What I've Learned: Steven Coffey

Steven Coffey, photographed in the author's kitchen in East Greenbush, NY.

Construction Manager, 45, Albany
By Emily Catherine Massa

You got to be mean. And I’m mean. I’m a carpenter by trade, but my vocation is construction management. To be a construction manager, you have to know how to technically do everyone else’s job, so you know they’re doing it right.

A lot of people in construction aren’t in it by choice. All they care about is getting home to the five o’clock cure. If they could be doing anything else, they would be. So you have to be very aggressive and patient at the same time. I’m basically a kindergarten teacher.

I’ve been doing carpentry since I was a very young man. My uncle was a builder. I got into the Marine Corps right after high school. I got out, went to college, and got a degree in Geology. My whole class was hired by Exxon. But I was a former specialist-in-nastiness, so I was more valuable to them as a Marine than a geologist. They said they were going to put a rifle back in my hands, and I just wasn’t having it. So I came back, and started to build. I love it.

I’ve been shot twice. So I know all about it.
I started a development on my own and I needed money for everything. There used to be this “Money to Lend” feature in the New York Times. I answered one of the ads, and it was all very official. There was a lawyer and lots of paperwork.

But before I knew it, I was getting money in suitcases. Cash. It was just like in the movies, except these guys had real guns. But that didn’t really bother me. They didn’t shoot very well.

Drink your beer. I was renovating a bar on Lark Street, The Griffin. It was the end of the day, we were all done, the bar’s ready to open. I was sitting at the bar with the owner, his bartender, and my foreman having a beer. I hadn’t been drinking for a couple of years, so mine was just sitting in front of me. All of a sudden, this guy drags his girlfriend in off the street, down the stairs, beating her. Just horribly. Wailing on her.

So I looked around and said, I’ll take care of this. I went over and intervened. In three-tenths of a second, I’ve had the guy’s arm twisted up behind his back and was tormenting him. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in the emergency room. The girlfriend had gone over to the bar, picked up the beer I wasn’t drinking, and cracked me on the back of the head with it.

I should have drunk my beer. It would have been lighter.

When a German shepherd looks at you, it like they’re looking at your soul. I had this ninety-pound, solid black, German Shepherd I used to bring to the construction sites. Albany was pretty rough then. He would sit in front of the door and guard. If someone new came, he would just look at them. I’d had to say, Oh, let them in for him to move. That dog was so good.

Both of my daughters are excellent carpenters. I could never stand the thought of somebody watching my children, so they would come to the site with me. When it was nap time, I would put a blanket in one those construction tubs, and they would take naps in the tubs with bulldozers and people hammering in the background.

There used to be a lot of drinking on the job. One day my wife came by the site after work to take the little one home. The house we were working on was perfectly blank, just plain floors and sheetrock. So in the middle of this empty room is an empty beer can. And the little one walks up to the beer can, looks at it, and says Aww fuck! And my wife looks at me and says That’s it! And that was it. My girls developed some foul mouths being on construction sites. But it hasn’t hurt their personalities.

I’m never going to retire. I’ll give up working seven days a week, but I’ll still build one or two houses a year. That should keep me fine; I don’t need anything to retire on. Really, it’s all for my kids.--

School Play: David Quinn's Not-Great Story About His Short-Lived Film Career

David Quinn in School Play.

David Quinn—father, husband, lawyer, longtime Center Square resident, folklorist, brother of original MTV VJ Martha Quinn—has stories to tell. Leaning back in his office chair, it becomes clear that, despite calling a week on the set of an Andy Warhol production School Play 'not a great story,' he has no qualms about making it one. “It was a great, great time to be 19,” he tells us. “I had the world by the short hairs.” He smiles as he reenacts his week, laughing at his 19-year-old-self and the adventures he had.--Michelle Cabral

It was the summer of 1969 and I had just dropped out of college. I went back to New York, back to my mother’s house, and found a job with a film production company. I thought that was what I wanted to do with my life.

I didn’t know anything about film, but I liked film, and thought I could do something with it. I got a job in the editing room, cleaning and splicing film together. It was mostly grunt work, but I told the guy I was interested in it and he sent me to Long Island University for a film production workshop.

Bud Wirtshafter taught the course; he was this avant-garde filmmaker. He had a piece called “Polar Bears in the Snow.” It was just a blank white film with a voiceover, describing all these polar bears running around in a blizzard. It was ridiculous but hysterical.

Well anyway, he was hired to do the camera work for this production out in Bridgehampton.

He asked, “Who wants to come out and watch and maybe help out?”

“Uh, Sure.”

So we go out to Bridgehampton and, lo and behold, all these Warhol Factory people are there. Taylor Mead and Gerard Malanga were the most famous people. There was also a woman named Brigid [Berlin]. She was this was this hugely fat, very pale woman, famous for her nude calendar. Anyway, I was young, wasn’t bad looking, and this guy says, “Wanna be in this movie?”

“Oh shit. Sure, okay,” I say.

“Put on this bathing suit.”

Oh god--I saw it coming. These were weird people, weird people, but peaceable people. Just a little weird.


The opening credits of School Play. Quinn's name is third down in the second column.

The plot of the movie was this series of dream sequences, sort of a Cinderella kind of fairytale thing. It was weird. And you know, when you shoot a movie, you never know what it’s about, unless you’ve written it or you're involved with it.

My character in this movie was one that would reappear in the various dream sequences with Brigid, who was the princess or whatever. Then we would repeat the scene with another woman who was just the absolute visual negative of Brigid.

I would repeat those scenes, and we did a couple more weird scenes. In one scene, this guy Carl was in a big cast iron pot, and I was one of the natives cooking him. I was supposed to taste him—ladle out of the pot and make native nosies. Ooga-booga, things like that.

So that was the movie.

When we wrapped, Brigid came over to me. “Oh David, you gotta come to L.A. We’re gonna start a TV series, The Every Day Show, it’s gonna be fun, you’re a natural, you should come to L.A. with us.”

Well, these people were weird enough, and it was going to be far for me to go off to L.A. with them, I tell you that right now.

Then Charles Rydell, the film's director, comes up and he has my check: 290 dollars. He comes up, just like on Cash Cab, and says “Well, I got your check right here. But I suggest you join SAG.”

“SAG? What’s that”?

“That’s the union for screen actors. Once you get into SAG, you get paid union rate”--scale, they call it--“and you get health benefits and all it’s a great gig. If you’re ever going to do this you’ve got to be a member of SAG.”

So I said, “What’s that going to cost me?”

He says, “275 dollars.”

“Wait a minute," I say. "You want me to give you my 290 hard-earned dollars and get 15 back, for a card? I don’t think so.”

And I think it was probably a mistake--it would have been worth the 290 dollars to carry a SAG card today.

About the spring of 1970 was when the screening occurred. I got a job in the Natural History Museum and went down to the book store and this guy comes over to me.

“Hey, David. Were you ever in a movie?”

Aww shit man, I’m getting busted on this. “Well uh, yeah, why do you ask?”

“Cause there’s a magazine, Interview, you’re in it.”

“No way.”

“A picture of you uh, ladling something out of a pot, and you’re name’s there.”

I never saw that picture. I never saw that magazine. I’ve no idea what this magazine was about.

So that is a flash-in-the-pan of my events with the Warhol group. That was pretty cool. But it’s not a great story.

Jack's Grillside Tales: An Interview with John M., Owner of Jack's Diner

Walk into Jack's Diner at 547 Central Avenue, and you're plunged into another time. Its fifties-style construction and décor jives well with clatter of cups and plates and sizzle of the counter-side grill.

I sit down at a booth, coffee in hand, to speak with John M., owner of Jack’s for 46 years. An active 77, he’s constantly running from kitchen to grill to customers, making everyone welcome with a smile and a joke. Over the course of forty minutes, we cover everything from family to the comical results of losing taste buds.--Dan Henderson

How long have you lived in Albany?
77 years—in the Capital District, that is.

What do you think the most rewarding part of owning the diner is?
Enjoying the job. The people. The money; it isn’t so important.

Just one of those nice things to have on the side?
I just enjoy the business. I talk to a lot of people—my son doesn’t enjoy it, but I do. You know, you meet the characters from A to Z in a diner. You have the governor sitting over there, and the worst bum on the streets there.

Has anyone famous ever stopped in or become a regular?
We had a couple actors, but I didn’t know who the heck they were at the time. The governor—Governor Wilson and the Mayor have been in here, but otherwise nobody that I know of. The biggest writer we had in here was Bill Kennedy.

Ever read any of his books?
Well, I’m not a reader. The last book I read was “See Jack run, see Jane run.” I mean, sometimes I’ll read the paper, you know.

You never read any books?
In high school I used to. We had comic books back then; they were famous books, like Moby Dick. I brought in Moby Dick for a book report and my teacher said “M––, who are you kidding?” He knew I wouldn’t have read it. They were good though, those books. I should’ve picked something different to do my report on. Moby Dick was huge!

Would you consider writing a book or contributing to a newspaper article to talk about your experiences working here and hearing customers’ stories?
We’ve been in US News & World Report and some diner magazines have written about us. But you could do a book just on the characters that have been in here.

Have you made plans for retirement anytime soon?
Not at this moment, no. God has been good to me and I’m healthy. I can have three beers a night and I feel good. I’ll be 78 in July.

You’re a lucky man.
Yeah, I broke my kneecap and I lost my taste for beer for a year and a half. I went to my doctor and he asked me how I was doing. So I told him I broke my kneecap and I lost my taste for beer for a year and he said, Oh my God, why didn’t you tell me sooner, I could’ve given you a shot!

So do you have it back now?
Oh yeah, I started drinking wine, but I just couldn’t do it. My father died an alcoholic, my father-in-law died an alcoholic, and my wife still thinks I’m an alcoholic. [winks and chuckles]

You must still be proud of your children, though.
Oh yeah, but I don’t know, I never taught any of them how to drive. Their mother did that. I put in more hours. We went on vacation, we would go places, and we had a nice boat. The kids were good.

I’ve got a question: Are you Catholic?

Nope, I was raised Episcopalian.
Well, I have been all my life. I go to mass at Saint Mary’s, and one day the priest told us that everyone who bears a cross can get to Heaven. And I sat there in the pew thinking about it, and thought, “Everybody I know is going to Heaven, because everybody I know bears some kind of cross.”

Everybody has problems. It’s just life.

That’s for sure.
I lost thirty-five pounds last year using an ancient method. My father died and my mother put a pound on that first month. She was worried, so she went to the doctor, who was Jewish, and in his office he had pictures of people in the concentration camps on his wall. He told her, if you want to lose weight, just do what they did, don’t eat! And that’s what I did. I stopped eating. I just cut down. You don’t need your special diets, you just eat less.

Of course I don’t have taste buds, so everything I eat tastes about the same. I could practically get away with drinking sour milk. You could open kerosene in here and I wouldn’t smell a thing. I could probably get away with not taking a bath for six weeks.

I don’t know if I’ll quote you on that.
In Korea, I went without a shower for about that long, we were being pushed back and nobody had the time to do anything. But when you’re eighteen or nineteen, it’s no big deal.