Hombres de Estufa

I hear them long before I see them, and see them long before I speak to them. Their arrival is heralded by the flat staccato of a big diesel engine, followed by the hiss of hydraulic breaks and the pulsed shriek of a company truck in reverse. From across the room we can just make out the beast's dull white dorsum, a long slab rimmed above with a thin steal truss that glides above level of the sill. Easing towards the window we see the monster itself, a 24 foot stub-nosed box van grazing at the barren branches on the far side of the road. It is a generic member of the species, dingy and unmarked except for the phrase 'Reliable Movers' stencilled with wind-blurred spray paint on the runners. It moves forward and backward in small steps, like a pig rooting for a place to lie down. When it advances, it roars, when it retreats, it shrieks, over and over until it finally finds a suitable spot on the sidewalk, far enough up that cars can pass but no so far as to crush the Japanese plum trees extending over the neighbors fence. Pop, hiss. The beast vomits up three men and lays still.

We had known it was coming. Our landlady had called us ten minutes earlier to tip us off and make sure we'd be around, and I had told Benjamin to keep a sharp eye out for these hombres de estufa, I not knowing how to say 'Mover' in what we have decided is the official language of the house. Actually, we had hoped to see these guys six months ago, but six months ago we had played our tenant favors to the hilt and didn't have the heart to request a new stove on top of the $300 refund we got for moving into an uncleaned apartment. Never mind that a new stove option was included in our lease, never mind that the old stove, a 1950's vintage Kalamzoo with narrow oven space, a rusty cabinet for pots, exposed steel tubes going every which way and a tendency to turn off with a bang, had been vaguely stressing us out since the beginning. "Ah, a little bit of gas" my damn-the-toxins-full-speed-ahead wife had responded to my comment that the device emitted an evil odor, "what harm can it do?" After all, we had installed a carbon monoxide alarm in the kitchen, and as far as we knew, it had never made a peep. But we recently realized two things: one, that carbon monoxide alarms only go off if the CO levels are high enough to fell a mastodon, and two, that the device keeps a record of peak CO levels, and the one stored in memory was off the charts. Maybe not mastodon-slaying off the charts, but definitely I-don't-want-my-child-breathing-that-shit off the charts. So from Bohemian delight in this match-ignited antique my wife passed to total raging protective-mother paranoia.

Everyone talks about the protective instinct of new parents as if it were some supremely powerful human impulse, a force capable of converting a wispy young mother into a towering pillar of lion-slaying rage, all within the span of a careless gesture. This may be true, but there is another instinct that is just as powerful: namely, the tenant's instinct to have nothing whatsoever to do with the goddamn landlord. I can offer no biological or evolutionary motivation for this impulse, only my assurance that it is true: ask any long term renter, and they will confirm. I have had good landlords and I have had bad landlords, but I have never had a landlord I trusted, and never have I called a landlord with anything less than sticky black dread in my heart. "Yeah, we should really call the landlords" has become a joke in our house, a codephrase that we use to acknowledge the Fall of Man, the inevitable and ubiquitous presence of evil in the world and our basic inability to do anything about it.

Which perhaps partially explains why, with the CO threat level Flaming Red, a new child, and a provision for a new stove written into our lease, we make the outrageous decision that maybe we should just cook a little less. And for a few days, this is exactly what we do, eating cereal, Chinese takeout, pasta in the toaster oven: a true adventure in dormroom survival. But I am a man who likes his bread. I like it fresh, warm, and sour, and the only way to get that is to have either a very good relation with the neighborhood baker (there is none) or bake your own. Thus, at last, the question: "Do you want to make this call, or should I?"

It is not a neutral question. It is a question rife with insinuation and consequence. Every trick of marital diplomacy goes into asking this question with just the right mixture of intention, indifference, threat and goad, and to answering it in a way that blends self-pity with the illusion of gameness in a way that is neither committal nor noticeably evasive. The who-should-call-the-landlord question is a question on which relationships founder, converge, fuse and explode.

My gaze fixes on something well outside the room as I heave a long, sputtering sigh, a sigh that dispels the accumulated bad gasses of 32 landlords over 18 years of renting life, landlords who have failed to present lead-paint disclosures and failed to fix leaky faucets and for whom, nonetheless, my monthly checks have been building slow equity. (Full disclosure: both my parents are landlords, and I like them. It is not the Landlord as an ontological entity that is the problem, but rather MyLandlord, as a syntactic structure and economic implication.) "Well, if you don't mind...?" Silence. Yes, rather disingenuous, I will need to do better. "All right, how about this: you call, and I'll give you a beer next time we go out?" A slight smile, a shake of the head: nice try, but we've got joint finances and we never go out. Touche. I think for a moment. "OK, how about the following: you call, and I'll wash dishes for a week?" Ring, chat, schedule, done: 3 minutes work on her part for a week of menial labor on mine. And the interesting thing is, I feel that I have never made a better deal in my life, and I continue to believe this, even one week and what seems a thousand dishes later, as I stand in the window watching the great white boxwhale sputter to a halt and three hombres de estufa stagger from its mouth.

The first to emerge is The Driver, a tall middle-aged man of medium build, shoulder length black hair, and a shuffling gate. He wears a baseball cap with the initials YH. "Up?" he asks when I open the door. A man of few but well-chosen words. He tells me he is from Boston, up in the Salem area, and doesn't do any of the heavy work. YH stands for Yankee Hater. He asks questions whose origins and intent lie far from the surface, like "you like living here?", and "what street is this?". The second man is a Popeye knockoff, 45 years old, ripped arms, a barrel chest, his chin covered in a manly shag. Like his cartoon Doppelganger, he directs all speech through a small teardrop-shaped hole in the side of his mouth: he talks quickly, constantly, endlesslessly, yet not once does his jaw show vertical motion. He wears a redsocks baseball cap, but denies that he hails from Beantown. "Naw, that's the Driver. He's real proud about that." Popeye take a shine to little B. "Hey buddy, you gunna help? Har har. Stay in school, buddy, you don't want to become one of us." The third man is an aspiring guitarist in his 20's, short cropped hair, clean shaven, delicate, almost feminine earrings. He probably thinks of himself more as a starving artist than a stove guy, but he and Popeye have a nice schtick, take turns with the dolly, curse the size and ridiculous antiquity of our stove, express grave doubts about the geometric possibilities of getting it out the front door.

I watch these guys at work, and marvel at the genius of the guy who assembled this team. Larry Moe and Curly don't hold a candle to these three. Their bonhommie casts stove schlepping in a whole new light, and makes me wonder if perhaps I acted hastily when I made that youthful decision to pursue a career among the non-hauling professions. I watch these guys appreciatively, and try to enter the Spirit of the Great Mover. I offer water, a few self-effacing jibes, sailor curses: they smile, but stiffly. For the most part I remain an outsider.

At the very end of the episode I sense a slight opening, however. The Kalamazoo Death Machine gets stuck in the stairwell. Popeye and the guitarist stand around wiping the sweat off their arms, throwing ugly looks and pacing the kinks out of their backs, prophesizing failure in loud and repetitive terms. To lift or not to lift, they ask. Lift, say I, and let me help (I'll be damned if we don't this stove out of the house today.) So I grab a corner, hoist on three, and oh miracle of miracles, the stove rises like a roc, flaps up over the obstructing ledge, and lands thudding on the second flight. From here its a mere question of coaxing this monster down a couple more steps, wheeling it to the street and letting it be absorbed back into what can only be its mother, that white leviathan snoring beneath the Japanese plumbs.

They slap me on the back, these stove men, smile their rough smiles, thank me profusely: for a brief moment, I bask in the glory of a job well done, in the triumph of muscle over mind, in the enduring power of the Grunt as both as a philosophy and an agent of change. I become, briefly, a member of the Team. They never go quite so far as to call me a regular hombre de estufa, of course, but then again, who would?