On the street in Frogtown, the St. Paul community I call home, people call me "Handy," exactly as they did in South-Central Los Angeles over twenty-five years ago.

I can no longer recall exactly how or when I got the name, but it refers to the penchant I have always had for fixing things others have declared either beyond or unworthy of repair.

Growing up, I was one of those kids who like to take things apart just to see how they work---toys and clocks, bicycles and radios---and this habit has followed me right into middle-age. My gift, if you can call it that, is an innate comprehension of machines and the mysteries they encompass, the cause and effect of levers and switches, motors and drive belts. It is a talent which has never earned me anything approaching wealth, to be sure, but it has at least managed to be sporadically profitable.

For the past nine years, after leap-frogging from one dead-end job and ungrateful employer to another, I have made a meager living working for myself, juggling small jobs almost anyone else could do with larger ones few others can or will take on for themselves. The small jobs, I perform in great number and on the
cheap---rewiring old table lamps, installing cards and upgrade components in home computers---but the big ones I take on selectively, and for a considerable fee. The people who bring me the simple stuff are generally lazy individuals who lack the initiative to read a user's manual, but those who hire me to tackle more challenging projects almost always have nowhere else to turn. I am the only person they've been able to find with either the expertise or patience their work assignment requires.

The objects of these latter exercises tend to be old and mechanical: manual typewriters and wind-up alarm clocks, belt-driven turntables and telephones with rotary dials. It is not always clear to me why their owners prefer to have them repaired rather than replaced, but I suspect they are motivated more by sentiment than common sense. There is a magic in old-school devices that newer, more technologically advanced versions of same do not possess, and sometimes, just the sounds these machines make alone are enough to render them irreplaceable to their user.

Such as it is, I ply my trade out of a little storefront on Rice and University I share with 'Ploitation Station, a video and memorabilia shop that specializes in the movies of the 1970s Blaxploitation era. Under a constant, period-appropriate soundtrack of Motown, STAX, and Sound of Philadelphia R & B, Quincy Hardaway rents