Art by Kate Miller
If I had known I would meet my new guru today, I probably would have tried a little more. I would have worn better, more uncomfortable clothes when I answered the door. I would have left my bass out lying around. Not the xylophone, though. No, some things about yourself you want to be discovered. Sure, I hadn’t learned to play these instruments, but damn, they add a vibe to a room. Instead, when I answered the door to meet my guru, I was dressed like some colonizer in my khakis and t-shirt. He didn’t look like the traditional guru. His large, gruff frame was neither fat nor muscular, just a square-shaped mass of humanity. I might have even mouthed “boomer” to myself as he passed me.
I had called him because my toilet wouldn’t flush, and, now, standing in the basement with him, I saw the first flash of this man’s brilliance. He was staring at a pipe running up to the first-floor bathroom. “Plugged or not, you have a crack in this main out pipe.”
“I tried to see, but I couldn’t tell….” I trailed off.
“Sometimes to see, you have to look,” he replied, still staring up at the pipe. My jaw almost hit the floor. The message was so simple yet, so powerful. You could put that phrase on a t-shirt and make a zillion goddamn dollars.
“Do you have any merch?” I asked him. He reached into his front pocket and shoved a pen branded with his company’s logo into my hand.
“That’s a start,” I thought to myself.
“Hey, you aren’t going to wash those down the sink, are you?” he asked, staring at the coffee grounds in the French press that sat on my counter.
“Oh, lord no. I wouldn’t think of it,” I lied.
“It’s hard to make the right choices,” he said, already turning away from me.
I thought about the collections agency that had been calling me every other hour of every day. I didn’t take care of that outrageous credit card bill properly. I had tried just flushing it down the sink instead of putting on dish-washing gloves, scooping out the grounds, and putting them in the metaphorical garbage. As I poured the grounds down the sink, I told myself that, from now on, I would change.
“Don’t question the good things,” he uttered after smashing out a century-old section of cast iron poop pipe in one hit. Goddamnit. If you put that quote over a stock image of a camping family, you could get ten million likes. The man was an inspirational quote machine.
When it became clear that his underling wasn’t going to show up for a day of hard manual labour, I volunteered myself. Looking over my sad physique, the plumber sighed.
“Being weak is a choice,” he muttered under his breath. Imagine that over the picture of a lion with a fabulous mane. I was blown away. I excused myself, telling him I had to use the “piss bucket” that was standing in for the toilet that day, but I was too excited to urinate. Instead, I stood beside the bucket, my phone in my hand, and started work on an Instagram page.
I settled on the handle “A Plumber’s Life.” My first choice, “The Pontificating Plumber,” was too long to use as a handle. I put his various quotes from the day in bright white font over the top of images I felt were profound. The minimalism trend has become essential for people like me who don’t really want to learn how to do anything properly but still wish to thrive.
He was on his knees, the length of his arm shoved down an exposed pipe. He set out on this gristly mission after spotting something with his flashlight.
“Of all the fuckin’ things,” he muttered as the pipe slipped past his elbow. That was one of the weaker quotes from the day, but I’m sure I could massage it into something useful. The vibes felt right, and the excitement rippling through my body caused my hands to shake as I reached into my pocket and pulled out my iPhone. I leaned down and showed him the account.
“I…made this…for you. Well, uh, actually for us. I thought we could go in on a…venture of sorts.”
He looked at the phone for a second while I scrolled through some of the images I had posted, but he quickly went back to his business with the pipe.
“Oh, I already have an Instagram account. The Pointless Plumber.”
My heart sank as my thumbs quickly navigated the search feature, and I found his page. Six thousand followers. That was more than any of my failed ventures combined and tripled. A cursory scroll through the content showed poorly cropped re-posts of cartoons where men complained about their wives and ancient memes that had been reconstituted to demand that Hilary be put in jail.
“There it is,” my coverall-clad guru exclaimed, pulling a t-shirt out of the pipe. “Did you do this?”
I didn’t say anything, still embarrassed over the Instagram snafu. He unfurled the shirt. It was bright pink, emblazoned with the term “Yas Queen.” My eyes stung with tears. It was a relic from the brief period when I was screen printing t-shirts. The ink had bled through on the “N” and smeared up and to the right.
“Yas? Queef?” the plumber said to himself, every syllable sounding like a question. Ashamed of the botched attempt, I had flushed the t-shirt down the toilet. It hadn’t felt great at the time, and now it felt worse.
“I should have done things differently. I should have lived my life better. I should have…” I began to weep with the large shoulder-shaking muscle contortions of a person who knows they will never feel better, ever again. The large man, as hard as the cast iron shit tubes we’d been removing all day, offered only his words.
“Forgive your younger self. Believe in your current self. Create your future self.”
Goddammit. That was a good one.
