by When you look through a keyhole, you might see an eye looking back at you.
–Robert Jordan PhD
It’s April 1995, six or seven years into drought here in San Francisco. My wife Rosey and I are at Cost Plus with two friends.
Cost Plus has stuff from all over the world for sale, and a men’s room. I finish my business at a urinal, zip up and a little old man pops out of a stall and shouts in a German accent, “Filthy! Piss is filthy! Filthy! It gives germs. Flush der toilet!”
He races to my urinal, and jerks handle down.
I’m startled, amazed and irate in that order. “What the hell are you doing? If I want to flush, I’ll flush. I do not need any help!”
He steps back, wags the index finger of a latex-covered hand at me and lectures, “Is filthy vee keep clean.”
The man is about seventy, slender and red faced. He wears a green Tyrolean hat with a feather in the band, a brown tweed jacket and tan corduroy slacks. His olive, knit tie is fastened with a brass tie clasp shaped like a lightning bolt.
I fire back, “Don’t do that! We are in a drought. Unless you like drinking urine you’ll stop this stupid stuff now.”
I am more amused than I am angry. We were in the middle of the sixth or seventh year in what turned out to be an eight-year drought. Conservation signs were everywhere, saying, “If it’s yellow, it’s mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.” Restaurants didn’t serve water. People had stopped watering lawns. Car nuts were sponge bathing cars. I had worked hard to change my habit of flushing the toilet after every use and here was this mad flusher running around in latex gloves messing up my effort.
“I know you have better things to do than this” I tell him. “Walk the beach, pick up beer cans, and shovel dog shit instead of ruining my conservation efforts?”
I give the man my meanest glare and stomped out. By the time I find my peeps I can’t stop laughing. What a funny scene? I was a partner to what could have been a candid-camera moment. When I tell them my ‘urinal experience,’ they laugh harder than me.
What do you call a guy who would do that? Nina comes up with, “The Tyrolean Tyrant.”
“How about the Pee Pee Potentate?” says Tony.
Sylvie, who really gets into the spirit of the absurd, says, “Too fancy. If he flushed four times we could call him a ‘Four Flusher.’ In that feathered hat? How about ‘Ferdie The Flusher?’ The name sticks—Irv meets “Ferdie the Flusher.”
Two years later, the drought is over. Umbrellas sprout like mushrooms as 1995 brings buckets of rain. The drought and Ferdie had been flushed out of memory. I finish an espresso at the supermarket in a small mall near the Lowell High School in the Sunset where I teach, when the urge to pee comes upon me. Though the drought is over I kept my habit of non-flush. I am thinking in terms of climate change and the predicted water shortage.
I finish my business and zip up. The stall door pops open and out comes—Ferdie?
He is wearing the same hat, tweed sport jacket, and latex gloves. He runs to the urinal and jerks the lever. There is a rush of water. He looks up at me and backs slowly to the door. He wiggles his index finger and, “Der Drought is over! You flush now!”
Just like that he is out the door.
I begin an uncontrollable laughter and can’t stop. I laugh my way back to school. Could it be that the man has followed me for two years waiting for his chance to show me up?
If he had been following me, how was it I didn’t notice him? The accent, the outfit. My imagination picks up steam. A spy who had perfected his shadowing techniques during the war? Makes sense. What else could it be?
One of my friends at school, Bob Jonas, is sitting in the teacher’s room eating lunch at a long table as I laughed my way in. Two other teachers are sitting across from him. I laugh out the story to him. We crack up together.
A Science Fiction teacher, Jonas takes it into space. “Ferdie is an astronaut whose space suit eliminator malfunctioned. He spent his whole time in space bathed in urine. Or he’s an alien, a visitor from another planet sent to sabotage our conservation efforts so his people can take over earth.”
Jack Groff, a huge man, a math teacher who wears plaid shirts and painters overalls pushes back his chair, and lectures us.
“That old man is a true revolutionary. Open all the spigots, flush and flush some more. Scarcity, we have to create scarcity. That’s the only way Americans will realize how much we need the natural world. Waste and waste some more, throw stuff away, that’s the key. You don’t make fun of a man like that—you imitate him.”
Groff straightens up, throws his lunch bag at the waste basket, watches it miss and plop down on the floor, He stares at the bag momentarily and marches out the room. He slams the door behind him.
I wait for him to open the door, pick up the bag and give Bob and me a big laugh. It never happens.
Copyright 2009 Irving Rothstein
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