The Wise Plumbers
LAST December, my 28-year-old son, Joshua, was in a residential treatment center, after battling alcoholism on his own for two years. Whenever "I'll Be Home for Christmas," played, I had to get to some place private quickly, to struggle with my despair alone.
Joshua died in July of an accidental overdose, and here are the holidays again. Some people can quietly vent their grief in public; I shake and keen. While I am well supported by both my friends and his, I am single, my parents died years ago and, like my late son, I was an only child. This year, the upbeat "All I Want for Christmas Is You" is guaranteed to flatten me wherever I am.
The carols started early this year: Barack Obama's victory in November made the city uncharacteristically cheerful. A 55-year-old bohemian holdout, I assumed the all-black uniform of my adopted home in the East Village: 300 rent-stabilized square feet of railroad apartment with the tub next to the kitchen sink and the bathroom in the hall. Bright colors, unbridled earnestness, tinsel, shininess in general and Christmas music in particular all rankle my inner New Yorker, even in this otherwise hopeful time. My family's old quip "Other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" comes to mind.
Like many Manhattanites, my son and I moved here from somewhere else. And to help me get through this particular season, a friend from our little New Hampshire hometown recorded three CDs — everything from the traditional "I Saw Three Ships" to the goofball "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" to something even sillier about Grandma being on the rooftop with reindeer. "How sweet! What a rube," I thought when the package arrived.
Then, as though the whole apartment were crying with me, the plumbing started to break. When the woman downstairs noticed water dripping onto her stove every time I took a bath, I wanted to just opt out of this holiday entirely. The pipes under my kitchen sink went next, having been precariously balanced on a brick since I started subletting eight years ago.
My place has the last hallway bathroom in the building, maybe in several blocks. It always feels a little like using an outhouse, but because the rent is affordable, the tradeoff seems fair. I showered at the gym and dumped the dishwater in the toilet down the hall to avoid the kitchen sink's corroded pipes.
In my native New England, pipes always freeze, and plumbers are like rock stars. You get used to periods of hauling water. In the city, it just seemed wrong. I lived in fear of running into one of the building's yuppies as I headed down the hall with a brimming basin in my hands.
Then the toilet stopped flushing, or, rather, could be flushed only by pouring gallons of water from a strategically chosen height (I knew how to do this from 20 years of country living).
Jack, the super, started avoiding me, shrugging when I asked for help. A frustrated, existential musician, he shuddered when you said, "Good morning." The woman I sublet from said she used to paste affirmations from self-actualization classes all over the walls but took them down before he came to fix anything. Jack is the last person you want around when you listen to Christmas music.
One night around 8, missing my son, discouraged by the plumbing, I played the CDs. Slowly, I started humming and cleaning and wondering where I'd put the wrapping paper last year. I heard a knock and opened the door to the super, flanked by a young guy with lots of tools and an older man. "Plumbers," Jack muttered, backing away from the tinkling music like Dracula shielding himself from dawn's light. "This is Juan. This is Country."
I could have asked what took them so long, or sat fitfully in the living room while they worked, but against my will that little bit of music from home had warmed me up.
I told Jack that he was my hero and the plumbers my Christmas miracle. I think I even saw Jack smile. I turned up the volume while the plumbers scattered their tools and splayed themselves out under the tub. I had to pick my way through their legs to go about my business. It felt awkwardly intimate, but they didn't care. They were singing.
"I love this song; we sing this in church," Juan said when "The Little Drummer Boy" came on.
"This music is off the hook," I heard Country say to the Beach Boys' "Little St. Nick." His voice sounded echoey, as if he were talking through a pipe.
WHEN they had fixed the tub, the sink and the toilet, I poured them water from the Brita in my empty fridge while Country swept the floor and sang "Silent Night."
"You really started our season right," Juan crowed, waving to me from the stairs, like a character in some urban Currier & Ives print.
I could hear them harmonizing all the way down five flights. I don't think they even work together normally; they were just subcontractors thrown together, connected briefly by music and the little last-minute heroics of doing a much needed job for a stranger.
I am learning that people usually preface their condolences with "Of course, nothing helps right now." But that is not my experience. Nothing can bring Joshua back; yet everything kind, everything beautiful or useful or funny or poignant helps, offering a resonant sense of who he was, his fullness, his Joshness. Suddenly, even caroling is starting to help, even those songs that make me cry.
After the men left, I felt like Scrooge in the old Alastair Sim version of the Dickens classic, waltzing his terrified cleaning woman round the hall, relieved and grateful, crowing, "I haven't missed it!" I took a bath by candlelight that night (the kitchen light doesn't work anymore) and played the music full blast. This hopeful/horrible year at least, Christmas, I'm in.