No one knows for sure when the toilet was first invented. It seems like every country has its own unique “discovery” of a device that politely and sanitarily collects and removes waste from under a squatting position. Some parts of India were using water-based shitters as early as 3100 B.C. The Egyptians were dropping deuces in water closets almost 3,800 years ago. Even the Scots shat in toilets around the same time, but the true originator of the toilet as we know it today—as well as all modern plumbing—is the Roman Empire. Nearly 4,000 years ago the Romans were using aqueducts made from enormous stone blocks to bring in fresh water to their palaces and cities from rivers miles and miles away. By the fourth century, the city of Rome boasted 11 public bathhouses, 856 private baths and 1,352 public fountains and cisterns. The Romans are actually where we get the name “plumber” from. Plumbus in Latin means “lead,” which was what they used to make their pipes and faucets. Plumbers were celebrities back then. They were indispensible. They were the most sought-after craftsmen and artisans for as far as the Roman Empire reached.
This is no longer the case today. In today’s world, plumbers are basically the guys that unplug toilets and touch human shit for a living. And from my first six days as a plumber’s assistant for one of the bigger “Rooter”-suffixed plumbing companies in Los Angeles, I would have to wholeheartedly agree with that assessment. Thugs, dropouts, drunks, and convicts—guys that you would never let into your house under any circumstance other than an iconic van parked in your driveway and brand recognition. We were McPlumbers—the guys you called not to lay the pipe but to unplug the shitter.
A plumber’s assistant was what they called the new trainees—the handful of us who had answered the ad in the paper and passed the written exam, and who were now getting a paid week of on-the-job training in courses like 1) How to handle irate customers; 2) How to use a motorized, coiled drill-thing to unplug a pipe; and 3) How to no longer eat food with your bare fingers. Ah, but god bless the paid training, though—a solid week of a salary for just a little bit of work. We were supposed to be gaining valuable experience from the veteran plumber we were partnered with. And I use the term “veteran plumber” quite loosely here. You see, I was partnered with a husky chap named Pedro, who looked like he’d seen a few years in jail before fathering a handful of children from several different obese women all named Maria. And his behavior over the past six days was the stereotypical Mexican figurine of a sombrero and a set of knees—the only thing this guy did was sleep in his driver’s seat when not on a job.
But I can’t blame Pedro too much. Being a plumber wasn’t the type of occupation your teenage self envisioned your future self having. Being a plumber in 1994 was a consequence of every bad choice you made before 1994. It was the type of occupation that your probation officer suggested would keep you out of trouble. We had no learned skills or years of education in the craft of irrigation; we simply had the vans and tools and “Rooter” name. We were franchise plumbers. Our only saving grace was that we could be at a client’s home in 45 minutes. We only got the emergency calls, which usually meant a toilet had overflowed and poured gallons of sewage water across the tiled bathroom floor. You then had to kneel in it to properly push the coiled metal cord of the electric snake as far down into the toilet’s pipe as possible. And with your knees then stained and soiled, your canvas-gloved hand submersed in cold filth, and your face as close to a brimming bowl of someone else’s urine and excrement as you ever thought imaginable, you turned on the motorized snake and tried to hold on to its gyrating cord and guide it down the pipe as it jumped around in the bowl and splashed your neck and chest with soupy beige water. The worst was when you felt a stray drop hit your lip but your hands were too dirty to do anything about it. It sickened you that there’s a drop of what might be someone else’s shit on your bottom lip, and it must stay there until the job is finished. You fight yourself against the urge to use your sleeve or your shoulder to wipe it away because you know it won’t be a clean wipe; you know you’re going to get some of whatever that is in your teeth or on the side of your mouth. And you focus all your available mental energy on making sure that you don’t absentmindedly bite your bottom lip or, heaven forbid, lick your lips. And this wasn’t a rare occasion. This happened nine out of every ten calls.
We sat in the van in the parking lot of a Wendy’s and listened to an oldies station as we waited for our next call. As Pedro dozed off with his feet up on the dashboard and his head on the hand rest, I reflected. I recollected. I reminisced. I pondered my family legacy, then its sudden demise at my hands. I had been very good this past week about not dwelling on the Consolidated Film Industries job—or, to be more precise, the ending of it—but here I was now, listening to some old, dead asshole singing about doing the twist while I dwelled on one of the monumental failures of my 23 years of life. It had been a short-lived spectacle and my only real taste of union life, but it should have been my birthright—my fate. Like British royalty, I was born into it.
Growing up in Hollywood, you either worked in the film industry or you served the people who worked in the film industry. Not much else to do outside of that. I came from a long line of Christophers who had nestled into the laborious, behind-the-scenes underworld of Tinsel Town and stayed there. My dad was a film cutter in the editing department of Consolidated Film Industries for 36 years; my grandfather was that same company’s accountant before that. Then it was my turn. A union job, with a starting pay of $23 an hour! I hadn’t broken the ceiling of $9 since calling it quits on an associate’s degree the year before.
I remembered my first day working there, weeks before this plumbing job was even a thought. It was like a family reunion at C.F.I.: Every adult I had ever known growing up was suddenly my coworker. Each person I ran into in the halls stopped and asked how I was doing, how my mom was, if my brothers were still all right. There were more union-guaranteed breaks than actual work. Employees all drank beer at lunch, snoozed at their desks, and engaged in hour-long conversations about quarterbacks and horse races. I could do this, I had assured myself at the time. I could give up my dreams and aspirations of sovereignty and struggle for this lifelong cushy ride into retirement. These people all did it; it couldn’t be that difficult. To hell with breaking new ground in the literary world; I was going to be a unionized film cutter and make lots of money. I would be able to buy a house, a new car, maybe a racehorse or a yacht. Even though cutting strips of film was about as exciting as combing your arm hair while conversing with your own reflection for eight hours a day, every day, it was a career—an actual career—and not just another bullshit job. It was a life choice.
Although I was then certain of my newfound path after only that first day there, fate was not and suggested otherwise. The moment I arrived at Consolidated Film Industries for my second day, I was called upstairs into the foreman’s office. It seemed he had just that morning received the news of my failed union drug test, even after I drank one of those $35 bottles of cleansing liquid that were guaranteed to make you pass. It was horrible. I wasn’t fired on the spot, but I was immediately “unhired” on the spot. No one made eye contact with me as I left the office and walked down the long hallway to tell my father that I would no longer be working alongside him. He nodded his head and seemed to be waiting for me to blurt out, “Ha ha, just kidding!” Or maybe I was expecting him to say it. But nothing followed but a pat on my arm and a, “Come by the house and see your mom this weekend.” I nodded and apologized for any embarrassment I might have caused, then walked to my old Camaro and drove to the movies. I then drank wine for three days straight before finding the ad for the plumber’s assistant job with no experience required.
The CB radio in the Rooter van severed me from my nostalgic regrets. After a squelch and a clearing of someone’s throat on the other end, the antiquated plastic device on the dashboard informed us of our next call up on the expensive side of the Encino hills. It took us a solid 20 minutes driving to the top of the huge hill in our clunky van, but we arrived to find another of our vans parked there at the head of the small mansion’s circular driveway.
“We’re assisting on this one,” Pedro said as he parked right beside the other van.
“Sounds good.”
A younger version of Pedro approached my Pedro at his opened window. “Hey bro, we got a good one this time.” They smiled at one another.
Pedro had me drag a large aluminum-covered box from the van to the back of the house, where a shallow hole had been dug at the center of an acre-long garden descending down a hill. The silver box was heavy and looked like something a ventriloquist would keep an expensive dummy inside of. I could have used a hand from either Pedro bringing it over, but a glance back at their precariously huddled conversation behind the vans made it pretty clear that they had needed a private conversation away from me.
I squatted behind the silver box and watched Mini-Pedro introduce the silver-haired homeowner to the other Pedro. A few papers were passed between them before Pedro pointed to the hole that I was crouching inside of; then they all suddenly looked at me. I quickly jumped out of the hole then pointed at the hole. The old man covered his mouth as if catching a word from coming out midway. He paused then softly nodded his head, finally acquiescing to the two Pedros and their seemingly bad news. Then two chubby, tan-skinned smiles in blue short-sleeve shirts strutted from the patio to me and my hole.
“See, I told you!” the younger Pedro exclaimed to the older Pedro once out of earshot from the homeowner. “The whole thing, man! He said he’d go for it. All of it. This shit’s from the ‘50s … he doesn’t know. All the way down the mountain, bro.”
“Dios mío!” Older Pedro grinned a real devious set of pearls.
“We’ll split the commission, right down the middle.” Little Pedro noticed me leaning in to hear. “Sorry, new guy. This is all me and Pedro. You’re still in training anyway. You don’t get shit, bro.”
“But you see how you can make real money doing this now, right?” my trainer asked with two fingers into my shoulder.
“Find an additional Brandon?”
“No, bro! Customers believe whatever you tell them. You’re the plumber, bro. They believe you. You can tell them anything and they usually go for it.”
“I was just …”
“You’ll figure it out, bro.”
Little Pedro opened the silver box and pulled out a large coil of rolled black cord and handed it to me. He wiggled what looked like a tinted lightbulb attached to the end of the roll of insulated wire and said, “Slide this end down the pipe slowly. We need to see what’s clogging shit up.”
As I squatted over the ditch and fed the bulbous black head of the cord down into the pipe, I looked back at the Pedros to find them flipping buttons and turning knobs inside the opened silver box. It looked like some type of NASA portable operations center: a small video screen, joystick, wires, blinking red lights. I leaned over and examined the green images awakening on the video screen when Big Pedro said, “There’s a small camera at the end of that wire, so we can see down the pipes.”
“Infrared?” I asked.
“No, it’s always just green like that.”
I pushed the cord farther down the pipe and watched the oval display across the screen like a first-person miniature view of someone walking through a dark tunnel. It was a smooth, clean ride for a minute or two before the obstruction came into view about 60 feet down. A tree’s root had broken through the ceramic pipe and formed the blockage. I quickly surmised a logical approach to the most effective way of fixing the problem. I turned to the two Pedros and explained.
“What if we mark the cable right here, then we’ll pull it all the way out and measure it down the mountainside. Then we’ll know exactly where that root broke the pipe. We can dig up that spot and repair it. How about that, huh? That’ll save the old guy a bunch of money.”
They looked at each other and laughed. “Bro, that’s like a $300 job. I’m not sitting here sweating my ass off for $300. We’re going to tear this whole fucker up! All the way down the mountain. The old guy thinks it’s all fucked up.”
“It‘s like a $9,500 job. That’s almost $1,800 commission … for Pedro and me. That’s how you make money at this.”
“He’s rich, bro!” Little Pedro added, “He doesn’t care. Look where he’s living, bro. He’s probably got millions tucked away. Fuck him.”
I started pulling the cable out of the pipe as the Pedros hatched their plan. They had a pretty good point about the homeowner being able to afford the costs, but I kept imagining the old guy as my father—the type of man who believed in honest plumbers and would take what these guys said as gospel.
They walked back to the patio for negotiations with the old man while I dragged the silver box back to the van. I snuck in a quick cigarette and watched the old man shaking his head as Pedro raised his shoulders, as if to say, “There’s nothing I can do about it.” I walked to the steps of the patio and eavesdropped on the rest of the conversation—partly for training and partly to be nosy.
“Yeah, it’s damaged clear on down to the street below … never seen anything so bad before,” Big Pedro said proudly.
“Ah, no, no, no …” the old man shook his head. “But $10,000? Seriously? There’s nothing else I can do? That’s … that’s $10,000! Can’t we just fix part of it?”
“No, sir. You’ve got root damage from that hole there all the way down. We’re going to have to take all that old plumbing out and replace it. All the way down the hill, sir. But we’ve got a special goi—”
“Oh cripes … oh cripes … I did all this myself back in 1957 … ’58. Arlene and I just bought the place … just got back from Korea. We put everything we had into the mortgage … didn’t have two dimes to rub together after that. I did all this plumbing myself. Took over a year … poor Arlene had to shower at our neighbors’ place for most of ’59 and ‘60. She never—”
“Yeah … so I’m going to need you to sign here and initial this and this, authorizing us to get started.” Pedro handed him a pen and held the clipboard for him as he signed.
“God rest her soul … if Arlene knew I was paying $10,000 now for what cost us about $500 back then …” The old man’s nostalgia was growing thicker, buying him some temporary happiness until writing a one followed by four zeros on the check. “She’d bring me down lunch and coffee every day, clear on down the hill, the farther down I got. She even fell on several occasions but didn’t complain one bit.”
“That’s messed up,” Little Pedro offered his condolences and shook the clipboard.
The old man finally initialed everything and signed the check, and the two Pedros hustled giddily back to their vans to call in the order for a small bulldozer, 100 yards of PVC pipe, and some day laborers. It was just me and the old man on the patio now, both of us staring out at that big blue sky ahead of us.
“That sure seems like a lot of money to fix some pipes. I think I’d even squirt in a bucket to save that kind of dough,” he said, though it seemed it was more to vent his frustrations than to clarify the scenario for me. “That’s almost what we paid for this house! But I don’t want to leave this hassle for my kids when I’m gone.”
He was staring at me when I glanced back at the two Pedros, both of whom were still on their phones but probably now telling their wives about all the fancy shit they were going to buy for them when they got their commission checks. I felt for the old man, which was a natural instinct for me. Empathy had always been my Achilles’ heel. I hadn’t realized it until we made eye contact. I wanted to tell him to seek a second opinion on the plumbing matter; to call up any plumber in the Yellow Pages outside of the “Roto”-prefixed variety. I wanted to point down the hillside to where the one and only root had broken through the pipe and tell him that’s all that needed to be fixed. It was the right thing to do, and every fiber of my moral code was fighting my tightened lips and new career choice. But if I did happen to change his mind, the Pedros would have known it was me that did it—they would have known it was me that transformed their $1,800 commission check into a $38 commission check split two ways. I would have been fired, possibly beaten up, maybe even killed.
I began thinking of different ways that I could surreptitiously tell the old man this without either Pedro catching on. Then, for some strange reason, I started thinking about what the Pedros would buy with their $900 apiece. A new nightgown for Maria, a pitcher’s mitt for little Julio, Dodgers tickets, schoolbooks, perhaps some new fire decals for the open-hooded Camaros permanently parked in their driveways. Then I started thinking about what I would buy for myself if I got an extra $900 on my weekly paycheck. I’d definitely buy a new television and replace my VCR with a laserdisc player or one of those new DVD devices. I thought of how cool I’d look showing up at a client’s house in a tailored blazer and silk scarf. I could treat myself to a month of steak dinners at Musso & Frank; take every other month off from the job to work on a novel; take a vacation in Italy. Italy.
What would the Italian plumbers of yesteryear do in this situation? Would the Romans screw over their fellow countrymen for a profit? Of course they would. I glanced back to the old man, who was now staring off into the clouds, probably mentally subtracting the cost of this plumbing job from the dwindling savings he was surviving on. He shook his head repeatedly.
“You have a beautiful home, sir.” I told him.
It took him a few seconds before he replied. “Thank you. It didn’t always look like this. You should have seen it when we first moved in … just a shack standing here.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your wife.”
He nodded his head and continued staring off into the blue sky. But his wife’s passing was not the most important factor running through his mind at the moment. “Does $10,000 seem right to you? That seems really high to me.”
“I just started this job,” I answered. “I’m in training. I’m not too sure about how much things cost yet.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I suppose I’m just from a different generation when things didn’t seem to cost that much.”
“Don’t you have a neighbor that can come over and take a look … maybe they might have some insight.”
“My neighbors? Oh, no, no, no. The people who live around here are all movie producers and stuff—bunch of rich people. They don’t know anything. Besides, those guys you’re with are professionals, right? You guys work for a big company. I see the vans everywhere.”
He had opened up another perfect opportunity for me to tell him to get a second opinion, but something inside me prevented my mouth from saying anything. I had a rush of thoughts about my own self-preservation now that I was without my union job. I had my whole life ahead of me to worry about. This moment would be the turning point in my life—the period where I shed the empathetic feelings of youth and became a man—a man who put his own self-interests above the feelings of others—a man who wouldn’t disgrace his father’s good name because he couldn’t bear not to smoke a joint with friends the night before his big drug test. Today I would grow up, no matter how painful it would be for me, or for others. Today I would grow up.
“Arlene always said I was too trusting. But what kind of life is it if you can’t trust people?”
The Pedros were on their way back to us, and I knew that all I had to do was keep my mouth shut for a few more seconds and I’d be home free. I glanced back to the old man but saw my father standing there instead, telling me to come by on Sunday and see mom. It felt like one of those moments in a political thriller when the protagonist had to let one innocent man die so that a million other innocent people would be spared. I couldn’t bear to look at him again, but I did—I had to. But when I saw the old man this time, I saw capitalism embodied and not my father. I saw the way business worked; I witnessed how success worked. Then it spun around and I saw myself in him. I saw that I was very much like this old man in that I was too trusting and didn’t question what I should have questioned. I wanted to punish myself for letting my father down and humiliating him in front of the people he had spent half his life working with. I wanted to teach this old man what happened when you let down your guard and trusted a fat plumber like Pedro, or a 20-something plumber’s assistant with little moral direction. I wanted to be mean to make the shame dissipate inside me. I wanted my heart to callous over and bury the empathy under layers of uncaring, inhuman selfishness.
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do what Pedro and Pedro could do. I couldn’t kill one innocent man to spare the lives of a million others. I just couldn’t. I didn’t have a family to feed, or children to put through school, or a mortgage on a house. I didn’t possess those fundamentals that produce a triumphant, successful man who’s willing to do almost anything for a buck. I only had a handful of blossoming morals and some jaded decency to build a career upon. And as jaded and blossoming as they were, they were all I had.
I looked back up at the old man to find him still staring, waiting for me to put words to the gaping mouth below my confused eyes. But the words didn’t come out. The caveat never came. Then I felt Pedro standing beside me. He was happy and smiling, and he patted my shoulder proudly. Pedro looked the way my father had looked on my first day at C.F.I., before I got fired. He was proud; proud of the big job he had negotiated; proud of himself for doing it; and proud of me for being a part of it. I smiled back at him because I knew that was what he wanted to see—and maybe that was what I wanted to see. I couldn’t bring myself to look back at the old man after that. That part of me was now over.
The small bulldozer and day laborers arrived about 35 minutes later. Big Pedro and I left after the old man disappeared into the house and 50 feet of his garden had been torn up. Back at the main office, Pedro recounted the story of the overpriced plumbing job to several coworkers, including the branch manager, and several cans of congratulatory Budweiser were then handed around. Pedro patted me on the back again and explained to his fellow beer-sipping plumbers how I had helped swindle the old man out of a small fortune, even though I was still in training—that I was a born plumber.
As I punched my timecard for the day, the branch manager handed me another half-filled plastic cup of beer and said, “Great job, kid. You’ve passed your training. Pedro said you’re ready for your own van. You keep this up and you could make a lot of money. How about we send you out on your own tomorrow? Commission on whatever you do! How’s that sound?”
“Yeah, that would be nice.”
After he patted me on the back, I walked into the bathroom and poured my beer into the toilet. I would not celebrate this moment. I was a bigger sucker than the old man for letting this happen. Before returning my timecard to the wall, I wrote above my typed name: I QUIT. PLEASE MAIL PAYCHECK TO ADDRESS ON FILE. And I left. I went by the folks’ house on Sunday and stayed for dinner, but things just weren’t the same as they were before either of those two jobs. I had learned some things about myself over that three-week period, things that I didn’t know were in me. But they were out now, alive and functioning on their own. I vowed to be a better man from that day forward, but it took a few more years and a few more disappointments before it really sank in.