Filed under: Idle Hands, friendship | Tags: addiction, crime scene mitigation, csi, dead friends, drug addiction, drug overdose, favor, friendship, love, over-committing?, oxycondone, oxycontin
The studio was so contaminated that the NYPD could only bag the solid remains before the had to evacuate the scene. The front door key was not located and the door locked behind them as they exited. As a result the scene and its contents became the jurisdiction of the NYS Surrogate Court.
Dan is dead. Phone to my ear, walking to work, a brisk morning in October. A shock, if not a surprise; that’s how I received the news from Rachel. Mother fucker, my tight response. When?
That’s the thing. That’s the terrible thing.
Oh. Shit.
The detective said he was in there, in his studio, maybe two and a half weeks before…
Right—the horror registering immediately.
The detective, he told Sally, Dan’s sister, did you ever meet Sally? Anyway. She said that they had to use dental records to get a positive ID.
Fuck.
Right? Terrible.
Why didn’t the neighbors?
They did. Eventually. I mean, just a crazy coincidence, but I know the people right downstairs from Dan. Even after Dan stopped talking to me. I didn’t know where they lived, just. They complained to the building manager about a smell, but the building didn’t do anything. Then there was a stain on their ceiling.
Fuck.
Right? And maggots.
Fuck.
They said. Anyway, they had to be evacuated.
That’s right.
But before that, John noticed Dan’s light on at crazy hours over a few days. Noticed from the street. From Houston Street. Dan wouldn’t answer his phone when John called. John left messages. The light stayed on. So John went up to knock on his door. That’s when he knew. Dan had been so crazy, John worried that if he was with the cops when they knocked down his door and he wasn’t dead. Worried that Dan would cut him off again. They’d only started talking again recently. So John went to the roof, climbed down the fire escape to the open window. He couldn’t even get near it. The smell. Just called 911 from the fire escape.
Right.
The smell.
Right.
So terrible.
I bet. Fuck.
Sally is coming in from Alaska on Monday to collect Dan’s things.
So the studio has been cleaned up?
I guess. I don’t know. The police took out the body.
Yeah, but there’ll be plenty to clean up after two weeks.
You think?
God yes.
Really?
Horrible, hon.
Really?
Sally can’t be the first one through that door. No way.
Right. Of course not.
I’ll do it.
Really?
I guess.
God.
What’s the cop’s name, d’you know?
I’ll ask Sally. She knows. She says he’s been great.
His name and number. Precinct maybe?
Okay.
***
Phone rings just once. Madden.
Detective Madden?
Speaking.
This is Manny Howard. I’m trying to help out Sally, Dan’s sister. I’m a friend of Dan’s. Dan died. You…
Right. You’re Sally’s brother?
Dan’s friend. Trying to help Sally. Want to clear the way for her. Get into the apartment where Dan died. Make sure it’s clean.
It’s not clean. It’s sealed. You don’t want to go in there.
Rachel said you caught a bad job.
One of the worst.
She said…
Rachel?
Another friend. A friend of Dan’s. Trying to help Sally. I want to go in there first, secure what I can of Dan’s. If I get enough maybe she won’t need to go in there.
She shouldn’t go in there.
Right.
There won’t be much worth keeping.
It was bad?
We couldn’t locate a key. We couldn’t stay in there long enough to find a key. Collected the remains and let the door lock behind us. Had to seal the scene. Usually gaining access is police business. If we have a key, we hold on to it for next of kin. That’s the job. Usually, say, if Sally provided notarized permission I could give you the key. There’s no key, so it becomes a, I forget the precise term, it becomes a matter for the court. I want to be helpful. It’s a terrible thing.
Yes. Sally sent me all the documentation including notarized permission from Dan’s dad to enter the apartment. I also have the death certificate. I have what the court needs. I’m thinking I can just go in to the apartment, see what happens.
I see. The lock. The lock. It’s nothing that couldn’t be carded open.
Right?
You know, a credit card is all you’d need.
I see.
If you have the documentation. Like I said. It’s not a police matter.
Right.
***
Sitting in the chair at the barber shop, I unload on longtime barber and and friend, Ray. My friend, Dan, remember I told you we had a fight. He was calling all the time, getting crazier and crazier. I did what you told me, told him, ‘don’t call me all fucked up’?
Yeah?
Dead.
Unh huh.
Alone.
Right.
Two weeks. Alone.
Sorry.
Decomp so bad they had to use dental records. And, you know, that’s the thing. The Dan I know, love, that Dan, wouldn’t have lay rotting in his apartment for two weeks with no one. Dan had friends, tight friends. Dan was important to people. But he’s dead and lying in a lake of his own juice, food for, you know.
Sometimes I hate The Disease.
Unh huh.
Really. People talk about evil, you know, wonder if there’s such a thing, if it walks the earth, you know?
Right?
The Disease, it’s Him—you know. That’s what I think anyway. It grabs you by the face, separates you from everything you love, that loves you.
It was like a wild animal on Dan. Two years is all it took. He was working, doing what he loved, getting paid, you know, paid to take photographs. Two years, reduced to, fuck. You know. They had to ID him using dental records.
Yeah?
Of course.
Right.
Remember that hot spell two months ago?
The Disease, it doesn’t discriminate, Rich, poor, smart, stupid, gay, straight, handsome, skinny, fat. It’ll take you if it can. It’s happy to have you.
It was probably Oxy.
Doesn’t matter.
Right. You know, I thought he was drinking. So stupid. He left a message on my phone that night: The Night. I didn’t check it. You know? He leaves so many. They’re all the same. I just. It was on there for two weeks. The whole time he’s in the apartment. If I’d checked…
You’re not feeling guilty, right?
No, no. It’s just. It would have been so easy.
There was nothing you could do.
Still, two weeks.
Nothing.
Dan wouldn’t want me to feel this way. That wasn’t Dan. Anyway I’m going in to clean out his things. Clean out his things for his sister. Sally.
That’s what’s gonna make you feel better?
I guess.
You don’t need to do that.
Sally can’t.
So? You?
Yeah, I guess. Maybe. Thought I’d call around figure out what I can expect, figure out what’s in there.
There is nothing in there.
Right.
No. No. Nothing.
Still.
***
After half a dozen phone calls to companies that specialize in bio hazard clean-ups (crime scenes, shut-ins, suicides, that sort of thing) I contact someone willing to give me advice, even after I tell him I don’t have the $5,000 it will cost to properly decontaminate the scene.
The thing is, Manny, it’s not really just a smell, it’s microbial. It’s alive. It gets into everything, anything with fibers. I say don’t do it. But if you do go in, don’t stay long, 2-3 minutes, most. Wear a respirator and get those coveralls, the Tyvek, or it’ll get into your clothes. And get a pair of those Tyvek booties. Even if you don’t step in something you can see, you’ll track that smell on the soles of your shoes. If you get in your car it’ll get in the carpet. You won’t get it out. Once you smell that smell you’re gonna be smelling it the rest of your life anyway, you don’t want it really in your car. When you leave, back out of the apartment and throw everything you’re wearing back in behind you and close the door.
What’s it going to be like?
Impossible to say.
Yeah, right. Two weeks in there.
Every scene is different. Was he on the floor or the bed?
Don’t know.
Suicides are usually on the bed.
Don’t know.
If he’s on the floor all, that floor’s gotta come up, subfloor usually, too.
The downstairs neighbors had to be evacuated. He came through the ceiling.
So he was probably on the floor. Mattress usually soaks up a lot of it.
Oh yeah?
Not always, though.
Ha.
What’s in the apartment? What’s in there still? The detective who caught the case said flies and maggots, millions in the lake?
If it stays warm, they could still be there. Nothing dries up if it’s hot. When it cools down it dries, no more food. Maggots die.
Hah.
No way to say for sure.
Right.
***
Filed under: Idle Hands, It's A Big World Full of People | Tags: bad bets, brooklyn bridge, gambling, life before 9/11, regrets, suicide
Once upon a time spring was “jumping season” in NYC. My office window offers a panoramic view of the Brooklyn Bridge. For better or worse, before September 11, 2001, you could count on at least two people making a high-profile dive off one of the two stone towers of the historic bridge. That was then…
NYPD pursues "jumper" up the cable to the tower
The Jumper
The Brooklyn Bridge
by Manny Howard
I recently spent an afternoon watching a guy
entertaining three of New York’s finest on the
eastern parapet of the Brooklyn Bridge. He was
wearing what looked like a green track suit.
“Jumper!” the call
went up in the office.
The view here is
extraordinary: the
Brooklyn Bridge, the
World Trade Towers,
the financial district,
the Statue of Liberty,
and the harbor
beyond. We had
seats in the sky box
for this one and
watched as the P.D. cleared the roadway of traffic (both to and from Manhattan), set up command posts, moved two pods of Emergency Service Unit officers (the name they give a S.W.A.T. team these days) into position, one on the cables below him and one on the parapet with him. We shared a pair of binoculars, looking through them at the Jumper, who didn’t look like the kind of guy who anybody had paid much attention to before. I don’t know why we all agreed about this, because even with the binoculars it was impossible to tell much of anything. Maybe black, maybe Hispanic. Somebody said he was an Arab. Maybe
Thirty, maybe twenty, he was wearing a baseball cap backward on his head.
Regardless, he had his audience now. There were the three cops in the first ESU unit, two helicopters, two harbor patrol boats, half the tourists in downtown Manhattan, and us. Why hadn’t he jumped already? we asked, handing the binoculars around.
Why don’t the cops just grab him? They were three big guys after all. The one closest was sitting Indian-style right next to Jumper whose feet dangled over the tower. That cop was tethered to the other two guys and the bridge’s super structure. He could just reach out and boom.
Like that.
But Jumper just kept on talking, gesticulating—angry sometimes, sometimes morose.
“He looks a little dingey,” observed someone in the office, handing off the binoculars to pick up a call ringing through on her desk. “We’ll have the meeting in five minutes,’ suggested someone else, wandering towards the water cooler. Soon thecurious crowd at the window thinned to just two of us.
The P.D. had inflated a giant yellow and white mattress thingy on the ground below the parapet. Jumper just talked and talked. “He’s not going anywhere,” said the other guy at the window, walking back to his desk.
“Five bucks says he goes,” I said.
“Dude,” scolded my officemate.
“You can’t bet on that,” said someone else looking up from her computer. I watched for a while longer trying to keep the binoculars in focus. Then I picked up the phone and called a friend in midtown. I explained the situation.
“How long’s he been with the police?” asked the friend.
“Going on twenty minutes.”
“He’s not jumping. No way. These guys jump in the first couple a minutes if they’re gonna go. No way he jumps.”
“So?”
“Five says he doesn’t jump.”
“I’ll call you.” I said and hung up the phone. The afternoon sun was making it hard to see what was going on but the two cops supporting the negotiator were leaning on the railing on top of the parapet like they were on break now. Bored stiff I figured. Each had one leg up on the railing, the one with the hard hat on had his right arm slung like a wing over the top bar. The cop on point, squatting, stood up now and shook out his legs and Jumper just talked and talked. I took a call and made two. ”Is he still up there?” a voice called from the conference room.
“Yep. The cops look pretty bored. I bet this was going to be the highlight of the shift for most of those guys. Now, I don’t know.”
“Yell if something happens.”
“I imagine I will.”
Jumper must have looked down and seen the yellow mattress inflated bellow him. The Eastern parapet, the one in Brooklyn, isn’t in the East River. There’s a cobblestone park below it that’s quite nice to visit just after sunset when the skyline lights start to shine. Anyway, Jumper got pretty agitated and triedto scoot around the other side of the tower, away from the mattress-thingy. He did this on his belly and hung his legs out over the tower to show he meant business.
“He’s moving!” I yelled.
The meeting in the conference room broke up and our windows were full as the three cops dropped to their knees and crawled towards him. He waved his arms wildly.
We all made the same sound when he started to drop. A loud strangled gasp with a curse mixed in there. Jumper spun spread eagle, maybe three revolutions, before he hit an outcropping in the tower half-way down. He only made it half way, though. As he fell he hung pretty close to the granite (quarried in Vineyard Haven, Maine) that the tower’s made of. The ambulance guys are trying to figure a way to get him back onto the roadway right now. They don’t seem to be in much of a hurry, though. The three ESU cops are still on the top of the tower. One guy, I’m guessing the lead negotiator, seems pretty broken up.
Traffic out of Manhattan is starting to pick up again, now. It’s just about rush hour. I must say, it tightened me up a bit watching him spin like he did.I sure wish I hadn’t made that bet.
First Published: http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/sec9/jumper.html
Filed under: Cook Like A Man, It's A Big World Full of People | Tags: Cook Like A Man, food, food history, inventor, Manny Howard, obituary, recipes, snack food
FOOD: ADOLPH LEVIS, B. 1911; A Tricky Stick
By MANNY HOWARD
The New York Times Magazine
Published: December 30, 2001
The Slim Jim was created by Adolph Levis in Philadelphia in the 1940’s. After an unsuccessful early career as a violinist and a failed effort to operate a string of tobacco shops, Levis and a partner had turned to the pickled-food trade, hawking pig’s feet, cabbage and cucumbers to bars and taverns in and around Philadelphia.
mysterious meat snack
Pepperoni, he noticed, was becoming popular among his clientele, and he made an end run around the fad by creating a preserved meat product that, rather than curing for weeks, could be manufactured in a matter of days by a process of fermentation and hot smoking.
The snack sold well in the bars, first in Philadelphia and then up and down the East Coast. Eventually, a bidding war broke out over Slim Jim’s name and recipe, and in 1967, Levis (pronounced LEV-iss) and his partner sold out to General Mills, for $20 million. The brand would pass through three other companies in the ensuing years, and each time it did, the recipe changed a little, to make production cheaper and more efficient. They even started putting chicken into the original all-beef formula. What at first required just 10 common ingredients now calls for 31. But the taste, everyone agrees, remains true to Levis’s original.
The sale of anything, even a stick of dried meat, to a company like General Mills pretty much assures that the instructions for making it become an industrial secret. So when we decided to make a Levis-era Slim Jim, as a salute to its inventor who died this year, we got no help from its current owner, ConAgra. They wished us luck and sent us on our way.
Undeterred, we went to Harvey Brodsky, Levis’s son-in-law, who told us he didn’t know the original recipe. ”It’s not like we’ve got it written down in family scrapbooks,” he said good-naturedly. He supplied one critical clue, however: the use of lactic acid is crucial in the fermentation process because it lowers the pH and imparts a unique tanginess.
We realized that we would have to go freelance, and so our next stop was Wade Moises, the sous-chef and butcher at Lupa restaurant in New York. He is that rare breed, a sausage geek, and he was certain that he could help us reverse-engineer a Slim Jim.
Though he did have some reservations. Before settling down to work, he snapped off a piece of a Slim Jim, chewed it and winced. ”You sure you want to do this?”
From Bruce Aidells, the man who restored the good name of mass-produced sausage in America, we learned that Levis’s original recipe was probably based on an Eastern European thin rope sausage, usually made with pork and beef, because ”its spices are mild and it takes the smoke well.”
A recipe for rope sausage, provided by Aidells, has 10 ingredients (not counting the meat and the fat), like the original Slim Jim. The heat comes from white and black pepper; Moises suggested using cayenne instead and doubling the salt. ”The meat-to-fat ratio is very important and so is the amount of lactic acid,” he says, dropping pieces of top round chuck and beef fat into a meat grinder. ”After that, it’s a question of adjusting the spices.”
Making sausage is really quite straightforward. The meat is ground, then kneaded together with spices, lactic-acid starter (freeze-dried milk, essentially) and a pink curing salt. The meat-and-spice mixture has to be kneaded until it is doughy and can be squeezed through the sausage press and into the sheathing. Slim Jims are now cased in collagen, but we figure that the originals were natural. So we go with lamb intestines,which are properly narrow.
A sausage maker close to the Slim Jim production process, speaking on the condition of anonymity, revealed to us that a Slim Jim is smoked at between 110 and 140 degrees for 22 hours and then allowed to cool at 50 degrees with next to no humidity. So that’s what we do.
After tasting the first batch, we decide it needs an additional two tablespoons of salt and eight more ounces of fat to make it into Slim Jim territory. By the third generation, we think we have something close, so we let it dry overnight in a refrigerator and then
smoke it. ”I think we got it,” says Moises, looking up from his prep work on the fifth day of our project. ”It could be a bit greasier, but the spice and the tanginess is there.”
We send a package of our homemade Slim Jims overnight to Brodsky. He is defensive and not at all complimentary. ”The samples are way off,” he says in a voice-mail message. ”The color is wrong, the chop is wrong, the consistency of the casing is wrong. The spicing just doesn’t seem to be there, and the lactic-acid starter culture? Didn’t taste any.”
We decide not to take his word for it, and as his father-in-law might have done, we head out to a local tavern. At Montero’s, hard by the Brooklyn docks, a regular sits at the bar. ”You made your own Slim Jim?” he says, as if he has heard this one already too. When I ask if he’d try one and tell me if it tastes like the Slim Jims of old, he wrinkles up his face and says, ”Why not?”
He chews for a moment, then shrugs. ”Sure,” he says. ”You made a Slim Jim. Good for you.”
Wade Moises’s Take on
The Original Slim Jim
(Adapted ffom Bruce Aidells)
1 lamb intestine casing (4 feet long)
2 1/2 pounds top round chuck, cubed
1 pound beef fat, cubed
3 tablespoons paprika
2 teaspoons black pepper
2 teaspoons cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon ground fennel seeds
1 teaspoon No. 1 curing salt
4 tablespoons kosher salt
2 teaspoons sugar
1 clove garlic, peeled and smashed
1/3 cup lactic-acid starter culture.
1. Rinse salt off the sausage casing. Soak in ice water for at least 1 hour.
2. Combine meat and fat. Run the mixture through a meat grinder into a large bowl, using the finest setting. Add all ingredients, along with one cup of ice water. Knead vigorously until mixture is the consistency of bread dough (about 8 minutes).
3. Rinse casing one last time. Choose the narrowest gauge tube of your sausage press. Splash the tube with ice water, then pull the casing over it. Transfer the mixture, about two fistfuls at a time, to the sausage press and then pump the meat into the casing, splashing more water on the tubing as needed to stop the casing from tearing.
4. Preheat an electric smoker to 100 degrees. Hang sausage in the smoker for 22 hours. Temperature should never dip below 90 degrees or go above 110 degrees. After 22 hours, raise the temperature to 150 degrees and cook until the internal temperature reaches 150 to 155 degrees (about 30 minutes).
5. Remove from smoker and let cool at about 50 degrees in a dry place for 4 hours. Cut sausage into 4-inch lengths.
Yield: 16 servings.
Mike Taylor, editing manager of Colorado Biz Magazine, only eats what he could grow in his back yard and raise from his chickens.
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/video/20734488/index.html
Filed under: Daddy Day Camp | Tags: childcare, daddy blog, Daddy Day Camp, mommy blog, outdoor children's adventure, recession beating tips, wild turkey, wild turkey hunt
Scared away by the lines at the Liberty Island Ferry the kids and I decided to drop back ten and punt, catch a ride on the Staten Island Ferry. On the walk between terminals through The Battery, swarming with tourists and office workers, we spotted an immature, male wild turkey (a Jake, as they’re known).
Filed under: Daddy Day Camp | Tags: child labor, Daddy Day Camp, entrepreneurial, fatherhood, Josh Eden, lemonade, mommy blogs, recession activity, shorty's .32 restaurant, SoHo Manhattan, staycation, summer time
Shorty (aka Josh Eden) and I have been meaning to add a Lemonade Stand Adventure to the activities offered at Daddy Day Camp since the first signs of Spring. The plan was to set up shop outside his restaurant on Prince Street Yesterday was D-Day. The first three rules of retail? Location, Location, Location!
First stop Staples for paper and markers, signage, we all agreed was very important for they’re new business. Staples rapes us for $47.00 for markers, paper and a pair of pouches (one for the markers and one for the money). “start up costs,” I explains, “can be paid back–amortized–over 60 days.” HRH nodded gravely. Bevan Jake asks if we could draw once we got on the subway.
Got off the Lexington local at the Spring Street station and walked across SoHo (passed the window at Agent Provocateur) to 199 Prince Street, Shorty’s .32. I’ve known Josh “Shorty” Eden since my first day on the job at New York magazine back in 1994. He was working Tom Valenti’s Line at Cascabel, has since run various kitchens for Jean-Georges Vongericjten’s operation, and is now running his own place.
Shorty is ready for us when we arrive. A deuce (table for two) already set up outside the French doors of his facade. As soon as we finish writing our signs, Shorty marched the children to the kitchen and set about making 8 quarts of fresh lemonade, asking a busboy to fetch the same amount of ice. “You understand, kids, I’m taking my cut, here,” explains Shorty.
“Aaaw??” Complains HRH, looking at me for back-up.
“Hun, Shorty pays SoHo rent, he squeezed the lemons, bought the sugar, pays the electric bills on the ice-maker. He’s gotta get something.”
“But we don’t have any money,” says Bevan Jake.
“You will,” replies Shorty, confidently.
“How much?” asks HRH, ready to deal.
What about you cover my costs for now?” says Shorty.
“How much?” says HRH, crossing her arms.
“How about 30 bucks?”
“Thirty bucks??” barks HRH, “We’ll never make any money.”
Shorty says his cut is Thirty Bucks
“It’s not even 11:30, and nearly 90 degrees outside,” says Shorty. “You’ll make money. Anyway that’s just what the ingredients cost. I didn’t even charge you for the plastic cups.”
“I’m hungry,” says bevan Jake.
“No, Jakey. We have to get to work,” says HRH, sternly.
I ask HRH how much she’s planning on selling each glass for. She replies “Two bucks.”
I suggest that might be a little high for 10 oz. of lemonade. Ask what would happen if a family of four wanted to buy four cups of lemonade and you told them $8? Would you spend $8? If I was thirsty, she says, unconvinced by her own response.
Maybe better you sell each glass for $1?
“We could sell a large for $2,” chirps Bevan Jake.
“Yeah!” agrees HRH. I walk across the street to the deli on Sixth Avenue for 16 oz plastic cups ($5.27). When I returned there was already a line.
Bevan Jake is scooping ice into cups, HRH is ladling lemonade (and ONE lemon slice per cup) as fast as she can. Business is so brisk she hardly has time to put the money in her cash pouch.
A Lolipop Break
A young mother from across the street remarks that she grew up here and used to sell lemonade all the time. “You don’t see that anymore,” she remarks. “It’s nice. I’ll have a large, hun.”
“Two bucks!” barks Bevan Jake, burning up with Gold Rush Fever.
“What happened to ‘please and thank you?’” I ask.
“Please and thank you,” Bevan Jake shouts after the neighbor pushing her stroller.
After an hour of steady business, HRH announces that we need more ice and more lemonade.
Bevan Jake wants some more Rice Krispies. In a twinkling, Shorty is back with another 8 quarts of lemonade and Bobby (the bus boy) has 6 more quarts of ice. I buy 26 more plastic cups.
“Anybody getting tired?” I ask, watching the kids depositing fistfuls of ice into cups and offering half-filled glasses to customers.
“No!” They reply in unison. In that case, I remnd them, no hands in the ice, and serve full glasses to your customers. Jake excitedly shows me a .20 Euro coin. “Look dad! Real gold!”
“Great!” I reply wishing silently that I’d been watching when the European Animal had pawned his dirty tourist money off on my kids.
Business slacks off a bit and Jake takes to hawking the product. “Fresh affordable lemonade!” he barks at passers-by across the street.
“Fresh and affordable,” laughs one local. “I’m sold.”
All work and no play makes Shorty a dull boy
Shorty found time to fraternize. I enjoyed a pair of Red Stripes and a plate of Grilled Shrimp, Black Cumin Honey and Parsnip Puree $14 and a Chilled Green Bean Salad $7
After another hour, HRH announces that she needs more lemonade. Bevan Jake is sitting under the red umbrella eating his third bowl of Rice Krispies. Before I can protest, Shorty has 4 more quarts and more ice ready to go. “I gotta call my publicist,” he grins, only half joking–less than half.
A sure sign that she has been working to long in the hot sun HRH begins to sob when I tell her it’s time to settle up with Shorty and head home. To make matters worse I inform her that she’s paying for the cab ride home with her earnings. “But, Daddy??” After a brief intervention by my sister, Bevin–who had just happened by and heard Bevan Jake’s carnival bark “Fresh, affordable lemonade! Getcher fresh, affordable lemonade!” “from the corner of Thompson Street–the kids made good on their promise to shorty and each cleared $51.00. And, because Obama says we should, we’re opening savings accounts on Thursday… When Daddy Day Camp is back in session.
The Daddy Day Camp Lemonade Team at Shorty's .32
And next Tuesday, weather permitting: Getcher Fresh affordable lemonade!”
Filed under: Idle Hands | Tags: auto repair, bottle blonds, customer service, firearms, lingerie, online shopping, retail, T&A, toyota landcruiser
Mike’s part, the “shock tube,” is proving very difficult to locate. This reply, my third strike, from Cindy at Cool Cruisers of Texas:
On Apr 17, 2009, at 12:04 PM, Cool Cruisers of Texas wrote:
I’m sorry, but we don’t have such a piece. Try asking our Bulletin Board for help. There are many Land Cruisers there being parted out by individuals. Thanks for checking
- Cindy
Cindy, from customer service at Cool Cruisers of Texas, suggests I look for a "shock tube" on their bulletin board
Cindy, is that you?
Filed under: Idle Hands | Tags: auto repair, fj62, gear, toyota landcruiser
The bright orange, four-point racing restraints had been sitting in a box in the dining room for a month before Norman and I got a chance to install them in the back seat of my 1988 Toyota Landcruiser, The Boyota. Late model Landcruisers are coveted by two distinct group of car freak, a geographically disparate, socio-economically diverse tribe of native-born, white men for whom collecting and restoring the trucks is a single-minded pursuit; and any male, 35 years or older, born in any one of 25 nations in the Caribbean (for those counting, I have excluded Cuba). This second group covets the late-model Landcruiser because it can be effectively kept on the road using coat hangers and the application of a willy nilly variety of ingenious homespun, curb-side mechanical remedies and hand hewn parts.
By birth I belong to the first group, but share the motivations of the second.
The racing restraints are for the kids and replace the factory-installed lap belts now rejected as more dangerous than using no restraints at all. I can generally shrug off the trembling forecasts of doom-oriented parenting, but, truth is, standing by the curb with the parking break engaged The Boyota constitutes a moral hazard of sorts, and so the terrible tales of bifurcated babies reached in, gripped my heart and haunt me still. But with the racing restraints installed the children are effectively pinned to the back of their seats–safe as houses–with the not entirely unintended ancillary benefit that they can’t lash out and swat each other.
locked and loaded in the back of The Boyota
A moment of good cheer followed the successful and surprisingly seamless installation of the new belts but nothing lasts forever.
Norman called from underneath the truck. There was a situation that required my immediate attention. A weld at the top of the rear right shock where it meets the chasis at what is called the “shock tube” had sheered and, while rattling around loose under the truck the shock had severed the emergency break cable. “You need to get this fixed,” said Norman.
I have made the left onto Coney Island Avenue from Church Avenue nearly every day since I moved to he neighborhood five years ago without ever noticing the sign on the second shop on the left.
Last Friday afternoon I stopped by Big S Springs a few minutes before five and was waved off. “Closed,” barked a white whiskered man in oily, blue coveralls.
“You open Saturday?”
“No. We’re open all week. Come back Monday.”
“I got a shock with a busted weld.”
“Monday. We open at 8:30.”
I stopped by the next Wednesday (time’s like that), introduced Myself to Mike and asked him to have a look at the rear end of The Boyota. He declined. “Those guys there just brought in that truck,” he said gesturing to at least three men lying under a home heating oil delivery truck with a bright red cab. “I’m gonna be here al night.”
I don’t know if he recognized me or the truck from the week before, but during a dramatic pause we shared while staring at the bright red cab of the lame truck, Mike seemed to relent. “Come back at 5:30, I’ll do what i can.”
“You’re slammed. I’ll come back tomorrow morning.”
“We open at 8:30.”
“Right.”
This morning Mike directs me to park in front of the lift in the last bay of his shop. “I’ll see what I can do,” he offers, projecting no hope of a speedy resolution.
Standing together under The Boyota, Mike expresses first shock and then grudging respect at the work done some months ago just off Utica Avenue. “Who did this work?”
“It’s a long story,” I reply.
“I bet it is,” he says, looking over his shoulder at me. Whoever he is, he’s a good welder, but he used the wrong piece of steel. This is galvanized, it’s a friggin’ fence post. But, I’ll tell you what, he did a good job. Really. He even put the bar on brackets,” he says, and instructs one of his mechanics, a man named Whoops, to get him a wrench. “Let’s see how the hell he put this together.”
A blizzard of parts and hypothesis follow, we strip the shock and consider various complimentary strategies to work with what we have, before Mike concludes, “Nah, that galvanized is your problem. It’s too hard to weld right. Jes’ take it back to the guy. Get him to fix what he did.”
“I’m here now, Mike. let me give you the work.”
“No way to do it right. You gotta order the part. They got all sorts of parts books, you’ll find it. Look it up. Call the guy. Ask him. It’ll cost you nothing, like $150.”
Mike, inspired by the ingenuity of the creator of this mess, seems to have a sudden change of heart and marches out from under the truck in search of a rubber sleeve he thinks might make a fix possible. When he disappears I ask his man, Whoops if he wouldn’t mind unscrewing the remaining bolt that holds the dead shock to the chassis. Whoops nods and fetches the wrench he has just put back in its box. “Better than having it banging around under the truck,” I say.
“That’s what I’d do,” Agrees Whoops.
Mike returns from his office shaking his head, “No sleeve that fits. Jes’ order the part from the book, it won’t cost you more than $150.”
“I just want to keep it on the road a few more miles, Mike. how about you try to weld it here, now. I don’t want to drive around on three springs anymore.”
“You kidding? This truck could drive around on three springs all the way to California. These things rot out like crazy,” he says, pulling a strip of rust from the the bottom of a panel and throws it on the floor of the shop, “but they never die. Never.”
“That’s why I want you to fix it today.”
“I can’t. My welder’s out with the Chicken Pox,” he says, shrugging with his eyebrows. “I got my cousin coming in all the way from Bayonne–Bayonne!–just to help me cover, but I gotta pay for him to get here.”
“And you gotta pass that cost on,” I say, trying to remain reasonable, sympathetic even.
“And I gotta take my piece… No! Order the piece. Come back. I’ll see what I can do.”
Filed under: The Farmer, backyard chickens, chickens, urban agriculture | Tags: egg birds, fowl predation, pecking order, urban farm, urban raccoons
The winter was hard on the flock. The coop was warm enough, but, though great efforts were made in the planning and construction, the building was not as secure as I had imagined. I locked it most every night–well, barricaded the door–but had not counted on daytime raids. Unlike last year–when, on three occasions, I found eviscerated Leghorns frozen to the dirt in the run, this winter when the flock suffered a loss it seemed that the casualty was carried off. Only the top-end predators (here, think lions and crocodiles) bother with the entire carcass. Most lesser carnivores, hoping to make the most of their opportunism before a beast (real or imagined) further up the food chain stumbles across the scene, will satisfy themselves with viscera and beat a hasty retreat. The disappearances were puzzling. Fiona, a neighbor who also keeps chickens, insists that when one of her chickens goes missing it has been purloined for use in a ritual of Santeria held somewhere in the bowels of Prospect Park, the borders of which are not three blocks away. I had my doubts, but no alternate theory to offer.
to avoid violence associated with establishing the peck order it is recommended that new birds be introduced into the flock at night
But I digress. By late February we had lost two of the three remaining birds. The idea of going to zero on my laying flock weighed heavily. I feared that if we lost all the hens, any resulting interruption in fresh egg production would doom my already slim chances of rebuilding the flock and we would default to the grocery store and languish there forever. I did not lay eyes on the culprit until the first week of March. In the predawn I was woken by the alarm call of Last Chicken Standing. I leapt from bed and flung the window open just in time to witness the terrified red hen sprinting down the driveway pursued by the largest raccoon I have seen (not just in Brooklyn, anywhere). There is a gaze of raccoons rumored to nest hard-by the dumpster at the KFC on Coney Island Avenue. I suspect all this locavore chatter had not been lost on the great, shambling filcher staring up at me now, when our dog Fergus leapt up on the window sill to see what all the excitement was about, the raccoon made for the back fence. Last Chicken Standing is now in protective custody in a metal layer cage, terribly lonely, bored and forlorn, but still producing one very high quality small brown egg every morning.
After some negotiation with Lisa I have placed an order for reinforcements. We expect delivery during the week of May 25. The birds arrive airfreight in a cardboard carrying case marked “LIVESTOCK.” The new flock consists of one red pullet, a pair of White Leghorns and two Black Stars. These are not the fancy collector birds you read about when (if) you read about fowl collectors. No outrageous plumage, no miniature splendor, our birds are work-a-day egg machines. At 18 weeks they should begin a life of labor, producing one egg a day. The propaganda from Murray McMurray Hatchery is very encouraging: “If you are after maximum production of eggs with the most efficient feed conversion ratio [and who isn't?], then this is your ticket. These pullets weigh about 4 lbs. at maturity, start laying at 4 1/2 to 5 months, and will continue 10 to 12 weeks longer than most good layers.”
I have begun the renovations of the original coop. In order to limit pecking order violence, each hen will have her own laying box and there will be ample roosting room. In an effort to limit any further predation, the coop’s run will be completely enclosed and attached to the coop itself. This year’s Winter Palace will be converted into a backyard clubhouse for the children. They will have ungoverned access to it as soon as it is free of vapors from the structure’s planned total immersion in chlorine bleach. More when there is more..
