My Secret Life as a DIY Guy
When I was a kid growing up in Weymouth, we had a next door neighbor who was addicted to Crystal Meth. The signs of it were obvious. The whole neighborhood could see it. On a typical weekend we could look over and see the guy in his backyard, going in and out of his tool shed feeding his habit. It wasn’t uncommon to see him on a summer day on his hands and knees in on his front lawn in the throes of his Crystal Meth addiction. None of the Thorntons would’ve been caught dead indulging such an insidious and harmful addiction, so my brothers and sister and I used to mock the guy constantly behind his back. We thought he was hilarious, though in some small way I always sort of felt bad for his wife and two sons for the way his Crystal Meth habit took over his life and seemed to be more important to the guy than his own family. Which makes it all the more amazing for me to admit that today I’m a Crystal Meth addict too.
I promise you that everything in the above paragraph is true. Except for the Crystal Meth part. In reality, our old neighbor was, and I now am, addicted to something far more insidious, damaging and habit forming: Do it yourself projects. “DIYs”. I never thought it would happend to me, but it has. My name is Jerry, and I’m a suburban homeowner addicted to doing projects around my house.
Home improvement jobs. Lawn care. Amateur carpentry. Landscaping. “Honey Do” lists. Painting. Masonry. Appliance repair. Wiring. I’ve done it all, and yet I can’t get enough. Every Monday I can’t wait for the weekend so I can run a cord out to the backyard and plug in a power tool. I don’t care which one, I’ve just got to satisfy my DIY jones. Sometimes I can’t even wait for the weekend, so I’ve actually taken personal days from work just so I can feed my habit during the week. They say missing time from work is the sign of a true addict, and I admit, that’s me. A thousand household projects aren’t enough, and one is too many.
And it’s cost me dearly. At times, I’m ashamed to admit, I’ve been guilty of putting my DIY addiction ahead of my own family. I’ve felt the shame of standing there in the driveway in front of a table saw while my sons stood there, ball and glove in hand, asking me to play with them, but my deck project or the shelf for mom’s gardening stuff came first. I’ve seen the disappointment in my boys beautiful eyes as they walked away, but I kept working anyway, numbing the pain with the smell of freshly cut pressure-treated 2X4's.
Back to my neighbor. All the houses on our street had crappy little 1/4 acre lots, but he treated his like it was the 18th fairway at Augusta. The hands and knees thing is true, as he literally used to get down on the grass with a pair of scissors to trim down any rogue blade that had the audacity to grow at a different rate than the others. I’m not making that up. Which was hilarious to us, fresh from our triple decker in Dorchester. I don’t mean to suggest we were the world’s messiest family, but when I was in grade school the federal government started storing the Ark of the Covenant in our house.
And our general sloppiness extended to our yard, which as you can imagine didn’t sit well with the Barber of the Bluegrass next door. If dandelions were a crop, we would’ve qualified for farm subsidies. And unfortunately for him, we lived upwind, so there was nothing he could do about it. In battle, the advantage is always to whomever is fighting downhill. In an apartment building, whoever lives on the upper floor can always strap on the ski boots at 4 AM and make life miserable for the people below. With suburban lawn Nazis, whomever can use the wind to export their bumper crop of weeds into the other guy’s yard will always have the upper hand, which was the case with us. Just out of spite, and for pure entertainment, we used to wait until the dandelions turned into those whitish, parachute looking things and blow them into his yard until his property looked like the skies over Normandy the night before D-Day.
So like I said, I never thought I’d end up like that guy. Not that I’m taking scissors to my front yard, but I’m not far enough removed from that for my own comfort. And like him, I spend an uncomfortably disproportionate amount of time working on keeping up my property. I’ve gotten comfortable with the idea that none of my Sweet Irish Rose’s friends are going to stop by and say, “Wow, Jerry is hot. I’d sure love to bone him.” But I have heard more than one say “Gee, you’re lawn sure looks good” and I find that almost as flattering, a thought which terrifies me beyond all rational thought.
Maybe it’s a sign I’m just getting old. It occurred to me last October that there are four stages in a guy’s life, where he looks at a monumental event like the World Series in completely different ways:
Stage 1: “I wish I could play for the Red Sox someday.”
Stage 2: “I wish I was playing for the Sox.”
Stage 3: “I wish made their money and pulled the kind of women these guys do.”
Stage 4: “I wish I could figure out how they mowed that Red Sox logo into the infield.”
I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which stage I’m in.
I’m not complaining mind you, but it’s not uncommon for me to work twice as hard on Saturday and Sunday around the house as I do all week. Economists love to talk about the need for immigration because of “the jobs Americans are unwilling to do.” And there’s a technical term for those jobs: “Jerry’s weekend.” Last month I did so much landscaping around the pool that a bunch of Brazilians showed up carrying picket signs that said “Ele está levando os nossos empregos” (“He’s taking our jobs.”)
It’s not easy being an addict. 4th of July weekend My Trophy Wife left a day early for the Cape and took the kids with her. Which gave me an entire night to myself. That’s no big deal to the single person, but to a guy with a family it’s like an soldier getting a weekend furlough in Amsterdam. With a night all to myself and any vice I want to indulge a phone call or a mouse click away, I... cut the grass, had dinner, watched the Sox and went to bed. I told this to a friend of mine and he was incredulous. “You had a whole night to yourself, and you mowed the lawn?! You could’ve hired a hooker!!!” To which I said, “Yeah, but they charge a fortune and you know she wouldn’t have edged the grass around the swingset...”
Like any horrible addiction, I got turned onto it by a fellow addict. In my case, it was my father-in-law. My dad had a workshop in our house, though I don’t recall him ever doing any actual work in it. Come to think of it, I believe the only power tool he had in it was a beer fridge. No, it was definitely my wife’s dad, who gave me a circular saw one Christmas when she and I were living in an apartment in Cambridge. Since I grew up in a house where used a butter knife as a screwdriver, I’m pretty sure I looked at the thing like he’d given me a box of Tampax.
As soon as we bought a house, he was taking me around to all the places a DIY junkie can get his freak on. Home Depot. Lowes. Little mom & pop hardware stores where they start to call you by name like you’re Norm stumbling into Cheers. Soon I was going into home improvement centers and asking guys in ugly aprons with their names on them how to do stuff. I saw their condescending looks but I didn’t care. Saturday would be here soon and I was going to strap on that tool belt, their judgment be damned.
I tell you all this not to for sympathy or pity, but just to raise awareness of this horrible affliction. This insidious disease that can cause an otherwise uber-cool writer for the world’s swankiest sportsmut newspaper to turn into a hammer-weilding, lawn mower-pushing home improvement junkie. A DIY guy. I just want you to know. Because if you come by and see me on the lawn with a pair of scissors, it might already be too late.