High Desert Journal: The Tub Club

contributors JJ Clark, Ellen Waterston, Charles Finn, Rebecca Miles, Katie Lee, Kyle Boogs. Simmons B. Buntin

The Tub Club

Nonfiction

by Katie Lee | 0 Comments

Forlorn and shabby, it almost escaped my notice where it leaned against the back fence of an antique dealer’s yard half hidden by a wooden-wheeled cart. Within the hoops, grey, weathered staves cast light and shadow through large gaps. The top hoop had fallen to a rakish slant and the empty bunghole, forming a plaintive O, gave this woebegone barrel the look of a tragicomic clown. When I bypassed the cart to have a good look inside, I saw a buckled up bottom with firecracker pentstemon growing between the slats. No matter. What captivated me was an extraordinary grain in the wood resembling rivers in meander – I made sand islands out of it, and rippled shores where the pentstemon grew along the banks – it had to be that kind of hallucination to make me want to buy the thing regardless of its tacky condition.

I called my contractor friend over and asked, “Jay, is this worth dealing with? It’s in pretty sorry shape. May not even fit in the space you’ve allotted,” I added, trying to vaporize the hallucination.

He pulled out his tape and measured round, up, down, across, “Yeah, it’ll work.”

“But it’s so busted up.” Again I teetered, “You reckon it can be put back together?”

“It’s just dried out. Your artist friend, Watson, will know what to do”

I’d bought my first ever house in an old mining town in the upper Sonoran desert and was making a bedroom and bath out of what had formerly been an unused room; but the space would not allow a tub. I didn’t want one anyway – I think they’re the dumbest water-wasters ever invented – so I’d asked Jay to make a brick silo kind of thing; smaller altogether than the normal sit-up-lie-down, lie-down-sit-up bathtub. He’d checked foundations, floor supports, spacing between old 2 x 4’s, all that, and said, “I can’t put a load of bricks on that old flooring, and I don’t trust the foundation beneath either. Why don’t you get a barrel?”

Get a barrel. Hmmm.

Easier said than done. I called wineries all over California to locate something I could comfortably sit in that would still meet the dimensions of my bathroom. Barrels ranged from what you could barely sit in, to the next size up – one you could drown a truck in – nothing in-between. When Jay suggested I try his aunt’s antique shop just a few miles down the road from me, I gave him the eye, suspicious about keep it in the family, but answered, “Hey, why not? Nothing else is working.”

As we stood there in the yard looking at the barrel, doubt and desire were in fierce debate inside me. Then Jay summed it up: “Watson is a real artist. He’ll soak it until the staves and the bottom fit again, put it all back together then go to work on the waterproofing.” My only question was: can you fit inside?

He looked me up and down, puckered his upper lip and said, “Maybe. Shall we go see my aunt about a price?”

“I think it only fair that Watson gets to see what he’s expected to do before I dash in there and slap shekels down on the shingles.”

His jaw poked out in a moment of thought before he decided, “Yeah, fair enough – but, you should slap a few down now to keep the barrel from rollin’ outta here. You’re not likely to find another’n close by.”

“It’s not going to be a barrel. It’ll be a tub.”

“Looks like a barrel to me.”

“Looks like a pile of wonky wood to me – soon to be a Tub.”

“Okay, but go slap the shekels, then you can call it anything you want – water keg, doghouse, miner’s-night-in-the-barr…never mind.”

When we saw auntie and she wanted a 110 for that stack of wood I damn near fainted! Jay whittled her down to 90 and I put 50 to keep it from rollin’.

The room slowly took shape.

When we knocked out the small room’s existing north wall to extend and double its size, the old boards which had been behind the outside tarpaper-wire-plaster since 1919 ended up as inside paneling to encircle the new bathroom area. A nice cozy space where, behind the paneling, an old oaken bathtub would add the classic touch, whispering of a past century when families actually did bathe in rain barrels. I suspected that’s what this one had been, it so closely resembled one that sat under a drainpipe beside my grandparents’ home in Illinois.

I was making closet doors from more beautiful barnwood when Watson called to say the barrel was finished. “When can I bring it up?” he asked, then cautiously added, “I want you to know I’ve cut six inches off the top, so a person your size can easily climb in – I mean, step in, without banging a hip, or…uh…some other appendage.”

“Excuse me?”

“I also removed one of the metal hoops and stretched it to fit around the middle for more strength; not that it really needs it, but it looks better that way in relation to the top and bottom ones. And I put the drain hole in the center bottom so you ladies can scoot around the sides without deflowering yourselves.”

“How considerate of you, Watt! But I suspect most of us are past the deflowering age.”

“Um-m, another thing…look, dear lady, I just couldn’t…I mean that wood is so gorgeous—now don’t go into shock—I couldn’t fibreglass over it, so I used resin instead; and since you’ve got a ceiling spot in there, wow! That wood will look like amber under… ”

“But, Watt, it’s only oak, and you said resin can crack and might leak! What’ll I do if water gets under the lino tiles and…..”

“You call me, immediately and I will seal it. Anyhow, it’s not oak, or I’d have fiberglassed it.”

“Then what the hell is it that’s so gorgeous you can’t….”

“It’s teak”

“Huh?

“Teakwood. Chinese Teak.”

“You’re shittin’ me.”

“No ma’am. I smelled it when I started sawing off the top; then I got down and took a real good look at the grain; went through my whole shelf of Asian books and I think, from what I’ve been reading, what I know and what I see here, that it’s old teak from China, maybe no longer available.”

I was pretty stunned by all this, so it was a while before I admitted I was intrigued, maybe even delighted, and couldn’t wait to lay eyes on what I now was thinking of as, ‘The Leakin’ Teak Tub’.

A teak barrel. As far as I knew there wasn’t a teak tree in the whole USA. Why would anyone, especially in this country, make a barrel out of teakwood? And for what? They wouldn’t. It stuck in my head and kept going ‘round and ‘round.

Jay was there when Watson brought the tub and immediately began designing the rest of the bathroom around it. Marble counters soon flanked a blue washbasin; in a cubby corner near a window sat a blue toilet; beside the tub a bidet. He laid a fan of bricks around the bottom of the barrel to make the step-over easier. A series of brick ledges against the corner walls held soap, brushes, shampoo and whatever. The spigot was fitted into the bricks, and a hook above the ledges supported a hand held shower.

Jay, Ricardo, Pancho, the plumber, and Watt, were present for the tub’s debut. When I turned on the ceiling light, four big guys gasped. It was indeed amber-gold. Every inch of grain seemed to move, to wave and pulsate as something alive under a magnifying glass. I’d never seen wood so articulate. I envisioned, that when I climbed into it, I would feel the staves embrace me, massaging my back—their gentle curve smooth and sensuous. Tired from a day dealing with twits or happy from a day dealing with friends, the water’s buoyancy would almost float me, scented oil coating my body. This loving tangle of wood from a place on the other side of the world would ease my aches and pains. It would be my meditation rug, my sandstone pothole, my temple, my sanctuary.

I hate it when something keeps tapping at my head and I can’t even locate the woodpecker.

Somewhere I’d seen a photograph; an old one, sepia, water-marked and battle scarred; foreign looking people standing around what looked like a cracker barrel in a store, but the fogged up background didn’t add up to “store” – through the mist I’d made out what seemed like benches or berths, like on a train. Possibly a storeroom or a warehouse? Peck-peck-peck.

Several months after the purchase I worked up the courage to go back and ask Jay’s auntie if she knew where the barrel originally came from and to discover, without asking, if she knew it wasn’t oak. Fortunately, she kept files on what came into her antique collection, and from where. She told me it had been sitting in her bone yard for more than two years; it was brought in by a man who was fixing up an old house in my town; that it had been outside under a drainpipe and the new owner had no use for it since water was now available to every house in town, old or new. I knew she was curious why I wanted to know so much about an old rain barrel, so before she could ask I told her I’d seen another somewhat like it and was wondering if they were common in older times, which, of course, I knew they were.

“Yes,” she said, “but most folks keep them for their kids to play in, sometimes cutting the barrel in half and using both ends, the bottom for a kiddie pool, then they’ll board the top part over, flip it and use it for a planter. That’s why I haven’t had any come into the yard for a long time.” She paused, gave me a quizzical look, half frown, half smile and added, “But you’re the first person I know ever wanted to make a bathtub out of one.”

By the time this exchange played out I was certain she was none the wiser about the wood. And I, who thought I was getting chingered for rolling out 90 shekels, had rolled out instead, ancient Chinese teak worth lord knows how much more than that. One day I’d tell her. Maybe.

A year or so after the Tub’s installation, I was made curator of our town’s Hysterical Society – well, you know what I mean. I’d been on the board for several years and found it to be like that – a group so hidebound and picayune at times they were hysterically funny – to me at least. I don’t know why I accepted the “position” – can’t recall now if I was elected, appointed, or heaven forbid, if I volunteered, but there must have been a reason.

The Hysterical Society put out a small monthly newsletter of sorts back then containing stories and photos from those early days. They actually spent some of their money printing it up and mailing it out to members. Each publication would feature a different subject, like transportation, or new construction; they covered everything from ladies of the evening, feuds, fires and eating-houses, to gambling, gunfights and miner’s strikes – all of it recording a way of life in this once rugged little frontier town.

I was moving a stack of these old newsletters from one cubby-hole to another, when…peck-peck-peck came that bird on my cranium again. Half an hour later under a six inch stack of them I found the photo I had remembered; several men, a couple with aprons, standing on either side of a barrel that came up to their waists – I still couldn’t make out the murky background, but it was not a store. Where then? This whole issue was about the Chinese; as mine workers, as merchants and tailors; the restaurants they owned or cooked for and the laundries operated by them, exclusively. An abstruse caption: “Chinese Merchants,” stated the obvious and a related story mentioned nothing about location. I studied the photo for a long time, especially the barrel and its size – no way to tell if it was a duplicate of mine – but taking into account that the average Chinese person is usually inches shorter than a Caucasian, my barreltub – in its original state, was at least similar to the one in this enigmatic photograph.

Mine was teak – Chinese teak, Watt had said –probably ancient. It had come from my town where Chinese lived and worked in the late 1800’s. So What? Why was I so intent upon discovering its former use? I had no idea but I couldn’t unscrew my curiosity. What the hell would be shipped all the way from China in a teak barrel? Dried fish? Herbs? Medicines?

When I discovered the answer several years later, the simple historic fact knocked my socks off.

Here at home, life in the barrel proves to be as magical as I’d dreamed it would be. Two can fit in cozily. But mostly it’s just me, my bod and I, in total surrender to the warm or hot scented water. In summertime, I sit in the curve of that beautiful wood, cross-legged, with the cold shower pouring over my head, and am transported beneath a canyon waterfall deep in the Glen Canyon wilderness.

More than one of my friends has taken a look, fallen captive to the novelty of it and asked it they could try it; whereupon, I draw the water, pour in the oil, leave, run upstairs for my instant camera, come back, sneak around the corner and shoot a picture of them – manly shoulders, boobs afloat, whatever came up to camera angle – one guy was actually in dreamland and snoring when I returned. When they crawled out I’d give them the photo, or keep it; it was always their choice.

One evening, returning from a chamber music concert with the performers in tow for a small after-theatre party, I back-flipped the music genre and loaded my player with cassettes of classical jazz – a flip I’ve noted that most classical musicians appreciate. A while later I was asked for a tour of my house. I must admit we’d tossed down a few bottles of beer and wine by then so it was no great surprise when one of the four performing artists expressed a wish to try my barreltub. The other three followed in quick pursuit.

I dashed up the spiral stairs for my Polaroid. Wasn’t going to let these historic, or maybe hysteric, moments fade into obscurity. I snapped four enchanting pics and gave one to each performer after they were dressed once again for society. Then we toasted the evening:

“Here’s to a salubrious and seren…uh..dippy…tuss evening!”

“Yea-a-a-ay!”

“Here’s to life on the wild side in a rubbedy-dub-tub!”

“A-a-a-ay-men!”

“To my next time in the barrel!” said the cellist.

From those…uh…bare beginnings the Tub Club was born.

In the fall of 1978 I turned 59 and made a huge decision. My very best and last husband had died in ’73, my father shortly thereafter and my mother in January of ’76. When the matrilineal stem is finally severed, the offspring, no matter how young or old, experiences a kind of free-fall that plunges them into nowhere. I awoke one day to the realization that my kin – those I cared for and who care for me – were gone. With no more family ties or responsibilities, I felt an undeniable buoyancy; yet, at the bottom lay the heavy sediment of loss. What would I do with this paradoxical freedom?

I’d been left a small legacy with no immediate desire or design for its use so the huge decision was…to take a backpack trip around the world. Alone.

Solo was not my first inclination. The thought of being out there in that big unempty space all by myself spooked hell out of me. Yet when I started looking around for endurable company, those in my age group – and even far younger – proved to be rare as hair on fish. I thought I knew every sort of cliffhanger-polesitter-shark-teaser on the map but when I proposed my trip to these monkey-type friends – as in ‘swingers’ – I found them all skewered to wimpy jobs of work; in amorous pursuit of one vibration or another or trapped in the futile exercise of treading rolls of wire like hamsters. In desperation I called Andy. He was a dear friend who played a game of “three-in, three-out” – worked his butt off for three years, then rambled the world over for the next three, before coming back to three more “in.” I wanted and needed his advice, certainly but in the long jog, I was hoping he would go with me. About now he’d be close to his next “three-out.”

“You don’t want me to go with you or any other guy – especially another guy. Trust me.”

“But you know the ropes, and I haven’t a…”

“You’ll find the ropes, and you’ll have plenty of assistance,” he announced with the utmost confidence.

“You crazy, Andy? Whose gonna help a 60 year old woman, all alone, in some foreign country with no…”

“Everybody!”

“Oh yeah?“ I breathed, uneasily – thoughts of the big bad wolf emerging – “I’m talking about the right kind of help. I don’t need…”

“You’re just the right age for the wrong people to ignore you – like the 20 or 30 year old cult traveler, or the fortyish travelling sales…”

“But I’ll need someone to…”

“Shut up and let me finish. You’re missing the whole point, babe. “When people see a woman your age travelling alone, they want to lend a hand. Even when they see you with another woman, they figure you help each other; but if you’re by yourself, you’ll find men and women, kids even, asking if they can assist you.”

“That old, huh?” A forlorn timbre takes over my voice (or is it my liver?) when I picture this bent person with a backpack being helped across a mud puddle by a barefoot seven-year-old in toga and turban.

Andy blows disgust air into the phone. “Aw, c’mon, Raggedy Ann, you know what I’m talking about. You’ll see more, meet more people, and be asked into homes you’d never get a glimpse of otherwise. No, you ain’t that old, or you wouldn’t still be running rivers, hiking deep canyons, riding your bike and breaking your usual number of balls for the season.”

“Why, Andrew! How can you say I’m a b….”

“Because I’ve witnessed; thereby learning to keep clear of the crusher myself—it’s why we’re still friends. With you, I always know when to quit, because you won’t quit. So…drop me a postcard now and then.”

“Where? Morocco? Terra del Fuego? Siberia? You’ll be out there soon yourself. Like maybe…we’ll just bump into each other, huh?

“You never know,” he blithed off, “Stranger things have happened.”

The upshot of all this was: I landed, November twenty-first, fresh from the good old USA, onto the British crown colony of Hong Kong where it dangles off China into the South China Sea. This was before Hong Kong reverted back to its original owners and Britain’s ninety-nine year lease was kaput.

You may wonder why I have strayed this far from a teak barrel antique? Ah-h-h, but I’ve not. We’re just getting warm.

At the end of two weeks my various abodes consisted of a private home, a hotel (of sorts), a train, another hotel (very nice), a rooming house; still another hotel (a grim latrine!), and finally (what I’d been waiting for all along), the YMCA in Kowloon. Having the name, Lee, in China wasn’t always the gate crasher one would expect—especially by telephone. I’d say my name and they’d whiz into Mandarin or Cantonese before I could tell the person on the other end I wasn’t Chinese. When I asked them to please speak English, the answer was, “So solly, we foolie boo-ked.”

Even this early on I had learned some tricks-of-the-traveller: Go there. Tell them you have a reservation—no reservation, solly--made at least a week ago, there must be some mistake,—no, solly, we foolie boo-ked—my travel agent booked it from the USA—no reservation, solly. So, you sit in sight of the reception desk--one, two, three hours, into the evening, nothing to drink, no dinner--manager comes, some tears, insist it’s their mistake, you’ve nowhere to go, poor woman all alone. (Thanks, Andy!)

“We not quite foolie boo-ked.” You get a room.

How was I doing? Only took me two weeks to learn that charade. But then, my bowels were in an uproar and my stomach so upset I had to stay in bed for two days to recover. I finished my one book; read pamphlets from the foyer, the magazines in English that were in my sparse, but very clean, room; and from Hong Kong newspapers that came and went in the hallway, whatever was printed in my language. Many serendipitous encounters with strangers had enriched my life since I’d left the small mining town--not to mention an undreamed of enrichment to my palate. (I don’t care if it’s snail shit, the Chinese know how cook it a la exquisite.) I’d entered an oriental culture, walked many miles and cried crocodile tears, but not one brainwave had rippled through my consciousness concerning the times I took nightly baths in a barrel –

…until…

The words rose off the page and floated before my tired eyes, just as peck-peck-peck flew out the window.

…the raw substance of a glutinous texture, would be rolled into balls, then shipped in barrels made of teakwood--its dense grain when sealed being impervious to telltale odours and resistant to oils or other liquidous matter. I turned the page, and there, lined up on a dock, along with a dozen others like it, was my barrel. Some were being rolled down planks into a ship’s hold by Chinese in coolie-hats.

…raw substance…telltale odours, huh? And there went my socks! I was one rare, very proud, owner of an opium barrel.

About eight months after this enlightening discovery, I was back in the barrel; only now I knew why it was so special, so relaxing, such a soothing, curvaceous, splendiferous thing. No wonder it felt so sensuous to lie against those fine boards, curled up in sweet bliss; even if I’d never had a whiff of opium in any form but Arizona desert and California roadside poppies – yeah, I know they aren’t that kind – never mind, I felt intoxicated. Whatever opium did for those who smoked it, my imagination allowed as how it now came through the old wood to ease my tensions.

My stint with the Hysterical Society had allowed me to poke around in the less known, but more interesting under-pinnings of the town. Yet, why I failed to make a connection between a certain item’s use, and a culture, I have to put down as not being the sharpest knife in the drawer. In the late eighteen-hundreds there were as many as five, perhaps more, opium cells, dens – or whatever they were called here – supplied and operated by Chinese merchants. When I arrived in the early seventies, half the fun of living on this mountain was scavenging the town dumps, and those in back of every old house plunked on a steep hillside. Behind some stores and beneath old buildings renovated by my friends, we found these small, pinky-shaped vials – two inches by half inch in diameter. At first we thought they came from some chemist’s shop; later to learn they were opium bottles. We had yard sales and sold them to the tourists, who wouldn’t know an opium vial from a rectal thermometer unless we told them. We did.

Those months I spent circling the globe, through the winter and into summer, the barrel stood unused and unattended; so when I returned to discovered a tiny crack in the resin I immediately called Watt, who immediately came and did as promised. Sealed the resin. When he returned the next day to run water through and make sure it was leak-proof, I said, “Hey, you aren’t a member of the Tub Club – and of all people, you should have been a charter member. You made a barrel into a tub, did all the hard work and you’ve never even sat in it. Go on, get it, really make sure it doesn’t leak. I’ll go upstairs and leave you to it.”

“I ain’t dirty.”

“Here’s a towel. You have no idea how much you’re gonna like it,” I smiled brightly as I handed it over, “You might even be back for seconds – uh, by appointment only. Some mighty famous people have been in there since its debut”

“Yeah. I heard rumours – an’ I don’t want my picture took.”

“Ah-h, I wouldn’t do that to you, Watt, unless you asked. You’ve got a wife ‘n chillen, and a fine reputation to…”

“Aw, shut up and get outta here. I need to see if there’s any bubbles”

I went up stairs, laughing, wondering, if I dared sneak down and take his picture, but thought better of it; he was a friend I valued, and whose workmanship I admired; so I didn’t need him pissed at me if the resin cracked again.

I was puttering about, washing up some dishes and wondering if I could get him to teach me how to repair things like that, when he hollered from below, “Katie! Come and look at this. Quick! Before it’s gone.”

“Before what’s gone?” I dashed down the spirals, mind racing – what could be there? Crossing the bedroom, I could hear suction sounds from the tub as the water drained out. “Did a snake come out of the bidet?” I panted, rounding the bathroom corner.

Watt stood with a towel around his waist, leaning over the tub, hands on the rim, his head moving in a slow circle, eyes following the wave pattern as it rounded the drain hole exit, center. “Man! That’s fascinating. It really is a Chinese barrel.” He spoke as if he’d found the answer to Saturn’s moons, never taking his eyes from the swirling movement.

Two heads now making the circle, I said, “Big friggin’ deal – sure it’s a Chinese barrel – but what’s so fascinating about ‘watta-drain-out-of-hole-into-suwa?”

Ignoring my smart crack, almost hypnotically he murmured, “You told me how super this barrel was in so many ways, but you never mentioned it drained this way.”

I still could not fathom what he was driving at, and his near reverent behavior didn’t fit the person I’d worked with and thought I knew fairly well; so I asked, “Doesn’t it drain like it’s supposed to…”

“Not on this continent.”

“…like the wash basin? Like the…what?”

“It drains counter-clockwise, like in China. In this country drains empty clockwise.”

“Oh, Watt! That’s an old wive’s tale!” I was amused, yet in some way pleased, to find this excellent craftsman into something as esoteric as right and left draining patterns for different hemispheres; a thing I’d always taken as a half-assed joke.

“The heck it is—we’re clockwise. Watch this.” He took a step to the washbasin, closed the plunger and filled the bowl, then opened it and let the water run out. At first it did nothing and I let a smug expression creep onto my face, but as the water slowly eased out, the current and small bubbles began moving to the right in smaller and smaller circles, down and out.

I stared at him, then at the basin, then turned to the tub. “But the tub is here now. If everything drains to the right on this continent, then the barrel should too. It must be tipped slightly to the right or left of center, so it drains to the left. I think you’re going woo-woo on me.”

“Okay, you live on a ridge in a mountain town where everything is out of plumb, and half the town is falling down the hill; if that’s your theory, go check your other sinks and bowls, see how they drain.”

You should have seen me stomp up those stairs. I knew he was jerking my string, and I wasn’t going to fall for his dream of ‘talking teak’ or whatever he thought was going on. I filled the double kitchen sinks – one at a time – and watched each one drain from a T pipe into the sewer line. Each, in its time, drained clockwise. Pissed, I filled them both and pulled both plugs – both clockwise again. By that time Watt was dressed and upstairs, but he didn’t have the smug expression on his map that I’d let creep up on mine.

“Have you tried the basin up here in the bathroom yet?” Simple question.

Simple answer: “No.”

We did, and the toilets also, both circled right--in this crooked house, on this crooked hill, in this crooked town, far, far from China and counter-clockwise drains. 

The Tub Club flourishes to this day.

Some forty members in all shapes and sizes from little kids to greylocks have joined. Now and then some man friend will pull the plug out too soon and get his wedding tool caught in the drain before he can escape the suction--thus dressing him farther left than he ever was before. But other than that, no casualties.

High Desert Journal

003

The Tub Club

Nonfiction

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