seeds and pliant rinds, plunging tusks and a beauty that bewitches the goddess of love. The petals fall fast off the flower that Adonis is transformed into, unlike the great and lasting bloom that the G Spot and Clit Vibe brings.