“The royal ass has been wiped!”
Mom would make this announcement from the bathroom as Rory and I drank Tang and ate burnt toast in the kitchen. We’d hear Dad moaning to himself in his bedroom.
After Dad went to the bathroom each morning, Mom would examine how much toilet paper remained on the roll. Dad was out of control when it came to products—Silver Foil, Wax Paper, Brillo, Saran Wrap. If he washed dishes, the soap flowed like a Las Vegas fountain; if the table needed drying, Dad swung a roll of paper towels around like a lasso. “Yahoo!” Cowboy Bob screamed, and round and round the roll would go, paper filling the air like a Chinese New Year. Mom would go friggin’ nuts. Rory and I would duck.
Products were purchased with Mom’s house money, and the house money budget never went up. Year in, year out, Mom made her case but Dad kept the allowance where it was and continued to use the soap and paper products like he was auditioning to replace Shirley Booth in Hazel.
One rainy afternoon, when I was five and Rory was three, Dad decided to give us a lesson on how to wipe our butts. We sat on the edge of the tub. Dad took the stage at the front of the bowl. Our bathroom was five feet wide and seven feet long.
“You see what I’m doing with my hand? See the way I’m rolling the paper around and around? That’s what you do before you wipe. Cover your hand like a bandaged wound, and only then do you go in and finish the job. Gotta be clean down there when you leave.”
Rory and I humored Dad with a quick nod, then gave each other a quicker look that said, “He’s out of his mind.”
Mom came in the bathroom at the end of the lesson and said, “If you use that much paper, I’ll kill the three of you.”
Pat & Bob Pryor, 1968
Thomas Pryor has been featured on A Prairie Home Companion and This American Life, and his work has appeared in the New York Times. He curates City Stories: Stoops to Nuts, a storytelling show at the Cornelia Street Café on the second Tuesday of the month (next one May 8th). Check out his blog Yorkville: Stoops to Nuts.
