Loo-ie, Loo-ie … Me gotta go now

by David Benjamin 

“The trail of lime trees outside our building is still a public loo … where else are they supposed to go to the toilet in a city where public toilets are about as common as UFO sightings?”

—Sarah Turnbull, Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris

 

PARIS—Anyone who has ever been to Paris more than once has had a toilet adventure or two … or a few dozen. One incident that I remember vividly, although I’m not sure why it stands out, was a lavatory visit in the famous Montparnasse bistro, La Coupole. 

As I performed my evacuation in an exceptionally modern (for those bygone days) urinal, I was startled to hear, on the other side of a partition no thicker than a few millimeters, the voices of two women, gabbling away in French. We were, literally—the ladies and me—in the same toilet together. It was a john not merely unisex but multisex. I was nonplussed, the women paid no heed to both my presence and my discomfiture. 

Gents and gals share loo turf in restaurants because of tight space and a casual French outlook on bodily functions—and, most important, because Paris has a historic shortage of public toilets. A café, brasserie, tabac or bistro is the place you can go if you need to go.

Of course, in those days—more than thirty years ago—when you opened the toilet door, you never knew what you would find. Your typical American commode, the ceramic throne with the doughnut seat and the rarely lowered lid, well, these were few, far between and reserved to the most chi-chi of eateries. Typically, back then, you encountered a hole in the floor beneath a water cabinet operated by a chain with a wooden handle. Helpfully, on the floor, flanking the hole, two footprints, complete with sole-treads, were sculpted in white porcelain. This served as an aid to aiming when a male was doing No. 1. 

However, I never entirely determined, in a No. 2 emergency, whether to crouch facing the door or looking at the wall. I suspect that women were even more troubled by this dilemma. 

Often, thankfully, the ladies’ water closet (which, surreptitiously, I preferred to use) featured a bare porcelain commode, but usually sans couvercle (no lid). You didn’t crouch but you had to hover.

This period was also the last gasp of the pissoir. Provided exclusively for men on convenient street corners all through the city, the pissoir was an open-sided cabinet, in spindly legs, usually composed of rickety plywood or battered sheet metal. It had a drain that fed straight into the Paris sewer somewhere below, which should have rendered it a fairly innocuous facility. However, since each pissoir was by patronized the lame, the halt, the aged and drunken, as well as by little boys to short to hit the bowl with any sort of accuracy, there was a high misfire rate. This spillage accumulated and coagulated on the pavement to the point where, in passing a pissoir, one would suddenly feel as though he or she had walked into an invisible cloud of vaporized urine. Surprised once by this miasma, my mind suddenly pictured doughboys in a trench near, perhaps, Ypres, lunging for their masks as a mustard gas canister lands at their feet.

For a long time, I thought the last pissoir in Paris—left there to serve late-night taxi drivers—was located in the bushes around the church of Ste. Clotilde. It exuded a pong that reached the sidewalk and sent pedestrians reeling to the other side of the rue Les Cases. That landmark, probably by neighborhood demand, disappeared before the millenium. However, a few years ago, I discovered what must absolutely be Paris’ very last pissoir, on boulevard Arago, on the curb beneath the walls of the infamous Santé penitentiary, which once housed—among others—Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Genet and Manuel Noriega. 

I have not been back lately to see if this historic outhouse remains. 

It was not long after the liquidation of Paris’ pissoirs that the city began to install public conveniences on main streets, shaped somewhat like a loaf of Wonder Bread, with a sliding door that would open if you slipped a coin into a slot. After each use, it is said, the entire interior is flushed and sanitized, rendering it fragrant and fresh for the next user. These facilities were a seeming solution to a chronic urban problem. However, they lost their cachet and were almost universally avoided, except by gullible tourists and Parisians in the most desperate straits, because of a story that swept the city.

As the tale goes, there was a little old lady, impatient to pee and too poor to pay her pittance, who squeezed inside as the portal was closing behind the previous customer. She did not realize that the lavatory had yet to be sprayed and sterilized in a smothering gush of caustic chemicals. Trapped inside the locked door, the woman inhaled the full blast of toxic disinfectants and nauseous perfumes. She collapsed, breathing her last before she even hit the floor.

Hence, these civic lavatories, clean, convenient and odorless, came to be known, among all Parisians who rushed past them, as “the toilets of death.”

I’m told that the story of the old lady in the john is apocryphal. But I like it.

Also apocryphal, possibly, is the widely held notion that hosts of cafés and restaurants must allow toilet access, even to non-patrons. I’ve never troubled to confirm this enlightened civic policy, but I’ve taken advantage of it often. The only time I doubted it was the afternoon I barged into a nearly empty restaurant and made a bee line toward les toilettes. I was stopped by a waiter, who had nothing better to do. He told me to scram outa there, unless I was ready to buy something.

One of us was breaking the rule, but I’m not sure which. Suffice to suggest that if you gotta go, sneak into the toilet of the nearest corner café. But make sure the joint is jumpin’ and the waiters can’t be bothered with policing the john.

As a veteran of the Paris streets, I’ve become a toilet maven. There is (or was), for example, a beautifully tiled quasi-Art Deco loo beneath the place de la Madeleine. Admission is about fifty cents, but it’s worth it. Coming upstairs afterward, I always had the feeling that I’d gotten away with taking a leak in church. 

My alltime favorite Paris toilet, of course, is downstairs at the Hotel Crillon, in the place de la Concorde. Of course, one doesn’t just mosey into the Crillon in baggy shorts, Chuck Taylors and no shirt. One must assume a somewhat dignified facade and project an air of belonging in a joint where the room rates bottom out at two large a night. But, once past the doorman and down the marble staircase, you enter a “lounge” with chandeliers and velvet settees. You tiptoe gingerly into a men’s (or ladies’) room with gold faucets, polished mirrors, three-ply TP, soundproof stalls, glistening floors, fluffy towels and a rising conviction that you could move your immediate family here and live happily ever after.

I also recommend the newly renovated toilets at the Café Beaubourg, near the Pompidou Center. It’s like exploring a cave with the cast of La Cage aux Folles.

Old guidebooks will tell you that, when you’re in distress and need the loo, the question you ask the waiter is, “Ou est le W.C.?” (Way luh vay-say). However, the old construction, “W.C.” (water closet) has been superseded by the more American term, “toilet.” So, the other day at lunch at a genial bistro called Astier in the 11th arrondissement, Hotlips got up from our table, looked around and resorted to our waiter, asking him, “Ou sont les toilettes?”

To which, with a mischievous twinkle, the waiter replied, in English, “Sorry. It closes at two.”

It was downstairs.