The Pipes, the Pipes are Calling Me

At night in this house, when everyone else is asleep and the world outside has slipped into a shadowy, slumberous state, I lay awake and I hear a mysterious noise either from the first downstairs, that is, the kitchen and living room and the like, or even worse, from the second downstairs, the basement.

I would call this noise a kind of shuddering death rattle followed by a quick low groan chaser, if that helps to get it across at all.

It is a wrenching kind of sound, as if metal is being twisted and stretched into unnatural shapes contrary to its original intent, and perhaps contrary to Nature itself.

It is a perverse sound. It lands uneasily upon the ear. It is disquieting to the soul and deranging to the senses, this sound.

This has been happening for some length of time now and I have diagnosed the problem as either something wrong with some expensive stretch of piping, the hot water heater, the air conditioning system, the sump pump, or the furnace....or ghosts.

I’m rooting for the ghosts.

You might say I’m rooting for them with all my might.

In the houses I have known, things get more expensive the further down you go.

There is just something about each foot of elevation that you lose on the altimeter reading that seems to crank up the repair bill all out of proportion to the actual distance traveled.

To go down the stairs is to leave behind items that are relatively cheap to repair or replace – alarm clocks and radios and light bulbs – till you get to the first story where refrigerators, washers, garbage disposals, dryers, stoves, fireplaces, lighting fixtures, and electric sockets reside and plot singly and together how they can go kaput.

You may do your own investigations online and discover that each of these items is enormously more expensive to fix than replacing an alarm clock or one of those globe shaped bulbs above the bathroom sink.

You could buy a tractor trailer full of such globe-shaped bulbs and still put out less money than for the replacement of simply the dryer.

But these items themselves are revealed as pikers when you pass by that first level and go all the way down to the basement, like Dante and Virgil descending into Hell as described in the former’s cheering book of light verse, The Inferno.

Here you are in the land of the truly expensive, and at the same time, the truly mysterious (which seem to go together, like, say, 'rack and ruin'), great hulking piles of elaborate electromechanical devices, fueled by elemental sources, heaped into expensive metal housings, while inside massive collisions of primitive forces take place, similar, if differing in scale, to like activities during the Big Bang some years ago.

The furnace, the ductwork associated with it, the metal piping going into, out of, and throughout the innards of the house, the foundation walls, the hot water heater, the fuse box, the sump pump, and the air conditioning each by themselves cost what all the houses on the first block you ever lived on cost if you added them together.

For these items the handyman outfit you have contracted with sends out a special envoy, someone they have recruited from the auto repair shop business, or the last will and testament line of work, someone who is accustomed to comforting people in tough situations.

I have seen these guys in the auto repair waiting room and I think I have the system down.

If this thing that is wrong with your car will only cost you an arm but not a leg, the mechanic that you spoke with when you dropped the car off will come on in and tell you what you’re in for himself.

However, if something resembling Pure Evil, as described by both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas in their theological inquiries, has taken over your engine or your transmission or your electrical system or any other of these things that cars are made of, and the bill at the end of the day is going to make you put in a shift every night at the county dump trapping rats after your full day of work at your office job for the rest of your life, and then further require you after you clock out of the county dump to pick up another shift still digging worms from the unforgiving clay of this region and selling them on street corners…then that is when they send out this Sympathetic Guy I speak of.

You know the type, he is a warm individual and doesn’t so much shake your hand as embrace you as a fellow sojourner on this wild journey we call existence.

He listens intently, encourages you to share your concerns, and then nods sagely or ruefully at the end of this frank and open conversation and tells you that the bill will be a billion dollars.

This is a guy that you don’t want to see coming up your driveway and ringing the doorbell to talk to you about something in your basement.

You don’t want him looking at you from across the kitchen table where he has spread his seventeen or so estimates saying, “Life, it is a mystery, is it not? It is a feast of both the bitter and the sweet, eh? What are we to do with it, my friend?”

No, between this fellow and the ghosts, I will take the ghosts.

These noises, I suppose I should describe them, come in all varieties and from different corners of the basement.

One set sounds like the type of sound you would get if a fellow was inside a prison and was intent on communicating with someone also in the prison ten or twelve cells over, so he has devised this plan to tap out signals on the piping that runs through the prison? Do you see what I mean? Like tap…tap…tap, tap, tap…bang!...tap…bang! bang! bang!----and so on?

It’s not going well, this system of communications, and now and again this prison fellow lets his frustration show by doing a CLANG!...CLANG!....CLANG!...CLANG! just to get this other fellow’s attention any old way he can, the Prisoner of the Second Part we shall call him.

That’s one set of noises, but there is another, and it is yet to be determined if the two sets have anything in common or if two completely different systems are shooting craps at the same time.

This other set of noises can best be approximated by remembering the last submarine movie you saw.

Now, there is no such thing as a submarine movie that doesn’t include an episode where the sub either sinks down into the Mariana Trench, or is caught between dueling icebergs in the Arctic or Antarctic waters.

In both cases you get the sound of heavy metal crumpling and seemingly ready to sheer off entirely from the main body of the submarine by way of the tremendous forces that Mother Nature is laying upon her.

A kind of screeching, grinding, groaning noise? You know what I mean?

That gives an auditory estimate of what this other sound is like.

In any event, together these are the sounds I hear at night while lying awake in bed, along with a couple of others that provide only cameo appearances in this pickup orchestra.

Well, given the range of possibilities that are fleeting through my mind, who wouldn’t rather deal with the Ghost of the Haunted Cottage, the Creature of the Slime, or the Headless Horror of State Street?

By all accounts these are fellows who are only doing their job, acting out some relentless revenge drama over and over again every night, or in the case of the latter fellow, this Headless Horror, taking his head off, for reasons of his own, and swinging it around with mournful shrieks and sobbing moans.

Well, all I can say is welcome, my friends, welcome to my humble abode! Make yourself at home!

What you eerie and unearthly creatures bring to these dealings is so much less alarming than the Sympathetic Guy that I encourage you to bring your family and friends. Consider my house to be your house!

There was a time, back when my world view hadn’t been enlarged and sobered by appliance repair, when I would have thought twice about bringing into the house, say, one of those spooky dolls that opens their eyes all of a sudden and in this flat, somewhat prerecorded voice tell you that they are going to kill you.

My thinking now is, we all have our passions, our hobbies!

What I’m saying is why can’t we be a little more tolerant of points of view other than our own?

I want to keep on living, this spooky killer doll wants to murder me, but is that any reason that we can’t get along, or at least agree to disagree?

In any event, I will take a flock of these dolls, including Night Nurse Killer Doll, Water Skiing Instructor Killer Doll, and Successful Junior Executive Killer Doll if it means that I’ll have one less major repair bill around the house.

Likewise as to The Human Praying Mantis, Cheerleaders from the Crypt, Wolf Girl, and Larva Man, all of whom are hard-working professionals, and much more pleasing things to have in the house than Sympathy Man.

These fine people, or ex-people I suppose is the more precise classification, will always be welcome at my home and I will applaud their work and provide a letter of recommendation to anyone who seeks to bring them on board at any time in their career.

Soon enough it will be Halloween and a grown man has become accustomed to seeing these and many another ghastly creature coming up the driveway with an open trick or treat bag in hand.

I have steeled myself to that fate.

But I can’t be accountable for my reactions if I see a foundation repair guy get out of his truck and lumber towards me with sad intent, holding the latest of the six bids he has spent the night preparing.

Do me a kindness, my friend, and look away at that point, just look away. I don’t want you to see me like that.