The Sink

Ever wonder why those sinks are delapidated in cheap hotels?


THE SINK

Being raised in a strict military family has restricted

and limited my powers of observation. I'm convinced of that.

As strictly as we were all raised-the top half of the

family anyway-we were for all of our childhood and much early

adulthood ingrained not to think, not to question, but to

blindly obey. Needless to say, as adulthood approached, I

sought an escape from that confining framework, and began to

progress toward a goal a mite more far reaching than retiring

as a Corporal.

Still, early training becomes part of the foundation,

and is hard to reconstruct past adolescence. Rules were meant

to be unquestionably followed, or so we were drilled. In

retrospect I suppose I just had too many questions to

continue blind in life's journey much past seventeen.

Slowly at first, and then as I gained more confidence

more blatantly I began abrogating some of my father's rules:

"The Right Tool for the Right Job"; "There is Only One Right

Way"; "Don't Touch! You'll Break it." And of course that

shining gem: " That's what you get for thinking." The result

of this brain washing was a slow and methodic approach to

something so simple as running for a hammer when I knew full

well that a tap with my on-hand pair of pliers would have

done the job adequately. Twenty years of the " don't think

rhetoric began proving a burden when I approached the

responsibilities of adulthood. Analyzing and solving problems

became a real chore for me. Nothing seemed to go right and

the expectation of my efforts never seemed to yield the

desired results.

I'm certain my father's training helped me, and at times

certainly kept me alive. Always an avid student; I learned,

to a degree, better to obey the direction of my instructors

and ask questions later. This especially came in handy

learning to sky-dive, and learning to fly crop dusters. Oh

Yes! No denying that, up to a point, good corporaling has its

merits. But there came a time when I decided that is was

necessary to cast off the panoply of platitude and learn how

to think.

I was quite along in life before I found something

really worthy of my first effort. I wasn't used to thinking a

lot and the first chore was to think of something to think

about. I moved around a lot, saw a lot, talked a lot, ate a

lot, read a lot, but didn't think a lot. It affected my every

waking moment, my relationships with people, my working

relationships on the job. Indeed the celebration of life

itself seemed to be a continuous corridor of wrong doors. In

all of my travels to all of the foreign countries, living in

hotels from Edinburgh to Seattle, I always observed, but

never questioned why, without exception, the sink in those

coldwater rooms were torn away from the

wall. If you have ever stayed in a cheap hotel I'm sure

you've noticed.

Admittedly, for years I never gave it a second thought.

It never entered my mind. How unobservant.

"Because that is the way it is."

"To make little boys ask silly questions...

"You'll understand when you get older."

" Don't ask why; just do it"!

I never had cause to place enough pressure on a sink in

order to cause it to pull away from a wall; still, after

years of hotel rooms with platoons of fallen sinks, barely

supported by the plumbing, I began to wonder. Certainly I

never had cause to place enough pressure on a sink to cause

it to fall away from a wall--unless I stood on it. Was

everyone standing on the sink? I searched the wall above the

sink for a moment, my attention momentarily diverted from the

silhouettes of the buildings out of the window. I was in

London, on the 4th floor of a coldwater bed and breakfast, just
off of Carnaby Street; I began to regress,
dividing my attention between the dark skyline and the yellow

swirling down the drain.

The bathroom was always down the hall in these places.

"Sod that," as the British are fond of saying.

Don't piss into the Sink!"

No. He never said that, but I'll always wonder if he did

He taught me to pee down drain of the tub while showering,

but it was always somehow forbidden nay, never even brought

to mind when I was a child to do it in the sink. I haven't

the courage to ask him so I don't suppose I will ever know.

"Hey Dad. Did you ever piss into the sink?" That just isn't

something that you ask your father. Not my father anyway. It

certainly came in handy during these cold nights in the

company of a four pint bladder. "Hope the toilet works.

Hope I can find it. Hope the light works; if it doesn't,

hope I get lucky and hit it. I can't remember when I first

did it. It was probably just one of those things that simply

happened. The pressures of a bladder full of beer and a long

line in some bar.

My first recollection is when I opened a window and

whizzed out into the street, but one day, come to think of it

was in February, that I decided it was too cold to continue

that practice; besides, someone saw me and instead of just

walking by, stopped to watch.

The first time I did it I thought: "Never mind Pop. If

Mom saw me she would keel over with heart failure."

" What am I doing"? I asked myself as relief became

guilts welcome partner. Mental images of my parents'

assiduous efforts in child-rearing on my behalf swirling

counterclockwise on the worn porcelain.

" I'm peeing into the sink."

Even through four drunken, ribald years of wild youth in

the Navy I had never done something like this. Oh. I did it.

We all did it. But only because the head in those

Philippine bars were always crowded and we were all having

too much fun to stand in line waiting our turn, and I was too

drunk to remember social protocol. That was different; it

wasn't a conscious act of rebellion; even when we did it out

of the barracks window it wasn't "on purpose", as it were

but simply testimony to the distance down a cold and drafty

corridor to the john, and again, we were usually drunk. Of

course I can imagine the consequences if the Navy had caught

me urinating out of the barracks window.

The thought of trooping down that cold clammy hallway

toward the head brought me back into reality and assuaged my

conscience.

That was it of course--the thought of the lonely journey

of uncertainty down the hall way in the middle of the night.

It wasn't an act of rebellion at all; and it began in the

Navy, cranking it out of the barracks window. Or into the sink. In a word

convenience.




Hold that thought and come with me now into 25 years of future. To London Town.

There was dew on the railing of the fireescape staircase across the

alley from my window. Dawn was breaking; my favorite time of

the day in London--even though it usually was the coldest

part. My digs for the night are in Bethnal Green.and the water
closet was at the end of a dark and drafty hallway.
The answer to my perplexing query came to me then; while

standing there enjoying the skyline of London chimneys and

rooftops silhouetted against the dawn. I wondered how many

other men--business men, wearing their Fleet Street blue

suits and derby hats along with their aloof airs--fail to

muster the courage to negotiate that cold hall way. They

would deny it of course. (and what the devil are they doing in a fourth floor coldwater walkup? OK. Research.)

They aren't the cause of the sink coming away from the

wall though. Like so many other sinks in cheap hotels, this one

was coming away from the wall. Certainly they aren't so arrogant as to stand up

on the damn thing, or maybe they are, pretending to do it on

the world; believable but hardly likely.

The guilty party, the cause of the sink--wall schism are

not standing on the sink but sitting on it. They are sitting on the sink and tearing it away

from the wall. Oh! They deny it vehemently. But it is so

terribly obvious if given some thought.

Who, more so even than men are considered the comfort

creatures. Who are the ones that would be just a wee (excuse

the pun) bit reluctant to negotiate a dark and unknown

hallway in an strange place. No. Men don't have a monopoly on

eschewing a cold hallway in the middle of the night,

especially with an ice cold, and sometimes seatless and

soiled toilet as their reward.

Oh! They deny it emphatically. But the evidence is

blatantly clear in the cheaper hotels from London to

Timbuktu. They will accuse me of being totally ignorant of

the female anatomy; challenging my masculinity, insulting my

parents and even trying to change the subject, but those

tottering sinks, barely standing, glare accusingly and wax

feminine.

The girls have been doing it for years. The cold

hallway to be trodden? Sitting undefended in a strange little

tiled room, on a really freezing potty in the middle of the

night? Come on ladies--fess up. It takes a man to admit she

did it. No sense denying it any longer.

It is just a little disconcerting that, given a choice,

you have little conscience about diddling into our shaving

bowl. But Hey! What are we here for anyway?

So the next time you're up shivering on a cold night with

a bladder full of beer, take a good look at the broken-down

sink and enjoy your new found freedom from parental

hypocracy...but send the kids down the hall; let them figure

it out for themselves._