You haven’t written much these days, for myriad reasons (the discussion of which is beyond the scope of this offering). And for now you’re pretty much content with that. But one consequence is that some stories aren’t being told or recorded for posterity. And your kids have noticed. Because as much as you enjoy writing these things, they enjoy reading them more. Major happenings are going unheralded! Misadventures are being missed! When are you going to write about your daughter breaking her arm playing ring-around-the-rosie? (“Mr. Hamilton, I’m calling about Nori. Her arm is badly disfigured. Y-you’d better come up to the school right away!”). What about the trip to northern California (and how visiting colleges for your baby turned not-baby made you feel)? And when are you going to explain the Crans-Jans Schematic (your system of replacing curse words in front of your kids with nonsense that has become so ingrained and automatic as to have permanently damaged your ability to effectively swear or even communicate intelligibly)?
When indeed?
The answer eludes you. And then today, you find yourself sitting outside a college test prep center, awaiting your daughter who was required to bring a parent for this introductory session. And she’s taking a practice SAT, which lasts for hours. And there’s only so much podcast listening, or online investment research, or Twitter nonsense that you can do before you get restless. And the book you’re reading (The Devil’s Highway) has reached that point at about 95 pages in when you remember that you don’t really read books.
So, you open Notes on your phone, flex your thumbs, and find the passage you wrote back in January but never finished. And you finish it. And you present it here, for what it’s worth.
* * *
You walk downstairs, on what you imagine will be a pleasant Sunday morning, to find sewer water filling your bathtub and overflowing from your toilet. It’s covering your bathroom floor, creeping toward your kitchen, and dripping into your basement.
This is the part of the story where a younger version of you would lose his mind. But hysteria seems undignified in a forty-five-year-old. Besides, your wife is working all weekend, your youngest kid has a fever, and panic is a luxury in which you should not indulge.
You call the plumber. He suspects it’s a problem with the city line, in which case he can’t help you. So you call the Water Department. They suspect it’s a problem with their contractors, in which case they can’t help you (the contractors have to fix it). So you call the hapless contractors, who have been installing replacement gas lines for months now and – it turns out – inadvertently cut your sever connection. They did it two weeks ago. And your sewage – sewage from a household of seven people and a few houseguests – has been steadily backing up in your pipes since that time.
To their credit, they dispatch a team immediately. And those poor bastards work their asses off, digging down into an underground river of shit – literal shit – to fix your pipes. But in the process, to diagnoze the problem, they had to access your sewer clean-out. For mystifying reasons, your sewer clean-out was placed inside your detached garage when it was built back in 1926. And accessing it means opening it inside your garage. The garage full of bicycles, and batting helmets, and archery targets, and hundreds of random other items you’d be embarrassed to catalog.
In fairness, they did tell you to move stuff. And you did move stuff. And they helped you move stuff. But neither you nor they had any idea of the sheer volume of filth that would belch forth, as if from the bowels of Satan.
Before opening the valve, the Hispanic man who apparently drew the short straw among his co-workers and had to do the deed warned you: “Choo don’t wanna stand in here man. Choo wanna go like, far away and shit.” And then, with a brief look to the heavens as if in prayer, he turns the wrench and unleashes a tsunami of shit all over your garage floor.
It keeps coming, and coming, and coming! The noisome liquid spreads and rises. It soils everything in a forty foot radius. And the fecal swamp that was your garage is now a Lovecraftian nightmare.
You and the contractors all watch, slack-jawed. Nobody says anything for a minute. Then one of the workers mutters “that’s a lotta sheet.”
It takes them eleven hours to fix the pipe. They are still digging, with flashlights in the rain, at 10PM. But when they finally fix the line, your tub and toilet still won’t drain. Because in the two weeks that the sewage was backing up, it has formed clog(s) in the pipes somewhere. And it goes without saying that they won’t be able to fix the clog or help clean up the catastrophic mess in your garage until Monday.
And early on in this fiasco, you realized you wouldn’t have drainage anytime soon. Which means no toilet, no shower, no human dignity. And so you got a hotel room nearby so the kids could shower and brush their teeth. And they are delighted, because they LOVE hotels. And you ferry them back and forth so they can crap – each on a different schedule. And they’re having a blast. There’s something magical about getting in the car expressly to make a poop run.
And you’re doing your best to reframe this experience into something vaguely positive. An opportunity to overcome adversity. A chance to appreciate the fact that you have previoulsy taken showering, and shitting, and washing dishes as a given. No more! Like losing air conditioning in August, or refrigeration during a hurricane, this kind of experience leaves its mark on you.
It goes without saying that all the stuff in your garage must go. When Godzilla shits on your stuff, you throw away your stuff. And you chuckle to yourself because you’ve been talking about cleaning out your garage for years. And now is the time! Nothing can overcome procrastination like a crapsplosion.
You manage to get your kids taken care of and to bed, and then you realize you failed to visit the grocery store. You had planned to do it today, back when your expectations for the day did not include an apocalyptic hellscape in your garage.
You groan, and lace up some shoes that weren’t wading in filth, and drive to Kroger. It is not your regular grocery store. But it is the closest. And you just need a few things. And damnit, after a day like this, your kids can eat a goddamn egg that came out of a hen that wasn’t free range, and organically fed, and self-actualized, and doing chicken yoga.
The store is deserted. Whenever you arrive there late at night, there is a line of grocery carts blocking the normal entrance, like some kind of zombie barricade. It steers you away from the deli and toward the checkout counters. What the shit? You assume the manager believes this will deter late night theft. But it also irritates the customers, and reminds them that the manager is worried about late night theft – about the sort of people who frequent his store at this hour. So maybe you should be worried too. You should have just gone to Central Market like you always do. But you’re here, so get it done.
You grouse your way past the stupid grocery cart barrier and collect your few items. Then you see that no human checkers are working. So you must scan your items yourself in the godforsaken self checkout. And one of the reasons you went to law school in the first place was so you wouldn’t end up ringing up groceries. So F Kroger, F them in their black, corporate hearts.
Huffily, you drop the plastic grocery basket at your feet, and begin to briskly swipe your milk and eggs across the scanner. And while you’re muttering to the HAL 9000 about how you’ve already placed the goddamn item in the goddamn bagging area, a human voice interrupts you.
“Can you pick that up for me and I’ll put it in my cart over there?”
“What?”
You turn. Before you stands a small, misshapen man. He is dressed in a Kroger uniform, and vaguely dwarf-like. He gestures toward the grocery basket at your feet and repeats his request. Then he clarifies: “I don’t have a kneecap on my right leg, so it’s kinda hard to bend over.”
“Y-yes. Of course.” You pick up the basket and hand it to him. He puts it in a cart and waddles away. You gather your things and drive home, staggered to learn of yet another way in which you are fortunate. No kneecap? That’s a thing?
And you pull up to your house, temporarily soiled and without plumbing, but still home. And none of it seems all that bad. You use your two healthy kneecaps to walk upstairs and get ready for bed. Then you remember you can’t use the sink. So you use your kneecaps to take your toothbrush downstairs and out back, and you use the hose to brush your teeth. And you piss in the backyard. And it’s great.
Everything is great.