Wino and the Mystery of the Bathtub

I enter the house, and as always, I am reminded of a cave. Wino likes to spend his days in the dark, and the curtains in the living room are cinched shut with old-woman care. His room upstairs has thick beach towels thumb-tacked around the windowpanes to prevent the passage of any sunbeams, but ironically, he usually conducts his business in there with the desk lamp switched on.

“I just like it that way,” he shrugs.

I see him in the gloom, flopped on the couch, and I hear the familiar blare of the Simpsons of the tv set. I used to think of it as a point of pride that I can pinpoint any episode if I hear a single line from the show; right now, Wino is watching the episode where Homer joins the Stonecutter’s fraternity.

“…and now, the final ordeal. The paddling of the swollen ass...”

I drop into a nearby chair, and exhale mightily. Another weekend, vanquished.

“Where were you?” Wino asks.

“I went away for the weekend.”

“Oh,” he says. He has his finger on the remote, tapping the red rubber buttons in Executive Order contemplation. Missiles loose. Say again, the missiles are in the air.

“So. Ah. What happened in the bathroom?” Wino says. He turns to look at me, and I’m struck with the impression he’s been thinking of a careful way to say something, possibly for a while, but then decided to just come out with it, and damn the torpedoes.

“The bathroom? What are you talking about?” I say.

“The bathroom. I wanted to have a shower on Friday,” he grouses. “But there is something wrong with the bathtub. It’s horrible.”


"What the fuck?!"

I struggle to remember something wrong with the bathtub. Friday morning was a couple of days ago. A leak?

“There’s a mess in it,” Wino prods.

And then I remember. Before I packed my bag for the weekend, I noticed that a cookie I’d left in the bottom of it had disintegrated, spilling crumbs all over the inside. Lacking anything better to do with it, I had simply brushed out the crumbs into the bathtub.



“I guess I forgot to rinse it out,” I say. “Why, what’s the big deal?”

“Go look at it,” Wino says. “Tell me what it looks like.”

Natural bathroom condensation had collected with the crumbs in the bottom of the tub, and I had to admit, it wasn’t pretty. I imagined Wino, sitting here in the dark all weekend, indignantly pondering the sudden appearance of this unknown munge in the bathtub.



“I thought for some reason you got drunk again the night before, and had an accident in the tub,” Wino says.

“Why the hell would I do that, with the toilet right beside it?”

“How the fuck should I know? Like I said, I thought you were drunk. Who knows what you were thinking.”

“Why didn’t you just clean it out so you could have your shower?” I say.

“I didn’t want to touch it! And besides, I thought it might be something else, not puke,” he says, gesturing at a few specific clots sticking to the side of the tub.



“Oh! Those are just chocolate chips. Chips Ahoy,” I specify.

“All right then,” Wino huffs, and heads off in search of his towel, glowing a happy blue in his window.