You can only drive around for so long with a toilet in the back of your truck before people start giving you strange looks. This is true even in North Central Florida, where I’ve seen such things in pickup truck beds as a full-sized basketball goal with a Confederate flag painted on the backboard, a coin-operated Pepsi cooler dispensing 12-ounce pop-top cans of live bait, and, on a Florida/Florida State game day, a live alligator gnawing on a wooden Chinese knockoff cigar store Indian.
We’ve been doing a kitchen renovation, part of which included removing a half bathroom located in our kitchen, which I thought was the ultimate in convenience, an opinion not shared by Lady M, who insisted it be removed and replaced with an “island” containing a dishwasher and a pull-out, two-can trash drawer, which apparently is all the rage among the kitchen elite of the Sunshine State. Did I mention the little bathroom even had a magazine rack and a mirror above the sink that, if you opened the door just right, you could see the reflection from the glass door in the kitchen stove, of the TV in the den, so when you and your buddies were watching the ballgame, and nature called, you wouldn’t have to miss a single play! Who wouldn’t want that?
So we demolished the bathroom, pulled out the toilet, and put it in the back of the truck to take to the county dump, which is located just down the street from the High School, where it enjoys a mutually beneficial Desk-to-Dump apprenticeship program.
But a few days later when I took it to the dump, the dump was closed, because lightning had hit the scales and they couldn’t figure out how much the toilet weighed and how much to charge me. I told the Dump Mistress (High School class of 1989) that I had put it in the truck myself so therefore it couldn’t weight more than 50 pounds or so, but I would be glad to pay the $3 100-pound minimum just to get rid of the toilet. Well, she came unglued and told me that may be how we ran our dumps in landfill-loving Tennessee, but in Florida we hold our garbage to a much higher standard. She even said that the toilet didn’t look all that much like a Florida toilet, and how did she know I hadn’t brought that toilet all the way from Tennessee just so I could dump it here? So now it’s my fault that, before I pulled the toilet out, I didn’t take a picture of it in the middle of the kitchen with a copy of that morning’s local newspaper on the lid! What is this — a hostage toilet situation?
Well, being that this is a small town, I figured I’d better wait a while after the toilet hit the fan before going back to the dump. Since I had no immediate plans for using the truck to haul fresh produce, potentially biohazardous laundry (don’t ask), or migrant farm workers — who probably wouldn’t have minded — I decided just to keep the toilet in the back of the truck. If nothing else it made for some interesting conversation down at the town Gas-N-Grocery-N-Go store.
“Wow. What year S10 had that option?”,
“Is that the only color? I’m doing my bedliner in mosaic backsplash, and I’m afraid it would clash.”
“I bet the plumbing was a bugger — is it up to codes — wouldn’t they also require a sink?”
“Did you buy that used? My uncle had one just like that in Orlando.”
“Is this one of those tiny houses I’ve seen on TV?”
And my favorite: “Does it have some kind of remote controls so you can use it while you are driving?”
One older lady tried to give me a five dollar bill, saying “It’s the least I can do for our homeless veterans.”
Oddly enough, nobody asked me where they could get one.
More people than you’d think asked if I would take their picture sitting on it in the back of the truck, and one woman insisted on a video while I drove her around the parking lot. She said they had just moved down here from Connecticut, and her family was concerned that she might have lowered her living standards too much. I guess that showed them!
So a couple days ago Lady M. “informed” me that it was time to lose the toilet. By then we’d taken out a lot of old wall and cabinets and such, so I tossed all that in the back of the truck, which covered up the toilet. I’d considered taking it out and putting it in the passenger seat to make more room, but it had started raining which meant I’d have to roll the windows up, and I’m not sure even the six pack of air fresheners shaped like gators would be able to deal with that. Plus, what if I got sentimental and “forgot” to unload it at the dump?
I was sandwiched between a couple garbage trucks in the incoming scale line, so the Dump Mistress didn’t really notice me. I drive to the designated area, unload all the stuff (yes, including the toilet), and go back to the scales for my post-dumping weight.
When I get the signal, I walk into the double-wide trailer office to settle up. I pay her, and on the way out the door she says, “Oh, a white S10. We had one of those in here a week or so ago where a guy was trying to unload a toilet he brought all the way from Tennessee!”
She had her office window open, so right before I drove off I yelled out, “Excuse me Ma’am, I was that guy with the toilet, but it wasn’t from my house in Tennessee. It was from a Taco Bell in Georgia!” •
