The Great Toilet Flood

            The toilet was backed up on Tuesday morning but I didn’t have time to plunge it because I had to leave for work early. After arriving at OCADU, as I was climbing the stairs to the fourth floor of the Village by the Grange campus, my phone started ringing. I didn’t bother to answer it on the stairs, but once I was on the level I took the call. It was my landlord telling me that water was leaking from my apartment down into the donut shop. I told him the toilet was plugged but I hadn’t flushed it. I also let him know that I could not come home until the afternoon. He has a key but he said he was in London. Later it occurred to me that I did pee before leaving for work and out of habit I flushed the toilet without seeing if it was overflowing. I couldn’t imagine a toilet continuously overflowing like a tub though so I figured it would have probably stopped already. Throughout my time at work though, from time to time I was dreading what kind of a mess I would find in my bathroom when I got home.

            The morning class for which I worked was first year when all the classes tend to try to give an overall sampling of the various aspects of art that students can choose to branch into in subsequent years.

            The instructor was Francisco Granados, a flamboyant man in a bright red toque. He had me start with a full 20 minutes of 30 second poses, then a set of 1 and 2 minute gestures, followed by four 5 minute poses and a 15 minute pose. Then he had me reverse the order and do the fives, the twos and ones and the 30-second poses again. It was a workout.

            During the break he asked his students to look up the word “palindrome”. I had actually forgotten that it’s a word or phrase that reads the same way forwards and backwards. Of course the point was that my poses for that class combined to make a palindrome.

            Immediately after Francisco’s class I had to pack up and head across the street to the main building and work upstairs at the top of the pencil box for Kevin Compuesto. He had the stage set up for a two-model pose, but the female model would come next week. He had two mannequin legs sitting in a chair with a drapery over them to indicate where the other model would be posing and I was supposed to sit on the stage and interact with her in some way. He’d put a few props at the front of the stage to suggest that the absent model would be some kind of worshipped being and so I sat facing her with one hand on the arm of her “throne”. It was a difficult pose because both of my knees were bent and they got pretty stiff by the end of the day.

            I was feeling a bit sleepy and so on a five-minute break I laid down on the stage to doze a bit. Kevin had to come over and poke me when I actually fell asleep for two minutes past my break. During the long break I got enough rest to continue to the end.

            I was glad to be on my bike afterwards and moving my knees. I stopped on my way home at the Bank of Montreal on Queen Street, east of Bathurst, because I was low on grocery money. The ATM in that bank sometimes rejects my card and I have to try again.

            The following day I would be entering the second transition out of my annual fast, as I would start eating vegetable protein, so I bought some soy milk, a couple of tubs of spicy hummus and a plastic jar of tahini. I got the last two items because I thought they might go well with some falafel that I had in the freezer. All of the tahini containers were greasy from sesame oil that was leaking out from under the cover. I picked the least slippery one.

            When I got home only the bathroom floor mat was soaked but the floor was dry. The biggest surprise was that the toilet was unplugged. I figured that the landlord must have let himself in and cleared the block. But that evening he knocked on my door and told me he’d just gotten into town. To explain how the toilet had cleared itself he suggested that the weight of the water had finally just pushed a hole through the blockage. He said there was still water dripping down in the donut shop but he couldn’t figure out why. He asked me to watch when I flush next time. He’s been a lot calmer since his stomach exploded a couple of years ago.

            The second season of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour started off with a bang in the story about the mental patients taking over the asylum, but the next three stories have been below par. The one that night was about a bus driver nicknamed “Driver” who stops for a beer at one of his old haunts and runs into his trashy-sexy ex-girlfriend, Betty Rose, who hasn’t gotten over him and continues to insist that they were made for each other. He had gone away to Korea though and brought back a bride named Mickie. He leaves the bar, but instead of going home, stops to sit at a spot by the lake where he used to meet Betty Rose. Betty Rose finds him there and once again pushed him to come back to her. She threatens to tell Mickie about his past with her and he strangles her to death. The next night, before Driver comes home, Mickie is visited by the sheriff, who tells her about the death of Betty Rose, including the fact that the killer tore a button from Betty’s coat. Mickey finds a woman’s coat button in Driver’s coat. As she is preparing dinner, her dog Rags gets under foot and causes her to spill a large can of milk. She ventures down to the McLeod General store and on the way runs into Mrs. McLeod’s mute daughter, Ruby, who loves Mickie’s dog. They walk together to the store with Rags on a chain leash. When Driver gets home Mickey asks him about the button and he tells her that he found it on the ground on the way home. Mickie says he should turn it in to the police and so he says that he will go right away. Mickie and Rags come with him. On the way though, Driver decides that it would be less incriminating for him if he just leaves the button for the police to find. Mickie is suspicious and based on the way he answers her questions, she figures out that Driver is the killer. She says she never wants him to touch her again and so he strangles her too. Driver tells the police at the store that Mickey didn’t come home after going out to get the milk. Since he is not a suspect he is told to go home. He pulls out Rags’s chain and tells him to come, but Ruby, who communicates with a blackboard, claps her hands to draw attention to her board and writes that Mickey had the chain with her when she came for milk, so Driver must be the killer.

            Mickie certainly didn’t look Korean and in fact she barely looked Asian at all, but it turns out that she was played by Pilar Seurat, who was a Filipina actress who got a fair amount of work in the 60s in both television and film.