When I woke up this morning, my bathroom, kitchen, and half of my living room was covered in toilet water.

Not, I’d like to point out, shit water.  There were no flotillas of feces in this new sea that was created while I slept.  Of course, I would not exactly call this water "clean," but if I had seen even one little turd floating around my bookshelf or my bar area, I would have calmly walked downstairs, out of the building and into a cab, never to return again, to restart my life in a poo-free apartment. 

As I stood there, half-awake at 7:45 this morning, I could hear the toilet continuing to regurgitate, could watch the water flow like a wave against a dock, out of the bathroom, rippling the water in the kitchen, expanding the water in the living room, like high tide rising in the bay.

This was going to have to be taken care of right away.

My "super" is an Italian man in his mid-fifties who drinks wine all day and night at the Italian restaurant below me.  I do not have his number or know where he lives.  When I moved in and asked for this information, he said in his heavily accented and broken English, "You come here.  I always here" (meaning the restaurant).  It was now 8am and the restaurant was closed.

However, on some mornings I run into him as he prowls the streets of my Little Italy neighborhood, yelling in Italian and flirting with the Chinese women walking about, who seem equal parts bemused and terrified by his advances.  Of course, as luck would have it, he was not to be found this morning.  But because this is Little Italy, several middle-aged Italian men are always sitting outside the restaurants that line my streets, smoking cigars and listening to sports radio.  With nowhere else to turn, I asked them if they had seen my super.  They said that he was still asleep, but they gave me the break I needed: they told me where he lived.

(It’s a very weird neighborhood.  Just roll with it.)

And so to his apartment I went.  I knocked on his door twice and got no response, though I could hear rustling inside.  I started ringing the doorbell.  In the middle of the second ring, I heard that familiar Italian accent: "Who is it?"

"Uh, it’s Jason from next door.  I have a big problem - my toilet is overflowing."

My super answered the door.  Naked.  Balls-ass naked.  Obviously disturbed from sleep.  Obviously hungover.  Very, very obviously naked.  Thankfully, he had the decency to shield the lower half of his body behind his door.  Thankfully. 

(In a related story, I will never again have a problem with premature ejaculation for the rest of my life.  You know, if I ever want to have sex again.) 

Thus began my first course over the day in linguistics.  I consider myself good at languages; in high school, I took Latin and Greek and Spanish and all the AP and SAT II tests that came with them, easily passing out of my college language requirement.  At one point in high school and college, I could find a bar and a bathroom in eight languages – really all you need to know when traveling.  So though my super barely speaks English and I know a total of ten words and phrases in Italian - "There is toilet water all over my fucking apartment" not among them - I thought we would be able to communicate without great difficulty.

Wrong.  I spent a solid eight minutes convincing a naked 55 year-old Italian man hiding behind a door that my toilet did not need plunging, that it was a bigger emergency than that.  I don’t think at any point in this conversation he understood what I was trying to say, but he did understand that I was not going to go away unless he came with me.  He said he’d be ready in a minute. 

I realized that our discussion was a waste of breath when we entered my apartment and my super saw the giant pool of water slowly enveloping my apartment and (I presume) cursed in Italian.  Finally, he understood.

As mentioned, I live above an Italian restaurant.  As in, directly below me is an Italian restaurant.  This toilet water presented a clear and present danger to the day’s business at the restaurant; if the toilet kept vomiting, eventually the water would leak down into the restaurant, which I assume would not be good for business. 

My super, after he finished cursing, shouted, "Gimme da phone!"  I handed him my Treo; it was like handing a monkey a copy of War and Peace.  Realizing we were going nowhere fast, I took the phone from him and asked him what number he wanted me to dial.  In a matter of seconds, he was on the phone, yelling in English at who I guessed were the plumbers, saying they needed to get here right away.

To their credit, the plumbers showed up only five or so minutes later.  I assumed they would be Chinese, because, well, everything within five minutes of me is either tourist (I knew none of those were coming), Italian (they don’t work) or Chinese.  However, they were Russian.

Thus began Linguistics II: English as a Foreign Language for Everyone Except You.  My super tried to explain what was happening to my two new Comrades, who looked at him with glazed over expressions that said, "More vodka, please."  Russians do not fuck around, and rather than try to engage in a discourse with this Italian man who only a few hours ago was on his fifth bottle of wine and only a few minutes ago was standing naked behind a door talking to me, they spoke to each other in rapid-fire Russian and headed over the toilet.   

One of the Russians stayed in the bathroom with his tools while the other Russki came over to where my super and I were standing. 

Thus far, the highlight of the morning was, obviously, seeing my super naked.  But this Russian wanted to get in on the competition and so started asking me about my bowel movements/toilet adventures.  I can’t repeat his line of questioning because my head was spinning and the whole thing was a blur, but essentially he wanted to know if I was regularly depositing brown babies into the plumbing system or if I counted among my hobbies "Flushing beach towels down my toilet."

Things got really blurry after that point.  There was the super, trying to talk to the Russians, there were the Russians, working and talking to each other, and there was me, packing (I’m leaving after work today for a long weekend in Philly). 

I gathered my bags, wrote down my cell phone number and gave it to my super, and told him that I was going out of town, that I would be back Sunday, and that this needed to be fixed and cleaned up by then.  In a rare moment of clarity between the two of us, I distinctly remember him saying that the apartment would look exactly as it did before.  Twice.  He said that twice.  Unshowered and beaten, I left for work, hoping that everything would be resolved and cleaned up.

I guess I’ll find out Sunday night when I get back home.

I think this is a good weekend to get out of New York City for a while.