When you step into a public restroom for anything more than to wash your hands you've already made a concession. You have agreed to step through a mysterious door that may on one hand lead you into an accommodating and well kept environment in which you may safely and comfortably "handle business" as they say. Your palms sweat and your gait slows as you approach however, because you know the odds are against you.
You know that what lies on the other side of that door may be the single most horrific experience you could imagine. You know that people do terrible, unspeakable things in public restrooms. You think of the things you yourself have been guilty of: drunken episodes that ended there, lurid sex acts that started there, episode after episode of gastrointestinal emergency. "That's the only reason people visit an unfamiliar toilet," you say to yourself. "Because it's an emergency." You think of the vast population out there in the world and try to estimate within your mind's eye exactly how many bathroom emergencies could potentially occur within the course of a day.
A fucking lot. That's how many.
So you brace yourself. You take a deep, calming breath, realizing for the last time before you open the door that you may very well be spending the next ten to twenty minutes of your life smelling other peoples' shit.
You step through and the smell is mild. So far, so good. Maybe this is one of those well-kept restrooms that keeps an hourly checklist on the maintenance of it. If you're like me, you look around for that checklist. No checklist. That means you just got lucky. That's all. It's early in the day and nobody's really had a chance to christen this place with a full scale desecration just yet.
There are three stalls and naturally, you want the handicap stall for its luxurious roominess. You could really spread out in a stall like that. But that's how everybody feels and somebody's already been in there and piled up two pounds of shit and three pounds of toilet paper without flushing. The stench hits you in the face as if looking at it dead on like that made you almost taste it.
You have two more stalls available to you and your legs are starting to twitch because you're really only there because you have to be. The next stall is busy and you find out because you accidentally peeked through the crack in the door and noticed two folds of flab resting over a turtle covered in a small shrub of pubic hair.
There are no choices left. You're at the last stall and at your wits' end. Your entire body shakes to hold everything in while you diligently wipe the exorbitant remains of dried urine syrup from the toilet seat, and while you're engaged in this task you wonder how people cared so much about their graffiti as to kneel down over a shitter and scribe their etchings into a toilet seat.
You lay down a layer of toilet paper over the seat because there's no way in hell you were able to get the seat actually clean and the liners in the dispenser, or "toilet condom" catches your shit before it hits the water.
Torpedoing your first sense of relief into the sewer, you reach for the hygienic paper and realize you've been duped. It's the wheel of toilet paper that has no perforations in it so the strips you tear off are irregular and never the length you want them to be. And it wouldn't be so bad if it was one-ply, but this is a single ply of the skinniest and longest strip of fine grain sandpaper you've ever laid your hands on. You fumble with the flimsy material and hope desperately that you don't punch through.
And now, things just got real. You have a new neighbor and their diet, as you can readily tell, consists solely of hamburger meat and salsa.
Now you're done. But it's not over yet. You're all perspired from the stress and because the place is poorly ventilated and greenhoused with methane gas. You approach the washing area, already soaked with soap and water, you hope, and littered with drenched paper towels that you swear weren't there when you got in.
You leave and meet your company now waiting for you because you're holding them up and you feel like you carried some of the stench with you but nobody complains. You're fine now. It's all behind you. You can rest easy knowing that you're safe... for now.
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