The Tawanda Moment

What possessed me to grab a pipe wrench at 9:30p.m., I’ll never know. Maybe the after-affects of a less than scintillating gathering of the book club. An hour’s discussion of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union had certainly made me drowsy (the story line and overall character development has the same effect. Proof, I suppose, that once you’ve garnered a Pulitzer you can get away with letting the writing not only slip but fall away completely). I left Jessica’s condo wanting nothing more than sleep, and was grateful to Basil that she only required a walk around half the block, a detour from her usual evening full block requirements. So maybe it was that. Had we been reading a James Patterson, or a T. Jefferson Parker (as we seem to be on a crime/mystery mission of late) I’d have been more awake, more inclined to make a better decision, one along the lines of, “Forget it. I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”

But no. Something had to remove my mind from disenfranchised Jewish street cops pondering random homicides on the allegedly mean streets of Alaska’s Juneau. So much wandering, and three hundred pages to go (clearly, August was going to be a long month in book club).

That something was the bathroom sink. Clogged, seemingly irretrievably, since that morning. Clogged perhaps irrevocably despite my best efforts with a drain snake, a plunger, and not one but two full size bottles of Liquid Plumbr, the remnants of the last of which foamed in the sink, unclogging nothing.

“You need to call a plumber,” Lainie advised. Or better yet, she offered, she’d have her boyfriend fix it.

The plumber was not an option, at least not until I’d exhausted my own resources (or myself). There’s something so…well, defeatist…about calling a plumber. Likewise having her boyfriend fix it. He’s very nice and I like him, but my plumbing is not his problem.

“I need,” I said, knowing she’d have one, knowing she might right then pull it from her back pocket and I wouldn’t be surprised, “to borrow your pipe wrench.”

In five minutes she was back with two of them, as well as a promise to call her boyfriend if my efforts were unsuccessful. Which of course only made me that much more determined not to mess this up. So at nine-thirty-five, I faced the problem head on. This was my self-created clog, so I would clear it. I knew what lie beneath that foamy sea in my sink. Lurking in the bend of that pipe I knew were hairs. Perhaps thousands of them. The cumulative result of three years and one month of standing over this sink, brushing my hair, rolling my hair, sometimes even washing my hair. Three years and one month without so much as a preventative snake or preemptive plunge to ward this off.

Yep, I’d done this one to myself.

I started bailing, coffee mug after coffee mug of Liquid Plumbr, tossing it (where else) down the shower drain, considering that a preventative measure of its own and not wanting any more ammonia-laden drain cleaner than necessary splashing into the bowl under the sink when I got the pipe removed.

Which was the next part of the process. Wrench in hand, I surveyed the underworkings of my sink. Two joints which, theoretically (and according to the Ask dot com information I’d printed on how to clear a sink trap) when loosened, would allow me to pull the pipe off, clear the clog, and go on with life, my sink no longer draining at a rate of ½” per half day when it drained at all.

Sounded so simple.

And probably is simple, for anyone else. I, however, never realized how heavy a pipe wrench really is. Going at it one-handed was my only option because every two minutes I needed the other to alternately pet and push away Basil, who for some reason found the smell of toxic drain cleaner as alluring as the aroma of sizzling bacon.

Or perhaps she was just being supportive. The project was not going well.

I won’t embarrass myself by admitting exactly how long I twisted the first joint on the pipe to absolutely no effect until remembering the old “righty tighty” adage and realizing I’d been turning the wrong direction. That correction made, in a mere twenty minutes I had it loosened, and the drain cleaner hit the pan.

Maybe I was onto something.

Feeling terrifically empowered at this point, I set to work on the final joint. Soon it became obvious that, ‘lefty loosey’ be damned, the thing was not turning. Nearly a half hour later, Basil having withdrawn her support and hopped into bed, I had to admit defeat.

And somehow, the idea of spending my time reading about unsolved cases on the Alaskan tundra was much, much more appealing than the project at hand.

So I thought about it. Calling a plumber. Letting Lainie’s man friend gallop in here and loosen the thing in five minutes. I decided I’d give it one more shot.

That shot wound up being nearly forty-five minutes long. Plumbing installed the same year I was born does not, apparently, go down without a fight. And once again, I felt like giving up, when it happened.

It turned. It loosened. Completely. I removed the bend of pipe, used the snake to extricate the indescribably disgusting mass of hair, hair spray, and two earrings which was roughly the size of a small animal from the pipe, and reassembled and re-installed the whole thing.

Talk about a Tawanda moment.

I completely understood that scene in Fried Green Tomatoes, knew exactly what Fannie Flagg had been thinking as she wrote her character knocking down a bedroom wall, wielding a sledgehammer for the first time and handling her own home improvements.

Honestly, it was a milestone. Like that first piece of published writing. I wanted to hang the pipe wrench on the refrigerator door as I’d done that first article, but number one it didn’t belong to me and number two I had no idea how to adhere it.

I went to bed and slept like a rock, even with Basil’s semi-constant space-shifting and intermittent snoring. I fell asleep thinking about all the possibilities this simple accomplishment opened up.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself here, but I’m seriously thinking cordless drill, and re-installing my own curtain rods.