Indiscreet Plumbing, or Praying to the Porcine God
I knelt down before my sink and through the chemical haze of the storage cabinet underneath it, I saw a vision as war-like and glorious as the one Emperor Constantine beheld – the cross and the sentence ‘Under this sign you shall conquer.’ I see my own sign post of conversion: a thick wad of cash and the sentence ‘You must break the will of this house that seems bent, if not on your destruction, then at least on monopolizing every minute of your spare time.’
I called the plumber, my next-door neighbor, as I stood staring into the kitchen sink, which sat with its basin full of dirty dishes and the expletives I had hurled at it all morning. He came by later that morning.
“This doesn’t look good,” the plumber tells me. When has it ever?
“How come?” I ask.
“Well for starters…”
From my standing position I glance down to what looks like his decapitated body. I kneel to his level in order to show my interest in not getting fleeced.
“Do you see this, Roy?” he asks.
“Yeah, what about it?”
“You’ve probably been a real lucky guy up until now.”
Porky is a portly, infectiously good-natured Filipino-American man. His high spirits are reason enough for the affectionate annoyance rising in me. There are many times I’m grateful for men like Porky who are able to keep the world together with a corny joke and a bit of duct tape, but right now I am resisting this man with the power to let the waters flow, or not.
“See this elbow?” he waits for me to reply even though the elbow couldn’t be more obviously placed. “See how the threads are stripped here?” I nod. “This is where the leak is coming from. Now do you see this, this rusty, crappy black stuff all around the mouth of the pipe?”
“Yeah, that’s gross.”
“Right, it’s the creature from the black lagoon,” he says, looking like a kid on Christmas morn. “You got swamp thing in your pipes and I’m going to have to go through the whole system trying to find out where he lives.”
“That sounds expensive.”
“That’s right, it could get very expensive,” he says, delighted. I’m wondering how long it would take for a jury of his peers to convict my plumber friend under federal racketeering statutes.
“Well, can you please write down exactly what it is you’re going to do and give me an estimate of how much it’ll cost? When can you work on it?”
“Not today, maybe tomorrow.” He closes the pipe back up, literally throws his tools into a plastic bucket that is as distressed as his pants and sweatshirt and his eyes become stuck to a plate of the cookies I bought at the bakery this morning. “Have a couple,” I offer.
“Thanks,” he says as he grabs four on his way down the hall. “How’s your boyfriend?”
“Porky, Tip is not my boyfriend. I’m not gay!”
“Oh, I forgot,” he says gently, his mirth smoldering in the upturned corners of his smile, “See you around.”
“I’m calling you first thing tomorrow, Porky.”
Along with the house and business, I had inherited Tipton, the young man who had taken Celestine’s reservation and whom Porky was now linking me romantically with, from my uncle. Tipton is short, fat and balding. He is quick to take offense and politically right of center. He has the smooth, milky white skin of a housebound Caucasian infant and perfumes the air around him with an infant’s spitty, farty, pablum smells produced in folds of tightly closed skin.
Tipton adored and lived through uncle Arthur and upon the latter’s death, he took me up as his new unrequited love. I’d never been able to bring myself to ask him if he didn’t have just a teeny bit of resentment that I had gotten the house and business. He had, after all, taken care of Arthur during his recovery from stroke and all but run the business. And they’d shared a passion for opera and mutton-chop sideburns and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer among other things. But Tip seemed to have found his station in life, and life was theatre and like any actor of small talent, he found purpose in sycophancy.
I’ll declare now what I should have said first off: I’m not gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but people have to start getting realistic; I’m just not. I show up on everybody’s ‘gaydar’ but if people would just look more closely, really examine my life, the truth becomes self-evident.
I’m one of those guys who everybody thinks is gay because I’m sensitive and artistic and I like traveling and I dress fashionably. My body language tends to be, by American standards, a bit feminine: I cross my legs like ladies and Europeans do, I hug and kiss freely, my handshake is weak and I’m witty and good at decorating a room. Even my parents think I’m gay. During much of my life, they were pissed at me because they thought I was queer, now they’re pissed at me because I won’t admit it!
Star power
Celestine returned from her walk around 6 pm. I heard her climb the front stairs laboriously and fumble a bit with the key. She rang the bell just as I opened the door.
“Hi, I had trouble with the key,” she said. She was deliriously worn out and unburdened by shopping bags, a free woman. I showed her again how to operate the lock and she removed a cheromoya fruit from her apple-green knapsack.
“I thought you might enjoy adding this to your fruit palette.”
“Thanks. That’ll be the proverbial piece of resistance. How was your day?”
“Oh, I lingered in the neighborhood for most of the morning. Wanted to check out the Vesuvio and soak in all that beat nostalgia.”
“Were you a beatnik in your wild youth?”
“My youth wasn’t that kind of wild, it was more Shelley and Byron and Gothic romance wild.”
“Waiting for Heathcliff?”
“Something like that.” She paused after she spoke, her eyes locked onto something far away, a cue card perhaps and then she continued, “And then after Vesuvio, I set out on a wonderful hike. When I was walking through the Marina a man stopped me and asked if I was staying with you. I thought, God, this is weird. Turns out he’s a neighbor of yours and saw me leaving the house. Porky the plumber? What a character he is. Told me he was doing a job for this little 85 year-old woman who wanted him to work in his underwear because that’s the way her dear departed husband did. He told her he couldn’t do briefs but would work in boxers and a V-neck t shirt.”
“Welcome to San Francisco,” I said.
“Porky told me you’re having some plumbing problems. Am I going to be able to take a bath?”
“That Porky certainly is a talker. Yes, you’ll have no problem, it’s just the kitchen sink that’s plugged. I’ve had such a time with it this week.”
“Good! I desperately need to soak in a nice hot tub.”
I thought she could have been a bit more sympathetic about my plumbing issues but I had to allow for her long walk and advancing years. There are two types of senior citizens, those who have become so much more grateful in their declining years and thank you graciously for every little thing, and those that forget to be polite; they haven’t got the patience for it anymore. I briefly and prematurely judged Celestine to be in the latter category.
A Distinguished Lack of Complaint
After her bath, Celestine knocked on the door to my private apartment, basically just two rooms at the end of the downstairs hallway – the kitchen and the old dining room that Arthur had converted to a bedroom and office. She wanted advice on a place to eat.
“What about that place at the end of the block?” she asked.
She was referring to a restaurant on the corner that I pass by frequently. The patrons tend to be toothy and tall – an affluent crowd. Everyone in that restaurant is always smiling, as though you not only had to be rich to eat there, but happy too. Or maybe miserable people (or the miserably rich) were allowed to eat there but the restaurant had such a beneficent affect on all who managed a reservation that they found themselves smiling like idiots despite their
better judgment.
I’ve thought about eating there. I often pass by the open door of the kitchen and it seems like a sane environment, not a lot of foreign curse words and the waitresses smoking by the door don’t seem stressed and close to breakdown. But I see that small dining room with those huge plate glass windows and I keep thinking ‘Darwin’ and ‘Smithsonian display case’.
“It’s a bit stuffy and overpriced,” I said. “Do you like Italian?”
“Love it.”
“Try Il Fornaio Caldo on Columbus, I think you’d enjoy that more. After you’ve gone out, I’ll get your wet towels and empty your trash.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I wrote a few suggestions in your book.”
Something inside me froze. I don’t have a suggestion box at my establishment because I don’t wish to dangle opportunities to complain in front of my guests. I do have a guest book where one is supposed to sign one’s name. In ‘A Room of One’s Own,’ Virginia Woolf wrote that ‘the best writing is distinguished by its lack of complaint.’ I have this written on the front of my guest book. Most find it funny and follow its dictum.
In the game of life, complaining can be a valuable survival skill. If Virginia, poor thing, had only learned to complain more she might not have stuffed her pockets with stones and flushed herself into the river Thames. Nevertheless, she exemplifies the kind of clientele I like to cultivate – people who would rather die than complain.
“Is there something wrong?” I asked.
“No, no, they’re just suggestions for other guests based on all the wonderful things I saw today. See for yourself, I wrote right below the entry of the distinguished ‘Sir Reginald Barfley the Third, of Puketon Manor, Stand-in-Upchuck, England.’
“Sir Reginald was a thirteen year old from Bakersfield, California with poor hygiene.”
“I’d better run and get dinner. Thanks, you’ve been fabulous.”
I grabbed a fresh set of towels and made my way upstairs to her room. She had made the space her own within hours of her arrival – flowers on the mantel, a few books and magazines on the tables. She had taped a picture to the wall – strictly forbidden, but in capitulation to my growing affection, lust even, tolerated. Like some illicit drug from the Summer of Love, her odor was in the air and I inhaled it.
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