To Tile or Not to Tile

When I was a child, my parents had decided they wanted a jacuzzi. So, one day we all piled into our cute, red AMC Gremlin and puttered off on “a trip,” my father said.

We drove two blocks to a huge jacuzzi store, that advertised a “blowout sale!” We entered and oohed and awed at the huge jacuzzis, sitting on their sides (I guess because they didn't want people sitting in them). A salesman came up to my parents and started his spiel.

Me and my brother, three years younger than I, saw a stack of books on a coffee table next to an ottoman. So, we went over there to amuse ourselves.

The books were catalogs, but they were large, not very thick. They looked like those big National Geographic books with information and panoramic pictures of places like the Serengeti, or the majesty of the Swiss Alps. Of course, I assumed information because when I read those, I only read them for the pictures.

I grabbed one, and with my brother sitting next to me, opened it across our laps. Yes, it was that big, or we were pretty small, I don't remember. The catalog contained pictures of jacuzzis, obviously, in various settings, filled with water and happy, smiling nude people. Here was one possibly set in Aspen, the snow on the ground, the view of the mountains behind and nude people. Here was one in a rainforest, with huge trees in the background, a monkey swinging from a tree and nude people. Another one was in Holland, with a dike behind with the sea and sea birds flying fuzzily in the distance and nude people.

I don't remember how old I was, but I knew it was before puberty smacked me in the face and made me realize that women were …. special creatures to be misunderstood and who would mystify and befuddle me to this day.

You could tell the man was naked because his back was always to the camera, yet you could see the crack of his buttocks. The woman, if she sat in the jacuzzi, always miraculously had the waterline about an inch below her breasts. (Pretty tall women, I had thought) Or she was shown slinking into or out of the jacuzzi, with legs bent in a demure way to cover up. I had read National Geographic articles about African nations, so it was nothing new to me.

My father was discussing a model with the salesman. My mom was getting bored of the banter, and looked over at us, slowly turning the pages of the catalog. She came over to see what had our rapt attention, looked and shrieked.

My brother and I never set foot in a jacuzzi showroom again. They made us wait in the car.

My father, after trips to showroom after showroom, was getting frustrated at finding that the jacuzzis he wanted was too large for the very small house we lived in. It was even too large for the very small yard that came with the house. So, a light bulb burned steadily over his head as he told his family that he was going to build our very own jacuzzi.

So the project began in the only bathroom we had in the house. We took showers at our grandfather's house (he lived behind us in the duplex we lived in) as my father labored over the jacuzzi. Gone was the standard bathtub, in went the tile. We couldn't see what he was doing. He had the door shut constantly, and when he would come out, he commanded us not to peek behind the plastic curtain he taped up.

When he was done, he proudly showed us his handiwork. The jacuzzi was deep, maybe three feet. It looked cavernous to me, young as I was. You had to step down into it, using the seat as a stair. It had jets to bubble the water and look like a jacuzzi. The tile was a mottled brown, half an inch by an inch in size. Yes, it was a lot of tile, almost like a mosaic. I looked at all that brown and thought he should have made a picture of something at the bottom of the jacuzzi, to look at. My mother marveled, my young brother was scared (he thought he was going to trip, fall in and break his neck; I hoped he would), and I was still wondering how to take a shower in that thing.
I don't think the jacuzzi was ever used. It took forever for the thing to fill up with water. At least, I never used it as a jacuzzi, because whenever I took a bath, everyone else in the house seemed to bang on the door within 5 minutes of my getting in, yelling at me to get out.

My parents probably used it, after my brother and I had gone to bed. They may have filled it up with hot water, got in and relaxed, letting the trouble and trauma of raising two hellish boys melt away. I think that's what they did.

If anyone stayed with us, it was always a source of entertainment. My father would never tell them about the jacuzzi. They would go into the bathroom, disrobe and pull the curtain expecting a typical ivory bathtub and instead look down on the Grand Canyon of jacuzzis. Then they would enrobe, come out and ask, “How do you turn the shower on?” This made my father proud as he would show them grandly how the thing worked.

I eventually liked the jacuzzi, as the shower head was one of those pulsating ones, that you could remove. I had to stand on the seat to remove it, but it was alright.

When we moved away from the house, the tenants-to-be looked at the Grand Canyon and told my father they weren't interested in it. So he labored to put the bathroom as it were, with a typical ivory bathtub. The brown with flecks of gold tile was gone, the custom jacuzzi never to be seen or built again.

Thus began my father's work in tile and the end of this story.