A Pilgrim’s Digression

Some observations: single men feel no obligation to clean the toilet or bathroom sink. Ever.

A single man’s house/room smells like a locker room. If the place has ever been cleaned, it’s because he is having a woman over.

A single man feels no compulsion to change his underwear more often than every other day or so. Unless he is going out on a date and expects (hopes) that his date will have the opportunity to see his underwear close up.

Typically, I have resisted believing the old sexist trope that women have a “civilizing” influence on men, but as I’ve grown older, and especially since I married and hopefully became wiser in the ways of the world, I’ve come to believe that women really do have a beneficial effect on men.

When I was in college, I lived with a man who had just graduated with a degree in business, but who was remaining in his old college town at least for another year or so while he worked as a branch manager for a local bank.

Total pig. This is the guy I may have written about before, who once while listening to a Queen CD told me, “It’s a shame that God gave such a voice to a fag.” He also expressed the sentiment that winter served a beneficial purpose by killing off large numbers of homeless people every year.

He had a girlfriend who was only a Freshman in college, and at night I had to listen to them rutting in the next room. I thought to myself, “If only her parents knew.” I would have told them, too, had the opportunity ever arisen, just to stop that incessant slapping of flesh and moaning at night.

And being from Buffalo, he was fanatical about keeping the thermostat turned down, too. I mean, he kept it in the fifties in that place. I froze to death all winter, and the winter of ‘93, you’ll remember, was one of the worst on record in the northeast.

He it was, Dear Tim C___, who gave me my “No Bushit” Coffee mug, which I treasure to this day much more than I treasure the memory of Tim.

Single men are absolute beasts until women come along. I swear it’s true.

Gay men are no better, despite the myths about their fastidiousness. I could never live with another man in a romantic relationship, for the simple fact it would be too much like living in a smelly, dirty college apartment again, only with a roommate who fucks you in the ass every night.

When I finished Graduate school, I took a teaching position at a college in a distant West Virginia town, and I lived with a gay man I’d known in college, a friend of Lynn’s. Although he was generally more cleanly in his habits than Tim C____, still his bathroom was a bit funky and his bedroom smelled just as bad as every other man’s bedroom I’ve ever been in. But being only a few months removed from college, I survived for the year I lived there. I’ve showered in worse places. I’ve smelled worse smells.

Now I am married with a child. I change my underwear every day. I rinse out the sink when I’m done shaving. I do dishes. I clean the bathroom (occasionally), though I admit Lynn is more regular about this chore than I am. I make up for this laxity by doing other chores faithfully, like vacuuming, taking out the trash, changing the cat litter, doing laundry, etc.

But nonetheless, I find myself living with a single man again. Three days and nights per week, I live and work here in Washington. I spend my evenings in a room I rent for $250.00 a month from an elderly woman and her fifty-five year old bachelor son. On Thursday evenings, I go home to my family in Virginia for a long weekend, returning to Washington on Monday night. This is how I keep them in the luxurious lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.

What I’ve discovered is that having lived with a woman for eight years has made me soft in the ways of bachelorhood.

For example, in college, I could stand in a shower in which new fungal lifeforms were growing that were hitherto unknown to science. Literally the floor of the shower would be soft and squishy with new life beneath my feet. I made it through by never taking a shower with my contacts in. I figured if I can’t see the fungus, it’s not really there.

Today, I again find myself living with a man who has never known the influence of a woman on his bathroom habits. Often, I pull back the shower curtain, and what do I see but a ring of little, curly hairs all around the bathtub.

Does this man shave his pubes in the tub? I really don’t want to know. All I know is, it’s absolutely disgusting. So I take the Scrubbing Bubbles and give the tub a good dousing, then rinse with hot water.

The sink is another matter entirely. Men usually learn on their first day of marriage that after shaving, one rinses out the sink. This is not just hygiene etiquette; it’s also considerate of the person, usually the woman, who has to clean the sink. Those little whiskers mixed with shaving cream harden like cement when coming into contact with porcelain. The man who doesn’t rinse out the sink when he is done shaving is the man who has never cleaned a whisker-coated sink before.

It’s disgusting. Almost as disgusting as the toilet. I never use the toilet for Number Two, let me say that right up front. It’s important for the story I am about to relate. The toilet in this house is one of the most nasty receptacles for human waste I’ve seen in years.

For starters, it is ancient, one of those old seven-gallon behemoths dating back probably to the forties. It is so old, the tank actually sits on the floor behind the bowl, rather than above it.

There are layers of yellow crust on this toilet bowl that were probably first laid down by the pissing sailors who roomed here while waiting to ship out for service in World War II.

The toilet seat has been replaced in recent memory, but my bachelor roommate has pissed on it so much, there are yellow stains on it, too, that have never seen the business side of a sponge soaked with Mr. Clean.

I do not sit on this toilet. I make sure I take care of any essential business while I am at work, and that is saying something. Public toilets are no place to spend any significant amount of time, but I would prefer almost any public toilet to the toilet in this house where I live three nights a week.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Why don’t you clean the toilet? You live there, too. I could clean the toilet, though it would require me buying the cleaning equipment to do it because as far as I can tell, no toilet brushes or toilet cleanser exist in this house. There is one bottle of Scrubbing Bubbles in the bathroom, and I bought that when I first started living here.

Also, consider that I spend only three nights week here. I come home from work around six. I go to bed around eleven. I basically flop here at night, and that’s about it. I just don’t feel particularly responsible for cleaning the bathroom. Maybe I should feel more responsible, however.

The shower is a different story, because I have to use the shower. No getting around that. The thought of this man’s pubic hair sticking to my feet absolutely grosses me out. I swear, he must shave his entire body in the shower. It is absolutely repulsive.

And the smell. Oh, the smell. That lovely, musk ox in heat scent of male sweat and glandular excretions. That charming bouquet of fart, perspiration, and body stench, mingled with a distinct whiff of garlic.

That smell wafts from his room whenever he opens the door. It lingers in the bathroom, violently shoving aside the weaker scent of strawberry shampoo and Dove soap.

Men are absolute pigs without women. What other conclusion is there one can draw? If we don’t live with a woman, or desire to eventually live with a woman, we just give up all pretence of cleanliness and personal hygiene. It just isn’t important. Rather like a wit once said of married men, “When the race is over, you take off the jersey.”

For my middle-aged roommate, the race is over. No hope of winning it now, if he ever really wanted to (I suspect he is gay). The jersey comes off, and the smell from it just about knocks you down.

And to top it off, I came home from work one night and there was a piece of paper taped to my bedroom door.

“Matt [it read], please flush the toilet every time you use it. This is very important to me.”

At first, I was embarassed, thinking I really had forgotten to flush the toilet, maybe that morning before going to work. Then I remember, I’m the one who is married, here. Married men don’t forget to flush the toilet. And besides, I don’t use this toilet except to urinate. And when I do that, I lift the seat up and put the seat down when I’m done.

Is he really suggesting that I’m the one causing the ugly scaling on the toilet bowl? Because he presumes I don’t flush every time I pee?

It made me think, he probably believes I am the one leaving enough pubic hair in the shower to knit a baby blanket. He probably thinks I’m the one who shaves his whiskers and leaves them to dry in the sink basin and on the edges of the sink. He probably thinks it’s me stinking up the place with my garlicky body odor and stale fart smells.

And right now, he’s probably writing a blog post about how unbearable it is to live with another man as a roommate.