Three Painters Named Steve

I’ve had three painters named Steve. I realize this may not sound very exotic, or even promising for an opener- a story about house painters? Why? Also, I cannot help but notice that the few short stories still making their way into print, having managed to survive the extinction process of this fast fading art form, inevitably contain dogs, trailers, guns, and/or at least one broken-down vehicle, none of which are included here. But you know how it is- inspiration can come from strange sources.

The first Steve was Greek, and he adorned my walls with solid, classical brush swipes for about a decade. Well, maybe “adorn” is not exactly the right word. He was more like what is generally known around these parts as a “shmearer,” but he was fast, unobtrusive, trustworthy. He was also old fashioned and liked to start the job at 7:30 a.m. sharp, if not before. Somehow this did not inspire terror, but rather comfort; the hallowed work ethic. He had a thick neck too, which I’ve always admired in a painter. Actually, his name was Steve Thanasopolis, and for some reason we always called him “Mr. Thanasopolis.” He was older than us by about twenty years, and somehow this bestowed upon him the dignity and wisdom of age. In addition, he was a bit courtly and formal, with vague intimations of a statue from the Met’s Greek Gallery, though of course not quite as perfect albeit he still contained all his limbs, nor was his nose or an ear missing. “Hello, is Mr. Thanasopolis there?” A few seconds later with the phone barely muffled, “Hey Daaad, it’s for you, pick up. . . pick up!” That would be Mr. Thanasopolis’ son, about whom we occasionally wondered. Mr. Thanasopolis lived in a little house on the other side of the Bronx, one of those red brick steadfasts, with a clinically depressed wife and an obese grown child, the son. We eventually found out about the darkly moody wife through several phone interactions over time with what appeared to be an unusually dead voice on the other end, and about the son through Mr. Thanasopolis himself. Prior to learning about the son, I had envisioned a little patch of working class heaven and salt-of-the-earth autonomy, the tiny driveway, the neat yard, a place of one’s own as compared to my boxy apartment in a busy, anonymous high rise; I pictured a place where the son, now a grown stock broker or similar practitioner of the American Dream, occasionally visited. The kitchen would have linoleum and be dated but incredibly neat. I have to admit when I learned about the true living conditions my heart did sink a bit- a disappointment almost tragic- you know what I mean. It turned out the son who worked for one of the communications megaliths, installing wiring or something, eventually moved into the basement apartment with a girlfriend, a “Spanish girl” as our painter pointed out, “and all they do is eat- they’re eating me out of house and home.” Mr. Thansopolis did not like Hispanics. He claimed they talked way too much and way too fast. This bothered him. It was a small nod to racism, but basically he seemed like a good guy, if a bit ignorant.  

Mr. Thanasopolis’ was born in Greece, he was not educated, and charming though he was his English was deplorable. He once sent me to the hardware store for a new “atlas” and when I attempted to purchase the said item, a befuddled clerk after several tries finally barked incredulously, “You mean outlet?” For a moment I felt like a semi-literate immigrant myself as I slowly absorbed the horror of my unforgivable mistake and could only nod mutely. There simply was no explanation that would even slightly ameliorate the confusion I had inflicted with my weird request. But I tended to take Mr. Thanasopolis at his word, however he pronounced it. He had an aura. He was wise and kind. He was like our painter-therapist. And as has often been observed, painting can be more stressful than moving, though of course this makes no sense whatsoever when you really think about it. Once in a very rare while, when there was wallpapering to be done, Mr. Thanasopolis brought along a testy sidekick named Hobson, an odd name for a strange guy. Hobson was a doozy and usually felt free to comment on anything and everything that caught his fancy. You could say there was a distinct lack of boundaries here. If my husband and I huddled in the living room passing the time talking quietly while he papered the bathroom, he felt obliged to note on his way to the kitchen for some water, “Talk, talk talk, all you guys do is talk, I’ve never heard anyone talk so much!” There is nothing you can say to this of course. Hobson would accompany these and other annoying comments with a slightly malicious smile. All we could do was return a half grimace and hope it would all be over soon. Mr. Thanasopolis did not bring Hobson along all that frequently. He once attempted to explain the guy’s obnoxious behavior by telling us about Hobson’s daughter-in-law, who as it happened, was “a Chinese,” implying by his inflection that this was several notches down from even Hispanic, which he called Spanish. Somehow this serious error of judgment on the part of Hobson’s son had taken the last of the paperhanger’s mirth, if there ever was any to begin with. I think it also gave Mr. Thanasopolis himself a tiny bump up socially in his own mind, the thought of Asians somehow being way over the top, or under the line, regarding anything that passed for acceptable; he related these events in his usual soft-spoken, classical way with more than his usual politeness and empathy. “She’s Chinese.” It was if he had said “it’s terminal,” or “there are some things you just can’t explain.” She may not even have been Chinese, but Korean or Indonesian or Japanese or Malaysian, or something else.  

Anyway, Mr. Thanasopolis could be sloppy, and we had to clean the place like crazy while straightening up afterward, but he was fast and cheap, and mainly fast. No matter what the job, he was in and out in a day. If you asked him to paint the coliseum, it would have taken him not a jot longer than seven hours, guaranteed. We were always working and raising the kids and stressing out and somehow he calmed things down by applying layer after layer after layer of paint globs on our deteriorating plaster walls. A few years went by and we hadn’t heard from him; he had a habit of calling in once a year to see what room we were up to. As it turned out, he had undergone a triple bypass during the  absence, an event he related to us one day quite stoically and almost casually when we had him back to slap some acrylic on the cabinet doors. It also appeared to have taken quite a bit out of him we were sad to see, but he remained heroic, still intent on wielding a roller and cutting a ceiling line with his customary sloppy though lightning quick panache. The last time I spoke with him though, his voice sounded a bit weak and I told him I would call him back when I had a specific start date. And that was it. The kids were gone, my tastes had changed, and I was looking for finer finishing touches, fewer globs and drips, more style. It marked the end of an era and we think of him often and wistfully.

“Ready to rock ‘n roll folks?” Now we were getting older and the painter was younger, a circumstance that snuck up on us while still working and getting the kids through college. Steve Capodanno often liked to start the morning with this cheery meditation on skim coating, one of his particular specialties. Aaah, the magic, and insane expense, of skim coating, let alone wire meshing and wet sanding. But oh the result on aging plaster walls. A numbers of years had passed since the philosophical ruminations of Mr. Thanasopolis, and we sought a higher standard of perfection, a more youthful touch, if not in our bodies and souls, than on our walls, the trappings. Steve was also from the Bronx, though the part nearer the water in an enclave a smidge more upscale than some of the other ethnic, brick covens of the borough. He was also the opposite of Mr. T in temperament, loud, funny and expansive- a natural for stand-up we often told him. And he was always just plain ol’ Steve, not “Mister” anybody. First names were here to stay by then, and the entire country had  resorted to nicknames or even mere initials by then, in international diplomacy and the War on Terror as well. Formality was dead. When Mr. T. had been in the house I too had begun to feel a bit mythological, like a character from an ancient story, maybe a member of the chorus, serious and classical. With Steve, both my husband and I became teeny boppers instantaneously, reverting to incipient Bronx accents and telltale colloquialisms that several intervening decades of denial had all but erased, at least in public. Fuggeddaboudit. When Steve II's cell phone rang, it was “Whassup?” I suddenly had the urge to cook up a mean, thick sauce and slap some vinyl on the turntable. I found myself inordinately grateful for having been born and raised in this northernmost province of the Big Apple, provincial though it be. “Let’s face it, where ya’ gonna go” boomed Steve, when we occasionally fantasized about moving to the suburbs and leaving crumbling plaster walls behind, along with dog poop and incessant traffic.  “It’s all right here!” Remotely placed though we were, Manhattan, center of our five borough universe and the planet too, was after all just a quick train ride away- this was the implication- “c’mon folks, just a short drive down the road, right? The suburbs are booorrrinnng. . . . . “

It was around Christmas in fact that Steve was about to take advantage of our world class urban setting to find himself in the frenetic midst of organizing what sounded like an inordinately large number of married friends for a holiday outing. The idea was to partake of a festive dinner somewhere in midtown and then head to Rockefeller Center to see The Tree.  As the holiday neared, his cell phone rang incessantly as he attacked and slathered the walls. He seemed to be the main arranger and uniting force behind the project. Everything seemed to be going according to the plans as well, barring some minor conflict over the exact dinner hour (“we do not want to eat too late and get bad service,” argued Steve as he meticulously sanded the inside of the cabinet door), that is until one of the women, a recent divorcee, decided she did not want to be the only “single” and threatened to bring her kids. Molotov cocktails of angst flew and firecrackers thrown from the roof of an emotional skyscraper landed perilously close to people’s heads. Steve’s wife had to finesse this gal out of the picture, and fast. “This was supposed to be a couples thing, was it not?” he boomed into the cell; “Why does she always need to bring her kids? They’re teenagers, for Chrissake!” There was obviously a history here. This was not the woman’s first transgression. Why did they need so many people anyway he mused? She would not be missed it was concluded, always causing trouble. Steve himself finally understood the real and true reason she had most probably gotten divorced in the first place- like, “Who could stand a person like that? No wonder the guy left!” To hell with a more equitable new world order. This dame was annoying. It was clear. We totally agreed. We had by then been completely taken over.

It was weird. Although Steve came from an upstanding Italian American family, his father a retired member of New York’s finest, his grandparents poor but pure and hardworking immigrants from Southern Italy, I slowly began to feel like a member in good standing of a milder, more innocuous form of the Cosa Nostra, or at least a Mafia Princess by marriage, or a cousin once removed. Or maybe just the haggard ex wife of a bookie, and then, as the paint job stretched out, an ignored, aging mistress even to one of the lesser lieutenants, but by that point I was willing to settle. Close my eyes and I’m livin’ in Jersey and driving something big, black, shiny and ominous. . . . We have two great danes and the house is set way, way back from the road and has a security system the envy of diplomats and heads of government. My kitchen of course eventually came out fabulous, and Steve moved on to his next gig with a higher up in the Teamsters Union. He was not cheap, but really, really great, a perfectionist. Steve had a son too, but unlike the the progeny of the first Steve, this son, Phillip, was described as no less than a wunderkind who managed to finish college half a year early and land a job doing something in healthcare during one of our greatest, most jobless recessions. And his wife, Patty, was totally functioning and had "a really good job" where "they love her!!!" I believe she worked for a car dealership. Steve eventually retired at a relatively early age and is now enjoying the palmed luxuries of gulf coast Florida at bargain prices. At least that's what I picture.

I recently came to understand that Latinos are getting heavily into the construction business. In addition, they are quite reasonable and do excellent work. I contacted this guy named Santo, but apparently he likes to be called “Steve.” It's amazing. I’ve also begun revisiting Latin jazz  and brushing up on my high school Spanish, pathetic as my sentences probably sound to the trained ear, and idiotic as I appear when attempting to converse sociably. But I like to be prepared. The economy is not getting any better.  I’ll probably never be able to afford to move, the place needs work, and like the second Steve says, “Where am I goin’? It’s all right here!”- not borrring like the suburbs. You never know when the realization suddenly hits that the whole mess needs to be gone over again - joint compound, a roller, a fine brush- and colors periodically do need to be updated. I’m thinking about using something called “Dreamy Cloud” in the entranceway.The building ain’t getting any younger muchachos, and living in this city ain’t getting easier- mucho trabajo, poco dinero, as our new contractor opines.