So I went to Gino’s.
The sink in the guest bathroom had been slow for weeks. A lazy gurgle after a shave, a faint, sweetish smell of decay that I’d blamed on the kids’ toothpaste. But last night, after my wife poured a pot of pasta water down the drain (a cardinal sin, I now know), the thing simply stopped. It became a black, glassy eye staring up from the porcelain, reflecting the fluorescent light of the ceiling fan in a way that felt almost accusatory. Plunging only produced a series of wet, apologetic belches. A twenty-foot auger got stuck at four feet and refused to go further, twisting into a corkscrew of frustration.
“Gino?” I asked.
It was a tunnel, and at the end of the tunnel was light—not electric light, but the soft, golden glow of a kitchen I remembered from fifteen years ago. Our first apartment. I saw myself, younger, thinner, laughing as my wife—then my fiancée—threw flour at me while we made pasta from scratch. The sink was clean. The water ran clear. We were happy in a way I had forgotten we ever were.
I laughed. It was the tired, brittle laugh of a man who had been up since 5 a.m. with a snake auger. best drain cleaner
“He’s dead,” the man said, not looking up. “I’m Sal. What’s backing up?”
The sign above the grimy window read “Gino’s Fix-It & Forgotten Things,” but the faded letters might as well have spelled “Last Resort.” That’s where I found myself at 7:13 on a Tuesday morning, clutching a bathroom plunger like a holy relic and staring at a sink that had become a silent, scum-rimmed monument to my own incompetence. So I went to Gino’s
I uncorked it. Poured slowly, as instructed.