Just Another Piece of the Pie

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been a compulsive hand washer. Before and after I ate, whenever I would come home from work, or after I watered my grandmother’s flower pots in front of her house with the dirt-caked hose sitting outside, it didn’t matter. Even if my hands were spotless afterwards, I would have to wash them. As it is, I’m only a single cough or sneeze away from complete germaphobia, and I sometimes find myself rationalizing that when St. Louis, Missouri, is attacked by terrorist dirty bombs, I’ll be one of the few survivors thanks to my vats of antibacterial soap and buckets of Purell.

When I was growing up, my family was big on celebrations, which I now see as perfect breeding grounds for diseases. Every month, it seemed, we would have another event planned for the birthday of a cousin or an aunt, or for some holiday ranging anywhere from the more ubiquitous Christmas or Thanksgiving to the obscure. I don’t personally know many families who come together to celebrate Columbus Day or throw Dr. Martin Luther King his own party, but to my relatives those were perfectly acceptable times for a get-together.

The scenes were pretty standard: at my aunt’s house we’d gather, twenty-some bodies crammed into a space the size of a bunker, and sit around tables set up in the spare bedroom and kitchen. Feasting was a given on these occasions; there would be in the kitchen no less than twelve dishes set up for my parents, brother, and myself, as well as my grandmother, aunt and uncle, and my unmarried or (later) divorced cousins. Most of the men would sit together, talking about deer hunting and fiscally liberal politics, while the women were left to discuss anything from the latest family gossip to who was sleeping with whom on daytime TV.

What made one particular Fourth of July more memorable was when my aunt served a blackberry pie she had handmade. She brought it into the spare bedroom where we — my mother, grandmother, aunt, women cousins, and I — sat and began to cut it into smallish pieces. She handed out plates for all of us interested and the people at the far end of the table began passing pieces my way.

My grandmother, for as far back as I can remember, has been prone to fits of sneezing. These episodes usually happen at least once every time I see her, and they always involve at least three sneezes in a row. When she grabbed the paper plate holding my blackberry pie, the fit seized her, and she sneezed onto my plate not once but three times, quick and succinct, like a burst of machine gun fire.

“Bless you,” everyone said, surprised, as if something had just exploded in the microwave.

I, however, was too mortified to say anything. After sneezing on it, my grandmother handed me the plate as if nothing had happened. Instead of taking it, I simply looked at it.

“Is everything okay?” she asked. She seemed unaware of the fact that she had contaminated my dessert with germ particles probably numbering somewhere in the millions. I’d learned about the spread of disease and the expulsion of germs through coughs and sneezes in my health class at school, and here she was, fifty years my senior, acting as if she didn’t know any better.

“You sneezed on it.”

Without missing a beat, she said, “There’s nothing wrong with it. It was just a tickle in my nose, and I didn’t sneeze right on it.” She reached with the plate toward me, and I took it reluctantly.

“Well, can I have a different piece? Or can I trade you?” It seemed only fair that, if this one wasn’t going to be treated like a biohazard, then I should at least be able to switch it with hers. But by the time I had finished my question, they were back talking about the soap operas they followed like religions, and I was stuck with my pie.

Looking down at it, I couldn’t help but imagine a swarm of microscopic particles squirming around the tan-colored crust, wiggling like worms and waiting to give me some severe stomach virus. I didn’t want to appear rude, and so I chopped up the pie with my plastic spoon, pushing the mess around a little on my plate so that it might look like I’d eaten some. Then I pushed it away and went to the bathroom to wash my hands.

I can’t recall if this was the first of my obsessive trips to a faucet, but it certainly didn’t help matters. Still, for someone who hates germs, though, there’s no worse place than a bathroom.

Public restrooms frighten me most, though. In fact, often times I’ll avoid using them at all, opting instead for a lengthy and uncomfortable ride home. Besides, I hate having to listen to another person’s bathroom noises or, worse, let someone else listen to mine.

Once I’m inside, the first thing I do is check to make sure that I am alone. I hate the idea of doing any business in the company of other people, and so, if necessary, I choose to wait for my privacy. This can be a difficult and lengthy task, especially if I’m at a movie theater or a concert venue where there’s apt to be more than a few fellow men roaming around. As life has taught me, people tend to be running on the same clocks, and so — much like arriving for dinner at a restaurant or stepping up to a grocery store checkout line — there are usually more than a few people needing to use the facilities at the exact same time I do.

These situations tend to allow me to showcase my tremendous good nature through noble self-sacrifice. “No, no,” I’ll say to the gruff flannel-clad man behind me or the sighing thirty-year-old checking messages on his cellphone, “you go ahead.” I’ll gesture to the urinal and, when they look at me, puzzled and slightly creeped out, I’ll nod at the occupied stall, whispering: “I’m waiting for this one.”

Once safely alone, I can take care of what needs to be done. The first thing I do is check to see which toilet is the cleanest, an awkward task because I hate to touch the stalls. So instead I use my foot and kick in the doors like an FBI agent tracking down a suspect compartment by compartment. Then, settled, I try not to linger, and I hope that there’s some kind of large-scale equivalent to food’s ten-second rule that applies to human beings. Sometimes I’ll try to keep my feet up off the floor, but when I start to teeter forward, I have to put them back down.

If this makes me sound somewhat prissy or my phobia overblown, it’s only because I hate going into the restroom with a simple need to pee and coming out with an obligation to visit my local health clinic so I can clear up a nasty case of chlamydia. I’d just rather skip it. It might sound extreme, but I don’t trust the idea of other people being courteous in their bathroom etiquette.

At a restaurant in Alton, Illinois, I went with some friends to dinner one evening a few months after my twenty-third birthday. I worked up the courage to go into the restroom and, to my surprise, it was empty.

I relished the silence, broken only by the sounds of my shoes against the tile and the occasional muffled voice of a maitre d’ voicing concerns over a loitering busboy. I entered the best stall and set about my rituals, fortifying myself against the army of germs looking to kill me. Suddenly, the bathroom door flew open and I heard heavy footsteps. I froze, and I couldn’t help but listen to him as he relieved himself at the urinal.

He zipped up, and I waited for the reassuring sound of a squeaky soap dispenser or even the simple flow of tap water over his hands, but instead I heard only his shoes against the floor followed by the door’s harsh squeal as it opened and slid shut.

Images of this nameless, faceless man going back to his seat flooded my mind. I thought of him passing by an acquaintance on the way back, maybe stopping to shake hands with an old business partner or one of the other coaches for the little league team, perhaps tousling a youngster’s unkempt hair. After returning to his seat, he would pick up his hamburger or chicken sandwich with his bare hands, rotating it as he looked for the best bite, and then going for it.

After I was finished, I washed my hands. Then before washing them a second time, I cranked out a sheet of paper towel so long it could have served as a hallway runner just so I wouldn’t have to touch the dispenser again. With my hands dry, I stepped to the door and started to reach for it. You know, I thought then, I wonder which hand he used to open this door.

I must have stood there for five minutes staring at the little silver bar that was the door handle. If I was trapped, it was only because my mind could not stop thinking about how a person could be so sloppy, so careless as to aid the side of the germs in this war of cleanliness. Eventually, once the realization settled upon me that the door would not open by my will alone, I went back to the paper towel dispenser and, using my elbow, managed to roll out a sheet about the size of the sink basin. I ripped it off and used it to open the door. I thought about throwing it back on the bathroom floor, a little slap in the face for all those who didn’t consider the other people who have to use the facilities, too. You might not wash your hands, I thought at them, but you’re not going to have a pretty bathroom to piss in either. After I thought it, though, it felt hollow, and I didn’t like the idea of littering the floor with my own trash. It felt more like a hypocrite’s response than a martyr’s.

Outside, then, I wasn’t sure what to do with the paper towel, and so I carried it, crumpled up into a little ball, to the host’s dark oak stand at the front of the restaurant.

The maitre d’, a youngish woman with blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, looked at me and smiled. “Can I help you, sir?” she asked.

“There was a man in the bathroom,” I said, “who did not wash his hands.” It made me sick to my stomach to be saying this, but I felt it had to be done. I wasn’t one to make a scene, but this, I felt, was important.

“Was it an employee here, sir?” The maitre d’ had a look of subtle indifference, like she were wishing to just have one day where a man squeezing a paper towel into a tighter and tighter ball might not have anything to complain about.

Her question stopped me. I, of course, hadn’t seen the man. To spare myself the embarrassment of having to explain that “Well, ma’am, I was in the stall” I chose to err on the side of personal discretion. Besides, the odds were in my favor that the man was a fellow customer.

“Well, sir, there’s not really anything we can do about that,” the girl said. “If he were an employee, then, yes, we would have to talk to him about that, but if it’s a gentleman just using the restroom, it’s up to him.”

Up to him? Why should it be up to him if I get sick? I wanted to ask. I had imagined her, I don’t know, marching over to the man’s table, knowing somehow which one was right. She would plant herself before him, fire lighting her eyes as if she were inhabited by a demon, and eject him from the restaurant like a flake of dried snot. But there were more customers coming in, and the hostess, dismissing my concerns like my grandmother had done all those years ago. Turning away from me with a halfhearted conciliatory smile, she perked up and asked a middle-aged couple how they were doing this evening.

Defeated, I returned to my friends and sat down to the meal that was waiting for me. I had ordered a salad, and I was thankful for a reason to eat with a knife and a fork, anything to keep my hands, those little germ magnets, from touching my food.

When our waitress came around to ask if we were interested in dessert, she told us about our options. I thought, almost certainly, that she was going to say blackberry pie, but she didn’t. Instead, there was all the standard fare: brownies with ice cream, cinnamon spiced apples, various cheesecakes. Nothing terribly exciting.

As she was rattling off fruit-flavored toppings, though, I looked up and saw the little hallway where one of the cooks was headed to the men’s room. He stepped inside and I imagined him or one of his fellow workers in there at the same time I had been, and not washing his hands afterward. All the food he would prepare. All the people that would eat it. All the germs he might spread. I had no way of knowing any different.

My friends chose strawberry- and caramel-covered cheesecake slices, but when the waitress turned to me, asking, “And for you, sir?” I reached into my pocket, grasped a tiny bottle of Purell, and answered, “No, thanks. I’ll be fine.”