Steep or Stand?
Just as there are blue states and red states, there are shower people and there are bath people. This is not to say that one’s disposition toward water reflects one’s politics, or vice versa. It’s just that people have different inclinations about water, the same way they have different inclinations about government.
What makes someone prefer a bath to a shower? Good question. Upon pondering it, I realize I have no idea whatsoever. So I started asking people. As in many other quotidian aspects of life, “bath versus shower” can evoke strong emotion. I wouldn’t call it a culture war, but the respective hygienic camps can brandish a pretty mean loofah when taking up the subject. Some shower people regard bath people as sentimental, pseudo-sensual fools who would rather wallow in their own filth than just get clean, dry off and go on to work. Some bath people regard shower people as utilitarian tools of the system who just want to get clean, dry off and go on to work. But really, what disposes a sack of flesh inhabiting this mortal coil toward one or the other? Maybe it’s just a matter of how much you do or don’t like water, which is in no way an indicator of your cleanliness or your godliness. And what determines that? Maybe it’s your star sign or your DNA, or maybe it’s your origin. My friend of Middle Eastern descent, for example, declares himself to be a desert person. He regards water as something sacred that should not be squandered in such quantities as required by a bath, though he showers daily.
I am not, in terms of origin, a desert person, but I am as a matter of temperament. I grew up in a land of rain and river, lake and creek, but I have never much liked water, which is perhaps why I moved West half my life ago. The ocean is awfully pretty to look at, but for my own hydrologic purposes, a powerful shower head will suffice.
Still, I’m wishy-washy. I’m a shower person who prefers the company of bathers. I regard them as superior beings, people capable of slowing down. I like the idea of bath beads, of herbal bath infusions, of Swiss-made Olbas Therapeutic Herbal Bath, of aromatherapy salts and whatnot. I just don’t have the patience to fill the tub and sit in it.
Most of the women in my life have been bath people, but this is more a matter of coincidence than gender. In terms of bathing (versus showering) as a vestige of female sensuality, we have several centuries of art history to reinforce this notion. The sight of females bathing has long drawn the fawning eye of artists, and when you take into account that most of the artists were men and presumably more inclined to round up female bathing beauties than male ones, well, what would you expect?
I am, though, sympathetic to the idea of the bather as sensualist. The thing is, you can’t judge a sensualist by his or her casing, and the two people indelibly stamped in my memory as bath people could not be more different in aspect. One was my Uncle Brown, whom I’ll get to in a minute. The other is a woman I lived with for a while in an old house in Echo Park. It had a skanky, long neglected bath-shower with grimy mineral deposits and was claustrophobically encased by limey, rattling shower doors.
It took guts to get into that tub, but Natalie was a bather, and whether splashing herself ready for work in 15 minutes in the morning, or luxuriating in it with candles, a glass of wine and a wedge of cheese in the evening, she drank in every moment of it. Me, I would sit on the edge of the tub, but rarely got in, and then only to be with her. One morning toward the end of our time together she looked at me and said, “For the rest of your life, whenever you think of me, I’ll always be taking a bath.” In this, she is correct.
Sensualists, however, come in different forms. If Degas might have painted Natalie, my Uncle Brown would have caught the eye of Bruegel the Elder, or one of those Dutch painters with a penchant for the grotesque. A raw-boned, hardworking farmer, he was another species of sensualist.
Uncle Brown favored Red Man chewing tobacco and a nightly half pint (or more) of Heaven Hill bourbon whiskey instead of a fine cigar and a warm cognac, but this made him no less a sensualist. He had to have his evening bath. This was in the mid-’60s, when I would spend part of my summer vacation on my grandparents’ farm in a crooked, listing house full of warped doors that never stayed shut, so there was an unavoidable lack of privacy. (Indoor plumbing had been a fairly recent addition.) But even for Uncle Brown, there was more to bathing than just getting clean. Arriving at the farmhouse, his coveralls caked with dust and sweat and tobacco juice, he would run himself a bubble bath with suds as thick as meringue, and lie there half an hour--luxuriating is the only word--until the grit of the fields was shed from his calloused, sunburned skin and aching back. Then he would hoist himself out of the tub, dry off and don the same dust-caked coveralls he had worn in the fields all that day, and, I’m fairly sure, go to sleep in them.
And maybe that explains why I’m a shower person.