Our house came with a wrought iron railing around the stairwell. It was painted white and it had these Rococo swoops in it that just did not make it. I tried painting it but the paint wouldn’t stick. Apparently it was painted with oil on top of acrylic at one time and the new coat just lifted top layer of white off. I bought some paint remover but I never started the job because it seemed so nasty. I considered dismantling it and taking it out to my brother’s to sandblast it and then we decided to just cut out the offending curves so we borrowed Julio’s Saws-all and I bought some extra blades for the job. The saw sat next to the railing for about a month until we came up with a new idea for a wood and stainless steel railing. So we took the old railing out to the driveway where it looked even uglier in the daylight.
The time had come to head to Krieger’s with the scarp metal. They’ve been bought by Metalico but everyone still calls it Krieger’s. When we lived next door to Sparky he used to collect junk and dismantle it in his garage and take it to Kriegers for extra cash. I’ve been there with him and the place is a trip so I gave Sparky a call and arranged to pick him up at nine.
Street people pushing empty shopping carts were walking toward us in the middle of Portland Avenue as we approached the gates. We piled the scrap metal in a cart and wheeled it on to their scale while workers barked incoherent orders at us. You get the clear sense that they deal with unsavory characters on a regular basis and they have taken on many of the same characteristics as their clients.
There are cameras mounted above and bars on the cashier’s window. There was a Puerto Rican woman with a black baby in line in front of us. She had tattoos up and down her arms and her transaction was not going smoothly. There was another women in tight jeans and high heels standing off to the side. I asked Sparky what these women were doing and he said, “They’re prostitutes,” like that explains everything.
I slipped my driver’s license through a tiny opening in the bullet proof glass and signed a form that stated that the junk was mine and that I had not obtained illegally. The cashier paid me with a receipt that I had to take to an outdoor ATM machine. She asked if I had ever used the ATM before and I wasn’t sure if meant this particular ATM or any ATM so I said “No” and a worker walked with me to the outdoor machine. There was a guy with long scruffy beard hanging around near the machine and the worker told him to “beat it.” He scanned the bar code on my receipt for me and then said, “When your money comes out, take it fast.”
Back at Sparky’s he showed me the remodeling job he was doing on his bathroom. He had put in a shower enclosure in place of the tub and inadvertently sealed some of his tools in the wall between the studs. I asked him how he was getting by without a bathroom and took me to the basement where he had set up his old bathtub with a garden hose running across the floor from the laundry tub. He used an aluminum extension from a vacuum cleaner as a drain pipe and it ran out of the drain right into the open storm drain.
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great Sparky story ;^)