Waiting for Gouda

I had noticed that over the last couple of weeks a tiny little trickle of water would appear around the edge of the toilet. It was really just a tiny little bit. One of those things that, if you actually owned the house, you might be compelled to investigate further, to fix as soon as possible, to protect your investment. As a renter, however, a tiny little trickle of water is not something to concern yourself over. A tiny trickle of water is something that you can hope remains small, a little non-nuisance that the next occupants of the premises might want to worry about. But not you. It’s practically the definition of an SEP. (At least one of you knows what that means , and that’s good enough for me.)

My Lovely Wife™, however, indicated that the leak had apparently gotten a bit worse. She indicated this by saying, “It’s gotten worse.” Being the manly, handy, do-it-yourself, type of guy that I am… hahahahaha ha hah hah aaaa ahaha ahaaaah hahah….. whoo…. Hang on a second. Hee heee, haaa haa haaa, haaa ha ah aha hahaaa….. ahhh…. wheeze… gasp…. Ahhhhh ahahahahahahahahah….. woo boy…

Anyway, when I got home, I realized that I needed to inspect the matter for myself. I also really had to pee.

I decided to multi-task.

Yes, the leak had gotten significantly worse. Now, despite the cold logic of the whole thing staring in your face, you want to believe that what is slowly seeping across the bathroom floor is nothing but water – pure and clean. Even having a pretty good idea of how the whole toilet thing works, you don’t want to admit what is really happening here. That you’re basically peeing all over your own floor with an intermediate dilutive step.

In a one-toilet household, when faced with such a situation, you realize that you only have a couple of choices until the problem is solved.

One - Go outside.

Now, if you live out in the country somewhere, you can go out behind your house and answer the call of nature without too much fuss. I suppose this is probably a much simpler process if you are a guy, but either way, you’re out in your own backyard, nobody around. No worries.

If you’re in some suburban housing development, you could probably still get away with it, if your fences are high enough. Just stick to the shadows or maybe duck behind the hydrangea bush, and you’ll be fine.

Here in Chicago, they’ll arrest you.

Two - Call upon the neighbors.

While I’ve never taken any sort of Urban Safety class or anything like that, I should think that one of the first things they teach you is to be wary of some stranger coming to your door needing to use your bathroom. Without any hard facts, I would guess that the odds of such a person tying you up and rummaging through your underwear drawer to be about 2 to 1.

Again, if you own a house out in the suburbs, you might actually know who your neighbors are and this might not be so much of an issue. But, hey, we’re renters! We’ve got no real incentive to go out meeting the neighbors do we? I suppose you could argue that anticipation of a situation precisely like the one we found ourselves in might suffice. Fine. I guess we had a chance to go out and canvass the neighborhood when we first arrived here but we…uh… pissed it away. What can we do about it now?

“Hi. Uh… you don’t know me, but I’ve lived next door for about three years now. Yes, yes… It’s very nice to meet you. I just wanted to let you know that I might be coming by later to take a crap, and I didn’t want you to be afraid.”

That’s another thing to consider: Suppose, through no real fault of your own, you totally foul up thy neighbor’s bathroom? I mean, what if you have to lay a real eye-waterer in there? How many cups of sugar do you think are coming your way after that?

Three - Find other places within your own house that you can, well… take care of business.

I think you know what I’m talking about. Certain other options do seem to present themselves. The bathroom sink, for example, does not leak. Just something to keep in mind.

The only trouble with resorting to option number three is that you need to hope you have a short memory. After all, at the end of the day, you’re gonna be hunched over that sink, brushing your teeth, and there are some things you don’t want be thinking about at that point in your oral hygiene regimen.

To give another example, I have a friend who used to throw some rather hectic parties at her house. I mean, these were shoulder-to-shoulder, hot and bothered, keg at each end, barely hear the music over all the chatter, boy the cops could show up at any minute, house parties. Big parties. Big lines for the bathroom. And while I feel I should categorically state that I in no way participated in such a line-up, as I have a very shy bladder, legend has it that some of the less inhibited gentlemen guests, rather than suffer in a long line, impromptuly (is this a word?) transformed the bathtub into one of those communal urinal troughs you might encounter in the ballpark men’s room (which I also steadfastly refuse to use).

Yes, this is rather disgusting. But the real trouble comes in when I remember another party, on New Year’s Eve, in which that same tub was filled with ice and bottles of champagne from which the revelers partook.

More precisely, the trouble is, I cannot recall which party came first.

Four - Just hold it.

As you can imagine, none of the options seemed particularly appealing to us. And so, I did what one should always do when confronted with any sort of dilemma. I consulted the internet.

Using the trusty home computer, I put the words “toilet” and “leaky” and “oh sweet jesus help me I really have to go” into my favorite search engine and waited for the results. And waited. (How anyone can actually still tolerate the old 56K modems is beyond me at this point. Thank God I have the company’s broadband connection to exploit all the live long day.) After wading through a few pages of really unusual porn, I ended up here.

Ah, yes! Here is a source I can trust. I’ve seen these guys on TV, turning a broken-down, rusty tool shed into a beautiful two-family townhouse in just 27 minutes a week! So long as that useless tool, Steve “Hey, Can I Hold Your Hammer?” Thomas, had no input whatsoever in the article’s content, I knew I could count on the TOH crew. What they suggested I do, and with such thoughtful illustrations, seemed easy enough.

And yet, I was hesitant. I knew that this particular old house had proven quite the adversary in the past when it came to tasks which should have been simple. In particular, I thought back a couple weeks to when I attempted to replace the crummy light fixture in the kitchen with one that actually worked when the light switch was toggled. I remembered how the circuit breaker boxes in the basement were simply labeled #1 (for the second floor) and #2 (for the first floor). How we found in the fixture itself, rather than the usual one white wire and one black wire, an impossible tangle of six white wires all tied together. How I cursed so prolificly in front of my Lovely Wife™’s parents.

What if we removed the toilet from the floor and some foul geyser started shooting out? What if the bolts holding it in place snapped off? What if the floor, weakened from days and weeks of barely perceptible leaking, collapsed beneath us? In short, I feared some sort of rancid I Love Lucy catastrophe. It would be just our luck. I began to do the calculations in my head. It was Saturday morning, so the soonest an actual plumber could be expected to arrive was 48 to 72 hours, multiplied by the two bran muffins I had had for breakfast…We decided to go for it. Off to the Home Despot. One wax toilet ring. $2.35.

It basically went off without a hitch. Except for one thing that they don’t really mention on the website.

It is really, really disgusting under there. If you’ve never seen what it looks like when you move a toilet away from where a toilet is supposed to be, well… It’s really basically just a hole in the floor. Just a dirty, nasty, dark slimy goo covered, open-ended tube. As I’m inspecting the flange as instructed, I had myself all crouched down, peering at this hole, fiddling with the bolts, and it occurred to me that the utterly obnoxious crud that was wedging itself under each and every one of my fingernails could really only be composed of one or two main ingredients. Then I thought that maybe I really should have worn gloves of some sort, but it was too late. I wondered if we had any of that special anti-bacterial soap in the house, or just the regular old bacteria-friendly soap.

But then, after everything was cleaned up, every time nature called for the rest of the week, every time I reached for that little silvery handle that I had taken for granted all along, I got a warm feeling inside. I derived such pleasure from not seeing something unquestionably unappealing seeping slowly across the clean white tile. I had stood up to the challenge that the vagarious home improvement goblins had lain before me. I had conquered my own plumbing-related doubts and now stood victorious over my porcelain adversary. I was lord and master of my household! There was nothing I couldn’t do! I could replace the piss-poor showerhead! I could refinish the hardwood floors! I could wallpaper the guest room!

Nah.

We’re just renters.