Unusual day. It began innocently enough last night when Consuela and Captain Jack Sparrow decided to pick up a few pounds of crawfish. They seemed happy with their purchase so I left them to it and turned in early.
This morning, as I was walking out the door with a load of laundry, I was met there by the carcasses of four crawfish which Captain Jack had nailed to a telephone poll presumably as a warning to any passing crustaceans who may harbor thoughts of challenging his authority in the future. I reflected on this for a moment and went on with my day. Laundry, a quick jog and a shower…. Oh did I tell you about the shower? This week we lost the ability to shut the water off in the tub. Once you’re done in there the cold water just keeps running. I figured out that this can be temporarily overcome by applying direct pressure to the knob. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get Consuela and Captain Jack to agree to take on this task in shifts. We devised a temporary solution involving a plunger propped between the knob and the soap holder and held in place by a towel which works fine but is a bitch to replace every time someone takes a shower.
So there I was this afternoon. It’s my day off. All of my errands are run. I’ve got the heads of impaled crawfish staring at my front door and a shower that could explode at any second. It’s definitely time to get out on the bicycle for a while. Naturally the three hours I spent riding around, drinking coffee, doing the crossword puzzle in Consuela’s bar were the two hours the a/c guy showed up to fix this problem and the plumbers came by to fix the shower. The good news is Captain Jack was in the house. The bad news is he was sleeping. I returned to find a “sorry we missed you” notice on the door from the a/c guy and the plumbers hard at work…. on the KITCHEN SINK. They had done a beautiful job too. We now have a brand new kitchen faucet. Everything works great there.. pretty much like it did before.
The plumbers had a little trouble adjusting when I had to tell them why Slumlord had actually dispatched them to begin with. Both of them are wiry, leather skinned, raspy voiced yats who have clearly aged beyond their years…. kind of how you might picture the Shut Up, Little Man guys. In fact, they even seemed to channel those guys as they descended into a short spat over which one of them was to blame for the mix-up. I was afraid they might even come to blows for a minute there. They recovered their composure, such as it was, and went to work on the bathroom while I watched the Kentucky Derby.
While the work was proceeding, Captain Jack finally emerged from his coma and eagerly asked me if I had seen his crawfish. I told him that I had and offered him my Vlad the Impaler comparison. This pleased him so much that he immediately ran out to show off his handiwork to the plumbers. The conversation went like this.
Captain Jack: “You see Jeff says it’s kind of a warning to all the other crawfish who might come up out the neighborhood to fuck with us.”
Inbred Leather-Skinned Cigarette-Scented Plumber: “What do you mean? Is ‘crawfish’ like code for niggers or something?”
Also, they didn’t finish fixing the bathroom. We may or may not see them again on Monday.
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