Willie Lobster, Detective: PART 5 "Krazy Klown Komedy"

Koqteese had just turned Detective Lobster’s car around when a small, slightly comical looking Ford Fiesta traveling in the opposite direction erupted into a ball of flames. The crappy lime green Fiesta lifted off the ground and tumbled through the air like a child’s toy. As it spun through the air a handful of people spilled out onto the blacktop.

People in baggy trousers and enormous shoes.

“Holy shit,” Koqteese said. “I have just forgotten all about taking you back to your apartment to get your glasses!”

“Glasses!” Lobster shouted. “What are you even talking about!”

Koqteese managed to steer their car out of the fireballs bouncing trajectory.

“You know,” Lobster said. “Ford makes one helluva basketball…”

“It is bouncing pretty high,” Koqteese said in agreement.

“Oh Jesus,” Lobster said as the flaming Fiesta hurtled past his window. “That’s not a basket ball, that’s a fucking flaming car!”

Koqteese decided to pretend like she hadn’t heard him—this would be her new way of dealing with Detective Lobster’s many short-comings. This was the same method employed by Lobster’s mother and father, as well as his first two wives (Rebecca and Sayshauna Ann).

“Pull over, we gotta see if there’s anyone left to pull outta that wreck,” Lobster said, banging his hand against the dashboard dramatically as he spoke.

“Whatever,” Koqteese told him as he slowed their car down.

Detective Lobster didn’t wait for the come to a complete stop—he was so badass that he leaped out of the car when it was still rolling to a stop. He’d seen that done in the movies and had always wanted to give it a whirl. Of course, what they don’t tell or show you in the movies is the wear that this tends to put on the souls of ones shoes. Detective Lobster could suddenly feel the pavement through the bottoms of both shoes.

“It was time to get a new pair, anyway,” he said as he stomped over to the wrecked Fiesta.

Though it was smashed against a streetlight, and consumed with flames, Detective Lobster could tell that this was no ordinary sub-compact. The rear fender was shaped like the backend of a goose, and the front of the car was bent to look like an enormous bird bill. Clearly this was some kind of bird-Fiesta hybrid.

Not that it mattered. The flames danced along the green paint job, licking away the frivolity like a fat kid licking an ice cream cone on a balmy July afternoon when the air conditioner is broken and he won’t shut up about being so fucking hot so his mother gives in and gives him an ice cream cone even though he’s just developed Type II diabetes and the State is going to take him away because she’s let him grow so enormously fat that it’s become a sick kind of child abuse.

It was kind of like that.

“Hey!” Lobster screamed into the flames. “Anyone still in there!”

“H-h-haaa!” a shrieking clown laugh sounded from somewhere inside the burning wreck. “H-h-haaa! This haahahahaha, this hahahah burns…”

Then there was a series of strange honking sounds. It wasn’t like the honking of a goose (which would have kinda made sense) but rather, it was like the sound of a deflating bicycle horn.

“Oh my gawd!” Koqteese said, shoving her heaving bosom against Lobster’s back. “There’s a clown in there! He’s fryin’ like a piece of succulent cod!”

“Take it easy,” Lobster said. “I’m canceling this fish fry.”

Without thinking, which was pretty much how he always operated, Detective Lobster dove through the flaming (broken) windshield and reached down to grab a hold of the burning clown.

“Hahaha…don’t try to save me…I’m done for,” the clown coughed. “Hahahaha!”

By this time the other clowns, the ones who’d fallen out of the Fiesta as it tumbled through the air, were limping towards the burning wreck.

“Chuckle-chuckle! Garsh, we gotta save Mr. Giggle-Pants!” one of the injured clowns said as he limped to the burning car.

“Stay back!” Koqteese said. “Detective Lobster will save your friend.”

“Well I couldn’t save him,” Lobster said as he leaped out of the burning Fiesta. “Poor bastard wouldn’t stop laughing…I couldn’t get him to leave the car.”

“That was Mr. Giggle-Pants,” another of the injured clowns said. “Always laughing…right up to the end.”

In the distance there came the sound of sirens.

“The fire department can handle the rest,” Lobster said, wiping the soot from his pants. “Let’s spilt before those bananas show up and start making trouble.”

“Hey mister,” one of the clowns said. “Did you say bananas?”

“Do you know about this gang of vicious, killer banana bullies?” Koqteese said, pursing her lips in a way that reminded all of the clowns, as well as Detective Lobster, of that fat boy licking his beloved ice cream cone.

“Those rubber heads have been muscling in on our territory,” the smoking clown said. He wasn’t smoking a cigarette; his clothes were singed and giving off little trails of jet black smoke. It was really distracting.

“The bananas are doing kids parties?” Lobster said skeptically.

“No, no, we’re cocaine smugglers,” the sort-of-still-burning Clown said.

“I should have known,” Lobster said. “That explains the red noses…”

“Those bastard bananas must have slipped a bomb under our Klown Kar,” the clown explained.

Lobster frowned.

“Why did you say it like that?” he asked the clown.

“Say what like what?”

“You called your clown car your ‘klown kar,’ that’s really very stupid,” Lobster said. Detective Lobster was a very good judge of stupid. This was because of Einstein’s famous theory of “Takes One to Know One.” This rule applies to a lot of people, in a lot of instances.

“I guess I was trying to add a bit of levity,” the clown said. “To a terrible situation. You see, that ‘s what we clowns do—we add levity to a terrible situation. That terrible situation is called ‘reality.’ You see, the world is full of chaos and pain, there’s nothing I can do about that. What I can do, however, is try to make both you and your voluptuous friend smile by wearing baggy pants…and calling my car a ‘klown kar.’ Is that so wrong?”

Another of the dazed, and injured clowns nodded in agreement and said: “We also sell cocaine…to help with all that suffering and shit…honk-a-honk-a!”

Detective Lobster grunted in disgust and turned away.

“Come on Koqteese,” he said, heading back to his car. “Let’s leave these Klowns to their Krime scene.”

SCATTERSHOT READERS YOU DECIDE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT:

DOES DETECTIVE LOBSTER PLAY POOL WITH AN UMBRELLA?

OR

DOES DETECTIVE LOBSTER DIG A REALLY DEEP HOLE WITH A SLOTTED SPOON?

VOTE IN THE COMMENTS SECTION!!!

Selected 2009 Titles from Uncle Dickie's Adult Video Bargain Bazaar

The Lovely Boners

Pubic Enemies

(500) Days of Hummers

Trannyformers 2: Revenge of the Fellas

In Glourious Basterds

Legs Up in the Air

He's Just Not That Deep Into You

Hairy Pooper & The Half-Inch Prince

XXX-Men Orifices: Wooly and Mean

Up

Dying: Part 2

My first near-death experience is also one of my earliest memories. The exact year (and my exact age) is a bit fuzzy, but I know that I hadn’t yet started school. Growing up I was a very clean child. I didn’t like to be dirty, I still don’t in fact. Hand washing was something that my parents had no problem cajoling me into doing.

Still, I was a child and somehow one day, while washing my hands—I got a bit of liquid Dial soap into my mouth. I was probably touching my lips, which were always causing me problems as a child. My lips are big, they always have been big. In fact, they’ve always been the size they are now. So my huge pillow lips got in the way of my hand washing and I somehow got soap into my mouth.

The taste was bitter and clashed with the viscous sweetness the Dial projected. My nostrils and my tastes buds were flashing my little child brain conflicting messages. Was this Dial something nice or something awful, putrid even?

I quickly lapped up some water and swished it around in my mouth—but the damage was done. This part of the story is also a bit fuzzy, but for some reason I felt (with much certainty) that I was going to die. Dial soap went into my mouth, now I was going to die.

A timeline was also somehow involved in my eminent death: I was convinced that I’d die at the end of the day. Going to sleep would somehow magnify the poison of the soap, allow it to choke my heart and silence my lungs.

Despite the fact that I was facing such a dire predicament, I felt calm, relaxed even. I spent the rest of the day “saying goodbye” to things that I would miss once I was dead.

The crabapple trees outside in my parents front yard.
The sun.
The gray chain-link fence that surrounded our back yard.
The sky.
Clumps of grass.
The oozy leopard-print slugs that slowly crawled along the concrete outside our door.

Strangely, none of the things I said farewell to were people—like my parents or my sister Amber (whom I loved dearly). For some reason I was only preoccupied with bidding farewell to all the small, inconsequential things. The things I rarely gave even a passing thought.

At the end of the day I told my family goodnight (again, not “goodbye”), then I went to bed. I was somber, but not devastated. I wasn’t blubbering like that inmate you see in prison dramas—you know the one on Death Row who acts all tough, but then when he’s being dragged to The Chair he cries like a total baby.

“Oh! Oh! Oh please Warden! I’m sorry.”

I folded my arms over my little-boy chest and shut my eyes. I got bored waiting for death (which doesn’t always come when once expects) and ended up falling fast asleep.

In the morning I awoke!

I was alive!

By some miracle that I didn’t understand, the Dial soap had failed to kill me. And though it made no sense to think that I was going to die in the first place, I find it even MORE absurd to think that because I had survived the night I knew that I wasn’t going to die. To this day I’m astounded by the rules I’d given “Death By Dial Soap.”

Much like anyone who brushes up against the icy shoulder of Death, and lives—I was elated. I ran around the house, flapping my arms like a bird. The sky was clear, the air was crisp, and my hands were clean. I was elated to be alive.

A (Not) Ghost Story

The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts—ITALO CALVINO

In between graduating from High School and graduating from college I worked the graveyard shift. I did this for two and a half years—eleven o’clock at night to seven o’clock in the morning, five days a week. Though I frequently griped about it, I actually sought this schedule out. The reason being is: at night there is simply nothing going on and you don’t have to deal with people.

Working an overnight shift as a security guard in the lonely streets of downtown Kansas City was both horrific and wondrous. The big, vacant office buildings and rusty industrial complexes seemed ripped from Hollywood horror flicks—and yet the closest thing I have to a ghost story from this period of my life happened one morning after I’d gotten off work.

When the sun came up, I’d go home, say goodbye to my family as they left for work—eat a quick bite and then go to bed until later that afternoon. Then I’d get up and go back to work or I’d go to night school, depending on what day of the week it was.

My one “ghost story” occurred after a particularly rousing after-shift meal of microwaveable mini-cheese burgers (with spicy Chipotle mayo). Upon finishing my greasy breakfast, I decided to take a leak and hit the sack. Instead of pissing downstairs in the basement, where my bedroom/bathroom was, I decided to stagger upstairs and use the houses “common” bathroom shared by all.

Hanging over the toilet was a little wooden shelf/cabinet-thingy. It was here that my sisters kept their girly make-up and a variety of gaudy plastic hair clasps. Also, sitting on one of the shelves was a candle in a frosted glass jar and one of those special “long barrel” lighters. As I stood there peeing into the bowl, the lower shelf was about at eye level.

Now, after being up all night one does get a little “punch drunk,” and sometimes a person in this loopy condition will do or say things that even they themselves cannot fully explain. I didn’t set out to commit a mysterious act, or cause any trouble. It wasn’t a mischievous scheme that I’d concocted that night while I stared blankly up at the square metal roof of the security booth that I lived in at the edge of the empty parking lot that I guarded. There was no malice or forethought involved—all I did, I did because I was trying not to fall asleep while taking a piss.

What I did: I reached out with my free hand and picked up the lighter. I flicked the flame on a few times, and then I lit the candle. Without a second thought I zipped up and headed downstairs where my bed laying waiting.



Nine hours later I woke up and found my house embroiled in controversy.

My mother and my father were having a heated exchange. Though I was still groggy, I was able to make out that one of my sisters had done something bad. At least, that’s what my Mom thought.

“I don’t know which one of them did it,” she told my Dad—who was leaning against the counter with a look that told me he was patiently waiting for her to finish ranting.

“But one of those girls did it, and I’m going to figure it out…”

When she was done, my father calmly told her who he suspected had perpetrated the mysterious ill-deed: “I think it was the ghost.”

Sitting down at the dinner table, I prepared myself for the fireworks. My parents were on opposite ends when it came to our house’s “ghost.” Every since we’d moved, my Dad had harbored suspicion that whenever anything went missing it was “taken” by a mischievous spiritual entity that craved familial discord. All sorts of things went missing—shoes, keys, important documents, and things that one rarely used on a daily basis but would need at odd/unexpected moments. Of course, the reason we could never find these things was twofold:

1. My sisters and I were not big on putting things away exactly as we’d found them.

And

2. My father, a compulsive-cleaner, would often scoop things up and put them away without really heeding what went where.

My mother, a realist not prone to the same flights of fancy as my father, wasn’t convinced that our house was haunted. As I sat there, listening to them bicker, I became curious as to what had happened. My sister Amber showed up and loudly proclaimed her innocence in a way that suggested she’d done so many, many times that day.

“Ugh, I didn’t DO IT!”

“Do what?” I asked impishly, glad for once that I wasn’t the one that had caused any trouble.

“Well,” my mother said with a shrug, “maybe it was Lindsey?”

Lindsey? This was too good!

Lindsey, my younger sister, never did anything that got my parents so riled up (to this day, I’ve never heard her swear—even though I’ve offered her a LITERAL cash bribe to say “ass” or “shit”). I was literally bursting to find out what she’d done, but I decided to play it cool. Sometimes when my Mom or Dad noticed how excited I was when one of my sisters got in trouble, they would shift some of their anger my way.

I wasn’t keen on catching any of this heat—so I waited. Finally, when I could stand it no longer, I once again asked what had happened.

“When I got home this afternoon I found a candle burning in the hallway bathroom,” my mother told me.

“I’m telling you,” my Dad said. “It was the ghost…”

My heart skipped a beat. Wait a minute…candle? Hadn’t I lit the candle this morning, when I was taking a leak? At first, I nearly confessed to the crime, and then I thought about it. Leaving an open flame burning while I slept downstairs wasn’t just dangerous, it was downright stupid. Admitting that I’d lit a candle, and then passed out from exhaustion was like saying “I’m a total idiot.”

Besides, for some reason I wasn’t even being considered a suspect—which meant that all I had to do was keep my mouth shut and I’d get away scot-free! On top of that, the sheer amount of vitriol being bandied about by all parties—both the accused and the accusers—was downright frightening. More so than any spook or specter could ever hope to be!

I decided to admit nothing.

When asked if I knew anything about the mysterious candle, and rather than lie, I gave a non-committal shrug. My baby sister came inside from playing for the night and whined that she too was innocent.

My mother later confided in me that she thought it was her anyway, and that she was angry that Lindsey had “fibbed.” Hearing this made my insides churn and provided me with an interesting mix of guilt and indigestion, yet I kept my silence. When I’d awoke that evening I entered a strange, new world where my parents household was split, divided like in the Civil War—between those who thought a ghost had magically lit a candle…and those who were pretty sure it was Lindsey.

Or maybe Amber…Amber might had done it, too.

I waited a for a few years to pass, and for the controversy to subside before confessing that I had, in fact, left the candle burning. The first person I told was Amber, my closest confidant. I expected her to laugh or shrug it off like it was no big deal.

Instead she twisted her face into a mask of angered-shock.

“Nu-uh! It was you?” she shrieked. “I’m telling Mom…”

My confession did more than get my sisters off the hook, however—it also killed my father’s greatest proof that a ghost really was pestering our household. Luckily for me, the statute of limitations on impersonating the undead is only six months...

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.”

The Other Sex’s Bathroom

In life, there are many mysteries—is there a God? What happens to us after we die? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? If a tree falls in the woods, and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? What is the sound of one hand clapping?

But of all these mysteries, there’s none greater than: “What is it like in the girl’s bathroom?”

Growing up, there was much speculation surrounding the ladies room. There were rumors of couches, marble fountains, and tuxedoed bath attendants. At school, the bathrooms were always situated side-by-side. But despite sharing a common wall, there was a fantastic gulf between these two rooms. None of us guys would ever ask the girls what it was like in their bathroom. We were certain the girls had it better, and we didn’t want them to know it. Somehow, but not asking we thought we were letting them know that we too had fantastic amenities and could care less about their fabulous toilet-room.

By our very nature, human beings always seem to think that whatever they don’t have is better. This is known as the “grass is always greener” principal. I think cows are the only other animal to suffer from this envy.

I grew up and grew out of many childish things, but not my curiosity about the ladies bathroom. At 17 I was ordered to clean the bathrooms by my first boss. This onerous/odorous task was dreaded by everyone on staff at the drugstore where I earned my first paycheck. But I was actually looking forward to doing it.

Finally, after all the years of wondering I was about to find out what the ladies room was all about. Sure, I could have sneaked in sooner…but I’m not a pervert. It’s not like I want to watch women take a dump or anything. It was just a forbidden thing.

At long last, I would see if they have a chandelier in each stall or just over the sinks.

As you can imagine, I was more than just a little let-down. There were no fountains or footstools like I’d always imagined just strange metal boxes in the stalls (which I soon learned to dread whenever I was assigned cleaning detail).

Having finally lost its mystique, I quit obsessing about the ladies room and moved onto other things. I hadn’t thought about my bathroom curiosity in quite a while, when I met a lady in the men’s room at Sam’s Club a few weeks ago.

It was a bright, sunny day. I’d gotten dehydrated and decided to drink a liter of water just prior to going shopping with my wife. By the time we made our way to Sam’s (that Mecca of American over-consumption) my bladder was ready to burst. So I ran inside and made bolted for the restrooms. Without being too disgusting (which, in a post about bathrooms is pretty hard), I went in and “got down to business” at one of the urinals.

While I was “getting down,” this elderly black woman shuffled into the men’s room and began examining every nook and cranny. Now, at the risk of sounding (and perhaps being) racist, I’m going to come clean and say that I thought this woman was Rosa Parks. I know that’s fucked up, but when you’re peeing and an old black lady comes shuffling in, you aren’t really thinking straight. For some reason all I could think was, “Oh God! I can’t tell this poor woman to get the hell out of here…I mean for cryin’ out loud, she’s been through so much!” She was wearing this little getup that looked right out of the 1950’s. Her gray wispy hair was mostly pulled back, but a few stray strands were flying wildly around her head. She was also wearing those panty-hose socks. You know, the kind that makes a woman look likes she’s wearing panty-hose. Those things never seem to work, because every woman I see with them on always has them all bunched up around her ankles.

As I stood there, holding my dick and thinking about the best way to let this woman know she was in the wrong place—she was busy checking each stall. At first I thought she was looking for a child (or perhaps an invalid husband) who’d gone in to use the facilities and hadn’t reemerged. But it soon became obvious that this was not the case.

She was talking to herself. Not quite mumbling, not quite whispering…something in between. I thought she was on the phone but she wasn’t—she was just confused. You see, in her mind she WAS in the ladies room.

The strangest ladies room on Earth.

For all you women out there who’ve not been in a men’s room, let me de-mystify it for you. The only difference between yours and ours are the urinals. They put them closest to the door (so we can shoot-in and shoot-out), so it’s very obvious that you are in the men’s room the moment you walk through the door.

And yet, despite walking past the row of gleaming white urinals (and yours truly), this old lady decided that she was STILL somehow in the right room. Once she’d reached the last stall in the row, I’d finished my business and was trying to figure out what to do. I headed over to the sinks and just stared at her. I can only assume that she’s one of these “picky” people and that she was trying to find the “best” toilet for whatever business SHE had to attend to.

“Uh, mama,” I said unable to just wash my hands and leave. “Are you alright?”
She turned around, startled that there was a man in the room.
“Well this is the strangest place….”
“You’re in the men’s room,” I told her. “That’s why there are all these urinals.”

She looked at me as though I’d slapped her. I suddenly felt very guilty, like maybe I should have just washed-up and left her alone.

“Well wait till the girls here about this!” she shouted, then shuffled out of the room. “Oh boy…” she muttered as she passed me.

Bathrooms are all the same--there’s nothing glamorous or wonderful about them. Of course, the only way you’ll ever know is to go and see.