That Warm, Fuzzy Feeling Outside, by Jenny Bahn

I have taken many showers in my day, as most of us in the developed world have become delightfully accustomed to. In fact, I have spent so much time in the shower that different showers remind of different times in my life: the yellow tiles of my NYU dorm, the tumbled marble in my mom’s bathroom after the remodel, a view of the forest through the window in the shower of a friend’s bathroom. Not all of the memories are terribly fond. In my New York summer apartment circa 2007, the tiles of our bathroom shower bent like a concrete sidewalk does around giant tree roots. Behind it existed a yet to be seen plumbing catastrophe, held back only by white ceramic and clear packing tape.

When I was younger, I took a great many baths – peacefully wiling away the day making my My Little Pony ponies dance on the tepid water, staring out the aluminum sliding glass window on to the patio with the broken Jacuzzi. When I was really young, long before the age when someone would say this was inappropriate, my brother and I took baths together, splashing around and making soapy foam beards and mustaches; the goal being to make your beard the longest before it melted off your face.

At some point, I grew out of baths. I attribute this to the realization that bathwater is just your wet dirt now floating around you on rafts of soap, having temporarily migrated off of your skin by hazard of physics. In other words, why take a bath when you need to take a shower afterward to actually be clean? The time for such anal retentiveness does not exactly exist for me; hence, less bathing in my adulthood.

Even the thought of lighting a few candles and putting on a Jewel record seems like an egregious waste of time. But this is because I am neurotic. I respect people who can take long baths, lingering in their solitude while reading a nice book – the corners marred with little wet thumb marks, their left foot managing the hot water knob when the temperature drops. This is what I envision my retirement to be like. For now, showers will have to do.

That is unless misfortune happens to strike you and your bathing principles down. Just yesterday I ran the water for my quick and easy shower and noticed that the water was just not warming up according to plan. Our hot water heater blows, but it doesn’t blow that hard. I tried it again an hour later, as I was dying to wash my hair and get my Saturday going in a cleanly fashion. Alas, no. I feared the pilot light had gone out: it was a blustery morning and I thought that perhaps the wild winds had made it into our basement and knocked the sucker out. I wasn’t quite sure if this was possible, but it made sense at the time.

As my uncle attempted to walk me through lighting my own hot water heater pilot via cell phone, I began to notice that the entire 10×10 basement was blanketed in a two-inch layer of water. Hmmm. That’s curious, I thought. Maybe there’s bad drainage? Then I noticed that a peculiar puddle had formed directly underneath the hot water heater and was leeching off the sides. From what I gathered, the amount of water on the floor and not in the tank, where it was supposed to be, meant that I would not be taking a shower today.

I alerted my eighty-year-old Romanian landlady who, when surveying the flooded basement, mused that perhaps it was from the rain last night and not from an exploding water heater. For the record, it didn’t rain last night and this is also a woman who didn’t believe us when we told her there might be a dead cat under the house producing an unlivable stench in our living room. She held out, asking us each passing day if the smell had subsided. When the handy man was finally called and a dead cat was indeed discovered she said, “Well, what do you know? That’s never happened to me before!” Oh really? Cats die under my floorboards all the time.

Being as yesterday was a Saturday, the emergency plumber hourly rate was out of the question for her. So when she said that they were closed until Monday, I understood. She was living on a fixed income (i.e. my rent) and didn’t want to shell out the dough for an immediate fix. She was kind enough to offer up her own shower, which I dismissed with a lie that I was going to my mom’s house anyway and would shower there.

After much deliberation, I decided I would draw myself a bath like in the olden days – with a kettle and boiling water. I admit that I did have an advantage over the wenches in Elizabethan England: my kettle was electric, thus expedited my “filling” of the tub. Still, the kettle only held about a gallon and there was an extreme risk of the water going cold before I could actually partake in this makeshift cleansing experience.

Three kettle fills and pours into my tub later and all I had to show for it was a disappointing two inch deep puddle, most of which was near the “deep end” above the drain. I would have been better off trying the basement, bathing with a luffa and a ladle in the remnants of my water heater. I brought one more kettle to a near boil and decided that this paltry body of water would have to do; I didn’t have the patience to wait it out.

I disrobed and sat in the tub. The only parts of my body enjoying the fruits of my labor were the heels of my feet and a portion of my hindquarters; the rest of my body shivered from the difference in temperature I was subjecting myself to. Quickly, I dunked my hair in as much water as it could soak up and began to lather up a partially lubricated muck of shampoo. Another dunk and I moved onto conditioner, by then my legs riddled with goose bumps. I poured the fourth kettle in for some much needed warmth, rinsed off as best I could, and hopped back out, feeling nearly half as clean as I normally do.

I literally have never taken a shower/bath/rinse with less water ever in my entire life. In fact, I am sure that the photographs of me as a baby – the ones where I can never imagine being the size to comfortably fit into a plastic Rubbermaid bin – were filled with more hot water. In this most uncomfortable and informative experience, new light has been shed on my appreciation for such movies as Shakespeare in Love or Romeo and Juliet. I will no longer be food by those tales of castles and riches, of corsets and bustiers. In the end, all those people had were shitty showers and smelly armpits. And to that I say, viva la future! Viva the industrial revolution and technology! Give me hot water or give me death.