The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
How a plumber poet rides out the pandemic
The phone doesn’t ring very often these days at the home of Joe Luciano, who has been a plumber for decades and has many longtime customers.
“I’m only getting calls for emergencies,” he told me. “Since the pandemic started I’ve done only about a dozen jobs. My business is down by about 80 percent.”
This has given him more time to write poetry. Luciano, known as “Joe the plumber/ poet,” self-published a book of his verse, “White Night,” about 10 years ago. (His pen name is Joseph James.) He has been writing ever since then and has amassed enough material for a second book. But he needs to do the formatting and editing to pull it all together.
Last month, feeling the sadness and fear all around us, he wrote “Spring Virus.”
He began it by noting that usually he looks forward to March because it brings us spring and the opening day of Major League Baseball. Nothing can stop spring from coming, not even a vicious virus. But “baseball was postponed indefinitely.”
He wrote of the ironies: “Folks being paid not to work/Friends show love by staying away.”
“So why does it take a pandemic to realize what really matters?” he continued. “Because we’re cogs in a complex machine, that makes us run and follow…”
“There must be more to this precious life than what we are seeing; something lasting, meaningful,” he wrote. “We’re going to be stronger and better after this, yet will we still be part of the machine?”
If you go to Luciano’s website (www.joetheplumberpoet .com) you can read his plumbing tips and more of his poetry. In his website’s “welcome,” he wrote: “I encourage all to write their own poetry. It can be a therapeutic way to get in touch with your thoughts.”
Luciano and I sat in the front yard of his home in the Hamden Plains neighborhood of Hamden last Thursday afternoon, soaking up a hint of spring weather. He likes to sit next to that round, metal table, using the location as a kind of front porch where he can call out to his neighbors as they pass by.
But since the virus hit, he said, many of them are wearing masks and, “It seems they’re a little scared, on guard. They smile; they’re not mean. But we don’t converse so much.”
Luciano feels the fear in some of his customers, too, those who decide they must call him because a pipe has burst and their homes are flooding.
“I always wear a mask when I go into somebody’s place,” he said. “But when I was on a call yesterday, the customer didn’t have a mask on. I try to stay pretty far away but I guess I got too close to her. She held her hand up and said, ‘Uh uh! Six feet!’”
Luciano keeps hand sanitizer in his truck and always applies it every time he comes out of anybody’s home.
“But I’m kind of used to germs, being a plumber,” he said. “My friends say I must be immune!”
His father, Pasquale Luciano, was a plumber, too. “My dad died four years ago. He had lung cancer, then pneumonia. It was really hard seeing my father die. But he was 84; he lived a good life. He was a plumber ’til he was 79. That’s a long time.”
After his father died, Luciano wrote a poem called “The Bed.” He mused, “Oh how I hated that damn bed … the one that held my dear father.”
But toward the end of the poem he wrote: “I wish it was here/Here in this room, with the TV/With my ailing struggling dad/So I could hold his face and kiss him/ And tell him how much I love him.”
Luciano is now 61 and told me he is getting close to retiring. “It’s hard work.”
When he calls it quits, that will be the end of Copperline Plumbing.
His grandson Thomas Runstrom walked past us, strumming on a guitar. Luciano told me the young guy has no interest in becoming a plumber. “He’d rather play music. I’m worried that not too many young people want to be plumbers. Our numbers are declining. The younger generation is more into electronics. They want to have ‘clean’ jobs.”
Luciano and his wife, Cherilyn, have two daughters (neither is a plumber) and Luciano dearly misses seeing two of his grandchildren in Meriden. “We only see them on Skype now. We did a drive-by; it was sad. We couldn’t even give them a hug.”
But during the lockdown Luciano and his wife are living with their other daughter and her two children. Nonetheless he’s unable to see his mother, who is 89 and living at her home in Orange. “We’re hoping that soon we’ll be able to visit her. This has got to end sometime, right?”
How’s he doing financially? “I’m doing OK. I got my stimulus check, which was very helpful. I tried to get one of the small business loans but they want to see my tax forms. I don’t have all the paperwork done because I delayed filing.”
Luciano will turn 62 in June and might then start collecting Social Security payments. They could prove to be essential. “If business stays like this, I’ll eventually start to feel it.”