Laying Waste, or Andy the Plumber

Metamorphosis

 
Four millennia ago, great stone sewers veined the isle of Crete. Water traveled slim terra cotta pipe to reach silver tongued faucets and marble lipped fountains. And in the Palace of Knossos, the first toilet yielded its basin to a Minoan elite.

How did they celebrate its arrival? How often–how kindly–did they sand its wooden seat? Did the inventor receive honors and admiration? Or did s/he tend the marvel in obscurity?

The toilet of Knossos turned to rubble, soon indistinguishable from earth; no longer a window to privileged detritus. It did not return until the 16th century, when Sir John Harrington introduced the valve closet to British consciousness in his subversive text, A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax. Both popular anti-monarchist allegory and practical description of an early flush toilet, the Queen felt conflicted over her godson’s Discourse. Ultimately, the saucy courtier was banished from the court, and the Queen was pleased to install a self-emptying basin in Richmond Palace

It waited another two centuries to part its lid for the populace, gaping from a million closet floors. The people praised Alexander Cummings, a Scottish watchmaker who patented the flush in 1775. His revolutionary S-shaped pipe trap prevented ugly gases from escaping London’s subterranean lungs.

Like Harrington, the watchmaker also wrote–about air pressure and gravity and stop-time. Find him referenced in John Hill’s The Construction of Timber from its Early Growth, Explained by the Microscope for his work in advancing the microtome. His tool cut fine slices of wood, allowing Hill to examine the morphology of a beloved black poplar he scaled in youth and “revived the ardor for microscopic pursuits.”

Meanwhile, the American chamber pot sang its dribbling tune.

A Select Glossary of Plumbing Terms

 
Adjustable hot limit stop
Back pressure
Back flow
Back flow preventer
Ball check valve
Ball joint
Ballcock
Blowbag
Blowdown
Burst pressure
Branch drain
Bushing
Cleanout Plug
Collar
Coupling
Diaphragm
Dip Tube
Elbow
Flapper
Flex Coupling
Flow Rate
Float Ball
Grease Trap
Half inch female union
Half inch male line union
Hard Water
Hex nipple
Impeller
Main
Manifold
Metal Fatigue
Nipple
Overflow Hood
O-Ring
Plumbing Snake
Plunger
Pressure Head
Relief Valve
Service Partner Plan (SPP)
Siphoning
Sleeve
Soil Pipe
Stopcock
Tailpiece
Tit of a trap
Valve Seat
Water Hammer Arrestor
Wet Vent

The Pipe Parana

 
Chris Dever spent two years knocking doors on the islands of St. Martin, St. Lucia, Barbados, and Antigua. Though he made little headway with the contentedly unsaved, he left a more fitting legacy: building bathrooms for special needs kids where the sugarcane once bloomed. See him shaking hands with Antigua’s Minister of the Department of Welfare.

Chris is a devoted husband, father of six, and fourth generation plumber. His father, Wesley George Dever, watched the Watts Riots from inside his plumbing truck. After years of frustrating flange removals, Chris went into his friend’s weld shop and invented a tool.

The Pipe Parana was born inverse of its yin, the ram bit, which reams plastic pipe squarely and accurately below the surface or finished grade. The ram bit leaves fittings clean and ready for solvent welding, but the Pipe Parana is specially designed to remove fittings from the outside of the pipe to which it is attached so that a new fitting may be chemically bonded to the existing waste pipe.

The Pipe Parana is young enough to be synonymous with its branding. The first shoot of its family tree; too naive for variations. New tools occur every day. Chris the Devoted, Chris the Resourceful, Chris the Believer drives out to Provo Bay, the sweet scent of grand babies still in his lungs, and casts an expectant line out past the reeds.

Andy the Plumber

 
Sunday morning without
arriving he was there,
ringing his weight through the kitchen.

Bloated, reawoken
from death by his mortgage
calling, ring ring,
Hello! It’s your friendly
neighborhood plumber,

Resurrected to pay his bills
in joyful purgatory a flowering
cupid, a ground-soaked
cabbage gone
to seed. Hello!

He works widely
in open armed attack.
Home to chainsaws cracking
in the backyard, narrowly
missing the twins window
with a branch, everything
near shatter.

But his first line of
inquiry, the branches,
led him off–it must
be the roots now unscabbed
from concrete, let
bleed. Unearthed the way
one pecked open
my blouse, in fever.

He brushes tools from his lap
like crumbs. Hello!
I hear his text,
a groping meditation
wet soft as everything
he does.

While listing debts,
he saws open the bathroom
floor to let it breathe and
leaves us gaping.

Something to his endless swinging,
bold incompetence: The only
power I obey.

His sentence in my home
a visitation–an angel
entertained

unaware. He is in color,
a bruise. He pains
to move yet moves
and wields tools like
drooping carrots,
half fisted.

He directs the ruin,
presents us well
placed holes.
His body in noticeable
bent, he might
walk circles in the dark.

He might live right
to the moment of stopping,
hideous with breath.

He visits me at the first flourishing of decay,
just when the buds are forming
on my memory palace, and
I’m writing sticky
notes that say,
Kill Your Dreams.

I am dreadful with life,
incredibly
happy as she put it,
and I answer his ring,

let him root
about unsupervised a floor
below. Let offend,

let repel.
I make myself damp-proof,
impermeable to perfection.

Andy: short,
rambling. Voice
like an antenna whining
into to the wind, chest
an overripe peach.

I turn from work
that is just so.
I run from
everything right
in its place.
I shrink

from the neat
comedian.
But I double, dissolve,
for Andy–his work
undone.