Mr. Clean

With date number four looming, she wanted to do something mellow, which was fine by me. We had spent the previous three dates painting the town, if not red exactly, then at least a reddish mauve; my butt still hurt from the Tilt-A-Whirl, and my pride was in shambles after an experiment in candlepin bowling, during which I learned that my follow-through made me look like a rubber man-doll tripping over a manhole cover. So sure, mellow sounded just peachy, and I did what you do in these situations: invited her over to my place.

 

That text message sent, I stared at my phone for a minute, and then looked around at my apartment. There was some serious work to do.

 

It’s not that I’m slovenly, necessarily. (Although a gander at my work space might suggest that.) It’s just that I’m single, and longtime bachelors have a habit of making some strange choices when it comes to their immediate environment. There’s nothing inherently wrong, for example, with storing clean socks on top of your microwave, or replacing one of the chairs at your kitchen table with a half-deflated exercise ball. But if you want to prevent women from dashing at horse-like speeds in the opposite direction, adjustments may be necessary.

 

A place for everything, and everything in an odd, odd place. This is my life.

 

The first order of business was the kitchen, since it’s the first room you see upon entering my bizarro pad. What’s particular about the kitchen is that it’s an unusual space to work with; it’s large, which is nice, but the layout is such that one end of the room is sort of dead, prevented from taking on more conventional kitchen-like forms by architecture of the impressionist school of thought: Angles, angles, and more angles. Because of the weird open space at that end, I chose it as the location of my computer desk. I know, a computer in the kitchen sounds strange, and it is. Trust me, though. It sort of works, so long as you don’t mind the smell of pan-fried chicken while you shop for Halloween costumes on eBay.

 

The problem with the computer area isn’t location, but organization. Pock-marked with drawers and cubby holes, each bursting with a bouquet of crumpled up papers and half-forgotten nic-nacs, the desk itself resembles normal office furniture that’s been blown to smithereens with a high-powered grenade. As my desktop PC has slowly seen less usage in favor of the laptop, the desk itself has become a repository for random detritus – on this shelf, a cluster of Ninja Turtles action figures, on that shelf, a shark-head hand puppet I snatched for a dollar at Big Al’s Super Value. This isn’t an area kept by an adult, much less an organized one. An archaeological dig through its contents would reveal more about my life than I’d like people to know, at least at first blush, and so any revamping project begins with this eyesore. I might get more out of the deal than just a clean workspace. Buried under empty picture frames and phone books from 2007 is a small fortune in quarters, enough to pay for my laundry until the age of flying cars.

 

A trickier business is the cleanup of random clothes. Generally speaking, single dudes don’t settle on one specific location for the storage of worn clothing items; we remove our jackets and sweaters at the end of the day and toss them on the nearest available piece of furniture, or perhaps a specially designated pile on the floor next to empty DVD boxes and back issues of Nintendo Power. There they stay until they develop their own ecosystems – invisible colonies of microbes that take advantage of the relative stability of the unmoving piles to build their own mini civilizations. Slung across the back of the living room couch, one may easily find pants that have remained stationary since Obama’s first term, and which might, with the proper training, play fetch or dance the tango. 

 

If this all sounds a bit gross, it’s for a very good reason: It’s a bit gross. Welcome to bachelorhood.

 

Now, I hate to engage in gender stereotyping – men are slobs, women are neat, etc. Certainly there are plenty of men who are tidy and organized, and judging from what I see on TV, a disturbing number of women live amidst hoarded stacks of newspapers and petrified cat poop. Realistically, though, I wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of rectifying the state of my abode had it been a guy visiting. I would have made sure the couch was clear, and that would have been the end of it. This particular lady’s status as my date obviously has a little something to do with the extra cleanup effort; stray bits of Cheese Doodles do not engender snuggling. Yet I’d also whip out the ol’ dustpan for my mother, aunt, and cousin with the weird mole, all of whom have one thing in common. Two, if you count their mutual disdain for my singing voice. There’s something about a woman’s presence that inspires respect, or at least a little elbow grease with the Spic ’N Span. 

 

So what is it in some people’s DNA that dictates cleanliness and organization? Some of us are just born with genes missing. I’d love to be one of those people who has a regular routine – floors on Tuesdays, dusting on Thursdays, windows never. Doing it piecemeal prevents the whole effort from becoming one massive undertaking. The way it stands now in Procrastination Land, it’s a sweat-inducing, roll-up-your-sleeves kind of project that burns more calories than dodgeball. By the end of it, you can find me lying spent on my living room rug, head swimming from inhaling near-toxic quantities of Pine-Sol. I’ve got post-traumatic stress syndrome from the bathroom alone.

 

But hey, you should see the results. Come on over, ladies – I’ve got a nice clean spot on the recliner, just for you.