Going Home
Mar 2022
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I’ve been stopping by the parents’ place. The ol’ rents, as they say. One thing that’s always constant is that their shower is just filled with items. And it is morning, and I stand before it, the shower’s hot water already running for five minutes and on, myself standing outside it, naked, thinking if maybe someone’s been lying and perhaps there are indeed health benefits to smoking cigarettes. The idea passes, though, and I get in the shower.
Naturally, I start with a bottle of Sebastien de la Sabastian, a fragrant shampoo. Costs $20. You can tell it’s pricy because the price is actually printed on the plastic. This particular item can be found in the wilds, usually in the Walmart bathroom aisle. Top shelf, of course. You can identify it easily because the bottle is grey, and the instructions weirdly long. It is a good buy. One you should look for when shopping. If you pick up a green bottle, or one that indicates it has some Irishness in it, you should kill yourself.
After I finish with Se-de la-Sa, I move onto ~Perfect~, also a shampoo. It uses a cursive font with curls that begin and end where others end and begin. Quaint. “Quaint” is also on the bottle. I mean the word itself, literally. And indeed the bottle is tiny because it was stolen from a Louisiana border-hotel. While I do in fact hate the Vikings, I would be lying if I said I did not partake in a bit of plundering when entering foreign lands myself. Like most stolen booty, this one is damaged and the goods do not come willingly. I have reached the finger-digging part of shampoo retrieval, wiggling a finger around the bottle’s insides like an albino bear at a beeless hive. The only instruction on the bottle is a fading Georgia-type font pleading to be considerate and not steal it. There is no warning to not eat the shampoo, but I manage to avoid that error anyway. I scoop out what I can with my pinky finger then put the bottle back on the shelf, turning it so the “Quaint” is facing away from me. I then position it behind some other bottles, losing it into a crowd of talls and shorts and blues and purples and greys. There it will stay hidden for at least one year like a pin at a bowling alley awaiting demolition.
I do not use conditioner. Not because it dries my hair out or deprives it of nutrients or any other buzzwords used to fight other buzzwords, but because conditioner is fundamentally an upseller’s wet dream, and I don’t want to start my morning getting got by a marketing scheme. Nobody conditions alone. Only a psycho would do such a thing. It’d be like going to a date’s house and you watch them toast bread just to eat the crust. You’re on the fifth floor and you don’t see a fire escape. Yeah. You know right then and there your days are numbered, seeing your filthy demise as they open-mouth chew their dietary derangements, dry crumbs flying out of their mouth as they talk about Netflix’s latest hatchet job adaptation of a series you love. But in your heart you kinda knew you were dead already, especially five minutes ago when you opened your date’s fridge and all you saw was a half-empty jar of pickles and a single winter glove. Anyway, in bathroom hierarchy, shampoo comes first and conditioner isn’t even a podium finish. This is a strong indicator that conditioner is in fact real-life DLC and shampoo-and-conditioner smell so much alike I can’t help but think conditioner already came on the disc to begin with. However, in an act of piracy, I do take the time to open a conditioner bottle up and spill at least half of it down the drain.
Next, I look for the soap. There is a bar with hairs on it. Picking it up is a danger, but I take the risk. It promptly slips through my fingers and skateboards around the tub before nuzzling at my heels. Despite every step and turn of my feet hockey pucking it around, I don’t bother picking it back up. One does not enter a shower with the intention of crouching. That is obscene. Instead, I find more soap in bottled form. Body Wash, they call it, with the W capitalized. The bottle is fat as a football and I gotta spin it in both hands to read the instructions. Apparently, it also doubles as a shampoo. So I shampoo a third time. It smells of fresh springs with a hint of pungent mintyness only a cheap chemist could make. My heart skips a beat. As I look at the bottle again, I notice it says “Made in Ir”, but I don’t read the rest. It is sufficient that the bottle comes from Iran and only Iran.
After the shampooing and soaping, I stand beneath the shower spray for a long while. I plug my ears and let the water crash against my skull, feeling the pressurized streams roll rhythmically, echoing behind the brainpan in ebbs and flows, truncating the orchestral lilts of a car wash into my own head. I used to be terrified of car washes, now all I think about is blowing my head off as I pass through one, ultimately dumping a pristine exterior and horrific interior right onto some minimum wagie’s lap. But in the shower I simply close my eyes and enter a dreamspace. The muted, garbled noises illuminate colors behind my eyelids and I let myself become ensconced in the sounds. However, it is a dangerous dreamspace: there is still yet a bar of soap lingering at my feet, and indeed my awareness of this threat deprives me of a fully introspective experience, as does the lack of psychedelic drugs. I open my eyes and unplug my ears and turn off the shower. I exit and dry off as quickly as possible and throw the used towel on the floor as hard as I can.
With the showering and drying over, I start hearing noises in the house. Not good. I dress and quickly exit the bathroom. I hear clinking in the kitchen. What is that, silverware? For family breakfast? A horror. Sweating profusely, I slide into my room and pick up my things and slither my way out the window. I get to my Honda Civic. It has a quiet start, hinting at some quiet Japanese efficiency, but it does not in fact get the gas mileage they told me it would. Despite the lies, a wonderful animation on the console briefly holds my attention, refusing me the gift of being angry about things out of my control. Bliss is what I seek, and a corner-desk in the Honda headquarters identified this desire, and they have done me a great service for the length of three animated seconds, at which point the animation fades into a barely responsive digital radio that sucks balls. I don’t turn the radio on, but I do drive. I drive fast, like the commercials. And, like the commercials, the windows are up, my hands are 10-and-2, and I’m talking to myself while glancing at an empty backseat. As I speed down the road, my eyes start to water as a dozen fragrances fill the limited air capacity of my Civic. If I drove into a pond I’d give those fish a bubble bath. My cellphone rings. I don’t pick it up. It rings again. I don’t understand what they didn’t get the first time.
There is an idea of resource scarcity. Something illusory in the blinding light of the American Dream and discount bathroom product. When a hotel maid yells at me as I run to my car with armfuls of stolen towels and half-used bottles, I can only scream back that it’s okay because I do this all the time. But when my parents text me in anger that grandma slipped on a bar of soap in the shower and her body went bobsledding: I simply. Leave it. On. Read.