I still remember this character. It is hard to forget someone who is insanely quaint and this guy was. He appeared at my door with tools around his waist with protruding dirty teeth and a jungle mouth which made me convinced that no breath at all is better than such a foul bad breath. I for certain would have preferred dying than present myself with a smell certain animals use as a defense mechanism to ward off their predators.
But his clothes. Oh my God! What he was wearing was grossly dirty and distressed out of neglect. Nothing wrong if you shop for your wardrobe at Value Village, but the least one can do is to wear clean clothes. Sure this guy was a plumber but that did not give him a license to wear stuff which most likely had shit hanging over it. In fact this guy did not need clothes, if clothes are for the purpose of hiding your body as his was already covered with tattoos small and big. With disheveled hair, an unkempt beard curled at the ends with the weight of dirt and an expression on the face of someone gleeful of his deed of robbing a kid off his lunch money and with glasses never attended to since the last millennium, everything about him cried “Faux pas” and aloud.
He appeared as the bonafide poster boy for organizations like, let us say, STB: Starve the Barber; KTDC: Kill the Dry Cleaner; SAGD: Screw All Goddam Dentists; BTFT: Ban The Fucking Toothpaste and many other nefarious and esoteric cult-like fraternities including HIFA: Hygiene Is For Assholes.
Many technicians have come over and repaired different things in my house. For instance, the guy who came last month to fix my ailing fridge or the guy who doctored my computer back from its blue death. Sure they were not the people you would like to invite on your birthday but they seemed to be there to do their work and disappear. You left them alone and let them do their business and, work done, you bid them adieu.
But this Mr. Plumber was different. Awfully gregarious, over friendly and abrasively aggressive, he was a guy with certified halitosis and facial hair, a playground for exotic bacteria donated to the cause of pathogens. This SOB should have rather been in some Lab than here, volunteering his beard for the discovery of new microorganisms.
He was a chatterbox and took on an in your face attitude with all seriousness and joy. I have grimaced more on the day I met him than ever in my life, trying all along to get my arm between me and his face by pretending that I was rubbing my scratchy nose, which really was not scratchy at all.
My cardinal sin, I suppose, was being a nice guy to comment something like “Boy you have a lot of tattoos.” Normally I would not say that but I thought I had to say something to keep his barrage of verbosity and bad air directed at my face and meant to offend my nose, probably even burning the hair in my nostrils.
“Hey”, he said excitedly, “This I got in Alberta.”
Before the fastest cowboy from the Wild West could have drawn his gun, this chap slid his bulky trousers, which slipped easily down his flat bum and presented a bleak, pale and crinkled ass. Tattooed on one bum was DI, and on the other ANNE.
“I see.” I heard my faint voice say.
He had turned around now. He asked earnestly, “Did you get it?”
“Well…”
“You see I had three girlfriends one I called Di and the other Anne and the third one Dianne. All at the frigging same time, you know what I mean…eh? ”
Of course I did not, but uttered a hastily put together “yeah I know.”
He was looking at me as if I was some moron who could not still understand how clever he was.
He had to obviously elaborate. “When Di was there she would get to see only one bum and Anne only the other and of course Dianne was allowed both. Each one was fooled into thinking she was the only one in my life.”
He was laughing— huffing and puffing smelly laughter in the environment.
“Now all three bitches are out of my life,” he said with earnest grief mixed with a sigh of relief.
“It is hard to erase these friggin’ tattoos otherwise I could have got CONSTANTINE’s name there now,” he said pointing at his decrepit pair of bums.
Deep down I was so happy for Constantine knowing Mr. Plumber does not parade his gross bums for her spectacle. That is until he dug into his pocket and showed me a picture which on first blush I thought was his dog but it turned out it was Constantine.
“See here she is,” he said, coming still closer to me showing her picture so as not to deprive me of the pleasure of witnessing what was his beautiful Goddess.
He was breathing out destructive air as he stood with Constantantine’s thumbed picture in hand with a self-congratulatory wide open mouth laughter of joy as he exuded poisonous air Zeus would have liked to own to severely punish gods for their impiety and lapses. Remember, he had to be content with hurling thunderbolts at Asclepius as this Olympian had dared to possess medicine which could raise the dead and Zeus was in no mood to tolerate this nonsense
I remember how overjoyed I was to see this character finally prepare to leave after it seemed like years of an excruciating ordeal of pain and torment.
“There is a cup link I have to get and tweak to completely fix the tap,” he said. “I will get it next week.”
“Oh no,” I almost shreiked. “You see I am out of town next week.”
“Okay I will phone you before coming,” he said.
I was overjoyed, now I could handle him from a distance and present him my, oh so busy, schedule.
So that was the end of that and I will never see this idiot now.
Or so I thought, when despite my trying to cover my face with the newspaper I was reading at Tim Hortons, this guy saw me and came running to me.
He quickly pulled his sleeve and exposed his arm.
“See my new tattoo…”
I looked at it and ….
