CHAPTER 1.
My lower back thanked me as I lowered myself slowly into the tub of steamy water. I had just had my sorry aching ass handed to me by my kids via the Ninentendo Wii. I tried to show them up with my moves of skill and finesse, my socks became tangled in my feet and I slipped on the family room rug. I fell hard on my tail bone. The kids laughed of course at my clumsiness, what kid wouldn't laugh?
Once, I prided myself a video game enthusiast and expert. I was pretty damn good at the original Mortal Kombat and Mario Brothers 3. My college roommate and I spent many hours sharpening our skills. We would face off as twin Liu Kangs, me red and him blue and we would block flying kicks with impeccably timed powerful upper-cut punches to Our bicycle kicks were bad assed and we were pleased by 'Toasty” over and over. Super Mario 3 and an obscure game called Star Tropics were the epitome of cleverness that 64 bits could bring to us, while licking Big Mac special sauce from the webs of our fingers and shoving monstrous handfuls of piping hot French fries down our gullets between boards. Who had time for napkins? The pant legs of our jeans or sleeves of three quarter rock-concert tee-shirts sufficed.
Even though I make a comfortable living designing video games the play of the Wii is beyond my 1980's physicality. As kids, we had well defined differences to our entertainment, baseball, football, basketball and dueling with home made martial arts weapons were things we did outside. Pac Man, Spy Hunter, Tempest or Joust, were indoor activities. Simple enough, things were easily divided and categorized back then. And now, now, I just don't get it.
My body relaxed from the water's caress. The tightness in my lower back slowly unknotted. I knew I would have a bruise, but I was fairly sure I didn't do any permanent damage. Ha, ha, Permanent Damage, oddly enough is the name of the game we were playing when I fell. My kids found it hilarious. What they thought more amusing than my actual injury was the fact that I'm the main designer for the game and I had bragged to them that I knew all the cheat codes and that there was no way in heck they could beat me. And of course they soundly trounced me at my own damn game. My injury allowed me to save face with my children. Irony no longer surprises me; at my age irony and coincidence holds no sophomoric fascination.
I closed my eyes and dabbed at the water with my fingers as if they were individual water bugs skimming the surface and bent my knees so I could scrunch down in the tub to submerge a good amount of my considerable belly. Glancing down at my navel I observed it looked like a swimming hole for louse. Yuck! I stretched my left leg and flipped a wash cloth off the faucet with my foot. It landed on my chest. I wet it and mopped my face and then slicked my hair back. The heat opened my sinuses and momentarily I was no longer a mouth breather. I closed my eyes again, salty sweat seeped through my lids and my eyes began to burn.
Looking up through tears I saw the black spot on the ceiling for the first time. About the size of a dime, it was almost dab center on the otherwise pristine white ceiling. The spot should not have been there because my wife and I the year before had spent and outrageous sum to have the bathroom renovated. If I had been a bath kind of guy, which I'm not, I’d have to look at the spot constantly and it would have annoyed me enough to investigate the origin. But to me a bath defeats the purpose of cleanliness unless followed with a hot shower. Otherwise, it is like sitting in a soup of my own filth. I find this to be a highly unappetizing hygiene habit that reminds me off the old saying, 'Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.' On a lark I once investigated the nasty history behind the euphemism. To my shock and dismay I found that during what my thirteen year old daughter called the 'olden days', the pecking order of a family’s bathing regime went from the oldest to the youngest; using the same water. I imagined how black the water must have been when it was finally the infant's turn to be washed. Children unrecognizable from detritus and filth were actually discarded with the dirty bath water. According to my research, it happened all the time. (Whatever.)
Regardless of the sauna like temperature of the bathroom I shivered, repulsed with the thought of actually bathing in such nasty water. I glanced one more time at the black spot and used my toes to flip up the lever that opened the tub drain. The water rapidly spun down into the inner reaches of the plumbing and gurgled as if having the last word or laugh at my ocd like apprehension of being in dirty water. Glancing up again at the spot I shivered harder. I carefully stood, steadying myself with the wall and prepped myself for a shower. By the time I had soaped and rinsed, I had forgotten about the black spot.
CHAPTER 2.
The days progressed into weeks and weeks into months as time marched on. I was walking by the bathroom and I heard a steady dripping. Thinking that someone had left a faucet on, as members of families sometimes do; I turned on the bathroom light and searched the sink and tub for signs of escaping water. Both faucets were dry and the handle valves were locked in place. I heard the dripping again and yanked back the shower curtain hard enough to pull the spring loaded shower curtain rod off the wall. The rounded metal end hit me in the face and my nose squashed and blossomed red like a tomato under the heel of a clumsy cow.
"Goddamn it!" My voice boomed and was amplified by the walls. This tiny bathroom had great acoustics. Sometimes, when the mood struck me and I knew I was going to spend an extended period of time doing my business, I played my guitar in the bathroom. I kept it safely encased in a leather sheath behind the bathroom door. I am nobody's musician, but I found that strumming a few Beatle and Beach Boy tunes relaxes me. The riffs to the Doobie Brother's China Grove, Deep Purple's Smoke on the Water and of course Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven never failed to please me.
Blood dripped down my face. I spied my guitar, it would have provided great comfort but not while I remained a bloody mess. The image of me playing the riffs to Tom Petty's Free-Falling while my rain my plasma was absorbed through the guitar strings, like a thirsty Venus flytrap sucking moisture and snapping at rotten hamburger sashayed through my head. I shrugged the thought off to my blood loss and an adrenaline rush. I tried to let the scarlet droplets drip into the sink, all the while I continued to hold the shower curtain pole, my pain induced clumsiness and I kept knocking things, mostly my wife's and teenage daughter's beauty crap off of shelves. Helpless, I continued blundering around the room knocking and breaking shit. The idea of letting go of the pole never dawned on me. I spurted little blotches of crimson all over the bathroom walls, floors, sink, tub, toilet and even the ceiling like a Goth Hansel and Gretel into blood sports, leaving behind a trail of AB negative to find their way home from a vampire club.
"Sally," I yelled for my wife; "Sally!"
"What's wrong Jayce?" My wife inquired, her voice directly in my ear and her hand on my shoulder startled me so much that I bellowed like an injured bull and spun around quickly with the shower curtain rod arced towards my her face. She nimbly ducked and weaved like a prize fighter with more luck than skill. The rod whipped by her, bare inches from impacting and probably fracturing her skull. "Jayce," She questioned as the shower curtain rod smashed into the medicine cabinet mirror, pieces of glass broke apart and sprayed like sharpened snowflake throwing stars. I felt a fragment enter my cheek. By scrunching my eyes all the way to the left I could see how it flayed my flesh to the bone with a surgeon’s precision. My bellows turned into the screams of an animal in death throes at the abattoir. My grip tightened on the rod and I made to make another violent move. "Jason Samuel Patrick Donovan O'Malley, drop that goddamn thing now!"
I dropped that goddamn thing. Sally is a tiny woman. In our own little private lexicon of pet names for each other, Pixie is one of endearment. I rarely use her christened name Sally, only in times of duress. And she either calls me Jacye or J. So when she addressed me with all four of my despised names the way my mother would address me to sit up and take notice, it brought me to my senses like a sterilized needle lancing the boil of my fear and anger.
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