Libraries. Also known as, The Biggest Adventure I've Had.
Another day like most. Exhausted, physically and emotionally, arriving home at 5:00. Eight hours of working with difficult people, then a (much needed) appointment with my therapist.
Therapist: Sometimes we just need to -
Self: S'cuse me, can I - cry for a minute? - *weep*
Get home. Schedule's all messed up. Double-booked half a dozen things. The only thing on my mind was the six-(five)-pack in the fridge. Dropped my stuff. Washed a few dishes (landlady returns in a few days - better keep the place tidy - what's that smell?) Last night the cat sprayed in my bathroom - strong smell of cat piss pervades the house. Okay, better do the kitty litter thing before I get online, then.
What did the landlady say? "If you think of it - scoop out the poops, flush 'em in the toilet." Okay. Different from how it's done at home, but whatever. Flush the cat poop - smells a little better now.
The toilet ran for extra long. I washed the dishes downstairs, I sorted some recycling (we don't do that at home, either.) Why is the water still running? By the time I get upstairs and notice that both the toilets are acting funny, it's a roar. Run downstairs. It's raining in the foyer.
No time to freak out. Rain storm in the foyer. Water gushing from three cracks - four cracks - run to several select corners of the house in search of buckets. Buckets, I need buckets. Water everywhere. Jane's desk. Jane's special coat hanging by the door. Jane's beautiful house. Need buckets. Look in the basement. Water dripping in the basement.
Bucket. Trash can. Pot, pan. Where's it dripping? Slide a receptacle in. It's leaking from the light fixture. Light! Power! Electricity - need to stop the electricity. Need to stop the water. Stop the power. Stop the water. Stop the power.
Where's the breaker? Shit. Run upstairs. Turn off the toilet (overflowing!) water. The running water noise stops. The gushing (downstairs) continues.
Should I call Jane? No. It's only been five minutes, what would I say? The water's off. The damage is done. Let the buckets collect the water. Slowly, it stops gushing. I find towels. Three floors covered in towels.
Later, Jane calls the plumber. That's where this story actually starts.
Have you ever met a plumber? I hadn't until tonight. I'd never seen water gush from a light fixture (on two floors.) "I'll call Joe now," Jane told me over the phone, "I'll tell him the situation. You'll love Joe." Sure, Jane. If he can fix this for us, I'm sure I will. I opened a beer and waited.
Complacent, by my standards, by the time he arrived, I was duly mopping up the foyer and washing the (shit-water-stained) pots and buckets in the kitchen. Joe barged right on in. "I'd shake your hand," I said, "But - questionable fluids -"
"Mine are dirtier than yours," was all he said, and he headed straight upstairs like he owned the place. I followed. He carried some kind of fishing-rod like plumbing device in one hand; he asked me if it was Jane's bathroom or mine. He stuck the rod-thing right into the toilet and fished around. I hovered.
Nothing doing with the fishing - he turned the water valve back on and did some testing. After about ten seconds the horrible sound of gushing water downstairs jolted me from my hover-post and I ran back to the kitchen. I'd put the pots and pans away, and dragged them back out in a panic. The foyer was raining again.
Me: STELLLAAAAAAA!!!! [I yell 'Stella' at least once a week when appropriate, and I've still never seen the movie it comes from.]
The plumber came back downstairs and headed out to his plumber-mobile. I was still mopping about ten minutes later when he came back in (what was he doing out there?) He sized me up, reached into his wallet, and did something hugely unexpected: he pulled out a twenty-dollar bill.
Me: ....What?
Him: Take this. Is that your car out there? Go buy some beer. I'm going to work.
I stared at him.
"I like Heinekin," he said.
I stared more. He offered nothing else, just waited.
Thoughts I had simultaneously included "It's bad - the bill must be extravagant if he's giving ME money," "Do I take him seriously and go get beer?" and "Am I really that freaked out?"
The beer offer won. I definitely wanted some, and I got the feeling he thought I was hovering. He disappeared into the basement, and I reached for my car keys. Beer run sounded good. (Should I leave a stranger at the house?)
[Aside - irrelevant to the story but still worth mentioning - when he disappeared to the basement I noticed a piece of paper that had fallen out of his wallet when he gave me the $20. It was a check, apparently from a client, made out to him. The amount was something in the area of $2,700. O, excellent.
I wandered downstairs in a daze with this, calling his name. Halfway to the basement bathroom he said 'Hold on just a minute.' I didn't, powering on to the basement bathroom - and, briefly, I saw him peeing in it. 'O'-face on, I backed up to the staircase and waited, then gave him the check when he emerged. He was appreciative.]
So, feeling dazed but good about myself (the check had fallen rather close to a puddle of ceiling-poo-water, I saved it!) I grabbed my car keys and took off to the liquor store, smelling slightly of poo-water. Heinekin it was.
When I returned some fifteen minutes later, I didn't have a chance to get out of the car. He appeared at the passenger-side door and hopped right into my car, feet on my day-old fast-food bags, ass on my accounting textbook. "Go up here and take a right," he said. And I did.
"Go two stops down and take a right," he said. Again, he offered nothing more.
Why did I trust him? Driving, silent, obedient, I imagined this was the beginning to a sad story that ended in a newspaper page-four crime headline: DC Girl [it would be girl, wouldn't it?] Murdered on vacant side-street. But I kept driving. It was mostly silent, and he made small-talk. What's your name? What do you do? How long have you lived with Jane? All while giving me directions. Turn here. Go through the light. Go to the next stop sign and turn left. (Is this how people get raped and murdered, typically? Interesting. Life is interesting. How many people walked in these shoes before they died? Interesting.)
In a flash of brilliance, I casually asked him, "How long have you known Jane?"
After a minute, he said, "Hm. Hard to say. Hard to keep track after the first twenty years."
That made me feel better. Then he told me to make a final turn. "You mean," I said, "Into this sketchy lot right here?" "It's not sketchy," he said. "Park at the end."
And still all I could think was "Well, whatever. This is an adventure. This is interesting."
It was an (abandoned) swimming pool parking lot. Weeds grew over the cement, the pool area itself was overgrown and abused. I pulled in the space he told me to. I put the car in "park." I waited for what came next, whatever it was. (Even if it was a struggle to the death.)
He hopped out and jogged over to the (padlocked) swimming pool entrance. Disappeared inside. I light a cigarette.
Would he come out with an axe?
A gun?
A baseball bat?
Some kind of drugging chemical?
How fucking stupid am I?
He came out with two narrow boxes under one arm. When he got closer to the car, I saw that the boxes read "TOILET BOWL CAULK."
Oh, Sean.
"Okay," he said, "on our way."
We got out of my car back at the house and he stopped on the sidewalk. "How much of this do you want to learn?" He asked me.
"As much as I can whilst drinking," I answered wisely. So he taught me about plumbing.
Joe the Plumber had dismantled the offending toilet in my absence and set up his tools. I watched while sipping Heinekin, asking innocent questions and liking him more and more by the minute.
My story is now reaching its head.
"How did you get into plumbing?" I asked him.
"I bought a house," he said, bent over his snake machine. The answer was immediate, as if rehearsed. It echoes in my head. After a pause - "there was an ecris account, and - when we moved into the house - there was a problem with the plumbing. So we hired a plumber, and he came out - did a good job - and when the bill came, it was for more than the escrow account. The whole account didn't cover it.
"So I said NO PLUMBER SHALL EVER ENTER THIS HOUSE AGAIN! but we still had problems with the plumbing, so -" He peered into the hole in the bathroom floor, twisting the snake - "I went to the local public library and sat down and read everything I could about plumbing. Then one day, my wife said, 'Get a real job!' and so I joined up with a local plumber. And after a few years being an apprentice, I got my license, and I started my own business."
He paused in his story, one (ungloved) hand down the toilet pipe hole, and looked at me. "You know what the moral of this story is?" he asked.
"Go to the library?" I asked.
"Vote. Democrat. Because the beautiful thing about this country is that anyone" (twisting a shit-covered coil) "can go down to the public library and learn whatever they please. And Republicans-" now he was using a scraper to scrape some gunk off the bottom of the toilet commode - Jane's beautiful pink bathroom was utterly covered in shit - I opened another beer can - "they get into office, and they're all about 'less federal government! More local government!' and when the Republicans get into office and local government decides what to do with its funds, what's the first thing that suffers from their tax cuts?"
"Libraries," I guessed.
"Libraries," he said. "So vote Democrat."
Finishing up (culprit was a mix between overload of cat poo and feminine hygiene products, which didn't seem to bother him at all,) he said "Plumbing is like every other thing in life. It gets easier when you've done it three hundred times.
"...Not bad for an undergraduate degree in acting, huh?"
Joe Kelly is a one-man operation in DC. If you need the best plumber in the world, tell him Jane Huntington referred you.
The moral of this story is Vote Democrat.
Therapist: Sometimes we just need to -
Self: S'cuse me, can I - cry for a minute? - *weep*
Get home. Schedule's all messed up. Double-booked half a dozen things. The only thing on my mind was the six-(five)-pack in the fridge. Dropped my stuff. Washed a few dishes (landlady returns in a few days - better keep the place tidy - what's that smell?) Last night the cat sprayed in my bathroom - strong smell of cat piss pervades the house. Okay, better do the kitty litter thing before I get online, then.
What did the landlady say? "If you think of it - scoop out the poops, flush 'em in the toilet." Okay. Different from how it's done at home, but whatever. Flush the cat poop - smells a little better now.
The toilet ran for extra long. I washed the dishes downstairs, I sorted some recycling (we don't do that at home, either.) Why is the water still running? By the time I get upstairs and notice that both the toilets are acting funny, it's a roar. Run downstairs. It's raining in the foyer.
No time to freak out. Rain storm in the foyer. Water gushing from three cracks - four cracks - run to several select corners of the house in search of buckets. Buckets, I need buckets. Water everywhere. Jane's desk. Jane's special coat hanging by the door. Jane's beautiful house. Need buckets. Look in the basement. Water dripping in the basement.
Bucket. Trash can. Pot, pan. Where's it dripping? Slide a receptacle in. It's leaking from the light fixture. Light! Power! Electricity - need to stop the electricity. Need to stop the water. Stop the power. Stop the water. Stop the power.
Where's the breaker? Shit. Run upstairs. Turn off the toilet (overflowing!) water. The running water noise stops. The gushing (downstairs) continues.
Should I call Jane? No. It's only been five minutes, what would I say? The water's off. The damage is done. Let the buckets collect the water. Slowly, it stops gushing. I find towels. Three floors covered in towels.
Later, Jane calls the plumber. That's where this story actually starts.
Have you ever met a plumber? I hadn't until tonight. I'd never seen water gush from a light fixture (on two floors.) "I'll call Joe now," Jane told me over the phone, "I'll tell him the situation. You'll love Joe." Sure, Jane. If he can fix this for us, I'm sure I will. I opened a beer and waited.
Complacent, by my standards, by the time he arrived, I was duly mopping up the foyer and washing the (shit-water-stained) pots and buckets in the kitchen. Joe barged right on in. "I'd shake your hand," I said, "But - questionable fluids -"
"Mine are dirtier than yours," was all he said, and he headed straight upstairs like he owned the place. I followed. He carried some kind of fishing-rod like plumbing device in one hand; he asked me if it was Jane's bathroom or mine. He stuck the rod-thing right into the toilet and fished around. I hovered.
Nothing doing with the fishing - he turned the water valve back on and did some testing. After about ten seconds the horrible sound of gushing water downstairs jolted me from my hover-post and I ran back to the kitchen. I'd put the pots and pans away, and dragged them back out in a panic. The foyer was raining again.
Me: STELLLAAAAAAA!!!! [I yell 'Stella' at least once a week when appropriate, and I've still never seen the movie it comes from.]
The plumber came back downstairs and headed out to his plumber-mobile. I was still mopping about ten minutes later when he came back in (what was he doing out there?) He sized me up, reached into his wallet, and did something hugely unexpected: he pulled out a twenty-dollar bill.
Me: ....What?
Him: Take this. Is that your car out there? Go buy some beer. I'm going to work.
I stared at him.
"I like Heinekin," he said.
I stared more. He offered nothing else, just waited.
Thoughts I had simultaneously included "It's bad - the bill must be extravagant if he's giving ME money," "Do I take him seriously and go get beer?" and "Am I really that freaked out?"
The beer offer won. I definitely wanted some, and I got the feeling he thought I was hovering. He disappeared into the basement, and I reached for my car keys. Beer run sounded good. (Should I leave a stranger at the house?)
[Aside - irrelevant to the story but still worth mentioning - when he disappeared to the basement I noticed a piece of paper that had fallen out of his wallet when he gave me the $20. It was a check, apparently from a client, made out to him. The amount was something in the area of $2,700. O, excellent.
I wandered downstairs in a daze with this, calling his name. Halfway to the basement bathroom he said 'Hold on just a minute.' I didn't, powering on to the basement bathroom - and, briefly, I saw him peeing in it. 'O'-face on, I backed up to the staircase and waited, then gave him the check when he emerged. He was appreciative.]
So, feeling dazed but good about myself (the check had fallen rather close to a puddle of ceiling-poo-water, I saved it!) I grabbed my car keys and took off to the liquor store, smelling slightly of poo-water. Heinekin it was.
When I returned some fifteen minutes later, I didn't have a chance to get out of the car. He appeared at the passenger-side door and hopped right into my car, feet on my day-old fast-food bags, ass on my accounting textbook. "Go up here and take a right," he said. And I did.
"Go two stops down and take a right," he said. Again, he offered nothing more.
Why did I trust him? Driving, silent, obedient, I imagined this was the beginning to a sad story that ended in a newspaper page-four crime headline: DC Girl [it would be girl, wouldn't it?] Murdered on vacant side-street. But I kept driving. It was mostly silent, and he made small-talk. What's your name? What do you do? How long have you lived with Jane? All while giving me directions. Turn here. Go through the light. Go to the next stop sign and turn left. (Is this how people get raped and murdered, typically? Interesting. Life is interesting. How many people walked in these shoes before they died? Interesting.)
In a flash of brilliance, I casually asked him, "How long have you known Jane?"
After a minute, he said, "Hm. Hard to say. Hard to keep track after the first twenty years."
That made me feel better. Then he told me to make a final turn. "You mean," I said, "Into this sketchy lot right here?" "It's not sketchy," he said. "Park at the end."
And still all I could think was "Well, whatever. This is an adventure. This is interesting."
It was an (abandoned) swimming pool parking lot. Weeds grew over the cement, the pool area itself was overgrown and abused. I pulled in the space he told me to. I put the car in "park." I waited for what came next, whatever it was. (Even if it was a struggle to the death.)
He hopped out and jogged over to the (padlocked) swimming pool entrance. Disappeared inside. I light a cigarette.
Would he come out with an axe?
A gun?
A baseball bat?
Some kind of drugging chemical?
How fucking stupid am I?
He came out with two narrow boxes under one arm. When he got closer to the car, I saw that the boxes read "TOILET BOWL CAULK."
Oh, Sean.
"Okay," he said, "on our way."
We got out of my car back at the house and he stopped on the sidewalk. "How much of this do you want to learn?" He asked me.
"As much as I can whilst drinking," I answered wisely. So he taught me about plumbing.
Joe the Plumber had dismantled the offending toilet in my absence and set up his tools. I watched while sipping Heinekin, asking innocent questions and liking him more and more by the minute.
My story is now reaching its head.
"How did you get into plumbing?" I asked him.
"I bought a house," he said, bent over his snake machine. The answer was immediate, as if rehearsed. It echoes in my head. After a pause - "there was an ecris account, and - when we moved into the house - there was a problem with the plumbing. So we hired a plumber, and he came out - did a good job - and when the bill came, it was for more than the escrow account. The whole account didn't cover it.
"So I said NO PLUMBER SHALL EVER ENTER THIS HOUSE AGAIN! but we still had problems with the plumbing, so -" He peered into the hole in the bathroom floor, twisting the snake - "I went to the local public library and sat down and read everything I could about plumbing. Then one day, my wife said, 'Get a real job!' and so I joined up with a local plumber. And after a few years being an apprentice, I got my license, and I started my own business."
He paused in his story, one (ungloved) hand down the toilet pipe hole, and looked at me. "You know what the moral of this story is?" he asked.
"Go to the library?" I asked.
"Vote. Democrat. Because the beautiful thing about this country is that anyone" (twisting a shit-covered coil) "can go down to the public library and learn whatever they please. And Republicans-" now he was using a scraper to scrape some gunk off the bottom of the toilet commode - Jane's beautiful pink bathroom was utterly covered in shit - I opened another beer can - "they get into office, and they're all about 'less federal government! More local government!' and when the Republicans get into office and local government decides what to do with its funds, what's the first thing that suffers from their tax cuts?"
"Libraries," I guessed.
"Libraries," he said. "So vote Democrat."
Finishing up (culprit was a mix between overload of cat poo and feminine hygiene products, which didn't seem to bother him at all,) he said "Plumbing is like every other thing in life. It gets easier when you've done it three hundred times.
"...Not bad for an undergraduate degree in acting, huh?"
Joe Kelly is a one-man operation in DC. If you need the best plumber in the world, tell him Jane Huntington referred you.
The moral of this story is Vote Democrat.