Stall Talk

I had no internet service all weekend because Verizon's outsourced tech support blows cock...

“I was thinking about doing something a little different this week.”

“Different with what?” she asked.

“Different with the site.”

“Why?”

“Because I was sick last week,” I replied. “I’ve been wanting to get this shit moving again for a while, so I figured if I could have a theme week, I could keep concentrating on this and maybe have a full week of posting for once.”

“You should want to do that anyway. You’re supposed to be some kind of writer now, no?”

“Yeah, I guess. But it’s kind of hard to think about anything else when you’re so fucking constipated that you start hallucinating about great dumps you’ve taken in the history of you.”

“True,” she said, putting the hood of her sweatshirt over her head. It was getting cold on the roof. We’d brought beach towels with us, but spring in New York has been a tad slow to arrive. “What kind of theme are we talking about here?”

“Bathrooms.”

“Bathrooms? Does this have anything to do with you being…backed up…all week?”

I looked out at a roof garden across the street. I’m not used to this part of New York yet – the part where people try so hard to simulate nature by cultivating ten-by-ten greenhouse and terrarium spaces atop the concrete and rebar structures they and a thousand other crammed-together people call home. I grew up in New York City, but not here, and not like this. If you mailed something to my house and addressed it to “New York, NY,” followed by my zip code, I’d receive it. Unlike here, though, I’d had a lawn mower in the garage and a lawn to mow. I thought some about this rooftop culture as I looked, and I thought about bathrooms.

“ I was gonna do it anyway.”

“Before or after your intestines almost split at the seams?”

“Before,” I said, “but being fortunate enough to have had to go through my recent troubles at home made me realize how good I have it.”

“In what way?”

“Did I ever tell you about the time I took a shit at Yankee Stadium?”

“No,” she answered. “Is there any way I can prevent you from doing it now?”

“I got all fucked up and drunk the night before, and then I went to see the Yankees play the Red Sox in an afternoon game. ‘Round about the third inning or so, I had a bit of an emergency.”

“Probably not the best place for it.”

“Dude,” I said, “I was in this fucking disgusting stall, with puke and piss and shit all over the place, and a hundred drunk guys on line outside, and I was hovering over this fucking bowl tryin’ to blast it all out.”

“Lovely.”

“The ironic thing about it was that even though the place was beyond fucking wretched, they still managed to have two full rolls of toilet paper in the dispenser. Saved my motherfucking life that day, I’ll tell you that.”

“And your point is?”

“My point,” I said, noting the inviting glow of the windows across the street as the onset of the gloaming brought to a close the first truly nice weekend day of this year, “is that there are a lot worse places to take a shit than my house.”

“Such as?”

“Well, the club, for one.”

“Ah, yes,” she sighed. “The song remains the same. Tell me something, though.”

“Tell you what?”

“Have you ever been in the women’s bathrooms there?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “I have. Many, many times.”

“Have you ever actually tried to use one?”

“No, but if I had a nickel for every GHB and roofied-up girl I’ve found sleeping in there and had to call an ambulance for, I’d have a few extra bucks in my pocket right now.”

“Yeah,” she said, “but you’ve never had to go in and use one when some insane crowd of girls is there fighting over every inch of space.”

“Hey, at least you get some privacy. Nobody’s asking you to stand shoulder to shoulder with ten other assholes whipping your schlong out and pissing into a trough cut into the wall. That sucks, I can assure you.”

“Well, let me assure you of something, in case you’ve never noticed. Women’s public bathrooms are disgusting. Have you ever seen what’s in those stalls? There’s shit everywhere and everything’s wet. And forget about trying to sit down. When you first close the door, there’s so much crap on the floor that you’re more worried about where you’re going to stand while you’re trying to make the whole operation sanitary enough not to throw up.”

“At least,” I said, “you don’t have to stand around pissing while a bunch of shithead Guidos stand there and yell stupid shit at each other.”

“At least,” she replied, “those Guidos don’t hang out outside the door of your bathroom doing pushups so they’re pumped up when they grab your ass and ask you to come to their table.”

“You’ve seen that?”

“You haven’t?”

“No,” I said. “I really don’t have anything to top that.”

“Don’t worry about it. I don’t think anyone else does either.”