The popularized TV stereotype of the plumber with his butt crack exposed by saggy pants isn’t totally accurate. When we were building houses they all seemed to wear bib overalls and usually had on a tight fitting hat. That might have been because a lot of their work was done in dirty crawlspaces or attics, or it may have just been tradition, I don’t know which. We used several different plumbers on our projects, depending on which firm provided the best service at the time and the lowest bid, but my favorite was a guy named Ted.

Ted told me once that all a plumber needed to know was that ‘shit don’t run uphill and payday’s on Friday’. I’ve since heard that from others as well and nothing could be farther from the truth. They not only need to be expert at reading blueprints for the larger jobs, but also must know how to lay out the systems themselves for the smaller projects like the houses and duplexes that we built. It may not look that complicated, but try doing it yourself and you’ll quickly find out that there are a lot of mistakes that can be made, many of which won’t show up until the floors and wall coverings are in place and the tubs, sinks, and toilets don’t fit the piping that you have installed. They also must know the plumbing codes and pass a state test to get their licenses, and more than one guy has completed his apprenticeship only to find that he can’t pass the test.

Ted was somewhere in his late forties or early fifties back then. He not only did excellent work but also he always cleaned up after himself; a quality that is rare on a construction job. He was a little on the heavy side but he carried it well and seemed to be as strong as a bull, with huge, hairy arms and a thick neck. He usually needed a shave and he looked like he’d be completely bald in a few years. He smoked cheap cigars and he had about the dirtiest mind of anyone I ever met.

Ted always had a dirty joke for just about every occasion and no common act was immune from his sexual innuendos. He usually had a copy of the latest Playboy centerfold in his lunch box, and several calendars of the same type adorned his work van. He couldn’t let ten minutes go by without popping off some vulgarity or witticism about sex or the female anatomy, but the few times we had lady visitors to the job site he regressed to being a perfect gentleman. A steady diet of his mouth would get old really fast but the two weeks or so he was on our jobs a couple of times a year was a sort of comic relief that was welcomed by most of the workers.

I was cleaning up around the jobsite one Saturday afternoon and Ted was inside working. We usually didn’t work weekends but I had taken a day off earlier in the week, and Ted was getting a little behind on his workload. He was cutting blocking for the fixture stub outs with a circular saw when the saw kicked back.

“Shit!” He said, dropping the saw and staggering to the door clutching his thigh. “Hey Jeff, I’m going to need a ride to the emergency room!”

It was obvious to me that he wasn’t going to make it that far at the rate he was losing blood. I ran over to him, and about that time he looked down and saw all of the blood and fainted. He had a rip in his overalls about six inches long centered on his right thigh, and the wound was spurting blood. I applied pressure and got it slowed down, but without seeing the cut itself I wasn’t sure just what was going on, so I popped the snaps on his bib overalls and pulled them down. He had one deep cut on the front of his thigh. I put direct pressure on the cut and got the bleeding slowed way down, and it was only then that I realized that he didn’t have on any underwear. That wasn’t really peculiar; it had been hot as hell the last few days and I couldn’t really blame him. He had a thick mat of black curly hair covering his thighs and ample belly, a rather large cock, compared to mine anyway, and no balls. Huh? With the bleeding almost stopped I took a second look. With his legs spread wide, hips elevated, and cock flopped back there was no way I could have missed them. There wasn’t even a suggestion of a scrotum, just a pink, circular scar where one might have once been located.

I hollered at a neighbor, who was working in his yard, to call an ambulance, then took Ted’s hat from his head and placed it over his crotch. The ambulance crew relieved me and Ted regained consciousness as they were loading him onto the gurney. He was immediately aware that his overalls were missing, and he tried to sit up, but lay back down when he realized that a towel was concealing his crotch from public view. He looked at me as if wondering what all I had seen, then quickly diverted his eyes when it was obvious that I had viewed his disfigurement. That was the only time I ever saw him unable to crack a joke.

“Ya gotta watch them Skil saws, Ted,” Carl told him, eyeing the rip in his overalls, “A few inches to the South and you’d of either had a frilly-dilly or be singing soprano.”

Ted still had stitches in his leg and could barely walk, but that wasn’t going to keep him from working.

“Thanks Jeff,” he said later that morning, “Not only for saving my ass but also keeping quiet about it.”

Even if I had been a big enough asshole to blab about what I’d seen nobody would have believed that the muscular, hairy, macho-man plumber didn’t have any balls. I was naturally curious, both about how he had gotten castrated as well as why he was apparently still a bull, so as to speak, but I didn’t have the balls to ask.

“I was about your age,” Ted began, “Just a young buck, when it happened.”

I hadn’t asked him for an explanation and he volunteered this information all by himself. Maybe he thought I could keep a secret, or maybe he felt he owed me. Anyway, we found ourselves in the same tavern and we were sharing a couple of pitchers of beer late one evening.

“I was a pipefitter in the Navy during the war,” he said, “I was stationed in the Navy yard in New Orleans, so when the war ended I separated from service there and took a job as an apprentice plumber.”

“I was renting a room from a lady, trying to save up some money, and was also bopping her daughter. She was eighteen and a wild little cunt, fucked like a mink. I had been in Panama and the Philippines and I thought I knew what a fuck was all about, but she did some things that even those Asian gals didn’t know about.”

I knew a little about the whores in Viet Nam and he was sure as hell right about that; Five bucks would get a guy a blowjob and a shoeshine at the same time and enough change back to buy a beer, and a twenty dollar weekend would sperm you out to where you couldn’t even think about sex for quite a while. I’d heard guys bragging about hundred dollar weeks but I don’t think the human body could stand that much abuse.

“Her mother was pretty staightlaced and we couldn’t get away with anything in her house,” he continued, “And I rented so many rooms for two hours at a time that I would have been better off just living in a hotel. I knew I’d have to move out sooner or later anyway, as her two brothers were both in the Army and would eventually make it home and displace me from my room in the house.

“Anyway, back then I always rode bareback. I figured the gals knew enough to not let themselves get knocked up, and a dose of penicillin would cure anything you could get, so I never used rubbers. Sure as hell she started missing periods. One of us had fucked up and she was pregnant.

“Being a gentleman and all, I naturally did the right thing,” he said, pouring another glass of Hamms.

“You married her?” I asked

“Hell no! I packed my shit and got out of there. I knew things were really booming in Southern California, so I left in the middle of the night and drove straight through. I got a job in L.A. as an apprentice plumber for a hell of a lot more than I had been making in New Orleans, and because of my shipyard experience they granted me a year’s promotion on my apprenticeship.

“Jesus!” I said, without thinking, “That took a lot of balls.”

“Yeah, well back then I had a lot of balls,” he replied, without a trace of shame or embarrassment.

“So what happened?” I pried. He had breached the subject, so I felt justified in posing the question.

“What happened was her fucking brothers came home and found their poor little innocent sister in a family way. They were a couple of mean sons-of-bitches and they tracked me all the way to California. Shit, I would have done the right thing and married the bitch, at least until the kid was born, but they had something else in mind.

“I was in a tavern one night trying to talk this little piece of poontang into going home with me. I went into the pisser, and was standing at the urinal when another guy came in. “Hey Bud”, he said, “Got a message from Shayna for you.” I wasn’t done pissing yet, but ‘Shayna’ isn’t a common name so I turned to see who it was.

“I recognized her youngest brother from the pictures that her mother kept on the mantle. Before I could do anything the cocksucker brought his foot up hard, right between my legs. I went down right there and he kicked me again. His brother came in and they dragged me to my feet and hustled me out of there like I had just gotten sick or something.”

“That kick ruined your balls?” I asked, interrupting his story and allowing him to refill his beer glass.

“Hell no,” he continued, “The fuckers stuffed me into the back seat of their car and took me up in the hills to a reservoir. It wasn’t all built up back then outside the city, and even though it was close in it was pretty isolated up there. They stripped me down and snapped a padlock with a piece of chain on it right around my balls. The other end of the chain was fastened to a concrete block. They dragged me to the edge of the reservoir and gave me a knife and threw me into the water.”

“Jesus, Ted!” I recoiled at the thought of what would come next.

“That’s just what I thought,” he said, “Either drown, cut my throat, or castrate myself. No way in hell could I stay afloat chained to that block. I was in good shape back then, and I thought I could just pick up the block and walk out of the water, but the side of the reservoir was too damned steep. I held my breath as long as I could, then just took a blind-ass slash with the knife. End of my balls, right then and there.”

“How did you get out alive?” I asked. “It looks like you would have drowned or bled to death.”

“I didn’t realize it at the time, but he kind-hearted assholes had also tied a rope around my ankle. The watched me nut myself before hauling me out of the water. They told me to hold my shirt against the wound and then they left. A night watchman came around eventually and hauled me in to the hospital.”

“Shit, man, that’s rough,” I said, and then asked as diplomatically as I could, “You don’t look like there’s anything wrong with you.”

“I get a shot once a month,” he answered. “And right after that I get horny as all hell. I can still fuck like I was an eighteen year old kid, but I’m shooting blanks.”

“Did you ever see the girl or her brothers again?”

“No. I figure she got a backwoods abortion; otherwise she’d have hit me up for child support. Anyway, I don’t have to worry about that kind of crap anymore.”

I have read that eunuchs typically are healthier and outlive intact males, but Ted wasn’t so lucky. He contracted some sort of extremely aggressive cancer and was dead a year later. I’ve kept his secret for over thirty years but by now it probably doesn’t matter anymore. I did learn on very important thing from him though; appearances can be deceiving.