Got distracted by some drains
On a recent evening, I woke up and couldn’t fall back to sleep. It was the sink in the bathroom. It had been draining very slowly, and earlier in the evening I had come to the realization that one often comes to about a week after noticing a drain has been draining very slowly: This isn’t going to fix itself.
Matt had suggested calling the super, but I was not interested in calling the super. I knew that I had the knowledge to fix the sink within my own mind, using the tools within our own home. The missing element was resolve: I’d been down this road before, and knew that I needed to be ready for it. And that night at 2 a.m., after a few hours of sleep and a short period of staring at the ceiling, I knew that I was.
The first drain I unclogged was several years ago, on Bergen Street in Brooklyn. The shower had been slow to drain for weeks and it reached a point where my roommate and I were not only standing in our own filth in the morning but each others’, too.
Calling one’s landlord is one way to fix a drain, but I didn’t do that. I didn’t trust the call not to result in a bill or a scolding or an eviction. This was not entirely rational, but neither was the notion that I could fix the drain myself. There was no evidence in my history that I could do such a thing or even that I would try to. At the time, I would have called myself “lazy,” and the only reason I don’t use the phrase in the present tense is because, after 35 years of my mother pleading with me not to use blanket statements to describe myself (“If you say it, you’ll believe it”) and another 10 of my therapist making the same point (“The evidence would suggest otherwise”), I know enough now to say instead, “Sometimes I prefer not to do things, as a matter of choice.”
But at the time I didn’t yet know that, I truly thought I was lazy to my core, so it really is a mystery to me what made me think I could fix the shower. It was a miracle, or at least a miraculous convergence of circumstances that are now lost to time. “You can do this,” said the circumstances.
And so, confident that I could figure it out, I set to work to learn how to unclog a drain. And despite watching many YouTube videos that claimed “here is the secret to unclogging a drain,” I learned that there is no secret. There is just persistence. You must take the whole thing apart, because the internal stopper might be wrapped in hair. You must unscrew the cover on the drainage hole and then stuff it with an old towel, so the efforts of your plunging go down the drain, not out the drainage hole. You must pour in baking soda and vinegar and boiling water and let it drain slowly and then pour more and let it drain slowly and then you must plunge the drain with a plunger, and you must plunge it harder and longer than you think you have to. You must pour and wait and plunge, and then you must do it again.
At some point in the drain proceedings you think, “this is never going to work.” You think, “I’m going to have to call my landlord anyway, this has been a massive waste of time and effort.” You think, “I should have never started this.” You think, “this is a nightmare.” But then at some point, it does work. It just takes time, and effort. Things get worse before they get better; black sludge bubbles up, your tub is filthy. But it eventually works. The drain clears.
At least it has, the three times I have done it. Two showers and a sink. My one skill. Or as my mom might say, one of my many skills.
Here’s how proud I was of clearing that first drain on Bergen Street: I told everyone I knew about my feat. It’s all in the email archive: “Guess what? I unclogged the shower.” And when my friend Julia joked that my incredibly detailed step-by-step account of how to unclog a drain reminded her of the moment-by-moment action in some works of fan fiction (this was not a compliment), I decided to write one. I will not share the fic here — the mere fact of its existence is funnier than anything actually in it. But I tell you about it to illustrate that the uncharacteristic unclogging of the drain opened the door to another unexpected first: I chose to write something for fun.
The fic did not make me a fiction writer; it remains my only contribution to the genre. And learning how to fix the drain did not make me someone who suddenly was handy around the house. I have not felt compelled to take on any other household projects in the years since.
But the fact that I did, once, is important. It is proof when I need it that I’m not lazy. Somewhere inside my brain is the drive and ability to figure out a new skill, to use my hands to complete a task. I try not to view it as an anomaly, but instead, as evidence of potential and resolve and ability.
I did unclog the sink last week, in the middle of the night. It only took 30 minutes, and I didn’t even have to plunge it. Although the noise did wake Matt up, and he did express some curiosity about what the fuck I might be doing at this hour. But the high of it was just like the first time (unclogging drains is not like other highs I’ve read about where you’re always chasing the first buzz — I’ve found it’s possible to achieve the first buzz, repeatedly). A victory! It felt so good!
Watercolor by Matt Davis