It’s an inescapable fact of life. At some point, your bladder and bowels will turn against you in the worst possible way at the worst possible time. You could be in the middle of an important meeting. You could be sitting side-by-side with the love of your life, the President of the United States, or the most famous celebrity in the world.
Then, it hits you.
Suddenly, you have to go the bathroom. Either your bladder is about to burst or you’re about to damage your underwear and pants beyond repair. It doesn’t matter how rich, well-connected, or powerful you are. Sometimes, your body will find a way to turn any one moment into something mortifying and/or stressful.
Without getting too graphic, I’ll spare everyone reading this the ugly details of what these situations entail. Since this happens to everyone at some point, I don’t think I have to. But I’m bringing it up because I recently found myself cleaning my bathroom. In doing so, I recalled an incident from many years ago that has impacted me in subtle, yet profound ways. And it has to do with the single most disgusting, dirty, and foul-smelling public restroom I ever had to use.
I understand the bar for awful public restrooms is very high. Depending on where you live in the world, a dirty public restroom might depend heavily on how much or how little actual fecal matter is smeared on the walls. In others, it might just depend on how backed up the toilet is.
I don’t doubt for a second that someone reading this can recall a public restroom experience that was many times worse than anything I ever experienced. But I still wish to share this story, if only to offer a hard lesson in what having to use disgusting public restrooms can to do your psyche.
Like many other formative experiences in my life, this one occurred while I was in college. Specifically, it occurred during my freshman year. That’s relevant because at the university I went to, there were numerous dorm facilities that were in various state of repair/disrepair. And, unfortunately for me, I ended up spending my first full year of college in an all-male dorm.
That fact alone should offer clues as to how dirty it was bound to be. Just picture, for a moment, the scenario beyond the context of college. Take a couple hundred teenage boys around the ages of 18 and 19. Put every one of them in a large, seven-story building. Have them be miles away from parents, relatives, and authority figures for the first time in their lives. Some of these young men have never even done their own laundry.
Things are going to get rowdy, dirty, smelly, and stupid.
There are any number of incidents I can recount from my experience living in that dorm. Looking back on it, I still can’t believe I managed to live there for nearly an entire year while maintaining a relative measure of sanity. But the worst part, by far, of living in that dorm had to do with the shared bathrooms.
Seriously, I cannot put into words how awful the shared bathrooms in an all-male college dorm were.
Yes, the dorm had a cleaning staff. But unless the people working on that staff had superpowers, I don’t see how they could’ve kept those bathrooms clean. And since that staff didn’t work on the weekends, things got really bad on Sundays.
It wasn’t unusual to walk into those bathrooms on a Sunday morning and see every stall clogged, overflowing, or in some state of general shittiness. It also wasn’t unusual to see traces of vomit, food, and other bodily fluids in the shower stalls, which I had to regularly use. I want to say you get used to it. But there are just some things the human brain is not equipped to process.
But on one particular Sunday morning during my freshman year, the true breadth of shittiness in public restrooms was taken to a whole new level. And to this day, my body and my gag reflex has never been so thoroughly strained.
This incident happened during the late spring. By then, I’d seen my share of disgusting crap in the men’s bathrooms. I had also gotten pretty good at managing myself so that, if I ever needed to take a shit, I would be somewhere else on campus where the bathrooms were considerably better. I learned early on that, so long as I limited how often I had to use the bathrooms in a male dorm, I could cope.
But on this morning, my stomach decided test my resolve. For reasons I still don’t understand, I woke up that morning feeling like bodybuilders were tapdancing on my lower intestines while wearing lead bricks as shoes. It hit me in a way where my roommate commented he could hear my stomach from across the room.
That’s when I knew I was in trouble.
Initially, I wondered if it was possible to get to another building with a decent bathroom. But my stomach quickly informed me that time was not on my side. I had to get to a toilet and I had to get to one immediately.
So, I entered the nearest bathroom in my dorm. It was right across the hall. It also happened to be empty, given the early morning hour. However, as soon as I stepped in, I was hit with a sight and a smell that is forever seared into my brain.
Someone, or more likely a group of fellow male students in a less-than-sober mindset, had found a way to utterly desecrate every single toilet in some way, shape, or form. One had a literal mountain of wet, piss-colored toilet paper spilling out of the toilet, onto the floor, and into the neighboring stall. Another had a massive puddle of liquid shit at the rim of the bowl, eager to flow over at the slightest provocation. And the third had what I can only describe as the coiled anaconda of all shits.
It was so awful I nearly threw up on the spot. Had my stomach not been a firestorm of fermenting sewage, I would’ve run to another bathroom. But I had to go. So, I picked a stall, wading through puddles of piss in the process, and did what I had to do.
Again, I’ll spare everyone the details. But trust me, these are NOT details you want to know. All I’ll say is that, when I was done, I had to take a very long shower in another bathroom. I also washed my hands at least 10 times over the course of that day. The memory of what I had experienced in that bathroom was just too raw.
That memory even lingered after I finished my freshman year and got to live in better dorms later on. In that same time, I didn’t just learn to appreciate the simple comfort of a non-filthy bathroom. I actually went out of my way to clean up after myself and even clean around certain areas if I could. It wasn’t much, but it was better than another shitty ordeal, literally and figuratively.
Even after I finished college and moved out of my parents’ house, I made a big deal about keeping the bathrooms clean. And rest assure, if any toilet ever showed signs of backing up or not working properly, I immediately looked into it. The more proactive you can be with a toilet, the better. You don’t have to be a plumber to know how to keep it working.
Now, I live alone in a place that I own. That means I am fully responsible for how clean and functional my bathroom is. I won’t say it’s always spotless. And I won’t say it’s the cleanest bathroom you’ll ever see. I can only be certain that it will always be pleasant to use and you can be confident that the toilet will work, as needed.
I honestly don’t know how long I’ll live in this crazy world. But I am certain that at some point, I’ll find myself in another situation where I’ll have to badly use a bathroom and I’ll have to go into a public bathroom. I just hope that, whenever or wherever it happens, I never have to use a bathroom like the one I used during my freshman year of college.
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