angst that's not at all existential

“I can feel your pain,” she tells me. “It’s like waiting for a package to be delivered.”

The liar. Waiting all day for a plumber to come extract you from an apartmental emergency is nothing like waiting for someone to deliver a package to you; and at least with UPS, if you miss them the first time, there’s always a second chance.

She apologizes, again, the insincerity oozing out of her voice. She just doesn’t want to pay her guy overtime, I think, even though he deserves it. Meanwhile, a fountain of black gunk erupts from my kitchen sink when I try to use the garbage disposal (which I've stopped trying to do, after the first time it happened); then the black ooze leaks from the pipes underneath, seeping in a slow treacherous line across my freshly mopped floor.

And my toilet needs replacing.

The toilet has needed replacing for a while. It doesn’t really flush anymore. Or it sort of flushes, occasionally, a few times a day. The rest of the time it just acts senile and frail, like a patient in the late stages of Alzheimer’s: it doesn’t recognize it’s own handle, or fill tank, or water supply, or anything really.

“What model is it?” she had asked me over the phone yesterday when I first called about the sink.

“I don’t know.”

“Under the lid of the tank there should be numbers.”

“All it says is 1953.”

Which makes this particular toilet older than me, old enough, in fact, to have been a single unwed teenage mother of me. Thank goodness at least that didn’t happen.

“I assume its white,” she said. “Is that one white?”

“No it’s pink.” A 1950s rosy pink, the color of nostalgia and some of the decaying tile work next to my bath tub.

“Well, should we get white one to replace it? Do you think your landlady would agree? Or…what colors are your bathroom? What color do you think the new one should be?”

“I don’t care. I just want one that works. White is fine." There's white in the bathroom. And pink and green and blue and beige: a whole rainbow of colors and styles, an element from nearly every decade, including the giant 70s mirror with the way-too bright bulbs on top. It’s typical of a lot of the apartments around here; I looked at dozens just like this before deciding to rent this one over a decade ago. The thing was, I never thought I’d actually stay here this long. Particularly not after my very first night here when the police were pounding on my upstairs neighbor’s door at 3 AM, just waiting to haul away her abusive boyfriend whose drunken epithets echoed off the concrete driveway for the whole building to hear. But that’s another story… (and she moved out before my one-year lease turned month-to-month).

“Well do you want round or oval shaped? What will match best.”

“I just want it to flush,” I told her. “Fully. You know, each time I press the handle it should flush. The rest really doesn’t matter.”

“But what does that one look like?”

“I can send you a digital photo if you’d like.”

“No, that won’t be necessary,” she said. “I’m sending my guy to look at it first thing.”

What she didn’t tell me was that was all she was going to instruct him to do: look at it. He came into my apartment and I directed him to the kitchen first. “Yeah, looks bad,” he said. He went to the bathroom and glanced at the toilet.

“An antique,” I said.

He nodded. “Oh yeah.”

Then he left. Door shut, ignition started, sound of his van backing out onto the street and driving away.

He promised to be back in “two, maybe three,” hours with a new toilet and a snake for the sink. That was seven hours ago.

“I’m sorry,” she says again. “But he got tied up on another job and now there’s Friday traffic and…” she takes a deep breath. I can hear the lie coming, the pathetic attempt at a Bill Clinton. “How about 8:30 tomorrow morning? You know, I really do feel your pain."

No she doesn't. Not at all. Because she doesn't really have to: I’m just a long-standing rent-controlled tenant, not the landlady who pays her account.