Life Beneath The Shit Pipe

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. When life hands you a broken shit pipe buried in a wall behind your kitchen cabinets and says, “Your turn, son,” you take a deep breath, bite your bloodied lip and grab that foul smelling dilemma by the horns, which almost certainly means getting some of that dookie on your hands. There is no shame in any of this, of course. It is life. Everybody, and I mean everybody takes their turns standing beneath life’s effluvium transport conduits. We common folk know them as shit pipes.

Welcome to this storyteller’s most recent turn beneath his.

The temptation here, of course would be to take a shortcut, to simply whine and post some little ‘woe is me,’ victim diary. Many of you, generous readers that you are, might actually read such a piece, affording me the benefit of your doubts as you did so, but honestly, if I myself have become weary of the growing feast of self-conscious little diaries displacing actual story craft here on the Substacks, I wonder if some of you might be growing weary of them too.

Perhaps at least the bones of a story then, instead.

This one has no heroic outcomes …at least not yet, and if there is a villain to this tale it is the moron who ‘Frankensteined’ a dozen little scrap pieces of CPVC pipe together with a pot of glue a few decades back to transport pressurized hot water to the kitchen’s dishwashing machine, then buried it all in the floor and walls so that no one could possibly see it. This was always going to end badly, of course, but only for whomever came next, that unknowing schlub (in this case, yours truly), who bought the house they’d hidden this and several other of these sorts of dangerous time bombs within as well. What an unkindness to an innocent old house.

Eventually the pipe cracked at one of those laughably glued together CPVC joints, which created just enough of a water problem that the house’s occupants (let’s call them Mary and Dave ), began to notice a musty smell in the basement, which sent one of the pair (that would be me again), sleuthing about until he found a patch of mold growing up from the base of the back wall in his seldom visited in summer office, directly below the kitchen.

This fascinating discovery quickly focused our hapless homeowner’s attentions to a laser sharp point, convincing him to remove the kickplate and some of the wooden moulding around the dishwasher so that he might peer back into the dark spaces beyond.

A flashlight, a soaking wet floor, a mist of spraying water and a failed shutoff valve at the end of that freaking, Frankensteined pipe. It would not shut off. A panicked run to the other end of the basement to close the water shutoff for the entire house, followed immediately by a frantic call to the homeowner’s insurance company, then a water damage company and, woe is me, a sheisty, slick-haired, Russian plumber whom we’ll call Boris, for personal safety reasons, who promised to arrive within the half hour.

Two days later, with that failed water pipe cut out and replaced, though still not nearly to code, a third of the sheetrock in my office torn out and hauled away, and an army of ten fans, dehumidifiers and HEPA filters running around the clock, there was still water weeping down the sewer stack from somewhere unseen above, still dampening the basement wall below.

As you’ve probably already guessed, this is not good.

Slowly it becomes clear to the homeowner and the water damage guys that this steady, weeping flow can no longer be explained away by waterlogged walls and floorboards slowly releasing all that sprayed water they had been absorbing for an indeterminate period of time. Obviously, something more sinister was going on.

The homeowner (guess who), signs more legal paperwork authorizing those water and mold abatement dudes to dig deeper, to get to work removing cabinets from the kitchen’s south wall, then watches them open up the enclosed space behind them. And there, finally, rusted and glistening in faint, heavenly light stands the weeping culprit we’d all been looking for, a cast iron sewer stack with an immense, three foot long crack down its side, defying both solitude and sanity in our gobsmacked homeowner, taunting the combined, knowledge library of the ‘we’ve seen it all’ abatement crew and basking in all its newly uncovered glory.

Now ain’t that a bitch.

So the incredulous homeowner, eager to get his life back and wildly reluctant to have any further dealings with Boris in this one precious life (god bless you Mary Oliver), calls a different plumber to come and replace this immense, weeping ‘crack pipe’ in his wall, in addition to cleaning up all of the shoddy, substandard work Boris had charged him extra for. Bye, bye Boris. May karma find you and have its way with you soon. And thank you, truly, Sir Bryson The Adept. Respect!

So, now that there is no further leaking or weeping within the walls of this hundred and twenty year old house, and the army of humming fans and dehumidifiers has been winnowed down from ten to just four, your humble, homeowner storyteller thought maybe he could reframe his most recent adventures by creating a humble portrait, the man and his teacher; a guy doing his best to stand in the world with integrity, to do right by his house and the cracked sewer pipe that tested his resolve when it finally rusted through.

When life gives us lemons, we may make lemonade if we choose. When life hands us a broken pipe buried in a wall behind our kitchen cabinets and says, “Your turn,” we may take a deep breath, bite our bloodied lip and grab that foul smelling dilemma by the horns. Almost certainly we will get some shit on our hands but there is no shame in any of that. There is soap and there is water. This is life.

Everybody, and I mean everybody takes their turns standing beneath life’s shit pipe.

Imagine learning to honor them.