Cold showers and Benjamin Braddock

There is a washer and dryer on the first floor of my apartment. But, unfortunately, a few months ago the dryer stopped working.

I refused to take my clothes to the laundromat. So my dirty clothes and I have waited patiently for the repairman to come.

When the repair company cancelled for the fourth time, I regretfully stuffed my laundry into plastic bags. With the help of my girlfriend, Lauren, I summoned all of my courage and some of my strength and lugged the 65 pounds of laundry out of my room, down two flights of stairs, past the lonely dryer and out the door.

Distraught, I treated myself to the wash-and-fold service and had the image of folded clean clothes in my head as I unlocked the door and walked back into my living room. And there he stood, bent carelessly over the dryer, the repair guy. I collapsed onto the couch in defeat, the rhythmic hum of the dryer like a sad song in my ear.

It is the kind of irony that I seem to be experiencing these days. So when our hot water heater stopped working four days later, I took it in stride.

You are now, dear reader, most likely forming your own opinion of the kind of apartment that my roommates and I live in. Ours is a process of fixing things that frequently break.

At this point, I am still unsure about the degree of the brokenness of the water heater, except to say that the pilot light does not stay lit anymore, and it fails to produce hot water.

My roommates Jordan and Robin struggled to light the pilot on multiple occasions, and found it futile. We called our landlord, whose number is now on the speed dial of all of our cell phones. Typically it takes him a couple of days to get back to us and this was no exception.

One cold shower and four days later, he sent plumbers to our house. They showed up while no one was home, and it was another cold shower and three more days before our landlord got back to us.

Eventually, we met the plumbers and in seconds they lit the pilot with a large, flaming, rolled-up piece of paper. Three hours later, it went out again.

It was two more cold showers and a week and a half later, before our landlord got back to us again.

Feeling helpless, we called 311, New York City’s hotline for information and housing complaints. After spending 20 minutes on the phone with an operator, spelling my name and street name six times, a follow-up phone call yielded nothing. My complaint had not been processed. Again, I went through the spelling of my name and street six more times with a new operator. The complaint was filed, but nothing happened.

We call our landlord again, and again.

I am graduating in May, and I only mention it because the idea has started to consume me. I think about it every day. I think about my plan, my hopes and my fears. I equate it with graduating from high school, and then decide that it is completely different. When asked how I am doing, I answer, “Fine, a little freaked out about graduating.”

A recent re-watching of “The Graduate” was an eye-opener. I’m not sure I really got it before. Benjamin Braddock, played brilliantly by Dustin Hoffman, is a college graduate. He’s home for the first time since graduation, and he has no idea what he wants to do with his life. “I just want my future to be something… different,” he stammers to his father.

I am interrupted from writing this column by a knock at the front door. The folks over at 311 have sent a code enforcement officer. He tells me that a violation will be filed and given to the landlord within the next few days. Hot showers seem to be in the near future. But I won’t hold my breath.

In my mind, I somehow equate the feeling of my upcoming graduation to my recent understanding of taking cold showers.

I stand outside the shower sticking only my fingertips under the steady stream of freezing water. I’m not quite sure what I am waiting for; the water isn’t getting any warmer.

Staring into the shower, I know that it’s not someplace I want to stay for any extended time period. And I long for the moment when I step out of the shower into the warm air, and wrap a clean towel around myself. Safe and warm.