“You hef wire heng-er, Jenny?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Heng-er. Wire heng-er, from closet so I can take apart?”
And thus began my 48-hour adventure in plumbing.
It was New Year’s Day 2006 and I had been waiting two weeks for my landlord to send over a plumber to fix my clogged bathtub and leaky toilet. I was less than thrilled when he finally sent someone over on the day I was planning to get to work on my New Year’s resolutions, which involved spending more quality time focused on lounging around my apartment in pajamas while eating clementines and drinking scotch.
It didn’t instill me with a great sense of confidence that the building handyman, Anton, and his helper Stash began their repairs by jamming a straightened wire hanger down my bathtub drain, but I was relieved that someone was tending to it, as I had grown weary of standing in four inches of water after each shower.
Anton – Tony – is the handsome fifty-something Polish man who takes care of my building. From the moment he walked through the door, my house smelled of a heady mix of aftershave, tobacco and onion.
His assistant speaks very little English and has a walrusy mustache that covers most of his mouth. The aptly named Stash has two fingers missing on his left hand, which doesn’t surprise me since last summer I saw him on a ladder outside my window, wielding a running chainsaw in one hand and steadying himself on the branch of a mulberry tree with the other. With each crack of a fallen branch, I readied the phone, wishing I knew how to say tourniquet in Polish.
Tony seemed to be there primarily to oversee Stash’s work, so while Stash was pulling hair from my drain, Tony and I chatted a bit. He said my name often as we spoke.
“How long you lived here, Jenny?”
“About three years.”
“Three years? And who was here before?”
“Uh… it was a young couple. The husband was-“
“The architect, yeah right. I remember. With wife who was teacher.”
“I think so – I never met them.”
He looked around my apartment, at the ceiling and the walls, and then noticed the photographs in the dining room.
“These your parents, Jenny?”
“Grandparents. They’re my mother’s parents.”
“Where are they coming from?”
I oversimplify: “He’s Italian, she’s German.”
“I think she look like Ingrid Bergman, with the hair like that and that face.”
My mother’s parents look like movie stars, both of them. Her mother was in a milk ad, I remember my mom once telling me.
“So Jenny, what do you say you are?”
“I say I’m Italian and German, although I mostly like to tell people I’m Italian. Sounds more exotic.”
I smiled, and he laughed.
“I know this girl who father Polish and mother Italian, and she say she hef and hef. I say, ‘Which hef Polish?’”
Tony moved his square, open hand around his face and said, “She say, ‘This part.’ I say, ‘Which hef Italian?’ and she say, ‘The rest.’ Is funny, what she said.”
He smiled, and I laughed.
Stash yelled something in Polish, and Tony excused himself and went into the bathroom. As I listened to them speak, I was reminded of a friend of mine whose grandparents were from Poland. She said that whenever she would hear her grandparents talk, it sounded like, “Shleeba shlaaba” to her. This stuck with me, apparently, because while I sat patiently in the living room watching Ellen, I could overhear their conversations from the bathroom, and it sounded like:
“Shleeba shlaaba shleeba shlaaba gasket?”
“Shleeba shlaaba shleeba shlaaba Home Depot.”
“Shleeba shlaaba shleeba shlaaba New Years?”
“SHLEEBA SHLAABA SHLEEBA SHLAABA BUCKET!!”
It was at this point that I saw a blur of denim overalls rush into my kitchen and back to the bathroom. I got up to see what was going on and found Stash on his knees holding a bucket under the pipe coming out of the toilet to catch all the water that was gushing out. Tony was pushing a tiny rag around the floor with his foot to mop up the lagoon that had collected on the tiles. I gave him an old towel to use instead and asked if everything was all right.
“I am calling other friend – Marius – to come help. He will bring new part for toilet. This first time I tried to fix problem like this.”
I found that to be an unnecessary clarification.
About half an hour later, Marius arrived. He was a youngish, somewhat shy Polish man carrying a large red toolbox.
“You were expecting me, right?”
“Yes – they’re in the bathroom.”
After another hour of clinking and clanking, flushing and snaking, and what sounded possibly like swearing, I thought about offering them a drink. At this point, I couldn’t imagine I could impair their abilities, and I was craving a beer. It was also the only word I knew in Polish – piwa – although I don’t remember why I knew that. I decided against it and opened up a Diet Coke instead.
Another hour passed and I heard the trio packing up. Finally, my house would be returned to me.
Tony got a serious look on his face and told me that they still needed one more part for the toilet, so Marius would need to return tomorrow morning.
Marius asked for my phone number and said, “Until tomorrow, you should use bucket.”
“Excuse me?”
“Bucket. Toilet still leaking when flushed, so you should use buck-“
Tony cut him off at this point, “Don’t listen to him, Jenny. You can use toilet. It still leaks, but for two, three times you gonna flush it by tomorrow, should be fine.”
I wasn’t comfortable with the fact that Tony was calculating my bathroom needs on an hourly basis, but appreciated that he wasn’t suggesting I relieve myself in a bucket for the next 24 hours.
After they all left, I had to know – what would happen when I flushed the toilet? I grabbed a towel just in case, then carefully pushed down the handle on my Victorian era toilet. At the base where pipe meets porcelain, a virtual typhoon of water came rushing out, most of which fortunately shot back down into the bowl. A less than ideal setup, to be sure, but many steps above the makeshift outhouse that Marius had suggested.
By the time I got home from work the next day, Marius had come and gone, leaving black fingerprints all over my sink and a ring of dark amber caulk around the pipe on my toilet. A crude solution, but a solution all the same.
So today, after standing in two inches of still water during my morning shower, I thought about Tony and Stash and Marius. I pulled out my cell phone and scrolled down to Tony’s number. My thumb hovered over the “talk” button for a few seconds before I came to my senses, snapped the phone shut and went to look for a wire hanger.

Filed under: General on December 6th, 2007