The Birthday Tub

And AstroTurf. You read that right.

Once upon a time, my wife and I bought a house. It was our first house, and it was a little further from work and college than we wanted. It was expensive. It needed work. But those are the compromises you make when you’re buying your first home together.

It was an old house, originally built in 1915, the sort of thing with character, that you would describe with language that implied personality and a dimensionality often lacking in newer homes. It had 10 foot ceilings in the downstairs, a basement built for Oompa Loompas (I fit perfectly), and the electrical wiring could (and might) be the subject of more stories than any other single topic I write about.

When we first moved in, we didn’t have enough furniture to fit the space. The walls were painted nineteen different shades of dark pink (all of them still waiting in the basement for another coat), there wasn’t enough light in any single room, and drafts of cold air came from everywhere at once. Nonetheless, as a new homeowner one of the things I had looked forward to most of all was to take a long, hot soak in the bathtub. Having just left yet another disaster of an apartment, I was intent on giving myself that one reprieve from all the hard work of packing, cleaning, moving, and unpacking.

Let’s visit the bathroom together. Allow me to set the tone.

Have you been to a wedding in the 1980’s? Preferably one in the Midwest? They all came standard with a crystal bowl full of these little bridal mints in pink, white, and green.

My dad was the minister who married lots of couples when I was a kid, so I endured far more weddings than the average child. Those little mint monstrosities tasted awful, but they were a predictable source of sugar for a kid left to tend to their own entertainment.

The bathroom in our house matched the mints perfectly. The walls were painted white, but not a nice calming white, not the white you see in a spa. This specific white was cold and reminiscent of hallways in a hospital. It was stark and cold. The trim along the floor and around the door was real wood trim, but it was painted seafoam green.

But the tub, Robin. This whole story was supposed to be about a tub.

Alas, the tub cannot be described without its matching counterparts, the toilet and the sink. All three were a lovely shade of pastel pink. Bubble gum? No. Pansy? Not quite. Pepto Bismol? Yes, that’s the one. Pepto pink all around. The tub itself was cast iron with an apron front. These were very common back in the day, sturdy, reliable, the kind of thing that lasts forever. Forever pink. The toilet – brace yourself – wasn’t just pink. It was also wall mounted. Four enormous bolts held it against that sickly pale white wall, the nuts securing them at least two inches in diameter each.

Who does a wall mounted toilet in a residential building??

The sink basin itself was in matching pink, but the vanity it was set into was something else. The countertop was wood that had been painted in enough layers of seafoam green paint to repel standing water for years to come. The cabinet base was particleboard with a tacky veneer of dark wood like what could be found on most stereo speakers circa 1972, plastic handles included in the poorly aligned doors. And the faucet was so small and so short that the stream of water barely reached over the edge of the pink basin.

Oh, but we’re far from done.

Above the mirror hanging over the sink was a vanity light constructed almost entirely out of more glass mirrors. The light it emitted was so harsh no human eye could bear to remain open to its glare for longer than two blinks. In the ceiling, however, was a florescent ballast with two standard bulbs, one that worked fine, the other than hummed and twitched to an irregular beat.

There was one window set high in the wall, and this was the only source of natural light and air. There was no vent fan and no heat supply anywhere in the room. There were also no electrical sockets. I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t need to shave my face back then.

Behind the tub was a Formica surround in six waving, interlacing shades of pink, from Bubblicious to Hubba Bubba to Bazooka (Millennials might have to look those up for context), and each of the three panels of that material was more than adequately adhered and joined at the seams by thick swirling lines of caulk.

But the floors didn’t match the established color scheme. They felt more unique, like a truly personal touch. The room was divided in half, one part by the tub and toilet, the other with the sink and the large amount of open flooring by the door welcoming you into the room. It would make sense to select a water-resistant material near exposed water, and so Formica tiles in what can only be described as jamocha-almond-fudge had been expertly installed there. Somewhere near the center of the vanity there was a brass metal threshold strip to transition from the tile to – brace yourself – brown plastic AstroTurf covering the rest of the bathroom floor.

It was in this safe haven of restful colors and spa-like fixtures that I decided to relax in a hot soaking bath, that new homeowner glow settling freshly upon my skin. I turned on the tap and started filling the tub. We had moved into that home in November, and it was frigid in the unheated, unventilated bathroom in the upstairs, so I danced from foot to foot in anticipation as the water level rose. When I hopped in, the contrast between the scalding water and the frozen cast iron under my ass was jolting. No worry, I told myself. It would warm up in just a few minutes.

My wife, being lovely and caring, busied herself with bringing up a few essentials like towels and shampoo, and she carried them into the bathroom as I was nearly half done filling the tub. My knees were almost submerged.

It’s important to consider perspective when imagining or reliving the next moment of this story. For me, I was sitting inside the tub, glasses off, facing the tap as it poured hot water out over my toes. My wife, on the other hand, viewed that diorama of terror in profile, at which point she promptly dropped the towels and screamed at me to “shut the damn water of now now NOW!” What I could not see was the huge bubble of Formica just under the tub spout quickly filling with water and stretching its bloated self out away from the wall by upwards of three inches or more. By the time I shut off the tap, I could just make out a thin trickle of fluid emerging from the boundary between the spout and the wall material. I pressed two fingers against it, and it was hard to the touch, so overfilled with contained water that it was at the brink of exploding.

No problem. Nothing to worry about. I extracted myself from the tub with a sigh, knowing that I wasn’t just losing that one pleasant soak, I was losing a whole bathroom in the process.

I’m not sure where to put this detail, but it is important to note that I never did figure out where all that water went.

There’s a lot I didn’t know about home ownership until that house. It taught me many important lessons. One of the best ones is this: Plumbing doesn’t belong in exterior walls. Exterior walls are subject to wild swings in temperature, and even the best of plumbing can’t expand and contract without failing at some point. And if you’re going to have plumbing fail, an exterior wall is a terrible spot for it to happen. It damages framing, insulation, wrap materials, siding, and it can easily work down to the foundation long before it’s detected. Yes, you guessed it, this tub had a faucet on the exterior wall of the house. And sometime long before we moved in it had failed, and no one had run a bath for so long that it went undetected.

My wife, brave soul that she is, donned all our best protective gear and ripped out all of the wall materials surrounding that tub the very next week. I have some pretty serious mold allergies, and I didn’t want to be in the house while she was stirring all those spores up. And goodness gracious was there ever a lot of black nasty mold back there! Drywall removed, Formica thrown in the garbage, and everything damp disposed of, we stared at the remains of the bathroom and knew that we were in for a studs-out remodel of that space.

Being a whole lot younger and poorer at the time, we could only afford to hire either a plumber or an electrician. The bathroom needed work from each of these. I could have tossed a coin to come up with a solution as to which to hire, but instead I considered what I knew about physics.

Electricity follows rules, and it’s obedient.

Water is the patron saint of chaos. Wherever you DON’T want it is where it goes.

We hired a plumber the very next week. His jobs weren’t small ones either. We needed the plumbing for the tub moved to the interior wall, and the wall-mounted toilet flange needed to migrate to the floor so that we could buy a standard toilet to replace it. Those jobs were way beyond my skill and knowledge level back then, and even today I’d likely hire someone at least for the toilet part.

He stood beside me, shoulder to shoulder, staring hard at that pink cast iron tub, and he said (with a brash confidence that can only come from having seen and done this exact thing many times in his career), “All ya gotta do to get that tub out is hit it right in the center with a ten-pound long-handle sledge. Damn thing’ll split in two.”

“I can’t take it out whole?”

A look of disbelief, a slight sneer, “You got any idea how much a cast iron tub weighs?” Turns out it’s somewhere between 350 and 500 pounds. Even Google backed him up on that estimate. “And even if you could get it out in one piece, you really wanna trust those hundred-year-old stairs out there to get it outta this house? Kid, you’ll crash right through ‘em and down into the basement.”

Fair point. Sledgehammer it is. I bought one the very next week. I also called a burly guy friend to come over and help. That conversation was way easier.

“Hey, Ryan, you wanna come over and bust up a cast iron tub with a sledgehammer?”

“And then some.”

Don’t worry, we were safe. Grubby clothes, long sleeves and jeans to protect our skin, safety goggles, gloves, and (eventually) earplugs. Ryan and I stared down the beast before us, full of knowing, topped up with a healthy dose of confidence. It would beg us for mercy after just one swing.

“Okay,” he peered at it from several angles, “but do we know how solid the floor is? This is the second story.”

“The plumber said to hit it right in the middle and it’d crack in half. Like an egg.”

“It’s a lot heavier than any egg I’ve ever cracked with a sledge. What’s underneath?”

“The kitchen.”

“Very bad idea.”

“Agreed.”

Which is why we opted to strike from the front, right into the apron edge of the tub. Ryan volunteered to hit first. It was probably a toxic masculinity thing, but wasn’t that why I asked the biggest, strongest guy I knew to come over and help? I stood out in the hallway, the door closed between us, anxiously awaiting the sound of a pink tub being split like an Imperial Cruiser bisected by Admiral Holdo.

WHAM. WHAM. WHAM. tink.

I opened the door to find Ryan panting and sweating. The tub looked untouched. “What happened?”

“It’s...” breath, breath, “it’s kinda solid.” He tried again, and this time I watched. His hulking shoulders primed for the assault, he swung the sledge with such force that anything less than cast iron would have been obliterated by the second shot. By the end of that effort he dropped the tool and declared that a break was in order.

I took over the station, my own goggles in place, and I inspected the front of the tub. I could see the precise point where Ryan had hit it repeatedly. The porcelain coating was fractured, and splinters of it littered the floor and the interior of the tub, but the base material was intact.

“You’re not gonna be able to do it,” he warned from the doorway, a glass of cool water in his hand.

“I’ll just loosen it for you,” I joked back.

My hands held the handle of the sledge with just enough tension to guide it to the same spot Ryan had struck, and with a breath held firm in my chest cavity and all of my strength swung through the arc of space between us, I rammed the sledge into the side of the tub. The force of that collision reverberated through every bone in my body, but the sound was different than what Ryan had elicited. My strike had resulted in a fissure.

We both took off our goggles and examined it. “Holy mother-*&#^ing-@%^$! How did you do that?” he yelled at me.

“I mean…” I shrugged.

“Gimme that thing.” He had the hammer in his hands and was striking again before I could clear out of the room. Strike after strike sang out through the house, the sound louder than a ferry horn up close. I was sure the neighbors could hear our exploits. Ryan stopped again after his series of hits made no progress, and we traded spots.

Yet again, with a single well-placed strike, I cracked the tub further.

And so that’s how we went, back and forth, Ryan and I each taking turns battering the crap out of a bathtub for what must have been hours on a Saturday. With each session, growing weary and sore from the tremendous effort, we kept ourselves in the game by summoning all of the anger and hatred we had ever contained within our bodies. We screamed at that tub. We cursed and cussed, we roared, and we tried hard not to laugh.

On one of my last attempts, I bellowed angry epithets at that stupid thing, cursing at it and accusing it of being a bad parent for forgetting my twelfth birthday and leaving me at the science fair that day for over nine hours with no one around to take me home at the end. I guess I had a lot to be angry about. Things from my childhood came out during that beat-down that shocked me, things I had repressed, things I had forgotten, things I never realized had made me feel so unbelievably furious. They poured from my mouth and my lungs, they stung in the blisters forming on my palms, they lit up with the spark of the hammer colliding with solid iron. I cried them out into the smoke-filled air, spitting and fuming at my silent enemy as I shredded it into four pieces, each jagged and shattered at the edges where we broke it apart with sheer determination.

At the end, I felt lighter.

My body was aching and covered in dust and sweat, but I was free. I’d never known how cathartic that type of work could be and how thrilling the vacancy of anger in my body could feel. It was out. It had all come out and served a purpose, and all that was left was a bubbling joy-filled tiredness, and a need for pizza and beer.

Ryan did a great job, too.

We remodeled the bathroom in about two months, installing a very nice jetted tub, several GFCI outlets, an in-wall heater, a vent fan, can lights, and fixtures that were certainly not pink. It became one of my favorite spaces in the house.

I’ve taken on many home improvement projects since that one, but it holds a special place in my heart. I learned about wiring, my animosity for plumbing intensified, and I developed an aptitude for DIY home projects. Turns out I’m pretty good at demo, and almost as good at construction and finishing. And after that project and so many that have followed it, I still have no doubt that my level of internal anger is lower than the average person’s. Maybe it takes a while to fill that sort of thing back up, but at least I know how to empty it out.

Just give me a ten-pound long-handle sledge and a cast iron tub, and I’ll show you how.

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Hey, thanks for reading. I hope this saves you from some of that sweat equity you were considering launching into. What’s that? You’ve done something similar (or worse)?? Do tell.

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Your Trans Friend,

Robin