Strange Moments In Public Bathrooms

"Man, this is one hell of a public bathroom. I think I'll take a picture of it and put it on the Internet!"

My age: 15
Location: Newport Bay restaurant, Portland

I walked into the bathroom to find it completely empty save for one closed stall door. As I was making my way over to the urinal, the stall’s occupant, who sounded to be about ten years old, said:

“Hey there.”

And right away I knew that this was going to get really weird, really fast.

“Hey,” I said, entirely out of politeness, realizing as I spoke that I had now committed fully and would be unable to turn tail and run out of the bathroom, having joined in the conversation.

“I don’t normally poop at restaurants,” the kid said, quite matter-of-factly. “But tonight I just felt like I couldn’t wait ‘till I got home.”

“Uh huh.” My impulse was to use the bathroom as quickly as possible and get the hell away from this overly conversational little tyke, but he was making it very difficult to concentrate.

“I dunno what it was,” he mused, prepubescent voice echoing off tile. “I guess I had too much chicken at dinner or something.”

As a general rule, I don’t have a problem with being talked to by people who are using the bathroom or vice-versa. I really don’t have much choice; Mike seems to make a point of using the bathroom at least once during every one of our phone conversations.

However, I do have a problem with strangers talking to me out of the blue – moreso when the stranger in question is talking about the regularity of his bowel movements, and double moreso when he’s actually moving his bowels while he talks about them. The fact that the stranger in question was a child did not make this situation any easier. All I could imagine was what would happen if someone walked in right at that moment:

“What’s going on in here?”

“Oh, y’know, I’m just chatting with this 10-year-old about the regularity of his restaurant pooping, as he poops, in a restaurant.”

“Do you know him?”

“I didn’t when I first came in here, but I feel like we’re a lot closer now.”

It was inevitable – the longer I stayed in the bathroom, the worse my life would become. I abandoned any hope of peeing in the foreseeable future and instead went about noisily washing my hands.

“Well, I’ve got to run,” I said. “It sure has been something, though.”

“Wait,” the kid said. “I’m almost done. Just a sec.”

And I was already out the door.

My age: 10
Location: Wellington International Airport, Wellington, New Zealand

We had about an hour between flights, and so I went to use the bathroom while my parents sat and waited on a bunch of those uncomfortable black vinyl chairs you only find in airports. As this was several years before Senator Larry Craig’s bathroom extravaganza in Minneapolis, my parents had no qualms about letting their son walk into an airport bathroom unattended.

Just like in the previous example, I was alone in the bathroom save for one other person, but once I got into the stall, it was clear that the guy next door was not doing so well. Honestly, it sounded like a symphony of wretching, belching, and farting, all going on about a foot away from where I was trying to do my business.

Now, at first this was great, because I was ten years old, and when you’re ten, there’s nothing better than having a front row seat for an epic display of bodily functions – and believe me, this guy was like the Bruce Springsteen of disgusting bodily functions. There would be a long burst of gagging followed by a wall-rattling belch, topped off with a brief yet substantial round of flatulence. I’m serious. This guy was literally The Boss. To me, he was like every episode of All That! rolled into one.

However, the appeal of a guy being violently ill quickly wore off for me, and I started to get worried. For me, when I had been violently ill in the past, the noisy part of it usually lasted about five seconds, if that, and this guy had been going strong for the better part of a minute. It was kind of freaking me out, so I left the bathroom without peeing to get my Dad’s help.

In retrospect, I’m not sure what I expected him to do. Come in with me and say, “Hey, Sick Guy! Quit being sick!”?

Dad, who was more concerned with us making our next flight than some tourist’s digestive pyrotechnics, told me to go back in the bathroom, take care of business as quickly as possible, and leave.

So I gathered up my courage and did as I was told, picking the stall as far away from the sick guy’s as I could. And so help me God, the poor bastard puked, belched, and farted the entire time.

In years since, I’ve wondered if maybe somebody had just recorded a bunch of bodily functions, spliced them together, and then stuck a tape player in the bathroom to flummox kids like me. If that’s actually the case, though, I’m honestly a little more freaked out than before.

I think the most likely option is just that people in New Zealand are really, really good at being sick.

Alexander’s age: Middle school-ish
Location: Portland International Airport

After a long flight from God knows where, Alexander’s Mom ordered him and his brother (“The Spaz”) to go use the bathroom before the family got in the car for the drive back to Salem.

And so Alexander and The Spaz did just that. As soon as The Spaz entered his stall, though, he called out to Alexander.

“Alexander, get over here!” Alexander later described his younger brother’s tone as reverent. “You have to see this!”

Alexander dropped what he was doing and ran to see what The Spaz was talking about. What he found his brother staring at was shocking and also somewhat humbling:

The previous occupant of the stall had sprayed excrement across the wall above the toilet in what Alexander described as a “majestic brown rainbow.”

“And all I could think was, ‘Somebody wanted to do this.’” Alexander said later. “Because doing that could not have been easy or pleasant. Whoever did this clearly had a plan that he was very solidly committed to.”

It didn’t make sense to him then, and it didn’t make sense to me when he told me about it. For a while we wished we could have been there when it happened to ask the guy what motivated him to do it, but then decided that maybe that was a situation we shouldn’t have been wishing to be close to.

If he and I learned anything from our speculation, it was that more often than not, public bathrooms raise more questions than they ever answer.

That’s just a natural side effect of places where complete strangers gather to do taboo acts in close proximity. Sometimes, elements of peoples’ private lives are best left shrouded in mystery.

Truman Capps admits that potty humor is probably somewhat played, but it's still a damnsight better than Twitter.