Kids in the Stall | lawrence.com

Photo by Ailecia Ruscin

Monday, May 12, 2008

I don’t wanna sound like a queer or nothin…but I think unicorns are pretty kickass!

— black marker, women’s room, Replay Lounge

It was nearing 10 p.m. last Wednesday night on the patio of the Replay Lounge when a woman named Al returned from the bathroom with a stencil freshly blackened by spray paint in her hand and a grin on her face.

“She just graffiti’d the women’s bathroom,” someone announced.

A couple of people walked into the bar to view her work as Al settled in at her corner table, quiet as those around her resumed their conversations. An architecture student at KU, she had never defiled a bathroom wall in her life.

She had designed the stencil a couple of months earlier: the figure of a woman sitting on the ground, legs crossed, arms wrapped around her knees, head tucked down. Perhaps a woman in a moment of despair, it was based on a picture she had taken of herself.

She had been waiting for the time to strike, for her nerve to build, and then she had swung open the bathroom door, positioned her stencil in the upper left corner of the wall above the toilet on the right and sprayed black.

The walls of the Replay women’s bathroom say Saturday night, booze, sex, jokes, a little wistfulness and a lot else:

“If you think Danny’s cock is big keep thinking so!” “Shit man—Noah Kelly is f*cking hott!” “I remember being a child and finding infinite beauty throughout the world…I miss those days.” “Haskell WPO! Save the Wetlands!” “Brandy S___ is a bitch!”

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Fresh paint dried in the bathroom. Al smiled. She had contributed, Lord knows to what.

Is there another place like the public bathroom? Where millionaires piss next to bums, perverts hook up, street poets are born, junkies shoot dope, drunks vomit and vagabonds seek shelter? A place where the underbelly of society—a little truth, a little hate, a little honesty—surfaces for a moment in a small room with a toilet and a sink, under a dim red light…

Anyone interested in time travel meet me here last Thursday

— black marker, men’s room, Harbour Lights

A man walked into the bathroom of the Lawrence Public Library. He looked to be in his 20s, with long hair kept in a ponytail, a leather jacket and a backpack. He smelled like he hadn’t showered in a while, which is why he was there.

He wetted some paper towels, soaped them up and stuck them under his shirt. First one armpit, then the other. He worked quickly and efficiently, and when he was a little cleaned up he walked back out.

If there is a class of man that knows the public bathroom, it is the traveler. The hobo, tramp, traveling kid or rambler. Trainwreck, who rolled back into Lawrence a couple weeks ago, has been circulating himself around the country for years. A train runs ear to ear in ink across his jawline. He groups his bathroom experiences into three categories: sex, drugs and shelter.

“At least for a traveler, that’s what you’re gonna use a public bathroom for,” he says. “Other than, obviously, to take a piss or a shit if you need to.”

Sex: “I’ve definitely been approached in a lot of bathrooms. Rest stops are dangerous. A lot of predators at rest stops, trying to come up and get a piece. I’ve been propositioned, offered drugs, money, anything. A guy offered me 50 bucks to let him suck my dick in a public restroom.”

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Drugs: “When I was a heroin addict, I used public restrooms all the time. I shot heroin for 17 1/2 years. It’s a place I can ditch out, nobody’s gonna bother me. I ain’t gotta worry about getting the door kicked in. I can go in there, do my hit and go. Walk out level again.”

Shelter: “It can be time out of the weather or a place to wash up and look human. I got off a coal train in Pueblo and then hitchhiked back up to Colorado Springs. Each of us probably was in the public restroom in the park for an hour, washing all the coal off our faces. It looks like eyeliner after you wash it ’cause it gets on you so much. We f*cked that bathroom up.”

Do you ever get weird looks?

“Oh yeah. Especially if you’re at rest stops where you got a lot of richer travelers. They come through with their families. We’ve been in there cleaning up, you know, I’m down to my long johns and no shirt on, got all my shit piled on my pack over there, I’m washin’ up, doing it right, drying off with a dirty T-shirt. And they’re just like—they don’t even wash their hands. And rich people always wash their hands.”

Xstina misses the P. Slut Wall of Shame from 2 years ago. She came back from Cali just to see it! Why did you paint?

— black marker on designated cardboard writing area, women’s room, Louise’s Downtown

Lynne Salvant lives in Oliver Hall, where she shares a bathroom with the other female KU students who happily live together on a wing of the dorm. Four showers, three toilets.

She likes a clean bathroom. This poses a problem. The custodian cleans the bathroom at about noon. It stays clean for a while. And then it gets dirty. Sometimes, very dirty. On the weekends, of course, you gotta watch out for the puke.

“To me, the bathroom is one of the spaces you have to keep clean at all times,” Salvant says. “So to live with people who don’t feel that way is kind of chaffing.”

One girl on the floor never washes her hands. Everyone knows about it. “But she just does not feel that social guilt,” she says.

Field Notes by Ailecia Ruscin

Bathrooms can be a place of intense scrutiny, especially for butch women and feminine men. But I am a feminine woman, a queer woman, but a queer woman who passes in everyday society unnoticeable many times to even the roving eyes of queer girls. As a queer girl with long hair, I’ve grown accustomed to strangers not knowing my sexuality.

So at 12:45 p.m. last Tuesday I entered the women’s room on the fourth floor of Wescoe Hall at KU to take notice of what girls do in the bathroom. People don’t go into the bathroom without a bathroom agenda, so I immediately wash my hands. Over the next 30 seconds, six other girls enter and all immediately head to the stalls.

I take my seat over in the “sitting area”—in Wescoe the sitting area is a small, windowless room with enough space for a matching blue vinyl couch and chair. I take the chair so that I can see who enters the bathroom, rather than the couch where my view would be of the sinks.

One girl emerged from the stall and starts working on her hair. She looks pretty nondescript, a classic college girl days away from finals. She’s wearing a grey thin hoodie, jeans that appear they haven’t been washed in recent days, and flip-flops. The most noticeable thing is her brightly colored floral tote bag. She stays at the mirror for what seems to me like an eternity. She combs her fingers through her hair and stares at herself in the mirror. I can tell that she is looking at herself, but I can’t see her reflection. What is she looking at? I’m afraid to change positions to answer my questions. One girl says “Hey” to her and she replies with a stoic “Hi,” the kind of “hi” reserved for people you recognize in public, but do not actually know.

“Whoa!” a girl wearing bright orange exclaims, surprised that the floral bag girl has opened the door at the precise moment she enters.

Other girls finish, each carefully washing and drying her hands. Nobody speaks or even smiles. To my surprise, there are no interactions between women in the bathroom. And yet all we see in movies are packs of girls entering bathrooms to apply make-up and gossip or engage in Mean Girls-esque drama.

As girls wash their hands, almost every single one looks at herself in the mirror. But are they really looking? Unless I have lip gloss to apply, I never look in the mirror while I’m in the bathroom. Or maybe I do but I’ve never realized it. I wonder, what are they looking at?

The girl in bright orange finally emerges from the bathroom smacking her gum loudly. She doesn’t wash her hands! A first for this weird bathroom sociology project. I’m pretty surprised.

Each girl who notices me sitting off to the side in the sitting area kinda looks at me and then quickly turns away. I appropriately look down and continue writing. I’m hoping they think I’m faking a semester-long journal for an assignment. If they knew I was writing down everything they did, I’m sure they’d think I was a total freak.

Then I notice something. There has been one girl in a stall the entire time I’ve been there. She has a purple backpack leaned up against the stall door, so it’s obvious it’s been the same woman the whole time. The bathroom finally quiets down; we are the only two girls there. I hold my breath and stop writing, so that she’ll think she’s alone. I look at my watch, she’s been camped out there for a full 10 minutes. I know what she’s doing. She’s waiting for the room to empty so that she can emerge and not have to claim the deposit she left behind. I figure she has taken a poop, but is afraid of the lingering smell. She wants to come out when nobody is around so that it can remain unclaimed. We’ve been sitting alone for a full minute, so she finally emerges. Like the other girls, she goes straight to the sink to wash her hands. She is very thorough. Then she glances at the mirror, but just as she begins to look at herself, she catches me watching and I quickly look down. She is probably just surprised that she is not alone, and I feel mildly creepy sitting here. She quickly exits just as three more girls enter.

A girl in a blue T-shirt goes into the stall where the camper had been. She quickly chooses another stall. My thoughts are confirmed. The camper had pooped and this girl in the blue T-shirt didn’t like the smell or the leftover remnants of poop. The bathrooms on campus seem to always leave behind extras.

One of the new girls comes out of the stall, and instead of heading straight to the sinks, she goes to the full-length mirror. I hadn’t even realized there was one! She scrutinizes herself in the mirror. Perhaps she is wondering, “Why did I choose to wear a bright orange oversized sweatshirt with itsy bitsy maroon running shorts?” Her skin is a weird fake-tan orange color. She looks at herself in the mirror and decides that it is her hair that is wrong. She takes her hair down from its purposely messy ponytail and finger-combs it before arranging another messy ponytail that to me looks exactly the same as the previous doo.

Ah, finally someone chooses the handicap stall. She’s a cute chubby girl who checks herself out in the full-length mirror after she finishes in the stall. She goes to wash her hands and then returns to the full-length mirror, making sure her double-layered shirt falls even in the back so that the white shirt underneath peaks out evenly from her black overshirt. She pulls at the butt of her jeans. I wonder what detail she is scrutinizing to death.

It’s 1 p.m. and I’ve been camped out here for 15 minutes. There’s one girl in a stall and the class period has started. Other than the “whoa” and “hi” exchange, there has been no talking in the bathroom. I had hoped to listen in on female small-talk or maybe overhear an odd telephone conversation. But the only sounds audible were the sounds of peeing, flushing, handwashing and paper towel dispensing.

A new girl walks in and heads straight to the sitting area where, she leaves her black purse and white school binder unattended. Noticing my presence, she takes her iPod out of her purse and puts it in her pocket. Around campus, there are always signs warning us to not leave possessions unattended, but she trusts me with her purse and semester-long binder of notes. But not her iPod. After she finishes in the stall, she looks at herself in the mirror while washing her hands and then returns to gather her things.

I then decide to change positions so I can see what the hell these girls are looking at when they look in the mirror. There’s only one girl left; will she reveal to me what they all look at? She pees. I wait. Man, I feel so awkward. I get a text message. Good; something to occupy my time.

The girl leaves the stall, washes her hands, and begins to look at herself in the mirror. She peers into the glass and decides a strand of hair is not properly placed. She changes its position, dries her hands and leaves.

1:06 p.m. The bathroom is silent. Nobody is there but me. 1:08 p.m. The bathroom is still empty as I gather my stuff to leave.

Maybe the girl’s room is really not that interesting. We don’t have special glory holes or bathroom etiquette to signal an interest in casual sex. The women’s room is a place of relative quiet. For butch girls, it’s a place of intense scrutiny—“You’re in the wrong bathroom!”—but for a femme-ish girl like me it’s a place of relative safety; a place where you can leave your purse unattended for three minutes. For girls more concerned about their appearance, the bathroom is a place to check and make sure your face and hair look OK. And for the occasional woman, it’s a place to publicly use the full-length mirror. How mundane.

Once, Salvant was in the shower when she heard a male voice outside the certain. “Hey, dude,” she called sternly, “you need to get out of the bathroom.”

When she grabbed her towel and emerged from the shower, the bathroom was packed with paramedics and resident assistants. All were men, except for the girl with alcohol poisoning. Vomit covered the tile.

In related news, Salvant’s floor was voted cleanest in Oliver Hall this year. Congratulations.

F*ck it.

— etching, men’s room, South Park

There is no graffiti in the bathroom of the Douglas County Courthouse. It is clean, quiet and well-lighted. It is a bathroom that means business, that says, “Respect the law.” Have men ever covertly fondled each other’s penises here while pretending to use the urinal?

Here’s something along those lines from a KU graduate student in American studies who wished to remain anonymous:

I’m only speaking for myself, but bathrooms—particularly public restrooms—have always been charged places for me, much like locker rooms or summer camp dormitories, due in large part to my being gay. These are places where I am most forcefully faced with masculinity, my own and others, and where I most often feel that I must contain myself.

Long before I became sexually active, I knew that you “weren’t supposed to look” at other boys in the bathroom or the grade school showers or anywhere else. Yet I suppose that such looking is natural, no matter what one’s sexual orientation. As I got older, it became more important to divert my eyes—while others were, I’m sure, diverting their eyes out of disinterest or out of a desire to maintain their own heterosexuality, I was diverting my eyes precisely because I was gay, precisely because I knew that to be caught glancing would be to invite derision, to give grounds for a ruined reputation, and even to be hurt.

Of course, later, places like this—including public restrooms—became places where I could glance side to side while standing at the urinal and where sometimes others glanced back. I’ve never really been into restroom sex, but there have been times when restrooms have been places where I’ve met guys. It’s weird, because in gay bars the restrooms aren’t really very exciting—maybe because I expect them to be safe, used by other gay men. It’s other restrooms that cause me discomfort, because they offer different possibilities.

One time, while driving on K-10 into Kansas City, this guy and I kept passing one another back and forth, trying to get ahead of the sort of traffic jam that happens on K-10 because of drivers who hang out in the left lane. I glanced over at him, he was older than me, he glanced back. We played K-10 cat and mouse for a little bit and I was unsure why except that we were both speeding. But then he sort of waved me to follow and I was scared to do that, but I did.

We exited in Overland Park and he pulled into the parking lot of the Marriott there and went inside, looking back several times as he walked into the hotel. I followed, thinking he was staying there and that maybe we were going to his room, but instead he went into the main floor restroom and stood at a urinal. He wasn’t pissing. I stood next to him. We handled each others penises for a while. My heart was beating so fast, every time I heard any sort of noise I immediately pulled back and pretended to be pissing. I remember that I kept not looking at him or his dick because I was so busy scanning the corners of the restroom, certain that there were security cameras and that we were going to get busted. Eventually we both shot off in the urinals and parted ways.

I remember another time, one night at the Replay in downtown Lawrence, standing at the toilet taking a piss while another guy I didn’t know stood at the urinal. There aren’t any dividers and the urinal and the toilet are just a couple of feet apart. We were both talking about the band that was playing that night. We’d both been drinking, I’m sure. He asked if I’d met any hot chicks, and I was tipsy enough to tell him that I was actually looking for guys. He gave me an odd look, asked if that’s how I swung, and whether it was fun. I told him he should try it, and then he moved over and grabbed my penis. We left the bar together.

In both of these cases, the bathrooms were weird spaces because they were public, anyone could have walked in, and that made them exciting. To know that probably millions of other people think of public restrooms as just places you politely excuse yourself to use, and here I was using them for different reasons.

FBI = Public Enemy #1

— black marker, men’s room, Louise’s Downtown

Mitch Young has supervised the city bathrooms of east and north Lawrence for the past decade. For him, Public Enemy No. 1 is vandalism: toilets jammed with toilet paper, bubble gum shoved down the drain, stoppers forced open.

Public Enemy No. 2 is George Brett. Somebody continually spray paints a stencil bearing the image of the Royals Hall of Famer in bathrooms all over town. Young scrubs it off. It reappears.

“It looks pretty cool,” he admits. But it has gotta go.

Pete + Coleman are not gay! Stop freaking out about it! — B. Self 7/22/06

— black marker, men’s room, The Wheel

The public bathroom can be a place of shame, where you never, ever own up to what you did. Some will only tell their stories anonymously:

I was in junior high. I grew up in a small town, so we always hung out at the bowling alley. I go in the bathroom one afternoon to take a shit. Didn’t want to sit on the toilet, ’cause it looked really bad. Made you feel nervous. So I hold on to this thing, I try to position myself right for it—and I anal blasted it. It went the wrong place, it went everywhere, man. It was baaaad news. I had a little diarrhea or something. So I wipe my ass like I normally would and get the f*ck out before somebody notices. I hang out there for a bit, and this friend of mine comes back. He goes, ‘Motherf*cker, you got me kicked out.’ He got blamed for it because he was the last one to come out of there. The guy that worked there kicked him out for a month, dude. And I laughed at that guy for months in my head. ‘I’m gonna get you kicked out of everywhere now, motherf*cker.’

One time I was at Kansas State’s stadium. I don’t even remember why, to tell you the truth. I was with my brother, and I looked at his dick. I did it on purpose. I peeked as he was pulling out, and it was like, wow, it’s bigger than mine. I got pissed, ’cause I got the bad genes. And now every time I take a piss I can’t not think about my brother’s dick.

We were at this party and we f*cked in the bathtub while people were coming in and out and pissing. When we were done, I opened the curtain and popped my head out. This chick was sitting there pissing on the toilet. I was like, ‘Hey, I’m ___.’ She was all scared, but she was cool about it. She was like, ‘Oh, I’m ___,’ shook my hand, and then the dude popped out from the other side of the curtain and was like, ‘Hey, I’m ___.’ They shook hands. She was all freaked out about it.

I got suspended because I went into the girls’ bathroom in junior high. I was convinced that they had couches and all this stuff for PMSing. I was convinced that you could go there and take a nap. I thought they had softer toilet paper. There wasn’t anyone in there. I’m getting out of school suspension for walking into a room?

I went to this camp back in the day. Me and all my friends, we would straight-up ‘Beavis and Butthead’ it. We would go to the restrooms and take shits together. We were all on the same clock. We’d go poop together and have just the most hilarious dialogue while we were pooping. And then we would look at each other’s turds. We were all like 14. Man, it was the f*ckin’ highlight. Maybe that’s wrong. Is it wrong to look at another man’s turd?

WWII was sweet.

— black marker, men’s room, Replay Lounge

Anne Dotter has been in Lawrence for nearly eight years, but she still doesn’t feel comfortable in an American bathroom.

In her native France, she says, a typical public toilet is surrounded by floor-to-ceiling walls on three sides, and the door, also framed by a wall, on the fourth.

“The space between the doors and the fake walls, the possibilities to see my neighbor’s feet, her purse or whatever she drops to the floor,” she says. “And I am not even talking about the sound. I am not quite sure I’ll ever feel completely at ease.”

Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% what you make of it

— white marker, men’s room, Harbour Lights

For people who don’t fit neatly into one gender or another—guys who get mistaken for girls, girls who get mistaken for guys—going to the public bathroom is a universally frightening experience. Where else is the gender line so rigidly drawn?

A lesbian punk rock band out of San Francisco named Tribe 8 used to sing a song about it called “Wrong Bathroom”:

Excuse me, sir?

Over by the stall?

Um, wrong bathroom,

Men’s is down the hall

Amy Wilhelm tries to use one only bathroom while she’s on campus. It’s in the basement of Budig Hall and it’s usually empty.

“I get that phobia of going to the restroom in a public place,” she says. “It’s panic for me, almost.”

Wilhelm has short hair. She’s queer. Three months ago, she was waiting in line for the women’s room at a bar, talking to the guys in line across from her. A girl cut in front of her and opened up the bathroom door.

“Hey, there’s a line,” Wilhelm said.

“What? You’re waiting in line for the men’s, right?”

Wilhelm says this happens all the time. Sometimes she’ll be on campus and a feminine girl will walk in and see her at the sink washing her hands. The girl will walk back out and check the door. Sometimes people ask if Wilhelm knows she’s in the women’s room.

“The interesting thing is, some people will actually apologize—‘Oh man, I f*cked up. I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,’” she says. “And then some people just ‘humph,’ and leave the restroom. They’ll refuse to be in there while I’m in there.” «

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