Edmund Callipeaux – artist, college instructor, lives in St. Louis Park.
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19 August 2009, 6:30pm
Owing to the G to PG nature of this blog, and given our aversion toward garnering cheap laughs via the employment of bathroom humor, our writers have steered away from subjects pertaining to bathrooms and what goes on therein (e.g., pooping, peeing, farting, etc., etc.).
With that in mind, I say to you:
I have a bathroom story.
A story that takes place in the spring of 2005....
By way of a primmer, I would also like to say that I have made a study of bathrooms for many years. It is my policy to pay attention to the condition of public restrooms (both in my hometown and while traveling) and to make note of the ones that are reliable, the ones to avoid, and the ones to make sure that I never find myself returning to for any reason on Earth.
For instance, Airports: Chicago’s O’Hara airport has surprisingly nice bathrooms, while Los Angeles’ LAX, unsurprisingly does not have nice bathrooms. People other than myself will agree that LaGuardia has worse bathrooms than JFK, and I don’t even want to go into the conditions at the Newark airport. Minneapolis has bathrooms that are tough to predict…which is probably the worst qualifier that can be assigned to a public restroom (dependability is paramount). Lastly, the entire Orlando airport is a mess (including its bathrooms) so, make sure that you have a HAZMAT suit in your carryon luggage if you find yourself traveling via aeroplane to the Sunshine State.
I find that’s it’s good to be privy to information like this, especially when traveling and not on your home turf. Places like Chicago, for instance. Stay away from the basement bathrooms under the main grand staircase, just inside the Michigan Avenue entrance to the Art Institute of Chicago. Don’t ask me why, but they keep the year-round temperature set at about 95° down there and it makes for a bad mix of heat and badness. However, take a turn up north from the Institute to a bar on Clark and Belmont called the L&L Tavern. This watering hole is ranked highly on several lists of best dive-bars in America, and it has tremendously clean bathrooms. And also, it’s worth mentioning, that the bathrooms are top-notch at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Chicago - - well worth the price of admission.
The Walker Art Center has nice bathrooms (the ones near the old Guthrie entrance used to be especially nice). The restrooms right at the main entrance to the Minneapolis Art Institute are killer - - make sure you plan a little time at the beginning of your visit so that you can prepare yourself to look at all that great art! The Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles, has terrible bathrooms, which wasn’t a surprise to me. MoMA, in New York is chaos. And by that I mean, Chaos, period (the bathrooms and museum alike). The Met has good bathrooms that are easily accessible throughout the museum, and the Whitney has bad bathrooms that are stuffed all the way down in their terrible basement.
This is important stuff to know. When traveling, things can get a bit dicey if the bathroom situation isn’t right. And by right, I mean that when I’m away from the privacy of my own home, I get rather particular about certain things.
I also have it on good authority that the bathrooms at the Louvre, in Paris are good. This brings use to Europe….
However, before I digress any further into the Continental bathrooms of France and beyond, I feel that I must yield (although, there are some terrible bathrooms in Italy that you should know about). It isn't really my goal to impress upon you my vast working knowledge of the State of Bathrooms, at home and abroad, but rather, by listing my observations, it has been my hope that you’ll understand how I regard a reliable restroom. For me, it breaks down to this simple formula: clean and private = heaven.
This brings us back to our story and to the year 2005.
I was teaching in the art department at a mid-sized college of about 6,000 students, in Rochester, Minnesota. This college was not an art school. Most of its students took art classes as electives, and thusly, the art department was rather small. We crazy art teachers shared our offices with the English and Nursing Departments. It was a great place to teach…and I loved it.
Now, given my aforementioned pickiness toward bathrooms, one of the first things I did after being hired was to seek out the secret bathroom on campus. Every institutional building has one or more of these select bathrooms. They are the restrooms that are down rarely traversed halls. They’re across the way, or around the corner from this or that office, or placed in a part of a building that is vacant much of the day. They’re an oasis of serenity within the beehive of a college or a business or a museum. And, over the years, I have discovered that they are commonly hidden within plain sight. For instance, the one I found at this particular college was directly to the left of the main entrance to the building where I worked. For some reason, everyone broke to the right upon clearing the building’s vestibule, so, the location of this valuable bathroom remained a secret.
It was perfect.
Having found this bathroom, I set up shop on campus and happily taught my classes. It was a great job, and like I said earlier, I loved teaching there.
One day, like many others, I found myself in urgent need of my secret bathroom. I had just finished teaching a class and I had a little personal time before the afternoon session. The building was quiet and no one seemed to be around, so I made my way downstairs and through the shadowy halls of the first floor, all the way down to my bathroom. Throwing open the door, I walked in. However, I was disappointed to find that I was not alone. Another guy was washing his hands at the sinks. Thinking fast, I coolly walked over to the sinks and pretended that I just needed to wash my hands. Turning on the water, I watched through the mirror as the guy dried his hands and exited the room. As he reached to open the door, he bent down slightly and picked up the backpack that he had left lying on the floor.
Let me ask you this:
How can anyone set a backpack on a public bathroom floor? And then, how could they pick it up and throw it over his shoulder without first boiling it in water for an hour? I’m freaking out just thinking about what was on that guy’s rucksack. Yikes!
Anyway, I washed my hands until the coast was clear. And then, I had the place to myself.
Walking across the room, I stepped into a stall. Sitting down, I looked forward and saw the institutional grey-colored door with some half-hearted graffiti scratched into the paint. I thought to myself, “This graffiti is terrible, our art students need to get serious about their studies, and quit goofing around.”
And then there was noise.
Like I said earlier, this is a G- to PG-rated blog. So, all I can say about this noise was that it was coming from me (or the vicinity of myself) and that it was horrible. It totally took me off guard. A shocker!
Ka-Bam, Ka-Pow!
Let’s just say this: I grew up in St. Paul, and we don’t talk about bathroom stuff like this in St. Paul. It’s not polite. And to describe the sounds and smells of what was happening that day, in that bathroom, would be not polite, cubed. Your author (me) is the type of guy who is actually somewhat embarrassed and semi-self-conscience about even buying toilet paper in a grocery store. I try to hide it under the cart like I’m the only misfit in the place that would have any use for a jumbo pack of 48 rolls.
All I can say is that the sounds and the smells that were happening in that bathroom were both surprising and appalling. It was horrible. As I alluded to earlier, I’ve been in a lot of restrooms over the years, and as I sat there that day, I unwittingly became the reason why this particular bathroom now ranks as one of the worst I have ever visited.
As time passed, and the craziness from below seemed unending, I kept thinking to myself, “How the hell much longer can this keep going on?”
And at other times, I thought, “Holy Toledo, that smell is terrible!”
While other times I found myself thinking, “My God!”
Just as I was thinking, what is wrong with me, I heard the door to the bathroom open.
I held my breath.
“Oh no,” I thought to myself.
As the footsteps made their way toward me, I couldn’t stop what was going on down below. My toilet bowl amplified its myriad of sounds into the greater room, which then, due to the ceramic-clad walls and floor, reverberated into shocking tones that would make dogs howl.
Above all these sounds and smells emanating from my stall, or rather, rents that torn at the air, I heard the mystery person shuffle to a stop near my door.
I bent my torso down to look at my feet in an attempt to make myself as small as possible. Seeing my shoes, I thought to myself, “Oh no, my shoes are covered in paint! I wore my painting shoes to work today! If the guy has seen under the stall, he probably knows who’s behind all this terribleness - - I’m the only person on campus who is ever seen covered in paint!”
Just then, as my last vestige of anonymity and privacy was fading, I heard the door to the stall next to me open and the mystery person moved inside.
Despite the presence of this mystery person, I couldn’t stop things from happening. It was horrible and loud and unstoppable. I don’t want to belabor the point, but in a way, it was remarkable - - terrible, but remarkable. So remarkable, in fact, that I could barely bare myself - - and I’ve bared myself for years.
Just when I thought that everything was lost; that the word would get out, and I would be identified, and therefore forever laughed at (and ostracized) by the entire student body; that my boss would hear tell of my bathroom debacle and forever shun me from her good graces.... Something happened. Just as I was hearing the doomsday whistle blowing in my head, I also heard the mystery man make a sound.
I heard a sound, or perhaps, it would be more precise to say that I heard a noise. A noise that is reminiscent of a sucking sound of fluid where the mixture is one-half air and one-half liquid. Or, more specifically, it was the sound of a guy in the stall next to me sucking the last of his soda pop out of a Styrofoam cup with a plastic straw!
It was an unmistakable sound that we’ve all known since we were little kids!
I don’t know if it was Mountain Dew or Mr. Pibb, but the guy was finishing off his soda despite the exuberant gruesomeness that was being generated from me, his neighbor.
And our story doesn’t end there.
Things on my end went from bad to worse. And yet, even though all manor of embarrassing and unmentionable things assaulted the senses, my neighbor set himself to getting every ounce of sweet candy-like fluid out of that cup. In my horrified laughter, I sat back with tears running from my eyes as things continued to happen beneath from where I was positioned. Fearing an aneurism, I eventually had to calm myself down as I heard my gentleman neighbor shaking the ice in his empty cup, in quick succession, from side to side, and tilt it back in hopes of getting at that last bit of Mr. Pibb remaining in the cup.
And as abruptly as the whole event began, it ended. Whatever was going on with me, it stopped. My business concluded, I exited the stall and turned toward the sinks. Looking down, I saw the aforementioned soda pop gentleman’s backpack sitting on the floor of the bathroom. It crossed my mind that perhaps I should take a look at what he’s carrying while he’s still busy finishing off the last of his ice cubes. But, then I thought otherwise.
So I washed my hands and silently left the room. – EC
