His Broken Throne

August 2003
Whitefish Bay, WI
The House Where I Grew Up
The Bathroom

My girlfriend and I had just returned home a five-week acting program in Oxford. My parents had spent some time in London and the Cotswolds, recapturing the quaint and gentle vacation taken for their honeymoon. They were to arrive home from London later that evening.

It was very late. I was pacing around my girlfriend’s house fuming with worry, waiting for their call. It finally came.

My parents arrived at O’Hare so late that they missed the last bus to Milwaukee. So they found a cab that would drive them the ninety minutes home. My father, traveling with no cash, had to stop at a TYME machine to pay the gracious cabbie before finally dragging his weary body through the front door. Then we all went to bed very cranky, our bodies reeking of wind and travel.

The next morning my mother woke up very early to retrieve our mail and to buy milk for the house. I was still asleep. She went upstairs, and from inside the bathroom my father called to her, “Could you get me a sponge?”

For the first ten years of my life, I had always remembered my father to have a little twitch. On Saturday mornings, I would sit on the couch and watch cartoons. Every Saturday, my father would come into the family room, put his face close to the T.V. and twitch, a sharp intake of air and a little shudder throughout his body. One time the twitch was very violent and he fell down. It was truly one of the most pure, organic, and poetic bits of slapstick I had ever seen.

Until this morning. My mother opened the door of the bathroom and found that the floor was covered in water. My father had been stepping into the shower, very tense from the previous day’s travels, and twitched. This twitch pitched him backwards into the toilet, causing him to literally crack it in two. My father is five feet, six inches tall weighing roughly one hundred and fifty-five pounds. He is a compact man, mighty in his own right, but by no means any perceivable threat to a rugged, porcelain Kohler toilet. Frankly, I would be hard to imagine a man three times his size pummeling the thing with all his might to do so much as chip it. But there she was, in pieces on the sopping floor.

“A sponge!” my mother was shouting. I was awake at this point. “You need more than a sponge! You need towels! God, look at this mess! Lots and lots of towels. Goddamnit!” My mother was very upset. She had just come home from a trip. There were so many things to do: sort through the mail, go grocery shopping etc. This was the last straw.

Luckily, the plumber came that day and installed a brand new throne. All was restored and my mother now laughs heartily at the story. While my father is a bit sheepish at its retelling, I try to reassure him with this: When you’re little it’s easy for your dad to seem like a superhero. That is a much more difficult thing for him to achieve when his son is eighteen years old. But to break a toilet in half with nothing but a brief body tremor? Shit, I’m the son of the Man of Steel himself!