My 12-Cent Memories

Mike the Master Plumber from Westhampton Beach was referred by Billy the Licensed Electrician from East Islip when I was building my three-bedroom heaven down the block from Jackson the Drip Painter from Cody, Wyo., 11 years ago in Springs, a hamlet of East Hampton where most of the homes use wells, high in iron, to supply drinking water, fed from the springs 73 feet below, perhaps coining the area’s name, “Springs.”

Mike had the most gregarious salesman’s salesman personality; he could sell me anything. As a matter of fact, he sold kayaks part time, traveling often to South Africa to find rare hardwoods and designs, which he tried to sell me, but his faraway exorbitant models’ prices were not even in the same universe as the orange plastic two-person Sun Dolphin I bought from Kmart in Bridgehampton that was marked down 40 percent one summer.

“Hey, Frankie,” he said so happily while waving two three-foot pipes, one blue and the other red, of rigid plastic. “These are the newest and greatest plumbing inventions since the flushing toilet bowl,” he boasted with a smile from ear to ear. “They will never, ever burst, can withstand minus 100 degrees, won’t freeze and pop like copper pipes. Unless, of course, you want old-fashioned copper pipes,” he continued.

And so, I bought Mike’s pitch, hook, line, and sinker, gladly handing him my check for $9,400 to install PEX pipes, “the greatest invention since the flushing toilet bowl,” all throughout my two-story cedar shake saltbox, beaming with joy, relieved the harsh Northeast winters, with howling wind-chill temps common at 14 degrees, would never, ever surprise me in the depths of night and freeze, springing a leak in my basement, destroying my lavish 99-cent-per-square-foot indoor-outdoor gray carpet from Home Depot I’d strapped to the top of my Honda CR-V.

He never said a word about the fittings — brass pipe connectors that after years exposed to hard minerals in well water can turn white and cruddy, like the decaying battery terminals on my ’85 Benz, ultimately corroding them, spewing flowing water everywhere when they fail.

Last winter, on a brutally cold morning, while relishing my third cup of hazelnut at my dining room table, all the while trying for three hours to access the internet on my laptop, I kept getting the same error message, “No internet connection,” a message not uncommon in my area because of the swirling winds that often take down a silver oak and interrupt service.

Nearing 11 a.m., Anderson Cooper’s face on my living room plasma TV disappeared; NO CONNECTION danced across its screen instead, forcing me to my basement to pull the plug on my modem, a recommendation the cable company makes when an electricity spike occurs, but when I neared the lower fourth step, my bare foot hit water. My basement was a two-foot-deep pond, causing my diastolic to match my systolic.

In a panic, I called a friend, who donned high rubber boots and turned off the electric main, discovering a ruptured brass fitting shooting water like an open New York City fire hydrant on an August afternoon, leading to the loss of two $8,000 broadcast cameras, while my cable modem bobbed up and down like a snapper caught on its coaxial, quickly turning me into my own master plumber with all the accessories.

An inch from the rippling water, on a two-foot-high wooden D.I.Y. shelf I made from watching Bob Vila on the original “This Old House,” sat a covered 2-foot-by-2-foot clear plastic box with 54 12-cent comic books, souvenirs and memories of my eight-week summer vacation in Rockaway Beach in 1965, a summer filled with fresh waffle and ice-cream sandwiches, 10-cent Skee-Ball games in arcades on the boardwalk, and my first paying job — for 50 cents, sweeping the wraparound porch of the bed-and-breakfast my family rented on Beach 69th Street.

The two quarters Miss DeWitt, owner of the B&B, handed me were spent at the candy store under the elevated A-train on banana Turkish Taffy and 12-cent comic books, such as Fantastic Four, X-Men, Spider-Man, and those based on popular TV shows like “Bewitched,” “Get Smart,” and “F Troop.”

Sliding off the cellophane wrapping of each comic book, I was hurled back 50 years to the front gray-plank porch, where I fell deep in a lime-green Adirondack chair, transported to a faraway land as the fifth member of the Fantastic Four, busting through the front line of my football team and rushing for a touchdown in Astoria Park, Queens, as Thing, or dangling from the Hell Gate Bridge, looking out over the majestic and peaceful East River as Spider-Man, or using my white Converse low-top sneaker telephone like Maxwell Smart did with his shoe, immersed in the colorful storyboards. Ironically, I stare at similar storyboards on my computer every day, editing projects for my video business.

“We’ll make a fortune selling these on eBay,” shouted my Stony Brook University son Paul as he Googled each one. “Hello, master’s degree!”

And now, with my 12-cent comic book memories two floors above my eroding PEX pipe fittings, as I sleep with both eyes open, one anticipating another piercing wail at midnight from my basement’s First Alert water detectors, and the other watching my finance-savvy son’s appetite to flip my comics to inflate his Fidelity.com account, I recall the benefits of my first paying job and a family-fun vacation that still exists within the “near mint” pages of my 12-cent memories.

Frank Vespe is a regular “Guestwords” contributor.