Ever wonder about those dilapidated sinks in the 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, 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 a 4th floor walkup bed and breakfast 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.
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
all female. 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._
