Why Every Guy Needs a Handyman
Canadian Don is no hired wrench. He’s my partner, my mentor, the man who taught me how to own a home
By Bob Drury; Art by Andrio Abero/33rpm
Handymen are not to be confused with “guys.”
Every homeowner needs guys, too. I’d bet even Bob Vila has guys: pool
guys, tree guys, lawn guys, roof guys. But handymen don’t simply
provide services. They anticipate problems. They proactively offer
solutions. Most of all, they happily share their hard-earned wisdom.
After all, a man should know how to fish his own cable line behind the
drywall.
It did not take me long to locate Canadian Don. He was fixing the
toilet at my local pub. (As he hails from Ottawa, and the legality of
his employment in the United States is, shall we say, nebulous, I won’t
use his last name here.) His chinos and sweatshirt were smeared with
paint stains, and dried tar and polyurethane encrusted his calloused
hands.
I bought him a beer and explained my dilemma. He scrunched his brow.
“Everything in the world works by the principle of the lever,” he said,
pronouncing the word leever and demonstrating by raising his pint,
pointing to his elbow, and downing a swallow. “See? Leever. Fulcrum to
aperture, load to base. When a man works alone, he needs to know these
principles.”
I pondered this as we drove to my house “fer a quick look-see.” Along
the way, into the mind of a handyman I plumbed. How does one, in fact,
become handy? For Canadian Don, it seemed that he more or less learned
to fly while falling.
“Let’s just say there was a time in my life when I had some free time,”
he explained. I nodded my appreciation of his circumspection. “I fooled
around with electronics, you know, takin’ radios and TVs apart and
puttin’ them back together. Did some stonework. Paintin’, of course,
anybody can paint. Sheetrockin’, a little ceramics, like that.”
Canadian Don had moved into my town only a few years before I’d bought
my home. Since relocating, he said, it hadn’t taken him very long to
gin up a humming business. Our community can, I suppose, be described
as ritzy, particularly the summer homes down by the ocean. (“They’re
making $500 an hour and don’t have the time or the inclination to fix a
leaky faucet. I can understand that.”) Up in the woods, where Canadian
Don and I live, it’s more middle class. As we drove, I wondered what
the handyman scene was like around town.
“There are a few others like me,” he said. “But we’re really a dying
breed. Everything’s so specialized these days. You’ve got your nail
bangers, your carpenters, your pool professionals, your landscapers.
But your jack-of-all-trades guys? Fewer and farther between. That’s why
I think I’ve found a niche out here. I’m busy as hell, and it’s all
word of mouth. There are limits, of course. I’ve done some roofing, but
I’m not too excited about it. And you won’t be calling me to wire your
house.”
I asked him what he charged. Twenty dollars an hour, he said. Cash. He
said he was up to most tasks, but if he had to tackle a job with which
he was somewhat unfamiliar, “Well, sometimes it’s a bit of an
adventure. But if I’m on a job for 8 hours when in theory it should
have taken me only 2, I’ll just charge for the 2.”
This was reassuring, as I’d envisioned a family of muskrats signing a
suicide pact and toddling off to the four corners of my plumbing
apparatus. “Of course,” Don said, “there’s a lot of big jobs I just
can’t take because I can’t afford to spend 2 or 3 days in one spot. And
then there’s the rudeness factor. I fired one customer because I think
he confused the terms ‘handyman’ and ‘dog-slave.’ Another owed me a
couple of hundred bucks and he started whining and complaining and I
said, ‘Aw, keep it,’ and just walked out.”
Honest. Polite. No-nonsense. Canadian Don was everything I was looking
for. When we pulled into my driveway, I ran to open his door for him
with my wallet out.
