HERE’S HIS STORY:

I would have preferred to tell this story in person, but it is simply too ridiculous not to share as quickly as possible…

So I’m taking a shower, which is normal for a Saturday morning. And my parents and brothers go to karate practice, which is also normal for a Saturday morning. I get out of the shower — still normal — and try to open the door — still normal — at which point the doorknob in my 90-year-old house falls off — not normal.

I am now alone in the house, trapped in the bathroom.

My family will not return for two hours. I am straight-up, R Kelly-style trapped in the bathroom. I have no phone. I also, for the record, have no Beretta. And there was no singing, although in retrospect there should have been.

The first option is to wait it out. I could take an extra-long shower, Clorox-wipe the entire bathroom, or do the Unspeakable (which honestly couldn’t occupy me for two hours). The second option is to exit through the window. But I wouldn’t be able to get back into the house. So I would be marooned in my hot backyard, wearing my dirty boxers and a towel, waiting for my family to come home. The third option is to escape. I go from R Kelly to MacGyver, amass a collection of potentially useful bathroom items — electric razor, seven toothbrushes, plunger (not sure how exactly that would have helped), hand soap, Q-tips, depleted toothpaste tube — and get to work.

My first plan of attack is to reattach the doorknob, which of course fails. Then, after about fifteen minutes of poking, hitting, jiggling, and otherwise harassing the door with various implements, I discover the fatal flaw of my prison: The door opens inward, but when I push it out, the Little Thing that the doorknob operates that goes into the Little Notch in the door (I don’t know much about door anatomy.) gets pushed back into the door. So all I need to do is block the Little Thing from going into the Little Notch while I yank the door back towards me.

I survey my toothbrush army, and ultimately select two soldiers for the mission: The smallest (one of my brothers’) and the largest (a surprisingly robust free handout from our swanky downtown dentist). I lodge the small toothbrush in the Little Notch, hoping that the Little Thing will slide over it when I pull the door. But without a doorknob, it is very difficult to exert inward force on a door, so I use the large toothbrush to pry into the stump where the doorknob once was and start yanking.

With each toothbrush dangerously close to its breaking point, the door lurches open. A refreshing burst of not hot-sticky-just-took-a-shower air comes over me. Free at last! And it was so freaking fun.

If you really want an adrenaline rush, I encourage you to succeed in escaping from an inconvenient but not dangerous situation using only immediately available household items.

Hoping there will be no Volume 2.