DIRTY JOB

(This is my paean to hot, sweaty, smelly, unwashed, raucous sex – I like it in the shower, or just out of the shower on the bed, all clean and sanitized and deodorized and scented, but sometimes I like it this way, too. As Prince Orlovsky sings in ‘Die Fledermaus’, “Chacun a son gout!”)

Ben and I had just taken the boards off of the back door of the old, abandoned house and opened it wide. We shone our flashlights around the room – which had once been a kitchen, and Ben hollered in his deep, gruff, voice, “Anybody in here?”

Ben and I both were rehabbing/restoring historic homes, for our own residences, a few miles away from the downtown neighborhood we were now in. Also, we both served on the Board of Trustees for the local Historic Preservation Trust. It was the mid-1970’s, and the major Midwestern city where we lived had decided to build an addition to the children’s hospital adjacent to this old downtown neighborhood, and the only way they could make it work was to bulldoze some of the earliest homes in the city – a couple of blocks’ worth of 3- and 4-story Italianate brownstones, with other brick homes scattered among them, most of them built well before the Civil War.

These had once been the most elegant homes in the City – the only one that they did decide to preserve, on a corner on the edge of the land the hospital needed, dated from 1830, and had belonged to the first Mayor of the City, who also served later on as Governor of the State. The rest of them had to go – which we understood. The neighborhood had been considered ‘blighted’ for 20 years and more, and the houses were mostly too far gone to be repaired. Saving the lives of children here and now was more of a priority for any reasonable person than preserving the ghosts of the dead past.

What pissed us off, however, was that once the City had determined to let the bulldozers roll, the Historic Preservation Trust had applied for a salvage permit to remove some of the remaining interior architectural details and fixtures, so that they could be re-used in other houses that were being preserved. We begged, we pleaded, we protested, we offered to sign any and every ‘Release of Liability’ form the City Law Department cared to devise – no dice. They wouldn’t budge.

At the final meeting on the topic, when their final ‘NO!’ was heard, Ben walked out in a rage – “Screw ‘em!” He growled, as he strode purposefully down the hall, “I got a truck and a crowbar and a ladder – we’ll get everything we can out of there, one way – or another!”

If you saw Big Ben in action, you would know that he meant what he said – he always did. First of all, he was huge – 6’5, with shoulders about that wide, tapering down to a narrow waist above strong legs, with a mane of wavy black hair flowing back from his forehead halfway to his waist, and a