Michael D. Davis.

Last week I made a grave mistake. In my Magic Mike from last week, I told a story about my Ma mistaking a dog for a deer. My Father has joked about and brought this up every day since its publication. Ma walks into the house, and my Father would go, “See any deer wearing collars?”

My Ma, annoyed with this treatment, told me to write a story about him. She told me to throw the Old One under the bus. As I had another story in mind, I was going to ignore this, then yesterday afternoon my Father cursed, banged, and committed other irritating acts from the basement. So, here we go.

It is my thought that the bathroom should be a peaceful area. You should be able to go into your bathroom and relax, whether that takes the form of self-reflection on the toilet or recounting 80’s pop hits in the shower. However, our bathroom isn’t this haven. It is at times the opposite of a haven, but instead a torture chamber.

I will focus on the shower, which is now the second column I’ve written about our shower for those keeping count. Ya see, the shower is this small plastic coffin from the 70’s, with a single knob, and pipes for outdoor use only snaking out to hold the shower head. Today, that’s not even the problem. The drain only works about half the time, but that’s not even the issue we are talking about today, really.

So, a few months ago, there was a problem with some pipes in the basement, and the water, and I don’t know. I’m not a plumber, so I’m not even going to pretend that I understand. My Father, however, likes to pretend. One pipe was hooked up to another, and for several months, the water from the clothes washer drained differently.

When I say differently, I mean that you will be sitting on the toilet doing what comes naturally, when some pipes will start to shake. You’ll hear them. Then a gurgle will come, small at first. Then, with a horrifying resonance, water will come shooting up out of every sink drain, as well as the showers. The drain filter will be thrown out of place by the power of the regurgitated water, and clumps of what we determined later was lint from the washer flew everywhere. That makes relieving yourself in peace a tad hard.

I don’t know how, but my father somehow turned every drain in the house into Old Faithful. A geyser of ick. The real topper to the whole thing is that the water stunk to high heaven, which nearly kills you when you walk into it.

So, if you were going to go take a shower after some laundry had been done, in the past few months, you’d possibly find water with a stench sitting in the bottom or clumps of lint and other grit thrown on the floor. You could either wrap some toilet paper around your hands and try to clean the shower floor every day before your shower, or just ignore it and let it go right back down the drain. Option two has a higher probability that you’d step on some wet, gritty substance that feels like slimy dirt, though.

When you wake up from a nap and sleepily drag yourself to the bathroom only half awake, pipes shaking, gurgling, and water shooting up from the drain are a bit of a shock.

So, I don’t know what exactly he was doing in the basement yesterday, but I hope he was playing plumber again. I really need my 70’s coffin shower with a single knob, and outdoor pipes back. God, that’s sad. At this rate, the next time I write about the shower, I’ll be saying, “So, the Old One played plumber again, and now every time someone turns on the shower, the lights go out, and the water starts to turn periwinkle.” I guess there are worse things.