Privy counsel

by David Benjamin

“… conservatives … argue that the crisis in Americasn schools is … about leftist teachers propagandizing on critical race theory and giving kids new pronouns while denying them safe bathrooms.”

—Nicholas Kristoff, The New York Times

 

MADISON, Wis.—In Nicholas Kristoff’s eloquent assessment of the real problem with American public schools, I got stuck on—and could not flush from my thoughts—Kristoff’s reference to the right-wing panic over “safe bathrooms.”

Of course, the Republican crusade over toilets in school is all about the fanciful danger of gigantic, hairy transgender freaks wearing frilly frocks to cover their male genitalia who lurk in the girls room, poised to pounce on ninth-grade virgins. Besides the fact that this temptingly cinematic rape scene is virtually certain never to happen, the fear itself suggests that Republicans have precious little experience with public lavatories, especially in school. 

From the moment in kindergarten when my teacher herded me, along with twelve other kids, into the boys’ room for an unchaperoned group urination, I understood that no bathroom without a lock, meant for simultaneous evacuation by more than one party—of any gender—was safe. I grasped this danger intuitively. I required no adult privy counsel. Other kids, I figured out later, had been warned more directly. 

Indeed, one of the curious phenomena that I note when I visit a public loo is the occasional patron who bypasses a half-dozen available urinals and chooses to pee, with the door locked, in one of the stalls. I can’t help but picture that guy years ago, as a little boy. He’s aching for release but gripped by his mother at the rest-room door. She says, “Bobby, whatever you do, don’t take it out in front of other boys. And never, EVER, turn your back. Use the stall!” But Mommy, what if all the stalls are full? “Then hold it.” HOLD IT? This tense moment would end with a desperate hug and Mom’s tearful exhortation that Bobby, his bladder about to burst, should ‘hurry! HURRY!”

(“But wash your hands.”) 

Growing up in rural Wisconsin, I had encountered both chamber pots and outhouses before I ever laid eyes on a urinal. The first I remember were in the boys room at St. Mary’s School, the oldfashioned white porcelain megaliths that were taller than me and stretched all the way to a floor-level drain. Replaced by the current generation of wall-fastened mouth-shaped jobs, those classic Kohler wraparounds are hard to find nowadays. There’s one at the Italian Workingmen’s Club on Regent Street in Madison, where I can’t help but feel a pang of nostalgia whenever I take a leak. Once, shortly after the horror of September 11, 2001, I came across an old-school urinal at a Wisconsin roadhouse where the drainhole was enhanced with a portrait of Osama bin Laden.

My most educational, but disturbing, men’s-room encounter was a visit to the men’s facility at the Monroe County fairgrounds where an artist of exceptional skill had painstakingly created a mural—in Magic Marker—depicting an arrestingly nude woman on hands and knees, poised for vigorous romance with a priapic partner. The young lady was uttering a request—in a comic-book balloon—that my cousin, Tony, a second-grader just learning to read, interpreted poetically as, “Flag me, baby.” 

Flags, since then, have never meant the same to me. 

That experience reinforced my awareness that a “safe bathroom,” in the public sector, is an oxymoron. High school, where I timed my toilet visits to avoid high-traffic junctures, reinforced my caution. The boys’ john was the hideout—“safe” from the scrutiny of Coach Breitenbach, Coach Olson and the dread Mr. Wendt, who prowled the halls and kept us from one another’s throats—for smokers, bullies, greasers and belligerents. There’s no feeling more vulnerable than to be caught at a urinal, unfinished, while two—or three, or a half-dozen—future convicts square off behind you, inches away, and start cursing, kicking and flinging fists fit to kill, oblivious to collateral damage. As John Donne so movingly wrote, “No man is an island,” especially when his fly is open.

No one who has experienced the trauma of the public toilets at the Port Authority bus terminal in New York City can any longer entertain the notion of a “safe bathroom.” My only worse experience in this category was when—despite my wife’s pleas, who feared that I would never return—I descended into the maelstrom, otherwise known as the men’s room of the old Greyhound station on Randolph Street in Chicago. I hesitated when I saw a brownish fluid seeping beneath the door. But I really had to go. Inside, despite the fact that the urinals—the classic model, of course—had overflowed, creating a discolored lagoon two inches deep, a number of unsavory characters lingered inside, not using the facilities, just loitering malevolently in wet shoes. They glowered askance at me as I gingerly addressed the porcelain shrine and contributed to the lake, maintaining an angle that kept the room’s tenants in sight. I left unharmed but shaken. 

Because of their scarcity, I’ve made it a personal practice, in any city where I spend sufficient time, to locate toilets that suggest easy access, swift egress and no evidence that I might be overwhelmed by a sudden inundation of toxic sewage. Once, while job-hunting in Boston, I reconnoitered every hotel from Washington to Boylston Streets in search of lavatories available to non-occupants and unpatrolled by the house dick. 

Since then, I’ve always been drawn to hotel privies, even when I don’t need them, just to get the lay of the tile. In that quest, I came across the toilet at the Hotel Crillon, in the place de la Concorde in Paris. I recommend it. The Crillon john is a spotless facility reached by passing through a lounge with luxuriant velvet sofas. Inside, it’s so spacious that one tends to picture the ballroom at Versailles. The floor is glistening marble. The lights are bright enough to read the small print of an insurance policy. The urinals are beautiful, the stalls are luxuriant, the t.p. is fluffy. The soap, creamy and slavishly sudsy, is olive-scented savon de Marseille. There are no paper towels. While drying one’s hands on thick, snow-white terry cloth, one resists the temptation to steal the towel and thinks, “Jeez, I could live here!”

Also in Paris, overlooked by most tourists, is the loveliest public lavatory in my experience of looking for the loo of my dreams. One finds it by going downstairs, beneath the place de la Madeleine, and surrendering a coin for admittance. There’s an attendant, vigilant but cordial. The decor is art nouveau, the wood is mahogany. Each stall is private, with its own commode and a lovely sink whose style dates to the turn of the 20th century. 

There’s a shoeshine stand that resembles more the throne of Louis XIV than a mere chair to plop down, stick out your feet and get a spit-polish. One leaves this privy, reluctantly, with a sense that whatever you’ve done there was a mild insult to the place. You harbor a nagging hope that you haven’t left behind an odor that offends the attendant. 

This W.C. is exemplary in a sense beyond mere hygiene and guardianship. It is doubly “safe” for anyone who discovers it because no French fonctionnaire, no matter how stiff and punctilious, would presume to challenge the presence of an apparent man wearing a dress, heels and Chanel No, 5. Nor would said gardien even think to interfere with a seeming female dressed in suit, tie and wingtips who takes “her” leak standing up.