Floored

It was day one of crawling around on the floor wearing knee pads, a respirator strapped over my nose and mouth, earplugs stuffed in my canals, nitrile gloves stretched blue and taut over my hands. I’m no nurse or ICU doctor, that’s for sure. I was an out-of-work editor on my knees in a newly bought house outside Woodstock, NY, that was being remodeled by its owner, a former executive of Spotify who had cashed in his stocks and launched his own start-up.
This wasn’t work I had ever planned to do, but the timing seemed to be right as I waited to hear about prospects. Editing is my main line financially, that and teaching, but of course I identified as an artist; and as artists sometimes do, I relied for hope on a coveted but false equivalency—a belief in cosmic balance: that suffering yields rewards.
I clutched a red ketchup bottle full of fiberglass resin I’d mixed. Lee had bought two 3-gallon tins and a two-pack of hardener. You mixed a cup of the honey-like base with ten drops of the clear fumigant hardening drops and stirred it with a paint stir stick. The measuring cup had a funnel spout, and you poured it into the ketchup bottles. Lee respected this family-owned hardware store nearby because it carried empty ketchup bottles. On the tins of Fiberglas resin, it said “Bondo” and showed a silhouette of an old American muscle car.
Now I was crawling around, squirting the brown gel into nail holes, into divots, into cracks and other imperfections in the reclaimed heart pine that had been laid as new flooring, after the previous flooring was torn out, before I was hired. My gloves were sticky with resin, despite the gloves, because my hands got sweaty and suffocated and sometimes I just had to remove them. Everywhere I moved, I had to take care not to step or kneel in the spots I’d applied it. But I did kneel in them frequently, wiping my hand on my pants afterwards.
The house was spacious but not extravagant. I worked in a long space at the front of the house lined by windows. It overlooked the driveway; below were the tuck-under garages. Connected to it was the dining room, and it all flowed to the kitchen, around the island, which was removed, to the benched bay window and to the bathroom at the top of the stairs to the small front office or guest room and even into its closet. All beautifully laid flooring six inches wide, tan, black, and acorn colored, peppered with black streaks from weather char or roof pitch.
It was a long job, filling holes. Just when you thought you’d gotten them all, you saw more. At the same time, the aesthetic that Lee wanted was not pristine. I was not to fill every single indentation or scar. Under the mask, my face sweated, and I heard my own huffing breath. My lower back hurt. My feet hurt. And my legs hurt. This was a test of ego, though, more than a physical test. I could endure the physical, and Lee knew it too, which is why he'd hired me.
“They just banned gatherings over five hundred people!” Lee yelled out from within a nest of custom cabinets he was installing in the kitchen. Lee owned the company running the remodeling job. He’d already hired and overseen guys tearing out a wall, replacing exterior doors and windows. Most of these guys had been let go—for reasons I couldn’t quite understand. But it was my job to fill holes, not to understand reasons for things. This was the essential nature of the change in my employment status.
I respected Lee, though he was much shorter than me and less educated than me and younger. I’d done as many foolish things in my life as him, but mine didn’t bear the same outward signs because I'd had considerably more resources. Fifteen years ago, you could have found Lee strapped to the underside of the George Washington bridge with a blow torch. I’d seen him scurry up my roof to remove a satellite dish like it was nothing. Since the ironwork period, he had built custom furniture and sold antiques for nearly ten years. But a divorce cut him off from his sales channels and commissions clientele, and now he was back in the building trade.
It was about ten in the morning, and I’d been going at it with the ketchup bottle since I'd arrived at eight, refilling it twice. I lumbered up off the floor, lifted the mask, popped an earplug, and grabbed my Contigo of coffee. Lee and I chatted about the developments, as this abstract body called COVID-19 seemed to have reached America’s shores. Lee read updates off his phone, and we bantered about the president’s not-so-hidden motives, and speculated on where this was all headed.
Shhhtock! Shhhtock!
The compressor fired upstairs where the installer was nailing down more boards just like the ones I was working on. The plan was that he'd be done by the subsequent week, at which time I’d move up there and do to the master bedroom and the hallway and the office just as I’d been doing on the first floor, sanding first, then filling holes with resin, and afterwards oiling. About two weeks of work were in store for me—work that I made a deliberate, but not easy, effort to be grateful for.
Sanding was the step after filling boards with resin, which Lee called “glue.” Underneath my bandanna was an internal editor’s hat, and I didn’t really accept that glue should be the term for anything but the white stuff in the Elmer’s bottle that tots do their crafts projects with. But again, this was not my milieu, and as was not my habit, I withheld all commentary and opinions on matters of nomenclature, terminology, and wordings.
With me, Lee joked about breaking the law to satisfy the demanding homeowner, who expected everything to be done on schedule even though labor and supplies were now a serious problem. Most days the homeowner conducted business on his mobile phone while pacing the yard. Lee in fact did make serious inquiries with his insurance company about what he should do in terms of the state quarantine laws and exceptions for essential workers; privately with me Lee shared the homeowner's disinterest in this topic and registered his frustration with me.
I finished all the coffee in my thermos, and using a handheld belt sander, on my knees again, fully kitted to protect my lungs, I sanded the hard brown globs down level with the roaring tool attached to a whirring vacuum. The sandpaper on the sander was 30 grit, it would take your fingertip off. Then I resurveyed the boards and applied more resin to deep cracks where air bubbles had created a gorge, and in nail holes I missed. Then I waited and sanded again.
Cleaning. It was a two-step process to prep the boards for oiling.
Picture the most sophisticated vacuum you can imaging for a home-building contractor, something incredibly beyond the basics, not like a Shop-Vac at all. No, this piece of equipment that Lee owned and brought to the job site was like a robot from Star Wars. It was vaguely humanoid, seeming to have a body composed of drawers that stored the many attachments that made it so massively functional. Inside it were expensive HEPA filters, and it was riddled with advanced features for its complex attachments. Most importantly, it sucked up everything, even things you couldn't see. It was Swedish made; there was one place, in Rhinebeck, that sold parts for it.
Before oiling, everything had to be vacuumed to a state of flawlessness. Lee insisted on this, despite the terrible mess I had known him to be, which gave me considerable pause and opportunity to hold my tongue. The perfection and care he demanded in my work had been entirely absent in his life only recently.
Once vacuumed, I swiffered the boards with a special chemical to trap dust, wearing booties over my shoes. Everything I did, Lee showed me how to do. When Lee introduced me to the floor installer, he said with a laugh, “This is ____________. He’s a woodworker and a writer. Mostly a writer.”
He was right. I’ve built shelves, but it’s not “fine finish” carpentry that I do. My pieces are more like trees brought indoors to hold books.
This reliance of mine on Lee’s expertise and guidance constituted a significant reversal in the balance of power in our friendship. The thing is, Lee and I have a history. For about two years, we didn’t talk. We offered friendly but strained hellos if we ran into each other in town. There were mutual but infrequent social media likes. Once or twice I’d forwarded letters to him from the courthouse that had appeared in my mailbox.
See, Lee had fallen on hard times a couple years back. Frankly, I didn’t expect him to make it through alive once I saw him looking gaunt, his cheeks sunken. Once I understood that Tito’s and tonic was his second-most serious problem. I knew he’d run a halfway house in Pennsylvania some years back, leading NA groups. But during the months that we were hanging out, he wasn’t honest about what he was using, and somehow I never suspected it was more than weed and cocktails. Then when he stayed at my house, I couldn’t parse his symptoms, what was depression and what was just normal. Lee had, after all, lost his job, his medical coverage, his wife, his house, and his dog. With the medical coverage, he lost his Wellbutrin. So divorce blues? SSRI withdrawal? I’d been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, and tried to cut him some slack.
Turns out, in those weeks when he earned two DWIs and totaled his SUV, a big factor in his weariness, sadness, and unpredictability was opiate withdrawal.
Well, now he was 1.5 years dead sober, rosy-cheeked, energetic. Still ADD as hell, still smoking cigarettes but pretty focused. He had a new girlfriend, a lawyer, and was going to meetings and staying away from his old hangouts, like Stockade Tavern.

⧝

Lee managed the timing of it all, when to start the staining based on the delivery schedule of the cabinets, and factors like when the boss man would be on site. (Of course he and the fam had a place in Manhattan as well.)
Day three, we oiled the back bedroom. As opposed to the fender bender glue we put in the floors, the stain and oil was gourmet. It had to be mixed as well, and came in a two-part container. It looked like tahini and olive oil but smelled nothing like lemons. More like maple sap and apple cider vinegar. Lee had rented a power buffer. Together, we carried it from his truck along with the giant disks, one a brush, one a buffer.
Whatever Lee said, we did. I poured oil in curving splashes onto the floor, and Lee steered the power buffer, which hummed loudly and bucked under its own weight. Lee’s elbows went up and he torqued it here and there, making the oil spread evenly, like magic. I scurried around behind him, doing the edges by hand with a two-inch paint brush and ragging up the excess using cloth rags that came in a huge pack from which you pulled them out like Kleenex from a dispenser.
Lee called out, More here, more there. Dry that spot more. And he kept steering this great spinning beast and managing the power cord that trailed and wagged behind it like a sperm’s tail.
Afterwards, the boards looked beautiful. They were amber and honey in color, the knots were darker and wavy in their grain. Every resin spot was handsomely black.
It was a big house. I spent another six days on my knees, Lee checking my work, pointing to spots to hit harder with the roto-sander.
“See that stain?”
“Yeah.”
“And smooth out the seams when one’s higher like this.”
He ordered range hoods, he fixed badly hung drywall, he appeased anxious home owners, he installed cabinets. I, the elder, who had been pulling in a good salary when everything in Lee’s life had gone bust, stood every 20 minutes clutching my back. Then I got back down there and leaned on the sander. Then I put on the mask and gloves and mixed up some more Bondo and refilled the ketchup bottle. Lee had bought more tins by now, and one of the ketchup bottles had gotten clogged with dried Bondo and was thrown away. I had emptied another five-gallon tin of resin that morning.
Every day we talked about the virus. When the first case arrived in Ulster county, Lee called out the news. We’d taken a coffee break, and he’d paced over my half-done floors, wondering what this meant for his business.
“Watch out,” I said. “Don’t step in my glue.” I was always telling him this, every day. It was my only defense against the whole situation. He never even seemed to look at his footsteps.
Everyone was supposed to be separating, staying apart, staying home. But we had momentum, working right up to the last day before the statewide ban on nonessential work. That day, Lee brought his new dog, Edith, a five-pound miniature boxer. He’d had a dog before, a dog I knew from the before times, before the meltdown of his life. That dog now lived with Lee's mother in Pennsylvania. For a while, I had that dog’s cage in my barn, along with a Trump dart board Lee had made. Both those items I’d thrown out during the years we didn’t talk.
It was 9:00 AM of the last day, Sunday. As usual, I had gone over my nail holes and crevices and edges, and circled back to the rooms where the oil had dried, eying everything from different angles. The floors were basically done, somehow, though I thought it’d never end. Soon I'd be starting the posts and exposed beams, which were bare untreated wood of some kind. There were eight posts, some upstairs, and some downstairs; they were ten inches square. And there were four long exposed beams running above the first floor, the dining room, that would I would need a ladder to reach.
I was basically potting about, waiting for Lee to give me the go-ahead on the posts and beams, which he'd been talking about me doing for weeks, when he came in from talking to the owner out in the yard (it was a sunny day) and handed me Edith. He seemed to need to get the dog out of his arms in order to think, because he then he paced around, speculating out loud about how much oil to buy—he was going to run to the hardware store. He asked me what I thought, but I had no idea. Then came the question of what I should use to apply it. The beams were too splintery to use cloth rags on, they'd snap and rip. He'd find some sponges for me.
“She’s better than the last one,” I said, about Edith, who quivered in my arms, yes, but Mona, Lee’s old dog, wouldn’t even let you hold her. Two seconds, and she’d bound away, yapping, bouncing up walls, racing around rooms, springing like a pogo stick.
“No, she’s pretty high-strung too,” Lee said. He came over and did his high-pitched puppy voice, which I had forgotten about. The same one he used to do. A falsetto voice like the old Mr. Bill cartoon. “Oh, hey, I’m fine! ________’s just holding me, that’s all, and I never met him before!”
Lee laughed.
I laughed.
“All right, I’ll be back,” Lee said. He was going to get more of the expensive oil.
“All right, " I said, mimicking him. "I’ll be here.”
He took Edith and together they left. Out the front windows I watched him get into his Subaru and back out of the driveway.

⧝

You thought something dramatic was going to happen. You thought something major was going to go down. It never did. I finished did the beams and the posts over a few days, getting up on a ladder and dusting and vacuuming first; mixing the oil base and the whatever next; wiping to apply, and wiping to remove excess, and repeating. While I was up there I took down a light fixture that was getting replaced. Lee didn't really inspect the beams and posts very closely, which was good, because in places I oiled over dust that was too hard to remove. Then my work was done, and the carpenters and the plumbers carried on every day without me for I don't know how long exactly. I returned home and in time some editorial work came along.
Also in time, I saw Lee's posts on social media showing the completed rooms, floors shiny, rustic, handsome, furniture in, walls painted. I just liked the posts, making no comments. Only I could see the little black dots, and only I (and Lee) knew all that had gone into them.
The virus of course grew and grew and grew and grew and grew and grew...and we don't really know yet, and may never know, if there was any benefit to it. ∯