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...

Veni, Bibi, Vici

I fixed the toilet. It was actually never really broken in the first place but, in determining that, I broke it, so then I had to fix it after all.

Turns out there’s this little floaty foam-rubber bit on the flush chain and it was floating so hard that the rubber flappy bit was never sinking completely closed. I tried sliding the foam-rubber floaty bit up on the chain so it wouldn’t float so hard, but it gave me a hard time so I got mad and got the scissors and cut the damn thing off.

That’s how I discovered that the foam-rubber floaty bit is there to keep the rubber flappy part up long enough for the toilet to completely flush. Without it, the rubber flappy part just flops back closed and you have to hold the lever down to make the toilet work.

That explains why the other toilet doesn’t work, the one I replaced the guts on last year. I’ve fixed a bunch of toilets in my life, but this is the first I’ve ever heard of these floaty bits. Are they new?

Anyway, so I went to Lowe’s (which I hate, by the way, and which we call Blowe’s behind its back, but which is only a mile down the road so I always hatefully end up there) and got two flappy-chain-floaty kits to fix them both in one fell swoop. Took me a couple tries to get the right combination of chain length and floaty height to make it flush properly and still stop running when it’s supposed to, but I got it done. Took about a half an hour for the both of them. So glad I put it off so long.

I was going to do all this yesterday – I did, in fact, do the exploratory breaking yesterday – but I accidentally stopped at the beer store on my way to Lowe’s. I was just so proud of myself for having done the taxes. The plan was to get grass seed, too, while I was at Lowe’s, but I forgot.

Shhhh....

I fixed the toilet. Wanna know how...?

Shut the door. Can't hear it. Ta Da!

Hey, with Johnny gone I don't really need two bathrooms anyway. Course, he does come home tomorow...

I'll do it this weekend, I promise. Or, okay, maybe next weekend. Just as soon as I file my freakin' taxes.

In the meantime, if a tree falls in the forest...

Rest In Pee

Okay, so this toilet that won’t stop running…

It’s in the new bathroom. Sort of a three-quarter bath, I guess, that we built (in a corner of what was once the rotten room) waaaaaaay back in 2004. And 5. And a little bit of 6.

We had a pair of plumbers, John and Bobby. John tall and white-headed. Bobby shorter, with dark hair and a hernia that made him look like he was smuggling footballs under his shirt. Johnny’s known them both for years, from a bar he used to drink at in South Boston. I first met them in, I think, 1998, when they installed the gas dryer in our apartment. They were already retired then, just doing little jobs like that for little money.

John’s the one with the license – come to think of it, I’m not entirely sure whether Bobby was ever actually a plumber or if he was just John’s best friend, keeping him company and handing him wrenches in their golden years. Not to disparage anyone or anything, I just don’t know. Maybe he was.

Anyway, John was the one with the license. He got the permit and met with the inspector and everything. But Bobby was the one that talked to me. And I liked the way Bobby talked to me. He’d joke and mutter, translate all John’s sentences from plumb-speak into English. And he didn’t treat me like a girl. He didn’t tell me dirty jokes or anything, but he treated me like I belonged there, like there was a chance I’d understand what he was saying.

It wasn’t fun, this plumbing project. They were, like I say, retired, so they would show up when they felt like it – every day, but at whatever time – take a break for lunch at noon no matter what had gotten done, and leave when they were tired but never later than, say, three o’clock. I’m no judge of what’s a fair price and what isn’t, but the inspector estimated the cost of our permit based on two times what they charged us, so who was I to comment on their routine?

My grandfather was a plumber, and though I never went to work with him or anything I’d seen him do some work in my folks’ house. Watching white-haired John on his hands and knees with a monkey wrench in his hand reminded me of Grampy, and so I kind of liked having him around. And, like I said, Bobby talked to me.

When the toilet was finally installed but not yet functional, I discovered that the tank wobbled if I tipped it with my finger. The boys said yeah, that was odd, but that’s the way it’s made: the bolt holes didn’t square so there was nothing they could do. I called the manufacturer and the manufacturer said um, yeah, no, it was not supposed to wobble. I called the inspector and he said um, yeah, no, a toilet with a wobbly tank would never pass inspection. So I called the boys and told them um, yeah, no, but they were going to have to figure something out.

They nailed a block of wood behind it on the wall. So it wouldn’t, you know, wobble anymore.

Ingenious, no?

Eventually they did get the bolts to go, and eventually it all did pass inspection. But it’s been making this weird dripping sound since almost the first time that I used it – not constantly, just when you sit on it and then for a while after. It sounds like its coming from under the floor, except for under the floor is a crawl space with dirt, so how could I hear water landing there?

And now it won’t stop running. That, I think, is just cheap plastic innards. I know how to fix it – I did it in the other bathroom about six months ago – but I haven’t gotten around to this one yet because I’m so annoyed I think that it should just go fix itself.

The other day John called to tell us Bobby died. Apparently his father passed away, then four hours later Bobby was taken to the ER short of breath. I asked about his mom but it turns out she’s been gone for years – so that’s a blessing, I suppose, on a day like that.

I still don’t know if Bobby ever was a plumber, but I know that he was my plumber – along with white-haired John. And, though it may not be the most sacred of memorials, I know that I will think of him every time I use the toilet they installed.