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take a look at the robes and pajamas and nightgowns hanging on the hook behind the door. You’ll get the picture. He says all their habits and hopes and dreams and sorrows, illnesses and hang-ups, and even their sex life—all stand revealed in that one small room.
    He says most people are secret slobs. He says the deepest mysteries of the race are tucked into the nooks and crannies of the bathroom, where we go to be alone, to confront ourselves in the mirror, to comb and curry and scrape and preen our hides, to coax our aging and ailing bodies into one more day, to clean ourselves and relieve ourselves, to paint and deodorize our surfaces, to meditate and consult our oracle and attempt to improve our lot.
    He says it’s all there. In cans and bottles and tubes and boxes and vials. Potions and oils and unguents and sprays and tools and lotions and perfumes and appliances and soaps and pastes and pills and creams and pads and powders and medicines and devices beyond description—some electric and some not. The wonders of the ages.
    He says he finds most bathrooms are about the same, and it gives him a sense of the wondrous unity of the human race.
    I don’t intend to start an epidemic of spelunking in people’s bathrooms. But I did just go in and take a look in my own. I get the picture. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. There I am.
    Go take a look. In your own Temple of Reality.
    And from now on, please go to the bathroom at home before you visit me.
    My bathroom is closed to the public.

 
     
     

    J UMPER C ABLES AND THE G OOD S AMARITAN
    “H EY, YOU GOT JUMPER CABLES, buddy?” “Yeah, sure. I got jumper cables.”
    English teacher and his nice sweet wife, from Nampa, Idaho (as I found out later). In their funny little foreign car. Drove around Seattle with their lights on in the morning fog, and left the lights on when they went for coffee, and so forth and so on. Dead meat now. Need jumper cables. Need Good Samaritan. Need a friendly hand from someone who looks like he knows what to do with jumper cables. And the Good Fairy of Fate placed them in my hands.
    Men are supposed to know about jumper cables. It’s supposed to be in the genetic code, right? But some of us men are mental mutants, and if it’s under the hood of a car, well it’s voodoo, Jack, and that’s the end of it.
    Besides, this guy only asked me if I
had
jumper cables. He didn’t ask me if I knew how to
use
them. I thought by the way he asked that he knew what he was doing. After all, he had an Idaho license plate and was wearing a baseball cap and cowboy boots. All
those
people know about jumper cables when they’re born, don’t they? Guess he thought a white-bearded old man wearing hiking boots and driving a twenty-year-old VW van was bound to use jumper cables often and with authority.
    So I get out my cables, and we swaggered around being all macho and cool and talking automobile talk. We look under the hood of his rig, and there’s no battery.
    “Hell,” I said, “there’s your problem right there. Somebody stole your battery.”
    “Dang,” he said.
    “The battery is under the backseat, dear,” said his nice sweet wife.
    “Oh.”
    So we took all the luggage and travel-junk out of the backseat and hauled the seat out into the parking lot and, sure enough, there it was. A battery. Right there. Just asking for jumper cables to be laid on it. I began to get worried when the guy smirked at his wife and said under his breath that he took auto mechanics and sex education at the same time in high school and they had been confused in his mind ever since, when it came to where things were and what you did to get any action out of them. We laughed. His wife didn’t laugh at all. She just pulled out a manual and started thumbing through it.
    Anyway, the sum of our knowledge was that positive poles and negative poles were involved, and either one or both cars ought to be running, and six-volt and twelve-volt batteries and other-volt