Toilet Humor

So I was in the Sovereign Center to see a boxing match a few weeks ago. I had never been there before, and found the place oddly disorienting as I tried to take in all the various food stands selling quesediallas, the women hawking programs by the escalators, and small groups of ticket holders milling about the promenade. With five minutes to spare before the first match, I wandered casually into the bathroom, vaguely aware that someone was shouting at me and waving me down as I walked through the entrance. I almost turned around to find out what they were shouting about but I didn’t. Strangers were always shouting weird things at me in public and I was getting tired of it. So I went into a stall and took care of business.

Afterwards, when I made my way to the sinks to wash my hands, a heavyset middle-aged woman with the same fashion sense as Raggedy Ann came out of a nearby stall.
“Oh, the cleaning woman is here,” I thought, and reflected on the fact that I’m never totally comfortable when the cleaning woman is in the men’s room when I am.

Then she said, “Uh-oh. A man.”

There was an awkward pause.

“Am I in the woman’s room?” I asked.

“You sure are,” she said.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought this was the men’s room.”

“I figured,” she said.

I went outside and found my fiancé, Stacey, waiting for me. “I just walked into the women’s room,” I told her.

“I thought I saw you headed the wrong way,” she said. “I can’t leave you alone for a second.”

(By the way, I think Stacey looks like Robin Tunney, from Prison Break and The Craft. She disagrees. But this is my blog, so...)

Of course, this was not the first time I accidentally wandered into the women’s room. A couple of years ago, I made the same mistake in a multiplex. I had noticed, over the years, that most movie theaters give their two, gendered bathrooms one large, fancy entranceway with the men’s rooms down a passage that curves off to the right and women’s rooms in the one that curves to the left. When I was in the middle of watching the movie The Human Stain, I started feeling the effects of the enormous Cherry Coke I had gulped down over the past half hour. I didn’t want to miss too much of the film, so I jogged out of the theater, down the hall to the grand bathroom entranceway, and instinctively hooked a right. My immediate reaction was anger and confusion. “God damn it!” I cursed aloud to myself. “Where the hell are the urinals? What the hell kind of men’s room is this, anyway? Stupid movie theater.”

On my way out I had an intuition that I had just made a mistake and double checked the signs on the doors. That was when I knew that some wise guy architect had broken with convention and put the women’s room on the right and the men’s room on the left. Just to mess with me. Good thing there was nobody in there with me that time.

Of course, even when I’m in the right bathroom, I have to admit, it is never a place I enjoy going. I don’t mind my own bathroom so much, but I’m never comfortable using a friend’s bathroom, whether it is a teeny little watercloset tucked under a staircase, or one of those beautiful, hotel-like affairs, complete with a hot tub and novelty seashell shaped soap. And I certainly don’t like public bathrooms. There’s always something wrong. Missing paper towels. No soap. Annoying graffiti. Huge scary guys who glared at you as you approach your destination, asking you with their eyes why you’ve wandered into their bathroom.


I remember one of my college dorms, Monroe Hall had a spotless bathroom. At least, it was spotless for about an hour after the cleaning staff gave it the once over. Then every guy on the floor would shave, and the sinks would be filled with thick clots of facial hair that only the brave would try to rinse down the sink or clean off with a tissue. On Sunday mornings, it was not uncommon to find vomit in the bathtub, another stall door leaning from its hinges, and on one occasion, half of the ceramic sink broken away. How someone was able to break a sink in half, even in a drunken rage, is still a mystery to me. Maybe the Incredible Hulk got drunk and used my dorm’s men’s room.

“Hulk hates stupid ceramic sink!”

Luckily, the newspaper I used to work for, The Richmond County Excelsior, had a pretty good men’s room. It was functional, and every once in a while some men would hang out in there to talk about things they didn’t want the boss overhearing. It was only ever annoying when I’m washing my face to freshen up and one of the other reporters comes in to say something snarky about my last article, like, “So, looks like you misspelled Wayne Chrebet’s name yesterday. How’d you manage that one?”

Of course, rumor had it that, as nice as the men’s room was, the women’s room was much better. Apparently, in addition to the bathroom proper, they even had a connecting room with a carpet, a make-up mirror, and a couch. None of the men had seen it, and sometimes we had wished, in our most tired moments working under deadline, for a couch to take a power nap on. Sometimes we’d even complain amongst ourselves that we didn’t get a couch for our bathroom. On one such occasion, I was brave enough to complain to a female colleague. I said, “I’m jealous. Why do the women get a couch and we don’t?”

She replied, “I tell you what, when men get menstrual cramps, they can get a couch to relax on, too.”

“Oh,” I said. “I guess you can keep the couch.”

I’ve used good bathrooms in my time and bad bathrooms. The College of St. Nicholas (where I teach) has its share of both. I’ve really taken to the men’s rooms in the New Science Wing. It is nice and sparkly and pretty. But the one on the upper floor of St. Nicholas Hall that obviously used to be a women’s room because it has no urinals – that one is really the pits. I’ve also had harrowing experiences in St. Nicholas' sharing a bathroom with a former student who I gave a C to the previous semester. But these are all minor quibbles. My greatest bathroom misfortune was the fact that toilet bowls cost me a cherished childhood friendship.

When I was in the fifth grade, I knew a quirky guy named Hans who was an expert at making huge castles and cities out of Lego. He was a child genius, destined to be an architect, but he had bad body odor and was very sloppy. He tended to chew on his pens and they’d explode in his mouth and get ink all over his face and clothes. I thought he was really cool and he didn’t have a lot of friends, so I invited him to hang out at my house. I had an early home computer called the PC junior and we played some first generation adventure games on it, like King’s Quest and The Ancient Art of War. But he kept wandering off from the computer game to walk two rooms down the hall to use my bathroom. He must have used the bathroom six times in one hour. Then he returned to the game we were playing and we really got in groove. We were really absorbed in it.

Then my father came downstairs and said, “What the hell is this?”

Hans and I followed his gaze and we saw rivers of water pouring down the hallway. Hans had overstuffed the toilet and overflowed it. Water had been gushing over the rim of the toilet in a torrent for the ten minutes since Hans' last trip to the bathroom and the whole basement was flooded with an inch of water. And it was carpeted.

After Hans went home, my father took me aside and said, “Please don’t invite him over here any more.”

Not long afterwards, Hans invited me over his house for a sleepover. It was my first sleepover, and it was a lot of fun, and Hans and I stayed up all night talking about nonsense with our friends Mitch and Robert. The next morning, I was awake and wondering if I’d had any real sleep at all. Everyone else was out light a light. Groggy, I woke up, rubbed the sleep mucus from my eyes, and stumbled into the hallway, where Hans had said his bathroom was.

I opened the door and was about to walk in when I stopped dead in my tracks.

Hans' dad was in the bathroom, stark naked, with his left foot up on the sink as he was cutting his toe nails. Since his legs were spread wide apart, it was difficult for my eyes to avoid staring straight ahead at his dangling bait and tackle. I took several steps back.

The normally calm, glasses-wearing intellectual looked annoyed. “Bathroom doors are closed for a reason,” he said in an even voice.

They’re usually locked for a reason, too, I thought, but was too scared to say anything.

Hans' dad casually closed the door in my face. I went back to bed, still needing to go to the bathroom, but too scared to explore the other restrooms in the household. I never told Hans I saw his father naked, and his dad didn’t mention anything about the incident at the very tense breakfast which followed.

While I cannot prove it, I wouldn’t be surprised if Hans' dad took his son aside, shortly thereafter, and said, “Please don’t invite Marc over here any more.”

Whether or not this really happened, I never went over Hans' house again and he never went over mine. And a potentially golden friendship was flushed down the toilet.