Full Circle

My former English professor, David Demarest, ambled up to me in the basement hall of St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church in Millvale, which was partly filled with munching parishioners and members of the crew for “Gift To America,” Dave’s play about the church’s famous Maxo Vanka murals. He leaned toward me, his lamb-chop beard trimmer than in my college days, and thanked me for my help in the production, which originally was staged in 1981. I was embarrassed, because I couldn’t express all he’d done.
About 20 years ago, I first visited St. Nicholas, for a field trip for a class Dave taught at Carnegie Mellon. He arranged the Saturday afternoon tour, and he checked to see that we had rides to the church. “Those of you who have cars, help your classmates out,” Dave instructed.
We all made it to Millvale and assembled outside the small Romanesque building. Perched on a bluff along State Route 28 outside Pittsburgh, the little church didn’t look impressive. But walking into the church, my heart felt tight in my chest as I viewed Vanka’s paintings on the ceiling beneath the choirloft. Christ on the cross, wearing a crown of barbed wire and being bayoneted by a World War I-era soldier, and Mary separating two soldiers on the battlefield, snapping a soldier’s bayonet from his gun like a matchstick. Those two scenes are part of 22 murals that decorate the church, and nothing Dave told us conveyed their magnificence.
I’ve been amazed by the murals ever since, and I have written about them for various publications. I just recently started volunteering with the Society for the Preservation of the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka, which produced Gift To America. Dave had known about the murals for decades, and had written a play about them and also an illustrated guide about them. He’d told friends, students, and many others about the masterpieces.
I’m thankful that Dave introduced me to the murals, which convey an understanding that is universal, while being uniquely Croatian. The paintings also are special to me because I am part Croatian, though my mother.
My late father sometimes referred to Carnegie Mellon as a “communist” school, because in his eyes the school was liberal. I know my churchgoing father would be pleased to see that my connection to CMU led to an awakening. I realized that working with others on the goal of restoring and preserving the murals gave its own catharsis.
On the opening night, as the first strains of tambura began to play and the Croatian voices sang with the entering actors, my stomach was strangely queasy.

Photo of actor David Crawford in St. Nicholas Church in Millvale, by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

At the salon

I’m sitting in a hairstylist’s chair in a fruity salon in the swanky Pittsburgh neighborhood of Shadyside. Women are all around me, but I’m getting my hair cut by one of just two male stylists in the place.
“Quentin,” my stylist, is an avowedly gay man—wide open, yet respectful of others’ heterosexual hang-ups. But you can get him talking, and I always do. I notice the inch-thick rubber choker around his neck, which seems out of place with his dress shirt and skinny tie.
“You’re looking a little S&M, a little fetishist today,” I say. He smiles, seeming happy I noticed.
“I like to be totally free with the person I’m with,” Quentin says, tossing his head and smoothing a bang of his jet-black, chemically treated hair with the back of his hand.
He deftly places a comb over my right eyebrow and says in a low voice: “I’m just going to trim your eyebrows, O.K.?”
I nod my head, and with a few sweeps of his clipper, my eyebrows are shorter, less full, and neater. I check myself in the mirror and immediately notice the improved effect. Though I feel a bit funny, the trim didn’t hurt a bit, and it sure did make I difference, I think.
That bit of man-scaping brings up a question that has been nagging my insecure macho ego for a while. So I ask myself again: Could I be a metrosexual?
I consider my location, and then go down my mental checklist of possible metrosexual indicators. I’m in a quichey women-centered hair salon. I’m getting my hair styled by a gay man in S&M regalia. I just got my eyebrows trimmed.
Sitting in that chair, I once again began to worry that I am at least partly metrosexual. What had happened to me, I wondered. How did I get to be such a sissy, seemingly overly concerned with my grooming? Was this some sort of midlife crisis of self-confidence?
On any other day I might’ve been in denial like all the other times, sitting there at the capable hands of my gay-boy stylist, but today is different. A frightening specter of my past—an old mistake of a girlfriend who I’ll call Scary—is sitting just feet from me. With a plastic bag covering her hairdo, she is reading a magazine and pretending not to notice me. I start to feel just a bit shy and effete, thinking of how she knew me years ago, when I was less refined. Then I momentarily feel like I am invading her womanly space, and possibly shocking the hell out of her. Part of me takes a perverse pleasure in the thought, and I talk louder and more brashly to Quentin because of it.
“I’ve been studying women for thirty years. I can pick out the strange haircuts, and also the awkward-looking knees,” I say. “Some women should not wear certain haircuts, because they don’t fit their face—just like some people can’t wear pastels.”
Even as I am saying these things, I don’t hear how potentially sweet they sound. But with Scary just feet away, I do realize how far I’ve come from years ago, when I was dating her and shoveling concrete for work while not finishing college. My old self would not have been caught dead in a place like the salon, unless he was there to pick up a girl.
When it comes to metrosexuality, if you have to ask yourself if you are one, you’re probably in denial. I haven’t gotten to the point where I get “mannies and peddies” yet (and I’m not ruling them out), but I have found myself paying a lot more attention to skin care products. I’m hip to StriVectin-HS, which somehow makes fine lines on the face disappear, at least temporarily. I’ve used it and seen the results, but it’s too expensive for me to want to regularly use.
A couple of haircuts back I mentioned to Quentin that I’ve been feeling like something of a metrosexual.
“There’s a difference between metrosexual and heterosexual,” he says, looking at me in the mirror and continuing to trim my hair. “A metrosexual will pluck his eyebrows, and a heterosexual won’t.”
“Well, I use Hylexion, for the dark circles under my eyes…” I say.
“You’re metrosexual,” he says, nodding his head.

A Father and Son's Climbs and Falls

Growing up in Bellevue Borough, outside Pittsburgh, I would go with friends to climb the superstructure of Jack’s Run Bridge. The bridge traverses a ravine between Bellevue and Brighton Heights, and the deck of the structure is 150 ft tall and unsafe to climb. We’d climb to the top of the structure beneath the roadway and drink beer and race each other down the bridge, shimmying around the piers and sprinting the ramps between them. We acted as if we were fearless.

I grew up working in landscaping and construction. I’d climb a tree, or scale a ladder, and it was no big deal. When I was 17, though, I got into a brawl in the North Side of Pittsburgh and was pushed down some outside cellar stairs. Trying to catch myself, I stuck my left arm though the window in the cellar door, severing the artery and causing me to nearly bleed to death. Ever since, I’ve had a healthy fear of falling and it’s been reinforced by more recent tragedies.

Nineteen years ago, my neighbor Doug, a guy who was all shoulders and arms and a favorite of the girls, was working for a contractor when he fell through an opening in a roof deck for a skylight. The fall permanently disabled him, at 25, and he now lives in a wheelchair and has the mind of a child.

That summer I was working for a company at a suburban airport, replacing the roofs of airplane hangars. Before we scaled the first roof, our foreman said: “Walk where the nails are. That’s where the trusses are.” There was no plywood decking on the hangar roofs, and the only things keeping us from falling to the concrete floor below were the prefabricated trusses. The roof deck we were replacing was a thin layer of corrugated material, rigid tarpaper a few sheets thick.

The heat and the realization that I could become crippled, like Doug, got to me. I was hesitant up there--not cocky, like some of the guys. After a while, they relieved me by having me carry sheets of plywood and push them up ladders to the guys on the roof.

When I write about contractors fined for fall safety violations, I think of workers who made an avoidable mistake, like Doug. Why doesn’t the fear of falling and dying stop contractors and workers from getting too comfortable on dangerous jobs? The answer is simple: They aren't afraid because tragedy hasn't struck them or someone they’ve known, and if it has, it was so long ago they don’t remember. I've had some unforgettable trouble from falls, even after my brawling days.

Sixteen years ago, I was working as a laborer, building a home. The company’s owner was flipping out one day, screaming for a saw, and I scrambled over with the saw. I stepped onto the corner of a piece of plywood we’d placed over the floor joists and the plywood slipped from under me, sending me down through the joists. I caught myself between two joists, saving myself from hitting the garage floor. My left side got the brunt of the fall, landing hard on a joist. That was a painful close call.

But the toughest fall involved my family, before I began covering accidents for ENR.
My dad, Harvey Lea Barnes, had been a civil engineer for U.S. Steel and American Bridge. He’d worked in steel mills across America, and on projects in Europe, Asia and Africa. Once he sent me a postcard from Mt. Kilamanjaro saying: “Some day you’ll climb mountains higher than this.” But his accident happened at home.

Eleven years ago, he was on a ladder scraping paint from the woodwork on the porch and fell onto the driveway below, hitting his head. He made his way to the basement, where my brother Pete later found him lying on the floor. He was rushed to the hospital, his survival in doubt.

He had a miraculous recovery, and came home, but the old square-shouldered commanding presence and booming voice (needed to focus the attention of his dozen children) were gone. He still had a wonderful vocabulary, but he was somewhat retarded.

Several months later, he fell again at home, breaking his hip. That hospital stay was his last; he died several weeks later.

If he’d not fallen, Harve would’ve congratulated me on writing for ENR. “You have a natural inclination for engineering,” he would’ve said. “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

Jonathan Barnes is Engineering News Record’s Pittsburgh correspondent. This story was published in ENR.