Men and Medicine Cabinets - James Thurber

How many of us have a drawer in our home known as the junk drawer; how many of us have one of those kitchen cabinets full of plastic containers that we accumulate from our local grocery store that we wash, keep, and store for food storage purposes but when the time comes to use one we can’t find the right size or even worse we can’t find the lid. How about a junk room; now those are a lot of fun. On a personal note, as Americans, I know we have more than enough space than we actually need; I say this because I have lived in countries where there is not enough space and rooms like junk rooms can’t exist; junk drawers and disastrous cabinets also can’t exist for there is just no room for such. How about that medicine cabinet that is in your bathroom; what does it look like? James Thurber once wrote a story about a man that had a run in with a medicine cabinet.

The man’s name is Mr. Albatross; it seems his medicine cabinet is filled to the point of complete disaster with items his wife has placed there. I’m afraid Mr. Albatross has problems with controlling his temper and removed the medicine cabinet, with all of its contents, from its home and threw it out the window. The author of this story puts it this way, "I am sure that many a husband has wanted to wrench the family medicine cabinet off the wall and throw it out the window, if only because the average medicine cabinet is so filled with mysterious bottles and unidentifiable objects of all kinds that it is a source of constant bewilderment and exasperation to the American male."

Now the character Mr. Albatross, after throwing his own medicine cabinet out a window, came in contact with another cabinet much like his own, but this one belonged to some friends who he stayed one weekend with. This couple lived on East Tenth Street near Fifth Avenue; Mr. Albatross had spent his entire weekend with his friends and on Monday morning they got up to go to work, but he slept in that day till early in the afternoon.

After rising, he entered a bathroom to shave and ended up losing his friends because of it. Mr. Albatross filled the "washbowl" up with hot water, lathered up, and began shaving. He was half through the process of shaving and cut his ear; annoyed more than hurt he wrenches open his friend’s medicine cabinet and begins hunting for "a styptic pencil". From the very top shelf of the medicine cabinet, falls a small "packet" with nine needles within its folds. The "packet" had made its way into the "wash bowl" where it melted away to almost nothing and the needles sank to the bottom of the bowl where they laid dangerously.

Here is poor Mr. Albatross half lathered with a bleeding ear and nine needles in his wash water; he could have pulled the stopper to allow them to be sucked down the drain, but he feared they would stop up the plumbing. Very slowly and gently Mr. Albatross slid both hands into the water and withdrew four needles in one hand and three in the other, seven; two were missing. Here stands Mr. Albatross still half lathered with his ear still bleeding and now has four wet soapy needles in one hand and three in the other.

He tried to transfer needles from one hand to the other, but they stuck to the skin; there was a bath towel nearby that he wiped the needles onto off of his hands. After accomplishing this task he began searching through the towel for the seven needles which now became five because two he couldn’t find. Instead of two missing needles now there were four; Mr. Albatross began thinking what would happen if the needles weren’t found. Well, he simply couldn’t find them and decided to wrap the towel, with the needles, up in some newspaper to take with him and leave a note for his friends; the only problem though he couldn’t find one writing utensil; paper he found but what was he to write with?

As, he thought on this an idea came to him, a tube of lipstick he could write with; perhaps there was one in the medicine cabinet if it could be found. He saw a tube of something that could possibly contain lipstick and began to slide it from under the many items that surrounded it. Well, you can only begin to imagine what happened next; every item in the cabinet began to move; some broke into the "washbowl" and some the floor. There were now different colored liquids spilling out of their bottles in front and around poor Mr. Albatross; a variety of metal instruments were bouncing off of the "washbowl" and clattering to the floor.

Mr. Albatross now smelled of "perfume, peroxide, and cold cream." He gathered the ruins toward the middle of the bathroom without replacing anything back into the medicine cabinet. "Before I went away (only partly shaved) and abandoned the shambles, I left a note saying that I was afraid there were needles in the bathtub and the washbowl and that I had taken their towel and that I would call up and tell them everything – I wrote it in iodine with the end of a toothbrush."

Poor Mr. Albatross did not have the nerve to call up his friends like he said he would; how was he going to explain what had happened? He assumed his friends thought he had done it all on purpose including stealing their towel; he wasn’t certain though because they likewise never called him.