Asking to be left in the dust is a step on the path to madness
There are many important subjects I could be writing about today, like war and crime and sex and death, but I am living in clouds of sawdust and cannot see my way clear to think. There is a crew of men in our house doing our floors.
What they’re doing specifically is sanding in that section of the place possessed of wooden floors, which is causing sawdust to permeate even rooms that are sealed off and areas that are protected with vast sheets of plastic.
I am, at the moment, in one of those sealed rooms, but I can still hear the brain-splitting cacophony of the sanders and smell the wood dust that billows through the house and seeps under the door of my writing room.
Theoretically, my room is a haven from the calamities that befall the rest of the house. It is a product of remodeling and adding on that occurred 25 years ago. So anxious was I to get into the new room I wouldn’t let the construction crew finish its work in here. My ceiling has never been painted and my floors never finished.
As a result, there is a kind of neo-primitive look to my work space, especially under my chair, where the unprotected floor has been worn down. I guess I roll back and forth a lot as I write.
“One day soon,” Cinelli has told me, “you are going to wear a hole in the floor and plummet into the basement like some kind of space creature falling from the sky.”
She said the same thing more or less about my bathroom, which is a little better than neo-primitive but still unfinished in some areas. For instance, I wouldn’t allow workers to tear up the floor to build supports under my bathtub, which now seems to be sinking. But how far can a bathtub sink when there’s a concrete slab down there somewhere? I’ll just ride it down when it goes, humming a happy tune.
Back to the sawdust. Its ability to creep into places that not even a spider can manage reminds me of a short story, the title of which escapes me at the moment. What I remember about it is a woman in a house in the desert. A constant wind blew dust under her door and through cracks in the window. She was a very clean lady, which was a big problem, because for all of her sweeping and vacuuming, she couldn’t keep up with the invasion of the dust whipped against her modest little house by the never-ending wind.
Eventually, the sand and the wind drove her crazy. The minute she stopped cleaning was the minute she snapped. The story ended with her screaming and disappearing into a dust storm, poor thing.
I could worry as I write that the same fate awaits me, but fortunately, as you might have guessed, I am not obsessed with cleaning and not likely to be driven mad by the bzzzzzzzzing of the sanding machines. I have written in submarines, aboard planes and helicopters, on destroyer escorts, in the bathroom and on fields of battle, so I probably won’t be sent screaming into the desert by anything buzzing.
What might send me fleeing to a motel, however, is the smell of the chemical that will shortly be applied to preserve the refinished floors. As I recall from other floor jobs, it is extraordinarily acrid and goes right from the nostrils to the brain, causing an interruption in the synaptic connections that send logic and reason from one lobe to the other. I’m not a neurologist so I am bereft of details on the disorientations, but suffice it to say that the smell is not intended for human ingestion. Only after the chemical dries and every window in the house has been left open for hours does the smell abate.
Can you get used to it? I guess. Some years ago I interviewed a man who refinished furniture utilizing a similar chemical substance. He worked in a small back room that billowed not only with the stinging aroma of the chemical but also with sawdust and the smoke from the cigarettes he chain-smoked. When I asked how he could stand the smell, he said, “What smell?”
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
I’ve noticed that there are different tones to the sanders. One has a high tone, not dissimilar from the beginning of a madrigal, although perhaps a little more intense. The other has a deep and determined masculine hum one might associate with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s loud but addled brain sounds. Now, as I listen, they are going simultaneously in separate sections of the house, forming a contrapuntal buzzBUZZing that is finding its way into areas of my brain never before explored and causing me to see strange lights and psychedelic images and even God beckoning to me.
I’d better get out of here before it’s too late.
Al Martinez’s column appears Monday and Friday. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.
