Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg

Okay now finally it’s time for me to write about the shower. Again.

If you remember – which there’s no reason you should because I’ve changed the subject like twelve times since I mentioned it, but – this is the shower in my bathroom. And when I say “my bathroom,” I mean the master bathroom which, except in an emergency, I am the only one to use. As opposed to when I say “the bathroom,” by which I mean the public one that's sometimes also known as “Johnny’s.”

Got it?

In other words, this time, I’m talking about my super-duper, en suite, pod-bay shower:

Which never got caulked up completely when it was installed and I didn’t know that when I started using it and Johnny (let’s be honest) didn’t have the sack to tell me. So the water was getting in the cracks between the pieces, and therefore in the wall behind the pieces, making all this yucky mildew slime that would come oozing out the creepy cracks when I was in the shower.

Yum.

So I stopped using it for a week or so. To let the nasty thing dry out a bit. Then Johnny, as he says, “bleached the piss out of it.” And I would like to state for the record that there wasn’t any piss in it. Not when he bleached it, anyway. I’m not going to swear I’ve never.

Oh come on, are you seriously going to claim you’ve never?

Fine.

Neither have I.

Ahem.

Moving on.

Apparently, however, I was wrong to disparage Johnny’s gonadal dimensions. Because when he finished this chlorinated task – and I don’t know the details of how he got Chlorox in all the cracks, but get it there he did – he had the sterile balls to come out and say to me: “You know, Love, you also have to clean the shower sometimes.”

Ahem.

Moving on.

No, you know what? Not moving on. I have to say in my defense, that this bleach job had been imminent for weeks before it happened, and I saw no sense in scrubbing the shower before he climbed all in it with his boots on. Plus he was going to be spraying bleach all over! Why not see what that takes off before I get on my hands and knees?

It’s also true that we were caught in a sort of catch-22. I say “sort of” catch-22 because it’s not really a catch-22, and I hate when people use that phrase for things that just don’t qualify at all. Like, I heard somebody say “I’m hungry but – catch-22 – if I eat now I won’t be hungry at dinnertime.” No, not catch-22 (also not a concept I can understand, by the way: ruining dinner). A catch-22 would be if you don’t eat now you won’t get dinner later. See?

Anyway, we were caught in a sort of conundrum whereby he needed me to stop using my shower for a few days before he’d bleach it, but I needed to know for sure he would bleach it before I’d stop. And since I couldn’t be sure he would until he did, and since he couldn’t do it till I stopped, we sort of circled the wagons round each other for a couple weeks. Hence the soap scum about which Johnny’s sack so prissily complained.

And then the shower broke. So that solved that problem.

The stupid hand-held nozzle for which I never installed the hanger-thing because I didn’t want to put a screw-hole in the wall and risk getting shower-water in there (you decide whether that’s irony or not: no way I’m going there). It had been hanging headfirst by its hose this whole time, occasionally getting dropped and banged around, and this time when I went to turn the jet-adjuster thingy (and I don’t remember why I went to turn the jet-adjuster thingy, but it had nothing to do with Dirty Boy, I swear) it just came off in my hand.

Lookit:

So I started using Johnny’s shower and Johnny, eventually, bleached mine. That, I believe, was this past Tuesday. I’m going to see if I can get him to caulk it up for me today while I spend nine and a half frustrating hours blow-drying plastic wrap onto all the old windows that need replacing.

Then I’ll go buy me a new shower nozzle for my bathroom, and some black curtain rings for Johnny’s. And he wants a black switchplate, too, if I can find one. And bathmat. So it will be full-on, come-up-and-see-me-sometime, bordello décor.

Hey, he's the one who's going to be pissing in there. If he’s got the sack for it, why not?


Anybody out there? Want to explain the title to me for a POEM CONTEST? Don't just google and define it, tell me what stupid pun I'm making...