Fruit of the Loom
the scent of sheep = irresistible
Once upon a time, my sister and I were sniffing discount candles at T.J. Maxx when I spotted a beautiful rug.
It was huge. Across the store from us, it was hanging from clips on a flippable wall-rack of rugs, so much bigger than its fellows that it grazed the floor, gathering dust bunnies along its edge. Abandoning my $7.99 pipe tobacco-scented candle on the shelf, I walked over to the wall-rack and flipped it open so I could see the rug better.
Ooh. This rug was blue and pink and cream and brown. It was thick and soft. It had little palm trees (or flowers?? were they flowers?) woven into it in a cool way, and the whole thing was so large you had to stand way back just to understand the pattern. So nice! I patted it. What a great rug! Examining the back of it, I saw a sticker that said, “100% wool”. Two other stickers proclaimed the rug was “100% Handwoven”, and a “GoodWeave Certified Product”.
What did that mean? I pulled my phone out. A GoodWeave certified rug, I discovered, is a rug that’s guaranteed to have been made without the use of child labor.
Amazing! And man: this rug was way too nice to be at a T.J. Maxx. All the other rugs were polyester or acrylic and backed with plastic matting, and none of them were certified. How much was this frickin’ thing?
Oh. It was $389.
I deflated a little. This was not a good time for me to be spending $389 on a rug. Davin and I very much needed a rug for our echoingly empty living room, but all of this was happening in 2022, which meant that we also needed every leftover cent of our paychecks to continue funding the travel for my book.
But I loved this rug.
“You should get it,” Shelley said.
“Stop.”
“You’ll never find something like this again.”
“You’re not helping!!”
I FaceTimed Davin.
“Get it,” he said. He’d looked at it for about two seconds.
“Are you sure?”
“Get it. I love it. We both love it, and we need a rug, and it’ll look perfect in the living room. We’ll put it on the card we never use; we’ll figure it out.”
“Are you sure though?”
“I’m hanging up!”
Heady with the high that only comes from making reckless impulse purchases, I bought the rug, tapping our emergency credit card against the checkout beeper with the triumphant, haughty air of a queen. I forced my sister to help me roll it up and wedge it into my tiny car, and then I drove it home, my right elbow unable to move because of the size of the rug-roll. The rug touched the front of my windshield and hung far out the back of my open trunk, flopping like a beluga sturgeon every time I hit a pothole.
Once home, we unfurled the rug. It did look perfect in the living room. Davin and I loved it.
…And so did someone else.
You know who loved the rug more than both Davin and me combined?
This dummy.
Teddy was magnetically attracted to the new rug. He rolled on it constantly, and seemed to love rubbing his face on it. And then, early one morning when we were still asleep, he snuck downstairs and peed on it.
I cleaned the rug with one of those portable carpet steamers. The big spot took forever to dry.
The second it was dry, Teddy peed on it again. In the middle of the night, again.
I cleaned the rug again, but angrily this time. What was this? Teddy was fully house-trained. We’d had him for years. He’d never done something like this before.
And then it stopped. Teddy seemed to lose interest. Case closed; it was one of those weird dog things that never happened again.
Until one hot, humid morning this summer, when I came downstairs and smelled something… bad. Oh no, I’d thought, gingerly stepping all over the rug with my bare feet, feeling for a wet spot. I didn’t find one, but I got suspicious. Davin and I moved all the furniture and flipped the rug over.
The back of the rug was covered – covered – with small dried wet spots. Apparently, Teddy had been creeping downstairs at night for ages, doing a tiny little sneaky tinkle on the rug each time, and tiptoeing back upstairs. The spots were small enough for us not to notice by morning. The heat of the first humid summer day, though – with windows that had been open to steamy air all night – had suddenly woken all the spots up, causing our entire living room to smell like the mat underneath the urinal at a gay bar at 3 AM.
Fun fact: Did you know that dogs adore peeing on 100% wool rugs? I do now! Did you know that it’s because their senses of smell are so much better than humans that they can still smell the animalness of the sheep? It’s true!
Davin and I tried everything. We took our beautiful rug outside and soaked it with the hose and scrubbed it with scouring brushes and blue Dawn.
Nope. It still smelled, even after baking outside in the hot sun to dry.
We rewashed it, this time buying a pressure-washer attachment for our hose.
Nope.
We poured vinegar on it. We sprayed antimicrobial sprays on it. We tried hydrogen peroxide. We tried Woolite.
Nothing worked. The rug stank. And every time we washed it, it weighed approximately 300,000 pounds sopping wet and then took at least four days to dry.
And then, two weeks ago, I saw this video:
This video suggested taking dirty rugs to your local self-service car wash. I forwarded the video to Davin, and before he could even finish typing the words “haha i’m ready to throw the fuckin rug away”, he was helping me load the world’s heaviest handwoven peepad into the back of his truck.
It worked. We had scrubbed and rinsed for an hour. Our backs ached, and we had fed $34 worth of quarters into the self-service car wash machine, but we got there. Our rug was really clean for the first time in months. We laid it on our front lawn in the hot sun to dry, and of course it took days, and it killed all the grass in a perfect rug-shaped rectangle, but. We’d made it.
We dragged the rug inside, unrolled it, and smiled at the sight of our stunning rug inside our house, where it belonged. We then swore a solemn oath to not give Teddy any water after 8 PM from here on out.
We were meticulous about it for a couple weeks, but…
We forgot and gave Teddy water before bed last night.
And he immediately peed on the rug again.
But wait, why am I telling you all this? What does any of this have to do with being queer, or sniffing glamorous perfumes, or having homosexual fun with a gay little email in your inbox on a Tuesday morning?
Why, it has absolutely nothing to do with any of those things! This is just the thing I’m dealing with right now, and it’s taking over my life, and it’s wild to me to think that almost every person you and I collectively know is doing battle with some kind of similar mundane bullshit thing that they can’t make go away or figure out how to solve, right now. I don’t know about you, but I never picture other people dealing with the tedious, tiresome, or gross parts of their lives. I only picture other people doing the cool stuff I know they do, ya know? Like, people on social media are always on vacation or busy being fearsomely hot or laughing with their friends at a cute outdoor picnic – the kind where someone brought a checkered cloth for the ground and a glass vase full of flowers – but really? we’re also all out here devoting cumulative full working weeks of our lives to scraping mold off of things, trying to figure out what’s causing the smell in the sink, or rinsing endless streams of dog pee down our driveways. We contain multitudes!
I guess what I’m saying is: Sometimes we’re a sexy giant handwoven 100% wool rug, and sometimes we’re on our hands and knees, noses touching the rug, sniffing to see if what we’re doing is having any effect.
We never know which one it’s gonna be, do we?
But from here on out, this guy sleeps in his crate!!!!
I would be hard pressed to choose between the dog and the rug. We've endured the same issue, too. Sneaky peeing. Bah!
the Teddy pics! perfection! "We contain multitudes!"