The Bathtub Treatment

I think I will dip my pink & white body in yon tub; I feel a bit gritty after the affairs of the day.  W.C. Fields

This all starts just before Christmas when my landlord (you know no story beginning with “my landlord” is heading anywhere good) leaves a note slapped on my apartment door: workmen are coming to take away my bathtub on December 27.

This is absurd. Right?  I call the landowner — way out in Paramount, formerly City of Industry — who tells me there is a Santa Monica City Code requiring 24-inches of space between bathtub and “water closet”.  I only have 17.

“But, I’ve been taking baths here for 25 years,” I say.

“Sorry,” he says.

“Can’t I get grandfathered in? What kind of flophouse are you running over here?”

“Workmen will be there on the 27th,” he says. “It is what it is.”

My landlord seems not to appreciate that hot baths have been a Santa Monica tradition of mine since 1994.You see I enjoy a weekend ritual featuring sacramental candle (scented), Epsom salts (ginger or white tea; lavender is for ladies), and KCRW deejays Garth Trinidad or Liza Richardson in the background. And hey: this is no over-the-top, cast-iron Roman tub. We’re talking good old American Standard porcelain.

He says he’ll fax me the work permit. Which he never does, but instead of getting angry, I get busy?  I call the family attorneys. My brother and my sister. Jim does mediation work in Michigan and Nancy is in San Diego, defending asylum-seeking Hondurans, but both say, sorry bro, a landlord has the right to bring a building up to code. Hey, what do they know about San Shamanica: where landlords force everybody out and charge the next tenant a zillion bucks?

Next, I call SMRR — Santa Monica Renter’s Rights — for support.  I leave a message on their hotline, get a message back, send another message, get one back, and that’s the last time I vote SMRR. (Casting no aspersions here; I know they are a fine organization. And I should have been home at the appointed time to welcome their wisdom, etc…) I go online to www.rental lawyer.Com. Pete the lawyer says the landlord should offer me money to move out. However,  a note from my doctor explaining, “I have a condition” — thank you Curb Your Enthusiasm Season Two! — will have no bearing on the case.

“What about mitigating circumstances?”  

The rental lawyer chuckles. Obviously I have no idea what I was talking about.

“It is what it is,” he says.

Down at the coffeehouse, my friends tell me, “a bathtub eviction is a first world problem.” Come on, here it is Christmas: I should feel fortunate to have a hot shower and a roof for $900 a month, God bless us everyone. 

So, I do what any DIY citizen should do: Type up every bad thing the landlord ever did and take it to City Hall.  Beth at the Rent Control Board I can tell really cares, considering it’s Christmas Eve. She reads my written complaint, stamps it, suggests I send a copy to the City Attorney, and directs me down the hall to Building & Permits. Susan, the Building & Permits clerk, checks her computer and finds, “No Permits Pulled” for my Ocean Park address. Susan is not as congenial as Beth. She says I should get in touch with Santa Monica Code Enforcement, but makes me go out to the rotunda to make the call. Which ticks me off.  I wish her “Merry Christmas!”sarcastically.  I’m feeling guilty and shameful by the time I reach the lobby but Derrick at Code Enforcement understands my plight! Derrick says the landlord, no doubt, has given me false information; he sees no permits pulled. He assures me: if workmen show up without a permit on the 27th he’ll, “send out a crew to shut it down.” Semi-relieved that nobody’s coming in on a besmirch-and-destroy mission to smash out the bathtub and ruin my life, I go spend Christmas with family in San Diego.

December 26 I get a call from Leslie, a Consumer Specialist at the City Attorney’s office. She cites California Civil Code Section 1941.1, which stipulates that landlords are forbidden to use, “lies or intimidation to make a tenant move out.”   And she offers: “Reasonable Modifications.” This forces a landlord to put in a new tub — but the tenant has to pay for it.

Finally, I call the contractor — way out in San Dimas in the 909 — and beg: “I have family in town for the holidays. My girlfriend cooked a ham.” Couldn’t they at least wait until 2019? (I’m still in San Diego, but you do what you gotta do when you’re a renter in “Bay City” — what Raymond Chandler called Santa Monica.)

Contractor Larry isn’t fazed and says the bathtub has to come out December 27th.

“Why?”

“It’s not up to me,” he says. “Talk to the landlord.”

“His mailbox is full. He won’t call me back!”

“It is what it is.”

And his last sentence…makes me go — to quote a family expression — nutsy cuckoo. I go off on the poor guy. A rage of f-words in f-sentences fly into the phone from somewhere primal. (I’m shaking when I hang up.) Emmet, my 6-year-old nephew watching all this, says: “What’s the matter with Uncle Hank?” I explain all I know about civil code enforcement and the iniquity of landlords.  Fifteen minutes later, the contractor calls back to say: They will wait until 2019. I thank him, apologize to him, and high-five my nephew.  “Go hard or go home,” Emmet says.  Indeed.  Now I get to spend New Year’s with family in San Diego. [Kids say the damndest things. Did he get that from “Fortnite”?]

On January 2nd contractor Larry comes to my apartment with Building & Safety Inspector Seth. Seth repeats the, “water closet requires 24 inches of space,” thing.  They show me the code in a pamphlet. (Weirdly, Larry and Seth never use the word “toilet.”) I show them a letter from my doctor which says I require a regimen of, “hot bath treatments due to spinal injuries suffered playing football.” Inspectors don’t care about notes from your doctor. I knew Dr. Ravitz should have included, these ailments came while playing defensive back for the Division III Wesleyan University Cardinals and would have tied the school interception record if not for that game vs. Williams, whom Wes could never beat. (Larry & Seth don’t have to know the injury occurred in 1976.)

The two men press into my tiny powder room. The inspector, not as congenial as the contractor, lays down the law: “There is no requirement to maintain a bathtub in any unit or single-family dwelling, for any reason, medical or otherwise. There is however, a requirement for the water closet to have 24 inches clear in front of it. The bathtub is going away.” *

“Can’t you just move the toilet so there will be enough distance?”

“I’d have to take out the sink,” says the contractor.

“So?” I cry. “I’ll conduct my morning ablutions in the kitchen.”  I’m desperate, pulling out the phone and beginning to film everything they do. “Just for my own edification; I’m curious about your deconstruction process.” (Thinking: evidence for lawsuit, housing court, mitigating circumstances)

“I don’t do video,”says Seth, hi-tailing it out of the apartment to jump in the Building & Permits van — me chasing, shooting and shouting — as Larry calls after him: “You see what I’m dealing with?”  (the threat to “barricade” myself in the apartment may have set Seth off, I don’t know)

In my journal that night I write: Didn’t take final bath. Didn’t want to feel how good it felt. Need to get used to not having it.

Nobody shows up the next day, January 3. Or January 4, 5, or 6.  I do some yoga and call the contractor to ask what the hell is up.

“We’re going to spin the water closet,” Larry says. “Take out the sink. Keep the tub.”

A moment passes.

“Wait,” I say. “You mean, if I didn’t get a postponement, you would have taken the tub out on December 27th?”

“Probably, yeah.”

I call my mother to give her the good news because she gave me my first bath. She has some elder wisdom, how it’s true what they say about, the squeaky wheel always getting the grease.  (which is, weirdly, also a lyric in James Taylor’s, “Shower the People”)

The lesson learned?  Rub-a-dub-dub, Citizens! You can fight City Hall. Or your landlord, at least. But melting down all over the guy like that? *

I join an anger management group and send the contractor a fruitcake.

                     After

P.S. The spinal stenosis — my “condition” — feels better, thanks for asking. A Santa Monica City Councilman read this story in the Santa Monica Daily Press and emailed: “The Rent Board administration has confirmed to me that things like bathtub removals are being used by landlords to harass tenants into leaving rent-controlled apartments.”

Well, rub-a-dub-dub in the tub, right?

* My therapist said going off on a contractor like this is evidence of autonomic neuropathy, which means, a discombobulation of all functions as one loses it.