Cabinet for the Toilet and Bed-Clothes, Ryūryūkyo Shinsai, Public Domain.
When I was applying to graduate programs towards the end of 2020, I made a last-minute edit to my statement of purpose for the PhD program in Geography at UC Berkeley, starting the essay with the following: “Toilets taught me that social inequities could be as tangible as steel and stone.” (I did not get in.) You’re lucky if you don’t think about bathrooms that often — where to find them, whether or not they’re clean, safe, or free.
I think about bathrooms sometimes because I have to, but also because I like to. They can be more than spaces to relieve yourself; they can be sites for privacy or social interaction, behaviors that are criminalized or stigmatized, ridiculousness and laughter and getting into scrapes.
Take your phone to the toilet with you if you want the right ambiance while you scroll. Here’s a list of a few bathrooms I’ve known:
1. Microsoft, Redmond, WA, multi-occupancy, women’s restroom.
Adrianna and I own these hallways on late weeknights and weekends when there’s no one but our dad squinting at his two monitors, incomprehensible lines of C++ in a terminal window. From the kitchenette we liberate sodas and Talking Rain flavored sparkling water and Wilcox Farms chocolate milk. The office has that corporate smell: vacuumed carpet and dry air. The lights come on with motion. In the bathroom, we decide we’re chimpanzees hanging off of vines in the forest. We each jump up, grab hold of the top of a stall door, and swing. The stall doors go
clang
and
thud,
boom boom boom,
and we don’t even hear the bathroom door open because we’re shrieking with laughter. When we see the scandalized woman, she’s already right up behind us. We cut and run.
2. Childhood home, Redmond, WA, single-occupancy, gender-neutral.
Pink marble floor a Rorschach test—
I saw the boot of Italy in those white veins,
sometimes a woman’s face in profile.
When I really wanted to be alone or to write
without feeling like anyone was watching over
my shoulder I took a laptop there, sat on the floor hunched over the keyboard
with my back to the wall of the tub.
In this way I wrote the talk everyone saw
and many more things which no one did.
One year I got this idea
to paint blue borders, like a picture frame,
on all the cabinets, which were off-white.
My mom and dad saw, said it wasn’t the right
kind of paint to use, so I just left it at one.
It was acrylic paint, the color of the sky on a perfect day.
At night I left the light on because I was scared of the dark,
left the door of my bedroom open, and the light would
filter from the bathroom to the hallway
all yellow, and I could sleep.
3. Rental apartment in Nice, France, single-occupancy, gender-neutral.
I’m 13. When I see the brown clumps in my underwear, I think I’m shitting my pants and just can’t feel it. The rental is a light-filled apartment with great archways and stucco walls. I don’t see much of it because I’m holed up in the bathroom trying to understand what’s happening to me. Who’s ever heard of poop that doesn’t smell like anything? I hear consternation outside. Turns out the beautiful rental is besieged by ants in a big way. We move to a different apartment. As soon as we get there, I go to the bathroom and pull my pants down. My incontinence hasn’t stopped. It’s not until I come out wailing and my mom hands me a sanitary pad that I realize blood can be this color, too.
4. Then-partner’s apartment in Berkeley, California, single-occupancy, gender-neutral.
I look like a ten-year-old boy with a punishment haircut, something out of a grade school bully’s craven imagination. The salon has fucked it up beyond belief. It can’t possibly get worse, right, so I stand in the bathtub bowing my head to the electric clippers he guides across my scalp. Looking in the mirror, I have no choice but to burst into laughter, alternating with mild screaming. We immediately visit a hairdresser, who barks at me, “Who did this?”
5. Bodega Dunes Beach, California, multi-occupancy, women’s restroom.
D. has the worst lactose intolerance of anyone I’ve ever known, and we’re in neighboring stalls when digestive Armageddon slams into her gut. She can’t handle poop, visually or conceptually, or the idea of anyone hearing her poop, so she starts blasting music off Spotify on her phone to cover up the woodwinds from her body.
The song she chooses is the one she’s had stuck in her head for weeks, “Sexual” by NEIKED. The bears can hear it in the woods, that’s how loud it is.
When I abandon her to go wait outside and also breathe untainted oxygen again, I see an elderly gentleman standing nearby with his walking stick, wearing an expression of complete and utter astonishment. I nod at him.
I’m feeling sexual / So we should be sexual trills out of the restroom.
6. Asha Tea, Downtown Berkeley, single-occupancy, gender-neutral.
Sometimes caffeine exerts a sudden and violent effect on my gastrointestinal system. (Also bookstores. There’s a name for it: the Mariko Aoki phenomenon.) One day I’m sitting in the perfect corner, laptop plugged in, downing my Hong Kong milk tea with fresh black tapioca balls, still warm. My stomach roils. I bolt past the expensive tea accouterments on the floating shelves to my left, a small black tea kettle and tiny ceramic cups, past the cardboard boxes stacked to the right — to the bathroom, blissfully unoccupied.
The moment I sit down and unburden myself, a simultaneous event, I don’t feel relieved, exactly, because now the clock’s started, the clock that starts every time you go into the Sole Bathroom, you have to weigh your own desire for — what? Relief, relaxation, cleanliness, space — with the needs of the fractious horde that could be amassing outside. What if there’s a kid who didn’t go any of the previous times his parents said “Do you need to go potty?” and now he really, really has to go. A pregnant woman whose bladder is being actively pressed against by the uterus distended by a massive new head, an arched fetal foot. An aging man dealing with the frequent need to urinate brought on by an enlarged prostate.
You could be causing them agony. Imagine them outside, shifting from foot to foot. Right now, they have terse smiles pulled across their jaws, but hand those people some pitchforks and a battering ram and you’ll be dragged to the guillotine with your pants around your ankles faster than that toilet can flush.
With this image in my head, I’m finishing as fast as I can. This means contributing to a small heap of toilet paper accumulating in the toilet bowl. (The unchallenged hegemony of toilet paper in the American bathroom is a canker sore in the mouth of our society. Here’s a BBC piece on TP and how other countries clean up better!)
Then: the dreaded knock at the door.
“One sec!” I respond. Oh God. Has there ever been a lie as bold-faced as “one sec” in the miserable single-occupancy bathroom? Sweating, I turn the handle to flush. Nothing: barely a bubble breaking the surface of that noxious swill. I try again.
At this point I’m scanning the room. There is no plunger, no toilet brush, no bucket. Nothing next to the toilet to fashion into a tool, nothing to force this vile mountain of waste into the pipes.
In this dim and windowless bathroom there is also no escape beyond the door. No pane of glass to push open or ceiling vent to crawl into, run away on the roof and change my name.
Nothing else to do, in short, but this series of actions. I:
yank several sheets of the coarse brown paper towels from the dispenser
cover one hand in the layer of paper towels
plunge my hand into the toilet bowl to scoop out the morass
The towels are soaked through instantly. I pivot on my heel, cursing under my breath, mound of shit in my outstretched palm, a level of unwanted intimacy with my own waste that I may never finish processing.
There’s nowhere to throw everything but the massive trashcan. I cover this, my shame, in more paper towels, shuddering at the small wet shroud.
A knock at the door again.
“One sec,” I say again, and I take a lot longer than that to wash my hands.
7. Someone’s house, Brooklyn, single-occupancy, gender-neutral.
Me and her and him, crowded around the sink. It’s his. I ask him about the supply chain. It’s fine, he said, I tested it. No I mean like ethically. He shrugs.
I love her a little bit even though she scares me, how wild and treacherous she can be. Outside I’d just heard her speak sweetly to this tall blonde LA girl’s face and then she turned around and whispered to me, I hate her.
I am here because she could ask me Want to do… just about anything and I would follow. Maybe.
There’s no way to explain it but when R. knocks on the door, jiggles the locked handle, and I open it, I’ve never been happier to see a person in my life, I throw my arms around him and kiss him on the cheek. I’ve never done this before. Treating my affection like a gun’s recoil, in need of a silencer — I think too hard, stand still and far. And then I don’t.
8. A dive bar, Brooklyn, single-occupancy, gender-neutral.
You know what I remember most. More than the frenetic shucking-off of our summer clothes, my silk slip bunched up over the door handle. More than stupidly sticking my bare feet into a pool of liquid of unknown provenance, more than how tenderly you put soap on my foot after. More than the knocking from impatient people queuing outside and our unapologetic assholery in ignoring them. More than your mouth or mine, more than the impossible angle against that black door. Is how much we giggled. In a photo booth where the curtain was too high for indiscretions, and walking to the bathroom, and inside, how much we laughed at this outrageous thing, like we were getting away with something, like sleepovers on summer nights, prank calling a contact off of someone’s phone on a dare, putting on a voice and a fake name, breaking, always breaking in a second’s time, plunging into laughter on both sides of the line.
—
Facility Mag is a publication all about restrooms that advocates for everyone’s access to them as part of our “right to the city,” and shares access codes (largely in the New York metro area, but some other places too).
Happy Lunar New Year!