The Worst Bathroom I Have Ever Been In by Brandon Mead

All I wanted to do was wash my hands after paging through the back issues of Bear Magazine that had been casually left on one of the tables of the dimly lit atmosphere of The Pony in downtown Seattle. The erotic fiction and personal ads had all been from 1998, and my boyfriend and I assumed the fluids on them were probably just as vintage.

Feeling my way toward the back area of the bar, I was greeted by the usual line of urinals and single stall, with the only slightly unexpected addition of a well-used gloryhole. This was no ordinary gloryhole. It hadn’t been carved hastily with a pocket knife, there were no jagged edges of compressed wood or chipped lacquer. This gloryhole had craftsmanship. It was a perfect circle lined with comfortable plastic all set in primary colors. The sanitized Disney version of a gloryhole. This was a gloryhole with self-awareness, and it begged anyone who entered, “Go ahead, use me, ironically.”

This was not the worst bathroom I have ever been in.

When I started college, I dated a punk. Not a blue mohawk punk. The kind who goes to shows in khaki cargo shorts after he works his day job as a property appraiser. That kind of punk. The one who forces you to listen to their music in the car so often you sort of start to like it. Maybe. I’m not going to pretend I don’t still get down to some occasional Against Me! or Bad Religion. As self-actualized people, we understand, there are pieces of us that only exist because of the people we’ve dated. I can thank the punk for my undying devotion to orthopedic skate shoes and need to check-in on Davey Havok every few years.

In either case, terrible music or not, I was nothing if not a supportive boyfriend– so I went to the shows. I held his sweaty polo shirt while he jumped half-naked in the mosh pit. And when I finally found a safe opening in the crowd, I made my way down a long hallway– there in Ybor City just a block from the huge cuban cigar factory, is one of the worst bathrooms that has ever existed.

The opposite of one of those Greek restaurants where they yell, “Opa!” and break plates. The ones where they throw packages of napkins in the air so by the end of night you’re wading through six feet of dry wood pulp like fallen snow. There was never any toilet paper in the stalls of The Masquerade, and yet somehow there would be nothing aside from wet globs of bathroom tissue lining every surface. The floor, the ceiling, every wall. So much to a point you’d have to push a path through with the tips and sides of your thick-soled Vans to make a walkable surface. The whole place smelling of beer and piss, everything slightly yellowed from the combination. The things we do, and places we go, for weird young love.

But, I’m not sure even that was the worst bathroom I have ever been in.

Toward the end of college, I was still in Tampa and frequenting Ybor City, but had left the punk behind and moved onto my independent, clove cigarette smoking, goth stage. I was finding myself, and on the way had found a group of girls and gays who loved platform shoes but hated men. The Castle was, and still is to this day, a great dance club for people who want to spend two hours applying black eyeliner only to cry it off before 3 a.m. in a brick-lined alley. This weird building, complete with a castle-like battlement, used to be the headquarters for the Ybor Labor Temple. It’s a huge space originally designed for the fraternal meetings of cigar workers but is now used as a light-BDSM dungeon where they play heavy electronic music. With Saint Andrew’s crosses, spinning stripper poles that reach the two-story ceilings, and more dark rooms than you’d want to accidentally get lost in with one of those heterosexuals who fit dead-center in that RenFaire/Rough Sex/Star Trek Venn Diagram Margaret Cho warned us all about.

High boots killing your calves and bleeding mascara aside, the worst part was when you had to pee. Picture, if you will, a men’s room with no door– wide open and facing a red velvet-lined lounge where fully-clothed patrons are drinking cocktails with cherries in them and spanking each other. Through the doorless opening, two crusty urinals, the pipes meeting the graying tile with crumbling blue lime from years of hard water. And toward the back left corner of the small area, a porcelain toilet with no seat. No toilet paper dispenser. No stall at all. Essentially, a third urinal covered in at least weeks of poorly aimed urine, boot marks, and brown paper towels. It didn’t flush, and at some point everyone had collectively just stopped trying.

Now, imagine you’re a male-identifying person who needs to sit to use the toilet, for any reason. This is worse than the worst BDSM torture, and way less fun.

This, is the worst bathroom I have ever been in.

Memories of places like the Masquerade or The Castle, make me long for graffiti-covered queer bars like The Pony. The gender non-specific, and mostly clean bathrooms, in clubs like the Parliament House in Orlando, or Pulse when it was still around. The kind of restrooms where you can make friends. The type you’re not afraid to hug a stranger or drop your pants in, whether it’s to take a quick pee and get back out on the dance floor, or to make use of the reinforced gloryholes.

But it also makes me nostalgic in a way, to think I’ve survived these bathrooms, waded my way through sewage and sweat in the name of love or friendship. That I can somehow equate these lavatory adventures with hiking the unknown or delving into the unexplored, in every new place I encounter. And maybe these new places will have a toilet paper dispenser or real stall doors now that I’m getting older and value my comfort much more than I used to, but perhaps they won’t. Maybe there’s still a chance I am yet to encounter the worst bathroom I have ever been in.