My Dance Partner

God DAMN I miss Home Depot!


There is a long list of complaints I have about our apartment. The management of the building has provided us with a “Complaint Log” in which we are supposed to write down said grievances and they will be addressed. This is the system as it was explained to us.

The system actually works like so:
*We write down everything that is broken or doesn’t work properly in this log and someone in management writes the words “Done” or “Repaired” next to it within a day or two. We look in the log and realize that it says “done” but it isn’t. We write down something along the lines of “No it isn’t. Get that ‘carpenter’ or ‘plumber’ back here and fix this shit.”

*A few days later a “carpenter” or whomever shows up with no tools, walks sheepishly into the apartment and stands there like an idiot until I physically take him to the offending appliance or piece of masonry or light bulb, etc. and (since I don’t know Hindi) pantomime to him what the problem is. He nods his head, leaves, and the complaint log shows up back in our apartment the next day, with the words “done” or “repaired” written next to our comments about the work not being done. We call one of the managers and explain that it isn’t done.

*A day or two later one of them shows up at the door. Usually a particularly shiftless worm named Charry. This happy bastard is all smiles and apologies and explanations about the “carpenter” being on his way. Neither hide nor hair of the tradesman is seen for another day or two but when he does show up, he is holding some sort of Neolithic tools and gets right to work. I leave the room (like a fool) and anywhere from one to eight hours later he rushes from the house. Wondering why the banging has stopped I ask my housekeeper where he has gone. The answer is always the same: “Finished, sir.” I go to inspect the work and inevitably it is done incorrectly if not just made to look like something was done. And three out of five times he has managed to break something else in the process.

*I phone the managers and we start the dance all over again. This time I stand there and tell the “carpenter” exactly what to do and how to fix whatever it is, he looks completely baffled but does as he’s told, and the work is finished.


Today they “repaired” a curtain rod, and the kitchen sink. The curtain rod is too short so every time the curtains are drawn, it falls clattering to the floor. I thought I’d get a head start on all of this by writing down very specifically what the “carpenter” should do. I wrote down that he needs to either A: get a longer curtain rod, or B: move the brackets that hold the rod closer together. Today while I sat unsuspectingly in the other room he re-drilled the exact same holes in the wall that the brackets were in and precariously balanced the rod in its usual place. When I came downstairs and tried to open the curtains, they fell down again, and he was no where to be found.

The faucet in the kitchen was never properly attached so when I move the stem, water comes squirting out from around the base and the whole thing, knobs and all, spins with the stem. The “plumber” came to fix that today (also while I wasn’t around), and now it seems to be securely fastened to the sink. What I didn’t realize until after I turned the water on, is that somehow during this repair he either pulled loose or purposely detached the drain from the sink, and did not bother to reattach it. So now the water runs down the sink and down into the cabinet underneath. The plumber was also, of course, nowhere to be found.

Heather always asks me why I don’t give them very specific instructions about repairs so I won’t have to get so angry at them when they screw it up. The reason is very simple: In order for these instructions to be truly detailed I would have to not only tell them what to do, but also what not to do. For instance, in the example I just mentioned, I would have to tell the plumber NOT to detach the drain when he fixed the faucet. How am I supposed to see that one coming? There are too many variables. So the next time the carpenter comes to, let’s say, fix a door, I have to tell him to fix the door, but not to remove any windows?

No. I’m afraid I will just have to take some Advil, not use the sink, and wait until tomorrow when the manager and I get to start our little dance all over again.

God DAMN I miss Home Depot.

Who's the Mack?

I'm willing to bet none of you have ever had your picture in an Indian style and living magazine. Well Josh, Spaz, and I have.


We were in Chennai standing around the lobby of our hotel waiting for our rickshaw driver, when we were approached by a beautiful young Indian woman and asked if we had a few minutes to spare. She said she’d like to have our picture taken in the bar for a local magazine. We were curious, and so we followed her into the hotel bar, the Leather Bar.

When I first saw the name of the place I was rather shocked, but very curious because homosexuality is illegal in India and I couldn’t wait to see what a gay-bar would be like here. I imagined the old smoke filled, speakeasy-type places I’d read about, where young men met in secrecy. Would we have to tell a password to a pair of eyes behind a peep hole to gain entrance? And why is this Leather Bar so openly displayed in the lobby of a nice hotel? I though maybe the speakeasy was in the back, the name of the bar an irony only understood by the initiated.

As we followed this woman in her neatly pressed blue sari it hit me: Why did she ask us of all people to pose for this picture? She thought we were gay, didn’t she? We were to become poster boys for the jet setting, intercontinental, gay, leather bar crowd. Perhaps I could give some young man somewhere the courage to come out to his Hindu parents.

Not that I wasn’t enjoying the thought of having my own fan club (perhaps based in Malaysia somewhere) but I thought it a little improper to misrepresent myself and was looking for a good time to tell the woman that she should find her mascots elsewhere. My delusions of glory soon came crashing down as we entered the Leather Bar and it became blatantly obvious that there was no irony intended at all in the name. It was just a bar with lots of leather. The chairs, the benches, the stools, a bumper around the edge of the bar were all black leather. Even the walls were leather; a grey suede.

She wanted us to be sitting at the bar, all three of us drinking one of the establishment’s flaming drinks at the same time. As you can see from the picture, this involved a several drink glasses precariously balanced atop one another. One liqueur after another was slowly drizzled over the tower. Finally the bartender lit it up and we stuck our straws in and tried to finish it before the straws melted or our eyebrows burned. The photographer wanted to do a couple of different takes, so we had to repeat the process again. The first drink tasted of citrus and the second was more like coffee. It was about 11:00AM and neither one of these tastes was very appealing.

I did manage to keep from retching, and the photos turned out fine. Afterwards we went back into the lobby of the hotel with the woman. She was in her twenties and had a lot of energy. A little too much energy for me, but since Spaz was the only one of us who's single, Josh and I set about trying to get her to invite him out.

The nickname Spaz did not just materialize out of thin air. The woman tried to tell us about some parties she was promoting and Spaz kept asking her where we should go to get sushi. She politely steered the conversation back to clubs where she liked to go dancing and Spaz, steered the conversation right back to sushi. He wouldn't shut up about the fucking sushi. I wouldn’t normally give a shit one way or the other, but he wastes an awful lot of my time complaining about his involuntary celibacy. So after banging our heads against that wall for a while, Josh and I decided it wasn’t our problem.

Needless to say Spaz did not get laid. But at least we got our photo in the magazine.