The Curious Incident of the Shower in the Basement

Part 2

At the time that I was growing up, having 1.5 bathrooms in a household of 8 people did not seem that strange.  To be honest, it was not unusual in our house to see 2 or 3 boys crowded around the toilet going #1 all at the same time.  And it was just as common for several of the youngest ones to use the same tub of water for our Saturday night baths, each one adding some Mr. Bubble and some fresh hot water before taking their turn.

Mr. Bubble

The half bath at the end of the hallway was reserved for my mom, my sister, and the occasional emergency when you just couldn't hold it until the big bathroom was available.  To this day, I've used "Mom's bathroom" less than a dozen times in my life.  The logjam on bath night was undoubtedly helped out by the shower in the basement.  It was located in a particularly dark corner of the basement, sandwiched between Dad's workshop and the sump pump hole.  Everything about that part of the basement screamed "No Little Kids Allowed."

The shower in the basement.

So, until I was a big kid, I was stuck using the little bathtub in the "big" bathroom.  Every Saturday night before going to church.  Or maybe mid-week if I had a particularly dusty baseball game, or if I walked barefoot on the oil roads on my way downtown to buy candy at the Eisner.

I'm not sure what is stranger about this picture. The fact that my mom would take a

random picture of me sitting in the bathtub, or the fact that I was wearing my glasses.

I continued using the bath tub without incident, until one day, without any fanfare, Mom sent me downstairs to use the shower instead. And she did so with only two directives:  Don't use all the hot water, and don't waste the shampoo.

Part 3

The basement at our house was basically divided into four distinct areas.

1. The bedroom of my two oldest brothers

2. The laundry room

3. Dad's workshop (including the shower stall)

4. The rest of  the basement, which was basically one big play area

The "one big play area" was a kid's dream.  It was loaded with things to keep kids busy for hours.  Puzzles, games, a TV and, for many years, an awesome bumper pool table.

Me getting serious about pool, while my little brother looks to distract me by doing the chicken dance.

My dad, getting ready to school Danny and Donnie on the finer points of bumper pool.

It wasn't unusual for us to spend hours at a time in the basement, staying out of Mom's hair, coming upstairs only to eat or use the bathroom.  One particular day, back when only the oldest boys used the shower, my brother Donnie was taking his turn at not using all the hot water or wasting the shampoo.  While he did this, I played with Hot Wheels just outside of the workshop.  At some point, I rolled a car toward the shower stall, sending it under the wood paneling wall, and into the shower.  My brother, likely not amused, kicked it back out the same way it came in.  We repeated this a couple of times, until he lost interest and didn't send it back.  A couple of minutes later, we heard a large crash from the workshop, followed by my brother screaming in pain.  I don't remember who went into the workshop to check on him, but what they found was him bloodied and laying on the workshop floor.  To me, it was obvious what had happened:  He had stepped on the Hot Wheels car that I pushed in there, causing him to fall and somehow slice both of his ankles.  How he had managed to slice both of his ankles was not quite as clear to me at that time.  I didn't stick around to find out.  The thought of seeing any blood and the guilt of causing the tragedy sent me upstairs to hide in a closet.

As it turns out, he didn't slip on a Hot Wheels car.  In fact, he hadn't slipped at all.  You see, years before, Dad had installed a mirror in the shower stall, fixing it to the wall with a glue that apparently dissolves when subjected to a steamy shower.  The glue gave way and sent the mirror crashing to the ground.  When it shattered, pieces embedded themselves in Donnie's ankles.

Years later, when I got to be old enough to use the shower, I did so with the constant thought of the bloody incident that had occurred that day.  You would think that was the scariest thing that would ever happen in that shower.  

It wasn't.

Part 5

When my oldest brother Danny moved out of the house, freeing up a spot in the downstairs bedroom, I lobbied hard to take his place and join my brother Donnie down there.  I'm not sure how the decision was made, or if there was even any competition for the spot, but one Saturday evening, after getting home from church, I unceremoniously packed up my belongings and made the big move to the land of workshops, bumper pool tables and, by that time, Pong.

I didn't have much stuff to move downstairs.  I worried less about my clothes, and more about my baseball cards, my cassette player and my fish tank.  At that point in time, my fish tank was really nothing more than a small glass bowl with a guppy or two inside.  I always had dreams of having a bigger tank, with a bigger variety of fish, and I quickly realized that the move downstairs might just help make that happen.

One fishbowl turned into two. Two guppies turned into a few swordfish and a sucker fish.  Before long I had a couple of large aquariums and a huge variety of fish.  The home for all of this was a hollowed out old console TV.  The design allowed for bowls on the top and aquariums and supplies down below.

I quickly became bored with the "run of the mill" fish species and started adding newts, eels and crabs. In addition to the "store bought" stuff, I also stocked my aquariums with tadpoles and frogs that I would catch in the tadpole hole down by Miceli's house, past the baseball diamond.  To top it all off, I added a few baby crawdads that I pulled out of the Black Slough drainage ditch west of town.

The Tadpole Hole

The whole setup turned into an ecological survival of the fittest.  Newts would rest in the floating grasses and eat the guppies as they swam by.  Eels and sucker fish would clean up the rotting carcasses along the bottom of the tanks.  Tadpoles never lasted too long.  Instead, they acted more as a replenishable source of food for the crabs and crawdads.  It all become self-sustaining after a while. There was no reason for me to feed the guppies and minnows, because they wouldn't last long anyway. My only job became corralling the things that escaped with their lives by squeezing past the lid that covered the aquatic version of Thunderdome.

Thunderdome

The only downside to all of this was the smell.  I suppose no teenage boy's bedroom smells great, but this took it to a whole 'nother level.  I became used to it, but it couldn't help but be noticed by Mom every time that she came downstairs to do laundry.  Finally, at her urging, I decided to end my career as a marine biologist and get rid of all of it.  By that time, nature had taken its course and there wasn't much left:  a couple of newts and 4 crawdads that had grown pretty big feeding on all of the carnage.  Or was it 5?  I could've sworn there had been 5 of them at some point. 

Time marches on.  Donnie moved out.  The bumper pool table and the Pong were gone, replaced by a VIC-20 computer and cable television.  My weekly showers became more frequent as I started to actually care about how I smelled.  One night, many months later, I was taking a shower in the basement, probably using too much hot water, and too much shampoo.  At some point, I looked down and saw an over-sized crawdad, only slightly smaller than a lobster, claws raised, looking up at me.  Screams not heard since the dreaded Hot Wheels accident rang through the basement.

I can't imagine how that crawdad had spent the last 5-6 months of his life.  He likely drank water from the shower or the sump pump and, based on his size, fed on mice and late night snacks that might have been left alongside my bed.  I quickly dried off, got dressed and corralled the monster, turning him loose in the garden to fend for himself.  He had done a great job of that already so I'm sure he had no trouble there.

My zoo nowadays is limited to an overweight annoying cat.  Someday, the last of her 9 lives will be used up and I might consider getting a fish tank.  It will probably start with a few guppies but, before long, I'm sure I'll be riding my bike out to the Black Slough to see if I can find anything interesting to join them.