How Now Brown Shower

I’d be lying if I said it didn’t start with my own stupidity. And my sad, sad lack of aptitude for anything handy.

I’m big, I’m tall, I’m strong, and I’m powerful. I’m even fairly smart. But I failed shop class in high school, and my dad saw the multitude of scrapes I got myself into and declined to teach me about anything with tools, fearing I’d burn the house down or something. (I think he had in my mind that time on a camping trip when I melted the soles of my shoes together, which caused me to hop around in a decidedly unamusing fashion—to me, at least. My dad laughed his ass off before cutting my shoes apart with his Swiss Army knife.)

Anyway. When I bought my own house, the realtor warned me that it wasn’t like living in an apartment; I’d have to keep track of all my own repairs and stuff. (Maybe I looked young, or something. Or stupid. It’s a toss-up.) It seemed pretty simple at the time, though. I went out and bought a whole shitload of home repair books, ranging from Glenn Haege And His Multitude Of Cheery Yellow Books On Home Improvement Shit all the way to The Complete And Total Idiot Who Is So Stupid That In Fact Mucilaginous Goo Is Probably Dripping All Over This Yellow Book, You Incredibly Devoid Of Any Shred Of Knowledge About Home Improvement’s Guide To Various Home Repairs. I stupidly thought I could handle it. I mean, you got your heating system, that’s kind of easy. Just keep the vents and shit open. Keep the fire lit, I guess. Air conditioning in the summer, I could deal with that. And if I didn’t I could just, I don’t know, keep the windows open or something. I could paint a room. I could handle it.

Or not, actually. My first night in the new house I heard a mysterious clonk clonk clonk ca-donk sound and I shot up in bed, freaked out of my mind. What the fuck was that? Was it a burglar? Did burglars usually go clonk clonk clonk ca-donk? What the hell was my house trying to do to me?

I ventured downstairs, turning on every damn light in the house in case this thing was nocturnal, or whatever. Into the basement I crept—silently. In the shadows I moved like a shadow myself, pretending I was in a cool action movie.

I wasn’t, in case you haven’t guessed. No, I saw in the basement a pipe come clean of its joisting…shit. Anyway. It came apart from the other pipe, and there was a shitload of water spraying all over the damn place. Dammit, I though. If a burglar were to actually break in now, I’m fucked. Standing in the basement in a quarter-inch of water in my boxers with my hair trying to go eighteen different directions? Yeah. Fucked.

Well, what the fuck was I supposed to do? When I was skimming through The Idiot Or Otherwise Dumb Person’s Guide To Owning A Home, I didn’t read the part that described what to do when your basement started flooding! God! What did I look like, a goddamn handyman? So I raced upstairs and did the only thing I could do.

“Hello, Klein Plumbing’s 24-hour emergency line.”

“My basement’s flooding! Help! Help!”

“Who is this?”

“Mike Comrie I live at 28 Westphalia Street I think. I just moved in. Something broke! There’s water! In my basement! What do I do? Help!”

“Okay, sir, calm down. I think we can get a truck to your house in about twenty minutes. Do you have a cordless phone?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“All right. I want you to go find your main valve shutoff and shut off your water.” What? This bastard! What is this mysterious main valve shutoff of which he spoke?

However. I didn’t want him to think I was stupid.

“Okay, I’m doing that right now.” I ventured into the basement again and looked at my circuit board. Nothing there but a bunch of switches. Back over to the gushing pipe I went, although it seemed to have slowed a bit. God only knew what that meant. I was probably draining the oceans of the world directly into my basement. I saw a little flip thingy, though, and I flipped it.

Nothing happened.

“Dammit! Dammit!” I hissed.

“Sir?” asked the bastard at Klein Plumbing.

“What?”

“Are you okay? Did you shut off the valve?”

“Uh, yeah. I just banged my foot,” I lied. “I’m okay.” Motherfucker.

“Then you can start mopping up, I guess. It’ll be a few minutes, and this will probably run you about $750, if it is what I think it is.”

Seven hundred and fifty fucking dollars? For a PIPE? What is it, a fucking gold-plated pipe? Motherfucker! I was pissed, let me tell you.

But I started mopping. I raced the pipe for a while. I made up songs about mopping and sang them. I made up songs about bursting pipes and sang them. I thought about calling Paul and singing some of my songs to him, but decided not to ‘cause it was like, two in the morning.

Eventually the plumber came and fixed it, all the while regarding me with a stare that said pretty much “You idiot, how can you be living on your own and not know how to fix a pipe?” and told me that he and I would never be friends.

But that was how the Bad House started.

It must have been about a month later, I think. I’d just gotten back from a road trip—sixteen days. A big one. I was tired and hungry and ready for a shower. So I made myself a bacon-mayonnaise-lettuce-tomato-cheese-mustard-pickle-horseradish-relish sandwich and wandered upstairs to my lovely new bathroom, recently painted a nice shade of green. (That was a fiasco in itself, by the way.) I turned on the light and opened the shower door…

…where I beheld a MASSIVELY DISGUSTING UGLY BROWN SPOT IN MY SHOWER.

I flipped out. What the fuck? Where had it come from? What was it doing? Was it alive? Was it poisonous? Was it a burglar that had come in and crapped in my shower? What? What?

So I did the only thing I probably could have done at that point. I ran—no, really, I ran like the entire Canadian Military Corps was chasing me in full regalia, with tanks and shit and everything—-to the phone, where I sat thinking for a moment.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Ales, how soon can you be over to my house?”

“Mike? What? What do you want?”

“You need to help me fix my shower. Please?” I asked. After watching him fix the locker room shower one day with like, a little metal thing, I knew he could probably help me out. And the difference between massive stains and handles that don’t work wasn’t that big. Right?

“What? Fine, I guess. Like, about twenty minutes.”

“Thanks.”

“Not a problem.” He hung up and I went back into my bathroom to behold the ugly brown spot that was preventing me from taking a long, hot, steamy shower with lavish amounts of soap and towels.

I continued eating my sandwich while pondering the shower.

A while later the doorbell rang and I raced downstairs to answer it. And, exactly as planned, Ales Hemsky was standing there, looking sweetly bewildered and holding a toolbox.

“Comrie?”

“Let me show you to my shower.” I turned for a second and thought about how much that sentence sounded like something out of an unbelievably shitty porno movie.

He looked at my shower and its accessorizing Big Brown Spot Of Nastiness, then looked back at me, then looked back at the shower, then looked back at me.

“That’s a mildew spot.”

Ew. EW! Mildew! In my shower! Ew!

“How do I fix it?”

He shrugged.

“Help me!”

“The only thing I can think of is to mix up a bleach solution, let it sit, and then wipe it down with a rag.”

“Okay, okay. I can manage that. But don’t leave just yet!”

He didn’t leave just then. He stuck around, watched me clean up the mildew, watched me execute a little victory dance, watched me finish my sandwich (and declined the offer for a sandwich of his own), and finally I let him leave.

And then I took a long, hot, lavish shower with a great deal of soap and water and many towels, stuffed myself into clean sheets, and fell asleep.

The next day at practice, after a particularly clumsy sliding fall directly into Ales, I took the opportunity to thank him for his help.

“Um, thanks for helping me out last night, man.”

He looked quizzical.

“It…really wasn’t a problem.”

“No, thank you! And, uh, can I take you out to dinner to thank you for it?” I stuttered. Violently.

“That’s really okay, but—”

“Please? Please? Please please please?”

“I was going to say yes that time, actually. Where?”

Oh.

“Oh. Um, Italian? That place? That one place? Vito’s House?”

“That sounds like a Mafia stronghold.”

“I heard it was kind of good,” I defended myself. He laughed to himself. Good Lord, he was almost cute.

“Okay, seven tonight?” he asked. I didn’t mean ‘almost cute’, I meant ‘incredibly fucking adorable that I almost want to jump his bones.’

“That’s fine.” I blushed. I BLUSHED. Now I felt like a moron in addition to wanting to jump his bones.

We went out to dinner and everything (and I had a very nice shrimp…thing, with some pasta and red sauce and I found it very tomato-y) and then, when I took him home, he kissed me goodnight.

This is an approximation of my thoughts: “Oh, hey…he’s going to kiss me, isn’t he? He is! He wouldn’t be leaning in that close…oh my God oh my God oh my God he is the BEST kisser in the world, oh my God oh my God, auugghhh…oh my God oh my God oh my God that ought to be illegal it’s so good, it is SO good, it is so so so so so good they could use it as an incentive in world peace, oh my God, or maybe not because oh my God oh my God I want him all to myself for the rest of eternity so people like Tony Blair and George Bush won’t waste their time on his lips, oh my God now with that mental image I am blinded I am blinded, but okay, now I’m better because dear sweet Lord he kisses SO FUCKING WELL, oh my God oh my God oh my God.”

I was pretty much in shock. But he really did kiss quite well. And he still does. And he also does other things quite well. And evidently kissing is not only meant for the lips. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an amazingly hot good kisser waiting for me in the next room.