Public Thoughts

What if I were to tell my entire life story through the lens of the moments that I’ve spent in public restrooms? The concept occurred to me when I was in downtown Chicago on a Saturday night, inside a lounge called Crimson. Prior to my departure from the establishment, I visited the restroom, which was – on its own – the size of the “lounging areas” of most people’s homes. It was decadent, painted in rich colors with large stalls and many expensive glass mirrors suspended on the walls by silky ribbons. It was absurd, when you considered the sort of room that it was.

My mind flashes back to the public restrooms of my high school, rooms that I spent a lot of time in – especially for the purpose of avoiding spending time somewhere else. They were nothing like this. They were the perfect example of designing for the target demographic. As a high school student, my attendance in school was mandatory. The staff knew that I had to be there, and that I had no choice but to use their facilities while I was there. That – to them – was license to make the rooms into miniature torture chambers. The temperature was alternately steamy or frigid, whichever might be more miserable at any given time. The odds of there being BOTH toilet paper and paper towel available at once were minimal, and at least 40% of the toilets were clogged at all times. To me, none of that mattered. What did matter: There were no classes being taught in the bathroom. This made it a mini-paradise.

I remember moments in a semi-private public restroom a few years later. I was being hospitalized, and the bathroom was temporarily mine, attached to my hospital room. The first time the staff forced me to walk to it, a couple of days after my emergency surgery, the pain was nearly unbearable. It felt as if knives were being stabbed into my stomach from all directions, and I could only shuffle, hunched forward and clutching my walker with one hand and my abdomen with the other. I breathed heavily, pausing only to glare at the nurse walking next to me. She smiled beatifically, patting my arm. “Just a little farther, dear…” Once inside the bathroom, I sat, not moving, thinking only that I would never leave. I never wanted to endure the pain of standing or walking again. I planned to spend the rest of my life in that tiny room, but the nurse had other ideas.

The next year, I visited a restroom inside a “mercado” in a small Mexican town. It was an open-air market, filled with produce, blankets, clothing, butchered animals suspended from the ceiling, and booth after booth selling tacos or enchiladas and any number of culinary delights. The bathrooms were in the very back of the roofed portion of the market, and I weaved my way through the crowds to get to them. Positioned at the door, seated on a stool, was a very tired looking Mexican woman. She held a basket on her lap, and it was filled with small square bundles – toilet tissue. The facilities themselves were accessible for free, but if one wanted to use toilet paper, one had to purchase it. I did so, handing her my coins and accepting the bundle. As I walked into the room, evaluating the stalls, I knew that there were many in the crowd who would not spare the change for the tissue, and I could not help but consider what the alternatives might be… Did they carry their own with them? Did they save the single napkin distributed with their lunch tacos? Or did they just go without?

I think back now on the many hundreds – maybe thousands - of public facilities that I have visited. Schools, restaurants, coffee houses, theme parks, grocery stores, gas stations, hotels… Where does the list end? How many have I forgotten? Why do I remember the ones that I do? What if I really could revisit every moment of time that I have spent in these places? What other venue have I visited so consistently at every point in my life, everyplace that I have traveled, with every companion that I have ever had?

The public restroom is a paradox. It is a public private moment. It is a time that you are surrounded by strangers and strange surroundings, but completely, intimately alone with the thoughts in your head. Perhaps this is why the thought of revisiting all of those moments appeals to me now. Today, when I am so filled with questions, I would like to revisit every moment of the “real me” to help me reconstruct my self-portrait. I would like to sit, quietly, in the strange space that is not mine and be entirely alone with my self.