Time to Shake, Hammer and Roll

I was working on a column the other day when I heard a funny sound from the other room. A kind of heeeeooneee. I checked and discovered it was the dog whining. His head was thrown back and his gaze locked on the ceiling in a pose of utter concentration. I knew in an instant that the roofers were back.

Barkley had detected their presence even though they hadn’t begun working yet. In a few minutes, the scraping would begin, accompanied by a pounding so intense that the house would vibrate like a ship in a storm, leading me to wonder how well it was built in the first place.

I was especially concerned about a section we added a few years ago. The contractor was one of those good old boys whose response to a structural deficiency was to “slap a little paint on it.” Did he slap a little paint on cracked beams intended to hold up the building? God knows.

The hammering began. As it did, things drifted down from the ceiling through newly exposed openings in the roof. Little black specks mingled with a thick gray dust, like snow falling in hell. It seeped into corners and crevices, where it will no doubt remain forever.

The footfalls from above grew heavier. There was an army up there. I worried that at any moment a worker would crash through the roof. He would get quickly to his feet, shaken but conscious, and say something to me in Spanish. I wouldn’t know what he was saying because I don’t speak Spanish, but as a gunnery sergeant used to say, “If he ain’t bleeding, he ain’t hurt.”

“YOU AIN’T BLEEDING,” I’d shout as a way of getting him to understand English, “SO GO BACK TO WORK.” “That dust will kill you,” says a friend who stops by. “It contains ...” He mentions a chemical in the roofing material that is deadly to humans and columnists alike. I forget what it’s called. He’s a woodcarver, but somehow he knows about chemicals that kill.

“Don’t worry,” my wife, Cinelli, tells him. “If martinis haven’t killed him, no chemical will.”

Our roof has been leaking since 1972, so we hired someone to fix it. The company re-roofed the add-on section of the house that had been leaking even worse than the rest of the place, and it hasn’t leaked since.

“I won’t live here another day if you won’t agree to the work,” Cinelli said during the last big rain.

I didn’t see a problem. Because the place had been leaking for so long, I knew exactly where to put the pans to catch the drips. I moved with the efficiency of an astrophysicist at the first sprinkle. A pan here, a pan there.

When she complained of the incessant drip-drip-dripping noise in the pans, I suggested that we retreat to the room in the house that didn’t leak and sit there until the rain stopped. It was an extension of the slap-a-little-paint-on-it theory.

It was at that point that she threatened to grab the dog and her earrings and leave me to the leakage. “The house will fall apart,” she said, growing angrier by the minute, “and the jungle will overtake you and you’ll rot!”

She is terrific with imagery, but this was no time to admire her ability to create word pictures. I know when she threatens to take the dog and her earring collection that she means business. So we called the roofers.

I was told that they were roofers to the stars. I don’t know which stars, but if it was a superstar, I knew he wouldn’t sit still for a bad job, so they’d have to be good. He’d be right up there on the roof, pointing out any flaws and maybe kicking a couple of the workers over the side, just to make a point. Then he’d leave for his villa in the south of France until the work was done.

I don’t have a villa in the south of France, so I am forced to endure the pounding and write at the same time. That’s where I am now. The hammering is so constant that at first I suspected they had hired someone specifically to sit on the roof and just pound. But when I checked it out, I realized that wasn’t the case.

These guys are thorough. They ripped off years, perhaps centuries, of old roofing right down to the wood. Then they had to replace some of the wood. At present, they are tacking down something in rolls, and then they’ll seal everything with torches.

As I sit here listening to the pounding, I am beginning to feel a little like Sarah Winchester. She was an heir to the Winchester Rifle fortune who, in a fit of conscience, built a mansion in San Jose to shelter the souls of people killed by the rifles. She kept building because there were more souls floating around out there than she’d anticipated.

Another story says she continued adding on because the pounding of the hammers kept the devil away. She also believed that if she kept building, she’d never die. She kept building but died anyhow. So much for that theory.

I don’t have any souls to house, and I’m not worried about the devil, so the sooner they finish the roof the better.

I just checked out the dog again. Now he’s lying on his back, still staring at the ceiling. He’s stopped whining and looks a little crazy. Poor thing. I may have to slap a little paint on him.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@ latimes.com