The Batman Towel of Shame
I moved in with Aaron after all the men I flirted with at college went back to their girlfriends, realized they were gay, or decided immediately was the appropriate time to marry a 40-something dominatrix they’d just met online. Aaron and I had been dating for five years and most of that was a long-distance relationship, which gave me the convenience of having someone to pay for movies on Saturday night and the freedom of collecting a harem of boys to take me out every other day of the week. I was in-between my junior and senior year at college and needed a place to stay that wasn’t my parent’s, so I packed up my Patti Smith albums and reluctantly accepted his offer of cohabitation.
The apartment was two rooms, one large divided at the linoleum/carpet into a kitchen/living room, and the bedroom. At any given time the kitchen contained no more than the following: crusty pink lemonade mix, ten Triscuits, a half-finished six-pack of Sam Adams still in the cardboard carrier, milk I was afraid to touch, and strawberry jelly. Despite a strong prowess in the kitchen that netted me more than one blurted marriage proposal, Aaron refused to let me cook and was instead content to exist off ramen noodles and roll-and-bake cookie dough eaten straight out of the wrapper with a spoon in front of ESPN. Aaron also did not understand why it was necessary to mop the floor and therefore, did not own or plan to own a mop. His living room had a big screen TV, a loveseat lovingly donated by his parents when the recliner on one half broke and they bought a new one, a computer that I was not allowed to touch out of fear that I, in my devil-may-care millennial college youth, might illegally download a Morrissey song and the Feds would descend upon him like seagulls on a hot dog bun, and a single Batman poster tacked proudly over the television.
The wood-paneled bedroom décor consisted of a slave-girl Princess Leia lithograph hung tastefully above his bed. The brick-and-board bookshelf contained no reading material that wasn’t a movie tie-in. The room’s main feature was the disco-era walk-in closet, thankfully devoid of sequined jumpsuits, but instead held Aaron’s six polo shirts and three pairs of JCPenny khakis, which he wore to his office with a black belt, white crew socks and scuffed brown shoes. Also inside was the pre-tied Yoda necktie he reserved for the classiest of occasions and the vintage dresses I was not allowed to wear because he insisted people stared at me whenever we went out, which was never. The top shelf held the unopened S’mores maker his brother lovingly regifted me one Hanukkah, a box of read-once and bagged comic books, and the Batman Towel of Shame.
Aaron only had two towels, one for me and one for him. Mine was brand-new navy blue from Macy’s, purchased my first day in the apartment. His was a threadbare green with college stains and a fraying hem. Sometimes a loose thread would wrap around his hand and he’d tear it further, curses echoing from the bathroom like New Jersey tourists at the Grand Canyon.
For seven days these towels hung, damp and mildewing, in his tiny windowless bathroom, which he also never mopped. “Aaron,” I tried to explain one afternoon while doing our laundry at his brother’s. “You need more than one towel. One towel does not get you through the week.”
“Why do you need more than one towel?” he asked, not looking up from the TV. “You’re clean when you dry off, so it’s not like it gets dirty.”
Aaron was not an unclean guy. Other than the sticky kitchen floor and the seven-day-old towels, the house was well-kept, dishes were done, Princess Leia lithograph straight on the wall. We were not poor, we could have easily afforded two more department store towels, four more discount store towels. His parents had plenty of towels we could have borrowed under dire financial circumstances, but still he refused. Two towels for two people, and that was final. Company, if we ever had any, could very well bring their own damn towels.
Of course, I told my mother and she was horrified at the thought that her daughter was drying herself in squalor. A week later a package arrived, addressed to Aaron in my mother’s spidery handwriting. Inside was the Batman towel.
This was no ordinary Batman towel. This was a Batman beach towel, as long as I was tall, trimmed in yellow, printed with the Caped Crusader swooping majestically over a midnight-blue Gotham City. His square face was stern, his beady eyes were set, and he was ready to take on the plight of Aaron’s wet white ass.
“Tell your mother I said thank you,” Aaron said, putting the towel back in the box.
“Aren’t you going to hang it in the bathroom?” I suggested.
“I already have a towel,” he replied.
It was at that moment that I knew I was fighting a battle I could not win. The Batman towel became a mark of his disgrace, his refusal to accept King Solomon’s heed that one day, his beloved college towel will pass on to shredded rags of what it once was. If he threw out the college towel, what was next? His fading plastic Bar Crawl mug? The outdated computer science textbooks piled in his parent’s basement? Perhaps, dare I suggest it, the Princess Leia lithograph that got him through so many long, lonely nights at college?
Batman kept his folded, cramped vigil over the S’mores maker for another two months, when I realized I couldn’t lived under his totalitarian towel regime another day and ran off with an art student one of my ex-romances introduced me to. I made my getaway while Aaron was at work, leaving Princess Leia and the Triscuits to their solitary existence. On my way out of town, I threw both towels in the dumpster, leaving only Batman to dry his tears.
Libby Cudmore is an MFA candidate with the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast graduate program. Recent publications include regular contributions to Pop Matters, Hardboiled and a Twist of Noir, as well as Inertia, Battered Suitcase, The Southern Women’s Review, Shaking Like a Mountain, Big Pulp and the upcoming anthology Quantum Genre on the Planet of the Arts (the latter two w/Matthew Quinn Martin). Additional publications include Sage of Consciousness, Crime and Suspense, the Subway Chronicles (Essay of the Year 2004) and Long Story Short (Author of the Year, 2004).
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