All Clogged Up

In every young boy’s life they come across the most hilarious and intriguing object ever created: condoms. In middle school sex seems to be the funniest thing ever. I found this to be especially true for my younger brother Will.

During the muddled days of early quarantine we were gifted with a little ray of light in my house. Our basement shower had the smelliest chunky brown mush spewing from the shower head and oozing out of the drain. 

An important detail to note is that my bedroom is in the basement. Ohh yeah baby, that’s right I was marinating in the stench of the rancid feces water that had just excreted from our sewage pipes and into the shower. This went on for days. 

I lived like a sewer rat during the time it took to find a plumber brave enough to venture out during a global pandemic to investigate my family’s predicament. I stuck it out in the basement while we waited for someone to come and save me from the lingering cloud of fumes. We needed someone to figure out why the hell our feces were coming out of our shower. 

It didn’t even cross any of our minds to really question too much what was going on with the plumbing down there. Of course my mom was all over it but the rest of us were just annoyed about the smell and the lack of the ability to use the bathroom downstairs. 

I’m sure by now you’re wondering: how in the world does this have anything to do with sex? Well, I’ll tell you. When those brave plumbers came and dug around in our feces they found that the pipes were clogged with none other than, you guessed it, condoms. But obviously the way I learned this straight and simple fact was not as easy as that.

Since I was located in the basement the blame was very quickly placed on me which was fine I guess. I did have a boyfriend at the time but on some other really large side note I had not seen him in months due to the initial lock down. (This is relevant. I swear I’m not trying to make it about my love life). 

My mom pulled me aside the moment plumbers left and instantly told me that they said I have to stop flushing “them” down the toilet. The use of the word “them” did not translate in my head, so I told her that I didn’t understand why since she had always told me to flush my tampons down the toilet. 

Her eyes grew wide and she snapped. “Not tampons Hannah!!!” and then a whisper after checking to make sure the young ears of my innocent little brothers, who frequently watch Family Guy might I add, weren't around to hear her utter the word “...condoms….”

My jaw hit the floor. She was accusing me of flushing condoms down the toilet. Now I didn’t have the heart to admit to her that I hadn’t used a condom in wayyyyy longer than just the start of the covid lock down. 

“Mom,” I said, “I have never flushed a condom down the toilet. I think you may want to explore your other options as to who may have done it.”

I’m not sure if it’s as obvious as it is to me that my mom is a very reserved woman so this made her extremely uncomfortable. This is the last thing she wants to be dealing with. Especially because at the time the only possibility for a condom user in the house was my second brother, James, who was 17.  

A week or two earlier James had also accused me of having condoms in the basement, but as I said earlier I hadn’t used condoms in a really long time so they couldn’t have been mine. People just really wanted me to be the culprit of the unfortunate act that had occurred in our toilet.

I knew who it really was. 

I made a  b-line to the basement to find Will. He was planted on the basement couch playing video games. I snatched his headphones off and demanded “You have condoms down here right?”

That got his attention immediately. His face scrunched up and he started to laugh as he nodded.

I asked him where he got them and he admitted that his buddies dared him to buy them from Walgreens, classic middle schoolers. 

I pictured them in the bathroom, filling them up with water and making them into water balloons. All wet and lubed up they were probably fumbling with them all over the bathroom, resulting in it popping and water going everywhere. Then flushing them down the toilet to hide the evidence. 

Laughing at him I shook my head and got on his level. “Have you been playing with them and flushing them down the toilet?”

This sent him into an uproar. For his 13 year old self the word condoms alone was hilarious. 

The shit water from hell coming out of our basement shower was because of him. He never fessed up though, his admission was the laughing that ensued after I questioned him, but I knew what really happened.