Readers of my resume might surmise that the title was conferred because I have written and edited a number of home-improvement books and magazines for New York City-based publishers. Those who know that I made my living as a carpenter before going into publishing might think I earned it by working on the elaborate model train set installed at Rockefeller Center at Christmastime every year during the late 1970s—or for the built-ins I created for big machers ensconced at the Dakota on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. But no, it came before all that—before I might have deserved it, which is not to say that I ever did.
After graduating from Rutgers with a degree in Comparative Literature, I moved to New York City to make my fortune as a writer. At first I did odd jobs—a little painting, some roof repairs—to make ends meet. Then a high-school friend who was a newly minted architect helped me get a job with one of his boss’s favorite contractors—John Tinnerello, a 30-year-old Brooklyn boy who had been too impatient to complete his own architecture studies.
Tinnerello was willing to build anything anyone would ask for, whether he knew how or not. Don’t get me wrong, John had smart hands. He probably could have fashioned a copy of Michelangelo’s Pieta with a belt sander. But his compagni—all named either Anthony or Michael— forget about it.
I became one of them. About three weeks on the job, we were converting a storefront near Kings Highway to a chiropractor’s office. Dark Masonite wall paneling, beige carpeting wrapped up the baseboards and over boxes that when fitted with cushions would serve as seating in the waiting room. A beige Formica receptionist’s desk, a suspended grid ceiling with drop-in acoustical panels and fluorescent light fixtures— Brooklyn interior chic circa 1975.
As the lunch break started, I made an announcement: “I’m going to be out next Tuesday for Yom Kippur.”
Nobody said a word. Someone turned up the radio. Everyone turned inward as we sat in the dust on bundles of metal stud and wallboard compound pails working on our sandwiches and Cokes. It was awkward. Usually when these guys started talking, you couldn’t get them to stop. Trash talk, heads-ups on strangers spotted in neighborhood, play-by-plays of spousal arguments, speculation about what you should pay for the “insurance job” when your old Continental’s transmission gave out and whether a job in private sanitation might lead to a more rewarding career path. “What I’m gonna do when I get outta here—fuggeddabowdit!” But nobody talked at lunch that day.
When the screw guns started squealing again, John approached me wearing the expression of a fighter returning to his corner between rounds of a bout with Rubik’s cube. “Mike, I don’t get it. You’re working construction? Most of my customers are Jews because they don’t know how to build or fix anything.”
I briefly pondered the causal relationship suggested by his syntax. But in the moment I became worried that he was building a case for dismissal on grounds of my hereditary defect. No, he was genuinely innocent of any instance in which a Jew had worked with his hands.
Before long John noticed that I was different from the Italian Mikes in other ways. For one thing, as a six-foot-two, 150-pound bookworm, I wasn’t ideally designed for busting up sidewalks and driveways. A lot of the outfit’s gross sales were derived from concrete restoration.
“You got no pecs,” observed Mike Pecoraro, a member of the crew who was angling to become Tinnirello’s partner.
So John had me work with him in the cabinet shop. At first I was assigned to cleaning contact cement from the finished Formica-work prior to delivery. But when I expressed an interest in learning to make cabinets, he decided to give me a shot. He was the only one with cabinetmaking skills in the organization, but he preferred to be out on the job sites with the Tonys and the other Mikes. He gave me a lesson on how to use the radial-arm saw and dubbed me the new cabinetmaker.
In keeping with my habit, I learned by studying the classics: John L. Feirer’s Cabinet Making and Millwork, and Willis H. Wagner’s Modern Carpentry. It was a year before I learned to position one eyeball directly in front of a given mark on the folding rule to avoid distortions of measurement caused by parallax. But I made all kinds of things—kitchen cabinets, built-in banquettes and dining tables, sleek built-in furniture for the architect’s Manhattan clients.
John told me about a new contract he had landed—fixtures for a chain of custom picture-framing shops. The order might include up to 600 Formica-finished hexagons mounted on lazy susans for displaying molding samples. The day he came into the shop and found that I had devised a jig to adapt a standard 90-degree laminate trimmer to work flawlessly at a 60-degree angle, he was truly impressed. With it I could finish six hexagons in a single day. At $300 a pop, it would be a pretty penny.
“You know,” Tinnerello said, “you’re pretty handy for a Jew.”