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posted June 3, 2009, from March/April 2009 issue
One last sentimental
sudsing.
THE BATHTUB
Red-lined homeowners wreak weighty revenge on Seafirst Bank
article and photos by John Merriam
The following events occurred
in 1977.
On an unusually sunny morning in late March, Johnny Horizon rummaged around in his basement. He gathered tools to get his temperamental English motorcycle ready for a ride to herald the first nice day of spring. He heard the sound of rain. “That’s odd,” he thought, “it seemed like the sky was clear.” Johnny went to the door—the basement was only accessible from outside—to investigate. Sure enough, no clouds were in the sky. He soon discovered where the sound was coming from. Water was dripping rapidly into the basement from the bathroom above, where his roommate was taking a shower.
Johnny and his roommate, Willie Maybee, had just gone from renters to owners of the house where the water was coming, rain-like, through the floor.
“Damn!” Johnny knew that the house had been built in 1901 and that he and Willie bought it cheap, but he was dismayed to be facing a major episode of the homeowner’s blues so soon. The house was to be officially recorded in their names by the county assessor that very day. He took a large screwdriver and probed the underside of the bathroom floor to see how bad the rot was. The blade of the screwdriver went completely through the floor with only a small push. Johnny wondered why he hadn’t discovered the rot before buying the house. “Before today, I could have just whined to the landlord... God must hate me.”
Johnny banged on the ceiling and yelled to Willie to get out of the shower. Willie obliged, muttering questions punctuated by obscenities; got dressed and left for work. Johnny continued to check just how rotten the floor was.
Water continued to drip, fast and loudly, even though the shower was off. It became painfully obvious that the entire floor would have to be replaced.
He would just as soon have avoided the task of a major home improvement. The house purchase had depleted all of Johnny’s savings. He needed to leave the area to go work. The only way he could get money was to catch another ship in the merchant marine.
Even though the house cost only $10,000, Willie and Johnny had to put up cash to buy it. No bank would loan them money, despite that fact that they had a 50% down payment, originally. Johnny had half in cash from a savings account. Willie tried in vain to borrow the other half. The house was in the Central District, Seattle’s answer to a “ghetto”. It was also red-lined.
Johnny has always had a good knack
for photographing his misdemeanors.
Banks in Seattle had decided that certain portions of the city were a bad risk for loan repayment or otherwise unworthy, somehow, for receiving loans. The chief banker dudes had apparently taken a red pen to a map of the city, isolating the areas where they refused to do business in the mortgage department. Even though Willie had worn out the yellow pages in calling, not a single bank would accept a mortgage application from the two homeowner wannabes after learning the address. While Johnny had no problem with his share of the purchase price, Willie was forced to hit up every friend and relative he had to get his portion—the remaining $5,000. Cash was obtained within hours of the deadline for closing the sale. The transaction had left Willie and Johnny with precious little disposable income and the necessity of costly repairs was an ugly prospect.
Johnny went upstairs and started ripping out the bathroom floor. The oversized bathtub soon stalemated his efforts. It had to be removed if the floor joists were to be replaced. After disconnecting the plumbing fixtures, he pried the tub loose from the floor. Johnny then tried to jockey it out the bathroom door using levers and a come-along. The bathtub was too big to even look like it would fit through the door. After trying to get the tub out the door, at every conceivable angle for two hours, Johnny had worked himself into a rage. He ran back to the basement and grabbed a sledgehammer.
The wall that Johnny had ripped into to get at the plumbing fixtures was shared with the entranceway to the house. Underneath the finish to the bathroom side of the wall was an old nest with dead termites and what appeared to be exterior siding. He then understood why he couldn’t get the bathtub out. The bathroom was obviously an addition to the house. That part of Seattle probably didn’t have running water in 1901, when the house was built, or maybe the original occupants couldn’t afford to pipe it in. The oversized bathtub must have been put in place before the bathroom walls were framed around it. That would explain why Johnny could find no possible angle to remove it.
A logical explanation in no measure lessened the animosity he was now feeling toward the bathtub. Johnny’s assaults on it had left the bathroom looking like downtown Beirut. He beat on the tub with the sledgehammer, using all his might, until the blood vessels in his face were close to bursting. All Johnny succeeding in doing was to knock off the ceramic layer that covered cast-iron 3/8-of-an-inch thick. He took the tub’s obstinacy as a personal affront.
Johnny jumped in his truck, swearing to “teach that bathtub a lesson it will never forget.” He drove to a tool rental store to get an oxyacetylene torch. The tub would be loath to trifle with him again if it were cut in half.
The bathtub did not give up without a struggle. Using the rented torch, Johnny went through a full 700 pounds of oxygen—from the large canister that was came with the acetylene bottle—before the tub was cut in two. By that time it was late afternoon. He used the remaining daylight to extract the two halves of the tub—weighing close to 1,000 pounds in Johnny’s estimation—by means of the come-along, anchored to the frame of the front door, and various trees outside. He couldn’t figure out a way to get the severed halves of the tub into his 1960 Chevy truck by himself.
Willie returned from work at his record store to marvel at the scene of destruction. His first thought was to wonder how he could convince his girlfriend at the time, Jeannine, to spend the night when there was no way to bathe. Willie considered the overnight presence of his girlfriend to be a necessity rather than a luxury and was rapidly inspired to help with the bathroom project. Johnny told Willie that once they obtained a new bathtub, it could be placed on the bare floor joists if necessary, allowing bathing facilities prior to replacement of the floor. Willie viewed that idea as unacceptable to his dating plans. Johnny promised he would proceed with the bathroom remodel as fast as he was able.
Johnny went shopping for a bathtub the next day. He was appalled when confronted by the prices. New tubs were in the vicinity of $300, more money than he and Willie had. He started cruising second-hand stores.
Johnny found what he was looking for at the St. Vincent de Paul thrift store on the eastern shore of Lake Union. After several rounds of dickering Johnny got the handicapped salesman down to $25 for a used bathtub. The man looked slightly embarrassed about how far and fast the price had been lowered, and said it was only good until the store closed that day. Johnny drove home and called Willie at his record store.
“You’d better come home early if you want to score another bathtub.” Johnny knew that was code in Willie’s mind for, ‘help me with the bathtub or your dating life will be ruined.’ Willie came home early.
Outside the house in the alley, Willie and Johnny heaved the old cast-iron bathtub onto the back of the pick-up. The truck bed almost touched the tires under the weight of the tub. Johnny’s worry about the bathroom floor collapsing seemed justified, especially if Willie suffered from impaired judgment after last call at some bar and brought home an obese patron for kinky sex in the shower. The combined weight could have proven fatal.
Johnny and Willie valiantly sallied forth a little after 4pm to get their “new” bathtub at St. Vinnie’s. When they arrived there was a problem: the old tub was overwidth and overlength compared to standard units like its replacement. The two halves of the cast-iron tub took up so much space that there was not enough room in the 4x8-foot bed of the truck for the new one. It was obvious that the old tub would have to be disposed of before the new one could be picked up. Willie and Johnny realized they would have to go to the city dump first.
The dump was on the north side of Lake Union. The truck lumbered off. Then there was another problem: a traffic jam. Both St. Vinnie’s and the city dump closed at 5 o’clock. News radio reported that traffic was clogged up on all sides of Lake Union. There was no way to make it to the dump and back to St. Vinnie’s in the little time remaining.
The truck, with Johnny, Willie and the old bathtub aboard, was cruising slowly along Lake Union when the bad news came over the radio. What to do?
Johnny lurched the truck out of traffic on Eastlake Avenue into a driveway by the Pipeline Tavern. Across the street was a Seafirst Bank, which later became a Mexican restaurant. Johnny saw the bank as a solution to their dilemma.
“Well, there wasn’t a NO BATHTUB
PARKING sign.” Bathtub in background. Note that the official name
for Seafirst at the time was Seattle First National Bank.
Seafirst was one of the banks involved in red-lining the neighborhood where they lived. It was also engaged in questionable labor practices regarding the collective bargaining rights of its employees. Johnny took offense to this last, being the member of a maritime labor union. In addition, he seemed to recall that Seafirst was responsible for funding the corporations that made napalm and engaged in other nefarious activities during the recently ended Viet Nam war.
Johnny and Willie agreed that Seafirst was not a nice bank. Johnny announced that the Knights of Karma, already mounted in the sagging pick-up truck, had been called upon to deliver a message. Willie was less sanguine about communicating with Seafirst over the evil of its ways. His main concern was to get rid of the bathtub and obtain a new one before his dating was curtailed. Johnny pointed the Chevy toward Seafirst.
Their hearts jumped into their throats when they entered the Seafirst parking lot: a security guard was posted at the entrance. He had a pistol at his waist. Johnny’s first impulse was to hang a U-turn at high speed, burning up some of the precious little rubber remaining on the tires of the old pick-up. Willie silently pondered whether dating was worth a possible arrest.
Johnny mentally speculated that convictions for littering were not increased by weight. He told Willie that a littering charge was only punishable by a fine, even if it took a crane to remove the type of “litter” they were conspiring to deposit. He went on to observe that a court appearance and a fine might be a bargain compared to the price of a bathtub, were they to lose their deal at St. Vinnie’s. Willie agreed. Johnny took his foot off the gas pedal and gave a nonchalant ‘fellow worker’ wave to the security guard as the Chevy coasted into the parking lot.
Fortunately, they were both clad in overalls. Not knowing what sort of hygienic horrors awaited them amongst the used goods at St. Vinnie’s, Johnny and Willie donned attire that made them look like deliverymen. Their appearance must have helped foster a sense of bruderbund with the minimum-wage guard, who merely nodded as they glided into the parking lot.
Johnny stopped the truck close to the only two vacant spaces, inadvertently managing to block traffic both entering and exiting the busy bank in that row of parking. He and Willie hoisted the two halves of the cast-iron tub onto the asphalt. By this time the security guard was getting aggressively curious, walking toward them from his phone booth of a guard shack. Johnny realized the situation was becoming precarious and decided to seize the initiative. He started barking orders at Willie.
“Move your end to the right!”
“Here?” Willie meekly inquired.
“No, two more inches to the left!” Johnny delivered his instructions officially, more like threats than requests. The security guard was impressed by the no-nonsense manner and retired back to his shack. Working for shit wages, the guard probably assumed that some vice-president at Seafirst had paid the two grunts to place a piece of ‘modern sculpture’ in the parking lot, or so Willie thought. Johnny imagined he could hear private dick thinking: “That ugly, cut-up bathtub probably cost more than I make for this job in a year.”
Willie, following his roommate’s loud directives, had straddled the two spaces and very cleverly blocked the only remaining parking at the bank. The two then went through the motions of perfecting placement for the cast-iron monstrosity, going so far as to pick off stray beads of melted cast-iron left by misadventures with the rented torch.
“That’s just right.” Johnny made the proclamation loud enough that the security guard heard it.
After installing another tub, it
was off to Pakistan on this tanker.
Willie and Johnny got back into the pick-up. On the way out the guard seemed friendlier then he had when the truck entered the lot. Johnny guessed that he became obsequious after deciding that the crew of the dilapidated truck was performing a chore for some mucky-muck at Seafirst. Willie thought the guy was a “butt-kisser.”
Having ditched their old bathtub, Willie and Johnny picked up the replacement tub a full ten minutes before St. Vinnie’s closed at five p.m.
After installing the
used bathtub, Johnny went to New Orleans and caught a tanker to Pakistan.
Willie’s dating continued, unabated.
John Merriam is an attorney practicing in Seattle. He specializes in wage and injury claims for commercial fishermen and other seamen.