Adventures in Defecation

Light plays a critical role in bathroom appearance. Compare your usual home bathroom or your work bathroom with the dread pervy bathroom — the bathroom with a flickering light, or some of its lights missing. In the pervy bathroom, dimmed light sets the stage for the dinginess, the gross grafitti, and then all the legends that swirl around such places.

I’ve seen a few pervy bathrooms, but the bathrooms at the University of Florida’s main library — third floor were legendary. The lights outside the bathroom didn’t work. The lights inside the bathroom barely worked. Nasty grafitti covered everything. The walls were never clean. Everyone across the whole campus knew that the pervs concentrated there, and at least one of us suspected that pervs were born there. In some dread mixture of black magic and demented science, that the toilets vomited forth leering, drooling “stack pervs” every new moon. In any case, everyone steered clear of those bathrooms. If you had to pee, you took the elevators up and down until you found another bathroom. If you had to poop, you learned new ways of exercising sphincter control!

I was reminded of those days when I walked into my corporate bathroom to find that half the lights were off. There was no lightswitch, and so uneasily, I did my business in the half-light, keeping an eye on the shadows. Sure, someone said a fuse had been blown by a guy with an ultra-manly shaver; I thought that perhaps a metrosexual with a hairdryer or maybe the cleaning crew was at it again. The cause didn’t matter. I wanted my regular bathroom back! Now, it wore the clothes of the pervy bathroom and I couldn’t keep looking over my shoulder while doing my business forever!

I was in one of my favorite places in the whole wide world a few days ago (for the uninitiated, that would be the bathroom), when I heard the unmistakable sound of heavy breathing coming from an occupied stall. It was a strange mixture of the usual straining sounds, but quicker, and quieter. All sorts of thoughts ran through my head and as I lumbered to the urinal, I had to keep listening. Apparently the guy was struggling to dump a giant turd and it was slow, dangerous work. So there he was, sucking in lungfuls of air, not realizing just how wrong it sounded! It sounded like one of those nasty phone services probably sounds like, only it was here. Here, in the stall behind me. I can’t imagine the kind of ribbing the guy gets when he visits friends’ houses. Ugh!