Remembering Teddy the roofer

Whenever it rains hard, I think of a guy named Ted Sage. He was a roofer. But that’s not quite right. He was a roofer in the same way that Michelangelo painted ceilings.

Ted was a genius. He fixed leaks.

I met him about a month after we bought our first home in Brooklyn, in 1994. Spring had brought a deluge. Water was streaming into the children’s bathroom from an unknown source. I went up on the roof and saw no obvious puddling. I went downstairs and checked the Yellow Pages. A representative from the company with the biggest ad showed up the next day in a red polo shirt with his name embroidered. He looked over my roof like General Westmoreland surveying casualty reports from Vietnam.

“Three thousand dollars,” he said. “We’ve got to do the whole roof.”

I don’t remember where I got Ted’s name as an alternative. It could’ve been from the older gentleman on the block who had a deep gouge in his forehead and sat on an aluminum chair in front of his house, discussing how his gang used to fight Al Capone’s boys from Garfield Place.

I called. A few hours later, an old rusted-out black station wagon that looked like it could have been the Munster family’s car pulled up. A Black man got out with a tar bucket. He wore thick glasses, a debonair mustache and a ball cap slightly askew on his head. He was a little bent and bandy-legged, with beat-up shoes and plastic kneepads, but he carried himself with immense dignity and poise. I showed him where the ladder to the roof was and followed him up. He took a box cutter out of his pocket and dropped it at his feet.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s where the water is getting in.”

There was no hole as far as I could see. Any gap in the seam was negligible. But he seemed very sure of himself. He went back downstairs, somehow never tracking dirt into the house from shoes that were encrusted with roofing materials, and fetched a roll of black fabric from the station wagon. Then he climbed back up on the roof, eyeballed a measure of the fabric the way a dressmaker would, cut it off with the box-cutter, laid it out and tarred it into place.

“That oughta do it, old man,” he said, with a hoarse laugh.

As he rolled up the fabric and put it under his arm, I asked him what I owed. He waved at the air and walked back toward the hatch.

“Forget it,” he said. “Come on.” I followed him. “When I called, you told me you had a dozen roofs to get to but you came anyway. Just for the cost of materials, let me...”

“All right, you can give me 20, if you really want, and tell your friends if the roof holds. But do me a favor. Get a better latch. The neighborhood is safer but we still get break-ins sometimes.”

That spot never leaked again. We never had to call him much in the years that followed. When he did come, he almost always found the leak within seconds. And I always enjoyed going up on the roof with him. He was more than an artisan. He was a forensic specialist when it came to ductwork, skylights and chimneys. He studied the whorls and smudges of tar like he was deciphering the words of an oracle, determining the past, present and future. And, above all, he was a rooftop philosopher.

“This is the best time,” he said to me one sunny midmorning we looked down over the edge on Sixth Ave., three floors below. “The streets are quiet. The kids are in school. The cars are parked. The leak is sealed. And everything is where it should be. And you know it won’t always be like this. But sometimes, you get a glimpse.”

We talked about the rest of his life occasionally. His family. His real estate investments. His years working for the Sanitation Department. He’d been through some strikes, had met some rough characters, and knew a lot about the underworld for a guy who’d spent a lot of time on top of houses. Sometimes he brought along apprentices. A few were pretty good, but none were the master.

At the beginning of the pandemic, there was a little drip in the kitchen. I called. Ted didn’t sound good on the phone. COPD, he said.

“I’ve been breathing in this stuff for 60 years,” he said. “I guess it caught up with me.”

The next time I called, there was no answer on his cell phone. I make a few more calls and eventually, another roof guy told me that Ted passed back in January.

Now the rains are coming harder and closer together. There’s a leak in an upstairs closet. I had another roof guy come. He said the time had come to redo the whole thing. Nothing lasts forever. But I know we could have lasted another season if Ted had gone up there with his patch kit again.