Caney

The landlord and his teenage son drove up as we were putting our tools away at Canterbury. He owned another place a few blocks away and water was shut off there as well. There was still daylight but I was reluctant to do more free work for the same landlord. He assured me he had been calling plumbers all day and been put on waiting lists two months long. He was filling out forms for FEMA. He was putting together a proposal to ask for help from his church. He wanted to pay us, which was out of the question, but signaled sincerity. None of us wanted to be on the side of the landlords, and strangely, me being a landlord did not inhibit this feeling. But the guy who lived in this next house was blind, which raised its priority. If the landlord would benefit, so be it.

As we got in our cars, the teenage son got out and went into the house. I had been told that this was the grandfather’s place. Was it going to be a teen crashpad now? That wasn't really what I signed up to facilitate, but I could only interrogate someone so much before deciding to help them. The landlord led me and Coleman a few blocks away to a house that was painted with thick, bright primary colors. A pit bull named Candace was attached to the rail of a wheelchair ramp with a heavy chain and sat in a smooth-worn pit of dust. I had only to travel from my van to the curb shutoff to find a needle and a used condom. 

The tenant, the blind guy, sat in front of a TV, which played a talk show. Not like Rikki Lake, more like Joe Rogan. Just someone talking in front of a camera with studio lights and bright colors in the background. I didn't recognize the host but the point of the show seemed to be his sense of indignation. The blind guy faced the tv as he noodled on an unplugged electric bass. This was a house built for poor people, maybe in the 40s. It felt held up by its paint, with a kitchen in the corner consisting of a free standing sink and a microwave on a small table against the wall. I could feel and hear the grit between my shoes and the painted plywood floor. 

I saw the angle here, this is a Section 8 place. The wheelchair ramp with no wheelchair users gave it away. The government pays rent and they are never late and never short. There are significant drawbacks: your property must have certain features and be subject to inspection, but the biggest drawback is Section 8 tenants, who are notorious for having all the problems poor people have: crime, drugs, children, drama. It’s the teflon lined bottom of the barrel of legal housing. After I bought my first rental property, I had difficulty keeping it rented and considered applying for Section 8. The market improved and I didnt have to. Landlords that do Section 8 correctly have resilient properties that can take a beating and bounce back with a coat of paint. Tile or vinyl plank on the floor, semi gloss on the walls, solid doors that are strongly attached to heavy frames. This place was the other kind. The kind where you do the minimum to get the certification and then let it all go to shit.

The tenant was accommodating and he moved Candace into the other room, where she was surprisingly chill. He said there was a leak in the bathroom. It's a tricky thing, altering the bathroom of a blind man. The razor is in a particular spot, as is the soap, the towel… everything, regardless how filthy, is in its place. The first step was reproducing the problem. I went outside and eased open the shutoff, until I heard the high metallic hissing of water. Coleman bellowed from inside and I shut it back off. Water was running down the far corner of the bathroom wall, from one side to the other, where it pooled against the bathtub. It had no obvious source. Coleman, less hesitant than me, stabbed a screwdriver into the wall and stabbed again, making a dotted line. I followed, cutting along the line with a drywall saw. I was kneeling down by the toilet and Coleman looked down from the sink, his long shaggy hair framing his face. The wall wiggled as I worked the saw in and out, as if the drywall were not screwed into all the studs. Unbeknownst to us, the large mirror over the sink was not anchored to the wall, but only leaned on it, its bottom edge resting on the sink. When I moved the wall with my saw, it toppled, shattering across Coleman’s back, sending shards in all directions. 

We sat in silence for a moment. Somehow, in his sleeveless t-shirt, Coleman was unscathed. Glass shards were spread across every inch of the bathroom and in a cone spreading out from the bathroom door into the bedroom.

The next twenty minutes were just cleaning up glass. Micheal showed up with a vacuum, which made it easier to get the invisible pieces. He had finished another job but wasn't ready to call it a day. Sometimes, after doing work like this, what one craves is not rest but camaraderie. We swept and vacuumed several times over the same area and took the throw rug outside and beat it over the grass, choosing to believe that tiny shards of glass would be ok settling into the dirt yard, among the needles and condoms. I was more worried about the sliver one finds with one’s feet. It just seemed especially cruel to introduce this into the environment of a blind person. But why did this guy have an enormous mirror? Someone had probably said “visually impaired” or “legally blind” and I had made assumptions as if it were a binary status. As a category, being Blind is kind of like being a Landlord.

After the mirror crashed, the talk show was replaced by loud, industrial death metal, and the tenant played along in fast 16th notes, as if we were all in a band together with him on bass and the rest of us destroying a house. We were deep into the wall now. The first hole had revealed the pipes we suspected of leaking, but they were not leaking. A second hole revealed nothing and was expanded to, at last, reveal the guilty pipe, a three foot galvanized bastard that rose up from below the floor to supply the sink and what appeared to be another sink, facing away from this one, on the other side of the wall. Apparently, this was not the edge of the house. 

f'n galvanized

Michael and I went outside and found another door hidden next to the little shack that sheltered the water heater. No one answered our knock, but there was a car. We knocked again. A skinny, twenty something year old opened the door in black boxer briefs. Tattoos on his arms, legs and trunk, and the shaved sides of his head were evenly spaced about 2 inches apart. A hot food delivery box lay on the floor next to the door. What life pattern has a young man deeply asleep at 7pm? He was accommodating and let us into the small chamber that contained his bed and the TV, which was on, to a hallway being used as a storage space, into another hallway that was the bathroom. The supply lines for his sink came out of a hole in the wall through which we could see into the other bathroom and converse easily with Coleman. 

The riser pipe was ½” galvanized, like every other supply pipe under the house. This, by itself, was a death sentence. The outside of galvanized pipe, dipped in zinc and never exposed to water, can look fine when the inside has been rusting and accumulating a thick layer of slimy corrosion for decades. During that time, water pressure at the faucet decreases as the passage through the pipes dilates. Expanding ice had pushed out a pinhole in this pipe midway between the floor and the sink. There is no patching galvanized pipe, it must be replaced, but with what? We had a roll of pex and a bunch of copper and pvc pieces but nothing that would connect to this. We conducted a search outside and under the house for extra pipe and discovered an identical length of ½” connecting the washing machine, separated by a shutoff valve. If we transplanted that, we could restore cold water. We proceeded to disassemble the system in the bathroom. Since the pipes were connected with threaded unions, we had to start at the sink and unscrew everything back to the riser. Upon inspection, it had a space smaller than a drinking straw through thick, black, rust flaked jelly. 

I crawled under the house from an access panel on the opposite end. It smelled like cat shit but not as bad as I expected. It was tight. I had to exhale completely to get under one joist and then army crawl to the cluster under the bathroom, where I could hear Michael and Coleman’s muffled conversation. A handful of things were dripping slowly, which could have been the water from our test draining out, but a small plastic cereal bowl was centered perfectly under one of the drips like a watering trough. It shimmered in the light of my headlamp, eternally full and spilling over like a cave pool. This suggested two things: first, this pipe had been dripping for a while, and second, someone crawled over here with a cereal bowl to create a racoon and feral cat sanctuary. The tenant did not seem the type to slither under these joists, though I was conscious of having already underestimated him. My experience with feral cat enthusiasts is that they keep to their own spaces and don’t go spelunking into the cat world. I tried again to get used to the idea that I would never have an answer to this and other questions as I threaded the pipe in by hand and tightened it as best I could. 

the elbow under the floor

We got the sinks hooked up in both apartments and Michael went out to open the main. I was crouched in the access hole, looking with my headlamp toward the cluster of pipes under the bathroom sink. It was twenty feet away and I didnt want to crawl through the mud again. Hissing rang out in the pipes as the system re-pressurized and drips came down like glittering diamonds from the cluster, splashing in the cat bowl, but not only there. I heard the tapping of droplets hitting mud and turned my light to reveal at least five other columns of drips. Then Micheal opened the main up all the way, the hissing became a roar, and the drips became sprays, like fire sprinklers. 

We were defeated.

I called the landlord, who was understanding but tried to talk us into repiping the whole house. We held a grudge against these pipes and were tempted to accept the challenge, but this was no longer low hanging fruit. We were in over our heads and had to abandon the place, having only caused harm. I was mortified, covered in basement mud and humiliation, but no one complained. The blind guy was actually grateful. As we left, he picked up a silver case with a handle and offered it to us: “Do you guys like electronics?”

It was a radio controlled drone, new, unused. There were two or three other cases that looked just like it on the kitchen table. Why does a blind guy have a pile of unopened drones on his kitchen table? I took it, thinking my 14 year old daughter would like it, but she didn't and it still sits in my basement.

On the way home, a journalist called me and I parked on an unlit, dangerous feeling sidestreet to be interviewed. The international press was following the Texas freeze and looking for heartwarming stories of citizens helping citizens. I don't remember much of what I said, sitting in my van. Probably a confusing mixture of prideful enthusiasm and candid embarrassment. I remember feeling like I was failing to produce what the journalist was looking for. The truth is leaky, I thought. Its pressure is inconsistent and its tinted red from corrosion. When it leaks, it damages the house and must be shut off at the curb.

This essay series is part of a project to document Texan’s experiences during the 2021 freeze. Do you have a story to share about the 2021 Texas freeze? Share it with my publication, Freeze Stories, on Medium. If its not filled with filth, I’ll publish it. Ok, I’ll publish it even if its filled with filth.