Crawling under Carly Simon's House
A working-class-hero tale from Martha's Vineyard
Précis
This is the true story of how and why I crawled, on my belly, like a reptile, under the house of Rock-and-Roll-Hall-of-Famer Carly Simon, and of the reward I got for doing so, and of, more generally, my twenty-plus year intermittent career as a construction laborer and working-class hero on Martha’s Vineyard, the largely rural island located 5 miles south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to which my wife and three children and I moved from Silicon Valley, where I had been a minor bicoastal potentate, a veritable Lord God BuFoo of Information Architecture, before I became a nobody and got laid off — in 1994, the year my ten year old son Jake nearly died (again).
With digressions into literary theory, firefighting, the differences between Jesuit and Franciscan seminaries, how lazy reporting about Martha’s Vineyard contributes to fascist performative cruelty, vagabondage, John F. Kennedy Jr.’ s airplane crashing in the dark into the sea off Noman’s Land, and similarly related topics.
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At Sundman figures it out! we aspire to the intricate art of consecution.
Themes emerge, interleave, dance around, fade away, and sometimes reappear. Incidents ramify, and their import may change upon being revisited. So reading earlier posts, for example this one, will enhance your experience of reading those that come later.
But if this is your first time with us, then, like William Shatner said1, you have to start somewhere, so you might as well start here.
No tools, Wetherell, Simon
When we moved (fled from Silicon Valley, to speak more plainly) my plan was to make a living writing how-to books of the ‘For dummies’ variety, for which I had in hand a few contracts. But shit happened & plans fell through and by the spring of 1999 I found myself instead doing construction work & writing a cyberpunk novel inspired by my experiences in the computer biz and by some of what I’d picked up hanging around my wife’s molecular biology lab back in the ‘before time,’ before our lives turned upside down.
My years in the construction trades involved virtually all low-skill work. I did demolition & made dump runs, I dug ditches and raked concrete and moved heavy stuff from point A to point B. I clambered up scaffolding and down rickety stairs, I dug basements with a shovel and knocked down walls with a sledge hammer. It was dangerous & exhausting work & the pay wasn’t great, but I liked that job well enough. I saw parts of the island, from mega-mansions to fishing shacks, that I never would have seen otherwise. And I got exercise every day, much more than I ever did in my other job at the time — freelance technical writing. And most importantly, I worked pretty much at my own schedule, which allowed me time to work on my books.
My first job as a no-tools, unskilled laborer was at the cursed site of a large house being built for David Wetherell, who was, for a while, a billionaire of the dot-com (CMGI) variety. During the excavation for that house’s foundation some human remains were found — which led to some breathless headlines in the local papers. After it was determined that those remains predated the 1600’s the breathless speculation died down and an archeological dig was undertaken. Hilarity ensued, as described a bit below.
During a lull in the work on the Wetherell house at Squibnocket Point I found myself working with a small crew at Carly Simon’s place for a few weeks. We added a new small library, enlarged the kitchen, rebuilt a porch. Simon wasn’t there during the construction but I met her a few weeks later at a private Simon/Taylor concert at her house, q.v. below.
Carly’s House
In 1999, Carly Simon's house was, by rock star standards, relatively modest. To get to it you traveled down a single-lane dirt road. (In 2023 that road remains unpaved.)
This house, I’m told, was originally barely more than a shack in the woods that she & James Taylor fixed up & enlarged during the early years of their marriage. I don’t know if that’s true but the place did have a look of whimsy about it — a guest room with a balcony added here; a porch there. There was also a pasture (with a horse), & a barn & other buildings, including a recording studio.
The biggest part of the Simon construction project that summer was the addition of the library, a room about twenty feet by twenty, with a peaked roof. It had been framed by the time I arrived on the job, and a fieldstone fireplace and chimney were being built.
After I had been working there for about a week an insulation crew showed up. They insulated the walls & ceiling of the new room but when it came to insulating the floor, there was a problem. There was only a small crawl space under it, and all the guys had developed claustrophobia. Couldn't do it. But that floor had to be insulated before some other thing could be done, I forget what, so there was an impasse, with workers standing idle. Construction project managers hate it when that happens.
Kennedy Nomans Land
I was digging at ditch at the Wetherell place on the hot, foggy Saturday morning of July 17, 1999, the day after John F. Kennedy, Jr’s plane went into the sea off the coast of the inhabited island five called Nomans Land, miles south of Martha’s Vineyard.
The fog was so thick that morning that you could barely see your hand in front of your face, yet I could hear helicopters right overhead. I couldn’t imagine what they were doing up there in such terrible flying conditions. My few co-workers that morning seemed to know what was happening but we were unable to communicate it to me, since they were all recent arrivals from Brazil and none of them had a good command of English. They said something about President Kennedy, but I knew that couldn’t be right — he was long dead. (Unless of course the cosmic axis had shifted, but that’s a whole nother topic we can’t go into right now.)
Five days after the Kennedy plane was found and his mortal remains — as well of those of his passengers (his wife Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and her sister Lauren Bessette) — had been recovered, there was a reburial at sea (conducted, for reasons that are not clear to me, by the United States Coast Guard), of which those of us humble laborers who were working on the Wetherell place had a clear view. Moreover it was a clear view that the worldwide media would have loved to have shared had the way not been barred to them. Their television on-location tucks with the telescopic antennas sat in the parking lot at Stonewall Beach, so close but yet so far away: the private road to Squibocket Point was open to workers like me but closed to them, the fucking ghouls.
Many wondrous things happened during the year I worked on the Wetherell place, including the meteoric rise in the price of CMGI stock, which peaked north of $300/share (after several splits). A few months after my last day on that project the dot-come bubble burst, and within a year after we had finished building David Wetherell’s mansion, the price of CMGI stock had fallen to $0.27share and was delisted from the NASDAQ stock exchange.
I wrote about all this for Salon:
It was during a break in the Wetherell project, sometime either before or after the airplane piloted by John F. Kennedy, Jr., went into the sea off Nomans, that a bunch of us were sent to the job at Carly Simon’s house.
Consecution in modern American writing
I learned quite recently that consecution is a principle that Gordon Lish hammers away at when editing fiction or teaching principles of good writing. This may be important, as Lish is quite famous and influential, insofar as those words can be applied to literary editors. The idea of consecution, as I take it, is that each sentence in a piece of writing should bear some relation to the ones that come before it.
That may sound obvious, but I guess it isn’t(?), because Lish has attained what some call a cult-like status for propounding it. When you delve into Lish’s philosophy (what you can find of it without getting formal instruction from one of his acolytes), what he seems to be saying is that in good writing, themes emerge, interleave, dance around, fade away, and sometimes reappear. Incidents ramify, and their import may change upon being revisited. So reading earlier sentences, enhances your experience of reading those that come later. Deja vu, that uncanny feeling.
Carly Simon hasn’t got time for the pain but I have The Pains for you
Carly Simon’s song “Haven’t Got Time For the Pain” is considered by some people to be among her very best. I feel about that song the way Abraham Lincoln purportedly felt about some book that was making the rounds in the 1860’s “People who like that kind of thing will find that this is the kind of thing they like.”
Carly Simon is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and God bless her for that, but the Pixies aren’t. So that’s all I have to say about the Rock and Roll hall of Fame. But if you upgrade to “paid” status on Sundman figures it out! I will mail you, gratis, an autographed copy of my illustrated dystopian phantasmagoria The Pains. PLUS, you get a bunch of other nifty things.
The loathsome fascist man from Florida and our guests from Venezuela
This incident —I’m sure you know what I’m talking about — put Martha’s Vineyard in the news in the summer of 2022 and occasioned the usual blather all over the infosphere about ‘the elites of the wealthy enclave of Martha’s Vineyard,’ and blah blah blah. I was planning to write something about it, but all that kind of shit — the performative cruelty of tinpot Trumpists, the shit-wankers who eat it up, the lazy reporting everywhere about our so-called wealthy enclave — just pisses me off so much that, like Bob Dylan, I can’t even,
You want to know about our wealthy enclave of Martha’s Vineyard? Here. Read about this woman2 who spent 20+ years working there, unpaid, to get food to the hungry and homeless.
Like a reptile
So, back at the Carly Simon construction site where work was stalled because the insulators didn’t want to crawl under the library, my boss said, 'John, you OK with crawling under there & tacking up some insulation?' & I said, 'Sure,' and so that's what I did. I had a flashlight & a staple gun & maybe another tool or two & I crawled on the dirt dragging insulation & then I somehow flipped over onto my back and stapled that stuff right up there.
It took me a day or 2 but I did it; I insulated the floor under Carly Simon's new library.
On breaks I went up into her kitchen, and, using her land line, I called my literary agent Joe Regal, in Manhattan. (In the year 1999 some people had cell phones but I sure didn’t.)
From Simon’s phone I was calling Joe to see how the whole novel-submission thing was going. Answer: not well.
So now you are wondering what I saw in Carly Simon’s kitchen, what she had on her refrigerator. That’s a gross invasion of privacy but it was 23 years ago so I guess it’s OK for me to tell you. She had photos of her two children, plus one of Carly and Harrison ford and one of Carly and Bill Clinton. Plus some other stuff I’m sure but you can’t expect me to remember every damn thing that was on Carly Simon’s refrigerator twenty three years ago.
A few weeks after we finished work on Simon’s place I got a phone call from my boss: Carly was so happy with the work we had done that she was throwing a potluck party for all the tradespeople who had done it.
Martha’s Vineyard, playground of the elite
In addition to reading that profile I linked to above about the woman who chaired the Vineyard Committee on Hunger, you might also check out my friend Holly Nadler’s account of being a homeless vagabond at seventy years of age: The Hobo Diaries. Down and Out on Martha’s Vineyard:
You can idyll for decades on a gorgeous island, comfy, safe and warm, immersed like a Medieval mystic on a life-long spiritual path, and all of a sudden it feels as if you’ve been dumped on a water slide with a slide that reads: “This life is out of your price range, sweetheart!” Splash!! Where ya gonna live?
Yes, these are the elites of Martha’s Vineyard that tinpot Trumpists and their army shit-eaters never tire of demonizing.
Simon-Taylor-Hoy rock show
On the glorious late summer Saturday evening of the potluck construction-worker’s gala at Carly Simon’s house, Dear Wife & I show up with our macaroni & cheese or whatever & find that Carly has hired caterers. The 'pot luck' thing was evidently just to make it feel less formal. There was enough food there, potluck and professionally catered, to feed an army.
Not far from Carly's house there was a swimming pool, and at the other side of the pool there was a barn that had been restored as a kind of hall. Folding tables & chairs were set up there, & at the far end of the barn there was a low stage with some guitars on stands & amps & a drum kit.
The caterer & pot luck tables were set up alongside the pool, and near those tables stood Carly & her (then) husband in a kind of receiving line. Dear Wife & I joined the line to say hello. While Betty & Carly talked for quite a while about whatever, I talked with Carly's husband. Somehow it came out that the guy had been a Franciscan seminarian en route to becoming an ordained Catholic priest before wising up & marrying a rock star. So he & I talked about Catholic theology and the difference between Jesuit and Franciscan seminaries.
Dear Wife & I eventually left the receiving line with our plates full of food & sat at a table next to the stage & had a lovely supper. I had just cleared our places when who should walk onto the stage but the stonemason who had built the library fireplace.
It was Johnny Hoy, only the best known blues singer & harmonica player in southeast Massachusetts. Somehow I hadn’t recognized him during two weeks we worked on the same construction site. Other rocker/tradesmen walked on stage and picked up instruments. Then, while they were tuning up, Carly appeared up there too.
The above video is of the 2023 instantiation of The Bluefish. That’s Delaney on guitar. If you want to say hello to her, stop by Mocha Mott’s on Main Street, Vineyard Haven, where she’s a barista.
They were just about to start playing up walked Kate Taylor, James Taylor's sister & a well-known Vineyard character (and a friend of my wife, it so happened).
So that was when I saw a private show by Carly Simon and Friends. It was actually a blues/Johny Hoy/oldies show, not a Carly Simon show. Carly and Kate just sang backup. I think they might have done one Carly tune; I don't remember. But I do remember that they played 'Great Big Idol With A Golden Head,' & lots of blues. They played for nearly an hour. It was great.
I've worked on houses on Martha's Vineyard owned by some rich people, some very rich people, some obscenely rich people; houses of some famous people, very famous people, as well as lots of houses of everyday people. Some were nice & some were assholes. But Carly Simon is one of only two people who ever threw a party for us workers.
Lish, Matthiessen, Kermode
F.O. Matthiessen, in the preface to the first (1935) edition of The achievement of T.S. Eliot: An essay on the nature of poetry says this:
In order to give my book as close a unity as possible, I have consciously made an experiment in its organization. I have tried to write the whole as one connected essay, with each section closely interweaving with what goes before and what follows. Indeed, the division into chapters is simply a convenience, in order, through their titles, to stress some points that I am most interested in establishing. My desire for sustained condensed effect has also caused me to make use of notes for some passages of more technical analysis, as well as for longer illustrations. These notes are intended to be integral to the text, but those readers who, like myself, are irritated at the distraction of being repeatedly referred to the back of the book, are asked to postpone that act at least to the end of the chapter. For unless the essay stands clearly on its own feet, without aids from the notes, it will not stand reading at all.
And now I’m out of time and room, so discussion of how the ideas in this paragraph by Matthiessen relate to Gordon Lish’s notions of consecution and the ‘attack sentence,’ and to various ideas put forth by Frank Kermode in his book The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, — and how all three of them relate to what I’m trying to do here in Sundman figures it out! — along with an account of the time I helped extinguish a fire at the photography gallery of Carly Simon’s late brother Peter, and other topics I may have mentioned in this essay’s précis but have not yet gotten to, shall have to wait for a future installment of this episodic autobiographical meditation. Cheerio!
William Shatner performing “Common People,” a song by Pulp, with the assistance of Joe Jackson and his band. (It’s seriously great. I’m not kidding.)
She’s my wife.
Excellent. I hadn't heard that business about the Gordon Lish theory about sentences and consecution, so thank you for putting it in there. Gordon was, as many writing teacher-editor-geniuses, quite good at using way too many words to state the obvious. Yawn.
You're right, great song.