BIHKAL: 1145 Indiana (Part 1)

Due to a personal request, I am bringing the BIHKAL series out of retirement for another installment. You can thank one Jon B. for this. This week, on Bathrooms I Have Known and Loathed: Avalanches of water that smell like crap! Heating appliances fueled by the rage of Satan! Dangerous experiments with nail polish remover! Absentee landlords! ...And so much more!


For 4 of the 6 years I spent at the University of Kansas, I lived in a charming 3 story plus basement shithole at 1145 Indiana St. This lovely little piece of hell was painstakingly maintained by Eck Real Estate Management. Over the course of my stay, I rented the entire first floor. The apartment was spacious, measuring in at a formidable 1300 square feet. Of these 1300, approximately 4 were allocated to the one and only bathroom. The bathroom was in extremely ill repair, but featured a (mostly) working electric space heater mounted in the wall. The heater was, essentially the inside of a giant toaster (about the size of the bathroom) mounted behind a flimsy metal grate. At some prior point in its lifetime, it had produced enough heat to burn part way through a facing cabinet door, scorch the linoleum in front of it, and burn the hair off of my legs while attempting use the toilet (hint from my roommate: "Just don't pull your pants all the way down."). At some point, I developed the following musical description of the evil beast.

(sung gleefully to an unidentified melody vaguely resembling the theme song to "Denver the Last Dinosaur")

Thermador, Thermador,
Heats the bathroom and so much more!
Thermador, Thermador,
Leaves a brown spot on the floor!

One evening, my roommate Andrew came home from spray painting stuff (a strangely regular occurrence) and we set out to the local pharmacy to purchase materials that would remove BRIGHT METALLIC SILVER paint from flesh. Instead of these materials, we came home with a bar of lava soap, a jar of acetone, and (at least on the part of Andrew) an uncontrollable desire to burn the goddamn house down. The acetone came in one of those crappy little tubs with the sponge in the top that you stick your fingers through to help remove the nail polish (don't ask me how I know this, but I do). Unfortunately, my roommate's giant silver hand wouldn't fit through the wee, finger-sized hole, so he removed the sponge and then commenced maniacal scrubbing. I was making a tasty meal of microwaved hot dogs and crap when I heard: "Justin, check this out!" I went into the bathroom to find the heating beast glowing ominously. The light reflecting off of Andrew's hand made eerie patterns on the walls. In this hand, he clutched a pink sponge with a finger-sized hole in it. He turned toward the thermador, and flicked the sponge.

At this point, I'm pretty sure I lost consciousness for about 3-5 seconds, but I do remember seeing a GIANT FIREBALL shoot out of the wall and rise to the ceiling, leaving behind the smell of burnt hair. When my pulse resumed, I saw Andrew standing in the middle of the tiny bathroom with a look of mixed childlike wonder and terror that seemed to say, "I probably shouldn't have done that." He turned to me and said, "I probably shouldn't have done that..." thus ending the first of many events in the 1145 Indiana St. bathroom that have made me reassess the value and purpose of my life. More to follow...