Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash

Call a Man

Because Ineptitude

brenda birenbaum
Published in
3 min readOct 8, 2023

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Record rainfall came down not for the first time in this urban arena, where the plebs are fighting each other instead of going up the marble steps to kill the landlords in their skybox, them that don’t have to worry about the rivers rushing down the pavement and the overflowing sewers inundating homes and shops with no flood insurance, ’cause like who can afford that, too, and all you can do is lie on the warm concrete under the heavy cloud cover as the first raindrops begin to fall and slit your throat with a box cutter your guy left behind, knowing the flood will wash away the blood, and you realize a little late that you shoulda done it in the woods and let the blood seep slowly into the mud like your clogged up sink that you can’t fix, and when you ask some dude, a neighbor or your brother, what to do about it, he says, “Call a man,” which is too much advice, so you just squeeze into the vanity cabinet, wondering how tall, beefy men that often do this sort of work fit in there, when you, who’s small by most standards, have got to fold over yourself to sit under the sink and use a tool you don’t know the name of that you dug out from his abandoned toolbox, and you go ahead and unscrew the nuts, or whatever those rings that hold the P trap in place are called, after you took out the pivot rod of the pop-up drain stopper but lost a plastic ring, which could be a washer or a gasket, though you really can’t tell the difference like with other parts whose names you learned on youtube, and you don’t notice you lost the thing until it floats back up when you flush the toilet after you poured in the gucky water from the bucket under the sink, and you don’t know if you accidentally dropped other parts into the bucket, and you have to watch more youtubes to figure out if the washer-gasket thingy goes in front or behind the ball of the pivot rod, but at least you’re able to put the drain stopper back together so it no longer leaks, and you open the faucet’s floodgates or maybe your tears but the clogginess stays, so now you gotta go out and get an auger-something or whatever that tool is called, and unscrew the impossible nuts of the P trap again, and unscrew the back piece, too, and stick that auger thingy into the wall and twirl it around and hope that this would do the trick like it does for everyone on youtube and you won’t have to shell out hundreds of dollars for a plumber to come in and fix the thing you can never fix, just so you can get a moment of peace to sprawl on the muddy ground and slit your throat

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