Every few months, I take a vacation to day-drink in Philly with one of my most favorite people in the world. And every time we meet, I bring up the tub incident (correction, the tuuuuuub incident)… just to hear him re-tell one of my favorite stories in the world.

So thank you, E, for sharing this precious, glorious gem.

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By ELS

In his poem “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost said “Good fences make good neighbors.” This truth has resonated in me through many years of living around people, and while it makes the most literal sense in the deep woods of rural Maine, I live in South Philly and share a breezeway with a crackhead. I’m just saying, the rules aren’t necessarily followed.

When I first purchased my house in the fall of 2004, it was a total gut. The bathroom was a disgusting mess with a ratty toilet, half-broken wall sink, a single light bulb barely hanging onto knob-and-tube wiring, and a WWII-era rusted and peeling cast iron tub. Everything had to go and I was going to rebuild it with all new finishes. During the demolition phase–and being an Artist who likes to work with reclaimed items to “upcycle” them into more useful pieces–I decided to save the tub and make a cool planter out of it for the roof deck I would eventually build.

The thing weighed 400 pounds and we could barely get it out the kitchen door and into the corner of a 15’x 15’ breezeway area between my house and my neighbor’s behind me. I had a door that led to the area, she had only a window.

There the tub sat, through the end of demolition that winter, into my first spring, through summer, another winter, and before I knew it, five years had passed. The roofdeck had not been realized. Life, work, and wretched laziness got in the way.

During a routine visit from my exterminator, “The Bugman,” he asked about the roofdeck and the tub. He was looking for a new home for his alligator (a story for another day), and I told him that I gave up on the tub planter and he could have it. Two days later he came back with a truck and a really good friend to help haul it off.

The following day I was at work when I got the call. It was the auto shop next door to my house. The owner said, “You need to come home, your neighbor was just here looking for you. She was yelling something about you taking her tub. There was snot coming out of her nose.”

“What tub,” I asked. “My tub?”

“I don’t know, dude. She was screaming ‘That ain’t his tuuuuub, that my tuuuuuub!’ She wants to sue you.”

I came home and within a few minutes I heard a knock on my kitchen door, which meant she crawled out her window to confront me. “Where my tuuuub at?! That ain’t yo’ tub, that’s MY tuuuuub.” I couldn’t help but focus on the dried snot ringing her nostrils when I said, “What the hell are you talking about? What tub? The tub that was sitting right here for the last 5 years?” “Yeah,” she said, “that is MY tub, that ain’t YO’ tuuuub.”

Citing legal precedent, I explained to her that “when I bought this house, the tub was inside, and I purchased the house and everything within it, including the tub. I took MY tub and put it outside here and got rid of it.”

At this point we had both raised our voices to an uncomfortable level. I’m not an expert in negotiation tactics when dealing with crackheads, but a voice of reason inside me said I needed to change my tone and get out of this.

She insisted this tub was hers. “This was the tub I bathed in as a child” she told me, adding that she was “a collector of antiques.”

I suddenly remembered the hundreds of photos of my demolition and construction project I had taken and said I could prove this was my tub.

I returned with evidence and reviewed them with her:

Here is a photo of the tub in the bathroom on the day I bought the house.

Here is a photo of the tub during the demolition of the bathroom and kitchen.

Here is a photo of me, my grandmother, and the tub at my Bar Mitzvah.

Here’s me and the tub on the Teacup ride at Disney World.

“I don’t know how else to tell you,” I said, “but this was MY tub, and it’s gone. I’m sorry.”

But I made her a promise and finally got out of this mess. “I see these tubs on Craigslist or in the paper all the time,” I told her. “The next time I see one I will get it and bring it to you.”

At this point she said “Aww, thanks baby” and gave me an awkward hug.

With the wall between us now mended, we never spoke of this incident again.