Nick the Woodman : ‘I was raised with people like Sammy the Syrian and Jimmy the Arab.’

Nick Halaby was standing in a cloud of lacquer fumes when I first met him. The fumes were being accidentally blown into the front office of his furniture-restoration shop through an air-conditioning vent that originated in a rear workroom.

I felt like I was breathing through a used paint brush.

“Let’s get on with it,” he was saying, “because I’ve got to meet Sammy the Syrian. We’re going to Vegas together and Sammy is the kind of guy you don’t keep waiting.”

“How can you work in this?” I ask, trying not to inhale the lacquered air.

“How can I work in what?” Nick says, lighting a Camel cigarette.

“The fumes.”

“They ain’t bad,” he says, looking up toward the ceiling. “In fact, they might even be good for you.”

I am at Nick’s place because a friend told me Nick was the best in the business and I have a chair that needs repairing.

When I telephone to ask if he can fix my chair, Nick replies that there isn’t anything in wood he can’t fix.

“Are you expensive?” I ask.

“I’m nicely priced,” he says.

That was good enough to get me to his shop, which is in one of those strip-zoned Chatsworth mini-malls, next to a cleaners that boasts same-day service and a few doors down from Christy’s Better Brands for Less.

“You know whose bathroom that was in?” Nick demands when I step in the front door.

He is a wiry little man with the piercing gaze of a chicken hawk and gives the impression that if the question is not answered correctly he will swoop down from the lacquered clouds with talons fully extended.

“Do I know whose bathroom what was in?” I ask uneasily.

“That,” he says, pointing toward an antique screen leaning against a wall. But, before I can answer, he says, “John Barrymore!”

“Well,” I say, and “well, well, well.”

Then he utters a sentence so filled with expletives that I cannot even begin to quote it here. If I took out the obscenities only “but” and “if” and maybe “they” would remain.

“I do work for some of the biggest names around,” Nick says, gesturing to indicate that they walk into his shop almost every day.

“Marc!” he shouts suddenly toward a back room, “who’s the famous broad we do work for? The one who dates Kurt Russell!”

A voice from the back room says, “What broad?”

“The one in Malibu!”

“Goldie Hawn!” a different voice from the back room replies.

“That’s the one,” Nick says. “What a sweet broad.”

Then he mentions Barbra Streisand and Kenny Rogers and someone whose name he cannot remember who used to be president of a steel company, or maybe it was a car company.

“Who the hell knows?” he says, shrugging.

Nick is a second-generation furniture restorer. He learned the business in his father’s shop on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue and loves the work.

The two voices from the back room belong to Nick’s sons, Marc and Jorge, who also do not believe that lacquer fumes are bad for you, although neither of them will go so far as to say they are good for you.

There is a third son, Charles, who is a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin and who, Nick confides, thinks daddy “not quite normal.”

“He don’t understand me,” Nick adds somewhat wistfully.

Nick, by the way, is 66 but could easily pass for 65. He was born and raised in the Red Hook area of Brooklyn, which, he explains in no uncertain terms, is the toughest place in America.

“I was raised with people like Sammy the Syrian and Jimmy the Arab,” Nick says. “I have three sisters, all widowed.”

I don’t ask how his sisters got widowed because I am not sure I want to know. There are certain questions you don’t ask a guy who has friends with names like Sammy the Syrian and Jimmy the Arab.

Nick came to the San Fernando Valley from Brooklyn 30 years ago, not because of the Valley’s sunshine and beauty but because one of his widowed sisters bought him a one-way plane ticket out of Red Hook.

“Everyone was looking for me in Brooklyn,” Nick says. “I was a gambler. I did horses during the day and floating crap games at night. I was at rock bottom, so she hijacked me.”

Nick figures he lost everything he ever earned up through age 35 by playing horses and shooting dice. He quit for 15 years and then went back to it, but quit again. He hasn’t gambled for 11 years.

“It’s stupid,” he says. “I was a sick man.”

He is going to Vegas with Sammy the Syrian, Nick explains, only because Sammy is an old friend. He will take in some shows and go to some restaurants, but he will not bet chip one.

As I am preparing to leave, two women come in. Nick turns to talk to them while I inspect an antique desk in a corner of the office.

Nick sees me looking at the desk.

“A piece of garbage,” he hollers across the room. “A Mexican imitation!”

“That’s the desk you tried to sell me,” one of the women says.

Nick nods solemnly, remembering.

“A work of art,” he says.

Then he is off to Vegas with Sammy the Syrian.