One Saturday, a couple of weeks ago, Susan, my mother-in-law, came down to visit from Cleveland. On the Monday prior, I asked Max, my 22-year-old, to clean his bathroom by Thursday, so she wouldn’t have to either traipse through mine and my husband’s bedroom to the master bath (which she’d never do) or trek downstairs to the half bath in the wee hours.
I gave him until Thursday so that if it wasn’t sanitary, which is usually the case, I could kick his ass back in there to clean it again on Friday. WARNING – if you have a weak stomach, turn away now! Go back to the pristine premises from which you hail because the images below ain’t pretty or for the faint of heart. No, they’re not as disturbing as, perhaps, the latrine at a concentration camp but probably not a whole lot better.
On Thursday afternoon around 4:00, I was in my office down the hall working, and I heard him shuffling around in in his sorry excuse for a loo. After about 15 minutes, I heard the unmistakable sound of an explosion in the vicinity of his room, and I heard him shout, “Dammit! What the fuck?”
Not to worry. It was a fake bomb, accompanied by rather impressive graphics – all courtesy of his XBox.
I crept into his bathroom for a peek at his progress, and I was bitterly disappointed. Check out his sink…
And, then, there was the toilet…
I marched down the hall to his room and beat my fist against his door rapidly, which I’m sure sounded like machine gunfire from outside, LOL.
“What?” he asked in a rather annoyed tone.
I opened the door to find him lounging on his bed, his Xbox controller in his hand, but luckily, his game was paused, so he was at least listening to me.
“You can’t possibly think your bathroom is clean?” I snapped.
“Well, what’s wrong with picking up all the trash first?” He whined in a defensive tone.
“Nothing, but you were supposed to be finished by now. Please get back in there and scrub your sink, the tub and your toilet, and I’ll do the floor to make sure it’s clean.”
Yes, I know, he should’ve done it all himself, but I knew such was asking too much of the universe that he do a decent job on the floor as well because his idea of cleansing the tile was swooshing a mop around for 3o seconds, paying no attention to the grime on the floor around his toilet or the weird crud huddled up under the canopy of the cabinet under the sink.
“Okay. Okay.”
“Now, please. I’ve got enough to do before she gets here.”
He frowned, and I slammed out of the room.
The next day around 3 p.m, I went downstairs to get a glass of water, and he was in his bathroom again. And this time, I could smell the effervescent perfume of SCRUBBING BUBBLES. My relief was tempered by my skepticism that his toilet would be hygienic enough for any woman to park her behind upon it.
Unfortunately, while I was eyeball deep in work, he managed to slip out of the house before I could inspect his janitorial efforts. And goddamit – his toilet was still filthy. The counter was clean, but everything else was still dirty, and he hadn’t even touched his bathtub, which had a smattering of dead bugs layering the bottom. Awesome!
He’d been showering in the guest bathroom downstairs (at the back of the house) because his tub wasn’t draining properly. No wonder. There’s probably a family of insects clogging up the pipes or something.
I left several vitriolic messages on his phone and a few angry texts to boot, but I knew I wouldn’t hear from him. And I didn’t. He said his phone died. WHATEVER…DICKHEAD!
Funny thing though, he hadn’t mentioned his sink wasn’t draining either…didn’t take a genius to figure out why…
There was something stuck in the drain.And he might not show up until 2:00 the next afternoon, and Susan was supposed to arrive around 11 a.m., so, of course, it was all on me.
I donned my hazmat gear, an old t-shirt, ratty shorts and a pair of vinyl gloves. I stuck my finger down inside the sink, but I couldn’t seem to get a hold of the object. It was about the size of a quarter, and it kept flipping around between my gloved fingers.
First, I tried a pair of tweezers, but they weren’t long enough. Next, I grabbed a pair of salad tongs, but they were too wide.
I finally realized, the only way I was going to fish this thing out was to use my fingers – sans the protective vinyl. I ripped off the gloves and stuck my fingers into the drain, and I managed to pluck it out on the first try. It was, in fact, a very hairy and grimy quarter…but, alas, there was something else wedged in the sink.
After a momentary bout of cursing, I took the plunge again, and this time I snatched a penny from the bowels of the sink.
You’d think my time playing sink surgeon was over, right? Oh, but, of course, you’d be dead wrong because there was still something else stuck in the curve of the pipe.
“Holy fuck balls, Max!” I shouted.
The last tidbit appeared to be a tiny bottle of some sort. I tried several times to pull it out, but it was plastic, and it kept slithering out of my grasp. At which point, I went into my bedroom, grabbed a sewing machine needle from my chest full of sewing junk. And I stuck the needle into the teeny, tiny bottle…and voila…
It’s a little bottle of eye drops, a sample from the eye doctor, perhaps?
We had a robust shouting match about him shirking his responsibilities when he returned very late that night. And I told him that he’d have to clean his bathroom once/week from now on because I was not going to spend another two hours on my hands and knees scouring his bathroom floor ever again. And for chrissakes, if you drop something in the sink, remove it before it turns into a waterlogged bit of rusty goo!
He apologized later, but the damage was done. And the worst part was – though I washed my hands repeatedly, I couldn’t shake the phantom slime lingering upon my skin after my dissection of his sink.
Yeah, wish I could’ve boiled my fingers!
And I seem to be cursed by nasty plumbing mishaps, i.e., http://tenaciousbitch.com/2011/05/16/like-a-really-bad-sit-com/ …when Nana’s toilet imploded…:)
Hope all is better in your world than that auspicious day was for me!!!
Over and out from insanity central…
TenaciousB and her band of truth-spouting hippies~
TB/ks
© Tenacious Bitch 2014
