Two-Piece

Manual labor as therapy

Whither has gone the Visible Man? 

If you’re of a certain age and were ever predisposed to building model airplanes or cars, you might remember the Visible Man, or his female counterpart, the Visible Woman. These were human model kits, each a bit over a foot tall. The “skin” was transparent plastic, allowing a view of the plastic innards, which consisted of a skeleton and a full set of major organs—brain, lungs, heart, liver, stomach, pancreas, intestines, kidneys, bladder. As a model it was pretty weak; the bones were connected by little bits of wire—repurposed staples if I remember correctly—that required a deft hand and the patience of Job. The organs each came in two pieces which, when glued together, formed an ill-fitting whole. The female model came with an alternate pregnant belly and two-piece fetus. [1]

I never managed to successfully assemble a Visible Man or a Visible Woman in its entirety; it was such a tweaky mess I doubt anyone did. But I got a kick out of trying and learned a few things about anatomy into the bargain. And without doubt it was a great idea, if lacking in the execution department. It’s surprising to me that they ever went out of production. I suppose in the digital age we believe we don’t need Visible People anymore, but any digital analog by definition would lack the tactile joy to be found even in such a crap model.

I’ve been thinking about that tactile joy over the last couple of weeks as I’ve slowly demolished and reassembled the master bathroom in my house. I say “reassembled” as though it’s a done deal, though at the moment it’s just a plywood box with a toilet. Still, that’s a far cry from where it was a week ago when I almost slipped off one of the joists that constituted the floor and plunged through the plaster and lath ceiling of the room below.

Watch your step.

It takes a large measure of faith to grab a hammer and start smashing tile in the only house you’ve ever owned, but my feeling is that ownership is a license to drill holes in things and rip things up and paint things silly colors. It’s possible that this tendency will lead me to a pauper’s grave, but the great thing about doing stuff is that you learn to do stuff. This is the fourth Christmas in a row that I’ve embarked on colossal construction or repair adventures, and while my wife said that the clutch replacement project had her worried about my mental health for a while, it’s a year later and we’re still driving the car and we saved a thousand bucks. 

A bathroom remodel can run several times that amount, and despite the immense success of Red Clay Bestiary, the free subscription model makes it difficult to conjure up that kind of cabbage. Nor could we ignore the issues the bathroom presented us any longer: the carpet—yes, our bathroom had carpet—was close to forty years old and was impregnated with so much cat litter that it was functionally a smelly shag beach. The toilet had become unmoored and rocked around like the world’s most disgusting bobble-head doll. The tub leaked and the joists below it made ominous creaking noises whenever I stood near the drain. Mold and mildew had set up bustling metropolises in the grout on the tile walls of the shower and pretty much everywhere else, and cockroaches had gotten so comfortable in the room that I knew most of them by name. 

So this wasn’t a frivolous undertaking. We aim to make the room a pleasant place but there won’t be a nook for a string quartet and the shower valves won’t heat up automatically when my alarm clock goes off. 

My wife is in charge of the pleasant part of the equation, while I’m primarily responsible for keeping it cheap. The old saw is that if you think hiring a professional is expensive you should try hiring an amateur, but my sacred charge is to find a third way. I’ll let you know later how that goes. 

In the meantime, I’ll say that I’m having a lot of fun. Demolition, of course, is more relaxing than building stuff, at least if you’re able to keep your mind off the fact that you’re heading into a wilderness from whence the only exit is through, not back. Ripping out drywall and prying up floorboards is primarily an exercise in exercise, and while it made me sore it didn’t tax my brain all that much. Of course, all the time I was gutting the room down to the bare studs, a part of me urgently wanted to be building instead, to allay the ever-growing fear that I wouldn’t be able to get it back together again. This sort of work, carpentry and drywall and plumbing in particular, are not as exact as automobile work, where everything is machined and tolerances are very fine. I’m more comfortable with the latter, but I’m learning to deal with the former. The wall is an inch narrower at the bottom than the top? Well, that’s weird, but I can deal. 

The best thing about the project is that now, some forty years after I last laid a bead of glue on my Visible Man, I find myself in possession of a Visible House. Our house was built in 1939 as a single floor, two-bedroom affair with a porch running along the west side. At some point someone walled in the porch, creating a long, narrow room we divided in half with shelves and now use as an office and dining room (the original dining room is currently my wife’s teaching studio). In the 1980s some enterprising owner had a giant hole cut in the south slope of the roof and plopped in a large dormer, which houses the master bedroom and bath. The remarkable ingenuity of this upgrade is hinted at by the crazy quilt of slopes and ridges that comprise the ceiling, but a full appreciation of the audacity of house builders requires one to pull away the veil and see the intermingled framing of the mid-80s structure and the 1939 structure, the roofline still visible in the walls of the dormer, which in turn is shoved into the original house like a cartridge into a Nintendo. It’s a two-piece thing of ludicrous beauty; a brazenly practical solution to a simple problem.

Tomorrow is Election Day here in Georgia, when with my fellow Georgians I’ll go to the polls to cast a vote for two Senate seats. It’s ironic, because voting is something we all do ourselves and yet it is as far from the DiY ethic as it’s possible to get—five million people all trying to solve a fantastically complicated series of problems by selecting a person to represent them on a two-piece team of 1) a hundred and 2) a hundred-thirty-five, many of whom are more interested in solving their own problems than those they’ve been tasked with. It’s a miracle that anything gets done, ever. But I’ll pour my faith into this exercise with just as much exuberance as I do digging nails out of forty-year old plywood. I expect many of you out there at the other end of this electric pipe will do the same. I wish you all well, and wherever the future takes us collectively I hope that individually you can find simple problems you can fix with your own two hands and marvelous two-piece brains. 

[1]  Two-piece Fetus would make a great band name and, because I believe in the free exchange of ideas, I hereby offer it without any restrictions to anyone who wishes to use it.