3 PROSE PIECES (2238wds)

1. THE CESSPOOL

If you live in a suburban area without sewers you know how precarious the system of disposing human waste can be. We become the cesspool Gestapo. There are signs in black marker in all the bathrooms: PLEASE DO NOT DEPOSIT PAPER TOWELS, TISSUES, TAMPONS, GUM WRAPPERS or anything other than one ply toilet tissue.

When the cesspool in our home backs up and starts to rise over the brim of the toilet seat after making its usual precautionary gurgling sounds, my husband flies into his catastrophic mode: “What the hell—IS THIS HAPPENING AGAIN?”

I quickly pull out the yellow pages to begin the cesspool hunt: who has the best deals, the quickest response, complimentary coupons, the largest looking truck in the ad, etc., etc. as he begins the usual blame game:

“You people don’t know how much toilet paper you’re throwing in there!” Six childlike eyes look up (mine included) “And how much soap you’re putting in.” He points to me. “You leave the water running when you do the dishes” and to the kids, “twenty minute showers; I’ve been timing them.”

I’m always the mediator. “You can’t do dishes without water. You have to respect the urge of elimination…”

His voice gets louder as he designates all allowable toilet use: “Only one elimination every 3 hours and the upstairs bathroom only, and for the time being, no poop.” Then we, the family, (except for the dog who has his own private out-house) become a little nervous (which, by the way, increases the urge to eliminate).

Frantically, I start to make phone calls, get exuberant prices and promises of immediate service, except on Sunday, which of course this was. If the world was going to end I think Sunday would be your best bet. I can hear him in the background: “RIP-OFFS, THEY’RE ALL RIP-OFFS!”

“We have to get someone” I insist.

“Hah!” he bellows, “You should have though of that before!”

“Before what?” I ask innocently, pointing to an ad. “Look—a senior discount.”

“Yeah,” he says. “They charge you more and then say you’re getting a senior discount.” Finally, he picks the winner: FLUSH IT ALL AWAY TODAY Cesspool. They promise to come in thirty minutes. In the meantime he digs up the cesspool cover that would have cost an extra $35 to have done. Two hours later we are still waiting. I start to watch Lifetime for Women to get my mind off having to go the bathroom and to see just how bad other women’s lives are.

“What are you doing down there?” He comes down into the den, face beet red and a glare in his eyes that makes him look almost homicidal. Then he says controlled, too controlled.

“Come outside, I want to show you something.” Sighing, knowing bad things are to come, I obediently follow. He stands over the large dug out hole that goes down into tunnels and tunnels of waste. “Do you see that?” he demands.

I look down into the hole, holding my nose. “Yeah.”

“Do you know what’s down there?”

I’m wondering where all this is leading.

“All your toilet paper, all that you used,” he says seriously. I want to laugh but don’t want to piss him off any further.

“Just mine?” I ask, innocently, trying to hold back the anger that has formed a basketball in my stomach.

“Yeah” he shouts, “You just kept throwing it and throwing it in.”

What is there to say? I walk away, leaving him to shout at the hole. Just then the Cesspool truck pulls up and two lanky looking guys get out. They look like father and son with the same snake tattoo, only on opposite arms. My husband gives them that Mr. nice guy smile then goes into a long tirade about how the situation got to this point, which of course they would never have figured out by themselves.

They take out a long snake and the older one in the ripped tee slips it down into the hole. “Ok, it’s full alright,” he says. “Let her rip!”

“And NO chemicals,” my husband states. “It’s just a waste of money.”

“Sure, whatever you say,” he replies, rolling his eyes at the son and then pulls the lever of the large tank that starts to suck all our shit away.

2. THE GARBAGE PICKER

Perhaps he should have gotten a job with the Sanitation Department, the way he takes to it. No pail is left, unexamined. My husband pulls out old, ripped shirts, holey socks, expired coupons and asks why they’re being discarded. Even food—a moldy piece of cheese, a bagel so stale a chain saw couldn’t cut it, a rotted peach, even a piece of tomato skin.

“No one is going to eat that.” I tell him.

“Waste,” he mutters, “just waste. Look at these pants.” He holds them up. “They can be cut and made into shorts.”

“Hmmm…”

“And what about these socks?” He holds up a sock with a hole large enough for a thumb.“My mother used to darn socks like these.”

I resist the urge to say: “Your mother was a moron!” And tell him that no one darns socks in 2007.

“Well, you see, that’s the problem.” He becomes the philosopher, scraping the mold off the cheese, taking, a bite, then putting it back in the fridge, unwrapped. “No one understands the meaning of thrift anymore.”

I shrug. “You’ll get sick from the cheese.”

“You’re such a Calamity Jane,” he replies. “Besides, I never get sick.” And he’s right—he never does. We’d all be in the hospital on IV, trying to replace the electrolyte imbalance we’d get from puking and he’d be just fine. No matter how dented a can is, he consumes its contents without even the thought of Botulism.

And broken appliances, now that’s his specialty. “You see this blow dryer,” he pulls it out from the garbage with strands of spaghetti still stuck to it. “Why the hell is it in here?”

“It hasn’t worked in a year.”

“The filter just needs a little cleaning out, that’s all.Lint trapped in there.”

“I have two others.”

“Of course,” he answers with sarcasm. “When something breaks, just buy another.” He takes it into the shed with all the other items in various stages of repair. An hour later he comes out with the dryer.“See, try it now.”

Cold air blows out from the nozzle. “It’s great.” I say.

He storms out tripping over the cord. “You can use it in the summer, you don’t need heat then.”

The other day he found a light bulb. “Doesn’t this work?” he asks.

“Sure. I always throw away good bulbs.”

He sticks it in one of the lamps and it lights up.It’s a three-way one but only the 50 wattage works. “It’s a three-way,” I tell him.

“So, it’s still usable. You know years back we never had 3-way bulbs, just regular ones.”

“Yeah, and horses instead of cars,” I mumble. I begin to feel a scream rising and start singing Fly me to the Moon off-key. Then he holds up a dead plant. “And what about this?” He cuts off all the brown leaves that now leaves a tall, leafless stalk.

“That’s very attractive.”

“It’ll come back,” he insists and takes it outside to give it some sun.

Wednesdays and Sundays are the big garbage hunt nights since the next day is trash pick-up.

I tell the kids: “Make sure if you throw anything out to cover it up real good with newspaper so he won’t find it.”

He begins to rummage through it all before the morning pick-up. “I’ve got to keep an eye on you. Who knows what you might throw out next.”

And I envision stuffing him into a large pail and sealing the lid while he screams desperately for help. Just for the heck of it I look in the downstairs bathroom pail, making sure I haven’t thrown any valuables away when I spot this hard metal looking item. “Hey what’s?” I ask out loud. He comes rushing down.

I begin to laugh. “Well, if it isn’t your bridge.”His face turns red as he tries to grab them out of my hand. “I’ve been looking for that all morning.”

“Why didn’t you just look in the garbage,” I say, sweetly.

“I bet you threw them in there,” he says, trying to grab them again but I stuff them in my pocket.

“Finders Keepers,” I say, leaving him standing with a puzzled look, his toothless mouth wide open.

3.THE WASHING MACHINE

One day it just stopped, right in the middle of the rinse cycle. When he came home I had to tell him the awful news. “The washing machine died.” It was as if I told him I had terminal cancer, a bomb had been planted in our basement, our son was in the witness protection program.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” he begins to shout, arms flailing and runs downstairs to turn the knob in a frenzy. “How the hell did it happen?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t there at the precise moment it had taken leave of this earth.”

“Were you doing wash?”

“Yes.”

“Was it an extra load?”

“No.”

“Did you mix the towels with the light stuff?”

“No.”

“Did you put in extra soap?”

“No.”

“Well,” he says, exasperated. “Then how did it happen?”

“Maybe because it’s almost twenty years old.”

He glares. “This model should still have plenty of life left in it.”

Who could argue? I really wasn’t sure of the life span of washing machines.

“I’ll check it out and get the part.” he says. THE PART is always this mysterious thing. It could mean anything from a single knob to the whole motor. I knew not to argue. “Sure.”

That night he has it all apart. The laundry room is covered in nuts and bolts and various other mechanical paraphernalia. He picks one and proceeds with THE PART hunt. There are only two places that service a machine that old, one in Queens, the other in the heart of Harlem. “Call first,” I suggest, but he wants to make it as difficult as he can.

“You know those asshole sales people. They never know what you’re talking about, they never even bothering looking. I’ve got to go down in person.” Each night he comes home with a different part. I hear him curse and mumble and know to stay out of the way. I begin looking at machines in the newspaper ads.

“You give up so quickly,” he accuses. “We’re not buying a new one.”

So I schlep the clothes to the Laundromat, lose a dollar twice in the change machine, one sock, and a ripped bra in the dryer. After that, my neighbor across the way offers the use of her machine and gratefully I accept.Because I don’t want to impose any further, I drag the basket of wet clothes back to our house to dry. By the ninth day I am desperate and very, very angry. “Please, why can’t we just look?” I say as he rummages through his part collection. “They’re not that expensive and we can pay it off interest free for a year.”

“Oh sure,” he answers, wiping grease from his sweating forehead. “Another bill, just what we need, another bill. Can’t you see I’m trying to save money?”

I wonder how much he has already spent on all those parts, and my left eye begins to twitch, which later spreads to the right.

“Aha!” he announces the following day. “I found it. It’s this one. I’m sure. See, I told you it could be fixed.”

“That’s great, “ I say, trying to sound enthusiastic. He puts the dirty clothes in and we wait, breathlessly, for the sound of water. There is a large, brief swoosh and then….nothing. I sort of feel sorry for him, well, maybe only a little—the way he looks, standing there, staring, as if it were a lover who had betrayed him.

“Are any of these parts refundable?” I ask. He just glares and then gives the machine a hard kick and would you believe—it starts? The damn thing begins to churn and swirl the clothes around. I resist the temptation to laugh because it seemed such a solemn moment.

Well, to tell the truth, it only lasted a couple of more months. This time he just went to the store and ordered a deluxe model with so many knobs I thought we would need a licensed pilot to operate it. And we have all these extra parts since he bought the same model because, he admits, “almost twenty years is a fair amount of time”.

And, oh yes, we saved $25 by taking out the old one.He and my son-in-law risked hernias trying to get the monstrous thing up the stairs. “They don’t make ‘em like this anymore,” my husband says, and we all hoped he’d be the one to get the damn hernia.