“I think you’re on call,” she said. “Must be something clogged somewhere…”
Word spread like wildfire. My phone number made the rounds with the speed of light. I wondered where the other plumbers-the real ones-were hiding, what with all those houses leaking all over the place, all those pipes clogging up. I was standing in line to buy a few yards of copper tubing and a right-angle elbow, when I happened to talk to a pro who told me that they didn’t want to bother with the little jobs. I’ll tell you something, the guy said, lowering his voice to a whisper, when somebody calls me up for a leak, if I don’t think I can wind up selling them a new bathroom, I don’t mess with it.
So I found my niche: five-second jobs paid for in cash. In a matter of hours I’d become a neighborhood celebrity. Expensive, but efficient. I knew where my power lay: somebody who has the flu can try to fight it, but somebody with a clogged toilet is at your mercy. I made as much money as I could. I overcharged. I had them all in a hammerlock.
For a couple of weeks it was pretty wild, but then it settled down. I stopped running around so much, booking all my jobs for the morning. Betty didn’t like me leaving, cap pulled down over my eyes and toolbox under my arm-it made her nervous. We even had a fight about it one night. I had come home totally wiped out.
I’d just done an emergency job for this military guy-uniform, white hair, blue eyes. It was my fifth job of the day and I was wasted. The guy led me down this long dark hall, his boots clacking on the floor, me following him all hunched over. The minute I got to the kitchen I was hit by this smell, like french fries and burned plastic, horrible. It was all I could do to stay there. It was something that happened every time I went into somebody’s house-this desire to turn tail and run. I stayed, though.
The guy was carrying a riding crop in his hand-he pointed it at the kitchen sink without saying a word. It didn’t matter-by the end of the day I didn’t care if people talked to me or not. It was more peaceful if they didn’t. I approached the sink, half holding my breath. There were three plastic dolls in it, mostly melted. The drain was clogged and everything floated in about two inches of oil. I opened the cupboard underneath to take out the garbage can and I saw that the drainpipe was completely corkscrewed, even melted in some places. I stood up.
“You did this with boiling oil?”
“Listen, I don’t have to answer you,” he whined. “Just do whatever needs doing and let’s get it over with quickly.”
“Hey, take it easy. It’s okay with me if you want to pour hot oil on your dolls. I see weirder things than that every day. It’s just that I have Io know if there might be something else besides grease and melted plastic in your pipe here. You’ll have to tell me.”
He shook his head fast and said no, then he left me alone. I took a cigarette break. At first glance it didn’t seem very complicated-just a drainpipe replacement-but of course things are never as easy as they seem. I went back into the cupboard and saw that in fact the drainpipe ran through two other cupboards before going into the floor. I saw that I was going to have a good time trying to get through all the crap.
I went out to the car to get a piece of drainpipe. I had all the basic sizes-they were strapped onto the roof and hooked to the bumpers at each end. Betty had rolled her eyes when she saw that. I’d found a whole bunch of them at this construction site during one of my nocturnal outings, and my profits had skyrocketed ever since. I grabbed a beer from under the front seat and chugged the whole thing before going back to work.
It took me an hour to remove the old pipe and another hour to install the new one. It drove me half crazy- down on all fours in the cupboards, smashing my head in every possible corner. I had to stop every once in a while to close my eyes for a minute. But I did the job. I leaned on the sink and got my breath back, smiling at the little disemboweled dolls. Come on, man, just hold on a little longer and your day will be over-think about the girls fixing you a drink. I grabbed the pipe, sawed off a good yard of it, and fitted it into the joint. I was putting my tools away when the guy in the khaki uniform showed up again. He didn’t even look at me, just stuck his nose in all the cupboards to check the installation. Guys like that make me laugh. I slipped the strap of my toolbox over my shoulder, grabbed my piece of drainpipe, and waited for him to come out of there.
He stood up, seized with agitation.
“What is this…?” he said. “WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?”
I wondered if maybe he’d burst a blood vessel in his brain while bending down under the sink. I stayed calm.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
He tried to dig his eyes into my forehead. He must have thought he was still in the colonies, getting ready to chastise one of his slaves.
“Are you trying to pull the wool over my eyes? Your pipes are not regulation!”
“How’s that?”
“Yes… the length of pipe that you’ve put in, THERE-it’s a piece of telephone tubing!! It’s WRITTEN on it!”
It was news to me. It’s true I’d never paid much attention. Still, I didn’t let it shake me.
“You scared me,” I said. “No, seriously, don’t worry about it. It’s exactly the same pipe as the other kind. All the sinks in town are fitted with it, it’s been that way for ten years. It`s good stuff.”
“No, no, no. No good. It’s not REGULATION!!”
“Really, don’t worry about it…”
“Don’t try to swindle me! I want things done according to regulation.”
It always happens to you at the end of the day, just when you’re totally beat. Nobody’s willing to throw in the towel. I ran my hand through my hair.
“Listen,” I said. “I do my job, you do yours. I’m not going to ask you what kind of dynamite you use to take a hill. If I use telephone tubing it’s because I know what I’m doing.”
“I want a regulation installation, you hear me?”
“Yeah, I hear you. And I suppose that all the weirdness you do in the sink, that’s regulation, too. Look, just pay me and let’s forget about it. That thing’s not going to budge for twenty years, I guaran-”
“Nothing doing! You’re not getting one penny until you change it!”
I looked the old fruitcake right in the eye. It was clear I was wasting my time with him, and I wasn’t interested in overtime. All I wanted was to get back in my little car, roll down the windows, smoke a cigarette, and go home in peace, that’s all. So I walked up to the sink, bent my knee, and kicked the U joint with all my might. I managed to break off half of it. I turned to the guy.
“There you go,” I said. “Something’s wrong with your sink.
You’d better call a plumber.”
The old man hit me in the face with his crop-I felt a line of fire from my mouth to my ear. He looked at me, his eyes gleaming. I smashed him in the head with my pipe. He backed up into the wall and put his hand on his heart. I didn’t go get him his pills. I just split.
I felt my cheek burning all the way home. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw a red-purple stripe. One corner of my mouth was swollen-it made me look even more exhausted than I was. It seemed to put into motion some process that made all the fatigue from the past few days show up on my face. I wasn’t a pretty sight. Caught in a traffic jam, I was able to recognize all my brothers in misery-we all looked alike. Same wounds, or almost. Every face ravaged by a week of meaningless work fatigue, privation, rage, and boredom. We crept forward a few yards each time the light turned green, without saying a word.
Betty saw the welt the minute I walked in. My cheek was all puffed up, glistening. I didn’t have the heart to make up a lie-I told her exactly what had happened. I poured myself a tall drink and she jumped on me:
“That’s what you get for clowning around all day long! It had to happen!”
“Shit, Betty. What are you talking about?”
“Spending your days on your knees under a bunch of fucking sinks, rubbing elbows with garbage cans, unplugging all sorts of shit, putting in toilets… you think that’s smart?”
“Who cares? It’s not important.”
She came up close to me. In a sugar-coated voice she said, “Tell me, do you know what I’ve been doing all these days? You don’t know? Well, I’ve been recopying your book! I’ve been at it day after day, and sometimes at night-it keeps me up nights, for your information!”
Her voice got more and more bitter. I poured myself another one and grabbed a handful of peanuts. She didn’t take her eyes off me.
“I am convinced that you are a great writer. Can you get that through your head at least?”
