The Screwdriver Pedagogies

1.

I’ve just tripped over the tool kit. Since the door to my home office tends to drift shut, this black nylon satchel of utility sits on the floor propping it open. There’s also nowhere else to put it. I bought the thing at B&Q, Britain’s version of Home Depot. There’s one down in Penryn, halfway to work, a big-box bonanza with aisles and aisles of objects and gadgets I’ve never known how to use but suspect I should own anyway. When I moved here from Hong Kong last year, I had an empty house, a furniture budget, and a certain gendered urge to be prepared for manual usefulness. Shelves to hang, flatpack furniture to assemble. In theory, I have everything I might need; in practice, there’s very little I’ll be able to use. Still, there’s a comfort in having it.

2.

My grandmother’s gentleman friend owned a tract of land on the outskirts of New Bern, North Carolina. On it, he had his own trailer, plus a second one he rented to a local car salesman. Granny had her own place, a green and white mobile home with a redwood deck in the front almost the size of her living room. Just beyond the three trailers, toward the back of the property, a metal warehouse loomed. In the summer, it radiated heat, but once you slid open the massive front door and slipped inside, it was not cooler, exactly, but less sweltering.

Although we’d been warned not to play in there, it was a dusty wonderland of strange tools and machines. A car-restoration business leased out some of the space for a time. Hulks of old roadsters and sedans sat on racks silently awaiting reanimation. The mechanics puttered, took cigarette breaks, got back to puttering. The cars took on approximate shape but I never saw one completed. Look but don’t touch, we were told.

Beyond that cavernous front space in the warehouse, there was another chamber, so to speak. Lower ceiling, dusty lights that barely pushed the dark back. It was a sculpture garden of filthy machines. Touch them and your fingers would come away black with unidentifiable grime. It should have been the perfect place for kids to play hide and seek, but the air stank of rust, old metal, and vague danger. It was a secret lair where thieves hid, an oubliette for objects and contraptions not touched in decades, a gateway I trespassed upon but never really passed through.

3.

I couldn’t quite work out why we had to go to school. According to my mother, knowledge appeared in your head as you got older. She spoke French, or said she did, and had never studied it. It was just there. Don’t worry, she reassured us. When you get older, you’ll know how to speak it too, and you’ll know how to cook and how to drive. In the same way, I believed the onset of adulthood would demystify the tools in the workshop downstairs. An understanding would coalesce in my brain like story ideas or useful tumors. I understood hammers, nails, and screwdrivers well enough. Pliers and drills and spirit levels. Chainsaws, soldering irons. My father didn’t talk and my mother didn’t stop, so in the version of reality she spun up for us, everything was mind over matter. We couldn’t see the screws that held everything together. We just had to trust that they were there. Everything already existed, and if it didn’t, it was about to. Case in point: Our house wasn’t finished when we moved in. My father would retreat to his DIY warren in the basement, saw some wood, pound some nails, make some things. Like the old roadsters in the warehouse in New Bern, the house never seemed to be truly finished, only more there as the months turned into years. Cabinets, shelves, new carpets. I had nothing to do with it.

4.

I hated getting my hands dirty and my father hated that about me. The only thing worse than grease and grit on my fingers was the gelatinous crap we had to clean our hands with afterward. My father called it “Bappo” or something like that. It had the stiff, oily texture of petroleum jelly and smelled like a little pot of kerosene. The stains would go away but the stink would linger.

Prissy. Princess. Pristine. His disgust didn’t toughen me up. I still detest getting my hands dirty. 

5.

Amid all those gruff silences, there were a few father-son teaching moments:

• Son, when you’re sawing wood, you can’t let the blade get bent. It won’t go through clean.

• Son, when you hammer a nail, you’ve got to pound it right on the head. Drive it in.

• Son, steering a car is like steering a woman in bed. You’ve got to show her where to go.

Or, to simplify: straightness. Anything bent is a problem.

6.

In college, my joints started to go. My left knee went first. I delivered pizzas for Domino’s. When the regional manager showed up at our branch, we had to scramble. She’d yell “Good hustle! Good hustle!” if she was pleased with your performative rushing-about. If you weren’t doing your part at helping Big Pizza reassure your starving fellow citizens that food could be summoned by people who were constantly dashing, she’d summon you to the back office for a stern word. The nights she wasn’t there, which is to say most of them, there were often a few joints in circulation. I once melted a hole through the dashboard of the Domino’s truck with one. And when my knee began feeling as if someone were hammering a nail through it, there was even more reason to augment reality with a puff or two before the next delivery. Or during. Or after.

Primed to ignore chronic pain until it settled in and carved its name on the mailbox out front, I pretended my hands didn’t ache all the time until I couldn’t anymore. I’d started working as an ASL interpreter, doing classes at my university as well as at the local community college. Overuse syndrome. Repetitive strain injuries. Carpal tunnel. For the next decade and a half, the pain in my hands, wrists, neck, and shoulders was a tidal force: sometimes debilitating, sometimes barely there at all. There were days I had to switch between ice baths and vats of hot water. Writing, while necessary in the same way oxygen is, didn’t help. Hands poised over the keyboard, shoulders hunched, scowl of concentration: I wrecked my upper body, gobbling ibuprofen like Halloween candy to keep myself going. Bashed out my first novel. Lost feeling in a couple of fingers. Got it back. Began thinking of a career change. Kept writing.

Back when my hands worked more reliably, when I had a modicum of grip strength, I could have learned tools, wiring, houses. I could have learned to install a window before one closed.

7. 

I can identify maybe 2/3 of the tools in the kit. More than half, certainly. There’s a measuring tape, an assortment of screwdrivers, and a hammer or two. Pliers, wrenches, and a wire cutter so sharp I left it in its protective plastic packaging to protect my fingers. There’s a metal file of some sort—is it an awl, an asp, a rasp?—and a level. I’d list the other ones but I’d have to take them out and check online to know what they’re called. In theory, all this male cutlery ought to help me bash my way through most household contingencies. In practice, I’ll text the landlord and let him sort it out. Or I’ll text the handyman I hired to assemble the furniture and hang shelves I could trust not to pitch forward off their mountings and crash to the floor. Either way, they’ll both arrive with their own sets of tools.

8.

If the stereotype holds, men from Generation X invented the Internet but can’t change a tire. Our fathers were missing but there, there but missing. They wanted to say goodbye to a part of themselves, I suspect, in the same way some immigrants don’t teach their children their homeland’s language. They wanted to raise a tribe of soft-handed bosses in offices, not the guys on the factory floor. It would prove something had been achieved. It would also be a perpetual defeat, ensuring they’d continue being needed.

I’m writing about a loss that may not be a loss, about an observation with faint tasting notes of blame. Manhood isn’t bashing your way through life, pounding nails and children and women, keeping them straight. It took moving away from North Carolina to learn that. Before then, I worried a lot. I seemed to be terrible at manning. I know better now, but I’d like to be handier. I’d also like hands that more or less work. In the meantime, the tool kit sits at the ready, guarding the door, comforting me.