“Come on dooooowwnn!”

“Noland, we missed Bob yesterday. Two days in a row would have been too much.”

At eleven every morning, Noland watches The Price is Right and I listen, but it feels as if we both watch. I’ve been working in his condo for two weeks and we have our routine. Later in the day we’ll “watch” Dr Phil, which is much harder to listen to without peeking at the sobbing, soap opera characters. “Jack, are you ready to make a serious commitment to Amy ? Are you ready to give up your affairs?” Dr. Phil asked. “I’m seventy-five percent ready Phil,” Jack replied in a southern drawl.

“Noland, did he just say, seventy-five percent? Amy won’t settle for seventy-five, she wants a hundred. What an idiot.”

“What’s the next item up for bid”? Bob Barker’s voice has changed little in all those years. He has, but not his voice.

“Bob the Barker, that’s my man,” Noland replied.

Loretta, Noland’s wife, is on the condominium board and I’ve known her for two years. She hired me to maintain the outside of their nine buildings. And, it took those two years before Noland, as suspicious a man as you’ll ever meet (reminds me of my sister), told Loretta, “Get Mike in here and see if he wants to remodel the kitchen.” The kitchen was the beginning, but they also wanted the foyer and dining room floors tiled, a new bathroom, and white, chair rail height wainscoting in all three rooms.

“And your bid is…?” Bob’s voice is one of many familiar, comfortable sounds in their condo. When Bob is not hollering in the background we listen to a local radio station that plays the love songs of Nat King Cole, Jimmy Durante, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, the list goes on. Lots of Moonriver and I left My Heart In San Francisco . Noland frequently sings along. He carries a tune not much better than I, and when he’s singing alone in his chair, about to fall asleep with his head on his chest, I see the man whose life is mostly behind him.

I know much about that life because the story teller follows me around his condo. When I tiled his entryway, he sat down three feet from me, cane in hand, and told WWII stories. Many. I’ve also heard about his two sons, his three wives, his jobs, his abusive father, his mother who died when he was a year and half, his brother Fred, married to the “witch,” his grandparents, and many tales of Loretta’s family. The stories continue until I leave at five.

As an insurance salesman, and a successful one (“I thought if I could sell a policy a week, I could make a living, but I sold one a day”), he has perfected a riveting style. Elmore Leonard admonishes in his rules of writing “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” Noland speaks as Leonard writes – in driving, declarative sentences. Reminds me of a bloody hamburger fresh off the grill with no ketchup or mustard. “When we got to Okinawa the bodies of our soldiers were so thick, we couldn’t climb over them. Not until the bulldozers plowed them into burning piles were we able to land more men.” I’m a faithful NPR listener, but with Noland trailing me with his chair, I leave my pocket radio in my truck.

When I tiled the dining room floor, he talked to me from his recliner. When it was time to hang the wall cabinets in the kitchen, he walked to the dining room table, flipped one chair so it was facing me, not the table, and sat down as a judge might before a defendant. I value his stories and he loves teling them, but I know he’s also watching every level mark, every nail nailed, every tile set, and every glop of grout forced into those tile joints.

I labored two days installing the wall cabinets, which were full height, stopping an inch from the ceiling. I was now finally ready to nail up the crown molding. With Bob Barker, Bing Crosby and Noland as entertainment, my work had progressed tidily in stages. I finished the foyer before his brother Fred’s visit, the dining room floor before Easter, the kitchen floor before Loretta’s aunt came for Sunday dinner, and now the upper cabinets were in place in time for the arrival of Loretta’s cousin and her “deadbeat’ husband. I’d chopped the work into pieces to accommodate Noland’s health problems. Fifty-one years of smoking and diabetes has left him sometimes gasping, and mostly house bound.

Climbing onto my short step stool, nail gun in hand, Noland began telling me about his ten days in the brig for stealing Hershey Bars. He was a gunner’s mate on an amphibious assault ship which carried those landing craft depicted in movies like Saving Private Ryan.I think he said his carried ten.

“The galley served an ice cream sized scoop of rice with crumbled crackers they called sauce.” Noland is a big man, maybe three hundred pounds and he had difficulty making a small circle with his index fingers and thumbs to show how insignificant the portion was. “I was always hungry and one day I’m lying in my bunk, when I look over at the empty bed next to mine and I see a box of Hershey Bars. Nickel bars. I climbed over and began filling my pockets, and mind you, I have five thousand dollars in a money belt wrapped around my waist. A lieutenant walked in and caught me. Hauled me down before the captain of the ship. Gave me ten days in the brig with food and water. The lieutenant wanted to send me to Leavenworth.”

“For stealing chocolate bars?”

“You know what food and water means? For every meal you get water and two slices of bread. Every third day they give you one regular meal, and then back to bread and water. When the ship passes the 180th meridian, they unlock our cell doors. Remember, we were sailing to Iwo Jima, and if we took a fish (torpedo), there would be nobody running down to let us out of the brig.”

“Okay, Noland, you have to quit distracting me for a minute. Some of this work actually requires thought. I’d say fire away with boring stories but you don’t have any.”

I turned back to my crown molding. For the short run of cabinets over the stove, the piece I cut fit perfectly. I would finish this stage today. I held my nail gun in place and fired. Bang, then Fsssssssssst the sound of air leaking around a nail puncture in a bike tire. I knew what I had done. The first nail driven from my gun went through the mahogany hue of the crown molding, through the sand textured white ceiling and through the coppery colored, cold water feed to the upstairs bathroom. That copper pipe is the same diameter as a dime, and I hit it dead center. The sound, Fsssssssst, was soon accompanied by water dripping through the cabinet top.

I ran to the basement to shut off the water, but as I climbed the steps I moaned, the water lines couldn’t be over THERE, with the lone cabinet easily removed from the wall. It had to be HERE, above the microwave with the outlet and the metal duct work, and screwed so perfectly to the other cabinet that contained Noland’s medicines. It took three hours to put these up, it would take about that much time to get back to the moment before I pulled the trigger.

“Noland, I screwed up.” I explained why I’d jumped off my ladder and down the basement stairs. “I hate to say it, but it’ll take me a while to repair that leaking pipe.”

“You do whatever you have to do.”

I cut the ceiling open and peered in over the top of the cabinets. There was the copper pipe, the nail hole and what looked like enough space to work in without removing the microwave and the oak cabinets. It would be risky using my torch in such a small, confined area, and Noland, sitting on his chair, advised aganist it. However, I forged ahead and had the pipe repaired before I went home for lunch. I came back rested and ready to finish the crown molding. I walked past the TV and caught the day’s sob story – a father unloved by his foul-mouthed teenage daughters and a wife who takes their side. Dr. Phil: “Jeremy, don’t throw away everything you’ve worked so hard for. You’ve got three beautiful daughters who aren’t drinkin’ and drugin’ and a wife who loves you.”

“Yeah, Jeremy, you fool,” I said loud enough for Noland to hear. “They ain’t drinkin’ and they ain’t drugin’, they’re just sassin’ you. Be a man, stay home.”

And there I sat with my buddy Noland, one more member of his audience.