Big John

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November 11th 2009

Published: November 11th 2009

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Big John

The man for the job.

"Um...I think you're going to be working...with Big John...on the church today?" says the guy with the long ponytail, the cartoon Minnesota accent, and a hat with two tiny LED lights built into the brim. The LED's keep drawing my eyes making it hard to look him in the face. He was winging by and stopped mid-stride to tell me this, and once he came to a halt a dozen people formed a siege ring around him.
"Daryl, what am I working on today?"
"Daryl, where are the keys to the blue van?"
"Daryl, have you talked to Miss Elaine today about the paint?"
"Daryl, can I get the keys to the tool shed?"
"Daryl, what about the paint?"
"Daryl, what am I supposed to do at John Harrison's if Big John has all the ladders?"
"Daryl, is Mikal leading at Harrison's, or what?"
"Daryl, where is John Harrison's?"
"Daryl, can you please remind everyone to fill out their crew reports?"
"Daryl! Hey! Over here! The paint. What about the paint?"
You would have thought that 'Daryl' was local slang for "hello," "good morning," and "excuse me."

First Street United Methodist

First Street United Methodist Church was easy to find, I just walked along St. Charles Avenue headed uptown until I got to First Street. Had I taken a left it would have put me in the picturesque heart of the Garden District with its high stone walls, stately live oaks, and pepper vines quietly working their way up wrought iron railings. The Garden District exists because, when these newcomers calling themselves "Americans" began arriving in New Orleans after Napoleon sold it in 1803, the Creoles, long since entrenched in the old city, did their level best to snub them out of town. The Yanks returned the dislike happily and with interest as they didn't much care for a bunch of effete snobs who considered it beneath them to work with their hands. The Americans moved out along the river road to build a new neighborhood that would surpass in taste and grandeur anything the Creoles had ever done. The Garden District is still here, but the Creoles are long gone, their family possessions sold a little at a time to fill the row of warehouses tucked out of sight behind Royal Street.
I didn't take a left at First

The Church Before

Looks like it could use a new coat of paint, doesn't it?

Street, however, on this bright February morning I took a right and that meant I was soon stumbling along the ruined sidewalks of Central City instead. I didn't know yet to walk in the street like everybody else or to be sure and say "Good morning" or at least "Arite, arite" to the people I passed no matter how surly or even deranged they may look. Central City is here because the families in the Garden District needed somewhere nearby to house their slaves. These two very different neighborhoods have looked across St. Charles Avenue at each other for two centuries and the church on the corner of Dryades has been here, in one form or another, for most of it. You can read about it here.

So I'll be working on the church. Daryl darts through a gap in the siege ring, banks hard to the left, and disappears down a narrow, dark hallway, people trailing in his wake still hounding him with questions. I'd like to ask him what kind of work he has in mind. I'd like to ask him lots of things (like why he's wearing that light-up hat) but at least there's one

The Education Wing Before

question I won't have to ask: "Who's Big John?" I suddenly realize that I'm standing there alone. Everyone else has disappeared down that dim hallway, so I follow along and emerge in the sanctuary.
The first three rows of pews are scattered with Americorp volunteers hunched in their grey sweats and trying to warm up by pulling their limbs in as close to their bodies as they can. The sun peaks over a row of houses on Baronne Street to filter through the upper windows of old stained glass, weave through the iron-bound trusses, and make a trigonometric Mondrian of the floor. The windows are the old-fashioned tilt-open kind and time, weather, and the action of Louisiana's marshy soil have unplumbed the walls and shifted the archways. Now, some windows hang permanently open and some are permanently shut. Some panes are laced with spidery cracks and some are gone. Daryl has fixed most of the leaks with whatever he can find and now the church choir can practice gospel on Tuesday night without walking through puddles on the floor of the multi-purpose room. I came here for two weeks to do some volunteer work while I looked for opportunities

The Multipurpose Room Before

in New Orleans. Three months later I will be mopping the floor of an empty, strangely quiet multi-purpose room after the last of the big volunteer groups have gone for the season and I will be reflecting on how this old church has come to feel so much like home. I will know this church like I know The Talisman, that wonderful little forty-two foot trawler who's every tiny hidden compartment I can find in the dark. I will know that this church always has another room and that room will always have what you need. If we need twenty more cots, you go down a corridor you haven't gone down before, open a door you didn't know was there, and there they are, piled in the middle of the room like they were expecting you. Everyone, myself included, will develop an affection for this building. It will give me a roof, it will give me a home, and in time it will make me part of a most unusual family of hundreds of unlikely members.
So, when Daryl was looking for a way to give something back to the place, and after fixing everything he knew how to

Job Board

Early morning, while volunteers are signing up for various tasks.

fix, it occurred to him that there was a simple thing of which the church was in desperate need. "This place needs a new coat of paint." As I have mentioned before, when you speak your thoughts aloud around here, the thing you need has an uncanny way of appearing. The church can reach across remarkable distances and apply its gravitational pull to just the man for the job. It's not an accident, nor is it a surprise, that this is when Big John appeared.

I'm writing this almost a year later, on my second tour with the United Saints Recovery Project, back home in the church once again. In the sanctuary on that February morning, however, I'm just taking a seat in one of the pews amongst twenty or so totally unfamiliar faces, not knowing what to expect. The guy with the ponytail breaks away from a knot of people still battering him with questions and moves to the front. The low murmuring in the pews settles down.
"Good morning. Um...Big John, who do you need for the church today?"
From the middle of an otherwise empty pew, there is a low rumble as a

The Sanctuary

Daryl, in his light-up hat, is greeting a new group.

huge silhouette speaks up. "I'll take Donald, the new guy,..." and he names his team, gets up, and walks out. Daryl continues to speak for a while. Quite a while actually, rambling a bit, doubling back, and countermanding things he said just a few minutes before. At first I just think he's just distracted, then I begin to think, "Maybe he's always like this." Eventually I'll learn that he's always like this because he's always distracted.
To explain a little about why, let me move forward into the present for a bit and pull an example from the work on Ella Mae Hogue's house. There is a daily battle going on in Daryl's head when it comes to her and it goes something like this: today he has three volunteer plumbers, two hundred dollars, a donated toilet, and the prefabricated shower stall we were able to salvage from the wreck of her former bathroom. This means we can make real headway on the plumbing. Next week, he may have ten enthusiastic but unskilled volunteers and no money to spend, which means selective demolition makes sense, but the plumbing will have to wait. The Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation comes to

Overflow

For large groups, the mutipurpose room earns its name.

help us for a day and all the material we have with which to employ them is half a dozen 4x8 panels of gypsum board and a bucket of screws. Guess what they're going to be doing? They'll be installing new finishes in whatever parts of the house aren't still leaking. They come and do good work and have a positive experience. They think they can help us raise some more money to keep the work going forward, but they're not sure how much or when. In the meantime, one of them is moved to write us a check for $500 out of her own pocket and God bless her for that. That $500 should go to repair the various ailments of the white van that we use to get materials to the site but it can't, that's co-mingling funds. Her donation is intended specifically for Ella Mae's house and money for repairs to our equipment has to come out of our operating budget which is hard-pressed to afford the daily bag of ice for the big blue water cooler. So if you wonder why Daryl seems anxious and even a little absent-minded when he's walking his dogs at 6:00

Caulking Clinic

Instructor Big John

AM, it's because he's trying to figure out how to keep us out of the embarrassing position of spending money we don't have on materials we can't deliver for work we can't perform. Tomorrow, he'll have to re-solve the same elaborate equation for a fresh set of variables using a computer that is slightly broken.

Back in that February morning, I've stood up to introduce myself and now, with Daryl under siege again, I'm off to find Big John. He's not a hard man to find, he's a hard man to miss. At 6'-11", 280 pounds and with the wingspan of a pterodactyl, he couldn't disappear into a heard of giraffe let alone a crowd of ordinary sized people. Where did Big John come from? Who knows. I've never heard the same explanation twice. Ostensibly he's from San Diego...sort of...some of the time. It depends on who's asking. He spits out chunks of Spanish and even Arabic, but they're rarely germane to the conversation. He chooses his food by "the frequency at which it vibrates" and don't you ever make the mistake of asking what that means. His personal philosophy is a bird's nest of whatever random transient

Priming

Everyone got their turn to do some of this.

twigs and fluffy, warm stuff that he can knit together. And religion? He puts the "So" in esoteric. He's a Rastafarian -Buddhist, a Hindu-Egyptian, a Devout Atheist, an Doubting Agnostic, a prophet of Baal, a follower of Ahmen-Ra, he's a hemi-demi-semi-quasi-crypto Shinto Pacifist. His private pantheon is an encyclopedia of the obscure and the contradictory and that's only one subject on which you can plumb the depths of his knowledge and find that there's no end to it, even if the water gets a little murky sometimes. I've heard him quizzing a group of third year medical students on organic chemistry and stumping them.
So, there's no point in asking where Big John came from just as there's no need to ask why he's here: the church needed painting and he appeared. He appeared because it just so happens that his improbable dimensions make him particularly well adapted to one particular vocation. He's been painting buildings for thirty-five years and he's a master of his trade. He was the man for the job.
At first, I was hard pressed to figure out how to get along with this ludicrous, temperamental giant, but then I realized that getting along

Running the trim brush.

Big John runs trim with a 3" brush. Nobody else does this.

with him is the last thing you want to do. He doesn't want to get along, he wants to not get along in an interesting way. It's no surprise, then, that I now consider him such a good friend. He also would teach me a lot about painting and its associated skills in a very short time. Even though, for my first three weeks here, both of my hands would take on a claw-like shape from holding a paint scraper and I would have to overcome my dislike for heights (which is a perfectly rational fear, thank you), this will remain in my memory as a truly wonderful time in my life for lots of reason, the privilege of bickering with Big John every day being one of them.
Ordinarily, a job like this would present few challenges to a tradesman of his experience, but we're South of I-10 here, and we're also in volunteer world. Some people are going to be here for a week, so he has to teach them enough to be useful without spending the whole week in training just in time for them to depart. Some people are going to be here for months,

Yep, me.

Dealing with my perfectly rational concerns about heights.

so it makes sense to train them a little more as long as they can not get along with Big John in the right way. Some people he just never could jive with, and it was no fault in either of them. They would not get along in the wrong way.
In addition, there are other projects going on and his team is going to get borrowed, shuffled about, re-allocated, or sent to work in the kitchen never to emerge again. For about four months, Big John ran a non-stop clinic on ladder handling, pressure washing, prepping, scraping, sanding, sealing, glazing, priming, painting, cleaning, and everything you have to do to do the job right. Everyone, and I mean everyone, got their turn to work on the church, which was fitting. Big John managed to handle this in style; except, that is, for a day or two after I got sent into the kitchen for good. He kind of bore me a grudge for a bit but there are very few grudges that a regular dose of high-vibe eggs-over-easy can't resolve. Besides, even in a foul mood and with a bad tooth, Big John is entertaining.
Few things

Donald the Scotsman

Who has no fear of anything, irrational or otherwise.

were as entertaining as to watch him explain when the subject of the color scheme came up, or rather, to watch him not explain. He would bob and weave, hem and haw, dodge, stall, tap dance, pull out the smoke and the mirrors, and then change the subject. Now that it's done I know he was right about the colors and he was also right to avoid telling anyone what he was up to. Nobody would have agreed to it, but it's right. In this neighborhood, it just makes sense. He knew they wouldn't buy it until they saw it all at once, so he just kept stalling until enough of it was done that there was no going back.
It really does look great, and it improves the whole neighborhood now that it's done. So, along with the countless volunteers who labored here, I want to thank Big John for making it possible to give this old church what it needed and deserved. I also want to thank him for all I learned from him. Hope you're getting good waves out there, man, and yes, it is amazing what a new coat of paint can do. Drop by