Nurse the Hate: Hate the Men's Room

There are two different types of people in the world.  Don’t get hung up on religion, sex, race or any other ridiculous tangents.  Those are only window dressing compared with the one stark contrast between all people on this planet.  This is not a matter of opinion.  This is a stark reality.  The two types of people are 1) Those that will shit anywhere and 2) Those that do not.  

I have worked in the same place for almost a decade.  I have shit here twice, both matters of extreme gastrointestinal crisis that required immediate attention.  Meanwhile there are a few men that work here that are shitting anytime I walk into The Heart of Darkness (i.e. the second floor men’s room).  One of these guys spends his entire day doing nothing but taking shits and smoking in the parking lot.  I literally don’t think he does any actual “work”, but is paid to come here for eight hours to defecate like a filthy animal.  Thank goodness he found this place as I never receive emails from recruiters looking for “focused experienced defecation expert that can sit in company rest room for multiple hours daily”.  Sometimes when I walk into The Heart of Darkness I make a quiet gagging noise when this guy is really tearing it up in there.  If he was a family dog, you’d say “I think he got into something”.  I often wonder if I should call an ambulance as what is going on in this room cannot be a sign of good health.  

I require a degree of privacy.  Most company men’s rooms have the privacy akin to a bus station rest room.  I can’t imagine just sitting down in a crowd and letting it rip like that.  I need to have everything just right.  Contrast that with Leo, who is sort of like a goat.  I remember one time I had given him some off brand Chinese energy drink I saw tucked away in a corner of a gas station cooler.  Within ten minutes of drinking it he was complaining of stomach pains.  Five minutes later he told me “Dude, you need to get off at the next exit…  Or pull over right now!”.  We pulled into one of those rural exits where someone had added on to a gas station with a Dairy Queen, tacked on a convenient store, and then a Subway counter.  As a result the men’s room was sort of in the middle of the place about five feet from the Dairy Queen customer line and ten feet from the cashier for the gas.  On top of that they used a cheap thin wooden door to the single stall facility.  It was a real hack construction job.  

I was paying for gas when Leo walked in to the place.  He made a beeline for the men’s room.  It was more like a stage than a bathroom.  It was literally the center of the room, sort of the “soul of the building”.  It didn’t take long.  The entire building sort of rumbled when he “released”.  A mother grabbed her daughter and pulled her close in the Dairy Queen line.  That is the God’s honest truth.  I walked out of the place quickly to try and distance myself from the horrible scenario unfolding in the place.  About ten minutes later Leo walked out.  Hey, how did that go in there?  Leo calmly sat down in the van and said “It was an expression of pure power”.  He would shit in a bucket in the middle of the room if that is what was available.  He just doesn’t care.

I was in Kentucky once playing a show with Hogscraper.  It was a pretty big place that for some reason had a men’s room much too small for the capacity.  There were 300 people there with two urinals and one toilet in a stall without a door.  When it became apparent that I would need a toilet, I knew there was no way in hell I could go in there.  “Hey, there’s a cowboy taking a shit in there!  Go take a look!”.  No thanks.  

I walked outside sure I would find a restaurant nearby that would offer something acceptable.  Of course, there was nothing but closed retail businesses everywhere.  A couple blocks away I saw some lighting on a door, sort of colonial in style that suggested a high end restaurant.  That had to be better than the doomsday scenario at the club.  By this time my situation had reached a bit of a higher priority, sort of a DefCon 4 level.  I walked briskly to the lights sort of squeezing my ass together.  “Look at that funny looking cowboy over there Sheila!”.  By the time I got close to the lights I realized it wasn’t a restaurant but a law office.  Making matters worse, the entire area was residential.  I was in real trouble here.  I had two options.  Try to make it back, or find somewhere to go in the immediate area.

I would like to use this space to formally apologize to the residents of the apartment complex where I shit in a dark corner of their courtyard.  I would imagine that some residents that spotted what I left behind and became worried that a bear or maybe werewolf had taken up the area as a hunting ground.  That would have been logical.  I remember thinking that I hoped no one would walk out of the front doors to discover me squatted over like a feral dog.  It was not my finest hour.  I sort of padded off with some leaves and hoped I could do a more thorough clean up back at the club.  (I did, timing it with the first band’s stage entrance, though it was rather awkward when some guy walked in the men’s room at the very end of my procedure.  I pretended that nothing odd was going on which I do not think was effective.)

This horrible incident has left a scar in my mind.  Yet, I don’t think it would even be considered as odd to the “other type” of people.  I knew a guy that took a dump on a totally exposed toilet in a punk rock club during a show once.  I know another guy that used to shit in Ray’s in Kent on Friday nights even as the door to the men’s room was open with college students waiting in line to take beer pisses.  He was so unfazed he used to read the paper.  People would walk by the open door to get a beer and see him seated on the toilet reading the sports page.  Is that learned behavior or genetic?  Nature or nurture?  My guess is he came from a long line of men that shit anywhere.  “Son, I shit in Times Square in a trash can on VJ Day.  Now get in that stadium men’s room and do your business!”.

I am going to a show tonight.  I have no doubt I will walk into the filthy club bathroom and discover a guy shitting like a mad ape despite a crowd of people.  It’s a world filled with diversity.  He might be one of “those” people, but I will try to see him as just another person like myself.  I will try to see him as a brother.  I’ll tell you this though.  I’m not shaking his hand.