water, a history
4 December 2007
I have always had an unnatural, if not downright creepy, obsession with falling water.
When I was a child, during rainstorms I would take my mom’s car keys and escape from the house, so that I could sit in her car, alone, listening and watching the rain fall on the windows around me and the hood above. After my mom put the kibbosh on that – because, you know, it’s pretty fucking weird – I’d settle for sitting on our outdoor porch while it rained, in warmer weather smelling that "rain smell" – the oil rising from the asphalt in the street as the barometer drops just before a rainstorm in the city.
But this obsession was not limited to rain. Growing up, we only had one bathroom in our house, and many times when my dad would shower, I’d knock on the door and tell him that I needed to come in to go to the bathroom. From behind the shower curtain he’d shout for me to come in and I’d sit on the toilet, pretending to go to the bathroom, listening to the water hit the shower, breathing in the steam.
As I grew older, I stopped doing these things – because, you know, they’re pretty fucking weird – and my love for rain/falling water only manifested itself in constantly wishing for rain while I slept so it would tap-tap-tap on my window and/or air conditioner and taking extremely long showers. The next chapter in my love for falling water – and creepiness – would not be written until the day after my 21st birthday.
My 21st birthday fell on a Monday in the middle of July between my junior and senior years of college. I was living in a disaster of an apartment with some friends in Brighton, MA, an apartment from which we would be evicted four weeks later, working at the Boston College library dusting books and checking fantasy sports with my buddies Joe and Jon. On the day of my birthday, our boss, a wonderful Russian man named Michael, knew it was my 21st and so dismissed me, Joe and Jon at noon so that we could grab some beers.
It is customary to have 21 drinks on one’s 21st birthday, but I made it clear to all my friends that I was not going to do this. Instead, I made it my goal to have 42 beers – double the amount, but no shots or hard alcohol of any kind. Given a full day, I figured I had a shot at 42 beers, but didn’t stand a chance against 21 beers, shots and drinks.
The three of us spent the day on Harvard Avenue playing pool, before heading back to my apartment (I was maybe 12 beers in) to grab some dinner. That summer, I slept on a mattress that was so uncomfortable it was the equivalent of sleeping on 500 sets of keys every night, so Joe, whose best man I was this past April, considerately bought me a new mattress pad and egg crate for my bed (he probably got sick of me complaining every morning at about how poorly I slept and how much my back hurt) and gave it to me during our little mid-load break. After a dinner which I can only assume consisted of ramen or pasta, we were off to MaryAnn’s, the unofficial dive bar of BC that at the time offered $1 draft beers. Though attendance was sparse (it was a Monday and I am very unpopular), this is where the wheels quickly came off.
Suffice it to say, I did not reach my goal of 42 beers. Ten minutes after getting to MaryAnn’s, I was doing shots. Thirty minutes after I got to MaryAnn’s, I was doing shots with Tabasco sauce in them. Sometime between forty-five minutes and four hours (no recollection) after I got to MaryAnn’s, I was being led out the door by my arm.
The next thing I remember was waking up in my bed, which was thoroughly soaked with urine. The egg crate and mattress pad that Joe had gotten me for my birthday, that I had put on my bed only hours before, was now less an egg crate and mattress pad and more a sponge saturated with my urine. I’ve peed the bed a few times before while drunk, but this was exceptional. I think that I must have pissed the bed not once during the night, but several times, and never woke up once, spending the night rolling around in my own urine, occasionally adding another layer of pee during the night/morning.
My hangover, as you might imagine, was gargantuan. After cleaning myself up with a quick shower, I sat down in my living room alone, as all my roommates were at work (I didn’t make it in that day and didn’t call out sick; Joe and Jon explained the situation to our fortunately sympathetic boss Michael). I sat in a chair with a newly opened gallon of water and the chocolate cake that the girls who lived below us had baked me for my birthday (what sweethearts), and ate the whole fucking thing in one sitting. It wasn’t a giant birthday cake that you see at kids’ 5th birthday parties, but maybe an 8×8 square one, yellow cake with chocolate icing. And it was delicious.
The cake filled my belly with something aside from alcohol, but I was still feeling miserable. I took aspirin, but it didn’t work. I tried to sleep, but couldn’t because my head was pounding. I sat for a while on our shitty deck, but the July heat and the stench of the garbage pile below the deck made me wretch. Faced with no other alternatives, I chose the only option I could think of: the bathroom.
I had showered quickly when I woke up, but I was still in a haze and, you know, covered in urine. So it was not exactly relaxing. With nowhere else to go and no one home to disturb me, I headed back to the shower. I stripped down, turned the water on ice cold, and stepped in, away from the stream of water so as not to get wet by the icy water. I stood there, dry, the cold water bouncing off the floor of the tub and onto my feet, with the bathroom window next to me partially open, the summer air warming the chills that the water gave me. I grew tired and more than a bit dizzy standing there, so I sat down – not in the tub, which I shared with six other guys and so was covered with a fine layer of spooge, hair, and HPV, but on the ledge of the tub, and I put my head in my hands.
I sat there for over an hour and in that time, my condition greatly improved. Listening to the water, taking deep breaths, closing my eyes, half the time feeling chills for the water and the other half feeling blasts of the warm air from the window, I could almost feel the hangover leaving my body with each passing minute. Despite the unsanitary condition of the bathroom (seriously, HPV was everywhere), this act of "showering" was incomparably cleansing, restorative and relaxing. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the Fantasy Shower had just been born.
Since that day, I have spent a ridiculous and probably unhealthy amount of time in the shower. I continued to take Fantasy Showers (so named by my roommates because I was in a "world of fantasy" alone in the shower for an hour each time) to combat hangovers, and each time I emerged from one of these showers I felt better by leaps and bounds. When I moved out of that apartment and into our senior year dorms, I shared a bathroom with only one other person, my buddy Joe, of egg crate/mattress pad fame, and I kept our tub squeaky clean so that instead of sitting on the ledge during these Fantasy Showers I could actually sit in the tub, with the showerhead shooting at my feet and the water draining, leaving my body above my shins completely dry. Before long, the Fantasy Shower was no longer just for hangovers and soon I had a stereo in the bathroom and was listening to music and even reading books and doing homework in the shower.
(I told you it was creepy.)
Now, I still take Fantasy Showers. Every morning, I wake up at 8am and spend forty minutes in the shower, sitting down and reading. At night, I may hop in as well to do a little more reading (I edited most of the manuscript of my book in the shower). Many times, however, I won’t feel like getting into the tub and will turn the water on but will sit on the ledge of the tub or on the bathroom floor or on the toilet, just chilling and listening to the water, breathing in the steam from the hot water in the winter and getting chills from the cold water in the summer. It’s not uncommon for me to spend two hours a day in the bathroom with the shower running.
(I mean, you can’t say I didn’t tell you it was creepy.)
************
My buddy Brian, who I lived with for four of my six years here in NYC and is my go-to guy, my rock, my constant drinking buddy, is leaving NYC and moving to LA shortly after the New Year. This is a crushing development, both personally and socially, and one that I may not be able to recover from. (In the last two months, of three of my closest friends here in NYC, one is moving to LA, one I’m no longer speaking to, and one asked to be removed from my email list. Sheesh.) I’ll discuss this in greater detail later, but since Brian’s weekends in NYC are numbered, we (his friends) are making a conscious and deliberate effort to spend as much time with him as possible; we’re treating him like he’s a terminally ill veteran from whom we’re trying to record memories of the war before he kicks the bucket.
So on Friday night, my friend Brendan and I joined Brian for some beers after his work threw him a goodbye party. Brendan was extremely hungover from the previous night’s festivities, and I was feeling run-down from a busy work week that left me legitimately sick for the first time in awhile. But hey, Brian’s leaving, so we pulled it together and headed up to midtown to meet him for beers.
I consider myself someone who has a fairly high tolerance when it comes to alcohol (I don’t mean to brag), but there are some nights when after three or four beers, I am acutely aware that I’m much drunker than I should be. I don’t know if this is because I’m just "off" on these particular nights or if my liver is transported back in time to 1989, but it doesn’t matter. Friday night, after my third pint of Smithwick’s, I could tell that it was gonna be a rough one.
Though nothing eventful happened during the night – it turned into the three of us doing a pub crawl through the terrible bars of the 30′s and 40′s on the East Side, during which time I text messaged just about everyone in my phonebook – I got drunk. Bad drunk. "How did this happen?" drunk. Dropping my phone in the bar bathroom, spilling beer on myself, spitting and slurring while I talk drunk. Not my finest moment.
When the bars closed at 4am, we headed down to the LES to cap the night off with some pizza/beef patties/frankie and cheeses/chicken rolls from Rosario‘s, as Brian is trying to get his fill in before he leaves. Brian got his first and Brendan and I watched him literally run out of the pizza place and into a cab, without saying goodbye. Brendan lives in Hoboken and asked if he could crash at my place, which I agreed to.
By the time we got to my place, the food was almost gone. I don’t recall the specifics of eating, but in short order Brendan was passed out on my couch and the food had been destroyed with extreme prejudice. I knew that Saturday was going to be a big day – we had plans to drink all day long in Hoboken, capped off by my friend’s birthday party there – so I desparately didn’t want to be hungover. Even in my drunken state, I knew if I sat down on the couch or laid down in my bed I’d be passed out in no time. So in order to keep myself awake so that I could let the aspirin work and drink some water, I turned to my old friend: the shower.
My bathroom is very small. Standing in it, you can touch the toilet, sink and tub from the same spot without moving. When you open the door, before you is the sink, not two feet away; left of the sink is the toilet and to the right of the sink is the tub, all practically stacked on top of each other. On this night, I didn’t feel like stripping down and actually getting into the shower; I was so drunk that there was a greater than 60% chance that had I done that, I would have slipped and broken something in my genitals. So instead I turned the water on – nice and hot, since it was so cold out – and sat down on the bathroom floor with my back on the door, to let the shower and steam works its magic and help me prevent a hangover.
Several hours later, I was awoken by Brendan, now awake and wanting to take a piss. The sun was up and both me and the walls of the bathroom were soaked with condensation; my hair was matted to my head, my shirt was wet, and, still drunk, I had no idea where the fuck I was. Brendan was banging on the door, shaking it and thus my body, saying, "Dude, what the fuck are you doing in there?" (He told me later that in the seconds it took me to respond, he thought I was dead.) I had passed out on my bathroom floor, with the hot water running, for a little over three hours.
************
I am 28 years old. I have a successful career and a job title with the word "Senior" in it. For my second career, I travel back and forth to Los Angeles, where I stay for ten days a month, making me effectively bicoastal. I have a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, more or less in Soho, in which I live in alone. I have an office in this apartment, decked out no only with my cool Mac and all the proper accoutrements but also with five of my guitars hanging regally from the walls. I watch DVDs with my Hi-Def DVD player on my 52′ plasma television from the comfort of my new furniture. Jean-Georges Vongerichten is my favorite NYC restaurateur. I have a foreign cleaning lady. I shop at Dean and Deluca. I drink expensive bourbon. I am a Medallion SkyMiles member.
The point: Under no circumstances should I be waking up on my bathroom floor at 7 in the morning with the shower running. There is no excuse for this. This is not what people like me do. This is what heroin addicts do. The only reason I think I didn’t choke on the steam and die was that the bathroom window was cracked a little bit, letting in the cold air and preventing the bathroom from becoming a complete sauna. Dying, drunk and covered in sweat on my bathroom floor with my shower water running, would have been a most unglorious death, if only for the absence of a prostitute, a mound of drugs, or a small fire, or the fact that I was not wearing high heels at the time.
Or is it this: No matter what fancy stuff I surround myself with, no matter how much I spend on expensive food or drinks, and no matter how hard I pretend, I can not escape who I am; the college kid who peed himself several times in the middle of the night on his 21st birthday, the child who would hide in his mom’s car listening to the rain; or the guy who, this weekend, may choke to death on a beef patty on the cab ride up to the Rub ‘n’ Tug by MSG.
(I at least hope I make it into the Rub ‘n’ Tug before I kick the bucket. I know for a fact that they have a sauna there.)
When I was a child, during rainstorms I would take my mom’s car keys and escape from the house, so that I could sit in her car, alone, listening and watching the rain fall on the windows around me and the hood above. After my mom put the kibbosh on that – because, you know, it’s pretty fucking weird – I’d settle for sitting on our outdoor porch while it rained, in warmer weather smelling that "rain smell" – the oil rising from the asphalt in the street as the barometer drops just before a rainstorm in the city.
But this obsession was not limited to rain. Growing up, we only had one bathroom in our house, and many times when my dad would shower, I’d knock on the door and tell him that I needed to come in to go to the bathroom. From behind the shower curtain he’d shout for me to come in and I’d sit on the toilet, pretending to go to the bathroom, listening to the water hit the shower, breathing in the steam.
As I grew older, I stopped doing these things – because, you know, they’re pretty fucking weird – and my love for rain/falling water only manifested itself in constantly wishing for rain while I slept so it would tap-tap-tap on my window and/or air conditioner and taking extremely long showers. The next chapter in my love for falling water – and creepiness – would not be written until the day after my 21st birthday.
My 21st birthday fell on a Monday in the middle of July between my junior and senior years of college. I was living in a disaster of an apartment with some friends in Brighton, MA, an apartment from which we would be evicted four weeks later, working at the Boston College library dusting books and checking fantasy sports with my buddies Joe and Jon. On the day of my birthday, our boss, a wonderful Russian man named Michael, knew it was my 21st and so dismissed me, Joe and Jon at noon so that we could grab some beers.
It is customary to have 21 drinks on one’s 21st birthday, but I made it clear to all my friends that I was not going to do this. Instead, I made it my goal to have 42 beers – double the amount, but no shots or hard alcohol of any kind. Given a full day, I figured I had a shot at 42 beers, but didn’t stand a chance against 21 beers, shots and drinks.
The three of us spent the day on Harvard Avenue playing pool, before heading back to my apartment (I was maybe 12 beers in) to grab some dinner. That summer, I slept on a mattress that was so uncomfortable it was the equivalent of sleeping on 500 sets of keys every night, so Joe, whose best man I was this past April, considerately bought me a new mattress pad and egg crate for my bed (he probably got sick of me complaining every morning at about how poorly I slept and how much my back hurt) and gave it to me during our little mid-load break. After a dinner which I can only assume consisted of ramen or pasta, we were off to MaryAnn’s, the unofficial dive bar of BC that at the time offered $1 draft beers. Though attendance was sparse (it was a Monday and I am very unpopular), this is where the wheels quickly came off.
Suffice it to say, I did not reach my goal of 42 beers. Ten minutes after getting to MaryAnn’s, I was doing shots. Thirty minutes after I got to MaryAnn’s, I was doing shots with Tabasco sauce in them. Sometime between forty-five minutes and four hours (no recollection) after I got to MaryAnn’s, I was being led out the door by my arm.
The next thing I remember was waking up in my bed, which was thoroughly soaked with urine. The egg crate and mattress pad that Joe had gotten me for my birthday, that I had put on my bed only hours before, was now less an egg crate and mattress pad and more a sponge saturated with my urine. I’ve peed the bed a few times before while drunk, but this was exceptional. I think that I must have pissed the bed not once during the night, but several times, and never woke up once, spending the night rolling around in my own urine, occasionally adding another layer of pee during the night/morning.
My hangover, as you might imagine, was gargantuan. After cleaning myself up with a quick shower, I sat down in my living room alone, as all my roommates were at work (I didn’t make it in that day and didn’t call out sick; Joe and Jon explained the situation to our fortunately sympathetic boss Michael). I sat in a chair with a newly opened gallon of water and the chocolate cake that the girls who lived below us had baked me for my birthday (what sweethearts), and ate the whole fucking thing in one sitting. It wasn’t a giant birthday cake that you see at kids’ 5th birthday parties, but maybe an 8×8 square one, yellow cake with chocolate icing. And it was delicious.
The cake filled my belly with something aside from alcohol, but I was still feeling miserable. I took aspirin, but it didn’t work. I tried to sleep, but couldn’t because my head was pounding. I sat for a while on our shitty deck, but the July heat and the stench of the garbage pile below the deck made me wretch. Faced with no other alternatives, I chose the only option I could think of: the bathroom.
I had showered quickly when I woke up, but I was still in a haze and, you know, covered in urine. So it was not exactly relaxing. With nowhere else to go and no one home to disturb me, I headed back to the shower. I stripped down, turned the water on ice cold, and stepped in, away from the stream of water so as not to get wet by the icy water. I stood there, dry, the cold water bouncing off the floor of the tub and onto my feet, with the bathroom window next to me partially open, the summer air warming the chills that the water gave me. I grew tired and more than a bit dizzy standing there, so I sat down – not in the tub, which I shared with six other guys and so was covered with a fine layer of spooge, hair, and HPV, but on the ledge of the tub, and I put my head in my hands.
I sat there for over an hour and in that time, my condition greatly improved. Listening to the water, taking deep breaths, closing my eyes, half the time feeling chills for the water and the other half feeling blasts of the warm air from the window, I could almost feel the hangover leaving my body with each passing minute. Despite the unsanitary condition of the bathroom (seriously, HPV was everywhere), this act of "showering" was incomparably cleansing, restorative and relaxing. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the Fantasy Shower had just been born.
Since that day, I have spent a ridiculous and probably unhealthy amount of time in the shower. I continued to take Fantasy Showers (so named by my roommates because I was in a "world of fantasy" alone in the shower for an hour each time) to combat hangovers, and each time I emerged from one of these showers I felt better by leaps and bounds. When I moved out of that apartment and into our senior year dorms, I shared a bathroom with only one other person, my buddy Joe, of egg crate/mattress pad fame, and I kept our tub squeaky clean so that instead of sitting on the ledge during these Fantasy Showers I could actually sit in the tub, with the showerhead shooting at my feet and the water draining, leaving my body above my shins completely dry. Before long, the Fantasy Shower was no longer just for hangovers and soon I had a stereo in the bathroom and was listening to music and even reading books and doing homework in the shower.
(I told you it was creepy.)
Now, I still take Fantasy Showers. Every morning, I wake up at 8am and spend forty minutes in the shower, sitting down and reading. At night, I may hop in as well to do a little more reading (I edited most of the manuscript of my book in the shower). Many times, however, I won’t feel like getting into the tub and will turn the water on but will sit on the ledge of the tub or on the bathroom floor or on the toilet, just chilling and listening to the water, breathing in the steam from the hot water in the winter and getting chills from the cold water in the summer. It’s not uncommon for me to spend two hours a day in the bathroom with the shower running.
(I mean, you can’t say I didn’t tell you it was creepy.)
************
My buddy Brian, who I lived with for four of my six years here in NYC and is my go-to guy, my rock, my constant drinking buddy, is leaving NYC and moving to LA shortly after the New Year. This is a crushing development, both personally and socially, and one that I may not be able to recover from. (In the last two months, of three of my closest friends here in NYC, one is moving to LA, one I’m no longer speaking to, and one asked to be removed from my email list. Sheesh.) I’ll discuss this in greater detail later, but since Brian’s weekends in NYC are numbered, we (his friends) are making a conscious and deliberate effort to spend as much time with him as possible; we’re treating him like he’s a terminally ill veteran from whom we’re trying to record memories of the war before he kicks the bucket.
So on Friday night, my friend Brendan and I joined Brian for some beers after his work threw him a goodbye party. Brendan was extremely hungover from the previous night’s festivities, and I was feeling run-down from a busy work week that left me legitimately sick for the first time in awhile. But hey, Brian’s leaving, so we pulled it together and headed up to midtown to meet him for beers.
I consider myself someone who has a fairly high tolerance when it comes to alcohol (I don’t mean to brag), but there are some nights when after three or four beers, I am acutely aware that I’m much drunker than I should be. I don’t know if this is because I’m just "off" on these particular nights or if my liver is transported back in time to 1989, but it doesn’t matter. Friday night, after my third pint of Smithwick’s, I could tell that it was gonna be a rough one.
Though nothing eventful happened during the night – it turned into the three of us doing a pub crawl through the terrible bars of the 30′s and 40′s on the East Side, during which time I text messaged just about everyone in my phonebook – I got drunk. Bad drunk. "How did this happen?" drunk. Dropping my phone in the bar bathroom, spilling beer on myself, spitting and slurring while I talk drunk. Not my finest moment.
When the bars closed at 4am, we headed down to the LES to cap the night off with some pizza/beef patties/frankie and cheeses/chicken rolls from Rosario‘s, as Brian is trying to get his fill in before he leaves. Brian got his first and Brendan and I watched him literally run out of the pizza place and into a cab, without saying goodbye. Brendan lives in Hoboken and asked if he could crash at my place, which I agreed to.
By the time we got to my place, the food was almost gone. I don’t recall the specifics of eating, but in short order Brendan was passed out on my couch and the food had been destroyed with extreme prejudice. I knew that Saturday was going to be a big day – we had plans to drink all day long in Hoboken, capped off by my friend’s birthday party there – so I desparately didn’t want to be hungover. Even in my drunken state, I knew if I sat down on the couch or laid down in my bed I’d be passed out in no time. So in order to keep myself awake so that I could let the aspirin work and drink some water, I turned to my old friend: the shower.
My bathroom is very small. Standing in it, you can touch the toilet, sink and tub from the same spot without moving. When you open the door, before you is the sink, not two feet away; left of the sink is the toilet and to the right of the sink is the tub, all practically stacked on top of each other. On this night, I didn’t feel like stripping down and actually getting into the shower; I was so drunk that there was a greater than 60% chance that had I done that, I would have slipped and broken something in my genitals. So instead I turned the water on – nice and hot, since it was so cold out – and sat down on the bathroom floor with my back on the door, to let the shower and steam works its magic and help me prevent a hangover.
Several hours later, I was awoken by Brendan, now awake and wanting to take a piss. The sun was up and both me and the walls of the bathroom were soaked with condensation; my hair was matted to my head, my shirt was wet, and, still drunk, I had no idea where the fuck I was. Brendan was banging on the door, shaking it and thus my body, saying, "Dude, what the fuck are you doing in there?" (He told me later that in the seconds it took me to respond, he thought I was dead.) I had passed out on my bathroom floor, with the hot water running, for a little over three hours.
************
I am 28 years old. I have a successful career and a job title with the word "Senior" in it. For my second career, I travel back and forth to Los Angeles, where I stay for ten days a month, making me effectively bicoastal. I have a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, more or less in Soho, in which I live in alone. I have an office in this apartment, decked out no only with my cool Mac and all the proper accoutrements but also with five of my guitars hanging regally from the walls. I watch DVDs with my Hi-Def DVD player on my 52′ plasma television from the comfort of my new furniture. Jean-Georges Vongerichten is my favorite NYC restaurateur. I have a foreign cleaning lady. I shop at Dean and Deluca. I drink expensive bourbon. I am a Medallion SkyMiles member.
The point: Under no circumstances should I be waking up on my bathroom floor at 7 in the morning with the shower running. There is no excuse for this. This is not what people like me do. This is what heroin addicts do. The only reason I think I didn’t choke on the steam and die was that the bathroom window was cracked a little bit, letting in the cold air and preventing the bathroom from becoming a complete sauna. Dying, drunk and covered in sweat on my bathroom floor with my shower water running, would have been a most unglorious death, if only for the absence of a prostitute, a mound of drugs, or a small fire, or the fact that I was not wearing high heels at the time.
Or is it this: No matter what fancy stuff I surround myself with, no matter how much I spend on expensive food or drinks, and no matter how hard I pretend, I can not escape who I am; the college kid who peed himself several times in the middle of the night on his 21st birthday, the child who would hide in his mom’s car listening to the rain; or the guy who, this weekend, may choke to death on a beef patty on the cab ride up to the Rub ‘n’ Tug by MSG.
(I at least hope I make it into the Rub ‘n’ Tug before I kick the bucket. I know for a fact that they have a sauna there.)
